In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

concLusion Americans in the Treasure House has shown that travelers played a powerful role in shaping American ideas about Mexico during the Porfiriato and in its aftermath. Travel discourse that circulated in the United States imagined many Mexicos, ranging from a dangerous backwater to a rapidly modernizing “sister republic.” Above all, travel discourse subtly but firmly placed Mexican subjects—from lowly peons to Porfirio Díaz himself—within the orbit of American imperialism. Representational practices like those examined throughout this book also bled into the new medium of motion pictures soon after the end of the Porfiriato, when villains labeled as “greasers” populated early westerns. Silent films like Broncho Billy and the Greaser (1914), in which perennial cowboy hero Broncho Billy Anderson soundly defeated a greaser with intentions to rob him and rape his blond paramour, proposed that Mexican character was a problem not only for Mexico’s development but also within the borders of the United States. The more than one million Mexicans who migrated to the United States to escape the violence and chaos of the Mexican Revolution from 1910 to the 1920s were forced to contend not only with the modes of representation examined throughout this book but with a new spate of cultural forms that imagined Mexican people as primitive villains who could not adapt to the law and order that supposedly characterized American life. This does not mean, however, that U.S. investors and politicians lost sight of Mexico as a field for capitalist expansion. Contrary to what one might suspect, U.S. economic domination continued throughout the revolution and into the 1920s. As Gilbert G. González and Raul A. Fernandez have put it, “The 1910 civil war . . . neither derailed nor significantly threatened the strategic position held by the United States; on the contrary, the [economic interests of] the latter emerged from the war not only unscathed but also even stronger.”1 Other scholars have shown that foreign firms such as Weetman Pearson’s Aguila oil company became much more profitable in the aftermath of the war. By the time the civil unrest in Mexico began to wind down around 1920, American proponents of economic conquest reintroduced the idea that Mexico was a treasure house waiting to be tapped by a more enterprising and ingenious nation. Travel discourse again supported this project, for travelers returned 218 AmericAns in the treAsure house to the idea that Mexico was a treasure house waiting to be exploited for pleasure and profit. Frank G. Carpenter’s travelogue, Mexico (1924), painted a strikingly different portrait of Veracruz than did either Morrill or the sailors stationed there in 1914, one that is more paradisiacal than infernal. “Although it has borne the brunt of repeated attacks from the sea, and submitted to a series of occupations by foreign invaders,” he writes, Vera Cruz remains to this day one of the most typically Spanish cities of Mexico. Seen from the harbour, its low buildings seem hardly to rise above ocean level, while behind it and around it are vast stretches of green plains. Its waterfront has docks wonderfully constructed of great blocks of stone, and so long, that a walk to the end of them is tiring in the blazing sun. Their equipment includes giant cranes, railroad tracks, and every modern device for loading and unloading cargoes moving by ship or train. The port works, as well as the asphalt-paved streets, water supply, and sewers were put in by an English firm, and it must be conceded that they did a good job. Many a larger town in the States has fewer modern port facilities and an uglier waterfront than this entrance to present-day Mexico.2 In this view of Veracruz, written just seven years after Morrill’s, foreign developers again take the credit for the development of Veracruz. The markers of Porfirian modernity—including cranes, railroad tracks, asphalt-paved streets, and sewers—make an encore appearance, perhaps to urge the reader in the 1920s that Mexico was again open for business (for that, after all, was the theme of so many travelogues from the 1870s to 1911). In stark contrast to the “wharf rats” discussed in the previous chapter, Carpenter claimed, “The only scavengers that we saw were the buzzards which flocked here in such numbers that they darkened the sky.”3 Paired photographs, one placed right above the other, illustrate Carpenter ’s vision of Veracruz as a sort of industrial paradise (Figure C.1). The top picture offers...

Share