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two Containment and Good Neighbors Tourism and Empire in 1930s Mexico e The banquet room of the swank Hotel Regis did not seem a likely place for talk of war in early 1934. For the gathering of California businessmen and their spouses, the trip to sunny Mexico City provided relief from the dreary February cold that had gripped the homeland . The Mexicans present, mainly city o≈cials, had greeted the visitors warmly, eager, no doubt, to lure more Yankees southward for their dollars. Thus, the luncheon speaker, State Senator Ralph H. Clock of Los Angeles, took his audience by surprise when he turned to the subject of military history and in blunt language recounted the valor of U.S. servicemen who had stormed the heights of Chapultepec Hill during the Mexican-American War of the 1840s. ‘‘We whipped’’ the Mexicans, the visiting politician exclaimed , ‘‘and made them like it!’’∞ The next day’s La Prensa, a leading daily newspaper, characterized the address as lacking ‘‘the most elementary courtesy.’’ Most of the Mexicans present, including Mexico City’s chief of police, had walked out of the room in protest, as did a few embarrassed North Americans. The U.S. ambassador, Josephus Daniels, wasted no time investigating. Talking to a reporter from his hometown Los Angeles Times, Clock denied having made such statements, but Daniels’s contacts testified otherwise. The ambassador gained assurances from most Mexican newspapers that they viewed the slight as an isolated incident and would not report it. As an additional safeguard against unwanted publicity, the U.S. embassy obtained a statement on behalf of eighty of the visiting Californians that expressed their collective regret and apology for the senator’s ‘‘ill-spoken words.’’≤ ‘‘Why will some Americans leave their manners, if they have any, at home 66 Containment and Good Neighbors when they go abroad?,’’ Daniels wrote to President Franklin Roosevelt. ‘‘I have had little trouble with Americans here,’’ he told fdr; ‘‘nearly all are highclass people who deport themselves in a way to cause respect for our countrymen .’’≥ Still, the incident was actually not at all isolated, and it is revealing for a number of reasons. First, Clock’s jeremiad demonstrated that the tourist’s power, although soft, often manifests itself in very public and embarrassing spats. Second, despite their position of relative weakness within the empire and their need for revenue, hosts are unlikely to tolerate overt cultural slights. Third, Daniels’s feverish activity to squelch the story illustrates that U.S. diplomats recognized early in the history of mass tourism that travelers could as easily be diplomatic liabilities as assets and that visitor-host encounters had emerged as an important element of bilateral relationships. The challenges grew with each passing year. Despite the global depression, the Mexican travel industry continued to grow during the 1930s. In fact, the financial crisis, along with the appearance of goose-stepping armies in Germany , Italy, and Japan, magnified popular doubts about modern life and amplified Mexico’s image as a land of rural calm. The country’s geographic proximity to the United States and its a√ordability, especially compared to pricey transatlantic travel, further bolstered its appeal. The annual tally of visitors, overwhelmingly from the United States, rose to 75,000 or so by 1935 and by decade’s end topped 127,000, still not taking into account the countless thousands of tourists who sprinted across the border each year.∂ As the Second World War approached, Mexico attracted more U.S. visitors than any other foreign destination in the hemisphere. Numerous commentators noted the growing presence of dollar-wielding, non-Spanish-speaking North Americans below the Rio Grande. In July 1935, the New York Times reported that Mexico’s annual tourist revenues surpassed $314 million. The presence of U.S. oilmen south of the border, the paper observed, ‘‘had been replaced by a swarming army of tourists.’’∑ Two years later, travel writer Howard Vincent O’Brien commented that Mexico City ‘‘is full of Americans, yet they say the season has not really started. . . . [T]here is a convention of lady horticulturalists, a convention of hotel managers, a gathering of serious minded folk intent on a study of Latin America, and heaven knows how many others besides.’’∏ New tourist hotels sprang up, international restaurants opened for business, and travel agencies sprouted new o≈ces around the country. The number and variety of cultural contact zones where North Americans and Mexicans brushed shoulders multiplied. The rapid growth of...

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