Governing Tourism: Representation, Domination and Freedom in Puerto Rico: 1949

This essay will explore tourism as a biopolitical strategy in the U.S. commonwealth of Puerto Rico. I focus my paper on the year 1949, the year in which Puerto Ricans chose their first democratically elected colonial governor, and the year in which Conrad Hilton opened the doors to his first non-mainland hotel, the Caribe Hilton. By analyzing political discourses, advertisements, and other contemporary media representations of these two events, I argue that tourism was indeed a new model of colonialism that used the Island as a ground for shaping a project for industrial, colonial (un)freedom in a post-industrial, post-colonial world. It provided a counter-model to the decolonizing model that was going on elsewhere in the undeveloped world. The intersection of democracy and tourism brings forth issues related to representation and governance in the Caribbean.