#seniorseminar Vinnie Whibbs and “Surf Exploration, Tourism, and Development along the Balsamo coast of El Salvador"

I have always liked history – ever since grade school. I loved my history teachers and history classes both in school and here at FSU. Through history you can learn about the world we live in today. And there is much to learn. My major is History, my minor Spanish. After graduation, I am hoping to go to Latin America to teach English. My first choice is Costa Rica, but I am looking into many other countries.

I love all kinds of history. College introduced me to types of histories that I had never known existed – for example, the course on American Architecture that Dr. Kathleen Conti teaches. It also introduced me to new career possibilities like historic preservation. That’s why I took the senior seminar with her that focused on the history of a built environment in North America.

Initially, I wanted to research the connection between surf tourism and coastal development along the coast in Central America. That turned out to be too big a topic, and I scaled it back to only looking at Nicaragua and El Salvador. Eventually I realized I should focus on just one country, so I turned my attention to the Balsamo Coast of El Salvador.

I grew up surfing. It is something I have done with my family, my dad especially, my entire life. I love it. I have been fortunate enough to travel to Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Mexico and El Salvador to go surfing which was an amazing experience. It has been fascinating to research the history of the different places I have stayed in. I wanted to find out how some of these rural fishing villages where people lived off the land developed into big areas of tourism. Furthermore, I was curious to see if there was a connection to surf exploration and surf tourism in these areas and coastal development.

A key moment in the development of surfing as a mainstream sport occurred in 1966. This year the classic surf film "The Endless Summer" was released. It showed that surf exploration and travel was possible. From here people started to travel to Central and South America, really all around the world, to find perfect waves. When they found the perfect waves, the waves were turned into a commodity, not always right away but eventually in most areas. The entire environment in some places changed because of them. It led to a lot of tourism. My paper focuses on developments in El Salvador from the end of their civil war in 1992 to the present. It was only then that the country opened to tourists and the surfing industry took off.

One of the cities I focused on in El Salvador is called El Tunco. They have a couple of world-class waves around which annual competitions have been set up. But these waves changed the small resource-based communities that existed along the coast into something very different today. To satisfy the demands of tourists, big hotels were constructed. And while El Salvador is developing, and its economy is developing, I argue that it has negative effects for the local people.

Despite the money that is coming in, the tourism industry does not offer sustainable jobs. Tourism is seasonal, which means employment is only available for part of the year. Plus, the pay for local people does not allow them to look after their families. Many of the jobs provided by the tourism industry along the coast are not aimed at local inhabitants. These jobs ask for native English speakers or expect applicants to have a valid driving license; skills that people in these rural areas might not have. While foreign investors and elite Salvadorians have been able to benefit from the growth of the surfing industry, the local population has lost out. The influx of tourism has created even greater disparities between the wealthy and the poor.

My project relied heavily on primary sources, and in the beginning, I was worried that I would not find enough. I searched through Google Scholar, other databases, and NewsBank to find articles about tourism and surfing in El Salvador. I was surprised by how many people had written on this topic. I discovered a master’s thesis devoted to Surf Exploration in Nicaragua, El Salvador and Mexico. I was also able to use photographs showing development along the coast. And I discovered real estate listings of pieces of land in the region. The land prices are so high now that local people cannot buy the land back, even though they are the ones that had initially sold it.

Working on the paper was both fun and stressful. Starting the project, things felt very overwhelming. I had not written anything as long as this paper before. Realizing how many puzzle pieces I had to research and put together was very scary. Once I started writing, it became more fun. It was a topic I wanted to write about. I decided that I would begin the paper by explaining how surfing developed and then talk about the global surf movement triggered by "Endless Summer," followed by the history of El Salvador till 1992. Dr. Conti provided a number of internal deadlines at which we had to submit drafts and that helped me keep working throughout the semester. Dr. Conti was an unbelievable help, and she worked with us individually throughout the semester which helped a lot.

My one regret is that I couldn’t go and interview people on the ground, I had to rely on the work of others who had done interviews in the area. Those pieces helped me with the details of my paper. Yet, I would have loved to have done interviews on site rather than rely on what others found. That would have been a primary source that I created rather than just using those found by others.

We did two presentations. One at the beginning of the semester when we introduced our topic and the sources we had found so far. What I found interesting was sharing what problems and struggles we were facing at that moment. Seeing where other students in the class were motivated me to work harder to keep up. The second presentation was at the end, and we got to see what everybody had made of their initial project idea. The senior seminar is a small class, and we all knew about each other’s projects. The variety of topics our class worked on was quite amazing.

My advice to other History majors thinking about the senior seminar is, be aware you are going to spend a lot of time on this class. Find a topic you are passionate about, so that even if you are struggling with the research, you are working on something you like and want to work on. Find something that challenges you to think. Look for something that not too much has been written about.

One big takeaway for me was to be more mindful about how I travel. Since I travel to surf, I need to be conscious of how that affects the places I visit. The reason that there are big hotel complexes along the coast is that as tourists we stay there, we pay them. We need to be responsible tourists and make choices about whom we are giving our money to. There are usually smaller hotels and hostels locally, family owned, that we can stay in instead. By choosing the big resort, we are supporting the privatization of the beaches, and we further the inequalities in the country. I want to continue traveling, so I need to be responsible in how I choose to do that. Overall, it was a great learning experience and something that I would like to continue doing. I owe a big thanks to Dr. Conti as she was so helpful and is an amazing teacher and professor.