Mexican Travel Writing: The Legacy of Foreign Travel Writers in Mexico, or Why Mexicans Say They Don't Write Travel Books

Introduction

What does the 'Mexican' in 'Mexican travel writing' actually mean? In the field of English studies in the United Kingdom, its meaning is assumed to be quite straightforward. Thus a critic such as Nigel Leask can publish an article entitled 'The Ghost in Chapultepec: Fanny Calderón de la Barca, William Prescott and Nineteenth-Century Mexican Travel Accounts' safe in the knowledge that 'Mexican travel accounts' are those works written about travels in Mexico by foreign writers.¹ But in Mexico the two-volume publication Viajes en México (Mexican Journeys) is explicitly divided into 'Crónicas mexicanas' (Mexican chronicles or accounts) and 'Crónicas extranjeras' (foreign accounts).² So here, the 'Mexican' in 'Mexican accounts' refers quite clearly to those accounts that are written by writers of Mexican nationality. It seems perfectly acceptable that both meanings should co-exist – especially as, to avoid confusion, many publications concerning travel writing and a certain nation or nationality find ways to make questions of destination and the origin of the author(s) of the work more explicit. Nevertheless, the fact that almost no publications exist in the English language that understand the 'Mexican' in 'Mexican travel writing' to refer to citizens of Mexican nationality reveals a rather colonialist mentality at work: travellers are presumed to be citizens of the (ex-)colonial powers of the Western World and places like Mexico are the passive recipients of their gazes. In other words, Mexicans are presumed not to write travel books so there is no need to distinguish quite what is meant by the adjective 'Mexican'.

In this article I argue that while evidently there exist travel books written by Mexican authors, the prevailing metropolitan assumptions about travel writing and the motivations that underpin the genre's development mean that Mexican writers frequently display an ambivalent position in this regard, claiming that they do not write travel books, even as they do just that. The first section – Mexican Travel Writing, I – addresses the first interpretation of the term 'Mexican travel writing', analysing the varying different types of travel writing written by foreigners such as Alexander von Humboldt and Fanny Calderón de la Barca on the subject of Mexico, and the impact of such works on Mexican writers. The second section – Mexican Travel Writing, II – examines in detail what Mexicans have had to say about their relationship to travel writing and its colonialist legacy, focussing in particular on statements made by Manuel Altamirano in the late nineteenth century and José Emilio Pacheco in the late twentieth century. I conclude by arguing that such statements are key rhetorical manoeuvres that allow Mexican writers to signal the postcolonial nature of their practice of the genre.

Mexican Travel Writing, I

The most significant demographic movement between Europe and Latin America has, of course, tended to flow from the metropolis to the colonies and this has generated a considerable amount of travel writing penned by Europeans – and later citizens of the United States – on the subject of Latin America. Of this fact Latin Americans are painfully aware. In the case of Mexico, the names of the most significant foreign travel writers to have published their observations and impressions of Mexico are repeated ad infinitum in Mexican cultural production, both creative and critical.

The reasons why certain foreign travel writers have more impact than others in the country about which they are writing differ. Availability and translation into the native tongue might be one a priori factor. Broadly speaking, in the case of nineteenth-century Mexico, it would appear that a lack of translations was not a factor that significantly hindered the capacity of a book written in English or French to reach Mexican readers and that the Mexican intelligentsia of the day avidly imported anything written on the subject of their new-born nation.³ In the twentieth century, the translation into Spanish of foreign travel books has greatly widened the influence of such writers in the Mexican psyche. It started slowly in the early years of the century with a...