Borderscapes and tourismscapes: The place of postcards in Mexican border town tourism

Dallen J Timothy

doi:10.7163/gpol.0188

Abstract

Since the early 1900s, Mexico’s northern border towns became important tourism destinations, receiving more foreign tourists than any other areas of Mexico. Historically, postcards followed the development of tourism in the borderlands, depicting unique border-oriented tourismscapes and life in general, and establishing an iconic image of the border as a rowdy, promiscuous and decadent location where Americans could spend their holidays abroad and participate in tourisms of vice. Until the 2000s, tourism in the US-Mexico border zone was overwhelmingly leisure oriented, and the proliferation of postcards illustrated that fact. Today, there are few postcards left and the ones that do remain are less focused on the border itself, as they once were; instead, they focus on the broader community with less emphasis on the borderline. Changes in border tourism from leisure pursuits to medical tourism and alcohol consumption, growing security concerns, and the proliferation of mobile phones and social media have almost entirely eliminated postcard use as a souvenir and marker of regional tourism identity in the US-Mexico borderlands.

Highlights

International boundaries have long been barriers to trade and flows of people and products, they have been intriguing in one form or another for curiosity-seekers
In common with most other tourist destinations, postcards traditionally played an important role in the Mexican border towns, and since the border created tourism there, it is little wonder that many of the images depicted in the postcards from these communities traditionally have been the border itself (Weigl, 2000; Arreola, 2001, 2017, 2019; Arreola & Burkhart, 2010; Pearson, 2016)
Between the late nineteenth and late twentieth centuries, picture postcards played a vital role in creating the images of rowdy border towns and moulding American perceptions of what life was like south of the border, creating and maintaining staged stereotypical representations of Mexico at the national frontier – the only Mexican experience many Americans and Canadians ever had

Summary

Introduction

International boundaries have long been barriers to trade and flows of people and products, they have been intriguing in one form or another for curiosity-seekers. Since the early twentieth century, most large Mexican towns and villages immediately adjacent to the US border have functioned as important tourist destinations.

Results

Conclusion