Random Readings Redux: Good tourists and bad

Here's a book review that ran in The Herald Mexico last year, but has lost none of its timeliness. It also fits in with the theme of this brief summer re-run period before Mexicalpan starts weighing in on current political and cultural events. That theme has to do with the interaction between Mexico and the Anglophone world, and the sometimes enlightened, but too often reactionary, commentary that accompanies it.

The review has been tweaked just a little from its published version, most of the adjustments consisting of overruling imposed changes by Herald Mexico editors (ah, the advantages of having one's own site).

Adventures into Mexico:
American Tourism Beyond the Border
Edited by Nicholas Dagen Bloom
Rowman & Littlefield Publishers (2006)


BY KELLY ARTHUR GARRETT


The key word in this welcome book’s title is the preposition. The flow of bodies southward into Mexico has a short history and a booming future. What we hear and read about Americans in Mexico, however, is mostly opinions, complaints, and proposals for cashing in on their existence. This collection of nine semi-scholarly essays gives us some much-needed background and information to go with our prejudices, and offers some prejudices of its own.

And let’s be honest: Prejudices, or at least value judgments, tend to dominate any conversation about U.S. tourists anywhere.

I’ll put my own prejudice on the table: Outside of lawyers and bureaucrats, tourists are the most unfairly maligned human beings on the planet. Nicholas Dagen Bloom, a U.S. historian who put the book together and contributed its most memorable chapter (on — where else? — San Miguel de Allende), gets right down to it in his introduction: “Tourism is still treated by many of its critics as a virulent disease on a par with sexism and racism.”

Bloom generously acknowledges that it would be a mistake to take this condemation as the final word, noting that tourism-related marketing strategies have helped save countless cultural sites and traditions. Still, what Bloom and most of the rest of the contributors seem to believe is that there are good tourists and bad tourists. The bad ones dress inappropriately, talk too loud and in the wrong language, “prefer places that are exaggerated for their attractiveness” (here Bloom quotes from another writer who does not have an essay in the book, John Jakle), and are “inflamed with standardized consuming fantasies” (Bloom’s own words).

The good ones, on the other hand, “seek out unspoiled spots, learn languages, and appreciate local customs.”

These tourist stereotypes are ever-shifting, Bloom notes. I’d go farther and say they’re fuzzy to start with. Are today’s Day of the Dead buffs bad tourists seeking costumed spectacles “exaggerated for their attractiveness” or good tourists because they “appreciate local customs”?

I also wonder if the implied moral ranking of tourism experiences is valid. Many of the book’s contributors tell us implicitly or explicitly that the bad tourist who lies on the beach sipping coco locos and reading a Dan Brown novel has an inferior conception of tourism. But what people prefer to do when they are on vacation, I would think, is no basis for evaluating their depth of character.

Underplayed in these essays is that the negative stereotyping of U.S. tourists in Mexico is almost always the creation of U.S. citizens -- either other tourists, self-righteous expats or armchair critics in the halls of academe. It seldom comes from Mexicans, who generally adopt a tolerant attitude of bemused attachment. I could be wrong, but I’m inclined to think that Americans mortified by the behavior of other Americans are more upset about having their own fantasies about Mexico interfered with than they are about the sensibilities of Mexicans, most of whom couldn’t care less.

The good and bad tourist theme underlies many of the essays in the book, as varied as those essays are. An excellent contribution by Rebecca Schreiber, a U.S. studies assistant professor, examines U.S. author Willard Motley’s Mexican experiences in the 1950s. Motley struggled with what’s still a problem among U.S. writers and journalists in Mexico today — the friction between what is actually going on here in Mexico and what U.S. editors and publishers want you to send.

Motley was convinced he had found in Mexico a sort of racism-free baseline for evaluating the racist society he had left behind. He especially resented what he saw as U.S. tourists’ overt racist behavior in that era. In “An American Negro in Mexico,” Motley reports that Mexicans he talked to felt then that Americans were "trying to bring prejudice to Mexico.”

I'll take Motley's and Schreiber's word that tourists packed prejudice along with their suntan lotion for their Mexican vacations. It wouldn't be out of character with the times. But I don't think U.S. tourists in Mexico today are as guilty of overt racism as in Motley's time, though there are still a few who just can't help it. Some things do get better.

Other chapters, however, cater to the common conviction that not much in Mexico is as good or as fun as it used to be. Those would include Dina Berger’s look at the Mexico City nightlife in the 1940s and Richard Wilkie’s memoir of his stint at Mexico City College in the 1950s.

There’s also the obligatory chapter on the beat writers in Mexico, excerpted from D. Ward Gunn’s "U.S. and British Writers in Mexico."

Another excerpt is from Diana Anhalt’s 2001 book “A Gathering of Fugitives,” her memoir of growing up in Mexico as the daughter of exiled U.S. leftists. It’s an anomalous chapter, in that it’s the result of a writer’s sensibilities rather than an academic’s research.

Anhalt’s book deserves reading in its entirety, although the excerpt included in “Adventures into Mexico” contains a passage that serves as a salutary antidote to the prescriptive view of proper tourist and immigrant behavior that prevails in most of the other essays: “My sister Judy and I didn’t have to understand the country, just live in it. We could approach it gleefully, which was probably the only sensible way to go about it.”

Rebecca Torres and Janey Henshall Momsen probably wouldn’t approve of a gleeful approach to tourism, if their chapter on Cancún is any indication. The Quintana Roo built-from-scratch resort city is the bête noir of the enemies of bad tourism, and the authors do a thorough job of outlining the sundry ecological, social, economic and cultural problems associated with the imposition of a behemoth development on a once-isolated stretch of tropical beach.

Torres and Momsen don’t offer solutions for the problems. Perhaps that’s because solutions are beyond the scope of their essay, but the tone of their chapter (such as the title, “Gringolandia”) indicates they think the whole thing was such a bad idea to start with that it’s beyond salvation. Perhaps they’re right. Judging from much recent writing on Cancún, a lot of people wish it would just go away.

To be sure, critical examinations of Cancún are legitimate and needed. Torres and Momsen’s contribution is worthwhile in that regard. But to demonize the place and the pleasure people get from it as “inauthentic” or (gasp!) “Americanized” falls into the same judgmental dichotomy that stains so much writing by and about tourists and expatriates. Much of the essay strikes me as snobbery with footnotes.

This “inauthentic” label for Cancún, coming from proponents of good tourism, is curious. Something can only be inauthentic if you have a predetermined definition of what’s authentic, in which case you’re a bad tourist seeking fantasy. The authors cite a colleague: “Cancún is in Mexico but not really Mexican.” But of course it is Mexican. Because it’s not what you want Mexico to be makes it not a whit less Mexican.

At any rate, I’m always surprised at the lack of scholarly curiosity about Cancún itself, as opposed to Cancún as the symbol of what’s wrong with tourists today. It’s not culture if it’s not old or picturesque? Or if it’s hybrid? Or if it makes money? It seems to me there’s a lot of anthropology going on behind those resort hotel walls.

Momsem laments, “Mass-tourist interest in authentic cultural experiences, such as watching a dramatization of Mayan history by Mayan-speaking villagers in a village close to the Coba ruins, is minimal.”

So it has come to this: A dramatization is a better example of authenticity than what is happening in real time. You and I may prefer to spend our vacation at the Coba ruins rather than tossing tequila shooters at a wet T-shirt contest, but to contend that one activity is more authentic than the other is a sin of cultural bias.

Despite its subtitle, “Adventures into Mexico” deals as much with Americans living in Mexico as with tourists. The chapters on Lake Chapala and San Miguel de Allende are both informative and rich in lore, though old hands may find them too cursory. Even then, the bibliography and footnote references point to a gold mine of further reading.

Bloom says he researched his chapter on San Miguel by reading 30 years worth of Atención, the local English-language weekly — an endeavor that strikes me as a heroic blend of scholarly diligence and masochism. The result is a quote-filled revelation of a unique community.

U.S. “colonists” in San Miguel come off in Bloom’s chapter as model citizens — involved with the community, philanthropic, and decent. But being Americans, they are, in the eyes of much of academe, touched with original sin.

The worst evidence of that supposed sin is what Bloom calls “linguistic self-indulgence.” Like bad tourists, bad immigrants don’t speak Spanish. No matter that adult immigrants everywhere prefer to speak their native language, if U.S. citizens do it in Mexico, it’s insensitive. Bloom sniffs, “At local coffee shops and restaurants (in San Miguel), it is not uncommon to hear U.S. music and loud conversations in English.” Horrors!

If the author could write with equal indignation “in local coffee shops and restaurants in Chicago it’s not uncommon to hear Mexican music and loud conversation in Spanish,” then I’ll be convinced that there’s something wrong with immigrants indulging in their own culture. But I doubt he would write such a thing, and he shouldn’t.

Respect, courtesy, cooperation and tolerance are what’s required of tourists and expatriates in the host country. They deserve to receive the same virtues themselves.