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Journal of Tourism and Cultural Change

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Cultural tourism and sustainable local

development
a b
Lawrence Culver
a
Rachel Carson Center , Ludwig-Maximilians University Munich ,
Germany
b
Department of History , Utah State University , USA
Published online: 09 Mar 2011.

To cite this article: Lawrence Culver (2011) Cultural tourism and sustainable local development,
Journal of Tourism and Cultural Change, 9:1, 45-48, DOI: 10.1080/14766825.2010.540370

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 Journal of Tourism and Cultural Change
Vol. 9, No. 1, March 2011, 45 –54

BOOK REVIEWS

Cultural tourism and sustainable local development, edited by Girard, L.F. and
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Nijkamp, P., Surrey, Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2009, 338 pp., £65.00, ISBN 978-0-
7546-7391-0

As tourism has grown as a component of regional and national economies, many places –
from small cities and regions to entire nations – have undertaken the promotion of tourism
as a means of economic development and prosperity. At the same time, however, mass
tourism has raised concerns about sustainability. Tourists can wreak unintended cultural,
economic, and environmental damage, distorting local real estate markets, causing
pollution and overdevelopment, and converting local cultures into commodified kitsch.
Is it possible that tourism can produce profits but not harm?
In Cultural tourism and sustainable local development, editors Luigi Fusco Girard,
Peter Nijkamp, and 22 other contributors offer 17 studies that, according to the editors,
posit a way forward for sustainable cultural tourism. The result is a volume that offers a
wide array of perspectives, and anyone interested in cultural tourism and its effects will
likely find individual essays or the volume as a whole an enlightening read. The studies
are primarily derived from Europe, with the largest number coming from Italy. This is
unsurprising, since the book derived from a conference on ‘Cultural Heritage, Local
Resources, and Sustainable Tourism’ at the University Frederico II in Naples in 2006.
The editors see both promise and problems in cultural tourism, asserting that ‘many
tourism initiatives must be fine-tuned in order to guarantee an ecologically efficient devel-
opment in an age with increasing volumes of tourists’ (p. 1). They also note that tourists are
hardly homogenous, seeking out different kinds of sights and experiences. In the case of
this volume, the editors are interested in those tourists traveling in search of ‘cultural heri-
tage’, which they define as ‘historico-cultural capital regarded as an important, and visibly
recognized landmark from the past and that is one of the identity factors of a tourist place’
(p. 2). They further assert that cultural heritage has what they term a ‘hate – love’ relation-
ship with tourism – it draws visitors and builds local revenues, but large-scale tourist
visitation can also threaten ecological sustainability and social cohesion (p. 2).
Cultural tourism and sustainable local development is arranged in four sections:
‘Tourism development as a sustainable strategy’, ‘Policies on sustainable tourism and
cultural resources’, ‘Case studies’, and ‘New departures for evaluation’. Within these
four subsections, readers will often find essays in dialog with each other. In Part I,
‘Tourism development as a sustainable strategy’, David Throsby examines recent research
in the economics of heritage tourism to find new basic principles useful for tourism
planning. Geoffrey Wall explores heritage tourism in urban contexts and argues that this
tourism is most sustainable when part of a larger, more diversified economic base, rather
that relying solely on tourism. Harry Coccossis looks at the threats tourism poses to cultural

ISSN 1476-6825 print/ISSN 1747-7654 online

http://www.informaworld.com
 46 Book Reviews

heritage and argues that while the nature of this threat varies widely from locality to locality,
all tourist destinations must ‘begin to find a way to act for a better long-term future,
developing tourism in a course towards sustainable development’ (p. 55). The final essay
in this section, by Peter Nijkamp and Patrizia Riganti, attempts the difficult task of
determining the economic value of cultural heritage, a vague variable that can lose out to
seemingly more concrete projections of tourist-fueled economic growth, and thus spur
unsustainable development.
The essays in Part II examine ‘Policies on sustainable tourism and cultural resources’.
Christian Ost uses cultural and conservation economics to work towards future planning,
which he argues must be based not on the short term boom-and-bust cycles of economic
growth, but must instead achieve the far more ambitious goal of simultaneously preserving
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cultural heritage and profiting from it for generations into the future. Giuliana Di Fore
examines the history of tourism as a long-standing global phenomenon, and then focusses
on modern mass tourism in Italy, primarily Campania, with its natural scenery and
matchless cultural treasures, particularly Pompeii, one place among many where achieving
sustainable tourism is a dire and pressing issue. Antonio Saturnino explores the same
general region and offers a proposal for economic development and sustainable tourism
in southern Italy. The final essay in this section, by Maria Giaoutzi, Christos Dionelis,
and Anastasia Stratigea, looks at a much broader question, that of renewable energy and
transportation as key components of sustainable tourism.
Part III offers five case studies. Francesco Polese looks at the role of local governments
in tourism development, and specifically at two national parks in the Campania region of
Italy. Daniela L. Constantin and Constantin Mitrut examine tourism in Romania, and
why tourism development there has lagged despite efforts to encourage it since the
1970s. Maria Francesca Cracolici, Miranda Cuffaro, and Peter Nijkamp construct formulae
to determine the economic efficiency and sustainable tourism efficiency of each province in
Italy, illustrating that some provinces and cities, such as Milan, are better able to balance
tourism and development, while others are struggling with a seemingly overwhelming
tourist influx. Unsurprisingly, the global tourist magnet of Venice scores poorly in this
regard. Donatella Cialdea utilizes GIS (Geographical Information System) analysis to
map archaeological sites and coastal conditions on the Adriatic coastlines of Italy,
Albania, and Croatia. In the final case study, Ken Willis and Naomi Kinghorn report on
a visitor survey they crafted for the Shipley Art Gallery, one of a series of museum and
gallery attractions in the Tyne and Wear district of northeast England, and argue for
wider use of such surveys to assess tourist preferences and perceptions.
Part IV presents ‘New Departures for Evaluation.’ Luigi Fusco Girard and Francesca
Torrieri examine cultural heritage – identity, music, traditions, symbols, etc. – that make a
place a ‘place’ – an identifiable site tourists want to visit. Andrea De Montis examines the
restoration of ‘roadman’s houses’, which once served as the residence of road network
employees who kept roads maintained. They no longer serve this function, but have now
become part of the history and heritage of Sardinia. Patrizia Riganti explores the rise of
‘cultural e-tourism’, and how many tourists now have both ‘on-site’ and ‘off-site’ experiences
of tourist places. The websites for museums, cities, or specific attractions allow tourists to
experience a place virtually before visiting it – or, possibly, without ever visiting it at all.
Douglas Noonan provides the final full essay in Part IV, examining the complex history
of historic preservation and cultural tourism in the US city of Chicago. He finds that sustain-
ability may be an elusive goal, with historic preservation creating complex consequences of
its own for everyone from real estate developers to long-time residents.
 Journal of Tourism and Cultural Change 47

The volume concludes with a brief review essay by Girard and Nijkamp, who dwell
upon the rich irony of climate change tourism as an exceptional example of the challenges
of sustainable tourism. In this emerging form of eco-tourism, tourists travel to see melting
glaciers in Greenland or other Arctic, Antarctic, or mountaintop locales, and the airplanes,
ships, and cars they utilize emit vast amounts of climate-warming carbon dioxide to get
them there. The editors take this not as a sign of defeat, but rather a call to arms, arguing
for more study, more assessment, and better empirical tools and models, all of which can
lead to better planning and more sustainable tourism policies.
While admirable, that view is perhaps overly optimistic – any place that becomes a
major global tourist attraction perhaps cannot avoid being warped in at least some negative
ways, from crowds and higher costs of living to more pernicious changes, such as rich
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outsiders making the housing market unaffordable for locals. Some tourist destinations
may face pressure to conform to a tourist ideal of timeless change that precludes the
economic, cultural, and social change and dynamism that all cities and regions must
maintain to flourish – and to be appealing places to live, rather than just appealing
places to visit. The authors, aware of these problems, hail the progress that has been
made, but assert that ‘there is still a world to win’ (p. 316).
Readers will find much of value in this volume. The editors and contributors have
created an anthology offering many new approaches to quantify and track the consequences
of cultural tourism and promising tools to better plan for its sustainable development. It is a
useful corrective to government officials or developers who support tourist development at
any cost, with no thought to long-term consequences. It likewise rebuts purely negative
arguments asserting that tourism is inevitably and irredeemably harmful. It is also impress-
ive for the range of approaches and methodologies it brings to bear on the problems – and
promise – of cultural tourism.
An anthology this broad is also not without its shortcomings. The single most glaring
drawback is an almost entirely European (and European Community) focus. While cultural
tourism is undoubtedly a major force in the EU, many other places – Turkey, Egypt, China,
or Mexico, just to name a few, have also experienced large waves of cultural tourist visita-
tion, and some such places have been the destination for travelers for centuries, no less than
iconic European sites such as Venice. Readers may also experience a kind of intellectual
whiplash, as each individual essay varies widely in methodology, practice, and focus. A
survey of art gallery patrons appears alongside studies of planning in individual cities or
resort regions, ruminations on the impact of the internet, and quantitative studies utilizing
complex mathematical formulas and charts – all very different essays, and ones that
sometimes seem pitched to distinctly different disciplines and audiences. Many of these
problems, to the degree that they may distract or confuse some readers, are likely due to
the volume’s origins with a collection of conference papers, just as the Italian conference
venue gives the volume an aggressively European focus. The end result is a book that
many readers may find selectively engaging or useful, though its widely varied method-
ologies will hopefully draw a diverse audience.
The conference which inspired this anthology also occurred before the economic crisis
in 2008, and as a result, the book’s assumptions of ever-increasing tourist visitation and an
always-expanding leisure economy may now seem too optimistic. With both the euro and
the US dollar in flux, governments in Europe and North America slashing budgets, and
retirement looking like a receding option for many, mass tourism might someday be seen
as a relic of a more affluent era, those sunny, prosperous decades that followed World
War II in Western Europe and the USA. Yet an economic revival would no doubt spur
tourism once more. For that matter, if growing, newly wealthy sectors of the populations
 48 Book Reviews

of China and India can be convinced to undertake a twenty-first-century version of the

Grand Tour, then European heritage tourism attractions, from Naples to Schloss Neusch-
wanstein, Venice to Versailles, can expect the tourists to keep flocking, with ambivalent
consequences for each of those tourist sites, and all the people who live with them.

Lawrence Culver
Carson Fellow, Rachel Carson Center, Ludwig-Maximilians University Munich, Germany
Associate Professor, Department of History, Utah State University, USA
Email: lawrence.culver@usu.edu
# 2011, Lawrence Culver
DOI: 10.1080/14766825.2010.540370
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City tourism: national capital perspectives, edited by Maitland, R. and Ritchie, B.W.,
Wallingford, CABI, first edition 2009, 304 pp., £75.00, $145.00 (Hardcover), ISBN 978-
1-8459-3546-7

This volume is devoted to aspects of tourism policy, marketing and development as they
apply to cities that represent their nation’s capitals. Despite the reservations I express
below, it is a good book and should be a useful read for anyone with an interest in the
rapidly growing literature devoted to urban and heritage (or cultural) tourism. The contrib-
uted articles are preceded with what I take to be a not particularly useful formula for cate-
gorizing national capitals and their tourism features by such vague and overlapping criteria
as, for example, ‘planned and political’ capitals, ‘global and multifunctional’ capitals, and
‘historic and former capitals’. The potential comprehensiveness of a contribution such as
this is further compromised by an over reliance on case studies from English speaking capi-
tals (10 of the 17 chapters) and the lack of representation for most of the world, including all
of Central and South America and most of continental Europe, the Middle East, Asia and
Africa. Considering these limitations, it is difficult to find support for the editors’ contention
that there is something of distinct importance about the nature and production of tourism in
national capital cities. Neither in my judgement do most of the individual chapters make this
case in a compelling or less than obvious way, although I do find that many of them do
provide considerable insight into the tourism of major urban places, especially in respect
to historically and circumstantially based variations in tourism policy, marketing and
planning. For this, of course, the editors deserve as much credit as do the chapter authors.
The book is divided into six sections, including one which provides introductory
material and a final section devoted to conclusions and recommendations for future
research. Of the more substantive sections, the second is devoted to issues of capital city
‘imaging’ and ‘branding’. Here, in a chapter devoted to Cardiff, the capital city of
Wales, Heather Skinner provides an interesting discussion of the multiple concerns that
can be manifest in attempting to brand a city for tourist consumption – ranging in this
case from attempts to distinguish the city’s identity away from a more general British
identity to policy dilemmas that arise as tourist expectations, based on (often stereotypical)
historical references, conflict with resident perceptions of Cardiff as a thoroughly modern
city. In a discussion of Canberra, Australia’s capital city, Leanne White adopts a semiotic
approach to describe the ways in which the city puts forth an image that reflects its
highly planned, bureaucratic structures and that can be problematic for tourism promoters
given the city’s ‘relatively lackluster’ reputation as a destination. Jerry Eades and Malcolm
 Journal of Tourism and Cultural Change 49

Cooper’s chapter devoted to capital city tourism in Japan provides insight into the not
uncommon phenomenon in Asia of ‘migrating capitals’. Japan has over time been served
by five national capitals, from the eighth century AD capital of Nara to modern day
Tokyo. The history of Japan and outside (particularly Chinese) influences on its urban
development are reflected in this progression of capital cities, each of which offers particu-
lar opportunities to draw visitor attention to Japan’s national identity. The final chapter in
this section is provided by Ernie Heath and Elizabeth Kruger and is based on the branding
of Tshwane, South Africa. This is an especially intriguing case that deals in part with the
ways in which South Africa’s dramatic political transformation is reflected in the remodeled
imagery of its capital (formerly Pretoria), as well as in its new found status as a center of
pan-African government.
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The third section of City tourism is devoted to discussions of visitor experiences in

capital cities. Two of the chapters in this section do help provide a case for the distinctive-
ness of capital cities as unique places for tourism development. The article by Bruce
Hayllar, Deborah Edwards, Tony Griffin and Tracey Dickson, devoted to tourist images
of Canberra, suggests that images of ‘national identity and power’ dominate the experiences
of tourists in this city, more than might be expected to occur in visits to other Australian
cities. In this case, the researchers’ methods might have encouraged such a conclusion,
most particularly their reliance on digital images provided by the research participants. A
somewhat more nuanced offering, again using photographic images provided by research
participants, is found in Nancy Stevenson and Charles Inskip’s discussion of student
tourism in London. While the researchers’ analysis of the photographic images did seem
to confirm a great deal of interest in London as a place of national imagery, accompanying
commentary made by the tourist photographers indicated much more far ranging and per-
sonal interpretations of the meaning of the images that were produced. In this same section,
Abel Duarte Alonso and Yi Liu find, somewhat surprisingly to this reviewer, significant
differences between the extent to which domestic and international tourists visit Wellington,
New Zealand, specifically to see and experience the city in its place as a national capital.
They argue that international visitors seem more inclined to appreciate the city as a rep-
resentation of its nation than are domestic visitors – a conclusion linked in the researchers’
view to negative images of Wellington among many New Zealanders. In the final article in
this section, and in a refrain familiar to many students of tourism development, Andrew
Smith warns of the extent to which tourism development focused on the ‘emergence’ of
Valletta as Malta’s national capital since 1964 has resulted in the neglect of the multifunc-
tional and residential character of the city in the service of creating a more singular heritage
destination that might serve to attract tourists but also reduce the livability of the place.
The fourth section of this book is focused on the marketing of tourism in capital cities.
Only the first chapter in this section offers anywhere near a comprehensive view of the chal-
lenges of marketing complex urban places, in this case the capital city of Brussels, which is
not only the capital city of Belgium but also the seat of the European Union. Here, Myriam
Jansen-Verbeke and Robert Govers indicate that the complicated political and cultural mul-
tiplicity of the city compromises attempts to ‘brand’ Brussels in a way that might have
immediate appeal to potential tourists. This chapter includes a worthwhile comparison of
issues related to destination marketing in a variety of other European capitals. The follow-
ing three chapters for this section are focused on marketing strategies for particular kinds of
tourism. Claire Haven-Tang and Eleri Jones provide a description of recent initiatives to
market Cardiff as a destination for conference tourists. International business tourism is
the subject for Heather Skinner and Paul Bryne’s discussion of tourism marketing in
Dublin. In a contribution that is somewhat astray from the single capital or national
 50 Book Reviews

focus of the rest of the volume, Brent Ritchie summarizes school excursion tourism in
Ottawa, Washington, DC, and Canberra. Taken together, these chapters help illustrate the
largely unmet challenge (if not impossibility) of characterizing tourism as a wholly coherent
subject in its own right. As we become versed in the enormous variety of activities that
have come to be linked to tourism, it is worthwhile to ask whether we need some further
refinement of our unit of analysis. Tourism in and of itself may no longer be the most
operationally useful point of departure for many of our interests.
The fifth section of City tourism includes five chapters devoted to aspects of tourism
development. This is also the most diverse set of chapters in respect to the nations rep-
resented. In their portrayal of tourism development in Budapest, Melanie Smith, László
Puczkó and Tamara Rátz refer to the ‘fragmentation’ of urban places like Budapest,
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which includes political and cultural divides as well geographic fragmentation. The
researchers argue that this condition makes it especially difficult to make effective linkages
between often disparate tourist sites. While the Budapest research offers an example of
tourism development in a post-socialist context, Lee Jolliffe and Huong Thanh Bui’s
discussion of Vietnam’s capital Hanoi provides a nice contrast from the perspective of
tourism planning in a continuing socialist political structure. The researchers discuss the
progression of Hanoi from an imperial to a colonial and presently a revolutionary capital
and the ways in which planned tourism developments (principally in the form of
museums) reflect these progressions. Interestingly, recent global economic conditions
have, according to the authors, led Hanoi’s tourism planners to refocus their tourism initiat-
ives on attracting domestic as opposed to international tourists – a strategy that is opposite
to that of many other capital cities discussed in this volume. In the third chapter of this
section, Ghada Masri makes a strong case for the special identity of Beirut as Lebanon’s
capital city. Based on his ethnographic research, Masri pays particular attention to the
uses of urban archaeology in portraying the nation’s identity through its capital city. He
offers the somewhat ironic observation that, while Beirut is a city that is often promoted
on the basis of its cosmopolitan heritage and culturally diverse attributes, its development
as a tourist destination is nonetheless fraught with local disagreements regarding how
particular heritages are to be recognized, or not recognized, as well as leading to the
displacement of central urban spaces into tourist zones that are seen by many citizens as
threats to the integrity of their nation’s cultural heritage. In the fourth chapter in this
section, Anya Diekmann and Géraldine Maulet critique recent attempts to promote
initiatives in Brussels’ European and African quarters. These efforts to increase the
multicultural appeal of Brussels are decried by the researchers, most especially in respect
to inadequate community involvement and infrastructure planning on the part of tourism
authorities. The final chapter, by Guy Chiasson and Caroline Andrew, describes the
extent to which deep-seated linguistic and cultural differences (between Anglophone and
Francophone Canadians) add to the complexities of tourism development for the capital
city Ottawa-Gatineau. The picture appears to be exasperated by further, deep-seated
conflicts between federal authority and regional authority. This is of course a source of
conflict that could be applied to other North American capitals as well.
In summary, there is much of interest in this volume. One of the strengths of City
tourism is related to what I have suggested might also be considered a limitation. The
diversity of urban settings presented, coupled with a considerable variety of research and
methods approaches, and disciplines represented, makes it difficult to put forth a wholly
convincing case that tourism to capital cities is in and of itself all that different from
tourism to other major urban places. On the other hand, these same characteristics add to
our appreciation of the richness and complexity of urban tourism in general. Some
 Journal of Tourism and Cultural Change 51

readers might well find that the editors make a stronger case for the distinctiveness of capital
tourism than I have suggested. A number of the individual chapter authors do at least begin
to make such a case in respect to particular national experiences, and this is a fine book in
any case. I certainly do not suggest that a focus on capital city tourism is misplaced. Editors
Robert Maitland and Brent Ritchie are to be applauded for the freshness of their approach.
In their concluding chapter, they acknowledge that the study of capital city tourism is still in
its early stages and offer a detailed listing of future research questions and topics. To these, I
would add only the need for even greater diversity in future research, with a much broader
representation of the world’s capitals, and as a result with greater attention paid to the
cultural and historical circumstances that might be associated with national capital tourism
policy and its developments. But then what else might one expect an anthropologist to
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recommend?

Erve Chambers
Department of Anthropology, University of Maryland, College Park MD, USA
Email: echambers@anth.umd.edu
# 2011, Erve Chambers
DOI: 10.1080/14766825.2010.540371

Holiday in Mexico: critical reflections on tourism and tourist encounters, edited by

Berger, D. and Grant Wood, A., Durham, NC, Duke University Press, 2010, 393 pp.,
$24.95, ISBN 978-0-8223-4571-8

This timely volume reaches the shelves as Mexico faces a crossroads. More than 28,000
Mexicans have died in drug-related violence in the last 5 years, and the gruesome killings,
widespread along the border with the USA, have started to crop up in tourist enclaves such
as Cancún and Acapulco. Despite the dire situation along the northern border, the pockets of
lawlessness elsewhere in the country, and the global economic downturn, Mexican tourism
minister Gloria Guevara claims optimistically that international arrivals and tourist reven-
ues, after declining in 2009, seem poised to recuperate in 2010. Guevara’s rosy outlook
suggests that the Calderón administration, true to the tradition of Mexican leaders going
back to dictator Porfirio Dı́az (in power from 1876 until 1910), understands the value of
Mexico’s image as a stable, safe outlet for foreign capital – an image that coexists uneasily
with the decidedly disorderly social dislocations of globalization and the ongoing war
between the Mexican state and the drug cartels. The continued health of the Mexican
tourism sector will turn on how foreign and domestic travelers perceive this situation.
The editors and contributors to Holiday in Mexico offer historical grounding to these
current dynamics through a series of well-crafted essays that range widely over the
country’s tourist landscape.
The 12 essays, bracketed by an introduction and conclusion, are organized chronologi-
cally around three periods: the mid-nineteenth century to 1911; the post-revolutionary
period of nationalist economic development strategies (roughly 1920 until 1960); and ‘con-
temporary articulations’, from 1960 until the present. Andrea Boardman’s essay on the
tourist perspective of US soldiers during the invasion and occupation of Mexico (1846 –
1848) quite appropriately introduces readers to the often intimate relationship between
practices of leisure and the exercise of military and political power. The author argues
that travel narratives written by soldier-tourists established the parameters of a Mexican
 52 Book Reviews

imaginary that structured how railroads would market the country as a destination after the
1880s. Cristina Bueno’s analysis of Teotihuacán, the great ruined city near Mexico City that
was ancient even to the Aztecs, rounds out the volume’s coverage of prerevolutionary
tourism. The Dı́az regime began excavating and reconstructing the vast site in preparation
for the 1910 independence centennial, where Mexico’s image could be grounded in the
grandeur of indigenous civilizations past. True to the spirit of the porfiriato, however,
the losers were the flesh-and-blood peasants displaced by the excavations. Bueno shows
how the construction of cultural capital, so important to Mexico’s tourist economy,
obeyed a logic of national development that destroyed and displaced as it created.
After the revolutionary violence of 1910 – 1920 wound down, the victorious ‘revolu-
tionary family’ – eventually united under the banner of the PRI (Partido Revolucionario
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Institucional) – pursued economic development while addressing some of the social dislo-
cations exacerbated under Dı́az. Postrevolutionary administrations also sought to renegoti-
ate Mexico’s relationship with foreign capital and so embraced tourism as a cornerstone of
nationalist economic development policies. The contributors to Holiday in Mexico provide
much insight into this period. Their work highlights what the late historian Hal Rothman
once termed the ‘devil’s bargain’ of tourist-based development: at what price, socially,
economically and culturally, do localities and nations embrace tourism? For locals, the
state-sponsored development of fun-and-sun tourist enclaves like Acapulco (in the
1940s) and Cancún (starting in the 1920s) could bring displacement and decades of margin-
alization. In his chapter on Acapulco, Andrew Sackett presents the striking image of local
peasants and street vendors being swept aside by the army to make way for the city’s tourist
infrastructure in the 1940s. M. Bianet Castellanos takes up the relationship of a tiny rural
Maya community to nearby Cancún, where community members have sought work.
Maintaining the social and cultural integrity of the village in the face of this state-driven
development project has proven difficult. The author presents indigenous perspectives
through the notion of a ‘native gaze’ that strives to distinguish locals from hedonistic
tourists. That critical gaze lays bare the inequalities Cancún has perpetuated and reveals
the shortcomings of top-down projects designed to modernize Mexican peripheries and
uplift ‘backwards’ populations. Eric Schantz takes up Tijuana’s gaming and tourist
complex and the transnational nexus of mob interests, Hollywood culture, tourist expec-
tations and PRI-connected business interests that created it. Students of post-revolutionary
Mexican politics will appreciate the author’s attention to the internecine political rivalries
that shaped Tijuana as a wild, titillating satellite of Southern California’s amusement-
park complex – a sort of cross-border sister city to Las Vegas. Of course, US tourists
were not only attracted to sun and sin. Lisa Pinley Covert traces the development of San
Miguel de Allende, Guanajuato, as an internationally renowned artist colony and
‘typical’ Mexican town. Covert’s study shows that tourism arrived in the town not as a
top-down economic development strategy, but as the product of local energies and the
interest of a few key international figures. Andrew Grant Wood’s ‘On the selling of Rey
Momo’ considers the creation of Veracruz as a destination for mostly domestic tourists, a
process underway in the 1920s. Veracruz’s tourist boosters – an alliance of local businesses,
civic organizations, and the press – built the port city’s appeal around its annual pre-Lenten
Carnival and worked hard to invest that celebration with civic significance. Alex Saragoza’s
essay focuses specifically on a post-PRI tourist development project, a once grandiose plan
to build a network of upscale shoreside resorts in Baja California – a ‘Nautical ladder’
that would, in theory, attract a stream of wealthy, yacht-owning Americans. Saragoza
details the career of this recent project and its remarkable departure from the century-old
tourist frameworks of heritage tourism and sun-and-fun resorts. The essay is an appropriate
 Journal of Tourism and Cultural Change 53

bookend to the volume’s treatment of tourist-site development since the nineteenth century.
One cannot help but conclude that the ‘placelessness’ Saragoza attributes to this planned
development reflects the broader cultural dynamics of globalization.
Another set of essays in Holiday in Mexico takes on the international flows of meaning
that undergird Mexico’s tourist development. Dina Berger’s contribution examines Good-
Neighbor-era tourism as a practice of ‘informal diplomacy’ that built positive relations
between North American travellers and their Mexican hosts – a surprising insight,
especially given the fraught relations between post-revolutionary governments and the
USA over the question of oil, which culminated in the expropriation of foreign oil holdings
in 1938. Jeffrey Pilcher’s chapter examines the varied meanings attached to Mexican food
and drink in the USA and the borderlands going back to the mid-nineteenth century.
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According to Pilcher, North American tastes for things Mexican have obeyed an ‘Orientalist
logic’ that invests those products with meanings shaped by the anxieties and desires of US
society. Pilcher follows the appetites and attitudes of American tourists from the San Antonio
(Texas) ‘Chile queens’ of the 1890s to the fast-food chain Taco Bell to the present-day prac-
tice of upscale ethnic cuisine geared toward foreign travellers. In each case, he situates
American consumption of Mexican products within the wider contexts of tourism, the tec-
tonics of cultural vogues, and even the development of the food industry over the course
of the twentieth century. This essay will be particularly intriguing for students of exoticism,
vogues of things Latin, and the cultural dimensions of US – Latin American relations.
In ‘Marketing Mexico’s Great Masters’, art historian Mary Coffey examines the relationship
between the international flow and display of cultural artifacts and the development of inter-
national tourism. She traces the efforts of various Mexican governments to enlist Mexican
artisans and artists in the selling of the country’s image in the USA and argues that such
projects have played a vital role in stimulating and shaping American interest in Mexico.
Barbara Kastelein’s ‘The beach and beyond: observations from a travel writer on
dreams, decadence, and defense’ rounds out the volume’s body of essays and, in some
ways, stands apart from the other contributions. Based on historically informed journalistic
groundwork, she presents readers with an intriguing set of observations built around how
locals have experienced tourist development in three distinct localities. In Acapulco,
once a posh global destination, Kastelein’s informants – among them the port’s renowned
cliff-divers (clavadistas) – reflect on the city’s deteriorating status and infrastructure.
Oaxaca, a destination now on the make, faces a different dilemma: tourism is the terrain
on which locals are negotiating the remote state’s integration into a globalized economy.
Amecameca, about an hour east of Mexico City, showcases a locality where tourist devel-
opment has been limited by government neglect and local indifference, despite the town’s
strong cultural capital (the Black Christ of Sacromonte, a pilgrimage site with colonial
roots) and its proximity to the Parque Nacional Iztaccı́huatl-Popocatépetl. Kastelein’s
essay reminds readers that tourist complexes can be more tenuous than one might think,
subject at once to social pressures and the shifting tastes of foreign and national tourists.
Holiday in Mexico makes a vital contribution to tourism history, Mexican history, and
the history of US –Latin American relations more broadly. The contributors and editors
skillfully manage lines of inquiry and conceptual insights developed in tourism studies
and bring them to bear on empirically grounded studies of various Mexican tourist com-
plexes. They also strike a fine balance between historical developments and their relevance
to the present. Those concerned with the tourism sector now – in fields such as economics
and community and regional planning – will also find much to consider here. Berger and
Wood’s closing remarks centre on the tourist conundrum at the heart of most of the
volume’s contributions: ‘despite the many, many unequal and exploitative characteristics
 54 Book Reviews

of the travel experience, there remains the possibility of something positive in the tourist
exchange’ (p. 381). In their examination of Mexico’s many tourisms, the editors and
contributors provide a nuanced treatment of tourism’s displacements and possibilities.

James W. Martin
Montana State University, Bozeman, USA
Email: jameswm@montana.edu
# 2011, James W. Martin
DOI: 10.1080/14766825.2010.544880
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