Mexican Travel Writing: The Legacy of Foreign Travel Writers in Mexico, or Why Mexicans Say They Don't Write Travel Books

Abstract

What does the ‘Mexican’ in ‘Mexican travel writing’ actually mean? In the fi eld of English studies in the United Kingdom, its meaning is assumed to be quite straightforward. Thus a critic such as Nigel Leask can publish an article entitled ‘The Ghost in Chapultepec: Fanny Calderon de la Barca, William Prescott and Nineteenth-Century Mexican Travel Accounts’ safe in the knowledge that ‘Mexican travel accounts’ are those works written about travels in Mexico by foreign writers.1 But in Mexico the two-volume publication Viajes en Mexico (Mexican Journeys) is explicitly divided into ‘Cronicas mexicanas’ (Mexican chronicles or accounts) and ‘Cronicas extranjeras’ (foreign accounts).2 So here, the ‘Mexican’ in ‘Mexican accounts’ refers quite clearly to those accounts that are written by writers of Mexican nationality. It seems perfectly acceptable that both meanings should co-exist – especially as, to avoid confusion, many publications concerning travel writing and a certain nation or nationality fi nd ways to make questions of destination and the origin of the author(s) of the work more explicit. Nevertheless, the fact that almost no publications exist in the English language that understand the ‘Mexican’ in ‘Mexican travel writing’ to refer to citizens of Mexican nationality reveals a rather colonialist mentality at work: travellers are presumed to be citizens of the (ex-)colonial powers of the Western World and places like Mexico are the passive recipients of their gazes. In other words, Mexicans are presumed not to write travel books so there is no need to distinguish quite what is meant by the adjective ‘Mexican’. In this article I argue that while evidently there exist travel books written by Mexican authors, the prevailing metropolitan assumptions about travel