Tourist narratives and the shaping of national heritage in Mexico: The development and evolution of Morelos as a tourist destination in twentieth-century tourist guidebooks

• In Event: Heritage discourses: from nation-building to nation-branding?

Abstract

Tourism as a social phenomenon is constructed and transmitted through multiple narratives, relying on discourses, images and representations, which contain different values and elements of identity. Notions of heritage play an important role in creating tourist narratives, which evolve over time as “the destination”, itself a social construct, changes.
Since the early 20th century, tourist narratives about Mexico used the country’s heritage, greatly influencing how the country has been represented and conceived abroad. The historic dynamics of how those tourist narratives are created and how they evolve, as well as the role that cultural heritage plays in that process, are usually not taken into account in the discussions about Mexico’s past and present as one of the world’s most prominent destinations.
This paper will address how heritage has been employed in the promotion of Mexico as a destination. I will analyse heritage discourses, images and the “tourist gaze” generated by the tourism industry in guidebooks published between the 1920s and the 1980s through a case study of the state of Morelos. My aim is to understand the processes through which the State, tourism promoters and other stakeholders, audiences and social actors created, negotiated, appropriated and displayed notions of cultural heritage in tandem, conflict and/or even opposition with new Mexican identities throughout the 20th century. By examining changes of tourist narratives about Mexico portrayed in guidebooks, this project will shed light on the rarely acknowledged role that tourism plays in the construction and development of notions of national heritage and identity.

Author

• Daniel Salinas Cordova, Leiden University