Negotiating Paradise: U.S. Tourism and Empire in Twentieth-Century Latin America (review)

Tourism is today one of the largest industries in the world; its business volume equals or even surpasses that of oil exports. The contemporary trade in tourism, however, is not without its history. In the Americas, particularly in the circum-Caribbean region, the tourist trade over the last 100 years or so—expanding, contracting, and expanding within the context of specific historical conditions—has become a leading industry. Tourism in the Caribbean did not emerge overnight, nor did it develop along a linear line of progress from the past to the present. Only recently, though, have historians begun to examine this complex and, as historian Frederick Cooper might describe it, "lumpy" history.

Dennis Merrill's new book, Negotiating Paradise, is an important contribution to an emerging and still relatively uncharted literature on the history of tourism in Latin America. Organizing his analysis around three case studies (Mexico, Cuba and Puerto Rico), Merrill explains how tourism reshaped political and economic relations between the United States and Latin America in the twentieth century.

As a historian of U.S. foreign relations, Merrill is interested in the way the historical development of tourism connected to important political-economic events between the U.S. and Latin America, such as the Puerto Rican nationalist movement and the Mexican and Cuban revolutions. He analyzes how tourism intersected politically, culturally, and economically with the history of "U.S. Empire" in Latin America.

Each case study highlights how tourism operated as a key element of U.S. imperial "soft power," a term first coined by Joseph Nye in the 1990s. Merrill uses the term to encapsulate his main argument: that U.S. power in Latin America "endured in part because the hard power brandished by marine brigades and financial houses has been accompanied by softer power, based on negotiation and suasion rather than compulsion" (p. 11). Tourism represented this softer version of U.S. imperial power.

Part of Merrill's understanding of U.S. soft power is the idea that U.S. officials and visitors did not exclusively dictate the growth of tourism in the region. Latin Americans also manipulated tourism for their own purposes. Within the context of U.S. hegemony, it was the combined efforts of Latin Americans, U.S. citizens, and transnational entrepreneurs that ultimately led to what he calls an "interactive process of globalization" (p. 26). This collective desire to develop the tourism industry complicates traditional interpretations in the field of U.S. foreign relations, which often separate historical actions in the U.S. from those emanating from a supposedly Latin American periphery.

Both tourism and U.S. power in Latin America are best understood (as the book's title alludes) as negotiated, albeit at times asymmetrical, processes. Merrill convincingly demonstrates that political and commercial leaders in Latin America worked to cultivate the tourist trade, as both a tool of diplomacy and an engine of social and economic development. Puerto Rico's well-known Director of Development, Teodoro Moscoso, would often say, "scratch a tourist and you'll find an investor underneath" (p. 186). Latin American governments in the interwar years and again in the 1940s and 1950s utilized tourism to promote their own national projects. Indeed, political leaders in Mexico and Cuba developed their own distinct versions of Moscoso's philosophy and in anticipation of tourist dollars, built new hotels and restaurants, commodified local cultures, and rearranged urban and rural landscapes to meet the leisurely desires of U.S. visitors.

In terms of theory and method, Negotiating Paradise engages a small, but growing body of scholarship that uses tourism to study issues central to U.S. diplomatic and international history. Merrill's argument dialogues, for example, with Christopher Endy's Cold War Holidays, which analyzes the Cold War era relationship between the U.S. and France through the lens of tourism. Merrill also follows the lead of historians, such as Gilbert Joseph...