Holiday in Mexico: Critical Reflections on Tourism and Tourist Encounters

Abstract

Mexico is indelibly imprinted in the collective imagination of the United States as a romantic playground and land of the exotic otherness. Neither the intensity of transnational migration of Mexican workers living in the United States and Mexico, nor the now millions upon millions of American tourists who have traveled, toured, and played in Mexico’s Spanish colonial cities, indigenous markets, pre-Columbian sites, and long tropical beaches have dulled these attitudes. How this came to be is a fascinating story that Dina Berger and Andrew Grant Wood begin to answer in their edited volume Holiday in Mexico: Critical Reflections on Tourism and Tourist Encounters.Berger and Wood’s volume counteracts the overwhelming tendency of tourism scholars to focus their research on contemporary, synchronic case studies. Certainly there are exceptions, but most research fails to address tourism from a historical perspective. Over the course of the well-written and interesting chapters, the authors remind us that not all was as new as the first tourism scholars in the 1970s implied. These chapters are bracketed by an introduction and conclusion in which the editors contextualize the contributors’ theoretical perspectives and their specific historical cases.One of the strengths of these essays is that neither the editors nor the chapter authors try to present a unified vision of tourism history and development in Mexico. What they do is present a panorama of Mexican tourism, not an exhaustive study of all kinds of tourism, but a diverse collection of specific tourism histories that tell as much about international politics between the United States and Mexico as about tourism in Mexico. Collectively, the authors illustrate the particular kinds of tourists and the shifting representations of Mexico that are cultivated by the Mexican state as well as regional and local community civic leaders and private entrepreneurs. As Berger’s chapter illustrates nicely, American tourists and Mexican hosts fit into the US “Good Neighbor Policy” of the 1930s, in which tourism played a strong role in fostering positive relations between the two countries. Other essays, notably chapters by Eric M. Schantz (about vice), Jeffrey M. Pilcher (about touristic consumption), and Barbara Kastelein (about ecological and social decline), show some of the darker sides of tourism in Mexico.Indeed, tourism development and its history is both positive and negative as tourists themselves engage in contradictory behaviors, the US and Mexican governments inject their political agendas in the mix, and businesspersons small and large try to gain an advantage and make a profit. Andrea Boardman shows how US soldiers in the US-Mexican War acted like tourists, setting the stage for the tourism growth that followed their return home. While Boardman shows proto-tourist soldiers, other authors show how tourism became democratized, at least for US tourists, following World War II.Essays by Christina Bueno on the reconstruction of Teotihuacán, by Wood about improving health conditions in Veracruz, and by Alex Saragoza about resort development on the Pacific coast describe the monumental acts and finances of the state to develop and promote tourism. Other authors show how tourism politics play out among local businesspersons, the state, and foreigners: Andrew Sackett on the politics of tourism development in Acapulco, Lisa Pinley Covert on transforming San Miguel de Allende into a cultural center, and Mary K. Coffey on the resignification of folk art. Collectively these authors illustrate how massive state capital investment was related to private investment and fostered tense public-private unions.In various essays, notably Wood’s chapter on Carnival in Veracruz and, especially, M. Bianet Castellanos’s chapter about Maya service workers, the authors take a contemporary tourism site or associated tourism activity and then describe the politics that led up to the contemporary situation. Relying primarily on oral histories, Bianet Castellanos reconstructs labor regimes and tourism in Yucatán from the perspective of workers who try to comprehend tourism work, which does not come under ritual control like corn farming. Castellano shows the development of mutual dependency and economic support that exists between a Maya community and Cancún tourism resorts.Berger argues significantly that the tourism gaze is not one way and imperial, and that tourism politics, development, and practices are dialectical. By considering tourism development as representative of power relations — between states, between tourists and hosts, and among politicians and businesspersons — the authors here deepen our knowledge of the history of tourism in Mexico.