CENTRO JOURNAL 103
volume xxxi • number i • spring 2019
The Imperial Gaze: Tourism and Puerto Rico — A Review Essay luis aponte-parés
In 2016, the World Travel and Tourism Council reported that tourism supported 292 mil- lion jobs, or one in ten of all jobs worldwide, of which 725,000 were in the Caribbean (Freiermuth 2017).1 Geographically in the “American Mediterranean” (Bonsal 1913), the Caribbean (Gaztambide-Géigel 2004; López-Marrero et al. 2012; Meniketti 2009), and Puerto Rico in particular, have been travel destinations for over a century (Bennett and Gebhardt 2005; Daye et al. 2008; Deavila Pertuz 2014; Harrigan 1974; Kempadoo 1999, 2004; Padilla 2007; Patullo 2005; Schwartz 1997; Sheller 2004; Skwiot 2010; Wood 2000).2 While tourism has not been central to the economy of Puerto Rico,3 its impact belies its importance in valuing how the Island and its people have been explained, represent- ed, and commodified through the “Imperial Gaze” of the United States (Anazagasty Ro- dríguez and Cancel 2011; Crespo-Armáiz 2012). Essential components of tourism, such as photography, postcards, travelogues, maps, and tourist guidebooks, offer windows on the way a people are portrayed, explained, or represent themselves (Clifford 1996, 1999; Crick 1989; Elsner and Rubiés 1999; François 2012; Fraser 1980; Rice 2011). Indeed, travel writing co-produces landscapes of the imagination (Duncan and Gregory 2002; Kuehn and Smethurst 2008). Examining Puerto Rican tourism under US colonialism offers an opportunity to trace the colonizing discourse(s) that shaped the industry, and perhaps how the rest of the world “knows” and “imagines” the Island. Scholarship on tourism and Puerto Rico has reached a critical mass. Triggered by a contemporaneous upsurge in the study of tourism in the Caribbean and other
The author ([email protected]) holds a B.Arch. from Catholic University, and a M.S. in Archi- tecture and a Ph.D. in Urban Planning from Columbia University. Luis has taught at Pratt Institute, City College of the City University of New York, and the University of Massachusets at Boston. His research explores the intersection(s) of space, place, and identity. As an activist Luis has explored social movements and identity, particularly LGBTT. Current research focuses on the imperial gaze of the USA and the construction of Puerto Rico and Puerto Ricans. 104 centro journal • volume xxxi • number i • spring 2019
Front cover of Harper’s Weekly, Saturday, November 24, 1906. Image purports to represent President Theodore Roosevelt’s visit to Puerto Rico. Roosevelt speeds along Puerto Rico’s country roads, accompanied in the car by the American governor of the island, Beekman Winthrop (1904- 1907), and a high ranking military officer. Trailing in the back is the President’s military escort. On the side of the road are children, depicted in the traditional racially degradatory style of “pickaninnies,” apparently freightened by the commotion. The Imperial Gaze: Tourism and Puerto Rico — A Review Essay • Luis Aponte-Parés 105 parts of the Third World in the 1960s, this scholarship has explored: a) tourism as an economic development tool and the institutional development of the industry; b) the cultural production of the Island’s identity through the lens of imperial actors; and c) the industry as an important element shaping the territorial and built environments. Needless to say, the research encompasses a wide range of academic disciplines. However, the scholarship has not charted the development of the tourism industry in Puerto Rico systematically.
Background: Cartographies of Puerto Rico and the Imperial Gaze A starting point to the study of tourism can be found by probing the succession of con- cepts like “explorer,” “traveler,” and “tourist”: “Before tourism there was travel, and before travel there was exploration. Each is roughly assignable to its own age in mod- ern history: exploration belongs to the Renaissance, travel to the bourgeois age, and tourism to our proletarian moment” (Fussell 1982, 38).4 The author admits that “the terms exploration, travel, and tourism are slippery” (1982, 38). Although these catego- ries advance a “Eurocentric” view of the world (Blaut 1993), their association to Eu- ropean imperialism reveals their historical origins in the study of travel and tourism, what John Towner identifies as “a history of western cultural experience” (1995, 339).
The Spanish Legacy. Andovimos por esta costa lo mas deste día, hasta otro día en la tarde, que llegamos a vista de otra isla, llamada Burenquen (3), cuya costa corrimos todo un día; juzgábase que ternia por aquella banda 30 leguas. Esta isla es muy hermosa y muy fértil á parecer; á esta vienen los de Caribe á conquistar… (Fernández de Navarrette 1922, 224–5).
With the “discovery” by Columbus in 1493 (Castellar 1892; Fernández de Na- varrette 1922), under the Imperial Gaze of Spanish chroniclers and cartographers (Abbad y Lasierra 1866; Butzer 1992; Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés 1851), Borikén, a small territory inhabited by Taínos, metamorphosed into Puerto Rico: an “island” represented in maps of the so-called “new world,” and part of an archipelago, the “Antilles,” in a newly minted “Caribbean Sea.” It was purported to be a tropical uto- pian paradise, “not merely reflective of social and political practices but were in fact constitutive of them” (Adorno 2007, 4). “By the late sixteenth century, royal institu- tions and a network of bureaucrats, royal officials, physicians, merchants, adventur- ers, pilots, and friars from Spain were circulating information about natural entities and samples from the New World” (Barrera-Osorio 2006, 1). Paradoxically, the “dis- covery” of Latin America “produced a profound revolution in the European imagi- nation,” producing a “replacement of the past as the site of a forever-lost golden age with the future as a golden age to achieve or to construct” (Quijano 1989, 149). Indeed, the “construction” (Alleyne 2005), the “invention” (Casimir 1997; O’Gorman 1995), and the “idea” (Mignolo 2008) of Puerto Rico, conceived by Span- ish imperial actors (Fernández De Oviedo y Valdés 1851), commenced with the age of 106 centro journal • volume xxxi • number i • spring 2019
“discovery” and exploration (Arnold 2002; Butzer 1992; Castillo 2006). Maps, travel accounts, and scientific reports and explorations, by scores of visitors (Flinter 1834; Ledrú 1863; O’Reilly 1765), elaborated the chroniclers’ views. “The commercial and utilitarian purposes of European expansion produced a situation in which the tropi- cal environment was increasingly utilized as the symbolic location for idealised land- scapes and aspirations of the western imagination” (Grove 1995, 3). By the end of the Spanish colonial period Puerto Rico had been invented: a tropical island in the Caribbean Sea. Thus, the historical foundations for the development of tourism in Puerto Rico were erected on “images of the tropical world” found in maps, illustrations, and in the texts of “European travelers over the past three centuries” (Driver and Martins 2005, 3; Driver and Yeoh 2000; Cosgrove 2008; Manthorne 1984). They produced “knowledge about these places, and the relationship between geographical differ- ence and generalized notions of ‘tropicality’” (Driver and Martins 2005, 3), and re- sponses by islanders, particularly those responsible for deploying these images in developing an industry. Underlying these images were “notions of tropical insalubri- ties and racial degeneration” (Amador 2008, 27–8).
U.S. colonial rule: Porto Rico. The name Porto Rico is established by 300 years of world-wide usage, as I have shown in detail elsewhere. This form has been adopted by all the best English writers, and by all the world-famous cartographers of England, France, Holland, and Germany almost since modern geography had its beginning in the discovery of America (Hill 1899b, 517).
Soon after the U.S. invasion of Puerto Rico imperial actors moved quickly to as- sess the prospects of Puerto Rico (Britton et.al. 1919; Carroll 1899; Copeland 1899; Da- vis 1902; De Olivares 1899; Gifford 1905; Hill 1809; Sanger et al. 1900; Wilson 1905). Travelogues, travel guidebooks, and professional magazines, like National Geographic Magazine (Crespo Armáiz 2014; Perivolaris 2007), that followed exploited images of the tropical world (Rice 2011), and race (Santiago-Valles 1999). The “tropical char- acter” (Cocks 2007; Kipling 1899; Wey Gómez 2013) of the Island, conceived under Spanish colonialism, was elaborated through the lens of environmental determinism, the geography-nature-culture relationship, i.e., “the environment affects all aspects of social and economic development” (Frenkel 1992, 143–4; Peet 1985; Smith 2003).5 The Island had limited offerings, as attested by travelogues of the period (Carpenter 1930; Davies 1939; Franck 1920; Phillips 1937; Vandercook 1939). “Hotels are few in num- ber and are generally run on the Spanish Plan” (Hotel Accommodation in Porto Rico 1899, 149). Still, during the first three decades, attempts were made to attract travelers by adding choice lodgings in an increasingly important Caribbean destination (Torres 2000). The second half of the twentieth century would see the growth of a tourism industry continuing the “tropical island in the Caribbean” thread. The Imperial Gaze: Tourism and Puerto Rico — A Review Essay • Luis Aponte-Parés 107
Foundation (1898-1937): Colonializing discourses. Between 1898 and the Great Depression, Puerto Rican society underwent vast social, economic, political, and cultural transformation (Ayala and Bernabe 2007; Caban 1999; Métraux 1951; Navarro 2010; Santiago-Vallés 1994). Toward the end of this period, the Ponce Massacre in 1937 (García-Passalacqua 2007; Rodríguez-Pérez 2010) galvanized an imperial legitimacy crisis that would continue unabated for many decades. During the early decades of U.S. rule, the island hosted visitors, mostly govern- ment officials, scientists, military personnel, wealthy investors, journalists, and others with business and/or other interests. I characterize this period as the foundation for the dominant “colonializing discourses” (Spurr 1993), i. e., the intersection of Tropics, Caribbean, and Island. These distinctive tropes, establishing and “maintaining colonial authority” (1993, 3), and deployed in countless travelogues and travel guidebooks, shaped future tourism development. All three were geographical categories with a lengthy his- tory in the “West.” With the rise of an overseas empire in the 1890s, the need to “explain” newly conquered territories and their people led to inventing the Tropical South (Cox 2007, 2013), a widely debated environmental determinism paradigm in US geographical scholarship (Peet 1985). The Tropical South was a “discursive construction of Southern ‘tropicality’” that generated “a familiar set of cultural images that resonated with West- ern imperialist imagery” (Ring 2003, 619–20), and purported to explain the character of the people of the tropics (Santiago-Vallés 1999).6 The representation of the population as “exotic” (Caronan 2005; Schmidt 2015) was common. For example, in The Value of Porto Rico, Robert T. Hill (1899) portrayed what he called Gibaros, “a mountain-loving race” who dealt with the slopes by “an- atomical adaptation” that “can cling to these slopes and cultivate the soil with ease. Their feet—like those of the camel, modified to tread the desert sand—are adapted to this rough configuration and its almost impassable trails” (1899, 415). This observa- tion was repeated in countless travelogues and travel guides throughout the first half of the twentieth century: “‘We divide the people of Porto Rico into four categories for the purpose of identification,’ said the American chief of the Insular Police, ‘according to the shape of their feet… The coffee men have over-developed big toes, because they use them in climbing the steep hillsides from bush to bush’” (Franck 1920, 258).7 Da- vid Spurr (1993), identified this “observation” as “rhetorical strategies of debasement,” namely, a “form of negation in the sense that it negates the value of the other” (1993, 4), or tropes of empire, “animalization” (Shohat and Stam 2014, 137). Travelogues, guide- books, reports, newspaper accounts, and purported “histories” of Puerto Rico of the time were imperial chronicles charting the island’s resources, population, and develop- ment opportunities employing the rhetorical modes identified by Spurr.8 Most of these early travelogues and travel guidebooks were common to other US territories (Feeney 2008), part of what Lanny Thompson (2010) called Imperial Archipelagos. Generally, development of tourism in Puerto Rico has been the production of these colonializing discourses through time and space; discourses reinforced by a geographic “colonizer’s model of the world” (Blaut 1993). It was also a “new Manifest Destiny” (Pratt 108 centro journal • volume xxxi • number i • spring 2019
1936, 1). This early period of U.S. rule witnessed the conflation of a people and a land- scape,9 that is, the intersection of the Island’s geography, climate, and cultural identity constituted the idea of Tropical Landscape.10 Transforming everyday life into landscape comprises a level of abstraction produced by the active participation of what Urry and Larsen (2011) call the tourist gaze, “constructed linguistically as much as visually. Seeing is what the human eye does. Gazing refers to “discursive determinations,” of socially con- structed seeing or ‘scopic regimes’” (2011, 1–2). “The tourist gaze is directed to features of landscape and townscape which separate them off from everyday experience” (2011, 3). Concomitantly, this period was key in the production of the first tourist places/ locales.11 These would be included in almost all subsequent tourist guidebooks,12 so- lidifying or “sacralizing” (MacCannell 1976) them. One place that would ultimately be important for tourism, under the impetus of New Deal13 environmental development projects, was El Yunque, now transformed into the Caribbean National Forest/Bosque Nacional del Caribe. (Valdés Pizzini et al. 2011, 8). As a sacralized locale, El Yunque, would play a major role in advancing a “tropical” image of the Island. This period also signaled a “reciprocal relationship between the modern practice of tourism and the built environment” (Medina Lasansky 2004, 1). Infrastructure development during these decades centered on the needs of U.S. cor- porations, particularly the sugar industry and social and cultural institutions (schools, etc.).14 Nevertheless, soon after the colonial regime took over, San Juan, the entry-point for travelers, was “enhanced” by extending the city into Puerta de Tierra, a working-class neighborhood just outside the old city walls (Quiles Rodríguez 2014). New locales built in the zone became “institution row,” featuring the Carnegie Library (1901), Casino Puer- torriqueño (1913), YMCA (1913), Parque Muñoz-Rivera (1919), Ateneo Puertorriqueño (1923), School of Tropical Medicine (1926), and Casa de España (1934). “This part of San Juan became the city’s great civic center… Over a period of forty years, a series of grand stage settings… built in Puerta de Tierra, and the intention behind them was to display and exercise political power in cultural terms” (Colón Zayas 2000, 176). These institu- tions became important locales to visit in the schedules of travelers of the period: “The Casino de Puerto Rico, where the Carnival queens are crowned, and the food is best in town” (Early 1939, 57). Perhaps they also promoted a “civilization façade” for investors (especially in the sugar industry) and other interested parties. There were few hotels in San Juan as well across the Island. In “Hotel Accommo- dation in Porto Rico,” Scientific American (1899) quoted U.S. Consul Hanna as report- ing that “many people have their eyes turned toward Porto Rico as a desirable winter resort… hotel accommodation is quite limited and… far from first class” (1899, 149). The construction in 1919 of the Condado Vanderbilt Hotel in the Condado beach area, fol- lowed by the Escambrón Beach Club (1932), and the Normandie Hotel (1939), marked the onset of first-class hotels catering to a small but increasingly important bourgeois and petit-bourgeois class, while providing important leisure spaces (“contact zones”) for these elites to mix with “influential” representatives from the U.S.15 “We set out from our sumptuous Condado Hotel, after a New York night-club at the gay Escambron The Imperial Gaze: Tourism and Puerto Rico — A Review Essay • Luis Aponte-Parés 109
Discover Puerto Rico U. S. A. Where the Americas Meet. 1938 Frank S. Nicholson, artist. One of two posters produced that year by WPA promoting Puerto Rico tourism. This poster depicts a view of the harbor from Morro Castle. Although the image conjures the Spanish heritage of the island it is clearly a U.S.A. territory. 110 centro journal • volume xxxi • number i • spring 2019
[sic] Beach Club, with a vague and disturbing feeling that Puerto Rico had ‘gone Ameri- can’ with jazz leaps and tango bounds” (Phillips 1937, 142). It also marked the tendency of coastal development that would be solidified as sea, sand, and sun tourism with the construction of the Caribe Hilton decades later in 1949. The Great Depression had worsened the colonial project, giving rise to an impe- rial legitimizing crisis, perhaps reaching its climax with the Ponce Massacre in 1937 (Merrill 2009). This called for reforms leading to a transition period, a “prolonged process spanning three or more gubernatorial periods,” transforming U.S./Puerto Rico relationship (Rodríguez-Beruff 2009, 432). As a result, key underlying economic and institutional structures to support a tourism industry were identified. It was also this pre-war period that would make Puerto Rico the “Eastern Outpost,” that is, ,a strategic “partner,” particularly via the militarization of the Island (Ibid.).
Development: (1937–1949)—the Puerto Rico “Problem” Heritage Tourism and Tropical Identity
Contracts for commercial space reported by brokers yesterday included one for office on the seventeenth floor of the International Building in Rockefeller Center taken by the Government of Puerto Rico and is headed by Enrique Ortega, director. (Discover Puerto Rico, 1938). The second period launches with the opening of a tourist bureau in New York City (1937). It continued with the founding of Trans Caribbean Airways (1945), the legalization of casino gambling (1948), and concludes with the opening of the Caribe Hilton (1949), and the enactment of Law No. 374 of 1949 to create “zonas históricas, antiguas o de interés turístico.”16 Between 1937 and 1949, however, travel to Puerto Rico was still very limited in relation to the rest of the Caribbean.17 “Despite sincere and earnest efforts on the part of Federal authorities and Is- land leaders to bring Puerto Rico out of chaos, unrest became acute early in the thir- ties” (Fairbank 1979, 66). The “problem of Puerto Rico” (Brown 1945; Capó Rodrí- guez 1921; Clark 1930; Diffie and Diffie 1931; Feagle 1917; Patel 2016; Polk 1942; Shaw 1935; Shaw 1938; Tugwell 1946) became central to the imperial/colonial relationship by the mid-1930s, and “political” concerns became evident, perhaps best exemplified by the statement “This book… is not designed to add another to the volumes discuss- ing the “problem of Puerto Rico,” observed in the Preface of a WPA guide, Puerto Rico. A guide to the island of Boriquen (Fairbank 1979: vii). Indeed, some travelogues of the period were visibly concerned, “And they talk about the Palm Sunday massa- cre in Ponce, when the Nationalists were given permission to parade, and the police showed up with machine guns” (Early 1939, 39–40). Fashioning a positive discourse, a counter-narrative from “poor house” (Shaw 1935), to “tropical paradise,” was critical. It required turning a Torrid Zone into a Caribbean Paradise (Carey 2011; Leys Stepan 2001; Thompson 2006). Indeed, mar- keting “the tropics … transformed climatic determinism from a pillar of white su- premacy into a vehicle for reimagining the relationship between whites, the tropical environment, and nonwhite peoples in a positive light “(Cocks 2007, 216). It is during The Imperial Gaze: Tourism and Puerto Rico — A Review Essay • Luis Aponte-Parés 111 this period that, rephrasing Arlene Dávila (1997), “sponsored tourism” became the foundation for Puerto Rico’s tourism industry. For example, in “The Problem of To- day,” Oliver Shaw (1938), editor of Caribbean Review, focused on tourism in Puerto Rico, and set out the “principles” for a tourism campaign. His “strategy” proposed a tourist industry whose foundation was heritage tourism, a celebration of “a broad array of architectural, artistic, cultural, curatorial elements of local culture” (Scar- paci 2007: 2). Heritage Tourism (AlSayyad 2001; Staiff, Bushell and Watson 2013), celebrating Puerto Rico’s history, natural beauty, and its people, became central. Alas, not everyone accepted the “heritage tourism” angle.18 In addition, conditions in the island had not been alleviated, and the economic, political, and social crisis reached critical levels (Fairbank 1979; Polk 1942; Tugwell 1946). Between 1937 and 1949, key marketing initiatives were circulated unsuccess- fully (Merrill 2001), perhaps due to the lingering effects of the Prohibition (Clark 1995; Skwiot 2010), the Great Depression (Chenault 1941; Clark 1930; Polk 1942), and the imperial legitimacy crisis of the 1930s (Ayala and Bernabe 2007; Brown 1945, Dif- fie and Diffie 1931). The opening of the Caribe Hilton in 1949 (Canel 1949) marked the rise of tourism proper, and the growth and development of the industry until today. In the search for institutional “solutions” to the crisis, the development of a tourism industry coincided with early discussions on the development of the Puerto Rican econo- my (Levin Moreen 2013), and the implementation of some “reforms” that would become critical in the rest of the world (Rist 2014).19 By the 1950s the key identity for marketing Puerto Rico’s tourism had been elaborated: Caribbean location and tropical climate.
Take-off and maturity: (1950s- today) Mass tourism — Modernity — New challenges
Puerto Rico began today a week-long celebration of its drive to emerge from a one- crop economy with the hope of becoming a self-sufficient industrial and agricultural area. The event was marked by the formal opening of the $6,000,000 Caribe Hilton Hotel on San Geronimo Point. (Cooper 1949)
After decades of challenges to the development of a tourism industry, the Puerto Rican government engaged in building a “new” image, a tourism infrastructure, per- haps best illustrated with the design and building of the Caribe Hilton, “a new type of hotel by a new type of hotelier” (Sutton 1980, 228). Indeed, the hotel became a landmark in resort hotel design with instantaneous benefits: “Puerto Rico, which had been a depressed slum pitted with shanty towns and open sewage found new courage and a new outlook. It made a winter resort out of San Juan, began a new industry for Puerto Rico, encouraged Hilton International to begin” (Sutton 1980, 229).20 After 1949 and through the mid-1970s the tourism industry “took off,” including an early presence of gay tourism (Laureano 2016).21 Urban living ushered a distinct turn with the suburbanization of San Juan and concomitant and sharp class differ- entiations in space. The restoration and historic preservation (and gentrification) of Old San Juan as the place for heritage tourism was key, as attested by the art galleries, 112 centro journal • volume xxxi • number i • spring 2019 smart shops, night clubs, and high-end restaurants that complemented the imagined nineteenth century city. Airline travel enabled the rise of mass tourism, and Puerto Rico and the Caribbean became destinations with the rise of Pan American Airways (Brown 1998). New hotels were concentrated heavily in the Condado/Isla Verde sub- urbs, becoming sun, sand, and sea tourist enclaves, along with homes for new elites. To decentralize tourism, other significant tourist enclaves were built, perhaps best il- lustrated with the building of Palmas del Mar in Yabucoa (Toon 1993). Internal tour- ism was boosted with the establishments of Paradores all over the Island. Since the ‘70s the tourism industry has had wins and losses and continues to be challenged by an increasingly important and competitive market. Puerto Rico and the Caribbean have become destinations where the Islands are imagined as “warm, sensual, escapist place(s)” (Gmelch 2003, 6). Tourism institutions in the Island have been reorganized several times. There have been various themes for the marketing of the Island: Puerto Rico as “bridge” between North and South; Puerto Rico as an integral part of the U.S. (thus minimizing its “foreign” identity).
The research: underlying themes The study of Puerto Rico’s tourism has not tracked an explicit order revealing the indus- try’s development through time; instead pursuing changes to scholarship in academia. Indeed, research on tourism and Puerto Rico coincides with the rise of mass tourism to the Caribbean and other parts of the Third World after World War II (Duval 2004). Early scholarship was in concert with greater theoretical discussions on devel- opment theories (Escobar 1995; Leys 1996), i.e., underdevelopment, dependency, and Puerto Rico’s specific “development model” (Dietz 1992; Lounsbury 1964; Picó 1953). Postwar decolonization coincided with an upsurge in Caribbean and Third World tourism, the so-called “pleasure periphery” (Turner and Ash 1976, 11). Cold War poli- tics stimulated travel to Puerto Rico by making it an “alternative” destination to Cuba during the Cold War (Merrill 2009), paralleling an upsurge of research on tourism and colonialism (Caronan 2015; Gmelch 2003; Sheller 2003). This was also a period of in- tense study of Puerto Rico and Puerto Ricans, as “social laboratory” (Lapp 1995) for the Empire, exemplified by two important works: The People of Puerto Rico (Steward et al. 1956), i.e. cultural ecology, and La Vida (Lewis 1956), i.e., culture of poverty. These studies transformed the way the social sciences would study the Island and its people (Lauria-Perricelli 1989; Scarano 2007), perhaps solidifying earlier environmental de- terminist scholarship, the conceptual foundations associating geography/ landscape with cultural identity, central tropes in the development of tourism in Puerto Rico. By the 1990s the scholarship adopted a “cultural turn” (Jameson 1998), reaching beyond the economics of tourism by engaging with literature from other fields, high- lighting political, sociological, and cultural aspects of tourism, (Cabezas 2009; Cocks 2007; Cox 2005; Crick 1989; Thompson 2006). This research exposed the Imperial Gaze by probing colonial discourses (Foundational Period (1898–1937) before a tour- ism industry had been established in full. The Imperial Gaze: Tourism and Puerto Rico — A Review Essay • Luis Aponte-Parés 113
The 2000s produced a shift in the research to a territorial, geographic focus, with attendant environmental and geopolitical dimensions that allowed a deeper analysis of the environmental impact(s) of tourism in the post-colonial era (Baver and Lynch 2006; Kerr 2013; Méndez-Lázaro et al. 2014; Pattullo 2005).
Economic and institutional development Colonial government promoting an industry part of Operation Bootstrap, and challenges in the institutional arena. It was no accident that after World War II tourism was linked to development (Andre and Hoy 1975; Lea 2006). With deep roots in the New Deal, and with the international competition triggered by the Cold War, the U.S. pioneered an “alternative model” by displacing post-colonial development discourses with what became “Development Theory,” and an American Economic Order (Ekbladh 2010). “In the late 1940s and early 1950s the U.S. -sponsored development program (administered through the U.N.) known as ‘Point Four’ used Puerto Rico as both a training ground and a “development laboratory” for non-socialist “third world” development (Berman Santana 1998, 90). Indeed, “Point Four inaugurated the ‘development age’” (Rist 2014 71). These works emerged post-1950, during the take-off and maturity stage (1950s to today) of tourism in Puerto Rico. In fact, the general literature on tourism and the Third World had yet to be studied. By joining the discourse on Third World Development theory, early schol- arship on tourism and Puerto Rico was groundbreaking. Associated primarily with Op- eration Bootstrap, a “new economic model,” scholarship on tourism and Puerto Rico emerged in the 1960s. All these early works were theses. Bruce R. Carpenter (1964) offered an ample review of Puerto Rico’s tourism in- dustry through the early 1960s. The author acknowledged Puerto Rico to be an im- portant link in international travel. He also examined the “planned” tourism model of the Island (in particular the role of Rexford Tugwell and Luis Muñoz Marín in the advancement of the industry), as well as the social, economic, political, and cul- tural benefits of tourism for Puerto Rico. William W. Goldsmith (1968) took a much more limited route. He focused on an econometric model to “inquire about the effect of tourism and travel on levels of development” (1968, 7). Robert C. Mings (1966), followed the script, explaining the “development of tourism as a supplement to the underdeveloped economies of the Caribbean” (1966, 1). Ruling out other routes to development (“few islands are endowed with mineral resources”), tourism posed no development challenges, “since the tourist industry requires mostly sunny climate, sandy beaches, and preferably, some sort of exotic scenery” (1966, 1)). The idea that Puerto Rico’s development “options” were limited to its Caribbean and tropical ecol- ogy was a clear association to geographic determinism and development.22 William Riefkohl-López (1971) advanced a critical analysis of the tourism indus- try from its origins to the ‘70s: an account of the institutional challenges and changes to tourism in the Island throughout the 1960s and early 1970s. During this period, tourism was specifically linked to the Operation Bootstrap’s legislation (tax incentives, etc.). The 114 centro journal • volume xxxi • number i • spring 2019
Left: “El Jibarito,” Puerto Rico. Front: Depiction of a horse-riding Jibaro hauling bananas to market and wearing a “typical” peasant outfit and a traditional pava (straw) hat. The peasant is watching an airplane flying over him.
Below: Back of postcard with text “El jibarito” watches the wings of the Army cast its protective shadow over Puerto Rico. Hundreds of millions of dollars are spent in converting the island into the “Gibraltar of the Americas. Postcard printed by González Padín Co., San Juan and Mayagüez. No date: circa 1940s. The Imperial Gaze: Tourism and Puerto Rico — A Review Essay • Luis Aponte-Parés 115 industry was burdened by political vagaries on the Island and, most important, needed to address challenges to the Island’s image as the poorhouse of the Caribbean:23 that the Island “no tenía una reputación distinguida como área turística. Por el contrario, se le conocía por la sobrepoblación, la pobreza, los emigrantes y los temporales. Los hoteles y comodidades para el turista existente en San Juan y en la Isla para aquellos años eran exiguos en su conjunto, y no gozaban de nombre y prestigio fuera de Puerto Rico” (Rief- kohl-López 1971, 99). At the same time, developing a tourism infrastructure was expen- sive and not supported by some key government officials.24 James McMahon (1973) elaborated a quantitative study examining the demand for international tourism by contrasting Puerto Rico’s tourism to other destinations. Although tourism to Puerto Rico had grown significantly between 1960 and 1969, it was possibly due to the Cuban Revolution’s redirection and partial withdrawal of tourism from the international market (shown by a bump on arrivals to Puerto Rico between 1961 and 1963, and direct flights to the Island beginning in earnest in 1963). But by 1969 tourism demand began to “taper off” (McMahon 1973, 3). The author concluded that as a destination Puerto Rico had relatively high hotel room rates, higher cost for food and services, thus becoming “less competitive” (McMahon 1973, 101).
Pickaninnies. Message: “The whole darn family of Puerto Rico.” Postcard taken in Old San Juan depicting purported Puerto Rican children: seven “black”, one “white” child. The “white” adult accompanies the children. Pickaninnies (a derogative term used for African-American children) was not commonly associated to Puerto Rican children. Nevertheless there were countless postcards depicting Puerto Rican Pickaninnies. Postcard sent to Yonkers, NY on August 11, 1905. No publisher. 116 centro journal • volume xxxi • number i • spring 2019
Philip B. Kurland (1986), explored a legal case stemming from a 1948 law legaliz- ing casino gambling under strict conditions. This law aimed to “protect” Puerto Ricans from gambling: “No gambling room shall be permitted to advertise or otherwise offer their facilities to the Public of Puerto Rico” (Kurland 1986, 3). Interestingly, the author opened a door into the government’s heavy hand in regulating tourism as an industry.25 In summary, early scholarship on tourism and Puerto Rico was understood to be part and parcel of the “new development model” (industrialization by invitation) by these authors. By the 1960s, “Operation Serenity” allowed the tourism industry to “conserve and develop the Island’s own cultural identity” (Balghin and Coleman 1965, 280). Since the 1990s, Puerto Rico has also been part of research on tourism and other Caribbean or tropical areas, and as such has been framed by the concepts of globalization and neoliberalism.
The Cultural Turn: re-fashioning the imaginary The production of the Island’s identity through the lens of imperial actors Critical theory, post-colonial, diasporic, and post-modern theories in academic circles sparked a paradigmatic shift in the literature on tourism (Cheong and Miller 2000; Edensor 2000; Löfgren 1999; MacCannell 1976; Vandegrift 2008; Urry 2002). Cultural Studies offered theoretical approaches examining, among others, race, gender, sexual orientation, class, and collective identity on matters of tourism, unveiling new ways of seeing the “other” (García 2000), under imperial culture.26 The advent of Puerto Rican studies in 1969, in the diaspora and the Island, elicited a diálogo between diverse Puerto Rican geographies (Acosta-Belén 1992).27 Diaspora scholars framed their analysis by in- troducing new paradigms, such as circular migration, transnationalism, and the space of the border,28 leading them to reexamine national identity and geography (Cruz-Ma- lavé 2002). Tourism was also a Cold War “weapon” against the rising claims of former colonial societies and the rise of Communism. In 1968 Robert C. Mings assumed a “post-colonial”29 stance, focusing on the challenges societies, previously under colonial regimes, faced in developing a tour- ism industry. Mings posited that the tourism industry needed to tackle major resis- tance to its development given to specific cultural, political, and institutional actors: “Commercialization of the culture will result in many indignities to Puerto Ricans. It will threaten our cultural identity, Puerto Rico is too colonial—a playground for the colonists” (1968, 9).30 Calls like “We don’t want another Miami Beach” identified critical concerns that government officials needed to address. Besides, “widespread concern among Puerto Rican people over the possible deterioration of their way of life” was reflected in official government policy. Most important, the author posited that the case of Puerto Rico could be a model to “other countries struggling for cul- tural autonomy” (Mings 1968, 9). By the end of the 1990s and coinciding with the centenary of U.S. rule in Puerto Rico, Libia M. González (1998), broadened the “cultural turn” framework by launch- ing a discussion on the power of images, guidebooks, and the Imperial Gaze by prob- The Imperial Gaze: Tourism and Puerto Rico — A Review Essay • Luis Aponte-Parés 117 ing key publications, including the U.S. Census, and an array of travel books and pho- tographs taken during the early years of American Imperialism. These writings and photographs, she argued, served to reconstruct “la vida cotidiana de los habitantes de la Isla” seen through the eyes of travellers of the period (González 1998, 274–5). Part of a book examining 1898, as a key moment of imperial power after the U.S. invasion, the work initiated a new area of research on the relationship between tourism and everyday life: “Los relatos del viajero-fotógrafo, ilustrados con las imágenes de per- sonajes y paisajes de la isla, elaboraron un imaginario sobre lo puertorriqueño hasta entonces poco explorado” (González 1998, 300). This book chapter was a harbinger of more recent publications on the significance of visual representation as a tool by the empire in classifying and defining the “other.” Angela Lotti de López studied “the problems with communication in the tourism activity in Puerto Rico between members of the community that are actively working in the planning and development of the tourism in Ponce and the Southern area of Puerto Rico and the government officials” (1999, i). Although limited in scope, it was distinct by focusing on tourism across the Island and away from the “traditional” tour- ist areas, like San Juan. Richard Rosa (2001) pioneered tourism studies on the Island through a new lens by pinpointing the institutional role of government agencies--what I call, sponsored tourism.31 The author asserted that “tourism appears not only as the island’s major eco- nomic asset during troubled times, but also a referential system that grounds Puerto Rican cultural nationalism” (2001, 449). Through a critical reading of a special issue of Puerto Rico Ilustrado dedicated to tourism, Rosa dislodged the “traditional model” of economic development (dependency theories). Instead, he called attention “to the in- terconnectedness between culture and the market in cultural and economic discourse” (2001, 450). Puerto Rico Ilustrado performed a major role in the institutionalization of the tourism industry through a campaign to promote tourism using “cultural discours- es elaborated by artists and intellectuals of the 1930s” (2001, 452).32 In fact, according to Rosa, “beginning in the 1930s, Puerto Rico Ilustrado intensifies its campaign to promote this sector of the economy” (2001, 454). Most important, the study pointed to the role the Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña would have in the development of tourism. Photography, particularly postcards, crucial in marketing tourism destinations, were purchased as “souvenirs during vacations and when living or traveling abroad” (Geary and Webb 1998, 3). Jorge Duany (2001) made a significant contribution to the growing literature on “representation,” expanding on the work of Lanny Thomp- son (1995), Libia M. González (1998), Félix Matos-Rodríguez (1999), and others, by analyzing two photographic archival collections on Puerto Rico, the Underwood & Underwood Glass Stereographs from the National Museum of American History, and the Helen Hamilton Gardener Photograph Collection. Through a “reading” (Lutz and Collins 1993) of a series of selected photographs and postcards of urban settings, individuals appeared as “depersonalized representatives of an alien race and culture” (Duany 2001, 132). The author extended their role in becoming historical figures, 118 centro journal • volume xxxi • number i • spring 2019 stereotypes of the other. The Gardener collection differed from Underwood’s by le- gitimizing American hegemony in Puerto Rico. “Despite its poverty, Puerto Rico is represented as a valuable U.S. acquisition, and the Island’s inhabitants as dignified and hardworking subjects” (Duany 2001, 142). As a whole the pictures were testimo- ny to “the dominant representation of Puerto Ricans as a friendly, polite, hospitable, docile, law-abiding, and industrious people that welcomed the American occupation of their country, domesticated their otherness and made them the perfect colonial subjects” (Duany 2001, 146). Duany added, “Such images endured throughout the twentieth century, especially in the form of advertising campaigns promoting Ameri- can investment and tourism on the Island” (2001, 146).33 In Negotiating Cold War Paradise, Dennis Merrill departed from “both the mod- ernization and dependency paradigms” in order to emphasize “that tourism can be either a force for social progress or exploitation” (2001, 182). “Local communities are not passive, and often seize upon tourism as a means of communication to dis- play their existence and establish their power” (2001, 182). Early travel guidebooks “disparaged the island’s widespread poverty, illiteracy, and health problems, and de- picted a helpless, dependent people, a foreign “other,” who lived outside the bound- aries of the civilized world” (Merrill 2001, 182). The early tourism industry found local challenges similar to arguments made by Robert Mings and a myriad of negative images. “By the second half of the 1950s, Puerto Rico had all the essential elements for tourism in place: an activist government, a modern airport, beaches, hotels, and remnants of the past“ (Merrill 2001, 200). To be sure, despite some early successes of Operation Bootstrap, economic inequality continued to plague the industry, and images of destitute slums, particularly of El Fanguito, “illustrated the intersection between tourism and class structure” (Merrill 2001, 204). Nonetheless, “by the late 1960s Puerto Rico had become synonymous with beachfront luxury, architectural innovation, bootstrap capitalism, anticommunism, and old world charm; a mix of old and new, material and spiritual, the mythic and the trivial” (Merrill 2001, 213). In a second contribution, Merrill (2009) employed three case studies: interwar Mexico, early Cold War Cuba, and Puerto Rico, in transition “from Cold War confron- tation to Cold War détente” (2009, 2). Here, the author focused further on the devel- opment of the industry by contextualizing Puerto Rican tourism within the larger Ca- ribbean context, particularly Cuba. Most important, this framework reached beyond specific places (Mexico, Cuba, and Puerto Rico), and introduced the use of tourism as “soft power” by the U.S., whose “hemispheric empire has endured in part because the hard power brandished by marine brigades and financial houses has been accompa- nied by softer power” (Merrill 2009, 11). Early attempts to establish a tourism industry during the 1930s were promulgated by Governor Winship, who “viewed the industry as an antidote to the devastating depression and collapse of the island’s sugar trade” (Merrill 2009, 181). Although marketing trumpeted “Puerto Rico’s climate, beaches, golf, deep-sea fishing…,” the effort “portrayed Puerto Rico in condescending terms: a poverty-stricken land whose simple, submissive people awaited the opportunity to The Imperial Gaze: Tourism and Puerto Rico — A Review Essay • Luis Aponte-Parés 119 pamper their northern benefactors” (Merrill 2009, 181). Merrill underlined the politi- cal importance of Puerto Rico’s industry as an answer to Cuba. Emilio Pantojas García (2006, 2012) took up and expanded on the economic de- velopment focus for tourism in Puerto Rico in the Caribbean context. Most important, Pantojas García extended “representation” beyond visual images into discursive analysis, e.g., Puerto Rico as an “underdeveloped” society. In “De la plantación al resort,” Pantojas García summarizes the Caribbean economic model and the rise of tourism in the last decades of the Twentieth Century: “El desplazamiento del eje de crecimiento económico de la agricultura… hacia la manufactura… y a los servicios internacionales (las nuevas “in- dustrias” del ocio y entretenimiento), mantiene inalterada la relación económica centro- periferia” (2006, 84). In a second contribution (2012), the author posited that Caribbean tourism had much to offer, including sexual tourism (prostitution). Marketing the Island was seen as imperative in the development of the indus- try (Dávila Rodríguez 2011; Picó 2014; Soto-Vélez 2012). Dávila Rodríguez explored three marketing “campaigns” developed by the Tourism Company in Puerto Rico by examining “critical visual analysis” of promotional materials “to gain a greater un- derstanding of how places, people, and culture” were represented (2011, 37). Alexan- dra Picó concentrated in the development of “marca país Puerto Rico” (2014, 8). Un- fortunately, like other similar works on “marketing,” this one ignored other, perhaps more important factors, and an understanding of how global tourism has undergone radical transformations in a new world order. Ivette Soto-Vélez also examined the missing “marca” in the marketing schemes by arguing that the marketing has been inconsistent, lacking unity, and lacking the “elementos necesarios para crear la mar- ca.” (2012, 9). The dearth of social, political, and cultural understanding of the way tourism developed in Puerto Rico, and Puerto Rican society in general, hampered an opportunity to understand these marketing campaigns in all three works. In 2012 Richard Rosa explored “the political and cultural dimensions of tourism in Puerto Rico,” as part of a “larger interdisciplinary project” (2012, 88). Indeed, he posited that with the building of the Caribe Hilton Hotel in 1949 “tourism was indeed a new model of colonialism that used the Island as a ground for shaping a project for industrial, colonial (un)freedom in a post-industrial, post-colonial model that was going on elsewhere in the undeveloped world” (2012, 86). The work opened another “new” door in the study of travel and tourism in Puerto Rico and “critical tourism” (Tribe 2008). Rosa proposed the need to consider “not only the possibility of con- fronting global trends of exploitation, but also a space for the local reconceptual- ization of issues concerning gender, race, sexuality, migration, and cultural identity” (2012, 95). Rosa articulated how the Island’s colonial conflicts and popular struggles shaped the tourism industry as a whole reaching beyond Merrill (2001, 2009). In her dissertation, Nora Rodríguez Vallés (2012) presented a comprehensive study of early Puerto Rican tourism. The author added to earlier work by Lanny Thompson, and others whose focus was on the importance of representation, par- ticularly, earlier texts, postcards, and other material. She proposed the “search for 120 centro journal • volume xxxi • number i • spring 2019
Paradise” as a key component of the development of tourism in the Island and the Caribbean at large. Rodríguez Vallés also carefully outlined a genealogy of the rep- resentation of Paradise and the Garden of Eden, a recurrent theme of the period’s literature, from its origins to today’s tourism, as well as to marketing materials of the shopping “mall.” She used MacCannell’s “sacralization” process to summarize the overall strategy for Puerto Rican tourism. In “Seguro sueñas que estás en Puerto Rico,” Rodríguez-Vallés (2014) further ex- panded her contribution to tourism in Puerto Rico by exploring the period between 1898 and 1932. The author challenged the view that tourism in Puerto Rico emerged between 1949 (inauguration of the Caribe Hilton) and 1955 (with the opening of the Isla Verde airport). Utilizing Dean MacCannell’s five stages for the “sacralization” of tourism locales, she posited that tourism in Puerto Rico could be traced to an earlier period: before the US invasion in 1898. The author’s focus on marketing/image de- velopment, an area well established by others—including works reviewed here (e. g., Duany, 2013; González, 1998; Rosa, 2001; Torres, 2000)—lessened her contribution to the literature on Puerto Rico and tourism. In Imaging the Great Puerto Rican Family, Hilda Lloréns expounded “an analysis of power-laden cultural and historical junctures imbricated in the creation of representations of Puerto Rico and Puerto Ricans by Americans (“outsiders”) and Puerto Ricans (“insiders”) during a historical epoch marked by the twin concepts of “modernization” and “progress” (2014, xx). Lloréns’ contribution lies at the core of how images (photography and allied arts) communicate and are implicated in “imagining” a whole society. Her work reached beyond tourism by extending her analysis to other areas (including, but not limited to, Na- tional Geographic magazine, the Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña, the photographs of Jack Delano, and scores of other artists, through a thematic and chronological succession of the twentieth century. An important contribution of the book is the discussion of “peopled landscapes,” from Sekula (1986) as a “system of representation that articulates the ethno- graphiable, the poor, and the other” (Lloréns 2014, 14). Peopled landscapes added critical dimensions to the much debated albeit controversial concept of cultural ecology, advanced by the study of Puerto Rico (Steward, et al. 1956). Lloréns’ work also made a major con- tribution on the imperial archives sites and locales that provide clues for understanding Puerto Rico and its people as “imaging” representations of given relations of power. In summary, these works initiated new avenues linking tourism to Puerto Rican society and the way the Imperial Gaze underlined how the Island was explained, represented, and commodified. Some of the works seemed disconnected from the development and growth of the industry itself: the material bases and conditions of the Island, and the changing social, political, and cultural relationships to the USA.
Shaping the natural and built environment Tourism and the natural and built environment. With increased scholarship on the impact of development on the environment, natural and built, (Baver 2012; Beekhuis 1981; Hall and Higham 2005; LeBlanc 2015; Lugo et al. 2005; The Imperial Gaze: Tourism and Puerto Rico — A Review Essay • Luis Aponte-Parés 121
Morales 1993; Schmelzkopf 2008; Sheller 2003), tourism research entered a critical stage. In La Invención de los Umbrales Del Edén, Jerry Torres (2000) authored a foun- dational contribution to the study of tourism in his analysis of the hotel industry as central to the development of tourism in Puerto Rico as well as San Juan itself: Hotel Condado Vanderbilt, Hotel Normandie, Hotel Caribe Hilton, and Hotel La Concha. The Condado and Normandie were closely associated with the rise of leisure in San Juan and the creation of privileged spaces for a rising bourgeoisie and petit bourgeoi- sie, which included the development of the Miramar and Condado residential dis- tricts, two exclusive suburbs outside the old city. By 1908, the first tracts of land were purchased to build el Condado, a “residential park along the lines of American street- car suburbs” (Torres 2000, 128).34 Soon after, the Gran Hotel Condado Vanderbilt opened in 1919, signaling a new kind of hotel: the “entire staff arrived on the steam- ship San Juan one week before the inauguration. All the managers and middle staff were Americans” (Torres 2000, 129), a thorough colonialist enterprise in situ. Across the Island there were other places of leisure and privilege, “pleasure havens” like Baños de Coamo, Hotel Francés in Ponce, “places where good society meets” (Tor- res 2000, 126). These were, indeed, also political and cultural “contact zones” (Pratt, 2003), places where Island elites would meet powerful and influential continentals. Torres argued that building of the Caribe Hilton made manifest what he called, the “Modernist Utopia” and the “Myth of the People.” The first established the close relations betweenthe Hilton’s design to the International Style and its application to the “modern” built environment in Puerto Rico. The latter, La Concha extended the linkage(s) between the International Style and “our” Tropical Architecture (Hertz 2002).35 The Modernist Utopia followed the same logic as Arlene Dávila’s (1997) spon- sored identity: a direct linkage between the modernization of the Island and the State’s role in shaping the built environment. José Anazagasty Rodríguez (2004) centered his work on the “capitalist produc- tion of nature in Puerto Rico” through travel writing on Puerto Rico between 1898 and 1917. Using Neil Smith’s (2008) Marxist analysis of “the production of nature,” the scholar framed his analysis on the mechanisms by which capital produces/repro- duces Puerto Rico’s socio-economic development under American Imperialism. He also reviewed earlier work by Lanny Thompson (1996) and Libia M. González (1998), and added a geographical/developmental perspective, particularly the role of capital in shaping the Island’s landscape(s). Analyzing a purported “history” of Puerto Rico (Dinwiddie 1899), Anazagasty Rodríguez highlighted the historian’s view of the Is- land’s agriculture: “Dinwiddie focused on the fertility of the soil and other conditions needed for organizing, sustaining, regulating and reproducing the conditions for the cultivation of sugar cane” (2004, 170). “Besides examining the prospects of industry and agriculture traveler-writers also assessed production conditions” (2004, 174). In Contesting Visions of Caribbean Landscapes, Carlo Cubero delved into debates that surrounded state-sponsored development projects in Culebra during 2003–2005, which were intended “to create or improve tourist infrastructure in order to stimulate 122 centro journal • volume xxxi • number i • spring 2019 the growth of tourism as the main economic activity” (2008, 1). An island municipality east of the mainland of Puerto Rico, Culebra has had a unique relationship to the rest of Puerto Rico and the Caribbean in general. After a protracted struggle involving resi- dents and government officials, the US Navy left the Island in 1975. Cubero focused on a series of court cases that revealed multiple visions for the development of the Island at large, and of the tourism industry in particular. These cases, “shed light on the complex social definitions of the island’s space and its delimitations... and multiple imaginaries and understandings of what it means to live in Culebra” (Cubero 2008, 1). Although very limited in scope, the study unearthed long-standing challenges in developing a tourism industry within a colonial context. Alicia Swords and Ronald Mize (2008), spotlighted again the intersection(s) be- tween tourism and geography. In a comparative study of Mexico and Puerto Rico, the authors summarized the rise and development of tourism in both societies. Using the notion of the “tourist gaze” (Urry 2002), the authors focused “on the relations of pro- duction and consumption that make the tourist gaze possible” (Swords and Mize 2008, 55). The article offered an excellent summary of the way tourism development has gone hand-in-hand with the colonial exploitation of the Island’s territory and labor. They made clear that “besides commodifying coastal land, tourism also commodifies particular meanings of land and places” (Swords and Mize 2008, 57). In the sea-side community of La Parguera, for example, “The same strategies that residents use to de- fine themselves and their town … are deployed by business owners and developers to market La Parguera to upper class sectors, with displacement as a result” (Swords and Mize 2008, 58). “In this way, not only the place but people’s sense of place and attach- ment to particular places is commodified” (2008, 58). The issue is to figure how the di- vergence between how the community’s conception of their everyday space and place turns into a “postcard,” a place for “visiting and leisure” (2008, 58). In 2012 Edwin A. Hernández-Delgado and his co-authors published a critical and scathing study of long-term impacts of non-sustainable coastal tourism in Puerto Rico. As a result of the legacy of urban development of the Island, in 2010 about 70 percent of the Island’s population “live within close proximity to the sea” (Hernández-Delgado et al. 2012, 357). Underlining the non-sustainable approach to tourism on the Island, the authors maintained that the “unprecedented planning strategies and policy chang- es” made by the local government, using “Old-style non-participatory, top down ap- proaches” to tourism and housing development “executed without meaningful partici- pation of local communities” (Hernández-Delgado et al. 2012, 359), has had negative environmental consequences. This approach encouraged or resulted in “significant permanent negative environmental impacts; socio-economic degradation; lax regula- tions; non-sustainable operations; decision-making processes with significant conflicts of interests and corruption; revenue leakage; and construction often envisioned as the solution to economic constriction” (Hernández-Delgado et al. 2012, 359). The article made a direct connection between urban/territorial growth and development with tourism in Puerto Rico. For example, the building of the Ho- The Imperial Gaze: Tourism and Puerto Rico — A Review Essay • Luis Aponte-Parés 123 tel Conquistador in Fajardo displaced local fishing communities in Las Croabas, as well as it discharging raw sewage to the sea (Hernández-Delgado et al. 2012, 368). Another important development was the construction of Palmas del Mar, “the first large-scale resort” built on the Eastern coast of Puerto Rico (Hernández-Delgado et al. 2012, 368). Indeed, Palmas, and other mixed-use, long-term tourism enclaves on the north coast, followed a similar scheme: ultra-luxury enclaves “secluded” from the rest of the Island. The authors traced the significant transformation and impact of changes made by former Gov. Pedro Roselló and continued by all gover- nors who followed in fast-tracking approvals of mega-developments leading to a decrease of local participation. In addition, the Ecotourism Law 340 of 1998 has not been implemented adequately, enabling the government “to foster rapid tour- ism and urban development on sensitive coastal habitats” (Hernández-Delgado et al. 2012, 371). As a whole, “Coastal tourism and urban development in Puerto Rico have become a paramount motor of the island’s economy. This development during the last two decades “has largely relied on a variety of changes to local en- vironmental, planning and zoning regulations, reducing the burden of permitting processes to developers.” These policies have also resulted in a “dramatic increase in construction in ecologically sensitive areas”; in significantly reduced community participation; and in the creation of a false sense that only through enhanced con- struction on ecologically sensitive sites” can Puerto Rico “remain competitive as a tourism destiny” (Hernández-Delgado et al. 2012, 389). Erica N. Morawski compared four hotels: Gran Condado Vanderbilt (1919, San Juan), Hotel Nacional de Cuba (1930, Havana), the Caribe Hilton (1949, San Juan), and Havana Riviera (1957), through the lens of “the Modern, the Tropical, and the Historic: Visual and Discursive Themes” (2014, 2). Morawski focused on the contribution these hotels made to hotel design, particularly, “the suburban, resort-style hotel” (2014, 13).36 Indeed, Morawski argued that “recognizing San Juan and Havana as centers of hotel design” might rectify general assertions in the literature, namely, “that innovative de- sign is always produced in specific ‘central’ areas and merely copied or reproduced in other marginal areas around the globe” (2014, 308). She pointed out that the design of the Caribe Hilton was celebrated in important architecture journals such as Architec- tural Forum,37 which stated, “This is the kind of hotel which should be built in Florida and California, but never has been” (cited in Morawski 2014, 167). At the same time, the Gran Condado Vanderbilt in San Juan, was part and parcel of the “process of Ameri- canization” (2014, 28), Morawski wrote: this hotel was “part of a well-established tra- dition of resort building and vacationing in the United States” (2014, 31). Florida had been important in this industry, and the “continued southward march of the resort industry” provided the “foundations for understanding the development of the Gran Condado Vanderbilt in Puerto Rico” (Morawski 2014, 39–40). Reiterating Jerry Torres’ (2000) argument, building the hotel was central to the development of the area as an upper-class district. The Condado shadowed similar architectural styles (Mediterra- nean Revival) built elsewhere in Cuba, the Philippines, and Hawaii. 124 centro journal • volume xxxi • number i • spring 2019
Morawski further underlined that the Caribe Hilton had “the power of architec- ture to shape an understanding and identity and place” (2014, 169). Echoing Jerry Tor- res (2000), she argued that the Puerto Rican government conceived the project “to not only increase the tourism on the island,” but also to promote “the insular project of modernization” (2014, 169). Calling the Caribe Hilton part and parcel of Operation Bootstrap, Morawski also linked the hotel to the postwar “crossroads of the Americas” theme, examined elsewhere in the literature on tourism and Puerto Rico; “the hotel effectively became the symbol of Operation Bootstrap, its modern design signaling the changes Puerto Rico was experiencing through modernization” (2014, 189). In Tourism and Climate Conditions in San Juan, Puerto Rico, 2000-2010, the au- thors highlighted the importance of climate to tourism. Marketing of the Island as a “tropical beach scene amid the harsh winter” of the northern hemisphere and offer- ing tourists from these regions a “pleasant climate in the midst of winter” (Méndez- Lázaro et al. 2014, 10) generate a dynamic between climate and tourism reflected in the Island’s high season for tourism. This article presaged the future of tourism and the effect(s) of global warming. The 2017 environmental debacle produced by hurricanes Irma and María, is a case in point. The collapse of the energy infrastructure, and atten- dant loss of communications, made the tourism infrastructure all but non-existent. An industry so dependent on climate faces a major challenge for its recovery. In Caribbean Ruptures — Making Sense of a Demilitarized Beach, Carlos Cubero (2015) returned to challenges of tourism in Culebra, particularly regarding Flamenco Beach. After the U.S. Navy left the Island, its lands were placed under the Fish and Wild- life Service of the US Department of the Interior. This event gathered the attention of real estate developers and tourism investors, resulting in the marked development of “large sections of Culebra’s north coast and eastern lands… owned by wealthy Western- ers who have built luxurious villas for holiday use” (2015, 19). The centrality of beaches, marketed as “untouched and undeveloped natural beauty” (2015, 14), the author argued, revealed how these images are the very constitutive element of the Caribbean. Caribbean landscapes “characterise the sea as facilitator and inhibitor of connections and associa- tions and represent Caribbean islands as simultaneously open and closed, insular and connected” (2015, 14). Cubero utilized a painting by local artist Jorge Acevedo, whose intention was to reveal the “open contradiction” of Flamenco Beach. The artist thus be- comes a “chronicler of island life” (2015, 14). The challenge of extending his analysis to the understanding of tourism in Culebra and, for that matter, Puerto Rico, was not met by Cubero. After all, Culebra is still part of the Puerto Rican archipelago, and the same issues have been at the center of the development of a tourism industry in Puerto Rico. In “Uncle Sam’s Jungle,” Will Garrett Mundhenke (2016) examined the centrality of El Yunque in the development of Puerto Rico as a tropical destination by explor- ing the intersection of tourism, imperialism, and the U.S. conservation movement. In Puerto Rico, “The creation of an imagined tropical paradise fueled the touristic notions of leisure, and the American infatuation with wild spaces. The American journalists and travel booster used this National Forest to turn one of the last remaining forests The Imperial Gaze: Tourism and Puerto Rico — A Review Essay • Luis Aponte-Parés 125 in Puerto Rico into a desired destination. They perpetuated the myth of the virgin for- est narrative, which proliferated in the American West” (Mundhenke 2016, 5). This led to imagining El Yunque as a “uniquely American jungle. Leisure travel inevitably reshaped the history of U.S.—Caribbean relationships” (2016, 5). Mundhenke traced the chronology of transforming El Yunque into the Caribbean National Forest and the contribution of the Civilian Conservation Corps in its development and the complicity of the United States Forest Service in promoting “desired landscape sold as a comfort- able exotic vacation” (2016, 6). Unfortunately, the author failed to connect to research on Puerto Rico’s tourism, and most notably, important research on the Civilian Conser- vation Corps and the transformation of El Yunque into a “tropical landscape” (Valdés Pizzini et al. 2011). Still, this work is an important contribution to understanding the importance of the connection between the environment and tourism. In summary, by examining the impact tourism has had on the natural and built environments, the above authors added new dimensions to the research on tour- ism and Puerto Rico. It was indeed a richer literature that also incorporated earlier themes on economic development and cultural dimensions of tourism.
Final comments Tourism is primarily an economic enterprise (Tribe 2008). Additionally, “size matters”:”Puerto Rico is too small (unlike Mexico) to offer a full array of destinations, but too large to become a “resort enclave” or “resort island” like other Caribbean destina- tions. To date, research on tourism and Puerto Rico has not examined this challenge. For over a decade now, tourism to Puerto Rico has been stagnant.38 The industry continues to experience challenges in an increasingly competitive global market (Engerman 1994). After almost a century of a tourism industry, questions on marketing Puerto Rico as destination remain. One key challenge is to understand the array of tourist “types,” i.e., gay tourists, SSSB (sun, sand, sex, and beach) tourists, cultural heritage tourists, and “diaspora” tourists. “Ethnic tourism” (Yang 2011), a significant part of Puerto Ri- can Cultural heritage has been poorly utilized by marketers by continual stereotyping the Island’s identity, i.e., “le-lo-lai-festivals”.39 Puerto Rico’s heritage tourism has not been problematized enough and raises the perils of “staged authenticity” (Chhabra, Healy and Sills 2003; MacCannell 1973). While heritage tourism remains an impor- tant theme in Puerto Rican tourism, scholars and researchers have yet to explore its complexity and dimensions (Buzinde and Almeida Santos 2009). In addition, there is a need to explore an “internal” tourist sector, important during the off-season, and its economic potential for “slow tourism” (Dickinson and Lumsdon 2010). The political aspects of tourism have emerged as an important area of research (Burns and Novelli 2007; Romeu 2014). The colonial status of the Island is never too far from these challenges. To those defending Puerto Rican identity, tourism continues to be seen as a “corruptive” influence on the Island’s identity. In addition, challenge(s) to the writing of tourism and Puerto Rico are not simple; the study of tourism is multi-dimensional and transdisciplinary. With its roots in Europe in the 126 centro journal • volume xxxi • number i • spring 2019
1890s, tourism research emerges as “sociological specialty” instead of an “exotic” topic (Cohen 1984, 374). In the history of tourism and leisure, the colonial nexus needs further examination (Walton, 2005). A crucial area of concern is the uncritical usage of “tropical” and “Caribbean,” two colonizing discourses present in most research on tourism and Puerto Rico (Praeger 2003).40 As major geographical categorizations, each should be examined in its histori- cal dimension(s), part of what Okihiro (2010) calls “imperial sciences,” and how their continual and innocuous use renders them hollow. Indeed, due to the fact that tourism to Puerto Rico is explicitly marketed as a “tropical” destination, the need to unpack its use and meaning is of utmost importance.41 The long tradition in the geographic literature of linking climate, geography, race, and civilization has in many ways been “normalized.”42 Research on Puerto Rican tourism has not fully explored its use. In ad- dition, the use of “tropical” and “Caribbean” posit the challenge of understanding the way Puerto Rico is understood “on local or regional scales” (White 1999, 985), sharing a history and a larger regional identity with other places. “The sea level has risen by about four inches relative to Puerto Rico’s shoreline since 1960” (What Climate Change Means for Puerto Rico 2016). Another challenge to the study of tourism in Puerto Rico and its geographical identity is to examine the reciprocal relationship of tourism and the local ecology, the Environment-Tourism Nexus (Holden 2009). One issue is forging a tourism “compatible with local conditions” (Pattullo 2005, 4). But also: “Tourism is more directly linked to climate change than other sectors” (Perch-Nielsen 2008, 1). Indeed, climate change in the Caribbean (López-Marrero et al. 2012; Taylor et al. 2012) can either “positively or negatively impact the attractiveness of a destination” (Moore 2010, 496; Hall and Higham 2005; Jones and Phillips 2001). The collapse of the industry after hurricanes Irma and María revealed the fragility of essen- tial tourism infrastructure and the challenge(s) ahead posed by the ecological danger of global warming (Muñoz-Erickson, Lugo and Quintero 2014). Perhaps the discoveries an- nounced in “Tourism and Climate Conditions in San Juan,” by Méndez-Lázaro and col- leagues (2014), will lead to a major field of research on tourism that remains unexplored. Finally, critical reading of postcards, posters, and other art work is a powerful tool in knowledge production (Ren and Morgan 2010, 899). Indeed, in the tourism literature, their use reflects a turn from “a social science paradigm” to historians, who “tend to write in a more fluid and literary style… especially since the growth of influences from cultural studies” (Walton 2005, 2). Early tourism research appropri- ately concentrated in the social sciences, in particular, economics. However, the turn to cultural studies has left out important material bases for tourism. At each stage of the development of a tourism industry in Puerto Rico, social, economic, political, and cultural spheres have been in constant change, and the current economic crisis re- flects a century under U.S. colonialism. This is a challenge for scholars, activists, and others whose primary focus is identifying “new models,” if you will, for the future. The interest in environmental impacts of tourism is a hopeful sign that the complex- ity of tourism studies is being explored to a fuller extent than before. The Imperial Gaze: Tourism and Puerto Rico — A Review Essay • Luis Aponte-Parés 127
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank Alberto Sandoval Sánchez for his critical reading of this article.
NOTES 1 More than 47 million international visitors traveled to the Caribbean in 2016 (
17 We learn from Riefkohl-López (1971, 73) that between 1933 and 1940 out of four hundred and eighty cruise ships excursions to the Caribbean, only twenty three went to Puerto Rico. 18 In Self-Discovery in Puerto Rico, Boorstin (1955, 235) states, “But in their fervor to make themselves interesting by inflating their past, Puerto Ricans have been inclined to overlook (or even deny) some of their peculiarities that may actually be advantages. One of the more obvious of these is that Puerto Rico is a country with a long past but a short history.” Boorstin’s musings echoed an earlier observer,” Porto Rico is generally supposed to have had no history, and in lieu of it, we are generally regaled with a few legends in regard to the conquistadores and with romantic imaginings concerning Poncé [sic] de León’s search for the fountain of youth” (Bonsal 1912, 289). 19 Rist (2014) examines the history of development thoroughly. The author argues that the U.S. had a major role in derailing, if you will, global decolonization discourses after WWII. The Four Point Program was proposed by President Truman as parallel to the Marshall Plan. Indeed, the Point Four inaugurated the ‘development age’ (2014, 71). “The adjective ‘underde- veloped’ appears at the end of the opening paragraph of Point Four” (2014, 72). Puerto Rico was an early site for the development of Punto Cuatro that would be taken as the cornerstone for a model copied across the globe to date. 20 The hotel became the “prototype for a new style in hotel building that spread all over the Caribbean and around the world” (Sutton 1980, 229). Furthermore, “The Caribe Hilton was the prototype for the Beverly Hilton, the Istanbul Hilton and other first-generation Hilton International hotels. It was also the progenitor for Hilton contractual arrangements with hotel owners in third world countries” (Wharton 2001, 189). 21 Although gay tourism had begun in the 1950s, by the late 1960s and 1970s gay bars had moved from marginal locations in Santurce to the “up and coming” and gentrifying Old San Juan. Interestingly, in 1966, “Night Life in San Juan,” a regular section of San Juan Review, Robert Hamory states, “Now, if you’ve made all of the twenty-nine places about plus the six gay bars we’ve neglected to mention” (1966, 33). 22 See, Harden (2012) for a short review of the literature on climate and geography. See also Blaut (1999) and Schulten (2000). 23 Puerto Rico was not the only one identified as the poorhouse. The U.S. Virgin Islands were identified with the same moniker, see Shaw (1935). 24 In Riefkohl (1971, 80), we learn that Raúl Gándara, a prominent government official, op- posed tourism infrastructure. He argued that because Puerto Rico was a U.S. colony, American tourists would not find the Island interesting. He also argued that Puerto Rico would attract “turistas de ‘5 y 10,” or the lower end of tourists, and so on (Gándara contra invertir en el fomento turístico 1945). 25 Commenting on the case, the author states, “the Posadas opinion makes the reader think, too, of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland and Frank Kafka’s The Castle, as words take on new meanings and bureaucracy triumphs over the rule of Law” (Kurland 1986, 2). 26 Issues of “race” and sexuality” were prominent (Matos-Valdelluli and Flores (20, 0049). 27 See for example special issue (Fall 1999) on centennial of U.S. colonialism and Puerto Rico of CENTRO Journal V. 11 N. 1. 28 Authors in Negrón-Muntaner and Grosfoguel (1997) challenge many “traditional” views on Puerto Rican identity and geography. 29 Although the author does not state his theoretical framework, this article contributes considers the post- WWII period of decolonization and the challenges these societies faced The Imperial Gaze: Tourism and Puerto Rico — A Review Essay • Luis Aponte-Parés 129
striving for development. 30 Quoted by Mings—see Belaval (1952). Belaval’s published successive articles on the subject on October 10, and 21. 31 Rephrasing Arlene Dávila’s (1993). 32 There was no universal support by intellectuals. For example, in 1946 Emilio S. Belaval pub- lished a book of short stories. In an ironic commentary, Belaval titled his book, Cuentos para fomentar el turismo, to show his disapproval of the way tourism was being promoted. 33 In Mari Mut (2013), the author makes a thorough analysis of the photographs in Our Islands and Their People. In a second publication (2013b) the author examines the photos further. 34 In “Nunca es tarde…” Colón Zayas (2000, 177), makes an important contribution to the emer- gence of urban amenities, i.e., leisure places that would add the “outward manifestation of a majestic or monumental view of the city.” 35 In Hertz (2002, 222), the author states, “This hotel was one of the ground-breaking models of tropical architecture.” 36 Due to space limitations I won’t address the Cuban hotels part of this research. 37 Architectural Forum 92, March 1950, p. 97). 38 See
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