Lewis Twiby

Specialised in the history of borders, human rights, and movements of marginalised communities. Their current project is looking at state-building and community identity in Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua on the the US-Mexico border from 1920 to 1960.

Tourism in global history

The history of tourism turns microhistory into global history. In fact, by focusing on tourism’s impact on a community we can extrapolate that case study to understand wider connections between communities. For example, Israel’s birthright program offers Jews in Europe and the US a holiday to Israel, presenting it as a Mediterranean paradise to entice them to settle, and since the 1990s Scottish advertisements painted Scotland as an ancient but still modern destination to unite Scots before the potential birth of a Scottish state. Dina Berger has similarly made this argument in regards to Mexico in the 1940s – the ‘Pyramids by day, Cocktails by Night’ messaging was a useful tool to package Mexico as a modern nation with an ancient past to tourists while also encouraging Mexicans to buy into an idea of what it meant to be ‘Mexican’, mexicanidad. By looking at two border communities, Tijuana in Baja California and Ciudad Juárez in Chihuahua, we see Berger’s argument in action from the start of the 1900s.

Border towns, tourism and power in the US-Mexico border

Located directly on the border with the United States, these two cities formed deep ties with the nearest norteamericano city – San Diego, California for Tijuana and El Paso, Texas for Juárez (so much so that El Paso and Juárez were once one city). Juárez in particular has had a long history of global connections, since the main railroad connecting Mexico City to the United States was constructed in the 1880s through the city. Consequently, migration and trade through Mexico resulted in Juárez becoming the venue for communities to interact: not only did central and southern Mexicans find themselves in the city but also Anglo-Americans, Germans, Chinese, Arabs, and Cubans. In this early mixed community, which neighbouring Tijuana soon came to resemble, tourism became a vibrant industry. While bullfighting was not uniquely Mexican, it became associated with Mexican identity along the border due to its absence in the north. City planners were well aware of the pull of the plaza de toros as when the tram connecting El Paso to Ciudad Juárez was constructed in the 1890s one of the first stops was directly outside the plaza. By the early-1900s Juárez’s bullfights had become so popular that they began evoking the Roman gladiatorial fights. In 1908 the Juárez bullring proudly advertised a battle between a ‘Dakota Buffalo’ and a ‘Mexican bull’. Here we see the development of nationalist mexicanidad – this was not just a fight between animals but a fight between nations.

Bullfight in Mexico

The 1910s saw a radical shift in the border region. First, in November 1910 liberal landowner Francisco Madero called for a revolution against the ageing Mexican dictator Porfirio Díaz. The second, the Eighteenth Amendment to the US Constitution banned the production and selling of alcohol in 1918. Tijuana and Ciudad Juárez would both see major battles during early days of the Revolution – in 1911 anarchist Magonistas briefly controlled Tijuana and that same year the future national heroes Madero and Pancho Villa would Juárez spelling the end of the Díaz regime. Despite Mexico facing ten years of civil war, tourism would flourish on the border. Photographers like Walter Hone would snap photos of the Battle of Ciudad Juárez and revolutionaries which were turned into postcards and sold across the United States. When the dust settled in Mexico, these same photos were incorporated into the national image. Soon, the images of mixed-race or indigenous revolutionaries proved a propaganda boom for the new revolutionary state in forming mexicanidad. Proximity to the border also meant that American tourists could still have an ‘exotic’ holiday destination despite the war.

Meanwhile, the passing of Prohibition in the US led to saloons and bars in San Diego and El Paso moving south across the border. Tijuana and Juárez became the destinations for nightlife, where a mix of alcohol, gambling, sex, and even opium gave the cities the reputation of being a modern Sodom and Gomorrah. To this day these cities have an international reputation for vice and debauchery, the ‘Leyenda Negra’ or the ‘Black Legend’. Despite the anti-vice campaign coming from the new Mexican government in the early 20^th century, these cities became heavily reliant on vice leaving these industries intact. For example, in 1939 Chihuahuan governor Talamantes had to backtrack his plan to close Juárez’s bars after unions raised issues about unemployment. In Tijuana, the governor himself Abelardo Rodríguez, who would become president in 1932, held shares in the glitzy Agua Caliente, a hotel, casino, and racetrack all in one. In Agua Caliente, Mexican elites rubbed shoulders with American celebrities: Charlie Chaplin was a regular guest, and mafioso Bugsy Siegel took inspiration from Agua Caliente for his Las Vegas casinos twenty years later. Hollywood star Rita Hayworth was even head-hunted at Agua Caliente! American entertainment was, therefore, shaped by Mexican tourism connecting the two countries together in an unexpected way.

Jockey Club at Agua Caliente captured on a postcard. Credit: The Print Collector/Heritage Images

From the 1920s, the Mexican state began the construction of a new Mexican identity, one revolving around the Aztec-Mayan past and the current rural, mestizo-indigenous present. The border was excluded from this narrative, but in order to ‘sell’ Mexico to tourists, border communities had to accept aspects of these cultural projects. For example, Juárez’s Toltec Café was designed to invoke the classical Toltec of central Mexico in which they advertised their restaurant in papers both sides of the border. Curios were souvenir stores that sold postcards, sombreros, serapes, and sometimes tequila – all things highlighted as Mexican by the central state yet that were taken from areas across Mexico. Curio owners had to buy into this concept of Mexico in order to market themselves. Non-elite Mexicans were integral in shaping tourism. Agua Caliente opened a pool for its 90% Mexican workforce to avoid nationalist strikes, and Juárez’s parents protested the city council in August 1935 where one cause of the protest was the schools’ proximity to bars. Consequently, the bars had to move – they could not be seen favouring American tourists over Mexican families.

The border from 1900 to 1940 shows us a glimpse at how the local connects to the global. Communities were exposed to wider trends fostered by tourism reflecting the evolution of the global economy during the twentieth century.

Bibliography

Archival Sources

‘Records of the Department of State Relating to Internal Affairs of Mexico, 1930-1939’, Archives of Latin American and Caribbean, Sixteenth to Twentieth Century, Gale Primary Sources

Newspaper Sources

• El Paso Herald-Post
• El Paso Times

Secondary Sources

• Daniel Arreola, Postcards from the Chihuahua Border: Revisiting a Pictorial Past, 1900s-1950s, (Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press, 2019)
• Dina Berger, The Development of Mexico’s Tourist Industry: Pyramids by Day, Martinis by Night, (New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006).
• David Dorado Romo, Ringside Seat to a Revolution: An Underground Cultural History of El Paso and Juárez, 1893-1923, (El Paso, TX: Cinco Puntos Press, 2005)
• Paul Vanderwood, Satan’s Playground: Mobsters and Movie Stars at America’s Greatest Gaming Resort, (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010).