STUDIES OF THE AMERICAS Series Editor: Maxine Molyneux MAGAZINES, NATION-BUILDING TOURISM, AND IN MEXICO Claire Lindsay
Studies of the Americas Series Editor Maxine Molyneux Institute of the Americas University College London London, UK
The Studies of the Americas Series includes country specific, cross disciplinary and comparative research on the United States, Latin America, the Caribbean, and Canada, particularly in the areas of Politics, Economics, History, Anthropology, Sociology, Anthropology, Development, Gender, Social Policy and the Environment. The series publishes monographs, readers on specific themes and also welcomes proposals for edited collections, that allow exploration of a topic from several different disciplinary angles. This series is published in conjunc tion with University College London’s Institute of the Americas under the editorship of Professor Maxine Molyneux. More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14462
Claire Lindsay Magazines, Tourism, and Nation-Building in Mexico
Claire Lindsay Department of Spanish, Portuguese, and Latin American Studies University College London London, UK Studies of the Americas ISBN 978-3-030-01002-7 ISBN 978-3-030-01003-4 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01003-4 Library of Congress Control Number: 2018957069 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2019. This book is an open access publication. Open Access This book is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this book are included in the book’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the book’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: © Melisa Hasan This Palgrave Pivot imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
In memory of Andrea Noble
Acknowledgements There are many people who have assisted me in writing this book in dif ferent ways, whether by listening to my ideas and sharing theirs, reading and commenting on early drafts, inviting me to give papers at seminars or conferences, asking pertinent questions, recommending reading, writ ing references for related grant applications, or simply providing val uable encouragement when it was most needed (and appreciated). My thanks to all: Lucy Bell, Zoltán Biedermann, Stephanie Bird, María del Pilar Blanco, Felipe Botelho Correa, Catherine Boyle, Matthew Brown, Elizabeth Chant, Eleanor Chiari, Jo Crow, Maria Chiara D’Argenio, Charles Forsdick, Guadalupe Gerardi, Katherine Ibbett, Ed King, John King, Julia Kuehn, Lorraine Leu, Angela Lindsay, Roger Lindsay, Sylvia Molloy, Maxine Molyneux, Andrea Noble, Joanna Page, Thomas Rath, Lauren Rea, Luis Rebaza Soraluz, Elisa Sampson Tudela, Erica Segre, Paul Smethurst, Ana Suriani da Silva, Camilla Sutherland, Philip Swanson, Alia Trabucco, Maite Usoz de la Fuente, Ann Varley, David Wood, Gareth Wood, and Tim Youngs. I am thankful for the editorial work of Anca Pusca and Katelyn Zingg and to the three anonymous readers at Palgrave. And I couldn’t have done anything at all without dearest Mark and Fabian, who loves maps and has already come so far. I am grateful for the assistance of staff at the Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, the Harry Ransom Center and the Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection at University of Texas, Austin. I am particularly grateful for the award of a Harry Ransom Center research fellowship which enabled access to Anita Brenner’s vii
viii ACKNoWLEDGEMENTS papers; for a UCL-Santander Research Catalyst award and to the British Academy, which both funded research visits to the United States and Mexico. University College London’s progressive policy of granting a term’s research leave following parental leave was also essential in bring ing work that had been conducted over several years to completion in the autumn of 2017. Parts of Chapter 4 were published in my essay ‘Map Reading in Travel Writing: the Explorers’ Maps of Mexico This Month’ in New Directions in Travel Writing Studies, edited by Julia Kuehn and Paul Smethurst (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), pp. 199–212, reproduced with permission of Palgrave Macmillan.
4 5 CONTENTS 1 Introduction 1 2 Tourism, Nation-Building, and Magazines Tourism Advertisem*nts in Mexican Folkways (1925–1937) Mapping Capital in Mexico This Month (1955–1971) Conclusion Index 17 3 53 91 127 137 ix
Fig. Fig. Fig. Fig. Fig. Fig. Fig. Fig. Fig. Fig. Fig. Fig. Fig. Fig. 2.1 2.2 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 4.5 4.6 5.1 LIST OF FIGURES Front cover of Mexico This Month, 3:1, 1957 Advertisem*nts in Mexican Folkways, 4:1, 1928 Front cover of Mexican Folkways, 5:1, 1929 Elegantes advertisem*nt, Mexican Folkways, 3, 1927 Número 12 advertisem*nt, Mexican Folkways Hotel Genève advertisem*nt, Mexican Folkways, 3:1, 1927, p. 1 Hotel Genève advertisem*nt, Mexican Folkways, 9:1, 1937, p. 1 Explorer’s map of La Lagunilla market, Mexico This Month, 1:9, 1955 Explorer’s map of the main drag in Mexico city, via the Paseo de la Reforma, Mexico This Month, 4:9, 1958 Map of Chapultepec Woods, Mexico This Month, 2:1, 1956 Trail of Cortés, a map for intrepid explorers, Mexico This Month, 3:8, 1957 Wayward Wanderers’ map of oaxaca, Mexico This Month, 3:10, 1957 The Complete Explorers’ map for Treasure Hunters on Land and Sea, Mexico This Month, 3:11, 1957 Reader’s letter, Mexico This Month 74 33 35 59 67 68 73 106 108 109 111 112 114 130 xi
CHAPTER 1 Introduction Abstract This chapter, drawing first on pertinent archival material from Anita Brenner’s papers, introduces the book’s main concerns in brief— the relation between print culture, tourism, and nationhood, and the (geo)political ramifications of content and style in and beyond the peri odical’s pages—before elucidating its overall scope, shape, and principal objectives. It provides a theoretical rationale for the study (referring to the work of Néstor García Canclini and Benedict Anderson as well as reinterpretations of the latter’s ideas within Latin American cultural stud ies) and ends with an overview of the main chapters. Keywords States · Diplomacy Tourism··Visual Magazines culture· Nationhood · Mexico · United Mexico was not so much a place as a journey that required no travel. Carrera (2011: 108) Anita Brenner’s 1947 article for the magazine Holiday is a signature blend of evocative description and touristic information about places of interest in Mexico, with historical and ethnographic details about its colonial past, fiestas, and present-day society. The feature begins with one of Brenner’s favourite metaphors, and a trope to which she returned throughout her career: the journey south across the border is ©C.The Lindsay, Author(s) Magazines, 2019 Tourism, and Nation-Building in Mexico, Studies of the Americas, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01003-4_1 1
2 C. LINDSAY a passage ‘through the looking glass … into never-never land’, which is not only ‘another world, as tantalizing and disturbing as a dream’ but ‘a place that shakes you like a mental atom-splitter and cuts you loose like a balloon’ (1947a: 2). That arresting image lays the groundwork for Brenner’s articulation of Mexico’s ‘fundamental characteristic … that it is an Indian country’ (1947a: 46). Indeed, as part of her ethnographic survey, Brenner criticizes the hypocrisy of Mexican elites who, in order to identify as ‘American’, at once exploit and/or disavow the country’s indigenous peoples while they repudiate its poverty and corruption. She also mocks a figure she elsewhere calls the ‘Typical Tourist’, who, when following the tourist circuit, ‘get[s] a Mexico served up anxiously in the gringo image; as interpreted by knowing promoters and hopeful catchers-of-crumbs’ (1932: n.p.).1 In Holiday Brenner acknowledges, in the twenty-five or so years since the Revolution, the opacity of Mexican politics, the country’s enduring inequalities of wealth and land distribu tion, its high illiteracy rates, poverty, and poor sanitation: that Mexico is a place that can be ‘exasperating, baffling, and shocking’. Yet she insists on its commitment to democracy and that it is ‘a country in transition … trying to cover a lot of ground very fast’. Above all, she identifies in Mexico a critical quality then absent in the United States and which she avows would lure thousands of tourists to its shores: ‘that sweet, sweet personal sense of freedom’ (1947a: 61, 62, 63). The Holiday article was just one of Brenner’s prolific writings on travel to Mexico, which, together with her authorship of the guide book Your Mexican Holiday (1932), included contributions to English language magazines and newspapers in the United States, such as Atlantic Monthly, Fortune, Mademoiselle, The Nation, New York Evening Post, and The New York Times Sunday Magazine.2 This piece, however, became notorious and was reprinted over several weeks as a column in the Mexican national daily Excelsior. The newspaper issued a caution ary prefatory note to the article’s serialization in ‘Realidad y ficción en México’: ‘Excelsior, que no se hace solidario de los conceptos de la autora, ha querido, sin embargo, divulgar el presente artículo para que los lectores vean como se nos juzga en el extranjero y para que los juicios que contiene lleguen a conocimiento de las personas que quisieran ref utarlos’ [Excelsior, which does not sympathize with the author’s posi tion, nonetheless wants to publish the following article so that readers can see how they view us abroad and so that the opinions it contains come to the attention of those who would like to challenge them]
1 INTRoDUCTIoN 3 (Brenner, n.d.). Against the newspaper’s charges that her unpromising picture of Mexico had frightened tourists away, Brenner, in private corre spondence with the editor (and not for the last time in her travel/writing career), defended her use of figurative language: la intencion irónica de estas frases [sobre los extranjeros en Mexico] estan evidente que no creo yo se le puede escapar a nadie … Sin embargo, el artículo recalca, antes y después de esas observaciones, que mucho de lo que se cuenta al turista de lo que leasusta, es leyenda. (Brenner 1947b) [the ironic intention of those words (about foreigners in Mexico) is so obvious it couldn’t escape anyone’s attention, in my view … However, the article emphasizes throughout that much of what frightens the tourist is simply fiction] Brenner was also robust about the ethics of her piece, insisting that it was poverty and poor sanitation that alarmed tourists, not information about or historical contextualization of said conditions. Tourists, Brenner contended, ‘gozan de la voluntad y la habilidad de comprender’ [have the desire and ability to understand]: meanwhile, the disservice done to Mexico was not that she had written about those issues but rather ‘la poquedad de espíritu de aquellos mexicanos que se espantan tanto de lo suyo, que todo lo quisieran esconder detrás de imitaciones y fandan gos’ [the meanness of spirit of those Mexicans who are so frightened of aspects of their own country that they want to hide them all behind imi tations and fandangos] (Brenner 1947b). In addition to the adverse coverage it received in the Mexican press, Brenner’s Holiday feature provoked a charged exchange of letters between Mexico’s then Minister for Tourism, Alejandro Buelna, and Brenner’s agent, Guillermo Hawley, in what became tantamount to a diplomatic dispute. Buelna took umbrage at Brenner’s audacity as ‘a for eigner living here and enjoying our hospitality to go to the lengths that [she] did’ (Brenner 1947c). Despite her ‘admirable’ reputation, Buelna accused Brenner of ‘twisting half truths with whole truths around in such a manner … that confuse[s] the average reader’ (Brenner 1947c). What he called Brenner’s ‘anti-Christian, anti-Spanish, anti-upper caste’ ‘overvaluation’ of Mexico’s Indian peoples and heritage together with her inclusion of details about the country’s inequities were features that would have contradicted the image of a modern Mexico that the state was then trying to project, promote, and protect internationally.
4 C. LINDSAY Meanwhile, Hawley proposed to Buelna that his client’s only miscal culation in the Holiday piece was to adopt such a sensationalist tone, although he observed that that was the prevailing cadence of US jour nalism: ‘we probably need a writer like Anita to wake us to the realiza tion that all is not rosy in the tourist business,’ he suggested, ‘and that a number of serious situations require correcting’ (Brenner 1947d). I begin with this incident in detail because it provides a striking distil lation of some of the principal themes of this study of magazines, tour ism, and nation-building in modern Mexico. First, the Holiday feature is an exemplary expression of Brenner’s tireless advocacy of the culture of and commitment to tourism in Mexico, which would define her career as a writer and editor. It synthesizes the proclivities of content and style that underpinned the editorial work on Mexico This Month, which, like Mexican Folkways, the other of two magazines this book considers, aimed to disseminate information about Mexico’s culture to audiences north and south of the Mexico–US border. Second, the ensuing debacle about the Holiday feature spotlights the acute sensitivities of the Mexican state to what it perceived as deleterious images of the country in the for eign press during the post-revolutionary period, sensitivities that have long since endured and resurfaced at different junctures. It also speaks to the transnational reach and power of the periodical press, a cultural form to which the Mexican state itself turned from the 1920s onwards in order to boost tourism.3 Third, Brenner’s defence of her Holiday con tribution to Excelsior, significantly, rests on legitimacy and raises broader questions of national and cultural authenticity, values that are at the heart of the experience and narration of tourism more generally. Taking up the issue of national elites’ sense of shame about Mexico, Brenner, who held US citizenship, advocates ‘orgullo de lo que se es’ [pride in what you are]: ‘Siendo yo nacida en México e identificada toda mi vida y obra con este país, me creo con el derecho de ese orgullo’ [Having been born in Mexico and identified all my life and work with this coun try, I believe I have the right to that pride] (Brenner 1947b). Her maga zine and earlier writing for Mexican Folkways can be seen precisely in this affirmative guise, as a means of championing Mexico and its culture to an international audience. Moreover, Brenner’s transnational affiliations, identifications, and networks are a defining feature of the period after Revolution in Mexico, when cross-border travel, residence, and (busi ness, cultural, and scholarly) cooperation were common. They are too a distinguishing characteristic of the periodicals, Mexican Folkways and
1 INTRoDUCTIoN 5 Mexico This Month, under scrutiny in what follows, each of which was the fruit of transcultural collaborations that were politically endorsed and funded by the Mexican state and the like of which became especially well established in the cultural arena from the 1920s onwards. As such, in addition to the North American magazine providing a ‘prototype’ of sorts for the periodical she would go on to edit in Mexico in years to come, the dispute over Brenner’s Holiday article allows us to more fully contextualize and apprehend the later editorial policy, design, and fate of her own and other magazines of the period. As discussed in Chapter 3, one of the principal objectives of Mexico This Month became the contestation and correction of disadvantageous views of Mexico circu lating in the US press—the very kind of ‘wrongdoing’ of which Brenner had been accused by Buelna in the Holiday feature. In turn, the aims of Mexican Folkways, edited by Frances Toor, a magazine to which Brenner contributed earlier in her career (and which is the subject of Chapter 2), were to record and communicate the customs and traditions of Mexico’s indigenous peoples just as they were being reevaluated in anthropological debates and in developing conceptualizations of the country as a mod ern Republic. To this degree, the two magazines examined in this study shared political, even nationalistic ambitions, as well as personnel. In Mexico This Month the question of tone would once again be paramount, as it was in Holiday, with Brenner’s trademark breezy editorial style con stituting a significant (though, as we shall see, not entirely infallible) articulation of the former magazine’s avowed ambassadorial objectives. Cadence was also a consideration in the aesthetic composition of the ear lier Mexican Folkways, which in addition to documenting the country’s folklore also comprised a catalogue of works by Mexico’s foremost visual artists and photographers. In short, where the Holiday feature exhorted the kind of vicarious journey-making to Mexico to which this chapter’s epigraph refers, the two periodicals at the heart of this study in different ways sought to galvanize (empirical and figurative) tourism in/to the new Republic as it emerged from Revolution and entered into twentieth-cen tury global modernity. Like their North American counterpart, these magazines’ publication and particular interventions into tourism had manifold political ramifications at national and international levels. * * * * This book is about the relation between periodicals, tourism, and nation-building in Mexico. It enquires into how magazines, a staple form of the promotional apparatus of tourism since its inception, articulated
6 C. LINDSAY an imaginative geography of Mexico during a period in which that industry became a critical means of economic recovery and political sta bility after the Revolution. Neither magazines nor tourism were new to Mexico then: the picture supplements of nineteenth-century newspapers can be seen as forerunners of the contemporary periodical and organized tourism to the country dates back to at least the 1880s. Yet the period under scrutiny here is of crucial importance in terms of developments in print culture and the travel industry alike. For instance, in 1928, in the midst of its national reconstruction, the Mexican government passed legislation that officially launched its role in the regulation of tour ism: among an array of commissions involved in organizing the indus try (including the National Tourism Committee, CNT), a Pro-Tourism Commission (CPT) was formed to standardize entry for tourists at the US–Mexico border.4 The intervention of Alberto Mascareñas, director general of the newly formed Bank of Mexico, who created a Department of Tourism in April 1928, was also decisive: the bank would go on to become a major sponsor of tourism development projects, including the completion of Mexico’s first international highway from Nuevo Laredo to Monterrey. Thus, while it ‘[ought] to [have been] a kind of impe rialism that …worked against revolutionary nationalism’, at this time tourism, insofar as it helped shape national identity as Mexico established itself as a modern Republic, became ‘compatible’ with the goals of the Revolution (Berger 2006: 20, 3).5 During that same decade, numerous magazines emerged in and out side Mexico to become a popular and widely distributed form of docu menting and disseminating the country’s culture and creative currents. These included pedagogical titles (such as El Maestro, 1921–1923, and El libro y el pueblo, 1922–1970, both published by the Ministry of Education (Secretaría de Educación Pública or SEP); political or ’work ing class’ titles, such as El Machete (1924) and Revista Crom (1925); and iterations of the so-called little or avant-garde magazines such as Forma: Revista de artes plásticas (1926–1928), Horizonte (1926–1927), Ulises (1928), Contemporáneos (1928–1931) and Crisol (1929–1934), among others. An important but hitherto overlooked subcategory of transna tional magazine became a part of a raft of measures to stimulate tour ism and refashion nationhood from this time onwards, as much to lure the tourist dollar south, as to counteract habitually prejudicial views of Mexico then circulating abroad. Such periodicals, deployed by both state and private actors from both sides of the border, who often worked in
1 INTRoDUCTIoN 7 collaboration, included the Department of Tourism’s inaugural English language brochure of 1929, William Furlong’s monthly newsletter about Mexico of the 1930s, brochures produced by the AMT (Asociación Mexicana de Turismo) before and after WWII, and titles such as Mexican World: Voice of Latin America and Howard Phillips’s long-running Mexican Life: Mexico’s Monthly Review, established in 1924. Those and the magazines under consideration in this book functioned as ‘guides’ to what they purported to be the ‘real’ Mexico to domestic and inter national readers alike. Notwithstanding their vogue, popularity, reach, and close affiliation to industry and state, such magazines have not received any sustained critical attention in the scholarship on tourism or nation-building in Mexico. This book aims to redress that oversight: it argues that magazines, in their responsive, serialized forms, and intrin sic aesthetic heterogeneity, offer a rich and compelling object of study in terms of both. The book considers two salient case studies of such magazines, Mexican Folkways (1925–1937) and Mexico This Month (1955–1971), both of which were binational titles, public–private collaborations, pro duced and published in Mexico City. The well-known bilingual Mexican Folkways, in concert with contemporary ideas in anthropology and debates among nationalist elites, was the first magazine of its kind to describe ‘customs … art, music, archaeology, and the Indian himself as part of the new social trends’ in Mexico (7:4, 1932, 208). As Rick López writes, ‘No other source did more during the late 20s and early 30s … to encourage an appreciation for the culture and arts of the Mexican countryside’ (2010: 103). Mexican Folkways ardently promoted Mexico’s contemporary visual culture too, through features on and reproductions of the work of artists such as José Clemente orozco and its art editor Diego Rivera, who designed the magazine’s distinctive front covers (see Fig. 3.1). As such, its general editor Frances Toor claimed that Folkways had an ‘important influence on the modern art movement’ (7:4, 1932, 205). By the same token, the perhaps less familiar English-language magazine Mexico This Month was also a first of its kind, conceived as a vehicle of soft diplomacy, to broker neighbourly international relations between north and south. Launched under the auspices of a self-styled group of businessman called the Comité norteamericano pro-México, Mexico This Month aimed to improve social and business relations between Mexico and the United States by promoting travel, investment, and retirement in
8 C. LINDSAY Mexico. Its editor Anita Brenner, who served an informal apprenticeship under Toor as a contributor to Folkways, enlisted Mexican and North American writers and illustrators to express what she called ‘Mexico’s wealth of beauty in full colour’ between the magazine’s covers. Both periodicals, though they spoke in different ways to national cultural and political issues and debates, emerged from and responded to a particular urgency after the Revolution to explore and contribute to the consoli dation of a new national consciousness: insofar as both were recipients of (albeit precarious sources of) state funding, to varying degrees they were also both implicated in what Carlos Monsivais has called ‘state con trol of the significance of being Mexican’ (Hellier-Tinoco 2011: 57). Notwithstanding divergences in style, circulation, and outlook between Mexican Folkways and Mexico This Month, their ‘nationalistic’ and/or periodized titles speak to that shared impulse; to articulate what one editor boldly but disingenuously called ‘no dogma … beyond fidelity to Mexico’ (Mraz 2009: 156). Since neither periodical has been digitized nor even previously (fully) read or studied, this book draws on the find ings of archival research in order to provide the first account of these titles and their publication histories and to offer an original analysis of their role in an industry that has been fundamental to the formation of modern Mexico. In doing so, the book perceives these magazines as an essential but hitherto undervalued part of Mexico’s ‘culture of the visual’ (Mirzoeff 2015: 11). The visual forms of tourism’s promotional arsenal create imagina tive geographies that do more than simply reflect the ideologies of their authors/creators: they have frequently shaped and become a constitutive part of the very spaces they imagine. In this respect, this book is aligned with others in the fields of Mexican cultural history and tourism stud ies that are interested in the discursive construction of geography and space and in the connections between imagining and nation formation. Such interests typically rest on and extrapolate the now seminal work of Benedict Anderson on the nation as an ‘imagined community’, which, though it has not been received uncritically in Latin American studies and elsewhere, in its insistence on the association between print culture and nationalism and that nations are ‘distinguished not by their falsity/ genuineness, but by the style in which they are imagined’, remains per tinent (Anderson 2006: 7).6 This book takes its cue from a number of (re)articulations of Anderson’s proposal in the context of Latin America and its visual culture by scholars such as Mauricio Tenorio Trillo, Jens
1 INTRoDUCTIoN 9 Andermann, and Shelley Garrigan who have focused in different ways on the role of national elites in respect of exhibitions, museums, and monuments during the long and critical nineteenth century, in which nation-states were consolidating across the region. This was a time when in Mexico particularly, as Nestor García Canclini observes, ‘the conse cration and celebration of the patrimony, its knowledge and use, [was] basically a visual operation’ (1995: 118). Tenorio Trillo, for example, in his work on Mexico at the world’s fairs, ‘underscore[s] the importance of form, style, façade’ not as separate to or ‘over content but as the con tent of nations, nationalism and modernity’ (French 1999: 251). At face value, the magazine might seem a return to the kind of print capitalism on which Anderson initially relied for his thesis; after all, as a serialized form, there is some correspondence between the magazine and the newspaper, which Anderson considers ‘an “extreme form” of the book’ (2006: 34). Yet magazines, like the brochures, postcards, photographs, and posters that have provided material for other germane scholarly stud ies in tourism studies, offer pathways into, around, and through destina tions. In what follows I attend particularly to their use of advertisem*nts and maps because of their emblematic association with tourism. I regard these visual representations, a central part of the industry’s material appa ratus and scopic regime, as ‘vehicles through which the performative spaces of tourism are activated and place is created, enlivened, and (re) enacted’ (Scarles 2009:485). The selected magazines are important because they tell us about the intimate but uneasy ‘connective tissue’ (Flaherty 2016: 104) of tour ism, state, and society at two critical periods of Mexico’s reconstruction as a modern nation (Revolution and ‘counter-revolution’) that are not always studied together. The magazines’ start and end dates of publica tion delimit a near fifty-year interval (1925–1971) that encompasses two decisive but usually bifurcated phases of Mexico’s history: the immedi ate post-revolutionary reconstruction (and the country’s so-called ‘cul tural renaissance’) and the less studied economic ‘miracle’ of the 1940s and successive decades of modernization. The latter were the mid-cen tury PRIísta years of political consensus or so-called dictablanda, seen by some (before the economic shocks of the early 1970s) as a cultural Golden Age, which, though previously deemed either ‘unfashionable’ or ‘irrepressible’ in scholarly terms, have been garnering significant interest recently from ‘historically-minded Mexicanists’ (Gillingham and Smith 2014: 6).7 This diachronic study of the two magazines thus allows for
10 C. LINDSAY a more extensive, comparative consideration of tourism and its cultural ramifications across periods in Mexico that conventionally have been compartmentalized in the scholarship. Much of the valuable work on this subject to date ends when the tourist success begins (that is, in 1946) or else leaps to the more contemporary experience of tourism in the late twentieth century. Either way, in doing so, it offers only a truncated view of an industry whose ebb and flow beyond its initial period of success and prosperity to its expansion after WWII and instability during the Cold War and throughout the radical (geo)political changes of the 1960s also warrants scrutiny.8 In bringing these two magazines and periods together, my aim is not to trace a simple linear narrative about tourism’s rich and varie gated promotional apparatus from Revolution to counter-revolution. As Gil Joseph et al. observe, things are more complicated than even a revi sionist metanarrative of post-revolutionary Mexico allows (Joseph et al. 2001: 7). Rather, what transpires in the comparison of these magazines across those decades in Mexico, in which the state’s engagement with tourism altered significantly, is the striking persistence and rehearsal of similar visual tropes, themes, and contradictions. Further, this study also brings to light previously unknown forms of recycling of key actors, rhetoric, and iconography from pre-revolutionary eras within the mod ern period, as Mexico navigated an ambivalent path towards and within modernity. In essence, the book reveals how the magazines’ textual and paratexual apparatus conjugated the perennial tension between tradi tion and modernity, and between culture and commerce, that was then being articulated and interrogated in Mexico on a larger literal and polit ical canvass. For, as Tenorio Trillo writes, the modern nation is always a particular expression of ‘the continuum of interactions between … tradi tion and modernity, non-Western and Western trends, popular and elitist expressions and interests’, an understanding of which exposes ‘the fra gility, the artificiality, and contingency of modern nationalism’ (Tenorio Trillo 1996: 242–243). This book combines the findings of archival work on Mexican Folkways and Mexico This Month, both of which are un-digitized, with historiographical research and close reading of the magazines’ aesthetic and textual features. In this regard, it contributes to an emerging branch of periodical scholarship in Mexican studies, including works on the ‘ubiquitous and vulgar’ popular comic books of the 1940s onwards by
1 INTRoDUCTIoN 11 Anne Rubenstein (1998) and, more recently, working class and politi cal titles by John Lear (2017). Insofar as it mobilizes methods from and engages with existing scholarship in Mexican cultural history, periodical studies, and visual culture, this book aims to speak to scholars from those disciplines and others that have yet to coincide in the study of this hybrid and intercultural periodical form in Mexico. It provides the first ‘biogra phy’ of each magazine, taking into account the wider media ecology of publication and distribution contexts as well as financial support, while also considering their design features (page length, use of illustrations, advertisem*nts, paper and so on). Indeed, the book conducts analysis of key paratextual features—advertising and maps—that have themselves yet to be subject to broader scholarly enquiry. Such nominally ‘mar ginal’ images, this book argues, though they are commonly considered peripheral in terms of the history of periodicals, merit serious scrutiny. In doing so, the book also engages with recent developments in the study of advertising and cartography in different disciplines including cultural studies, geography, history, sociology, and tourism studies. In sum, this book moves beyond an exclusively text-based or semiotic analysis of the magazines’ visual and narrative contents to embrace a historically situ ated interdisciplinary methodology, informed by the very constitution of its distinctive object of study, which ‘does not just make history [but] … is history’ (Bulson 2012:268). While each of the following chapters comprises an analytical and methodological enquiry into a distinct feature of the magazines’ visual apparatus, Chapter 1 deals with contexts and frameworks in broad terms. It provides a detailed introduction to the book’s historical, industrial, and cultural contexts and further situates its own efforts within and across relevant fields of study, including tourism and periodical studies and Mexican cultural history. It examines the value of tourism to nation formation in Spanish America broadly before considering the specific cir c*mstances of the industry in Mexico after the Revolution. It also pro vides a vital discussion of the magazine as a form and elucidates in detail the particular methodological issues at stake in the analysis of this ‘singu lar’ but heterogeneous object of study. Chapter 2 examines the use of tourism advertisem*nts in Mexican Folkways (1925–1937), a bilingual periodical designed to endorse the study and understanding of indigenous cultural practices as a means of racial integration and modernization, which has since become a treasured
12 C. LINDSAY source in the historiography of Mexico’s post-revolutionary period. The chapter considers advertising in the context of the magazine’s genesis and dissemination as well as within the context of a reconceptualiza tion of Mexican nationalism and a burgeoning consumer culture dur ing Mexico at that time. It contends that attention to such paratextual features illustrates some of the central paradoxes at stake in the reliance on this periodical as a historiographical source. Such tensions resonate with other ambivalences at national level in the new Republic’s ostensi bly counterintuitive endeavour to deploy tourism as a means of recovery and reconstruction after the Revolution. Methodologically, the chapter adds to content and textual analysis of advertisem*nts for El Buen Tono cigarettes and Mexico City hotels, a historically situated consideration of the context of their, and the magazine’s, production. In doing so, it spotlights what elsewhere Garrigan (2012) has called ‘the dialectical embrace of patrimony and market’ at various layers of the periodical and illuminates untold forms of recycling of processes and stakeholders that had been fundamental to nation-building during the Porfiriato in the re-making of modern Mexico after 1920. The chapter aims not simply to re-tell an already familiar story about Mexico during that period of national reconstruction. Rather, it argues that if one of the much-lauded innovations of Folkways was its attempt to present the ‘real’ Mexico as rural and indigenous, its commercial associations and engagement with the ‘new science’ of advertising also grounded it firmly in urban moder nity and implicated it fully in the business of shaping consumer-citizens and tourists in and outside the new Republic. Chapter 3 considers the role and ramifications of illustrated travel magazines in the 1950s, at the height of the so-called miracle. Focusing on the particular case of Anita Brenner’s Mexico/This Month (1955– 1971), the chapter attends to the function of what would become in the magazine’s early years its trademark centre-fold maps, the Explorers’ Maps Series. This chapter, taking its cue from scholars in geography and cultural studies who are interested less in ‘maps as finished artifacts than … in mapping as a creative activity’ (Corner 1999: 217), rather than consider them visual adjuncts or simple guides to the routes trav elled elsewhere in written form, perceives maps as complex representa tions with their own narrative qualities and histories. The story of the Explorers’ Maps series of Mexico This Month that unfolds in this chapter is one about maps as intertextual objects which, as Stephen P. Hanna and
1 INTRoDUCTIoN 13 Vincent J. del Casino argue in their work on the ‘map space’, ‘are mate rially interconnected to other spaces and texts, both past and present, and are thus rich sites for the critical interrogation of tourism practices and spaces’ (Hanna and del Casino 2003: xxvi). The chapter also consid ers the impact of capital on the magazine’s endurance as a material object over its lifetime, and sheds further light on the anomalous ways in which Mexico This Month was invested in the aesthetics, geopolitics, and eco nomics of tourism during Mexico’s post-war/Cold-War years. 6. NOTES 1. In this article she pitches against those who Go Native the Typical Tourist who ‘work[s] awfully hard, examining ruins, and cathedrals, and murals, and sombrero-ed peasants, and blanket-weavers [who] will become much bewildered and confused and irritable, because no one [can do that] with out getting extremely fatigued and distressed’, n.p. 2. Your Mexican Holiday, regarded as a pioneering English-language guide to the country, was researched and compiled on Brenner’s honeymoon there. It was first published in New York by Putnam’s in 1932 and was reissued in five further editions until 1947. 3. Holiday, launched in 1946 by the Curtis Publishing Company, was a rela tively new and expensive yet influential travel magazine in the US market: as Richard Popp points out, although ‘it would never achieve the iconic stature of Life, Holiday did establish itself as a media industry model dur ing an era of remarkable change’. See Popp (2012: 31). 4. According to Berger, its operations nonetheless ‘mirror[ed] the equally chaotic political climate’ of the time (2006: 20). 5. Heritage tourism, a magnet especially to US tourists, as Alan Knight observes, apart from generating valuable foreign exchange, also ‘performed a useful politico-diplomatic function … breaking down some of the ancient prejudices which vitiated US-Mexican relations’. Knight (2015: 316). For a summary of the critique of Anderson, see Chasteen (2003). 7. Joseph et al. explain that the reluctance of scholars to study the latter half of the twentieth century is down in part to a fear of ‘losing’ Mexico, ‘to en-counter little more than crass transnational capitalism, an all-too-fa miliar McWorld set down on the Zona Rosa’, in part too because of the absence of (still classified) archival materials (2001: 14). 8. Recent studies on tourism in/into Mexico, in addition to Berger (2006), include Berger and Grant Wood (2010), Clancy (2001), Merrill (2009), and Méndez Sáinz and Velásquez García (2013).
14 C. LINDSAY REFERENCES Anderson, Benedict. 2006. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, 2nd ed. London and New York: Verso. Berger, Dina. 2006. The Development of Mexico’s Tourism Industry: Pyramids by Day, Martinis by Night. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Berger, Dina, and Andrew Grant Wood, eds. 2010. Holiday in Mexico: Critical Reflections on Tourism and Tourist Encounters. Durham: Duke University Press. Brenner, Anita. n.d., n.p, Anita Brenner Papers 30:8. ———. 1932. ‘on Going Native in Mexico.’ Arts and Decoration, August 1932. Anita Brenner Papers 31:6. ———. 1947a. Holiday MS. Anita Brenner Papers 29:6. ———. 1947b. Anita Brenner to Gilberto Figueroa, 21 February. Anita Brenner Papers 30:8. ———.1947c. Alejandro Buelna to Guillermo Hawley, 31 March, Anita Brenner Papers 30:8. ———.1947d. Guillermo Hawley to Alejandro Buelna, Departamento de Turismo, 10 April. Anita Brenner Papers 30:8. Bulson, Eric. 2012. ‘Little Magazine, World Form.’ In The Oxford Handbook of Global Modernisms, edited by Mark Wollaeger and Matt Eatough, 268–285. oxford: oxford University Press. Carrera, Magalí. 2011. Travelling from New Spain to Mexico: Mapping Practices of 19th-Century Mexico. Durham: Duke University Press. Chasteen, John Charles. 2003. ‘Introduction: Beyond Imagined Communities.’ In Beyond Imagined Communities: Reading and Writing the Nation in 19th-Century Latin America, edited by Sara Castro-Klarén and John Charles Chasteen, ix–xxv. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press. Clancy, Michael. 2001. Exporting Paradise: Tourism and Development in Mexico. Amsterdam: Pergamon. Corner, James. 1999. ‘The Agency of Mapping: Speculation, Critique and Invention.’ In Mappings, edited by Denis Cosgrove, 213–252. London: Reaktion. Flaherty, George F. 2016. Hotel Mexico: Dwelling on the ‘68 Movement. oakland: University of California Press. French, William. 1999. ‘Imagining and the Cultural History of Nineteenth Century Mexico.’ Hispanic American Historical Review 79 (2): 249–268. García Canclini, Nestor. 1995. Hybrid Cultures: Strategies for Entering and Leaving Modernity. Translated by Christopher L. Chiappari and Silvia L. López. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. Garrigan, Shelley E. 2012. Collecting Mexico: Museums, Monuments, and the Creation of National Identity. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
1 INTRoDUCTIoN 15 Gillingham, Paul and Benjamin T. Smith, eds. 2014. Dictablanda: Politics, Work, and Culture in Mexico, 1938–1968. Durham: Duke University Press. Hanna, Stephen P., and Vincent J. del Casino Jr., eds. 2003. Mapping Tourism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Hellier-Tinoco, Ruth. 2011. Embodying Mexico: Tourism, Nationalism, and Performance. oxford: oxford University Press. Joseph, Gilbert M., Anne Rubenstein, and Eric Zolov, eds. 2001. Fragments of a Golden Age: The politics of culture in Mexico Since 1940. Durham: Duke University Press. Knight, Alan. 2015. ‘History, Heritage, and Revolution: Mexico c.1910–c.1940.’ Past and Present Supplement 10: 299–325. Lear, John. 2017. Picturing the Proletariat: Artists and Labor in Revolutionary Mexico 1908–1940. Austin: University of Texas Press. López, Rick A. 2010. Crafting Mexico: Intellectuals, Artisans, and the State After Revolution. Durham: Duke University Press. Méndez Sáinz, Eloy, and Mario Alberto Velásquez García, eds. 2013. Turismo e imaginarios. Hermosillo: El Colegio de Sonora, Instituto Tecnológico y de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey Campus Sonora Norte. Merrill, Dennis. 2009. Negotiating Paradise: U.S. Tourism and Empire in Twentieth-Century Latin America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Mirzoeff, Nicolas. 2015. How to See the World. London: Penguin. Mraz, John. 2009. Looking for Mexico: Modern Visual Culture and National Identity. Durham: Duke University Press. Popp, Richard. 2012. The Holiday Makers: Magazines, Advertising, and Mass Tourism in Postwar America. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. Rubenstein, Anne. 1998. Bad Language, Naked Ladies, and Other Threats to the Nation: A Political History of Comic Books in Mexico. Durham: Duke University Press. Scarles, Caroline. 2009. ‘Becoming Tourist: Renegotiating the Visual in the Tourist Experience.’ Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 27: 465–488. Tenorio Trillo, Mauricio. 1996. Mexico at the World’s Fairs: Crafting a Modern Nation. Berkeley and London: University of California Press.
16 C. LINDSAY Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this chapter are included in the chapter’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the chapter’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.
CHAPTER 2 Tourism, Nation-Building, and Magazines Abstract In two sections, this chapter examines, first, the correspond ence between tourism and nation-building in conceptual and material terms and, second, the magazine as a paradigmatic expression in print culture of that concurrence. The first section, drawing on recent scholar ship in tourism and Latin American studies, situates the book’s focus on Mexico within the country’s remarkable emergence from the Revolution during the 1920s and onwards, contextualizing that significant juncture within the history of organized tourism there since the late nineteenth century to the present day. The second section, drawing on examples from the book’s corpus of magazines, elucidates the unparalleled prop erties of the periodical as an object of study within those contexts and considers ensuing methodological issues. Keywords Mexico · Magazines Tourism · · Revolution Consumerism· Nation-building· Archive · · Modernity · Methodology This chapter considers the cultural, historical, and methodological con texts that are at the heart of this book’s enquiry. It provides an essential frame of reference for the chapters that follow and offers a timely inter vention into current methodological debates in periodical studies. In two sections, the chapter examines, first, the correspondence between tour ism and nation-building in conceptual and material terms and, second, ©C.The Lindsay, Author(s) Magazines, 2019 Tourism, and Nation-Building in Mexico, Studies of the Americas, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01003-4_2 17
18 C. LINDSAY the magazine as a paradigmatic expression in print culture of that con currence. Drawing on recent scholarship in tourism and Latin American studies, the first section situates the book’s focus on Mexico within the country’s remarkable emergence from the Revolution during the 1920s, contextualizing that significant juncture within the history of organized tourism there since the late nineteenth century to the present day. It then locates this book’s endeavours within the growing scholarship on tourism and nation-building in Mexican cultural history and recent con siderations of the relation in Spanish America between tourism and visual culture. The second section, drawing on examples from the book’s cor pus of magazines, elucidates the unparalleled properties of the periodi cal as an object of study within those contexts. It offers comprehensive observations on the magazine as a unique form, considering its defining admixture of visual and written material and its dialectical functions as archive and store. The question of different categories of magazine (e.g. the popular vs the more high brow) and their associated symbolic capital is also addressed here with specific regard to the magazines selected for study in this book, among the aims of which are to advance our appre ciation of such texts beyond their value as source materials and to enrich our understanding of the diversity and complexity of the periodical field. The rich heterogeneity of this serialized form of print culture has broader methodological implications, which are pursued in the chapter’s final section. TOURISM AND NATION-BUILDING Tourism has often been mobilized by developing countries as a form of nation-building, especially in the wake of economic and/or political crisis.1 Indeed, as Florence Babb has shown in her ethnographic work on the subject in Latin America, ‘tourism often takes up where social trans formation leaves off and even benefits from the formerly off-limits status of nations that have undergone periods of conflict or rebellion’ (2011: 2). At face value, however, that coincidence of tourism and revolution (as it has manifested in Latin America) might seem anomalous, the two scarcely compatible phenomena: the first, the commercial organization of ‘leisure’ travel and sightseeing, which are often regarded as superficial and exploitative practices; the second, the forcible overthrow of a government in the name of social justice.2 Further scrutiny of the experiences and ‘logic’ of the two, however, reveals a closer affinity that is camouflaged
2 ToURISM, NATIoN-BUILDING, AND MAGAZINES 19 by those definitions. Dean MacCannell hints at this association, notwith standing the early admission in his groundbreaking book The Tourist that, ‘originally I had planned to study tourism and revolution, which seemed to me to name the two poles of modern consciousness – a willingness to accept, even venerate things as they are, on the one hand, a desire to transform things on the other’ (1976: 3).3 In fact, MacCannell’s study insinuates an epistemological affiliation between tourism and revolution that belies that assertion. That is, while at first he articulates his under standing of the two in binary terms, MacCannell goes on to character ize them as exemplary, synchronous components of modernity: if ‘“The revolution” in the conventional, Marxist sense of the term’, he writes, ‘is an emblem of the evolution of modernity’, ‘“the tourist” is one of the best models available for modern-man-in-general’ (1976: 13, 1). Indeed, the very idea that tourists ‘accept/venerate things as they are’ is revealed on closer inspection to be a limited understanding of their activities. For, as MacCannell himself and other scholars of tourism have demonstrated, it is curiosity and desire for engagement with rather than pure detach ment from culture and society that fuel the tourist’s motivation to travel. Moreover, if we think of transformation as the core, driving impulse of both revolution and tourism, a closer correlation of the two phenom ena starts to look more conceptually viable. The former is about a met amorphosis of political structures and institutions, while in the latter, the change of the traveller’s environment, from home to away, may entail a form of ‘internal travel … an exploration, or discovery, of feelings’ or identity (Clark and Payne 2011: 117). Each involves a transgression of boundaries, whether it be of socio-political classes, spaces, geographical frontiers, or emotions. In short, to invoke and adapt Eric Leed’s semi nal observations on travel, in empirical and figurative terms, both tourism and revolution ‘[are] a source of the “new” in history … creat[ing] new social groups and bonds’ (1992: 15). The correlation between tourism and revolution is more than con ceptual, however: it has strong historical foundations in various Spanish American nations that have undergone armed conflict identified as rev olutionary. Countries such as Cuba, Nicaragua, and Mexico have at different junctures of the twentieth century become magnets for what Maureen Moynagh calls political tourism, precisely because of their histories of armed rebellion.4 Most often the purview of mobile ‘vul gar cosmopolitans’ who ‘pursue affiliation and belonging with strug gles ostensibly not their own’, for Moynagh, political tourism has an
20 C. LINDSAY affective dimension, as it expresses a form of ‘long-distance empathy’ with anti-imperial and anti-fascist struggles across the world, and seeks to de-construct international borders ‘in acts of affiliation and commit ment’ (2008: 6).5 If the 1959 Revolution, and the imposition of the 1962 US embargo on travel and trade, discouraged the kind of mass tourism to Cuba seen in the 1950s, the island nonetheless became a hub for intellectuals, writers, artists, and activists who flocked there to see revolutionary society and contribute to processes of social transformation then taking place (Jayawardena 2003). ‘Tourist-revolutionaries’ from North America took circuitous routes to help cut sugar cane while others of an intellectual or artistic stripe (such as Susan Sontag, Mario Vargas Llosa, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Simone de Beauvoir) went ‘to make of their observation an active participation’ (Fay 2011: 408). Nicaragua, fol lowing the 1979 Sandinista victory, hosted an analogous horde of what poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti—himself a visitor to the country—wryly termed ‘tourists of revolution’. Those so-called sandalistas included fig ures such as Margaret Randall, Susan Meiselas, and Salman Rushdie on similar kinds of pilgrimage to those made earlier to Cuba, though the Nicaraguan state was keen ‘to shed the notion of [the country] as a place of political conflict and of danger, and [for tourists] to discover a land of beautiful landscapes and friendly people’ (Babb 2004: 549). In each of these cases tourism, animated by the triumphant formation of revo lutionary states, is articulated and identified largely as an exogenous, elitist, and ephemeral affair, depictions that resound with that time-hon oured, yet troubling dichotomy between traveller and tourist. Criticism of tourism as shallow and superficial, which underpins that persistent but ultimately reductive dichotomy, is frequently ‘more anecdotal than analytical’, however (Merrill 2009: 14). Indeed, resting on a rhetoric of moral superiority, it is open to charges of superficiality of its own.6 on this theme, MacCannell wryly observes that, ‘God is dead, but man’s need to appear holier than his fellows lives’ (1976: 10). As he, Merrill, and others have argued, ‘discounting the intellectual and cultural depth of the tourist experience’ is specious as it disregards tourists’ histori cal agency as well as their significance in international relations (Merrill 2009: 13). These factors are crucial to the context under scrutiny in this book, although at stake here is an iteration of tourism that differs in signifi cant ways from the kind of ‘solidarity travel’ just discussed—in this instance, a modern Mexico attracting visitors from far and wide for its
2 ToURISM, NATIoN-BUILDING, AND MAGAZINES 21 intriguing amalgam of social reform (in land ownership, education, and popular art), pre-Columbian archaeological sites and indigenous peo ples.7 In what follows, my interest in and engagement with tourism as a category stems not only from a shared scepticism of and enthusiasm for neutralizing that pervasive travel-tourism dichotomy. Fundamentally, it arises from the unique historical context, the endogenous develop ment of tourism as a mass industry in Mexico—rather than a niche, ver tically imposed ‘imperialist’ affair—and to the Mexican state’s attempts to foster tourism as a tool in its reconstruction after the Revolution (unlike Cuba) as ‘an industry made by and for Mexicans’ (Berger 2006: 2).8 Indeed, some important work in Latin American and post colonial studies in the last decade or so on tourism, to which this book aims to contribute, has undertaken a more considered reappraisal of its historical operations in the region. As Michael Clancy argues, such scrutiny is, if nothing else, an economic imperative: ‘Tourism deserves greater empirical attention due to its sheer size in the world economy and within the developing world’, he avers, since ‘roughly one in every four international tourist dollars is spent [there]’ (2001: 2). In conse quence, much of the scholarly work on tourism in Latin America to date has tended to focus on those countries already mentioned as well as different Caribbean nations that have turned to ‘tourism [as] an agent for the refashioning of cultural heritage and nationhood’ after periods of particular upheaval and instability (Rosa 2001: 458).9 Scholars in anthropology, geography, history, sociology, and cultural studies have in different ways illuminated how tourism can function ‘as more than just a form of imperialism, exploitation, or profit’. In doing so, they have contributed to a shift in thinking about this industry and activity away from ‘a simple system of cultural imposition’ to ‘an ongoing interna tional negotiation’ in which cultural linkages between the global North and South are created and produce ‘ambiguous, interdependent rela tionships’ (Merrill 2009: 1, 9). Tourism, for Dina Berger and Andrew Grant Wood, for example, and as evinced in my case studies, can operate ‘as a form of potentially positive encounter … as a form of public diplo macy [even] because it is a kind of exchange among non-state actors that … can shape and even reorient perceptions of other people, cultures, and nations’ (2010: 108–110). As such, in concert with Berger, Grant Wood and others, this book regards tourism as a set of complex (trans) cultural practices and encounters, for which the long-standing caricature of the tourist/tourism visualised in Duane Hanson’s well-known lifelike
22 C. LINDSAY sculpture ‘Tourists’, though amusing, is ultimately unhelpful.10 Rather more useful in this context is historian Rudy Koshar’s affirmation—a reminder of the association of travel in all its modalities to ‘travail’—that ‘tourism finds its meaning through effort, contact, and interaction, no matter how programmed or structured’ (quoted in Merrill 2009: 14). This is not to say that we should disregard the imperialist precedents and continuities of tourism: to be sure, in some circ*mstances tourism does resemble conquest and in Spanish America, the industry’s contra dictions are more than evident. The cases of Cuba and Mexico attest to this. While the industry can restore the coffers of an ailing econ omy (whether, as in the case of Cuba, due to the US embargo since the start of the so-called Special Period, or, in the case of Mexico in the 1920s and 1930s, as a result of the protracted armed phase of the Revolution), tourism has had adverse effects that can undermine the original nation-building aspirations at stake. In Cuba and Mexico, for example, state encouragement of foreign capitalist investment has had equally compromising implications in terms of the two nations’ revolu tionary credentials. In the former, the increasingly visible economic and social inequalities that emerged alongside the development of tourism in the island since the early 1990s have undermined the preservation of socialism and its egalitarian principles, a central paradox given that it is precisely ‘Havana’s oppositional role as anticapitalist capital [that has had] … a potent and enduring heterotopic function’ in sustaining the international image of Cuba as a ‘political fantasy, nostalgic commod ity, and Cold War fetish’ (Dopico 2002: 458). In Mexico, the pace of industrialization and the development of tourist infrastructure in the 1940s onwards (to which I return in Chapter 3), part of a ‘public rela tions effort to convince their northern neighbor that Mexico was a safe place to invest’ (Nilbo and Nilbo 2008: 42), effectively contradicted the revolutionary state’s former economic nationalism as well as paradig matic Cardenista land reforms. Moreover, in tandem with those inequal ities arose new kinds of corruption, whether in the form of a revivified economy of sex tourism in Cuba or in diverse manifestations of polit ical misconduct in Mexico at the start and throughout its subsequent development of tourism, as when the channelling of state resources into industrialization programmes has ‘coincided with the private interests of key functionaries’ such as President Miguel Alemán himself (Nilbo and Nilbo 2008: 38). Nevertheless, it is precisely the complexity of these
2 ToURISM, NATIoN-BUILDING, AND MAGAZINES 23 experiences, as Babb suggests, that befits consideration of ‘the ways that tourism and revolution intersect [in the region]…particularly at a time when postsocialism is heralded and globalised capitalism reigns’ (2004: 553). This book aims to enhance and advance such considera tions with specific regard to Mexico, where from the 1920s onwards tourism allowed the country to participate in modern capitalism and overcome the serious financial problems bequeathed by Revolution, as well as a foreign debt exacerbated by the Great Depression. For tour ism in the post-revolutionary period, as Alex Saragoza writes, ‘contrib uted substantively to the nationalization of cultural expression in Mexico and its projection outside of the country … [and ultimately] presented the dramatic making of the nation’ (2001: 91, 93, my emphasis). A brief contextualization of the development of tourism in the country will be useful at this juncture. organized tourism to Mexico from the north began in the 1880s, stimulated by an acceleration in the construction of railroads, which multiplied in number at that time.11 Indeed, Mexican rail-road compa nies also became ‘prolific publishers of tourist materials and travel guides’ (Boardman 2001: 32), providing information on where to stay and what to do along their routes. At the turn of the twentieth century, President Porfirio Díaz invited foreigners to settle in the north of the country in an attempt to populate the region so that American immigration there almost doubled between 1900 and 1910. The following decade saw increasing numbers of Americans travelling to Mexico, a flow that would only increase with the boom in air travel in the late 1920s (famously pub licized by the ‘hero-tourist’ Charles Lindbergh’s 1927 goodwill tour to Mexico to promote commercial air transport), while the border states received a substantial boost in visitor numbers following the Volstead Act’s prohibition of alcohol (Boardman 2001: 63). In addition to the ‘northern bohemians … drawn for the most part from the US middle and upper classes [who] discovered a postrevolutionary oasis for artistic exper imentation, social reform, and rural tranquility’, the 1920s and 1930s saw large numbers of cultural and scholarly exchanges develop between Mexico and the United States as well as an influx of travellers and exiles from Europe who sought participation in the country’s ‘exhilarating lab oratory for revolution and modern socialism’ (Merrill 2009: 3, 31). In turn, the Mexican government focused its efforts on developing tourist infrastructure in the 1930s and 1940s by constructing new and improved
24 C. LINDSAY highways and by establishing tourism offices in all major US cities. As a result, between 1939 and 1950, tourism receipts in Mexico grew from $21.7 million to $156.1 million, the greatest percentage of which came from US visitors (Boardman 2001: 69). During that period of rapid economic growth known as the ‘Mexican miracle’, Mexico’s economy and society were transformed, from a largely agricultural to an urban base, through heavy investment in industrial and capitalist development. In a turn to the right initiated by Alemán, Mexico enjoyed a prolonged period of political stability (its longest since the Porfiriato) in the guise of a ‘counter-revolution’: for since 1940 the commitments to addressing inequalities in wealth distribution and for eign economic domination that had been at the heart of the Revolution had begun to looked seriously compromised. In the post-war period, Mexico also benefitted from increasingly if not entirely cordial interna tional relations with the United States, as Mexico became ‘a vital out let for US capital and a reliable ally in the Cold War then underway’ (Zolov 2010: 250).12 Indeed, Mexico’s rapid industrialisation benefit ted considerably from US funds, loans, and business interests (so much so that, as Hector Aguilar Camín observes, ‘by the 1960s the Mexican industrial dependence on foreign capital and technology became, as in the Porfiriato, quite evident’ (Aguilar Camín and Meyer 1993: 162). As Mexico’s ruling class became increasingly conservative, it also became more outwardly nationalistic. Investment in tourism was a significant part of this. Under Alemán, Mexican tourism was modernized, profes sionalized and ‘made’ the country modern; given ‘a sleek contemporary style, [the industry] refashioned the image of Mexico away from quaint peasants, curio shops and village marketplaces toward one that was more metropolitan, up to date and business like’ (Saragoza 2001: 93). As a result, during the 1950s, ‘thousands of tourists and investors flocked to Mexico … to take advantage of the county’s vaunted progress’ (Zolov 2010: 249). Mexico also then developed a reputation as a haven for bohemian visitors from the North, who were propelled by a sedimen tation across the border of ‘Protestant morality and expectations of upward social mobility, on the one hand, and a rigid, racial divide, on the other’ (Zolov 2010: 263).13 In this context, longer-stay tourists became of particular interest to the Mexican government, for while the Mexican ‘miracle’ had been successful in augmenting their number, the type of US visitor attracted to Mexico had begun to cause concern, as Michael Clancy points out:
2 ToURISM, NATIoN-BUILDING, AND MAGAZINES 25 Border tourism, as it was defined at the time, constituted almost 60% of the total [tourism in Mexico]. Short stays contributed to relatively low spending per visit and the reputation of border areas as centres of vice and smuggling intensified. (2001: 45) Indeed, as a consequence of social problems associated with border tour ism, subsequent Presidents Adolfo López Mateos and Gustavo Díaz ordaz ‘wavered in their enthusiasm for [the industry] and were hesitant to promote it more strongly’ than had, say, Alemán and Ruiz Cortínez (2001: 47). By 1970, Mexico was drawing 2.2. million tourists, a figure that nearly tripled by 1991, thanks to growth rates over that period exceed ing 5% for arrivals and over 10% for receipts. It was then in the early 1970s that newer beach resorts, such as Cancún, Ixtapa, and Los Cabos, started to become established with increasing state endorsem*nt and investment: eventually, they would draw tourism away from the tra ditional centres of Mexico City, Guadalajara, and Monterrey (Clancy 2001: 62). In 1974 a significant institutional change—the elevation of the Department of Tourism to Secretaría status (a cabinet-level min istry), which gave it greater prestige and (albeit still limited) financial resources—enabled the state to intervene further in the tourism sector (Clancy 2001: 56). Mexico has since become one of the largest tourism export sectors in the Third World: ‘By 1996 the country drew more than 40% of all international tourists to the Western Hemisphere outside the United States and Canada and ranked seventh in the world in popular ity’ (Clancy 2001: 10). Today, tourism accounts for 10% of total national employment (Berger 2006: 3). Although in recent years the spread of drug cartels and attendant violence has had adverse effects on differ ent regions of Mexico (most notably Acapulco, the northern states but including Mexico City), tourism in the country remains a more than $12 billion-a-year-industry.14 Throughout its development and promotion of tourism, Mexico has had to contend with long-standing negative images of it in the US press, which stem back to the nineteenth century and beyond. These include the view that Mexico and Mexicans are ‘retrograde, both culturally and racially, by virtue of their “mongrelized” mestizo image’, a condition (consolidated particularly during the Revolution) apparently marked by violence and childishness, a propensity towards hedonism and barbarism, as well as an inclination for dishonesty and theft (Anderson 1998: 27).
26 C. LINDSAY If the country’s ethnic diversity provided an account of its ‘backward ness’, it was also—counter-intuitively—a source of difference to be exploited in subsequent attempts to promote tourism. Advertising cam paigns aimed at international travellers in the 1920s and 1930s thus tended to focus on the country’s natural resources as the main attrac tions, later adding themes of the indigenous peoples, regional cos tumes, and folk arts, as well as Mexico’s proximity to the United States by rail. In the 1940s, however, as indicated above, Alemán made con certed efforts to modernize Mexican tourism, to move it away from its dependency on the folkloric and to cultivate a more cosmopolitan vision of the country: ‘the touristic promotion of Mexico by the 1940s signi fied the transition from essentialist cultural depiction to one less reliant on the appeal of authenticity, monumentalism, and folklore’ (Saragoza 2001: 108). During that decade of accelerated modernization (when WWII in fact aided tourism to Mexico as it had closed off alternative destinations, especially for North Americans), in touristic representa tions, Mexico was sold ‘as the embodiment of both modernity and antiq uity’ (Berger 2006:56).15 The result was that Mexico’s reputation in the north shifted in and after WWII from that of the barbaric to the good neighbour.16 As Berger has illustrated, the combination of the modern and ancient proved to be persuasive as well as pervasive in the visual and narrative rhetoric of tourism. While images of the mestiza and regional types continued to be deployed to personify the Mexican nation and its tradition of hospitality, other images used to advertise Mexico City in the 1940s onwards ‘consistently compared the capital to other well known US and European cities such as New York, London or Paris’ and included ‘fashionable, cosmopolitan women to personify modernity in an effort to make the capital desirable and familiar to tourists’ (Berger 2006: 101, 105). If developing nations such as Mexico have deployed tourism as a pan acea to economic woes, central to this endeavour have been attempts like these to counteract deleterious images in ‘the international imagina tive atlas’ (Fay 2011: 408) in visual and narrative form. In consequence, a striking feature of recent scholarship on tourism in Latin America has been the central role played by various forms of cultural produc tion in the methods being brought to bear on its study. Geographers, historians, and anthropologists alike have looked to myriad representa tional practices—including tourist posters, postcards, photographs, and travel accounts—as source material for their understanding of this
2 ToURISM, NATIoN-BUILDING, AND MAGAZINES 27 industry. In her work on tourism and photography in the Anglophone Caribbean, for example, Krista Thomson observes that in order to address the time-honoured stigma associated with the West Indies as breeding grounds for potentially fatal tropical diseases (such as yellow fever, malaria, and cholera), touristic-oriented representations of the Bahamas and Jamaica depended on a domesticated version of the trop ical environment and society. Nature and the ‘natives’ were tamed and disciplined in photographs and postcards of these sites, which were mar keted as ‘premodern tropical locales’, conveying not only the success and entirely benign legacy of colonial rule but also encoding the kind of safety travellers could expect when they arrived in those destinations (Thomson 2006: 12).17 In doing so, such visual images presented a ‘par ticular Edenic (a holier than thou) image’ of these nations, recreating their colonial past as ‘clean, wholesome, and a world without conflict’ (2006: 272). Likewise, Ana Maria Dopico notes that ‘the image machine reproducing Cuba for a [contemporary] global market’, while exploiting Cuba’s exceptionalism, ‘in fact relies on tourism’s capacity to camouflage revolutionary Havana into consumable mirages, visual clichés that dis guise or iconize the city’s economic and political crises’ (2002: 464).18 While existing studies on tourism in the region draw on visual forms such as photography and postcards (Thomson, Dopico) and an array of other sources including travel writing (Merrill, Schreiber), tourist bro chures, and radio broadcasts (Berger, Saragoza), among other textual and visual representations, this book focuses exclusively on the magazine. It perceives and champions the magazine as an essential but hitherto overlooked part of Mexico’s ‘culture of the visual’, whose own illustra tions in the form of advertisem*nts and maps, which are the subjects of the following chapters, to some degree evince tropes and tendencies of the kind identified by scholars such as Thomson and Dopico. While I am interested in the magazines’ features, articles, and editorials, the fol lowing chapters devote considerable attention to those promotional and cartographic features of their visual paratextual apparatus, not only because of their emblematic relation to the ‘industry without chimneys’, but also because this kind of rich but nominally ‘marginal’ visual con tent merits scrutiny in its own right as well as in relation to the maga zines’ remaining content. As Hammill et al. observe, though ‘periodical studies is frequently structured by an implicit hierarchy of content that privileges the story over the advertisem*nt, the enduring over the fash ionable, or, more broadly, the exceptional over the repetitive’, magazines
28 C. LINDSAY need to be understood as and for their character as miscellany, as ‘inter locking systems of mediation’ (Hammill et al. 2015: 6). Moreover, while advertisem*nts and maps share the same cultural economy and contexts as other visual forms, they have yet to be fully appreciated in relation to Mexico’s broader visual culture, a lack of connection that, as Magalí Carrera notices apropos of maps, is both ‘curious and problematic’ (2011: 4).19 Such an oversight, to which I return in more specific detail in this chapter and Chapter 3, can be partly explained by a prevailing tendency to discount or simplify matters concerned with marketing or else to affiliate maps with a purely scientific domain, in both cases ignor ing the relevance or relation of these visual forms to the aesthetic or the symbolic realms. Yet, as this book argues, such images are intimately con nected to Mexico’s contemporary visual and political culture. Further, when read within their historical contexts of production and in relation to the other heterogeneous material between the magazines’ covers, they convey complex, sometimes even discrepant meanings. Indeed, as much as photographs and postcards, this kind of illustrated periodical material attests acutely to the ways in which tourism functions both as a com modification of Mexican culture and a complex means of cultural affir mation. Thus, by concentrating solely on the periodical form, this book does not dismiss or simplify ‘the elements of bricolage’ (Moynagh 2008: 17) that an ostensibly more variegated corpus, such as that of other stud ies of tourism, by Berger or Moynagh say, might appear to offer. Rather, as I elucidate in the following section, the value of the magazine as a ‘single’ object of study lies in part precisely in its own compositional het erogeneity (that is, that it is a visual and narrative form) and its inter medial porosity, both of which belie any reductive idea of ‘uniformity’ or what Mikhail Bakhtin calls ‘monolingualism’. In what follows, I also argue that the magazine has an agile yet ‘archival’ quality that is remark able when compared with other forms of cultural production, especially in the area of tourism, an industry with which it has a suggestive and historical affinity. THE MAGAZINE: STORE, ARCHIVE, SOURCE As a form, the magazine is a regular miscellany of articles and illustra tions often focused on a particular subject or aimed at a particular audi ence/readership. It is distinguished by its contemporaneity or ‘newness’, that it is ‘continually on the move, across time’: responsive to events and
2 ToURISM, NATIoN-BUILDING, AND MAGAZINES 29 developments in the area of its subject matter, it selects those that are deemed worthy of report or inclusion in its pages (Turner 2002: 183). As Eric Bulson points out, the little magazine (one of the periodical’s salient forms) came of age not long before WWI and was followed swiftly by the rise of Fascism and Nazism in Europe and the decolonization of countries across Africa and the West Indies after WWII: as such, Bulson avows, ‘[the periodical] is not something that simply registers the shocks during these tumultuous moments; it actively responds to them by estab lishing literary and critical communication when it could prove difficult, if not impossible’ (2017: 5). Such nimble and contingent qualities and, notwithstanding recurring predictions of its imminent demise, its con tinued proliferation as a form have afforded the magazine (and its ‘little’ iteration in particular) an innovative or experimental character that has long been put to radical ends. As Gorham Munson puts it in a charming 1937 article, the magazine has operated like a ‘potting shed where very rare and usually frail plants are given a chance of blooming’ (1937: 10). The currency from which such experimentation has sprung is amplified by the magazine’s weekly, monthly, or quarterly appearance; the serializa tion or ‘multiple periodical rhythms’ that are also one of the periodical’s defining features (Turner 2002: 188). The frequency of a magazine’s publication is determined by symbolic and economic rationales that have various material and epistemological implications, for, as Turner points out, ‘there is no single rhythm … no single cycle, no single motion which somehow contains it all’ (2002: 187–188). For instance, we might compare subjects that appear to ‘merit’ a periodical title of increased (daily, weekly) frequency, for example—current events, politics, satire—to others that have a more staggered (monthly) output, such as leisure pursuits and less topical issues. In essence, however, frequency is informed by affordability at the level of production and readership. In terms of the latter, as Richard ohmann (1996) has shown in his pioneer ing work on North American ‘commercial’ periodicals, in the late nine teenth/early twentieth century ‘mass market’ magazines had to extract themselves out of the realm of luxury consumption in order to attract large audiences with money to spend: they did so by lowering their price and by selling more advertising space to cover the costs of production.20 More fundamentally, the question of how regularly an editor can afford to publish is the defining factor: historically, many of the so-called little magazines (and others), due to financial constraints and difficulties, have either amended the frequency of their output, interrupted and/or ceased
30 C. LINDSAY publication altogether. Such is the case of Mexican Folkways and Mexico This Month, both of which received government grants and subsidies for their publication, the precariousness of which repeatedly affected their publication schedules and, following withdrawal, ultimately sealed their demise. Such state-funding arrangements are unique to Mexico when compared with many titles in the Anglophone market that are considered in the existing scholarship on this form, though the ensuing relationship between cultural producers and the state was not necessarily straightfor ward: as Joseph et al. write, it was ‘typically asymmetrical … [but] invar iably multifaceted, and power was rarely fixed on one side or another’ (2001: 7). If the magazine is distinguished by its response to the new and by its recurrence, it also rests on a degree of belatedness. The magazine is not as urgent a publication as a daily bulletin, it does not ‘meet spe cific, local needs in the way a newspaper does’ (ohmann 1996: 355). This, counter-intuitively, lends it a degree of ‘untimeliness’, although Turner suggests that the break inherent in serialization is precisely ‘the space that allows us to communicate’, the lapses in time in fact ‘where meaning resides’ (2002: 193–194). Notwithstanding, the magazine’s periodic appearance means that it runs the risk of anachronism from the very moment of publication, let alone of distribution, which (when on an interrupted or unreliable schedule such as those of this book’s case studies) adds an additional layer of adjournment and risk.21 Its very in-frequency means that the magazine’s hold on its readership might be more tenuous than that of a newspaper or a novel, although serialization (of fiction, in particular) was one mechanism for retaining (and manipu lating) readers’ attention and loyalty. Mexican Folkways, for the first two years of publication, 1925–1927, was published bimonthly and from 1928 to 1933 every three months, with an interruption in 1932. During its last four years of publication until 1937, only three issues of Mexican Folkways appeared, as monographic numbers on Mexican ‘masters’ José Guadalupe Posada and its ‘own’ Rivera. Its editor Frances Toor was apol ogetic about the discontinuous appearance of Folkways, due to intermit tent government funding. In a 1927 issue she pledged to ‘do better in the future’ and promised ‘an accounting’ if there was any further suspen sion in publication; while in 1933, she lamented once again ‘find[ing] myself without [the] assurance of being able to continue publication. But Mexico is a land of miracles (and perhaps there will be another for Mexican Folkways eventually)’ (8:1, 1933, 2). on the other hand, letters
2 ToURISM, NATIoN-BUILDING, AND MAGAZINES 31 from regular readers of Mexico This Month to lament or even sympa thize with the magazine’s habitual tardiness were frequently published between its covers. For example, Elaine Snobar of New York wrote on 8 April 1970 of the months of delay she waited for the magazine: ‘How could we possibly take advantage of anything which happened more than a month ago?’ (Brenner 1968). Meanwhile, George Blisard of Waco, Texas, was more generous about the magazine’s late arrival, suggesting that ‘these people who write letters complaining of not receiving issues on time … have either never been to Mexico or else spent only a little time there [for] the things that make the publishing date uncertain are the basic reasons that Mexico is such a wonderful place’ (Brenner 1968). Brenner thematized this belatedness in Mexico This Month, acknowledg ing and answering her readers’ complaints in the magazine’s pages. on one occasion she admitted to its late publication due to their printer’s attempt to bribe them for more money: ‘If you have jumped to conclu sions and figured it’s Mexican printers who act in this way, the answer is, they don’t’, she wrote, ‘This one was a foreigner … carried away by the fact that he’s the only plant in town that does photogravure’ (4: 11, 1958: 6). Brenner’s broadside against time-honoured preconceptions of Mexican degeneracy here was typical of her efforts throughout the mag azine to contest the country’s unfavourable image in the north, a subject to which I return in Chapter 3. In other ways, a magazine’s ‘infrequency’ can have generative prop erties. Its reiterated and recurrent articulation of a particular position, rhetoric or subject matter has a legitimizing, institutionalizing function in terms of ideology and subject matter. Indeed, the lack of immediacy together with such recurrence furnishes the magazine with archival or memorializing potential, conferring a greater sense of permanence and ‘authority’ on it perhaps than, say, that of a newspaper. As such, even when not advertising the manifestos of a particular avant-garde move ment, say (as in modernist periodicals), the magazine of any kind is a purveyor of ideology and operates as a form of manifesto itself.22 Mexican Folkways is a good example of this. Insofar as ‘it contributed directly to the effort to collect and disseminate knowledge about the country’s vernacular traditions and cast them as part of a coherent whole’ (López 2010: 103), it essentially operated as an expression or pro gramme of state policy to integrate Mexico’s indigenous peoples. Indeed, it is as a repository of this sort that this magazine has subsequently become most prized by scholars, although, as I argue in chapter 3,
32 C. LINDSAY this in turn has lead to some significant oversights. By contrast, the enterprising Brenner actively mobilized the magazine’s ‘archivable’ potential in discrete ways. From its inception Mexico/This Month was cir culated to schools and college libraries in the United States (the costs of their subscriptions covered by the US government) and, during the 1960s, Brenner planned an educational toolkit, among other items, as a spin-off to the magazine. The kit was to include folk art and a film package as well as supplementary teaching material for the orientation of children of Mexican origin in the US public school system. In this way, Brenner foresaw the magazine’s long-term ‘social’ function. As such, both she and Toor can be seen as incipient ‘archive entrepreneurs’ in Antoinette Burton’s terms, whose periodicals contradict the tendency of ‘much of the material that documents tourism …[to be] by nature ephemeral’ (Boardman 2001: 17) and challenge elitist histories.23 In broader terms, the magazine as archive in this vein complicates further the question of its ‘untimeliness’. For if the magazine is ostensibly con cerned with the new and the now, but, on publication and reception is always already ‘belated’, its archival and archivable potential (foreseen by both Toor and Brenner) is also forward-looking. For, as Jacques Derrida has famously observed, ‘The archivization produces as much as it records the event’ (1995: 16–17). This is a particularly significant gesture in the context of a country in the tumultuous throes of nation formation. As a material object, the magazine’s potential for individual or institu tional accumulation and collection—and thus for multiple usage—coun teracts the impermanence and fragility usually associated with a print medium of limited lifetime, frequency, or the kind of precarious finan cial arrangements on which both the magazines under examination here depended. These are the normative conditions of many a magazine’s production and existence. In this respect, as well as its known/identifi able subscribers (whether private or public), we need to take account of the magazine’s ‘pass-along’ readership, for which the sense of that belat edness/untimeliness might be even greater. To be sure, the question of readership is complicated: a magazine’s specialist theme or subject matter does not necessarily mean a ‘coherent’ or bounded audience, with the result that reader numbers are always going to be approximate, if not perhaps ultimately unknowable. Nevertheless, it is essential to acknowl edge the undetected/able ways in which magazines circulate synchron ically and diachronically beyond the subscription list and outside of the archive, that is, their wider, less formal dissemination and survival in the
2 ToURISM, NATIoN-BUILDING, AND MAGAZINES 33 Fig. 2.1 Front cover of Mexico This Month, 3:1, 1957 fuzzier realms of cultural memory. Mexican Folkways and Mexico This Month are instructive in this respect. Though Toor had at first intended to publish exclusively in Spanish for a Mexican readership, she was per suaded by the North American anthropologist Franz Boas to publish a bilingual version of the magazine. For many years in Mexico, ‘though edited by a foreigner, [the magazine] won credibility domestically’ in part because of its subject matter, in large part too because most of its contributors were Mexican. Folkways thus had contemporary reach and influence on either side of the Mexico–US border (López 2010: 102– 103; Hellier-Tinoco 2011: 63). Mexico This Month was also well received in the north in reviews in titles such as Sunset and Esquire, where it was favourably compared with the New Yorker (Fig. 2.1). In a bulk ‘controlled circulation’ arrange ment that was part of its state sponsorship from Nacional Financiera, Mexico This Month was also distributed to Mexican consulates and embas sies across the world, which allowed it to reach readers at home, in the north, as well as in Europe and Asia. Composed by both Mexican and North American writers and artists, and providing reading material to audiences located often well beyond Mexico’s borders, both titles tes tify to the globality of the magazine as a form, offering ‘a place in which writers, readers, critics, and translators could imagine themselves belong ing to a global community that consisted of, but was not cordoned off by, national boundaries’ (Bulson 2012: 268). This is not to overstate the extent or depth of these magazines’ networks and influence, nor to disre gard their darker side: as Bulson puts it, the more a magazine travels, ‘the less [can] be known about where it was ending up, how it was being read, and by whom’ (2017: 16).24 Nevertheless, it is important to acknowledge
34 C. LINDSAY the hemispheric, intercultural authorship and readership at stake in the titles considered in this book, within the context of a unique geopolit ical relationship during the period in question, which has few parallels elsewhere.25 If the magazine’s archival impulse and archivable potential resides in questions of subject matter, frequency, and readership, there are singu lar and complex implications of its discontinuous form, some of which are particularly pertinent to the experience of travel and tourism. The magazine is a composite text of articles, illustrations, photographs, let ters, and advertisem*nts: an astonishing miscellany of material that, as ohmann observes, recalls the mixed stock of ‘[warehouses] of the odd … the notable [and] … of the commonplace’ (1996: 223). As such, the magazine is quite a different order of text to, say, a book, although the total number of published pages over its lifetime might be comparable to or even exceed the length of a late nineteenth-century, modernist, or postmodernist literary novel.26 The magazine’s etymological roots in the French magasin and the Arabic makzin/makzan (‘storehouse’) are suggestive in this respect. In the formal juxtaposition of written genres and visual material, their arrangement in sections of similar order and location in each issue, magazines of all kinds sort their material into different sections that resemble the profuse and miscellaneous stock of the department store or warehouse. The arrangement, in ‘small sec tions … [that] appear month after month under the same title [allows the reader][to] regularly revisit her favourite [sections or] displays’ and provides a sense of orientation and familiarity (ohmann 1996: 225). Categorizing writing further into unnamed but familiar genres (fiction, adventure, sport and so on), the magazine appeals to and accommo dates the diversity and individuality of readers’ tastes (ohmann 1996: 225). Notwithstanding, as ohmann has observed, these anthologies of diverse genres of writing and image are all collectively engaged in ‘pointing, describing, and enumerating …[in] a rhetoric of taxonomy and accumulation’ (1996: 230). The experiences of visiting a depart ment store (principally, observation and consumption) are thus invoked in the magazines’ pages in aesthetic, thematic, and phenomenological terms. If, for ohmann, the magazine editor thus becomes ‘like a tour guide, pointing to this thing as notable, that as interesting, another as … curious’ (1996: 230), Richard Popp’s description of ‘popular’ travel magazines such as Holiday as ‘geographic galleries’ (2012: 5) also aptly captures the particular resonance of that analogy between this
2 ToURISM, NATIoN-BUILDING, AND MAGAZINES 35 Fig. 2.2 Advertisem*nts in Mexican Folkways, 4:1, 1928 print form and the experience of tourism.27 Indeed, tourism is bound up not only in visual forms of appropriation, as John Urry and David Spurr, among others, have noted, but fundamentally also with acts of consumption, for as Hammill and Smith remind us, ‘travel can be reduced to a series of expenditures: a cruise, railway journey, or road trip; accommodation; dining and drinks; sightseeing and tours; sou venirs and photographs – all have a price tag attached’ (2015: 147). The Spanish term revista retains a strong sense of the repeated visual inspection—or ‘re-vision’—at stake in magazine reading, as well as in the analogous experiences of shopping and tourism. In this respect, Mexican Folkways and Mexico This Month were not only ‘guides’ to Mexico and archives of folklore, tradition, and culture. They func tioned in literal and figurative terms as catalogues, offering a monitored, respectable space (like that of the department store) for readers to peruse and experience new forms of cultural and consumer citizenship. The magazine is a store not only in the sense that it might articulate a particular vision of Mexico for ‘consumption’ or advertise commodities for sale in its pages. The visual or material presentation of the magazine can announce its own potential as a commodity. As discussed further in Chapter 3, both Toor and Brenner produced special (bound) numbers of their magazines and produced pull-out sections for sale separately from the periodicals’ regular issues (Fig. 2.2). The magazine, straddling cultural and commercial arenas, is a hybrid, collective and intermedial form, its production and design the result of the collaboration of writers, artists, photographers, and read ers, not to mention advertisers, publishers, ‘sponsors’ and distributors.
36 C. LINDSAY It is fundamentally dialogic on three levels, as Suzanne Churchill and Adam McKible (2007) have emphasized: it is dialogic within its own pages, in the interplay between different magazines, as well as in rela tion to the larger public sphere. Questions of authorship, taking named, pseudonymous and anonymous forms can, as with readership, be diffi cult to disentangle. (This is especially the case in a bilingual title such as Folkways, which printed mostly simultaneous, sometimes anonymous translations of its articles in English and Spanish.) Nevertheless, for all its discontinuity (of form and publication schedule), the magazine can gain coherence from a coterie of established contributors with a shared ‘world view’, or from continuous editorship.28 In the case of Mexican Folkways, the two anchors were founding editor Toor and the magazine’s art editor, a post that was briefly held by Jean Charlot and then Diego Rivera; there was also a core of contributing editors including Salvador Novo, Carleton Beals, and Tina Modotti. Likewise, Mexico This Month was only ever edited by Anita Brenner, who had contributed to the inau gural issue of Toor’s periodical. Both women were inveterate travellers and travel writers, authors of well regarded and much-reprinted travel guides to Mexico. In this respect, Toor and Brenner can be thought of as archons in Derrida’s formulation of that figure; that is, guardians ‘accorded the hermeneutic right and competence … the power to inter pret the archives’ (Derrida 1995: 2).29 Driven by a personal and public archive fever, editors such as Toor and Brenner endeavoured to ensure the ‘security’ and continuity of their magazines’ content and publica tion (insofar as they could in the funding and media landscapes of their eras). In a 1926 issue of Folkways, Toor lamented that ‘if I personally didn’t carry out all the labours from distributor to editor, only for the pleasure of seeing that the magazine continues publication, it wouldn’t exist’ (1:4, 1926, 29). Meanwhile, Brenner was known for her ‘indom itable will, definiteness of purpose and unwillingness to brook criticism or suggestion’ in the editorship of Mexico This Month (Brenner 1959). This testifies to the editor not only ‘act[ing] like [a] narrator’ over a magazine’s lifetime but, like its contributors, also taking on the role of character (Bulson 2012: 272). Such long-term editorships speak once again to that notion of jurisdiction mentioned earlier—the magazine as ‘institution’—as well as to the cross-fertilization of different transnational intellectual networks in print culture in Mexico during this period. They also speak to the prolonged, dynamic activity of women magazine editors in Mexico at that time, further consideration of which lies beyond the
2 ToURISM, NATIoN-BUILDING, AND MAGAZINES 37 scope of the present study but of which there is a respectable tradition in Spanish America more widely. In sum, the magazine is a discontinuous but coherent form: con temporary, ‘spontaneous’ but untimely, it has suggestive, dialectical affiliations to both store and archive. It is a malleable, mobile, and very much public work: a rich and complex assembly of material that raises the possibility, indeed, urgency of a number of potential methodolog ical approaches to its study. In general terms, following Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker, the magazine’s composite form requires us to consider what they call the internal and external periodical codes. That is, the magazine obliges us to take into account its textual and design features (page layout, length, number, use of illustrations, ads, and type of paper and so on). Equally important, however, is its materiality, the ‘media ecology’, distribution contexts, and financial support, the ‘busi ness’ end of operations. To date, these features have tended to be stud ied unsystematically or in separatist fashion, by scholars working in distinct disciplinary silos whose findings have been published either in ad hoc publications or in editions of anthologized essays about a particu lar country/region’s print culture, rather than in sustained monographic studies or series. Examples include work in sociology on, say, the por trayal of masculinity or femininity in popular lifestyle magazines (Winship 1987) or Catherine Lutz’s and Jane Collins’s ethnographic study of National Geographic, based on semi-structured interviews, reader sur veys, and analysis of the magazine’s photography (1993). There is also work by historians, such as Lydia Elizalde (2007) or Saul Sosnowski (1999), whose editions of collected essays on periodical culture in Latin America provide helpful introductory overviews. In the Americas, it is notable that the fine, now canonized monographic works on single and singular periodicals—by authors such as John King (on Sur and Plural), Richard Popp (on Holiday), and Guillermo Sheridan (on Los contemporá neos)—are relatively few in number and although they are invaluable cul tural histories they conduct little analysis of their magazines’ textuality (their internal structure, external design, and shape). Although, of course, ‘there is no one way “to do” periodical studies’ (DiCenzo 2015: 36), perhaps there is something about the relentless novelty and perceived ephemerality of magazines, to which I referred above, that has worked against either more coherent or consistent forms of engagement with them and/or the establishment of a well-defined set of methodological frameworks in the field. To be sure, the question of
38 C. LINDSAY number and scale is significant here, as Bulson explains: ‘There are too many magazines to account for, somewhere in the tens of thousands, maybe even more. … the impossibility of collecting … empirical data has a lot to do with the size of the print runs and the fragility of the materials’ (2012: 269). Whether in terms of locating a full and complete print run of a magazine or mapping the periodical culture of a particu lar period or region, addressing what Scott Latham and Robert Scholes call the holes in the archive can be a difficult task. Scholarly ‘search and rescue’ work (Bulson 2012: 285) has been endeavouring to address these very issues, to arrest the magazine’s ad hoc diffusion and to sal vage it from its hitherto vulnerable existence. The burgeoning number of digital archiving projects and periodical collections in the Anglophone world (from JSToR, Project MUSE, to the Modernist Journals Project of Brown University, among others) attests to this. The publication of anthologies and volumes such as the Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Global Modernist Magazines and the establishment of journals such as the Journal of Modernist Periodical Studies, societies and asso ciations for the study of periodicals in different regions, such as RSVP and RSAP in the United States and ESPRiT and NAPS in the UK, are further significant developments.30 Yet, while on one level such activi ties attest to the growth of a veritable academic industry, there is much still to be accomplished especially in non-Anglophone regions of the world, where circ*mstances in what Patrick Leary has called the ‘offline penumbra’ (Hammill et al. 2015: 4) remain far from the rather utopian situation described by Bulson, who avers that ‘from now on it will be impossible not to know the little magazine through … digital technolo gies, interfaces, and archives’ (2017: 32).31 In chorus with Leary, Maria DiCenzo rightly points out that one of the risks with digitization ‘is that if it is not there many assume it does not exist’ and, in fact, it is not a question of ‘how much, but, rather, how little [periodical mate rial] is available in digital form’ (2015: 31). In this respect, though not discounting the value of digitization, and mindful of the challenges pre sented by international archival work with analogue periodical forms, scholars of Modern Languages or in languages other than English, espe cially those of us working in interdisciplinary, transnational contexts (and less wedded to the traditions of single-author study), are well placed to make advances in periodical knowledge and scholarship. As DiCenzo argues, ongoing work with print and manuscript sources is critical and
2 ToURISM, NATIoN-BUILDING, AND MAGAZINES 39 ‘will play a central role in keeping the offline penumbra on the radar’ (2015:32). This is one of the central endeavours of this study. In essence, one of the essential tasks for scholars of magazines in whichever format is to adopt a catholic approach to the very categories that have emerged to date to define and delimit them. This requires engaging with the high and the middlebrow, identifying and acknowl edging the overlap between them as well as their differences. It is about moving away from the ‘valorizing of literary and artistic ventures over commercial enterprises’ that has characterized periodical studies to date, to counteract the prevailing tendency identified by Robert Scholes to ‘exclude middles and emphasize extremes’ (2007: 218). While catego ries can be useful frames of reference, it is also necessary to acknowl edge the porosity and fragility of their boundaries in practice, especially in active ‘dis-identifications’ with criteria—or ‘brows’—that have been defined from the top down (DiCenzo 2015: 30). Indeed, as Churchill and McKible aver, ‘attention to the wide array of periodicals can [only] enhance our understanding of modernity’ (2007: 7).32 I emphasize this point because it is without a doubt that it is the little magazine in English, the fruit of the institutions that sustained and promoted mod ernism, which has become paradigmatic in periodical studies. Though it is a term that ‘cannot be applied universally’ (Bulson 2012: 269), two features distinguish the so-called little magazines. First, that they have lived what Brooker and Thacker call ‘a kind of private life’ on the margins of conventional culture, from where they articulate adver sarial positions on the ‘new’. A second characteristic is their putatively non-commercial nature, that they ran on a small budget and had short print runs. As such, the little magazines spoke to a very limited group of so-called ‘intelligent’ readers (usually no more than one thousand), the small circulation ‘seen as a marker of success in reaching [those] high in cultural capital’ (Brooker and Thacker 2010: 7).33 Recent work on mod ernist magazines has shown, however, that they by no means eschewed commerce entirely, either through advertising or deploying aspects of visual culture associated with it, and that some little magazines did reach larger audiences (issues to which I return in the next chapter). The magazines of this book’s corpus testify to the need to take an expansive, inclusive view of the form. In fact, the particularities of my case studies’ content, composition, and circulation distinguish them in the publishing contexts of their day and from the kind of titles that have
