In 2002 a government programme selected Cuetzalan, a town in a mountainous region of the state of Puebla, as one of Mexico's Pueblos Mágicos (Magical Villages). This charming designation signals to the broader public that the town possesses nationally significant cultural heritage worth preserving and experiencing. Tourism, then, enables these Magical Villages to sustain their traditional heritage. But who really benefits from such designations? Casper Jacobsen's anthropological study of Cuetzalan and the surrounding Indigenous communities urges us to look past the magical veneer to better understand the threat that such programmes pose to Indigenous communities in Mexico and beyond.

In Tourism and Indigenous Heritage in Latin America, Jacobsen introduces the concept ‘multicultourism’, a fusion of ‘multicultural politics of recognition with tourism’ (p. 7), which he examines through the example of Cuetzalan. He questions the assumption that recognition of Indigenous heritage will bring tangible benefits to Indigenous people, and instead shows how tourism reproduces and recreates ‘dispossessive patterns of extraction’ by offering inclusion and participation without challenging historical asymmetries (p. 8). Ultimately, Jacobsen aims to demonstrate that governments seek to ‘narrow down and tame’ multiculturalism and thereby limit the threat of Indigenous political activism, and multicultourism has been one strategy to achieve that end (p. 13).

Although this book analyses a specific Mexican community, it offers crucial insights into the global politics of recognition in the name of tangible and intangible heritage, especially UNESCO's World Heritage programme. Jacobsen organised the book around three questions, each examining a different analytical scale. First, how does the Magical Villages programme maintain or expand asymmetrical power relations between Mestizo majority society and Indigenous minorities? Second, how is the programme enacted and negotiated in Cuetzalan? And finally, how do Nahuas from surrounding villages position themselves in relation to Cuetzalan, tourists and the programme?

Jacobsen employs a translocal approach by examining the intersections and interactions of the supranational, the national and the local. His source material includes government documents, newspaper articles, tourism promotional materials, as well as field notes, interviews and analyses of public rituals, spaces and texts gathered over the course of two periods of fieldwork in Cuetzalan and a nearby Nahua town, San Miguel Tzinacapan. Jacobsen's discussion of his methodological approach in Chapter 3 includes a thoughtful description of his interview process and the challenges and benefits of doing field research while accompanied by family members. These sections would be especially helpful for early-career scholars preparing to embark on their own projects.

One of the book's more significant contributions is its analysis in Chapter 4 of the history of Mexico's Magical Villages programme, from its inception in 2001 through to 2015. Several scholars have examined elements of the programme and its implementation in specific locales, but this study provides a comprehensive yet succinct overview of its origins and evolution. The programme ostensibly protects the nation's cultural heritage, and Jacobsen correctly links the Magical Villages rhetoric to the Partido Acción Nacional (National Action Party, PAN) broader ‘vision of inclusionary politics’ (p. 59) following decades of Partido Revolucionario Institucional (Institutional Revolutionary Party, PRI) rule (however, I would argue that this is more of a rhetorical repackaging of strategies that date to at least the early post-revolutionary period). What is new and noteworthy is the framework provided by UNESCO's World Heritage programme, including the expansion to include both ‘tangible’ and ‘intangible’ heritage. Jacobsen demonstrates how Mexican officials envisioned the requirements and expectations of the Magical Villages recognition process as preparation for recognition by the UNESCO programme, with San Miguel de Allende, a city that successfully navigated the transition from a Magical Village to a World Heritage Site, lauded as an example. Indeed, the buy-in from local elites (as I write, over 120 locales across Mexico participate in the programme) serves as a testament to the perceived value that such recognition can bring to a community.

The book's most critical insights come in Chapters 7 and 8, where Jacobsen focuses on how local Nahuas position themselves vis-à-vis Cuetzalan's tourism industry. Chapter 7 examines the practice of ritual compadrazgo (co-parenthood) as part of a broader strategy to redirect the socio-economic benefits of tourism to the nearby San Miguel Tzinacapan. Chapter 8 analyses an annual fiesta in Cuetzalan, revealing how the celebration privileges a settler colonialist narrative that erases histories of dispossession and conflict and limits Indigenous participants to the realm of the religious and folkloric. One of the book's more interesting findings is that, over time, the community of Tzinacapan challenged this framing and opted out of the fiesta. But the decision to opt out did not result in increased leverage. Instead, Jacobsen argues in the epilogue that the Magical Villages programme has assisted the Mestizo authorities in Cuetzalan in their efforts to assert control over the region's intangible heritage. The declining participation of Indigenous communities resulted in the creation of a cultural school to teach Mestizos Indigenous dances and other cultural practices, therefore rendering the actual Indigenous communities, like the Nahuas of Tzinacapan, dispensable.

The book has a few weaknesses that reflect the challenges of moving seamlessly between multiple scales: from the international to the national, and between different dimensions of the local. For example, the reader does not learn how Cuetzalan became a Magical Village until Chapter 6, information that would have been valuable at the outset. Chapter 5, which provides a close reading of a meeting between local tourism stakeholders, was a missed opportunity to examine the local beneficiaries of the programme. The chapter provides glimpses through the hotel proprietors, knowledge producers and bureaucrats involved in the meeting, but the sketch of the primary local proponents and beneficiaries remains unclear.

Nevertheless, the book's important insights outweigh these minor flaws. It provides a concrete example of the perils of the politics of recognition for marginalised communities by revealing how the official embrace of Indigenous heritage can function as yet another form of dispossession, and is thus of interest to a broad range of scholars of tourism, heritage studies and Indigenous studies, and scholars of the politics of recognition in and beyond Latin America.