This essay surveys Mexican literary and cultural production to model a literary cartography of Acapulco. I examine cultural materials that register the patterns of Acapulco’s peripherality at different scales, ranging from the intimate to the global, and across periods, from the heyday of Mexican developmentalism to the so-called neoliberal era. Focusing on the cultural figuration and representation of Acapulco, the essay suggests that the port city’s ascendancy as an iconic resort destination from the 1940s to the 1970s and its inexhaustible afterlives in literature, film, theatre, photography, and popular culture, offer a model to ponder the urban dimensionality and organization of social life in the global periphery.

Literary Geographies, vol. 11, no. 1, 2025, pp. 1-20.