Review by Ed Quillen
Tourism – October 2001 – Colorado Central Magazine
Seeing & Being Seen – Tourism in the American West
Edited by David M. Wrobel and Patrick T. Long
Foreword by Earl Pomeroy
Published for the Center of the American West
in 2001 by University Press of Kansas
ISBN 0-7006-1083-9
JUDGING BY THE GROWTH in literature about tourism in the West, we must be having a hard time understanding it. This book, an anthology with more than a dozen contributors, represents an effort to get a better handle on our leading industry by coming at it from many perspectives — historic, economic, cultural, and ethnic, to name a few.
Seeing & Being Seen is a result of a 1997 conference with the same theme at the University of Colorado in Boulder. The book is not “the conference proceedings,” in that not all of the conference presentations are in the book, and the book contains material that wasn’t presented at the conference. But there’s considerable overlap.
Easily the most provocative speaker at the conference (which Martha and I attended) was Hal Rothman, a professor of history at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas and author of Devils’ Bargains: Tourism in the Twentieth Century American West.
Rothman told us that our delightful sport of Vegas-bashing was based on truth. Las Vegas is indeed a greedy place of contrived attractions whose novelty fades, and thus the old extravagances must be replaced with even gaudier contrivances.
But we’d better get used to that, he said, because that’s where we’re all headed if we live in a tourist zone. Tourists are willing to spend good money to get a certain experience, which means there’s a “script” — a set of expectations that a successful tourist industry must meet.
The industry helps define those expectations with its marketing — but it’s the script that matters.
The Vegas tourist wants bright lights and the chance of getting rich quick. The Iowa tourist in Central Colorado might want to catch fish — and to assist with the script, the streams and lakes are stocked with rainbow trout. The cultural tourist in Santa Fé wants “authenticity” — so there are strict building codes to insure that every exterior is constructed “authentically.”
Rothman’s contribution, “Shedding Skin and Shifting Shape: Tourism in the Modern West,” is not always easy reading, but it is perceptive and provocative:
“Tourism is the most colonial of colonial economies … as a result of its psychic and social impact on people and their places. Tourism, and the social structure it provides, makes unknowing locals into people who look like themselves but who act and behave differently as they learn to market their place and its, and their, identity…. locals must be what visitors want them to be in order to feed and clothe themselves and their families, but also must guard themselves, their souls, and their place.”
ALAS, ROTHMAN doesn’t offer us techniques for _guarding ourselves, but he makes it clear what we need to guard against, since the by-products of tourism “include the spread of real-estate development, the gobbling up of open space in narrow mountain valleys, the traffic and sprawl of expansive suburban communities, and the transformation of the physical environment into roads and reservoirs that provide activity and convenience for visitors. Tourism offers its visitors romanticized visions of the historic past, the natural world, popular culture, and especially of themselves.”
All is not as bleak as Rothman’s view, according to Patricia Limerick who sees many of the same contradictions that Rothman does. But she points out that tourists aren’t exactly “the other.” Even scholars want clean restrooms and a place to park, so why are we making fun of tourists for wanting the same things?
Patrick Long examines Western tourism from the “touree” point of view:
“Western rural communities are not positively predisposed toward tourism — they don’t view it as a recourse to be undertaken regardless of the community’s economic need; rather, they view it as an option that sometimes has to be undertaken when a local economy is faltering.”
IN OTHER WORDS, try tourism if you don’t have anything else. And he observes that in many towns, if another industry perks up, then support for tourism withers.
He argues for a more structured approach, and even provides a useful list for what might constitute good tourism development. It would:
* Be beneficial to local residents;
* Result in local purchases and local profits;
* Preserve the natural environment;
* Preserve traditional values and lifestyles;
* Result in local employment and management;
* Provide secondary infrastructure benefits;
* Inform and educate visitors;
* Result in local control and ownership;
* Avoid overwhelming communities;
* Channel external investments toward these ends.
Rudolfo Anaya celebrates being a tourist — as a boy in New Mexico, he wondered about these people who came through town. “Tourists didn’t go to work. They just went to look and maybe take pictures. What a life. I knew I really wanted to be a tourist.”
“We travel to seek connections,” he writes. “What are the tourists who come west seeking? Is our job to take their money and be done with them, or should we educate them? Should they read our books and history before applying for visas to our sacred land?”
No, but there’s another form of learning. “As we respect places and people in our travels, we expect to be respected by those who travel through our land. Respect can be taught. After all, we are on Earth ‘only for a while’ as the Aztec poet said. We are all dharma bums learning our true nature from the many communities of the West. Let us respect each other in the process.”
Those four pieces — from Anaya, Long, Limerick, and Rothman — form the first, and best, of the book’s three sections. They’re worth the price of admission.
The other two sections are either historical (mostly Northwest and national parks) or overly analytical and too pedantic, as with “Tourism, Whiteness, and the Vanishing Anglo” by Sylvia Rodriguez.
She may have some interesting or useful insights, but it would take a better miner than I to recover the worthwhile stuff from material like this:
“The gaze within which such ethnic meanings are arrayed marks them as other and different from the perceiver. This implies an embodied consciousness that is pervasive but unmarked. The landscape it sees is empty, grand, and populated by savages. The imagery of enchantment is modernist, racialist, and masculinist all at once…. The æsthetic panorama of a Nature unspoiled by humans is a creature of modernist nostalgia… White, Anglo, bourgeois consciousness organizes this gaze, supposing itself to be universal and alone. Its historic precursor is the imperialist gaze that subjugated and extracted and collected from the subaltern ‘tribal’ world of ‘people without history.’ ”
This is not prose designed for public consumption. But most of the rest of the book is quite accessible, providing you’re not in a hurry. And it’s worth the time, since the more we understand modern tourism, the better we can deal with it.
— Ed Quillen