Americans in the Treasure House: Travel to Porfirian Mexico and the Cultural Politics of Empire

3. American Travel Writing and the Problem of Indian Difference

chAPter 3 AmericAn trAvel writing And the Problem of indiAn difference The people of Mexico are not Latins. They are Indians. And they are Indians, only somewhat resembling the Indians of the United States. They are not merely a different tribe. They are a different race of Indians. JAck london All apologies for the Díaz system of economic slavery and political autocracy have their roots in assertions of ethnological inferiority on the part of the Mexican people . . . John kenneth turner Americans who were setting out to make a new society could find a place in it for the Indian only if he would become what they were— settled, steady, civilized. roy hArvey PeArce the PorfiriAto coinciDeD with a period in which savage but subdued native people populated travel books. From Kipling’s British colonial adventure stories set in India to Boy Scout novels that transported young American readers to the Philippines, colonized or semicolonized native people played important roles in travel discourse during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.1 As scholars of imperialism and the literary imagination have argued, the appearances of native people in travel writing almost always reinforced white dominance over those that Kipling called “new-caught, sullen peoples/Halfdevil and half-child” in “The White Man’s Burden,” his famous paean to turn-of-the-twentieth-century imperialism.2 Even in Mexico, where no formal empire existed and one could not accurately describe indigenous people as “new-caught,” travelers saw indigenous people within an imperialist frame. Chapter One examined a large body of photographic evidence that 104 AmericAns in the treAsure house suggests that Americans saw the Indian as a desirable, if endangered, part of Porfirian Mexico. Photographers like Charles Burlingame Waite developed visual tropes that constructed the Indian as hardworking and attractive but poor and needing rescue by, in words that appeared in an article in Harper’s, a “higher and more progressive race.”3 These views of Mexican Indianness, which were sometimes erotically charged, helped underscore the view of Mexico as an attractive place for tourists and profit seekers alike. Travel writing followed suit, and a number of travel books focused on Indian people and themes, including ones with mysterious and compelling titles such as Che! Wah! Wah!, or, the Modern Montezumas of Mexico (1883), Unknown Mexico (1902), and In Indian Mexico (1908). These books and the many like them that were published in the Porfiriato opened up new ways to talk, write, and think about indigenous people in Mexico. Indians were no longer merely local color, as they had been in the eyes of American observers prior to the Díaz regime, but were now treated as a real force in Mexican life. This does not mean, however, that travelers necessarily championed Indian Mexico as a place to find opportunities for business and pleasure. Instead, an entirely new set of concerns emerged in American travel writing about Mexico’s indigenous population and how it fit with the imperial adventures of the United States. In 1894, as U.S. investment in Porfirian Mexico continued to grow, Scribner’s Magazine published a travel article by John G. Bourke describing the Río Grande as “The American Congo.” A West Point graduate and experienced Indian hunter, Bourke had fashioned himself as an eminent frontiersman, explorer, and amateur ethnologist of the Gilded Age by the time his travelogue appeared in Scribner’s.4 Like many white travelers from the United States who considered themselves experts on the places they visited (and the reader knows by now that there were many), Bourke used a trip to Mexico as an occasion to think about Mexican Indians’ relation to race, civilization, and the growing power of the United States. His bleak vision of the indigenous people in the region of the Río Grande fit within a powerful counterdiscourse that emerged during the Porfiriato, for an equally large number of representations construed the Indian as an obstacle to bringing American progress to Mexico. Referring to the Río Grande as the “American Congo” was a provocative comparison in the 1890s, as the Congo was then gaining infamy as an example of European colonialism’s excesses (King Leopold of Belgium had established the Congo Free State as a private colony; atroci- AmericAn trAvel writing And the Problem of indiAn difference 105 ties perpetrated against the native people there caused an international sensation).5 The Río Grande...