South of the Border: Women Travelers to Latin America

Abstract

In South of the Border: Women Travelers to Latin America, Evelyn M. Cherpak, PhD, has compiled an extensive collection of essays, letters, and diaries by women who traveled to Latin America between 1818 and 1956. Cherpak, a former archivist, curator, and teacher at the US Naval War College, has focused on women from the United States and Europe, and this collection provides fascinating insights into the diverse attitudes, assumptions, and experiences of a particular class of international traveler.Cherpak has gathered 12 writers who published accounts of their travels and adventures in Latin America upon their return home. An additional three entries—those by Sarah Sabin Wilson, Mary Robinson Hunter, and Virginia Heim George—are based on previously unpublished letters and diaries. A short biographical section introduces each author. Among the women included here are some who traveled to Latin America as the wives of diplomats, businessmen, and mineowners; others were scientists, educators, or missionaries, while more than one woman was a thrill seeker.Among those who were professional writers is the journalist Nellie Bly, who reported from Mexico during a visit in 1886. Less than a year later, she became famous for her exposé of the insane asylums in New York City. Other notable women tried to establish themselves in Latin America on a more permanent basis, often without the aid of husbands or other family. Sarah Sabin Wilson describes her experiences running a Cuban plantation, Mary Lester recounts teaching in a rural school in Honduras, and Virginia Heim George tells of working for the YWCA in Brazil. The fact that few of the women included here were professional authors at the time of their travel is often an advantage, offering an unpolished but unguarded window into their experiences.Readers will benefit from Cherpak's inclusion of previously unpublished and difficult-to-find materials, and entries such as these allow researchers who cannot travel to archives access to original primary resources. The collection also combines material intended for widespread public consumption with private reflections and observations on Latin American culture, giving us access to a broad range of perspectives. These primary sources reveal how these largely middle-class white women from Europe and the United States judged the cultures, customs, and races of Latin America. It is an approach that usefully informs us of these women's cultural biases toward the Latin American people, although more contextualization in the classroom will be necessary to move beyond the stereotypes expressed by some of the authors.Placing their writings side by side permits us to discover commonalities in these women's experiences, informed by such factors as class, nationality, and gender. For example, through this collection one can track how the act of travel—its motivations, means, and meaning—changed from traveler to traveler in the intervening years and across locations. In this regard, a more extensive and detailed introduction would have been useful in framing the collection and highlighting its underlying continuities and tensions. For example, three of the authors—Sarah Madeleine Vinton Dahlgren, Marguerite Bates Dickins, and Wilma Jerman Miles—are the wives of naval officers. It would have been interesting for Cherpak, a historian of naval history, to draw out the implications of such connections.Cherpak's contributors comment on a wide variety of topics, including slavery, contemporary political figures, and women's customs regarding fashion, education, and the ability to socialize in public and private spheres. Few of these authors specifically addressed their lives as women or set out to write about the women whom they met while traveling. Nonetheless, although these travelers often did not see themselves as exceptional, they were able to gather information about women's lives that male travelers would have been uninterested in, unaware of, or unable to record.By letting these women speak in their own voices, Cherpak's volume allows them to tell us as much about themselves—including their prejudices and misconceptions—as they tell us about Latin America. With selections drawn from throughout Latin America and ranging from the early nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, the digital edition of this book will be particularly useful for classrooms in which one might assign a pertinent chapter based on time and place. Our historical record is incomplete without the varied perspectives of women, and a collection that brings forgotten voices to our classrooms is something for which many instructors long. We need more compilations, anthologies, and websites that draw together and recontextualize unfamiliar primary sources, and Cherpak's book takes a step toward filling this gap in the literature.