Kenneth Little, William

English

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Critical Tourism Studies Proceedings
Volume 2019 Article 40
2019
Parca’s Picks: Stuck and Unstuck by Numbers in
the Tourist State of Belize
William Kenneth Little
York University, Canada
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Recommended Citation
Kenneth Little, William (2019) "Parca’s Picks: Stuck and Unstuck by Numbers in the Tourist State of Belize," Critical Tourism Studies
Proceedings: Vol. 2019 , Article 40.
Available at: https://digitalcommons.library.tru.ca/cts-proceedings/vol2019/iss1/40
CTS 2019 
Title: Parca’s Picks: Stuck and Unstuck by Numbers in the Tourist State of Belize  
 
Author:  
 
William Kenneth Little 
York University, Canada 
 
Abstract: 
Parca is a Creole woman living in a small Belize beach town that has “gone crazy” for 
the panic expansion of generic Caribbean tourism. She plays Boledo, the national gambling 
game. The rules of the game are simple. Pick several numbers and play as much money on them 
as your seductions dare you to. Parca’s Boledo picks resonate when they feel right and that is 
when she is seduced by her numbers to play them successfully. This paper tracks a confusing and 
violent moment at the US Consulate in Belize where Parca hoped to secure a US visitor’s Visa. 
The interview experience was paralyzing. Traumatized as a result, she became “stuck” in place 
and in life, glued to bad attachments, unable to negotiate the chancy edges of the sensible where 
rogue bodily agitations might enliven forces of desire through her successful number picking 
system. The Consular experience shocked her, after which she felt powerless to make any life 
“moves” at all. Generally when “stuck” Parca’s picks fail her. She can’t win. When “unstuck” 
Parca feels nimble enough to improvise life “moves” using her strategy for picking numbers, 
enough to multiply moments of desire for something else of life, something excitable expressed 
against an emergent local world of global tourism futurities that can incite contingent material-
semiotic linkages that rub up against a Belize that has hooked itself to the spasmodic world of an 
“unsustainable sustainable tourism”. This paper explores how Parca’s emotional entanglements 
with the profound shift in everyday practices in Belize means riding the wild oscillating forces of 
becoming stuck and unstuck and that instantiate a politics of desire through her system of 
picking numbers. I suggest that Parca’s picks are her local strategy for negotiating the nervous 
antics of global tourism mobilities, for better and for worse.   
  
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Kenneth Little: Parca’s Picks: Stuck and Unstuck by Numbers in the Tourist State
Published by Digital Commons @ TRU Library, 2019


Parca’s Picks: Stuck and Unstuck by Numbers in the Tourist State of Belize

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Parca’s Picks: Stuck and Unstuck by Numbers in the Tourist State of Belize

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