Dennis Merrill - Negotiating Paradise: U.S. Tourism and Empire in Twentieth-Century Latin America

Table of Contents

Mass Tourism, Empire, and Soft Power

:
The U.S.-Mexican Rapprochement of the 1920s

:
Tourism and Empire in 1930s Mexico

Tourist Soft Power and the Physical Construction
of Cuba's Contact Zones

:
Commonwealth Puerto Rico

:
Puerto Rico in the 1960s and 1970s

Trouble in Paradise: Cultural Negotiation and
the Everyday Life of Empire

Neotatn
Paradse

U.S. Tourism and Empire in
Twentieth-Century Latin America

DENNIS MERRILL

The
University
of
North
Carolina
Press
Chapel
Hill

2009
The University of
North Carolina Press
All rights reserved
Manufactured in
the United States
of America

Designed by
Jacquline Johnson
Set in Minion
by Keystone
Typesetting, Inc.

Parts of this book have been reprinted with permission in
revised form from Negotiating Cold War Paradise: U.S.
Tourism, Economic Planning, and Cultural Modernity in
Twentieth Century Puerto Rico, Diplomatic History25
(Spring 2001): 179214.

The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence
and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines
for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources.

The University of North Carolina Press has been a member
of the Green Press Initiative since 2003.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Merrill, Dennis.
Negotiating paradise : U.S. tourism and empire in
twentieth-century Latin America / Dennis Merrill. 1st ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-0-8078-3288-2 (cloth: alk. paper)
ISBN 978-0-8078-5904-9 (pbk.: alk. paper)
eISBN: 9780807898635
1. United StatesRelationsLatin America. 2. Latin
AmericaRelationsUnited States. 3. AmericansLatin
AmericaHistory20th century. 4. TouristsLatin
AmericaHistory20th century. 5. TourismLatin
AmericaHistory20th century. 6. TourismPolitical
aspectsLatin AmericaHistory20th century.
7. TourismSocial aspectsLatin AmericaHistory20th
century. 8. Latin AmericaCivilizationAmerican
influences. I. Title.
E1418.M453 2009
303.48' 280730904dc22 2009009380

cloth 13 12 11 10 09 5 4 3 2 1
paper 13 12 11 10 09 5 4 3 2 1

For my
daughters,
Nikki,
Iris,
& Willa,
and the
places
they'll go

Preface

I have enjoyed good-natured ribbing from friends. Brows furrowed, they ask, The history of tourism? And where do you do your research? I honestly can't say that I have endured hardship on my research trips, but it has been immensely challenging to mine multilingual archives, to probe the many points at which the history of international tourism intersects with the history of international relations, and to analyze and explain the findings.

What comes into focus when the history of twentieth-century U.S. relations with Latin America is viewed through the lens of leisure travel and tourism rather than the traditional prism of diplomacy? How has the history of holidaymaking paralleled and helped shape the history of U.S. military occupations and dollar diplomacy? What might interwar leisure travel to Mexico teach us about Franklin D. Roosevelt's Good Neighbor policy in the 1930s? What role did tourism play in the Cuban Revolution and its aftermath? What was the relationship between Yankee sun worshippers in Puerto Rico in the 1960s and John F. Kennedy's Alliance for Progress? How can the seemingly trivial pursuits of North American vacationers reflect on the history of dictatorships and dirty wars that consumed so much of Latin America during the 1970s and 1980s? These are just a few of the questions that drive this study.

After perhaps too many years of preparation, I have found the answers to be compelling enough to share with others. Readers familiar with current historiographical debates among foreign relations scholars will recognize how I have been influenced by the field's recent cultural turn, with its emphasis on nonstate actors, transnational interest groups, identity formation, and popular constructions of race, class, and gender. On close examination, readers will also detect that I use cultural analysis to build on and complicate but not necessarily overturn conventional wisdom. In addition to Clifford Geertz, Edward Said, and Joan Robinson, the text reflects insights advanced by George F. Kennan, William Appleman Williams, and their many intellectual descendants. Alongside analysis of national identities, I discuss national interests.

I have long since concluded that the history of U.S. foreign relations cannot be told without an understanding of the nation's interior life. This examination of international travel has only reinforced that conviction. The social and cultural tensions associated with the new era of the 1920s, the Great Depression of the 1930s, the consumer culture of the postwar era, the African American struggle for civil rights and the women's movement, and the rise of evangelical religious thought have influenced how Americansboth travelers and diplomatshave viewed the world and the U.S. place in it. I seek not only to tell the history of mass tourism, an intriguing and significant topic in itself, but to use the narrative moment to address challenging issues in the history of U.S. foreign relations, to suggest ways to bridge the chasm that typically separates scholars of culture from those who study empire and international relations, and to stimulate debate in both fields.

I have conceived and written this book during an era when the discipline of history and the life of the planet have undergone major transformations. Since my years as an undergraduate, historical inquiry has been reshaped first by the rise of social history, or history from the bottom up, and more recently by cultural history, feminist theory, subaltern studies, and postmodern paradigms. International affairs have similarly evolved from Cold War confrontation to dtente to an ill-defined postCold War era, reconfigured by the rise of former colonial areas and the rush toward a not-yet-determined system of globalization. The world has shrunk temporally and linked peoples and societies as never before. Yet over the same period, nations have continued to wage wars, ethnic groups in various regions have committed unspeakable atrocities, famine remains a part of everyday life for millions, and the U.S. empire in Latin America still lives. My book has been influenced by all of these developments.

This history of international tourism illuminates the forcescultural, economic, and politicalthat have helped create our globalized world and positioned the United States as its leader. It does so by examining international relations from the bottom up and at times from the outside in, frequently emphasizing the agency of the other within the U.S.-led empire. While the story cannot be told without reference to transnational elites, ambassadors, presidents, and members of Congress or to world wars, revolutions, and global markets, I hone in on ordinary tourists and the men and women who have played the role of host, arguing that these people have left their mark on the front lines of global change.

The book begins with an introduction that explains and analyzes the rise of modern mass tourism and conceptualizes the U.S. tourist presence abroad as a form of international soft power. In the Western Hemisphere, the consumer and cultural privileges enjoyed by visiting Yankees fused with U.S. financial and military power as a manifestation of empire. Tourist power, however, proved less cohesive, more imagined, and more susceptible to host society manipulation than the traditional tools of empire. examines the hemisphere's first large-scale experiment in mass tourism, which took place in Mexico during the 1920s. The chapter follows the trails blazed by Prohibition-era Americans, many disaffected by the world's first modern global war and Wilsonian internationalism, who nonetheless sought to engage the outside world. Drunken cowboys, adventurers, would-be filibusters, poets, artists, social commentators, college students, and other more anonymous vacationers poured across the border. Some came as conquerors to impose their preconceived notions of Mexican identity on their hosts; others arrived in search of communion with the Mexican other. A corps of cooperative cross-border groups arose to build a tourist infrastructure, and visitors and hosts tested each other's power and helped bring the United States and postrevolutionary Mexico closer together politically as well as culturally.