In Juan Villoro’s best-selling novel Arrecife (The Reef, 2012), the hapless protagonist Antonio “Tony” Góngora plays reluctant witness in a murder mystery when two of his coworkers, in successive fashion, turn up dead at the tourist resort where they had worked. Aptly named the Pyramid, the resort is ensconced on the fictional coastline of Kukulkán, a stand-in for Cancún, Mexico’s most popular and profitable tourist destination. As the dystopian plotline unfolds, readers discover an uncanny cast of characters, including a dubious US investor dubbed El Gringo, who stage mock kidnappings of foreigners, guerrilla fantasies of revolution, and absurdist hallucinations that blur the boundaries between make-believe and reality. Through it all, the political economy of tourism endures. As the Pyramid reels toward chaos, its aloof financiers reap the benefits of mass tourism while its disaffected workers suffer the consequences of environmental degradation and labor exploitation.

The long history of tourism in Latin America animates the sordid episodes satirized in Villoro’s dramatic tragicomedy. Hal Rothman, a pioneering figure in the field of critical tourism studies, famously argued in the late 1990s that tourism is a postmodern form of capital. “Its emphasis,” Rothman observed, “is not on the tangible marketing of things … but on the marketing of images, of information, of spectacle.”Footnote ¹ Decades later, his thesis remains true. The consolidation of the digital age, the proliferation of sharing-economy platforms, and the emergence of artificial intelligence travel planners have further transformed the social dynamics and structural dimensions of mass tourism. What was once a relatively private activity has become remarkably public. The intimacies of travel, the asymmetries of tourist encounters, and the illusion of authenticity are laid bare before the fleeting reels of TikTok and Instagram. Unsurprisingly, mass tourism has come under scrutiny in recent years. The challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic raised a range of ethical and environmental concerns about the privilege of the traveler, and a growing number of “antitourist” protests around the world have repeatedly condemned the tourism industry’s predatory tendencies of saturation and gentrification.Footnote ²

How should historians and other social scientists understand tourism? Is it primarily a cultural, economic, or political phenomenon? To what extent is tourism a form of development or a strategy for democratization? How might socially responsible travelers, public officials, and business leaders reform the industry? Drawing on recent studies of tourism in Latin America and the Caribbean, this article argues for a multifaceted approach to the problem that unifies the region’s disparate histories of tourism, development, and democratization into a coherent narrative. If tourism is here to stay, as the anthropologist Mathilde Córdoba Azcárate has speculated, we must reimagine the industry. We must grapple with its internal and international dimensions while remaining attentive to its familiar challenges.Footnote ³

In general, historians of Latin America have posited three methodologies that allow us to better understand the problem of tourism. Their approaches can be summarized as transnational storytelling, domestic contextualization, and US-centered analysis. Andrew Grant Wood’s edited volume, The Business of Leisure: Tourism History in Latin America and the Caribbean, offers a hybrid interpretation of the first two frameworks. Working through twelve diverse case studies that cover much of the region, Wood and his collaborators propose four capacious categories of touristic development: burgeoning international travel, national tourism, postwar possibilities, and dark tourism. Their respective examples include countertravelogues from nineteenth-century Colombia, Peruvian railroads and steamships from the early twentieth century, Pan Am flight routes from the Spanish Caribbean, and travel clubs sponsored by the Pan American Union in the 1930s; Viña del Mar’s Miramar Beach in fin-de-siècle Chile, domestic tourist routes in reformist Peru, Veracruz’s midcentury Carnival, and an abortive hotel-casino project in 1960s Ecuador; archaeological tourism in Cold War Guatemala and a beach tourism in the post-Trujillo Dominican Republic; and, finally, Zacatecas’s contemporary mining excursions and Medellín’s coterminous narco-tours. The authors thereby invite us to reconsider the causes, course, and consequences of tourism in Latin America.

The volume’s authors advance an innovative and productive periodization. Wood’s introduction begins with the 1850s and ends with the present. Wood and his contributors identify several important causal agents in this narrative. They argue that the development of railroads and luxury steamships in the latter half of the nineteenth century created a hemispheric market for recreational travel. State intervention in turn catapulted the industry. When the Cuban federal government legalized casino gambling in 1919, a new type of tourist (readily recognizable to aficionados of The Godfather) appeared in Latin America. The regional expansion of Pan American World Airways in 1928 and the subsequent construction of the Pan-American Highway in 1936, though never completed, provided an antidote to the anxieties of the Great Depression. This phase coincided with the development of domestic beaches for mostly South American elites, such as Mar de la Plata in Argentina, Piriápolis in Uruguay, and Viña del Mar in Chile. Similarly, with varied success and input from the private sector, the Peruvian state sponsored domestic tourist initiatives in the 1940s, much like the postrevolutionary government of Mexico, which spearheaded the rebranding of Veracruz as a distinctly national destination.Footnote ⁴ By the mid-twentieth century, these trends converged and conflicted with broader national currents. The emergence of indigenismo and the resurgence of anticolonialism clashed with the supposedly antistatist mandates of many Latin American cold warriors. In one spectacular example, the same airstrip that transported international researchers and tourists to Tikal also served the Guatemalan military, attesting to the multiple uses and abuses of tourism. This pattern continued after the 1970s. As the Alliance for Progress veered toward neoliberalism, “all-inclusive” hotels became the norm. The result is evident today, as many beach resorts combine boozy relaxation with cultural immersion, archaeological exploration, and related pursuits.Footnote ⁵

The examples analyzed in The Business of Leisure are both specific to Latin America’s engagement with the tourist trade and representative of global industry trends. The chronology outlined in the first part of the book, “burgeoning international travel,” in particular complicates the conventional narrative of touristic development by moving beyond the European Grand Tour.Footnote ⁶ At the same time, several of the volume’s authors suggest that the development of Latin America’s tourism industries contributed to the democratization of leisure. Meri Clark, Fernando Armas Asín, Blake Scott, Anadelia Romo, and to a lesser extent Mark Rice and Andrew Grant Wood (who emphasize domestic tourist developments), argue that technological innovations have progressively made tourism more accessible to middle- and working-class Latin Americans. While that is part of the story, the monopolization of the industry by a coterie of private-sector developers, often in collusion with rentier national governments, has also bolstered regional elites in ways that have been socially and environmentally detrimental. As Rodrigo Booth wryly summarizes in his account of Miramar, “the social valorization of the pleasure trip is a significant innovation imposed by modernity.”Footnote ⁷

The tension between development and democratization, and the role of tourism in that story, is at the heart of the historiography. While many recent studies of development in Latin America have redefined the concept as an endogenous and even vernacular practice, much of the literature still treats tourism and development as independent problems.Footnote ⁸ This is unfortunate because many historical actors in twentieth-century Latin America viewed them as interrelated. Across the region, advocates of tourism insisted that the industry would drive economic growth and social progress. They claimed that tourism would attract foreign capital to “modernize” their primarily agrarian societies, while creating new jobs in the service sector for a select class of consumer citizens who might one day experience democracy.Footnote ⁹

We now know the outcome of that experiment. As the historian Blake Scott reminds us in a more explicitly transnational account titled Unpacked: A History of Caribbean Tourism, the “democratization of leisure” thesis is woefully inaccurate. The adoption of tourism as a developmentalist model for balanced economic growth did not make tourism more accessible for most Latin Americans. Nor did it meaningfully contribute to the region’s democratization. On the contrary, it exacerbated internal and international inequalities throughout the hemisphere. This process began with repackaging the Caribbean as a desirable tourist destination after centuries of racist epidemiological stereotypes had rendered it, in the words of one cautionary brochure, a place “unfit for whites.” Indeed, Scott rightly argues, the tourist revolution reified the region’s colonial legacies. Imperial ambitions overlapped with the development of maritime steam liners on the payroll of the United Fruit Company, creating ideal conditions for the emergence of “service-sector republics,” which attracted a growing clientele of US Americans through the expansion of Pan American Airways, the consolidation of the Smithsonian Institution, and the influence of privileged travel writers such as Ernest Hemingway, before the 1964 assault on Hotel Tivoli in Panama City forced a tepid reckoning with the hospitality industry.

Although much of what Scott documents is familiar to specialists, his account differs from other recent histories of tourism in Latin America in two important respects. First, he grounds his analysis in the first half of the twentieth century. The aftermath of World War II signaled a turn to mass tourism, but Scott demonstrates that this trend had deeper roots, originating with the War of 1898, passing through the construction of the Panama Canal, and culminating in the eruption of the 1959 Cuban Revolution. Second, Scott reframes the study of tourism through the lens of historical revisionism. He contends that tourism repackages the past as a vacation, leading tourists to forget the real and symbolic violence upon which the modern tourism industry is founded. “Pirates plundering and pillaging become childhood heroes, slave-owners and racists become dignified planters and merchants, explorers and writers in the service of empire become role models of adventure,” he writes. “To be a tourist is to be part of history.” This tendency began with Panama’s mosquito eradication campaigns of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which were themselves inspired by Cuba’s prior experience with mosquito eradication, and they later reshaped tourists’ conceptions of the region as a timeless paradise. Such images are now part and parcel of Royal Caribbean’s marketing campaigns.Footnote ¹⁰

Fundamentally, Scott argues that tourism is analogous to empire and that empire is a way of life. His methodology thus reflects a concerted attempt to produce a transnational and hemispheric history of tourism. This approach is both a strength and a limitation, simultaneously revealing hidden connections between the histories of tourism and imperialism while also missing more textured opportunities to rethink the national dimensions of the Caribbean’s tourism industries within a larger causal framework. Although Scott evinces a rare knowledge of Panamanian political history vis-à-vis Cuba and other Caribbean countries, Unpacked is at times unnecessarily self-referential and overly US-centric. And yet it is impossible to write a critical history of US imperialism without acknowledging the legacies of the Caribbean experience and the role of the United States in shaping that enterprise.

By contrast, the development of beach tourism in Rio de Janeiro was primarily a domestic phenomenon. In a posthumously published monograph titled From Sea-Bathing to Beach-Going: A Social History of the Beach in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, the historian B. J. Barickman (with support from Hendrick Kraay and Bryan McCann) reconstructs the social origins of the Brazilian beach from the late nineteenth century to the 1950s, with occasional references to the 1980s, and with the 1920s as the focal point. Eschewing the analytical straitjacket of Brazilian political history, Barickman argues that the proliferation of beach tourism—or beach-going, as he prefers—was a sui generis practice in the former Brazilian capital. Unlike most modern Mexican beaches, Brazil’s counterparts did not arise through state intervention but through the patterned interactions of everyday life. In the nineteenth century, Cariocas established an unusually inclusive culture of sea-bathing. Buoyed by therapeutic theories of leisure and a practical desire to escape the tropical heat, locals began their day with an early-morning plunge in Guanabara Bay. The overlap between medicinal and recreational bathing, however, gradually redefined the beach as an elite space. The construction of luxurious hotels and restaurants along the beachside, as well as increasingly strict regulations on swimwear, disproportionately targeted working-class Brazilians and Brazilians of color, eclipsing the beach’s democratic possibilities.

As sea-bathing evolved into beach-going, many Cariocas became displaced by the new urban developments that would eventually give rise to Rio’s notorious favelas. By the early and mid-twentieth century, this social transformation of the Brazilian beach required political attention. Although Barickman is keen to decenter the state, he ascribes Rio de Janeiro’s gentrification to the interventions of municipal, state, and federal officials. His demographic analysis of the region elucidates that process. From 1920 to 1940, Rio quadrupled in population. According to census records, approximately 40 percent of Cariocas identified as Black in 1940, while 77 percent of inhabitants in the Zona Sul—an affluent subregion of Rio de Janeiro that encompasses multiple beaches—identified as white. Copacabana also had become an elite space by 1930. Rather than ameliorate these disparities, government authorities compounded them by promoting new urban developments such as roads, tunnels, and bridges that overwhelmingly favored elite Brazilians. State intervention, Barickman concludes, effectively segregated Brazil.

Nevertheless, Barickman maintains that “tourism did not play a significant role in shaping the history of beach-going in Rio de Janeiro.”Footnote ¹¹ Although he devotes significant attention in the book’s last two chapters to analyzing the gendered and racial implications of suntanning, including a series of “public decency” campaigns that at least some foreigners would have noticed, Brazilians remain the protagonists of this narrative because, he assures us, few international tourists visited the country prior to the late twentieth century. Still, we may wonder how Rio’s localized culture of sea-bathing evolved into one of international tourism. The last two chapters that he had planned to write prior to his untimely departure may have answered this question. They might have shed further light on the relationship between politics and culture, which was central to the development of other beach resorts in Latin America. While future scholars may revisit these questions, we shall remain indebted to Barickman’s foundational research and to the considerable effort that Kraay and McCann invested in publishing it.

The national parks of Iguazú in Argentina and of Iguaçu in Brazil also emerged as domestic developments, albeit with a transborder twist. As Federico Freitas argues in Nationalizing Nature: Iguazu Falls and National Parks at the Brazil-Argentina Border, both parks arose in the 1930s through developmentalist competition over natural resources and frontier colonialism. Alternating between the two national contexts and cross-border comparisons, Freitas demonstrates that the internal dimensions of Iguazú and Iguaçu generated a modern-day environmentalism of commercial value. In doing so, he reveals the intersecting roles of state officials, private investors, and renegade actors in the making of a South American “natural wonder.”

Freitas begins with Iguazú. Established in 1934 as a federal park, Iguazú anticipated the founding of Iguaçu in Brazil by five years. While the latter was largely driven by private interests, state intervention was key to the former. As he explains, “Brazil followed Argentina in funneling national park funds into developing its side of the border, but it refrained from using national park lands to create settlements.”Footnote ¹² Nevertheless, the parks’ populations grew into the 1960s. When the national premises of these parks changed from development to conservation in the 1970s and 1980s, the parks paradoxically became more exclusionary, resulting in the eviction of about three thousand settlers on either side of the Brazil-Argentina border and, eventually, in the internationalization of both parks under UNESCO. Despite their parallel trajectories, Freitas reminds us that the parks “have more in common with the other national parks within the national system of which they are part than with their sister park across the border.”Footnote ¹³ Their divergence began with the “nationalization” of the Argentine border in the period from 1898 to 1944, the heyday of Argentine state formation. While the Brazilian federal government countered this perceived Hispanization with the development of its own proto–national park in the former military colony of Foz do Iguaçu, which it promoted to municipal status in 1914, its response to the “Argentine threat” was mostly reactive. Even so, both federal governments shared a common problem in converting private lands into public spaces. By mid-century, this challenge assumed heightened stakes as the colonization of the border, particularly in Brazil under Getúlio Vargas’s “March of the West,” reawakened latent territorial disputes and intranational regional interests. The resolution of such conflicts, Freitas suggests, resulted in the bifurcated town-park experience that many tourists encounter today.

Nationalizing Nature is a model for transborder history and domestic spatial analysis; it demarcates the ways in which national parks have functioned as instruments of state formation. Freitas is especially attentive to the geopolitical complexities of the Iguazú-Iguaçu border during the nascent Argentine and Brazilian military dictatorships of the late twentieth century. In 1953, the Territory of Misiones became a province, and Puerto Iguazú became a municipality within the park in 1961. A decade later, a federal commission separated Puerto Iguazú from the park. Freitas demonstrates that the conservationist pretext behind this realignment was tied to de-Peronization, since Juan Perón had zealously advocated for mass tourism. Rather suggestively, at least one montonero sought refuge in Iguazú National Park during the Argentine Dirty War, raising the question of whether perhaps there were more.

In a similar fashion, Freitas argues that national politics in Brazil contributed to the parallel consolidation of Iguaçu. The problem of grilagem, or the appropriation of public land through forged property titles, was central to this process. When Vargas founded the Brazilian park in 1939, he did so on former public lands that the state of Paraná had ceded to the federal government. Five years later, Vargas expanded the park on what were essentially privatized lands that he had expropriated in 1940. This time, however, Paraná’s state authorities claimed the lands in question, provoking a constitutional conflict. Although the Brazilian Supreme Court ruled in favor of the federal government in 1963, the issue resurfaced during the military dictatorship, in part because of European immigration into the region and the construction of a new highway between Foz do Iguaçu and Curitiba, Paraná’s capital. The federal government again intervened with new agrarian policies (overseen by a retired army colonel) that resulted in a series of forced evictions from Iguaçu—in no small measure because Paraná had a deep history of leftist militancy.

By comparing Iguazú and Iguaçu, Freitas fruitfully reorients the historiography of tourism beyond the conventional internal-international dichotomy, which often privileges US actors, to one in which two Latin American countries engaged in parallel national projects of state formation. Equally important, Freitas—like Barickman—maintains an analytical balance between the regional and national dimensions of a socio-spatial practice that was not initially intended for tourists but that eventually became emblematic of South America. As the national parks of Iguazú and Iguaçu assumed conservationist functions, they increasingly came under the jurisdiction of their respective federal governments. This transformation raises new questions: How did the successive legal regimes of Argentina and Brazil, and the cross-border competition between these countries, influence local conceptions of labor and identity? If locals advocated for the creation of the parks, as Freitas muses in passing, why did they largely disappear from the historical record? How might contemporary Indigenous movements in both countries grapple with the transborder histories of Iguazú and Iguaçu? While the available evidence may not have allowed Freitas to fully answer these questions, Nationalizing Nature remains a must-read for scholars and tourists alike.

In contrast to Freitas’s transnational approach, the last two books reviewed in this article turn toward an international model of Latin American tourism specifically designed for US Americans. The first example is Atalia Shragai’s Cold War Paradise: Settlement, Culture, and Identity-Making Among U.S. Americans in Costa Rica, 1945–1980. As the title of her monograph indicates, Shragai examines a transient class of white and middle-class US Americans that most third-party observers would easily perceive as expatriates. However, she deliberately avoids that characterization and instead frames her analysis through the dual lens of lifestyle migration and Cold War politics. In doing so, she explains through a detailed study of oral interviews and other sources why Costa Rica—the proverbial Switzerland of Central America—appealed to temporary transplants.

Shragai begins by interrogating the problematic national narrative of Costa Rica as the “Switzerland of Central America.” Citing revisionist accounts of Costa Rica as a multiethnic society, she notes that “Costa Rica staked a claim for ‘whiteness,’ which was then implemented through the manipulation of the national census and modes of public representation.”Footnote ¹⁴ Indeed, the arrival of US Americans after the Costa Rican Civil War of 1948 propagated the very myth that had attracted them there in the first place. Institutionalized whiteness, pro-US policies, and economic incentives drew an ideologically heterogeneous cohort of US Americans. Some were counterculturalists and conscientious objectors to the US wars in Korea and Vietnam, while others were Protestant missionaries or agricultural prospectors. Although Shragai emphasizes that they had little in common, few of them learned Spanish, and apparently none of them assimilated into Costa Rican society. Some of them even moved to Costa Rica by mistake, believing that they were resettling in Puerto Rico.

For the US Americans who forged new lives in Costa Rica, their residency was protected by a privileged ambiguity that allowed them to live there without the threat of deportation or the pressure to regularize their status. As Shragai reveals, “None of my informants defined themselves as immigrants.”Footnote ¹⁵ Therefore, she focuses on their “identity work” of maintaining physical roots in Costa Rica while remaining culturally embedded in the United States. Although the local consequences of that work remain largely unexamined, each chapter attends to relevant aspects of their social relations. These include the push-pull factors that led them to migrate; the place-making rituals they performed in relative comfort; the ethnic, environmental, and ideological implications of their transient status; the gendered dimensions of their everyday lives; the material cultures of their sequestered universe; and the existential quandaries posed by their peculiar positionality. In this sense, Shragai’s contribution to the study of tourism is largely methodological. She illustrates that oral histories are best interpreted as discursive constructs.Footnote ¹⁶

Even more than the case of US Americans resettling in Costa Rica, the rise of celebrity chefs in Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula exemplifies the extremity to which certain demographics crave escapism and “authenticity.” In a brilliant study titled Rooting in a Useless Land: Ancient Farmers, Celebrity Chefs, and Environmental Justice in Yucatán, the historical anthropologist Chelsea Fisher interweaves the ethnographic and archaeological records of Yuxanah, a Maya community near Chichén Itzá founded during the Caste War and recently charged with supplying elite restaurants with local foodstuffs, into a damning critique of settler colonialism. Noting the wasteful tendencies of the fine dining industry and its attendant claims to Indigenous lands, Fisher asks whether it is possible to reconstitute Yuxanah’s communal land relations under such conditions. Although she remains optimistic, she convincingly argues that “government-sponsored partnerships between [nongovernmental organizations], sustainability projects, and celebrity chefs have eroded Maya sovereignty.”Footnote ¹⁷

Fisher attributes Yuxanah’s novel role to the Fundación Haciendas del Mundo Maya (FHMM), a nonprofit organization founded by Mexican banking executives in 2002 to refurbish former plantations into luxury resorts and restaurants. Under the guise of sustainability, the FHMM has formed various partnerships with local agricultural cooperatives and government officials to pressure vulnerable Maya communities into replacing traditional agricultural techniques with “organic” alternatives. In practice, that means abandoning regenerative farming methods (maligned as slash-and-burn agriculture) that require considerable access to land. Such replacement conveniently reclassifies communal farmlands as fodder for privatization. The FHMM actively promotes this narrative, which pop-up restaurateurs have exploited to great effect. As Fisher elaborates, “Celebrity chefs landed in Yucatán not by accident but by way of the historical tangles of extractive land relations.”Footnote ¹⁸ She cites Noma Mexico as a paradigmatic example. Established by Danish culinary superstar René Redzepi in the nearby city of Tulum for only seven weeks, Noma Mexico relied on Yuxanah to source “Indigenous ingredients” for its extravagant yet sustainable menu. As intended, Redzepi discovered Yuxanah through a tortillería cooperative affiliated with the FHMM.Footnote ¹⁹

By tracing the backchannels that enabled Noma Mexico’s rise and denaturalizing their consequences, Fisher demonstrates that the alternative to unfettered consumerism is not sustainability consciousness, as Noma’s creators and clients insisted, but rather participatory reengagement with the land. To that end, she prescribes communal land surveying as an embodied decolonial praxis. Leaving the detritus of Noma Mexico behind, she ventures into the jungle with a team of Maya collaborators to reimagine contemporary Yuxanah through its ecological archive. In almost literary fashion, they uncover the archaeological remains of a Maya woman’s home garden. Once deemed useless by Spanish colonists and later by male scholars, such gardens have come to resignify, to discerning observers, Indigenous presence and productivity. As Fisher explains, “The reason why so many Maya sites appear empty is because their ancient residents interspersed settlement with intensively cultivated plots.” Their rediscovery provides a prescient counternarrative to the self-serving myth of the Yucatán Peninsula as an infertile landscape, a claim propagated by countless conquistadores.Footnote ²⁰

Like forgotten artifacts interred in the jungle, Noma Mexico has become an archaeological ruin. Its circuitous development followed the elliptical plotline of Juan Villoro’s dystopian novel, Arrecife, which eulogized the decline of the allegorical resort town Kukulkán. Similarly, the narrative arc of tourism in Latin America reflects the inverse relationship between development and democratization. Beginning with the panoramic work of Andrew Grant Wood and his colleagues, the rise of tourism in Latin America appears simultaneously as a political, economic, and social phenomenon. Therein lies the foundation of our analytical model. The industry burgeoned in the mid-nineteenth century, and it continues to shape the region’s internal and international dimensions today. How we understand those elements depends largely on our own critical assumptions. While Wood, some of his collaborators, and Blake Scott have emphasized the role of transnational factors in developing the industry, scholars such as B. J. Barickman and Federico Freitas have demonstrated the significance of domestic contexts, state intervention, and socio-environmental forces in transforming iconic national sites into global tourist destinations. The parallel cases of Iguazú and Iguaçu thereby reorient the internal-international dichotomy of the historiography, which typically privileges US actors, into a bilateral process of borderland bricolage. Meanwhile, Atalia Shragai and Chelsea Fisher provide alternative methodologies to study tourist projects that specifically cater to US Americans. Taken together, the works reviewed in this article attest to the multiple uses and abuses of touristic development in Latin America at a time when local activists and social media protestors are increasingly questioning the industry’s progress narrative. Although the future of tourism remains indeterminate, one lesson is clear: If we are to reform the industry, we must reckon with its development.