Mark Rice. Making Machu Picchu

A volume that is long overdue in the history of Latin American and global tourism, Mark Rice’s Machu Picchu: The Politics of Tourism in Twentieth-Century Peru takes its place among a recent number of solidly grounded regional studies that highlight the outsize influence of leisure on national identity and development. Like Lisa Pinley Covert’s San Miguel de Allende: Mexicans, Foreigners, and the Making of a World Heritage Site (2017), Rice’s study focuses on cultural tourism development, and in this case on what might arguably be considered South America’s most towering archaeological attraction. Far from the beaches, which attracted the earliest interest of this century’s scholars of Latin American tourism development, Rice relies on traditional sources and an extensive use of local newspaper archives (hemerotecas), locally produced guidebooks, national archives, and personal collections to situate the celestially perched citadel as a product of a regional brand of indigenismo, local ambition, and disproportionate foreign influence in the southern Andes.

Archaeology · Economic history · Economy · Ethnology · Geography · Latin Americans · Media studies · National identity · Newspaper · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Tourism · Culinary Culture and Tourism · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies