The Culture of Tourism, The Tourism of Culture: Selling the Past to the Present in the American Southwest

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Rothman, Hal, ed. The Culture of Tourism, The Tourism of Culture: Selling the Past to the Present in the American Southwest. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2003. The Southwest has long been one of America’s dreamscapes, a place we go to relive and reinvent our past for the purposes of the present. Yet the Southwest is a real place too, one where people live and make a living. This collection of essays looks at the ways tourism affects people and places in the Southwest and at the region’s meaning on the larger stage of national life. The first section, “Configuring Ethnicity: The Meaning of Who You Are,” explicates tourist sites in Albuquerque, California’s Camino Real, and Taos. Essays on “Collecting and Belonging,” the focus of the second section, include discussions of scrapbooks, souvenirs, and virtual tourism on the Internet. The third section, “The Practice of Tourism,” offers the perspective of a leading ecotourism operator and arguments for the autonomy of native people in presenting their experience to visitors. The final section looks at how places are transformed by tourism. (Text adapted from University of New Mexico Press website.) Hal K. Rothman (1958–2007) was a professor of history at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and a leading historian of the American West.