Grutas Tolantongo: Model resort cooperative?
By Betsy Bowman and Bob Stone

We rarely inquire about a commodity’s origins in wage labor. This is especially true of restaurant meals and resort vacations. Confronted with the stifling heat and indignity borne at Disneyland by the guy in the Mickey Mouse suit, our enjoyment might be subverted. The suit’s fixed smile compels its wearer to endure tail-pulling by pre-teens without complaint lest the spell of “being with Mickey” break and a refund be demanded.

So when those who profit from selling commodities conceal the exploitation in their relations of production, we consumers usually ratify their act by a willed ignorance. We don’t want to know how our “vacation” is produced! But is there any alternative?

Friends had recommended Grutas Tolantongo, in the state of Hidalgo (just north of Tlaxcala and the state of Mexico), solely as a resort. However, on two recent visits, we also came to be inspired by its democratic relations of production. Up to a point.

The large resort is made up of three hotel complexes that descend the side of a steep box canyon. Its main attraction is a steamy grotto at the bottom of the canyon’s enclosed end. Flowing from this grotto is a small, clear thermal river. Our trips were mid-week, free of Mexico City crowds.

An absence of hierarchy in the staff— rare at resorts— struck us. Desk managers and waitresses all dressed with the same informality (and almost all of the men wore moustaches). Why? The resort turns out to be a cooperativa ejidal run democratically by its 112 members, or socios!

Sociedad Cooperativa Ejidal “Grutas Tolantongo” SCL (www.grutastolantongo.com.mx), about a four-hour drive from San Miguel, was formed some 30 years ago by members of the ejido that own the side of the canyon described above. Not all members of the 5,200-hectare ejido are in the co-op, but all socios must be ejidatarios. Land reform set up this land tenure form in the 1930s in response to a cry for “Land and Freedom.” The 1910 revolution had demanded restoration of communal lands taken from campesinos after Independence and made into haciendas. Article 27 of the 1917 constitution had declared that every campesino has a right to land. But in 1992, in order to join NAFTA, then-President Salinas de Gortari stealthily passed a modification that undermined ejidos by allowing sale to corporations. While entire ejidos have been sold since, the new permission is widely ignored and most ejidal land remains intact.

Socios are divided by family, and the head of each family gets one vote. Here our admiration became qualified. Among the 112 socios, our dinner waitress told us there are only two female heads of households. We suggested to a 40-year-old male socio that wives who work in the co-op should also have a voice. “But they do,” he explained, “through their husbands— who are in any case more important.” The wives we asked about it did not consider themselves members. This paradox of sustaining a co-op with the labor of women, while denying them votes, was glaring to us. Why didn’t the co-op principle of engaging all talents in a workforce extend to enfranchising females? Roughly 30 male contract workers also get mere wages, never a share of profits or a vote; not being ejidatarios, they are also collectively exploited by socios. We could not complain. In the US, with the exception of some 500 worker co-ops and democratic ESOPs, no enterprises make any pretense of running themselves democratically.

Perhaps because we had widely praised the co-op, we received an extra-warm welcome on returning. Our friend Pablo (Francisco) Rebolledo Pérez’s associate, Vasily Ramirez, having brought our bags to our rooms, surprised us by asking to borrow our car. Inspired by the spirit of the place, we gave him the keys. In an hour he returned them. It felt like a sort of test.

It got better. Pablo invited us to a baptism of four children of socios. The all-day event started with a mass, then a comida serenaded by mariachis, then dancing. About 200 people socialized happily under a yellow Corona tent as some 50 family members served. Without charge, we ate the delicious barbacoa and drank beer, serenaded by eight mariachis. We expressed our gratitude for being included as foreign guests in this family celebration. We noticed in a corner a circular table of about 20, all men. Each wore a stiff straw cowboy hat, a long-sleeved striped dress shirt, and a moustache. They were the first to be serenaded. Did this express a subtle hierarchy in the co-op after all?

The next morning, before the city crowds arrived, we interviewed Pablo over still more barbacoa. “The grandfathers” had had the vision, Pablo said, and had started building the resort in the late seventies. Most socios were members of three or four large families, he said. There are no professional managers. Minor income differences based on responsibilities had been allowed by the General Assembly, but such jobs rotated.

It was important to Pablo— and other socios with whom we spoke— that neither outside capital nor expertise nor government help had launched or sustained the project. The first five simple units started generating income in 1992. These in turn raised funds for 10 more, and so on. “We don’t even save in a bank; we reinvest everything. Everyone must work every day,” Pablo explained. Slackers lose rights one at a time until the ejidatario is no longer a socio. Slow self-capitalization has preserved the co-op’s collective autonomy.


Socios were proud of two results. Living standards have begun to rise— a rise the co-op had made uniform for all income levels. And virtually all young people who had gone to the US for work have returned to join in the cooperative.

Is Tolantongo a model response to NAFTA’s effects? So far, we are inclined to say yes. The ejidatarios had not sold long leases to developers or foreign corporations and then become servants on their own land— a NAFTA-based pattern we had seen on Mexico’s west coast. They had instead developed their land themselves, welcoming visitors as its owners. We had visited a similar co-op restaurant-hotel near Yucatán’s Uxmal ruins. By forming co-ops so as to retain profits, these two ejidos had rejected exploitation. Yet exploitation is tempting. Co-ops can so boost their own value that members accept buy-outs rather than pass it to their children. Meanwhile, as Tolantongo builds an alternative economy on new democratic relations of production, it prospers.

Jobs rotate yearly. In 2006 Pablo had collected entry fees at the gate. Eighty pesos admits one to all facilities for 24 hours. Socios pay no entry fee but get no break on rooms. The co-op covers all federal health services and gives stipends to retirees. “We make sure everyone enjoys the increases in living standards because we need everyone’s work,” Pablo explained. Given this universal need, we felt that a socio’s daughter, educated on co-op income, would sooner or later make such a contribution that the paradox of excluding her from voting would be too visible to go unresolved.

Having had chambermaid and waiting jobs, we understand George Orwell’s account of the strong feelings generated behind the scenes in workers who produce the pleasures offered by restaurant and resort owners. In the kitchen of an elegant restaurant described in Down and Out in London and Paris, those feelings were epitomized by garnishing soups for obnoxious customers with spit. But Tolantongo is the reverse. Delight in the unique pride of workers who are also owners is one of its pleasures. Sharing this pride with visitors would likely benefit itself as well as the co-op movement.

So there is an alternative! Cases like Tolantongo are not everywhere, and they take a lot of collective work, but their sheer existence is evidence that exploitation-free relations of production are possible after all. For in that canyon those relations are, or could be made to be, almost as beautiful as the place.

Along with Cliff DuRand, Betsy Bowman and Bob Stone founded the Center for Global Justice in 2004.