Results by title

With its archaeological sites, colonial architecture, pristine beaches, and alluring cities, Mexico has long been an attractive destination for travelers. The tourist industry ranks third in contributions to Mexico’s gross domestic product and provides more than 5 percent of total employment nationwide. Holiday in Mexico takes a broad historical and geographical look at Mexico, covering tourist destinations from Tijuana to Acapulco and the development of tourism from the 1840s to the present day. Scholars in a variety of fields offer a complex and critical view of tourism in Mexico by examining its origins, promoters, and participants.

Essays feature research on prototourist American soldiers of the mid-nineteenth century, archaeologists who excavated Teotihuacán, business owners who marketed Carnival in Veracruz during the 1920s, American tourists in Mexico City who promoted goodwill during the Second World War, American retirees who settled San Miguel de Allende, restaurateurs who created an “authentic” cuisine of Central Mexico, indigenous market vendors of Oaxaca who shaped the local tourist identity, Mayan service workers who migrated to work in Cancun hotels, and local officials who vied to develop the next “it” spot in Tijuana and Cabo San Lucas. Including insightful studies on food, labor, art, diplomacy, business, and politics, this collection illuminates the many processes and individuals that constitute the tourism industry. Holiday in Mexico shows tourism to be a complicated set of interactions and outcomes that reveal much about the nature of economic, social, cultural, and environmental change in Greater Mexico over the past two centuries.

Contributors. Dina Berger, Andrea Boardman, Christina Bueno, M. Bianet Castellanos, Mary K. Coffey, Lisa Pinley Covert, Barbara Kastelein, Jeffrey Pilcher, Andrew Sackett, Alex Saragoza, Eric M. Schantz, Andrew Grant Wood

Holidays in the Danger Zone exposes the mundane and everyday interactions between two seemingly opposed worlds: warfare and tourism. Debbie Lisle shows how a tourist sensibility shapes the behavior of soldiers in war—especially the experiences of Western military forces in “exotic” settings. This includes not only R&R but also how battlefields become landscapes of leisure and tourism. She further explores how a military sensibility shapes the development of tourism in the postwar context, from “Dark Tourism” (engaging with displays of conflict and atrocity) to exhibitions of conflict in museums and at memorial sites, as well as advertising, film, journals, guidebooks, blogs, and photography. 

Focused on how war and tourism reinforce prevailing modes of domination, Holidays in the Danger Zone critically examines the long historical arc of the war–tourism nexus—from nineteenth-century imperialism to World War I and World War II, from the Cold War to globalization and the War on Terror.