Keywords

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 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 distribution, 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 guidebook 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 cautionary 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 refutarlos’ [Excelsior, which does not sympathize with the author’s position, 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] (Brenner, n.d.). Against the newspaper’s charges that her unpromising picture of Mexico had frightened tourists away, Brenner, in private correspondence 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] es tan 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 le asusta, 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 fandangos’ [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 imitations 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 foreigner 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. Meanwhile, Hawley proposed to Buelna that his client’s only miscalculation in the Holiday piece was to adopt such a sensationalist tone, although he observed that that was the prevailing cadence of US journalism: ‘we probably need a writer like Anita to wake us to the realization 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 distillation of some of the principal themes of this study of magazines, tourism , 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 foreign 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 contribution 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 country, I believe I have the right to that pride] (Brenner 1947b). Her magazine 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 (business, cultural, and scholarly) cooperation were common. They are too a distinguishing characteristic of the periodicals, Mexican Folkways and 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 circulating 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 modern 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 constituting 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 earlier 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-century 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 an imaginative geography of Mexico during a period in which that industry became a critical means of economic recovery and political stability 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 tourism: among an array of commissions involved in organizing the industry (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 imperialism 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 outside Mexico to become a popular and widely distributed form of documenting 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 ’working 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 transnational magazine became a part of a raft of measures to stimulate tourism 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 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 international 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 intrinsic 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, produced 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 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 consolidation 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 control 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 findings 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 imaginative 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 studies 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 pertinent (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 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 consecration 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 content 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 studies in tourism studies, offer pathways into, around, and through destinations. In what follows I attend particularly to their use of advertisements and maps because of their emblematic association with tourism. I regard these visual representations, a central part of the industry’s material apparatus 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 tourism , 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 publication delimit a near fifty-year interval (1925–1971) that encompasses two decisive but usually bifurcated phases of Mexico’s history: the immediate post-revolutionary reconstruction (and the country’s so-called ‘cultural renaissance’) and the less studied economic ‘miracle’ of the 1940s and successive decades of modernization. The latter were the mid-century 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 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 variegated promotional apparatus from Revolution to counter-revolution . As Gil Joseph et al. observe, things are more complicated than even a revisionist 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 modern 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 tradition and modernity, and between culture and commerce , that was then being articulated and interrogated in Mexico on a larger literal and political canvass. For, as Tenorio Trillo writes, the modern nation is always a particular expression of ‘the continuum of interactions between … tradition and modernity, non-Western and Western trends, popular and elitist expressions and interests’, an understanding of which exposes ‘the fragility, 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 Anne Rubenstein (1998) and, more recently, working class and political 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 ‘biography’ 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, advertisements, 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 ‘marginal’ 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 situated 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 circumstances of the industry in Mexico after the Revolution. It also provides a vital discussion of the magazine as a form and elucidates in detail the particular methodological issues at stake in the analysis of this ‘singular’ but heterogeneous object of study.

Chapter 2 examines the use of tourism advertisements 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 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 reconceptualization of Mexican nationalism and a burgeoning consumer culture during 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 ostensibly 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 advertisements 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 modernity 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 travelled elsewhere in written form, perceives maps as complex representations 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 Vincent J. del Casino argue in their work on the ‘map space’, ‘are materially 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 considers 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 economics of tourism during Mexico’s post-war/Cold-War years.

FormalPara Notes
  1. 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] without getting extremely fatigued and distressed’, n.p.

  2. 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. 3.

    Holiday, launched in 1946 by the Curtis Publishing Company, was a relatively 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 during an era of remarkable change’. See Popp (2012: 31).

  4. 4.

    According to Berger, its operations nonetheless ‘mirror[ed] the equally chaotic political climate’ of the time (2006: 20).

  5. 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).

  6. 6.

    For a summary of the critique of Anderson, see Chasteen (2003).

  7. 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-familiar McWorld set down on the Zona Rosa’, in part too because of the absence of (still classified) archival materials (2001: 14).

  8. 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).