Magazines, Tourism, and Nation-Building in Mexico

Author: Dr. Claire Lindsay

Publisher: Springer International Publishing

Book Series : Studies of the Americas

Part of: Springer Professional "Wirtschaft+Technik" , Springer Professional "Wirtschaft"

Table of Contents

About this book

This open access book discusses the relationship between periodicals, tourism, and nation-building in Mexico. It enquires into how magazines, a staple form of the promotional apparatus of tourism since its inception, articulated an imaginative geography of Mexico at a time when that industry became a critical means of economic recovery and political stability after the Revolution. Notwithstanding their vogue, popularity, reach, and close affiliations to commerce and state over several decades, magazines have not received any sustained critical attention in the scholarship on that period. This book aims to redress that oversight. It argues that illustrated magazines like Mexican Folkways (1925–1937) and Mexico This Month (1955–1971) offer rich and compelling materials in that regard, not only as unique tools for interrogating the ramifications of tourism on the country’s reconstruction, but as autonomous objects of study that form a vital if complex part of Mexico’s visual culture.

Frontmatter

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Chapter 1. Introduction

Abstract

This chapter, drawing first on pertinent archival material from Anita Brenner’s papers, introduces the book’s main concerns in brief—the relation between print culture, tourism, and nationhood, and the (geo)political ramifications of content and style in and beyond the periodical’s pages—before elucidating its overall scope, shape, and principal objectives. It provides a theoretical rationale for the study (referring to the work of Néstor García Canclini and Benedict Anderson as well as reinterpretations of the latter’s ideas within Latin American cultural studies) and ends with an overview of the main chapters.

Claire Lindsay

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Chapter 2. Tourism, Nation-Building, and Magazines

Abstract

In two sections, this chapter examines, first, the correspondence between tourism and nation-building in conceptual and material terms and, second, the magazine as a paradigmatic expression in print culture of that concurrence. The first section, drawing on recent scholarship in tourism and Latin American studies, situates the book’s focus on Mexico within the country’s remarkable emergence from the Revolution during the 1920s and onwards, contextualizing that significant juncture within the history of organized tourism there since the late nineteenth century to the present day. The second section, drawing on examples from the book’s corpus of magazines, elucidates the unparalleled properties of the periodical as an object of study within those contexts and considers ensuing methodological issues.

Claire Lindsay

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Chapter 3. Tourism Advertisements in Mexican Folkways (1925–1937)

Abstract

This chapter examines the use of advertisements in Mexican Folkways, a renowned magazine of folklore, visual art, and culture. It contends that attention to such features illustrates a central paradox at stake in the reliance on this periodical as a historiographical source. Methodologically, the chapter combines content and textual analysis of advertisements for El Buen Tono cigarettes and Mexico City hotels with a historically situated consideration of the context of their, and the magazine’s, production. In doing so, it spotlights what elsewhere Shelley Garrigan (2012) calls ‘the dialectical embrace of patrimony and market’ at various layers of the periodical and illuminates untold forms of recycling of processes and stakeholders that had been fundamental to nation-building during the Porfiriato in the remaking of modern Mexico after 1920.

Claire Lindsay

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Chapter 4. Mapping Capital in Mexico This Month (1955–1971)

Abstract

This chapter, based on original archival work on Mexico/This Month, responds to Susannah Glusker’s invitation to undertake ‘an analysis of [its] contribution … in promoting Mexico’ (Glusker 1998: 15), with a particular focus on cartography and capital. The chapter, through a close reading of its trademark Explorers’ Maps series, and drawing on pertinent work on cartography from a range of disciplines, suggests that Mexico This Month visually and discursively mapped a fantasy of capital that is related to, yet destabilized by, a second, more problematic fantasy of conquest. The chapter also enquires into the impact of capital on the magazine’s external periodical code, that is, the relation between the conditions of its state funding and its endurance as a material artifact over its lifetime.

Claire Lindsay

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Chapter 5. Conclusion

Abstract

By way of conclusion to the preceding arguments, this chapter, drawing on ideas from the new formalism and media studies history, pursues the implications of the magazines’ rhythm and serialization with respect to theories of nation-building in the context of post-revolutionary Mexico. In its summation of the ramifications of the book’s findings, it also returns to the suggestive idea of archive, first rehearsed in Chapter 1, to consider the concept’s material and epistemological value for this particular object of study.

Claire Lindsay

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Backmatter

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Title: Magazines, Tourism, and Nation-Building in Mexico
Author: Dr. Claire Lindsay
Publisher: Springer International Publishing
Electronic ISBN: 978-3-030-01003-4
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-01002-7
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01003-4