{"title":"Mapping the Good Neighbor","authors":"Mette Flynt","doi":"10.1525/phr.2022.91.1.104","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"American tourism in Mexico increased significantly during the Good Neighbor era. By creating tourist maps, cartographers on both sides of the border participated in an intentional, ideological process of reshaping these tourists’ views of Mexico. They sought to transform Americans’ perceptions not only of Mexicans and their history but also of the physical environment. Their Mexico was a place of contrast, suspended in the romantic past and engaged in modernity. Although cartographers constructed a new Mexico through their maps, they did not challenge perceptions of an asymmetrical power dynamic that had defined U.S.-Mexico relations and the tourism industry at large. Instead, their maps reinforced, reproduced, and contributed to it. Cartographers, like the maps they created, were not passive or inconsequential actors. Analyzing the ideas, relationships, and myths embedded in their maps expands our understanding of transnational tourism, environmental change, selective history, and imagined communities in the twentieth century.","PeriodicalId":45312,"journal":{"name":"PACIFIC HISTORICAL REVIEW","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.4000,"publicationDate":"2022-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"1","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"PACIFIC HISTORICAL REVIEW","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1525/phr.2022.91.1.104","RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q1","JCRName":"HISTORY","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 1
Abstract
American tourism in Mexico increased significantly during the Good Neighbor era. By creating tourist maps, cartographers on both sides of the border participated in an intentional, ideological process of reshaping these tourists’ views of Mexico. They sought to transform Americans’ perceptions not only of Mexicans and their history but also of the physical environment. Their Mexico was a place of contrast, suspended in the romantic past and engaged in modernity. Although cartographers constructed a new Mexico through their maps, they did not challenge perceptions of an asymmetrical power dynamic that had defined U.S.-Mexico relations and the tourism industry at large. Instead, their maps reinforced, reproduced, and contributed to it. Cartographers, like the maps they created, were not passive or inconsequential actors. Analyzing the ideas, relationships, and myths embedded in their maps expands our understanding of transnational tourism, environmental change, selective history, and imagined communities in the twentieth century.
期刊介绍:
For over 70 years, the Pacific Historical Review has accurately and adeptly covered the history of American expansion to the Pacific and beyond, as well as the post-frontier developments of the 20th-century American West. Recent articles have discussed: •Japanese American Internment •The Establishment of Zion and Bryce National Parks in Utah •Mexican Americans, Testing, and School Policy 1920-1940 •Irish Immigrant Settlements in Nineteenth-Century California and Australia •American Imperialism in Oceania •Native American Labor in the Early Twentieth Century •U.S.-Philippines Relations •Pacific Railroad and Westward Expansion before 1945