Negotiating Paradise

A historian of American foreign relations, especially in Asia, Dennis Merrill immersed himself in selected aspects of Mexican, Cuban, and Puerto Rican historiography and mined archives in the United States, Mexico, and Puerto Rico to produce this lively, readable, and thought-provoking contribution to the historiography of tourism in twentieth-century Latin America. His main arguments are that mass tourism influenced international relations, that Latin American hosts of various kinds had power and agency — thus making US “empire” negotiated — and that the trajectories of tourism and politics varied by country. The book will be of interest to specialists on American foreign relations, Mexico (1920s – 30s), and Cuba and Puerto Rico (both 1950s – 60s) but also could find a more general audience among Americans who have traveled to Latin America as tourists.Merrill positions his book as part of a relatively recent stream within his field that seeks to articulate a social and cultural history of American foreign relations. He argues that US influence in Latin America has been shaped by the “soft” power of tourists and hosts as well as by the “hard” power associated with diplomatic and military actors. One example of this influence is his argument that mass tourism to Mexico, which took place increasingly on Mexican terms, helped to temper the US government’s response to Mexico’s nationalization of the oil industry in 1938. More convincing are his arguments that the character of US tourism in Cuba in the 1950s helped to provoke the Cuban Revolution and that tourist images of Cuba blinded US officials to the strength of the revolutionary movement. He claims that “U.S. and Cuban tourist interests came close to preventing a political rift” in 1959 – 60 (p. 145) and certainly demonstrates that these actors tried relentlessly to counter Cold War paranoia. Finally, he argues that the success of tourism in the post – World War II Puerto Rican economic transformation fueled the unrealistic optimism of Alliance for Progress planners in the 1960s.Merrill consistently and usefully highlights the variety among his three case studies. He finds private US investment dominating the Mexican border cities of the 1920s and Batista’s Cuba of the 1950s. Both in Mexico under Cárdenas and in Puerto Rico under Muñoz Marín, government planning and investment and local public-private ownership of facilities were far more significant. Efforts to construct “authentic” national culture for tourists also occurred, with emphasis on colonial and pre-Columbian historical sites as well as beach holidays. He acknowledges the racially constructed character of Mexican and Puerto Rican history and culture via tourism, but he could expand his critical analysis of these constructions and more explicitly link them to the now large body of scholarship on the construction of national histories and identities in Latin America intended for domestic consumption.Merrill claims to “hone in on ordinary tourists” and hosts (pp. xii – xiii) and includes several rich sections and many scattered anecdotes that document the texture of interactions in specific locales. Overall, however, the book gives more time and space to government and industry actors both in the United States and Latin America. Often the analysis suggests the context in which everyday negotiations of “empire” between tourists and sometimes unionized hosts took place, rather than fleshing out those interactions. Negotiating Paradise could well prompt further research in this area, especially as Merrill remains attentive to questions of gender, race, and organized labor in such interactions.While Merrill’s transnational history is not simply about studying the United States through the lens of tourism to Latin America, and he does include good background sections on each of his three case studies, his training as an Americanist sometimes shows. Mexicanists may find it odd that he doesn’t present Cárdenas’s oil nationalization as an act of economic nationalism that defied US power, perhaps forcing a new dynamic in tourism. This moment, as much as the early Cuban Revolution, prompts the question of whether “empire” is always the appropriate rubric for studying US– Latin American tourism history. Puerto Ricanists are likely to wonder why mass planned tourism is not presented as an ironic counterpoint to mass planned emigration, which is only mentioned in passing. On a more factual level, Muñoz Marín was not committed to commonwealth status as early as 1938, nor was his election victory in 1940 “smashing” (p. 183). Overall, though, the book is truly about both the United States and the three Latin American cases studied and will remind specialists on particular Latin American countries that their version of the tourist experience is not the only one. I expect that Merrill’s book will become a touchstone for comparative discussion as more detailed work on specific countries and locations develops

Economic history · Empire · Historiography · Latin Americans · Political science · Politics · Power (physics) · Sociology · Tourism · Colonial History and Postcolonial Studies · Culinary Culture and Tourism · History · Law · Travel Writing and Literature