A refreshingly original study, Tropical Whites traces the rise of mass travel to Florida, California, Mexico, and the Caribbean. Throughout, the author's richly informed discussion traces a complex process by which privileged North Americans learned to “love the tropics without losing their souls” (p. 2). Cocks's first chapter tells how northerners set out to “tame” the south for their own profit and pleasure. Previously, the idea (and practice) of people traveling to warm climates engendered considerable fear. Hot zones, it was said, constituted a veritable “white man's grave” for anyone foolish enough to venture forth. To combat this, “modern” transport, engineering, and medical practices were called into action.
Her second chapter follows the rise of railroad and steamship travel in the making of the American tourist industry. Cruise lines such as the Great White Fleet (!) ferried passengers from island to island across the Caribbean offering shore excursion encounters “in small doses, short visits, and symbolic souvenirs" (p. 72). She then takes up the idea of how pleasure travel to the tropic zones came to be understood as not only safe but even restorative for whites. Here, Cocks's impressive access to tourist-industry promotional literature illustrates how “Southland promoters rearticulated the relationship between humans and nature,” finding that whites could in fact securely sojourn south. Tourists enjoyed time in the tropics but were careful to limit their exposure to (it was assumed) unhygienic nonwhites. Following guidelines cast in the heyday of Jim Crow, such “racial” and class segregation proved unproblematic for most.
Cocks describes ways in which southern cultures were carefully marketed for consumption. In scheduling exposure to local destinations, great care was (and still is) taken in selecting just the “right” and most “authentic” aspects. “Advertising rapid journeys through a tropical bazaar,” she writes, “tourist brochures offered healing drafts for over-civilized, hardworking whites, not encounters with people or politics or places with histories” (p. 87).
“Dressing for the Tropics” (Chapter 4) became all the rage as fashionable leisure wear and bathing suits were paraded forth. Tanning, Cocks writes, soon became “a visible sign that both white men and white women could profit” from southern exposure (p. 127). She notes how adventurous tourists dabbled in the exotic, with some even taking to playing “pleasure pirate” (Chapter 5).
Through it all, the author identifies a powerful neocolonial tide. Tourism's developmental narrative was clearly written by and with northern whites in mind. Yet, as an important counter to this, Chapter 6 assesses efforts made by leading nationalists in the Americas (in Mexico, Cuba, and Jamaica, for example) to accommodate US tourism while at the same time working to advance their own political, economic, and cultural interests. To a certain degree, Cocks argues that these anti-imperial campaigns paid off; she contends that tourism produced “a concession that the white supremacist civilization born of the temperate zones of Europe and North America was not adequate to human happiness” (p. 185). Northern “tourists—most of them white, wealthy, and convinced of their own and their nation's superiority—accepted the invitation to go south” (ibid.). In doing so, they articulated (however inadvertently) a new conception of human society—one that included greater respect for people who appeared different from themselves. A far- reaching critique of US racial ideology, Tropical Whites should be required reading for all gringos traveling abroad.
