Contemporary Travel Writing of Latin America

Claire Lindsay

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9780415991216
• eBook ISBN: 9781135167660
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria

This book takes a new approach to travel writing about Latin America by examining 'domestic' journey narratives that have been produced by travellers from the continent itself and largely in Spanish. Historically, travel writing about Latin America has been written primarily from the perspective of the foreign, often European, traveller. As such, and following the large influx of military, scientific, and leisure travellers in the region since its colonisation, much of this foreign travel writing has depicted the continent in predominantly exoticist and/or imperialist terms. Lindsay explores how Latin American travellers have conceived and constructed narratives about travel at home and considers how such texts (many of them available in English translation or with subtitles) function to counter or corroborate long-standing myths about the continent.

Through a series of regionally- and thematically-oriented case studies that engage with key issues, themes and debates in both Latin American and travel studies, Lindsay provides the first sustained interdisciplinary study of contemporary domestic travel narratives about the region and will also comprise an important intervention into methodological debates about travel and travel writing.

1
Introduction

Contemporary Travel Writing of Latin America

“Many lives are now inextricably linked with representations, and thus we need to incorporate the complexities of expressive representation (film, novels, travel accounts) into our ethnographies, not only as technical adjuncts but as primary material with which to construct and interrogate our own representations.”¹

At a staff training seminar at my former institution, I took part in what turned out to be a memorable and culturally revealing ice-breaking activity. The exercise was a familiar one: participants had to describe their departmental affiliations and research expertise to the person sitting next to them, after which they were to introduce their neighbour with the information gleaned to the rest of the group. After the required exchange of information had taken place and I had presented my partner (an Italian psychology specialist researching Alzheimer’s and responses to trauma), she then introduced me, to my surprise, as a researcher of human rights and tourism in Latin America. Something had definitely been lost in translation, for I had told my colleague that I worked on Latin American women writers (the project I was completing at the time) and on narratives of travel in the region (the project I was starting). How had I acquired this new—and, I admit to thinking at the time, slightly more radical—professional identity? I concede that my colleague might have misheard me: this was not the first time that my “women writers” had been mistaken for “human rights”, for I am quite softly spoken. I admit also that some element of transference might have occurred in the light of the gap between our particular disciplines. I am not exactly sure, however, how travel narratives became tourism (although, of course, they are not unrelated) and, least of all, how such combined interests corresponded to my then location as a lecturer in an English and comparative literature department. Nevertheless, what did happen in that exchange was that Latin America emerged as a tourist destination with human rights issues. A minor misunderstanding, to be sure, but nevertheless one that has stayed with me in subsequent years as I have researched this, my second book.

On one level, then, what happened at that seminar is no more than an amusing anecdote, the result of poor auditory conditions, disciplinary entrenchment, and possibly ice-breaking exercise fatigue to boot. On another level, however, the episode also brings into focus compelling questions about cultural stereotypes, modalities of travel, and, ultimately, the place of Latin America in the Euro-American imaginary. It is precisely such issues that underpin this study of contemporary travel writing of Latin America. My former colleague might not have gleaned her impression of Latin America from reading any travel books, of course, although, as Dennis Porter points out, written accounts of places and their peoples “have traditionally been the vehicle by which our knowledge of things foreign has been mediated.”² Nevertheless, her specific associations with the region and conception of travel there correspond to a number of commonplace ideas that have been, if not engendered, certainly perpetuated by journey narratives, and which have become crystallized in the Western geographical imagination. According to that well-rehearsed but paradoxical script, the region is an exotic destination for the (adventurous) leisure traveller seeking escapism and enjoyment, the conventional motivations of the paradigmatic tourist who, in Dean MacCannell’s words, is a “sightseer, mainly middle-class … deployed throughout the entire world in search of experience.”³ However, the “Latin America” of that formulation is also a (largely homogeneous) continent with a notorious history of social and political injustice, conditions which offer a significant “edge” to any adventure undertaken there. This study does not seek to expose those ideas as untruths, for it would be foolish to deny that some, though not all, countries in the continent have undergone recent or ancient periods of violence and improbity (for, as Mabel Moraña et al. point out, “The Latin American modern subject is the product of a traumatic origin”)⁴, just as it would be misguided to fail to recognise the increasing importance of tourism to many Latin American economies. Rather, this book will explore and evaluate the ways in which contemporary Latin American travellers have engaged with these and other “myths” in accounts of their own journeys in the region.

In essence, this book is about how contemporary travellers from Latin America write their journeys at and about home. In its consideration of modern narrative forms and experiences of travel, the book is about the practice as well as the representation of journeys there in the late twentieth century. In contrast to other analyses of travel writing in Latin America which focus on Euro-American journeys to the continent, this study enquires into how “regional” travellers have negotiated this hybrid but volatile form, which has been fashioned in large part by their foreign predecessors. Some of the travellers discussed in this study—who include Luis Sepúlveda, Mempo Giardinelli, Andrés Ruggeri, Ana García Bergua, Silvia Molina, María Luisa Puga, Rubén Martínez and Luis Alberto Urrea—will be familiar to readers with a knowledge of Latin America, whereas others may be less recognizable. Insofar as they are all writers of literary fiction as well as travel narratives, and some even trained or amateur ethnographers, they are not unlike many contemporary practitioners of the form in other parts of the world. Nevertheless, these “middlebrow adventurers” are not professional travel writers of the ilk of Bill Bryson or Paul Theroux in the anglophone tradition: there are few if any of those in Latin America, Mexico’s Jorge Ibargüengoitia being perhaps the closest example of a contemporary serial travel writer of sorts. The proponents of the form in this study, then, following Maureen Moynagh’s pithy but effective formulation, are very much “writer-travellers rather than travel writers”.⁵ Moreover, the motivations for their journeys vary and include the more conventional “literary” commission as well as projects of political or social commitment. This study is not only concerned with how contemporary Latin American travellers of this kind “write back” to and within a fundamentally metropolitan discourse, therefore. It also explores what kinds of epistemologies of travel are at stake in their journey experiences. If expansion and exploration have been the dominant models of transit to and within this region, Contemporary Travel Writing of Latin America asks which paradigms of mobility inform modern Latin American travellers’ accounts of journeys in the “periphery”. Taking my cue, as have others, from James Clifford, I approach travel here in full recognition of what he calls its “historical taintedness”, that is, “its associations with gendered, racial bodies, class privilege, specific means of conveyance”.⁶ Indeed, the term’s very taint throws into relief the modalities of travel considered here, the narratives of which attest to changing and more nuanced conceptions of the idea of “travel” itself. In contrast to (and at times in concert with) those time-honoured Euro-American journeys to the region of conquest, expansion, or leisure, “domestic” journeys in Latin America adhere to a diverse range of models of transit including economic migration and political exile, as well as philosophical speculation regarding the continent’s very “ontology” of travel. In its focus on contemporary Spanish- and English-language travel accounts of Latin America, then, this book seeks in part to respond to Clifford’s injunction that we “listen to a wide range of ‘travel stories’”, for, as he suggests, “travel needs to be rethought in different traditions and historical predicaments.”⁷ In order to elucidate more fully both the exact scope of my enquiry as well as its methodological underpinnings, it seems appropriate at this point to outline in a more detailed fashion the parameters of my engagement first with the subject of travel writing in Latin America.

TRAVEL WRITING IN LATIN AMERICA

Travel accounts of Latin America have been written extensively from the perspective of foreign, often European, travellers, through what Mary Louise Pratt, in her landmark study, evocatively calls “imperial eyes”, in narratives which have sought to convey a sense of far-flung lands visited to an audience back home. Indeed, Jason Wilson claims that “in complex ways, Latin America is the creation of foreigners writing about the New World” (my emphasis), the aim of whose work was “to dissipate ignorance and awaken envy … to offer a vision of a different place in terms of a rhetoric of cultural shock.”⁸ Nevertheless, travel books written by Europeans about non-European parts of the world, which have attracted most attention from scholars and critics of travel writing to date, are not only about that apparently benign process of bringing the faraway near. They “created the imperial order for Europeans ‘at home’”, Pratt observes, and in giving their readers a sense of familiarity with and concomitant ownership of distant parts of the world, such works became “a key instrument … in creating the ‘domestic subject’ of empire.”⁹ Indeed, following the large influx of military, scientific, and leisure travellers in Latin America from the colonial period onwards, journeys of expansion and exploration became the paradigmatic experiences of the foreign traveller there and continue to persist in myriad forms. As Porter notes, these include: “diplomacy, emigration, forced exile, and trade … religious or political pilgrimage, aesthetic education, anthropological enquiry, and the pursuit of a bronzer body or a bigger wave.”¹⁰ Moreover, such journeys and their accounts have had tremendous impact in and beyond the region itself, both of a positive and negative kind. Alexander von Humboldt, for example, for the portrayal of the equinoctial regions of the continent in his journey accounts, was considered by Simón Bolívar to have “[done] more for the Americas than all the conquistadores”,¹¹ while in other cases the exploration and research carried out by travellers there had a direct or indirect military application. As Roberto González Echeverría points out, the efforts of travellers such as Captain Richard Burton, who were also military men, “had in some instances a revolutionary impact on Latin American societies.”¹² Whether revered or reviled, since the early modern period such travel books have established and perpetuated a range of enduring myths about the continent, especially in relation to its natural resources, for, as Echeverría notes, “Latin American nature had been a source of wonder to Europeans since the discovery”.¹³ These myths invoked its vast and variegated land and riverscapes, an enigmatic and elusive indigenous people (who might be threatening, if not cannibalistic), as well as the lure of unearthing lost cities of gold or other natural wonders. As Neil Whitehead sums up, for foreign travellers Latin America offered “the discovery of the fantastic, the survival of the anachronistic, and the promise of marvellous monstrosity.”¹⁴ These are tropes which have survived centuries in travel mythology, the tourist site with human rights problems conjured up by my colleague mentioned earlier—a destination (still) for Europeans to “discover” through leisure travel but one with primitive and potentially corrupt systems of social justice—being just one contemporary iteration of those ideas.

If much travel writing about Latin America has been written from an outsider’s perspective, it is also true that much existing scholarship in this area to date has focused on its production in the colonial era or on the output of the long nineteenth century. While this is not the occasion to provide a detailed overview of all of that work, it is fair to say that much of it has been (necessarily) concerned with unravelling the genre’s imperialist underpinnings, as well as tracing, or problematizing, the surviving vestiges of such ideologies in periods of particular dynamism and transit.¹⁵ Thus, Michael Kowalewski’s observation that “Criticism of modern (by which I mean twentieth-century) travel writing has been scanty” remains valid.¹⁶ This book aims to redress that imbalance by examining contemporary journey narratives that have been written by travellers from and about the region in the late twentieth century. Contemporary Travel Writing of Latin America seeks to explore how Latin American travellers have constructed journey narratives at home, largely, although not exclusively, in Spanish, the “of” in my title pointing as much to the travellers’ regional affiliations as to what their books are about (although the question of identity itself may be articulated in fraught or volatile terms). In doing so, this book seeks to contest the notion that, as Steve Clark puts it, “travel writing is inevitably one-way traffic” as well as to complicate the idea that the travel encounter is always about “simple relations of domination and subordination”.¹⁷ Travel writing of the kind considered here has tended to receive little if any critical attention to date, however, not only because of a particular fetishization of its earlier, “imperial” forms but also due to questions of translation (or, what Loredana Polezzi describes elsewhere as the “eminently Anglo-centric” character of much existing critical work on travel writing and a tendency to “marginalise texts written in languages other than English”).¹⁸ To be sure, the question of the coverage and consideration of travel books in a variety of languages is already being addressed in what is a burgeoning area of study, for, as Peter Hulme and Tim Youngs point out, “travel writing has played an important role in recent years in the creation of an international literary field.”¹⁹ The increasing number of book-length studies on travel writing by scholars in the field of modern languages of late, such as those of Charles Forsdick, Angela Pérez Mejía, Thea Pitman, David Scott, and Polezzi herself, attests to the welcome early expansion of this particular field of enquiry’s attention to source material and questions of travel in non-anglophone cultures and languages. My own study owes a considerable debt to this body of work: in its focus on travel writing of Latin America it seeks as much to draw on, dialogue with, and amplify this increasingly international corpus of scholarship as to engage with critical work on travel and its writing in the anglophone tradition. In equal measure it aims to speak to and enhance an emerging body of critical texts on travel writing in and from Latin America which, often in article-length studies, unpublished doctoral theses and in a small but growing number of monographic studies to date, has tended to take an author- or more narrow nationally based approach to the form in the continent.²⁰

It is not only for reasons of linguistic bias or accessibility, however, that “domestic” travel writing of the sort under consideration in this book might occupy a discrete realm in the critical imagination. It is due also to some residual indifference towards, if not devaluation of, the very type of journey on which it rests. The journeys undertaken in such accounts have perhaps suffered from another kind of “taint”, this time of the terms commonly used to describe them, such as “domestic”, which have local, small-scale, and often feminised connotations (in another context, for example, compare the sound of the “Home” to the “Grand” Tour). Until recent times and with specific exceptions, these kinds of journey have been underestimated as somehow more banal and inferior than the apparently more dramatic intercultural or transatlantic encounter. For Tzvetan Todorov, for example, travelogues require spatial movement to a physically located elsewhere and, as such, they “entrench a Western and European point of view”.²¹ In consequence, Todorov claims that “A journey in France would not result in a ‘travel narrative’” because it would “clearly lack the feeling of alterity in relation to the people and lands described.”²² Nevertheless, Todorov’s disavowal of the possibilities of the journey in and through home territory is overstated, in my view. In this respect, I concur with North American traveller Paul Theroux, who is right (if not, otherwise, a terribly sympathetic travel writer himself on Latin America) when he says that the journey near home is in fact “the most difficult of all travel subjects”.²³ It is a difficult subject because of an enduring preference for the consumption and examination of English-language journey accounts of places “elsewhere” and also because to travel at “home”, notwithstanding its perceived ordinariness, can be a fundamentally (and sometimes unexpectedly) complex enterprise. On one level, the freedom of movement or escape from conventions typically associated with travel “abroad” is not necessarily as immediately apparent on the journey in “home” territory, an aspect which can function to circumscribe and/or galvanize the traveller in equal measure. Indeed, the circumscriptions of the home journey can in fact be productive rather than limiting, as examples as diverse as Iain Sinclair’s psychogeographical tours of London in the anglophone tradition, Héctor Perea’s literary-philosophical explorations of Mexico City, and Jorge Macchi’s multimedia Buenos Aires Tour in the context of Latin America all illustrate in different ways.²⁴ Latin America is an especially fascinating site of travel in this regard, where vast distances, variegated geographies within and across nation-states as well as a strong tradition of regional and ethnic identities mean that home territories are not always necessarily very well known, familiar or even considered home at all to the regional traveller. In this context, Clifford’s assertion that “home [can be] a site of unrestful differences” is especially resonant.²⁵ Writing about such journeys thus also corresponds to some degree to Kowalewski’s characterisation of the domestic travel narrative as “celebrating the local or unfamiliar … [or] exposing or investigating conditions at home that most would prefer to ignore”,²⁶ except that in the case of travel writing of Latin America the destinations can often be local and unfamiliar. Th...

Table of contents

• Routledge Research in Travel Writing
• Contents
• Figures
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 In (Postmodern) Patagonia
• 3 Spectacular Andean Adventures
• 4 Unhomely Mexico
• 5 “Real” Ethnographies
• Afterword
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index