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  • The Development of Mexico's Tourism Industry: Pyramids by Day, Martinis by Night
  • Monica A. Rankin
The Development of Mexico's Tourism Industry: Pyramids by Day, Martinis by Night. By Dina Berger (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. xvii plus 164 pp.).

Unwind on the white, pristine beaches along the coast. Get swept away in the mysterious past of ancient cultures. Experience "authentic" native life by exploring local markets and witnessing traditional shows. And at the end of the day, leave the primitive yet charming adventures behind and enjoy the most elegant and trendy of cuisines, the most contemporary and cutting-edge of night clubs, and the most modern and luxurious of hotels. A vacation in Mexico has it all—from the alluring charm of old world traditions to the voguish and glamorous enticement of a modern get-away.

The vocabulary is timeless. The rhetoric used to market a vacation in Mexico has changed very little in fifty-plus years; but the historical context that provides the backdrop for that language has evolved considerably. Dina Berger takes us back to the beginning in The Development of Mexico's Tourism Industry: Pyramids [End Page 790] by Day, Martinis by Night. In this seminal study of the formation and evolution of a formal tourism enterprise in Mexico, Berger makes a substantial contribution to a bourgeoning body of literature on the post-1930s history of Mexico. If any skepticism existed as the legitimacy of tourism in particular—and popular culture in general—in the mainstream of historical analysis, Berger has helped to lay those doubts to rest by placing the history of tourism squarely in the context of broader political and economic trends in post-revolutionary Mexico.

An Assistant Professor of Latin American History at Loyola University Chi- cago, Dina Berger has synthesized information from a vast array of U.S. and Mexican archives. One of the greatest contributions is her thoughtful analysis of many formerly overlooked sources, such as tourist publications and the records of early travel promotion agencies. In the book, which is a revised and updated version of her Ph.D. dissertation from the University of Arizona, Berger provides two significant levels of analysis that substantially enhance our understanding of Mexico's post-revolutionary history. First she presents one of the first scholarly treatments of the development of Mexico's modern tourism industry. The growth of vacation-related business ventures over the last half of the twentieth century make this a vital, yet unexplored, aspect of Mexico's economic history. In a second and more significant analysis, Berger uses tourism as a lens through which to view the ways in which the varied and often disparate meanings of Mexico's 1910 revolution were constantly renegotiated and redefined throughout the twentieth century. Berger deviates from many of the conventional interpretations of Mexican history that have marked 1940 as a major turning point when "the revolution" either ended or made a major shift to the right. Instead, she joins the growing cadre of scholars who offer a more complex and nuanced version of post-1930s Mexico—one that considers national unity and the growth of capitalist enterprise as an essential part of the revolutionary project.

Berger's argument is that the tourist industry emerged durng an era of revolutionary state-building and provided the government with a new set of language and symbols through which to express Mexican identity and—through revolutionary nationalism—the meaning of the revolutionary project. She supports this thesis by presenting the development of the tourism industry as a virtual metaphor for revolutionary state-building through two parallel, yet interrelated, analyses. First, Berger examines the connection between the revolutionary government and local private interests to establish and promote Mexico's tourism industry. Beginning in the late 1920s, private initiative led the push to organize a national effort around the creation of a major tourism enterprise. Groups such as the Mexican Tourism Association and the Mexican American Automobile Association had formed and often cooperated with the Bank of Mexico and other local organizations to promote travel-related business. State involvement was slow and gradual, but between 1930 and 1935 the government and private organizations participated in exploratory conferences...

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