Driving Pan-Americanism: The Imagination of a Gulf of Mexico Highway

Abstract

This article examines the intertwined efforts of Mexican and Cuban officials, US policy makers and business interests, as well as tourists and tourism advocates, to link all three countries' highway systems around the Gulf of Mexico and promote automobile excursions in the region from the 1930s through the 1950s. Adopting Ricardo D. Salvatore's concept of transportation utopia, the article argues that the physical and imaginary construction of this particular infrastructural project came into being through the combined impact of the politics of hemispheric unity, the emergence of tourism as a development strategy, and the growing vogue of automobile touring. The article first situates the circum-gulf highway project within an earlier history of road building, tourism, and motoring in Cuba and Mexico. It then traces the numerous efforts by officials from all three countries to join these road systems through a circum-Gulf automobile link, an idea that soon became the subject of numerous articles publishe...