Negotiating Paradise: U.S. Tourism and Empire in Twentieth-Century Latin America

Preface

Preface I have enjoyed good-natured ribbing from friends. Brows furrowed , they ask, ‘‘The history of tourism? And where do you do your research ?’’ I honestly can’t say that I have endured hardship on my research trips, but it has been immensely challenging to mine multilingual archives, to probe the many points at which the history of international tourism intersects with the history of international relations, and to analyze and explain the findings. What comes into focus when the history of twentieth-century U.S. relations with Latin America is viewed through the lens of leisure travel and tourism rather than the traditional prism of diplomacy? How has the history of holidaymaking paralleled and helped shape the history of U.S. military occupations and dollar diplomacy? What might interwar leisure travel to Mexico teach us about Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor policy in the 1930s? What role did tourism play in the Cuban Revolution and its aftermath? What was the relationship between Yankee sun worshippers in Puerto Rico in the 1960s and John F. Kennedy’s Alliance for Progress? How can the seemingly trivial pursuits of North American vacationers reflect on the history of dictatorships and dirty wars that consumed so much of Latin America during the 1970s and 1980s? These are just a few of the questions that drive this study. After perhaps too many years of preparation, I have found the answers to be compelling enough to share with others. Readers familiar with current historiographical debates among foreign relations scholars will recognize how I have been influenced by the field’s recent ‘‘cultural turn,’’ with its emphasis on nonstate actors, transnational interest groups, identity formation , and popular constructions of race, class, and gender. On close examination , readers will also detect that I use cultural analysis to build on and complicate but not necessarily overturn conventional wisdom. In addition to Cli√ord Geertz, Edward Said, and Joan Robinson, the text reflects insights xii Preface advanced by George F. Kennan, William Appleman Williams, and their many intellectual descendants. Alongside analysis of national identities, I discuss national interests. I have long since concluded that the history of U.S. foreign relations cannot be told without an understanding of the nation’s interior life. This examination of international travel has only reinforced that conviction. The social and cultural tensions associated with the ‘‘new era’’ of the 1920s, the Great Depression of the 1930s, the consumer culture of the postwar era, the African American struggle for civil rights and the women’s movement, and the rise of evangelical religious thought have influenced how Americans—both travelers and diplomats—have viewed the world and the U.S. place in it. I seek not only to tell the history of mass tourism, an intriguing and significant topic in itself, but to use the narrative moment to address challenging issues in the history of U.S. foreign relations, to suggest ways to bridge the chasm that typically separates scholars of culture from those who study empire and international relations, and to stimulate debate in both fields. I have conceived and written this book during an era when the discipline of history and the life of the planet have undergone major transformations. Since my years as an undergraduate, historical inquiry has been reshaped first by the rise of social history, or ‘‘history from the bottom up,’’ and more recently by cultural history, feminist theory, subaltern studies, and postmodern paradigms. International a√airs have similarly evolved from Cold War confrontation to détente to an ill-defined post–Cold War era, reconfigured by the rise of former colonial areas and the rush toward a not-yet-determined system of globalization. The world has shrunk temporally and linked peoples and societies as never before. Yet over the same period, nations have continued to wage wars, ethnic groups in various regions have committed unspeakable atrocities, famine remains a part of everyday life for millions, and the U.S. empire in Latin America still lives. My book has been influenced by all of these developments. This history of international tourism illuminates the forces—cultural, economic , and political—that have helped create our globalized world and positioned the United States as its leader. It does so by examining international relations from the bottom up and at times from the outside in, frequently emphasizing the agency of the ‘‘other’’ within the U.S.-led empire. While the story cannot be told without reference...