Manifest destiny meets inclusion: Texas nationalism at the Alamo (original) (raw)
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Remember the Alamo: A Cross-Cultural Analysis of Visitor Meanings
Journal of Travel Research, 2013
Honoring a memorialized past while being responsive to the needs of contemporary visitors is a challenge for heritage tourism managers. Visitor-employed photography (VEP) and a means-end investigation were used to identify, organize, and explain numerous descriptions of the Alamo in San Antonio, Texas. Nine images were obtained through VEP and used during 71 on-site interviews (41 Anglo and 30 Hispanic visitors). Four primary meanings about the images were articulated by visitors, including patriotism, remembering and reembracing history, multiculturalism, and identity. However, the explanations given to achieve these outcomes differed between Anglo and Hispanic respondents. Managerial implications in relation to heritage tourism sites were discussed.
INTRODUCTION It is well-known that the Federal Government of the United States played and is still playing a considerable part in the heritagization of its territories and tourism development; therefore, this process was essentially based on Euro-American culture. Since the XXth c. and especially since the application of NAGPRA law (1990), a transition is noticeable between the times where American heritage emanated from a vision and a European governance, became at the time a worldwide model, and a more recent period where this management shows signs of evolution, the same way it changed in school history curriculums (Brun 2015), toward a management integrating more noticeable multicultural aspects, allowing native populations culturally affiliated to those heritage to influence the way these sites are presented to the public. Are we experiencing a new process of heritagization through the birth of new heritage values? This heritage construction extends beyond the heritage scenes of these National Parks and is affected by many other factors, ideological, historical, political, economic, memorial, but especially identity. Thus, each participant involved in this heritage construction as an actor or "supposed" actant (native), contributes to change the gaze upon the descendants of those sites, through this process of heritage. This study proposes to investigate whether these recent cultural changes, which seem to affect the Native American heritage of New Mexico and Colorado and by inference the culture transmitted by the National Park teams, can be detected in the “one day” visitors’ approach; however, this belief seems mainly sustained by tourism stakeholders - private actors with their own multiculturalism in New Mexico and visitor centers from cities adjacent to the parks, eager to feed the imaginary of tourists. In order to give an answer to this topic, I will summarize in the first and second parts the national and the local heritage processes since the creation of the National Park Service, as well as tourism development process on these territories during the same period, both responsible for establishing strong and persistent geographic imaginary; finally, a third chapter, exposing the results of my field research (PhD thesis), will analyze the meeting with the tourists from these parks and how they appropriate this heritage and Native American history to which it is linked. Through the examples of the National Parks of Chaco Culture, Aztec Ruins (New Mexico) & Mesa Verde (Colorado) will be exposed territorial dynamics since the origin of tourism in the south-west and how their accessibility and appropriation remain essential features in the imaginary of today's tourist.
North American Migrants Working as Tour Guides in Alamos in Mexico Mobilities and Imaginaries
The article focuses on the guide's narratives and practices when guiding "House Tours" that is the most visited tourist attraction in the Mexican town. We argue that these guides provide narratives about concrete imaginaries that constitute not only authenticity but also utopia – that we consider one of the core elements in tourism imaginaries. The guides inscribe themselves in the utopian imaginaries in the Western hemisphere that continue to be essential in the socio-cultural and political construction of society. We conclude that these tourism imaginaries of places (and people) cannot be considered only as commoditized representations with a symbolic content. Alamos displays that way the significant connections that exist in terms of both representations and mobilities. Amigos de Educación, (AE) 1 is one of several transnational organizations founded and managed by North American immigrants who live in Alamos, a town in the northern state Sonora in Mexico. This orga...
Sustainability
While a growing body of literature explores tourism impacts in search of sustainable outcomes, research on justice in diverse tourism settings is nascent. Theoretically informed studies drawing from interdisciplinary perspectives are just beginning to emerge to help examine contestations and injustices such as addressed in the case study presented here. The Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument (or “Custer’s Last Stand” as some know it; LBH) is a protected heritage tourism site that commemorates a battle between Native American tribes and the U.S. military in 1876. Indigenous stakeholders have struggled for decades with the National Park Service to overturn a long legacy of misrepresentation and exclusion from the commemoration and development of the site for heritage tourism. Site closures and other effects of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic present additional challenges for Native American stakeholders like the Crow Tribe. Guided by Nancy Fraser’s principles of trivalent just...
The big house as home: roots tourism and slavery in the USA
International journal of tourism anthropology, 2018
The dominant discourse preferences the experiences of African Americans who take trips to sites linked to slavery outside of the USA. This paper expands research on roots tourism, by centring the experiences of those who travel to slavery-related sites in the USA. Documenting the case of the Behind the Big House Tour as a response to the Annual Pilgrimage Tour of Historic Homes and Churches in Holly Springs, Mississippi, this study examines evidence for African diasporic roots tourists who acknowledge sites at which their ancestors were enslaved as home sites. Results suggest that this level of acceptance occurs when African Americans come to feel a sense of belonging. The study identifies two general conditions needed to facilitate this process: access to slavery-related sites encouraged by historic site owners or managers and reunion with enslaved ancestors and descendants of those who historically lived and worked at slavery-related sites.
On the Political Utterances of Plantation Tourists: Vocalizing the Memory of Slavery on River Road
Within the study of southern plantation house museums, the cultural power that tourists exercise in interpreting, reacting to, and even shaping historical narratives has received limited attention. The purpose of this paper is to advance our understanding of the agency of visitors at plantation museums, paying particular attention to their verbal expressions as they respond to the depiction of slavery on guided tours. Spoken words, questions, and conversations of plantation tourists are not unproblematic transmissions of information but represent "political utterances" that play a crucial role in the constitution and mediation of the process of remembering (or forgetting) the enslaved. We consider the importance of tourist voice and outline two analytical settings for studying the political utterances of plantation visitorsthe vocalizing of interpretative communities in post-tour or exit interviews and docent reaction to on-tour comments and questions posed by visitors. Drawing evidence from interviews with visitors and docents at four tourist plantation along the River Road District, we demonstrate the diversity and impact of the political utterances of tourists, and how these vocalizations of memory can possibly lead to greater changes in the way in which slavery is dealt with and remembered at southern plantation museums.
Maya América, 2022
When we think of tourism or migration, we think of international mobility. However, the history of Quintana Roo teaches us that tourism and migration can be forces of nationalization. This article invites us to revisit the history of the southeast Yucatan peninsula, in order to understand the mechanisms that presided over its inclusion into the Mexican nation and the logic of the resistance movement that was opposed to it. Furthermore, this article delves into the ritual practices, social organization and territoriality inherited from the Cast War, that are kept alive by the rebels' descendants (Cruzoob), unbeknownst to the gaze of the tourists and migrants who currently inhabit the region. How did the Cruzoob negotiate an identity as Indigenous to the nation, without losing sight of their sense of territorial sovereignty? At the time of the development of the Mayan Train, what are the challenges of the potential touristification of the Cast War? These are some questions that this article proposes to shed light on, in conversation with historical and anthropological readings, and drawing on ethnographic material collected in Tulum.
Identity Tourism: A Medium for Native American Stories
Tourism Culture & Communication, 2006
This article considers identity tourism, which comprises both ethnic and heritage tourism, as a medium for the projection of ethnic and nationalist messages. Marginalized peoples acquire "spoiled" or stigmatized identities through stories that use their alleged inferiority to "explain" their position. They may counter the negative group images created through these stories by fashioning new stories of their history and culture, in an effort to set the record straight. Museums and other attractions that focus on a group's history and culture serve as a medium, in that they provide opportunities to tell a revised story and build a revalued collective identity. The analysis draws from examples of Native American heritage attractions in Washington, Oregon and British Columbia to examine the specific properties of the medium of identity tourism, and how these properties shape the messages that can be conveyed through it.