The Tourism Encounter ─ Fashioning Latin American Nations and Histories

Mark Twain once wrote that travel is fatal to prejudice and narrow-mindedness. Yet as Babb shows in this panoramic journey and anthropological analysis of post-revolutionary Latin America, travel cannot escape history. As she uncovers, travel is always packed with the politics of social relations, past and present. And that's just the way it should be, as this book so ably demonstrates."-Matthew Gutmann, Brown University

"Babb's book is a provocative, moving, bittersweet journey to the tourist zones of Latin America, which once seduced outsiders with their hopeful visions of utopia. Now it is mostly revolutionary nostalgia that they offer for sale. How to understand this nostalgia? What has become of our dreams of revolution? Babb responds to these questions and to her own complicity with tourism in thoughtful and subtle ways that make her the ideal guide to all of us who want to learn how to be compassionate travelers in our post-utopian world."-Ruth Behar, University Of Michigan

In recent decades, Latin American nations have experienced political upheavals that have caused a decline in tourism. In spite ofuor even because ofuthat history, these areas are again becoming popular destinations. This work reveals that in post-conflict nations, tourism often takes up where social transformation leaves off and sometimes benefits from formerly off-limits status. Comparing cases in Cuba, Mexico, Nicaragua, and Peru, Babb shows how tourism is a major force in remaking transitional nations. While tourism touts scenic beauty and colonial charm, it also capitalizes on the desire for a brush with recent revolutionary history. In the process, selective histories are promoted and nations remade. Presenting diverse stories of those linked to the trade, this work reveals how interpretations of the past and desires for the future coincide and collide in the global marketplace of tourism.

Florence E. Babb is Vada Allen Yeomans Professor of Women's Studies and Affiliate Professor of Anthropology and Latin American Studies at the University of Florida. She is the author of After Revolution (2001) and Between Field and Cooking Pot (1998, rev. ed.).