The subject of tourism and the tourist industries across Latin America is of great cross-disciplinary interest; the industry accounts for as much as 15% of GDPs in some countries and employs up to 17% of some workforces (Statista, López, 2023). Some scholars point to tourist industries as possible vehicles for ameliorating poverty or uneven development. Others still point to concerns over the adverse consequences of mass tourism for Latin American countries: pollution and contamination of shared spaces, the exacerbation of existing socio-economic and racial inequalities, and the reiteration of colonial imaginaries constituting the exotic, non-cosmopolitan, or sexually available Latin American “other.” Excepting the years in which travel was heavily restricted by a global pandemic, tourism has continued to burgeon across Latin America thanks in large part to the constant expansion of air travel, the capacity for mass media to market Latin American tourist destinations to national and international audiences, and the continued investments of Latin American governments and private sectors in this industry.

Over the last two decades, scholars (Berger 2006; Babb 2010; Lindsay 2010; Carrera 2011; Lindsay 2018) have begun attending more closely to the relationship among tourism, colonialism, and decolonial narrative in twentieth and twenty-first century Latin American cultural production. A significant portion of this scholarship concerns itself with archival matter—from print culture to travel brochures and advertisements—produced by state tourism bureaus and private industries with a large stake in tourism. Another important contingent of this scholarship, following the lead of Mary Louise Pratt’s Imperial Eyes, has underscored the colonial power play inherent in travel literature. Some in this second contingent have attempted to find a corpus of travel literature capable of narrating travel in Latin America beyond a colonialist ideological framework (Lindsay 2010).

To date, there is still little extant scholarship addressing the complex relationship between state and industrial ambition to achieve “modernization” or to successfully market “national culture” through tourism, colonialist travel narratives that render Latin American human and non-human subjects consumable, and narratives produced in Latin American that challenge these prior two kinds of narrative. This panel will facilitate a timely discussion gathering a spectrum of regionally- and hemispherically-rooted perspectives, cultures, and regions from across Latin America.

Dr. María Inés Canto Carrillo (Assistant Professor of Spanish, Colorado State University, Ft. Collins) will discuss the palimpsest identities of Tulum/Zamá, Mexico, as a present-day tourism epicenter and a historically significant site for Maya activism and spirituality during the nineteenth century. Subsequently, Dr. Julia R. Brown (Assistant Professor of Spanish, Florida Atlantic University) will discuss the modernity-versus-tradition dialectic in travel brochures and paraphernalia published by the Mexican government and Petróleos Mexicanos from the 1950s to the 1970s. Finally, Dr. Leila Gómez (Associate Professor in the Department of Women and Gender Studies at CU Boulder) will discuss the themes of pan-Latin American tourism and heterosexual erotic experiences in the short stories by American-Chilean writer Lucia Berlin. Dr. Amanda Petersen (Associate Dean of Undergraduate Studies, University of San Diego) will serve as respondent, reflecting on the dialogue between all three papers while commenting on the relationship between each paper and broader subjects in Latin American cultural production, including gender dynamics and gendered violence.