San Miguel de Allende is often touted as one of Mexico's ‘must see’ attractions, a destination consistently recommended by magazines such as Travel + Leisure. Lisa Pinley Covert's well-researched book, San Miguel de Allende: Mexicans, Foreigners, and the Making of a World Heritage Site, examines how this colonial-era town in Mexico's central highlands developed into the popular tourist site of today. Covert's work makes a decisive contribution to a number of related scholarly fields, including the history of Mexico, tourism and cultural heritage, as well as transnational history and American Studies.

San Miguel did not become a tourist attraction simply because it is a quaint Mexican town. The town's transformation from an agricultural economy to a service-based economy was not inevitable. As Covert eloquently demonstrates, a complicated history lay behind the making of this tourist destination. The process was marked by ‘conflict, collaboration, successes, failures, and unintended consequences’ (p. xix). The scarcity of documents in San Miguel's municipal archives led Covert to mine other sources, especially newspapers, radio programme transcripts, private archives and interviews with dozens of residents. The result is a rich and deeply-nuanced look at the complexities of building San Miguel's tourist economy from the 1930s to the 2000s.

Covert roots the origins of San Miguel's tourist industry in the period after the Cristero Revolt (1926–9), when the town found itself on the margins of post-revolutionary Mexico's economic, political and cultural developments. At a time when industrialisation was seen as the route to modernisation, a group of local elites and transnational figures sought to chart a different path for San Miguel by turning to tourism. Individuals such as José Mojica (the Mexican opera singer who spent years performing in the United States) and Stirling Dickinson (the US artist and writer) promoted a romanticised image of San Miguel as a timeless, typical Mexican town. Their efforts paid off, and in 1939 San Miguel became a población típica, a legal designation designed to protect historic towns. It was the state of Guanajuato rather than the federal government that gave the town this designation, according to Covert, a claim she makes without offering much explanation. The Mexican government had a decades-old apparatus for establishing archaeological and historic sites. Were other places becoming federal monuments at this time? Was San Miguel an anomaly? Perhaps it would have been illuminating to do a little more digging to flesh out this aspect of the historical context.

The Sanmiguelenses (residents of San Miguel) who benefitted most from this new legal designation were the entrepreneurs who financed the town's hotels, shops and restaurants, along with the administrators of the Escuela Universitaria de Bellas Artes, the newly-established school of fine arts. Foreigners interested in history and the arts soon flocked to San Miguel, especially US veterans of World War II who found that they could study art and live comfortably in the picturesque town on their educational stipends from the GI Bill of 1944. A 1948 article in Life magazine called San Miguel a ‘GI Paradise’. The town also attracted other US and Canadian expatriates, especially hippies, beatniks and well-off retirees.

Not all Sanmiguelenses wanted to turn the town into a tourist mecca. Covert examines alternative visions for the town's future. She shows how some people favoured industrialisation as a development strategy and sought to promote the La Aurora textile factory on the outskirts of town. These residents argued that the factory's unionised jobs would benefit more locals than the small circle of entrepreneurs who profited from the tourist industry. By the latter part of the twentieth century, however, plans to catapult Sanmiguelenses into the middle class through industry evaporated, as the failures of the ‘Mexican Miracle’ of the 1940s–70s became increasingly apparent. The residents no longer questioned whether to base the town's economy on tourism, ‘the industry without smokestacks’ (p. xxv). Covert's focus on San Miguel's tourism-based economy contributes to the growing body of literature that adds nuance to the economic history of mid-century Mexico, which is usually dominated by narratives about the Mexican Miracle and the emphasis on industrialisation.

Becoming an international travel destination paradoxically turned San Miguel into a town that was at once typically Mexican and intensely foreign. Some residents feared what they saw as the loose morals of foreigners. The parish priest José Mercadillo, for instance, spent years denouncing foreign influences, which were considered a threat to Mexican ‘national identity’, a term used by Covert, although it goes undertheorised throughout the book – what exactly is national identity? Conservative Catholics also worried about the presence of hippies, which they saw as a threat to Mexican youth and Mexican masculinity. Here, Covert makes a novel contribution to scholarship by historians such as Eric Zolov (Refried Elvis, University of California Press, 1999) and Alexander Aviña (Specters of Revolution, Oxford University Press, 2014) that has begun to take a hard look at Mexico during the Cold War. She shows how conservative residents linked foreigners and immorality with communist threats and reacted by drawing on Cold War notions of containment. In one famous episode, hippies and beatniks were jailed and forcibly shaven.

San Miguel de Allende covers much ground in a concise and compelling manner in five chapters and an introduction and epilogue. Written with great clarity, and richly illustrated with photographs and several maps, Covert's work is appropriate for undergraduates and should be of interest to a wide range of scholars. While rooted in the Mexican setting, its examination of the interconnections between economic development, tourism and historic preservation should appeal to scholars throughout much of the world.