Americans in the Treasure House: Travel to Porfirian Mexico and the Cultural Politics of Empire

Abstract

At the turn of the twenty-first century, Dennis Merrill published his pioneering work on tourism and international relations, “Negotiating Cold War Paradise: US Tourism, Economic Planning, and Cultural Modernity in Twentieth-Century Puerto Rico,” in Diplomatic History (2001). A flourish of books on tourism development and international relations, including monographs by Merrill (Negotiating Paradise: US Tourism and Empire in Twentieth-Century Latin America [2009]) and Dina Berger (The Development of Mexico's Tourism Industry: Pyramids by Day, Martinis by Night [2006]) followed in the ensuing decade. Latin American tourism studies then took a postcolonial turn with works including Christine Skwiot's The Purposes of Paradise: US Tourism and Empire in Cuba and Hawai‘i (2010). Jason Ruiz's Americans in the Treasure House contributes further to the intersection of postcolonial cultural discourse and US-Mexican relations during the lengthy dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz (1876–1911).Utilizing an unusually deep and extensive collection of photographs gleaned from archival collections as well as traditional travel writing accounts of the era, Ruiz “asks how travel discourse, deeply bound to racialized and sexualized accounts of Mexican bodies, functioned as a site of knowledge production and empire” (p. 3). Expanded railway service between Mexico and the United States in the 1880s served as the connecting link that brought a new wave of American and European travelers to Mexico, ready with cameras and notebooks, to stare, gaze, and contemplate the compatibility of the two countries for imperial economic engagement. While the source material for the book spans a wide array of visual resources, Ruiz centers his narrative around the widely distributed work of Charles Burlingame Waite, a commercial photographer renowned for his tourist postcards as well as panoramas of the Porfirian economic project.Each of the book's chapters centers on encounters in “contact zones” scattered across the country, from the vestibule of Porfirio Díaz's office to the desolated Zapotec ruins near Mitla, Oaxaca. In the second chapter, for example, Ruiz analyzes widely distributed postcards of Porfirio Díaz as well as travelers' accounts of meetings with the president in an effort to understand representations of masculinity masquerading as national fitness for imperial compatibility with US enterprises and the nuanced acceptance of the president as the heir of European ancestry despite his conspicuous indigenous mien. Other chapters in the book analyze at great length the observations of middle- and upper-class American and European visitors to Mexico regarding indigenous and mestizo Mexican compatibility with the burgeoning neocolonial integration between the two countries. Ruiz points out some of the interesting North-South divisions of racialized discourse at the time. For example, while many travelers had their doubts about the ability to remake indigenous populations into citizens of the modern world vis-à-vis the freedman in the Jim Crow United States, skillful management of diverse native communities could render them acceptable as workers in a transnational economic system. Ruiz closes the book with a chapter on the US occupation of Veracruz during the Mexican Revolution, which paralleled a resurgence of doubts about Mexican compatibility with imperial designs north of the border as well as a longing—“Porfirian nostalgia,” in Ruiz's words—for a return to the order and stability achieved during the ousted president's long rule. With this chapter, Ruiz makes a strong case for the intersection of empire and tourism, reminiscent of Andrea Boardman's work on the origins of US tourism in Mexico at the close of the US-Mexican War (1846–1848). Ruiz's scrupulous attention to detail in reading photographs of locals within arm's length of American soldiers suggests that these locals may have congregated as a sign of opposition to their presence rather than curiosity (p. 210).Ruiz's strength lies in his insightful analysis of his visual sources. He thoughtfully evaluates images from the era to identify common visual and literary tropes used by travelers to explicate a Mexican variant on Edward Said's Orientalism (1978) that resonates within the particular dynamics of US-Mexican cultural politics. For example, in the first chapter of the book Ruiz examines the significance of the burdened laborer who permeates commercial and private postcards of the era, drawing out connections between representations of impoverished bodies and labor relations between the two countries. Ruiz gleans additional insight regarding the broader imperial implications of travelers' observations by comparing paired images of individuals and juxtaposing traditional and alternative readings of visual sources. Comparisons of pictures of Díaz and his second wife, Carmen, as well as photographs of Presidents Díaz and Theodore Roosevelt demonstrate how these images reinforced patriarchal notions of the Mexican head of state and the compatibility of the two heads of state for continuing economic rapprochement.