And while locals and newcomers may have differences about community boundaries, both sides in those coastal communities must deal with sargassum fouling up their beaches.
Record amounts of sargassum seaweed are slowly moving west and north across the Atlantic Ocean, piling up on the shores of the Caribbean and the United States.
Today we asked Tourism Minister Anthony Mahler about the sargassum crisis. He feels the region isn't taking it as seriously.
Reporter
"Do you feel hopeless in the face of that problem?"
Anthony Mahler - Minister of Tourism, Youth & Sports
"Some days, because I don't think we're looking at this heavily as a region, and I push it personally in both, meetings for Central America and the, Caribbean. But I don't think we have worked on this collectively and with science behind it to see how we can deal with it. And the scientists say that it's coming out of the Amazon, out of the Sargasso Sea and a whole pile of thing. So we just have to try it. If you can see Playa del Carmen, we got lucky over the last month or so, most of it went up, to Mexico. And they are taking a beating right now. And they have much bigger budgets, and they have the Coast Guard working on all kinds of thing to try to, it still just keeps coming because you can't work 24/7 in that environment. So by the time you wake up in the morning, a boatload or a beach load of sargassum, it has washed up on the on the beaches."
