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4 “this is how it will be when you get there” Destination Profiles and Middlebrow Geography I n March 1947, a lengthy profile of Mexico penned by author Anita Brenner appeared in Holiday. Brenner, an expatriate American journalist and anthropologist best known for her popular studies of mestizo craftwork and the Mexican Revolution, offered a nuanced picture of the nation, playing its stark contrasts off against one another. The Mexico that Brenner described was at once rich and poor, modern and traditional, European and Indian, and oppressive and liberating. Through this enigmatic land snaked a three-hundred-mile “tourist circuit” connecting Mexico City to the volcano Parícutin via a network of idyllic villages, where Americans saw “a Mexico served anxiously in the Gringo image.” Brenner’s editors at Holiday were delighted with the piece. The travel magazine was not the only publication to feature the article, though. A pirated, bowdlerized version ran in a number of Mexican newspapers as well, setting off a storm of controversy at the Mexican state tourism board. Bureau head Alejandro Buelna blasted the article as “utterly unfair” and inappropriate “for a foreigner living here and enjoying our hospitality.” To make matters worse, Holiday, only a year old at that point, had already run a Mexico profile that Buelna found “derisive, crude and for the main, far from the truth.” Brenner, aware of the outcry her piece set off in high circles, worried about her own well-being, telling Holiday’s editors that the whole affair rekindled “the impression that I am a dangerous character.”1 Just one of many travel profiles that appeared in American magazines that month, “Mexico Fact and Fiction” may have been unusual in its quality of writing and insight, but it certainly wasn’t unusual in form. Destination profiles filled postwar magazines, developing into a distinct promotional genre viewed as integral to the global tourist economy.2 This chapter explores the processes and assumptions that guided the genre’s production. By “this is how it will be when you get there” 83 transforming multifaceted nations, regions, and cities into vacationlands, destination profiles acted as a type of geographic pedagogy. As individual articles, their intent was to shape popular conceptions of areas in ways that made them appear as desirable vacation spots. As a genre, though, their aim was to cultivate a particular way of seeing that rendered landscapes through the lens of middle-class touristic desire.3 In doing so, destination profiles addressed readers as mobile people with both the itch and the affluence to roam, presenting them with catalogs of places out there to experience. Like other postwar cosmopolitan productions, travel profiles assumed a high-modern perspective that framed the world from afar as an endlessly complex, yet still ultimately orderable, collection of parts.4 As sociologist Dean MacCannell has observed, this sense of fragmentation and synthesis lies at the heart of tourism. “Sightseeing is a kind of collective striving for a transcendence of the modern totality,” he argues, “a way of attempting to overcome the discontinuity of modernity, of incorporating its fragments into unified experience.”5 It was precisely this desire and geographic mind-set that destination profiles sought to nourish. Poking out of newsstands, resting on coffee tables, or laying open on waiting-room couches, popular magazines circulated these touristic representations of place through everyday life. Joined by everything from popular movies to vacation photos, they allowed the world of touristic fantasy to bleed into that of mundane reality.6 The editors, writers, and photographers behind their production implicitly assumed that American vacationers, off on their annual jaunts, nursed a desire for geographic totality, racing across a global landscape to gather up as many fragments as possible. For boosters in Mexico and dozens of other locales, the easy mobility and popular cosmopolitanism voiced by midcentury magazines carried the promise of a booming tourist trade, as masses of American tourists poured in to collect whatever piece the region embodied. Thus it made sense for administrators like Buelna to keep close tabs on journalistic profiles, and he was by no means alone. During Ted Patrick’s tenure editing Holiday, the governments of Italy, France, and the United States all awarded him honors for what they deemed helpful portrayals. Viewing these articles as unofficial supplements to their own promotional campaigns, industry boosters heaped praise on stories that pleased them and scorn on those that did not.7 “Lorelei of...

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