Holiday in Mexico: Critical Reflections on Tourism and Tourist Encounters ed. by Dina Berger and Andrew Grant Wood (review)

The Latin Americanist, June 2010 Codex Mendoza and the Codex Telleriano-Remensis. Despite these objections, Bauer and other specialists seem to believe that the Codex Cardona was a sixteenth-century product. Anthony Pagden, for example, enthusiastically endorsed the authenticity of the codex for Sotheby, and in her evaluation for Christie’s, Stephanie Wood, although reserving definitive judgment, emphasizes the evidence in favor of authenticity. After its final public appearance at Christie’s in 1998, Bauer traces the Codex Cardona to owners in Mexico, who claim to have lost the document. Bauer concludes that the codex may no longer exist in its original form, because the current owner, who is aware of the problems posed by its ambiguous provenance, the legally dubious claims of ownership, and the risk of illegal trafficking in cultural patrimony might have decided to sell the codex piece by piece (169-170). The Search for the Codex Cardona is an imaginative literary text as well. In his search for the codex, Bauer frequently inserts fictional episodes informed by his research. Considering the possibility that the codex was a forgery, Bauer creates a short story in which the famous anthropologist Robert Barlow fabricates the codex. Searching for the owner of the codex, Bauer imagines a Spanish hotelero whose quixotic perspective makes him indifferent towards notions of ‘authenticity.’ In addition to these imaginative stories, the author also frequently weaves his personal life and memories of his family, friends, and colleagues into the main plot. It is unusual to find such fictional elements in scholarly texts, but the subject matter of this book is highly relevant to the field of Aztec studies. The Search for the Codex Cardona is an amusing, informative, and novelistic scholarly book. It develops its topic rapidly with concise and short sentences, which makes it easy to read. This book could serve undergraduate students and lay readers as an introduction to Mexican painted books and graduate students and scholars as an introduction to the virtually unknown and now lost Codex Cardona, a possibly invaluable source of information about the Aztecs. In this sense, The Search for the Codex Cardona makes a unique contribution in that it focuses not on an available scholarly resource but on one that has never been available and that may no longer exist. Jongsoo Lee Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures University of North Texas HOLIDAY IN MEXICO: CRITICAL REFLECTIONS ON TOURISM AND TOURIST ENCOUNTERS. Eds. Dina Berger and Andrew Grant Wood. Durham: Duke UP, 2010, pp. x+394. $24.95. This collection of essays is a welcome addition to the burgeoning number of histories of tourism. Until recently, the field has focused mostly on 126 Book Reviews North America and Europe, as well as American and European travelers in the colonies. This emphasis means a conspicuous lack of studies of many places that were leading tourist destinations in the twentieth century and continue to be so today. Holiday in Mexico begins to remedy this problem. Among the book’s strengths are the wide range of what gets called “tourism” and the connections drawn between pleasure travel and other realms. Andrea Boardman’s essay on US soldiers in Mexico in 1847-48 and Lisa Pinley Covert’s chapter on artists teaching and studying in postWorld War II San Miguel de Allende demonstrate the overlap between pleasure travel and other activities. Dina Berger notes the importance of tourism in diplomatic efforts to improve the strained relationship between Mexico and the United States in the 1930s and 1940s. The contributors also demonstrate that tourism is intimately tied to other forms of mobility and to the viability of local communities. Bianet Castellanos examines the regional economy in which Maya migrate from rural Yucatán to work in service jobs in Cancún while Mexicans from other states take higher-level positions, all to serve foreign visitors. Andrew Sackett, writing about Acapulco in the 1940s and 1950s, details how national elites’ appropriation of land and resources to serve tourists left residents homeless and lacking basic municipal services. Through interviews with locals in Acapulco, Oaxaca, and Amecameca, Barbara Kaselstein shows that the relative success of the tourism industry, local involvement in its organization, and whether visitors are...