MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

As part of a larger cultural history of Mid-20th Century American road travel at home and abroad, this paper examines American tourists who traveled to Mexico by automobile in the first two decades after World War II. The influx of these American “autotourists” to Mexico during the 1950s and 1960s was facilitated by a series of transformations in both nations: the strengthening of diplomatic ties forged through wartime alliance, the cooperative construction of connective overland transportation corridors, the deliberate development of tourism infrastructure as part of a larger project of state-building in Mexico, and a cultural preoccupation with road travel for the sake of pleasure in the United States. Although the mutual, decades long cultivation of both literal and symbolic corridors of exchange resulted in an invocation of “good neighborliness,” midcentury travelogues, travel guides, and travel advertisements produced in the United States about driving in Mexico leveraged an enduring rhetoric of American imperialism and expansionism. Despite droves of American tourists flocking to Mexico every year, in American hands the automobile mapped Mexico as a frontier zone awaiting American exploration and discovery. While many Americans were visiting newly developed touristic sites in the Western United States to experience an “authentic” American past, this paper posits that American drivers in Mexico imagined themselves as actively (re)creating their frontier heritage altogether. By employing a language of vehicular “conquest,” narratives of Americans driving South of the Border presented autotourism as a way to come into unmediated and autonomous contact with a past of “westering” lost to history in their own country. Distanced from the increasing popularity of driving to staged tourism sites in the American West, post-war American drivers traversed this “foreign” landscape to (re)discover and (re)enact their own mythic past in the present day.