Early 20th-Century Latin American Travel Writing 229

Early 20th-Century Latin American Travel Writing: Postcards for a Lost Utopia

di Gorica MAJSTOROVIC Stockton University

doi.org/10.26337/2532-7623/MAJSTOROVIC

Riassunto: Questo saggio offre una lettura storicamente contestualizzata di tre racconti di viaggio dei principali autori latinoamericani dell'inizio del XX secolo: il poeta nicaraguense, giornalista e diplomatico Rubén Darío (1867-1916), il critico letterario e storico domenicano Pedro Henríquez Ureña (1884 -1946), e lo scrittore argentino Ricardo Güiraldes (1886-1927). Il saggio colloca la narrativa latinoamericana, i diari di viaggio e i testi correlati all'interno del quadro più ampio delle mobilità ed esamina il ruolo svolto dal viaggio nella disintegrazione delle utopie e nell'incipiente cultura di massa. Abstract: This essay offers a historically-contextualized reading of three travel narratives by the foremost early 20th-century Latin American authors: the Nicaraguan poet, journalist, and diplomat Rubén Darío (1867-1916), the Dominican literary critic and historian Pedro Henríquez Ureña (1884-1946), and the Argentine writer Ricardo Güiraldes (1886-1927). The essay places Latin American fiction, travelogues, and related texts within the broader framework of modernist mobilities, and it examines the role travel played in the disintegration of utopias and the incipient mass culture. Keywords: Latin American travel writing; mass culture; utopia Saggio ricevuto in data 12 febbraio 2019. Versione definitiva ricevuta in data 23 febbraio 2019. Introduction

This article examines ways in which early 20th-century Latin American narratives revisit literary forms and cultural practices associated with travel and displacement. More specifically, it offers a historically-contextualized reading of three travel

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narratives (two travel chronicles and a fragment from a novel) by the foremost early 20th-century Latin American authors: the Nicaraguan poet, journalist, and diplomat Rubén Darío (1867-1916), the Dominican literary critic and historian Pedro Henríquez Ureña (1884-1946), and the Argentine novelist and poet Ricardo Güiraldes (1886-1927). Written in three parts, the article follows a chronological order, spanning the time period from 1904 to 1916-17. The first part examines Rubén Darío’s travel chronicles from Spain and Italy, published in 1904 and titled Tierras Solares. The second part focuses on Pedro Henríquez Ureña’s Notas de viaje (A Cuba), a segment of his Memorias. Diario. Notas de viaje which was written in 1911. The third part analyzes a fragment from Ricardo Güiraldes’ Xaimaca, a novelized travel chronicle set in 1916-1917 and published in 1923, the title of which comes from the name that Taino Indians gave to the Caribbean island of Jamaica. The essay places Latin American fiction, travelogues, and related texts within the broader framework of modernist mobilities, and it examines the role travel played in the disintegration of certain utopias and the emergence of mass culture, especially through tourism and the global circulation of postcards. The reasons for this abundant circulation, of both postcards and travel notes, can be found in the dramatic socioeconomic changes experienced at the time. The early period of the 20th century was a time of rapid urban modernization, rise of global mobility and tourism as mass culture. In the context of this deep structural change, I refer to postcards as material objects of modernity, and also as metaphors that I see employed in the early 20th century travel texts in order to point at constant negotiations between the old and the new.

A problematic relationship between travel, knowledge, and observation is evident in Latin American literature and culture in the first two decades of the 20th century. Culture as a strategy

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of survival is, in Homi Bhabha’s eyes, both “transnational and translational”. It is transnational because postcolonial discourses are rooted in specific histories of cultural displacement, and it is translational because such spatial histories of displacement «make the question of how culture signifies, or what is signified by culture»1 a key issue. In order to approach this issue, I borrow the notion of “questing fictions” from Djelal Kadir to analyze early-to-mid 20th-century Latin American travel writing’s search for its place in the world. My approach is decidedly transnational. While it fully acknowledges the national literary history in which each of the authors emerges, it does not follow a national genealogy, nor does it apply national delineations of literary study. Instead, it focuses on intersections and deterritorializations in Latin American travel writing that spans the period between 1904 and 1916. For example, I analyze the work of an Argentine author reporting on crucial historical events he observes in Jamaica and Panama, of a Dominican thinker focusing on social life and cultural institutions in Cuba, and of a Nicaraguan author witnessing urban transformation in early 20th-century Spain.

The three texts under examination show spatial configurations of a “primitive” utopia that is lost to modernization. They show interlocking temporalities that see the world as consisting of multiple, and often diverging, visions of culture through the lens of tradition and modernity. The term “utopia” comes from Sir Thomas Moore’s Utopia (1516) that describes an ideal society developed at a fictional island off the coast of South America. Indeed, the South American continent has been viewed through a lens that often projected not only an idealized image but also the idea of a lost world. Latin American visions of ideal places have recurred since, but such places were 1H. BHABHA, Freedom’s Basis in the Indeterminate, in J. RAJCHMAN (ed.), The Identity in Question, New York & London, Routledge, 1995, p. 47.

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nearly always located in an irretrievable past. However, as travel became more accessible at the turn-of-the century and as societies were rapidly changing, the search for such places intensified. Rubén Darío Tierras Solares

Rubén Darío (1867-1916) is a pseudonym for Félix Rubén

García Sarmiento, a prolific Nicaraguan poet and intellectual who was the first Latin American writer to achieve global reach and fame. Darío was the founder of the Spanish-American literary movement known as modernismo, which flourished at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century. A recent revival of Darío’s multifaceted work is marked by the publication of a number of important texts, such as those under the rubric “Archivo Rubén Darío”, a ground-breaking digital project initiated at the Universidad Nacional de Tres de Febrero (Argentina) by Professors Daniel Link and Rodrigo Caresani, and a collection of Darío’s travel chronicles edited by Graciela Montaldo under the title Viajes de un cosmopolita extremo.

Darío was an avid traveler. He mostly traveled as a diplomat and a reporter on duty, sending travel dispatches for various Latin American newspapers. This section of the article examines the travel writing that Rubén Darío published in the Buenos Aires daily La Nación. These travel chronicles were subsequently published in a book called Tierras solares, which consists of two parts. Part I focuses on the trip to Spain and Italy, which was prescribed by Darío’s doctor due to his poor health. Part II, titled De tierras solares a tierras de bruma, encompasses a subsequent trip, from May to June 1904, through Belgium, Germany, and the Austro-Hungarian Empire. While critics have mostly focused on Darío’s orientalist view of Andalusia, while

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certainly acknowledging this important feature, I will focus here on Darío’s vision of Catalonia and Italy.

Accompanied by his wife Francisca Sánchez, who interestingly is never mentioned, Darío traveled to Spain by train from Paris, where he was a consul of Nicaragua (1902-1907). In Barcelona, he notices the modernization efforts and the resurgence of the Catalan spirit: «Todo esto en catalán», he writes. «Pues son raros los que como el noble poeta Marquina, prefieren vestir de castellano sus versos»2. He posits a question, currently hotly debated in Catalonia and across Spain: «¿Existe el catalanismo? ¿Existe el odio que se ha dicho contra el resto de España?»3. He goes on to offer a following diplomatic answer:

Yo no lo creo ni lo noto ahora. Existe el catalanismo, si por catalanismo se entiende el deseo de usufructuar el haber propio, la separación de ese mismo haber para salvarlo de la amenazadora bancarrota general, el derecho de la hormiga para decir a la cigarra: «¡baila ahora!»; y la voluntad de mandar en su casa. Mas así como el ansia de porvenir ha unido a los obreros catalanes con todos los de la península en una misma mira y un mismo sentimiento, el deseo de vuelo y expansión comienza a unir a la intelectualidad libre catalana con la libre intelectualidad española.4

Interestingly, Darío’s conciliatory view vis-à-vis Spain also

recognizes Catalan autonomy. At the time of his visit to Barcelona, Catalan industry grew at a rapid pace, and modern buildings were constructed allover the city. The economic argument for the Catalan autonomy and independence is evident in Darío’s estimation from the early 1900s, especially when he refers to the Catalan “deseo de usufructuar el haber propio” and its separation from the threatening Spanish national bankruptcy. Following a first stop in the rapidly changing Barcelona, Darío

2 R. DARÍO, Tierras Solares. Biblioteca Virtual Universal. (online) 3 Ibidem. 4 Ibidem.

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sails to Málaga in southern Spain where he goes in search of sun and physical light. From there, he embarks on a trip through Andalusia that lasts from December 1903 to February 1904.

Darío had long been attracted to Andalusia through readings of romantic literature and his pursuit of orientalism. As a child, he was an avid reader of One Thousand and One Nights, a text which he projects onto his view of Córdoba, Sevilla, and Granada. In Málaga, however, he claims: «El progreso es el enemigo de lo pintoresco», the progress is the enemy of the picturesque5. Indeed, the progress and modernization are in Darío’s view crushing the traditional Spanish life. A lament runs throughout Tierras Solares about the lost (traditional, picturesque) Spain. In fact, the contrast between the tradition and modernity is a tension Darío observes not only in Málaga but throughout Spain.

In Sevilla, Darío visits Hospital de la Caridad to see paintings by Murillo and Valdés Leal but is disillusioned by the picturesque neighborhood of Triana that he sees filled with tourists. In Granada, Darío is further irritated by the incipient mass tourism, so he requests a private visit of the Alhambra. In fact, the critique of mass tourism, and the Cook Travel Agency in particular, is another key feature of Tierras Solares. He refers to Granada as «una de las ciudades más frecuentadas por los rebaños de la agencia Cook»6. In a text titled Tarjeta postal, written in Paris in March 1903, he summarizes his views on tourism - mass culture, by focusing on its emblem, the postcard:

Por eso en todos los puntos de la tierra a que la agencia Cook conduce sus caravanas, encontrareis en abundancia los puestos y tiendas de tarjetas con las variadas fotografías de los monumentos, curiosidades, personajes célebres, y demás particularidades de la ciudad o pueblo, desde la recóndita

5 Ibidem. 6 Ibidem.

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China hasta la clara Italia, desde las pirámides hasta el país del Sol de media noche7.

Indeed, Tarjeta postal is testimony to the impact that new

mass culture has had on modern writers: «la comunicación, si escasa por la palabra, es más elocuente por la imagen. Es la ilusión de la presencia»8. Darío praises the visual features of the postcard and goes on to ask when did the first illustrated postcard appear? He offers the following acerbic answer: «El uso es reciente y el abuso mucho más reciente aún»9. By focusing on the visual and especially, by looking at the mass appeal of the postcard as a product of modernity, Darío is caught between the fear of the negative consequences of their abuse and the enthusiasm for the new affective possibilities that seem to open for the practice of postcard writing.10

Part I of Darío’s travelogue ends with a conclusion titled Italoterapia. Following enthusiastic if short visits to Venice and Florence, Darío summarizes them in the following therapeutic terms that define the whole trip and what he terms “Italoterapia”:

El mejor sistema de curación para la fatiga de los inmensos capitales, para el hastío del tumulto, para la pereza cerebral, para la desolante neurastenia que os hace ver tan sólo el lado débil y oscuro de vuestra vida: este sol, estas gentes, estos recuerdos, esta poesía, estas piedras viejas11.

7 R. DARÍO, Tarjeta postal, 1903. <http://archivoiiac.untref.edu.ar/uploads/r/null/b/4/c/b4c7801b4df75130e126777288cbdfe2c5bbb618ea4b100cbfef9c21f6814188/298.pdf> (Last consultation: 8-2-2019). 8 Ibidem. 9 Ibidem. 10 On postcards as interdisciplinary image-objects, see D. PROCHASKA, J. MENDELSON (eds.), Postcards: Ephemeral Histories of Modernity., Penn State University Press, 2010. 11 DARIO, Tierras Solares.

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Prior to this journey that culminated in a brief therapeutic visit to Italy, Darío had visited Spain in 1898, as a correspondent for the Buenos Aires daily La Nación. During this trip he wrote about the aftermath of the Spanish-American war. It is during his 1904 visit to Spain, when Darío also reported for La Nación, that he was able to make some of his most lasting observations. He would return to Spain yet again, in 1905, to represent his native Nicaragua in negotiations on border limits with Honduras and will also serve as an Ambassador of Nicaragua to Spain, from the end of 1907 to the beginning of 1909. Pedro Henríquez Ureña Notas de viaje (A Cuba)

Figure 1: La Universidad de la Habana in 1902, and today

Pedro Henríquez Ureña, a Dominican essayist, philosopher,

humanist, historian, philologist, and literary critic, was born in Santo Domingo in 1884 and died in Buenos Aires in 1946. In 1904, Henríquez Ureña traveled for the first time to Cuba, where he began his early work in Latin American criticism, including a focus on Rubén Darío. In 1905 while in Cuba, he published Ensayos críticos, his first book. Notas de viaje (A Cuba), the notes about his second stay in Cuba, was written in 1911 and included in Memorias. Diario. Notas de Viaje. It starts with Henríquez Ureña’s arrival at the port of Havana where he is welcomed by his brother Max Henríquez Ureña and two Cuban friends. The night of his arrival on April 17, 1911, he goes to

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hear a lecture at the Ateneo. The celebrated Cuban philosopher Enrique José Varona, who wrote the famous speech Yankee Imperialism in Cuba (1921), gives a lecture that night entitled Mi escepticismo. The following day, Henríquez Ureña goes to the University of Havana: «Está en una pequeña colina, desde donde se divisan el mar y la ciudad. La vista es espléndida: la ciudad, multicolor…, el mar... El aire sopla con fuerza (como siempre aquí en la Habana…)»12. He attends another lecture, this time at the School of Law, given by Dr. Pablo Desvernine Galdós. Henríquez Ureña returns the next day to hear Professor González Lanuza, whom he praises as the best speaker at the University of Havana.

Despite his early fascination with Havana, however, Pedro Henríquez Ureña soon laments:

Ha existido otra Cuba. Otra Cuba mejor, que yo no he conocido,

ciertamente, pero cuya tradición es conocida en toda América Latina: la de Heredia, Domingo del Monte, Saco y Luz Caballero; la que todavía perdura en Varona, en Montero, en González Lanuza… De esa Cuba queda mucho aún, sobre todo en la Universidad13.

This lament for a lost Cuba is followed by criticism of the

Cuban youth for disregarding this classical tradition that dates back to Spanish colonial times; the youth, in his view, are motivated only by their blind faith in the new, progress and modernity.

While in Cuba, Henríquez Ureña also frequents the Havana theatres (Politeama among them) and establishes contact with the intellectual circles of the newspaper El fígaro. He also visits three Cuban women famous at the time for their literary salons and vigorous intellectual engagement: Lola Tió, Rosalía Abreu, 12 P. HENRIQUEZ UREÑA, Memorias. Diario. Notas de viaje, México, Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2000, p. 195. 13 Ivi, p. 198.

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and Justina Casanova. On May 14, 1911, he returns to Santo Domingo from Santiago de Cuba, accompanied by his sister Camila (who will return to live and teach in Cuba, following the Revolution). In sum, this second visit to Cuba makes an important mark on the formative years of Pedro Henríquez Ureña. Some of the ideas that he is introduced to for the first time in Cuba will be echoed in his later well-known essays, especially Seis ensayos en busca de nuestra expresión (1928), about the particularities of Latin American literature; Literary Currents in Hispanic America (1945), the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures he will give at Harvard University; and Historia de la cultura en la América Hispánica (published in 1947).

Following the recent celebrations of the quincentennial of the publication of Thomas More’s Utopia, Pedro Henríquez Ureña’s views on the American utopia, presented in the following (historical and dialectical) terms, are particularly remarkable:

El hombre universal con que soñamos, al que aspira nuestra América, no será descastado…La universalidad no es el descastamiento: en el mundo de la utopía no deberán desaparecer las diferencias de carácter que nacen del clima, de la lengua, de las tradiciones, pero todas estas diferencias, en vez de significar división y discordia, deberán combinarse como matices diversos de la unidad humana. Nunca la uniformidad, ideal de imperialismos estériles; sí la unidad, como armonía de las multánimes voces de los pueblos14.

In 1922, Henríquez Ureña gave a lecture at the University of La Plata (Argentina), entitled “Utopía de América”, which was subsequently published as a book making the following prophetic call: «Ensanchemos el campo espiritual; …esforcémonos para acercarnos a la justicia social y la libertad verdadera…avancémos, en fin, hacia nuestra utopía»15. He then

14 P. HENRIQUEZ UREÑA, La utopía de América, Caracas, Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989, p. 8. 15 Ivi, p. 6.

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referred to Plato and the Greek origin of the term “utopia” and added that the concept itself appears in moments of social crisis and disorientation, only to be understood as a process that is rational, actualized, modern, and thus continuously transcended. Some of the ideas that Henríquez Ureña introduced for the first time in this volume are echoed in his later well-known essays, especially Seis ensayos en busca de nuestra expresión. Ricardo Güiraldes Xaimaca

Figure 2: Inauguration of the Panama Canal in 1914

Ricardo Güiraldes, one of the most influential Argentine

writers of his era, was born in Buenos Aires in 1886 and died in Paris in 1927. His early writing, although quite different in tone and scope from Henríquez Ureña’s, shares a certain utopian vision of American culture in the Caribbean. And yet, that idyllic vision is shattered by a visit to the Panama Canal, which he sees soon after its construction. Güiraldes describes the canal

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zone in Xaimaca as another “primitive” utopia lost to modernization. Furthermore, he describes the traumatic transformation of tropical landscape as “a botanical necropolis that extends for kilometers”: «Por las vastas regiones anegadas se extiende un bosque desprovisto de hojas: ejército de esqueletos en pie, cuyos últimos huesos se pudren de humedad… Necrópolis botánica que se agranda kilométricamente, como si quisiera apoderarse del mundo»16. This brief yet crucial reference to the loss of enormous natural resources in the Panama Canal is included towards the end of the book; its depiction of rainforest destruction and the perilous treatment of the environment may be seen as an early example of Ecocriticism.

Xaimaca depicts an extensive South American journey that originates in Buenos Aires and continues across the continent toward the Pacific. The narrator and his lover subsequently embark on a ship sailing up the coast towards the Caribbean. When they reach the Caribbean, in the port of Kingston, the narrator observes the Fifth Jamaican Regiment departing for World War I:

Del puerto de Kingston, barrido por el viento que desnuca las palmeras, parte rumbo a la Guerra europea el quinto contingente jamaiquino. Letreros, gritos heroicos…pañuelos de despedida. Concluye el juego de soldadito en una realidad de congoja…el padre saldrá con su machete de cortar caña, en busca de un ínfimo sueldo…la madre quedará cuidando la mísera quinta, cuyos frutos acarreará al Mercado los sábados… La raza vino a pagar tributo a un pueblo de conquistadores desde una lejana y patriarcal región. Los viejos, como los hijos, dieron su sangre por otros. El contingente se va. Ya el destino apunta su proa hacia los brutales combates de los países civilizadores, ávidos como mercaderes de poder y riqueza. Allá serán los campos yermos, arados por el hierro fabricado para la muerte. Los proyectiles harán líquido rojo de

16 R. GÜIRALDES, Xaimaca, Buenos Aires, Editorial Losada, 1960, p. 75.

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la negra masa de músculos… El silencio en torno, será el eterno silencio del contingente jamaiquino17.

This poetic passage contains a thruth that is progressively

revealed to the traveller, and the reader: the Jamaican contingent is departing to foreign lands accross the ocean, to fight in somebody else’s war. A number of recent critical essays point towards “decolonizing” World War I commemoration, to which Güiraldes’ poignant description of the Fifth Jamaican Regiment, undoubtedly belongs. According to Nelson Maldonado-Torres in Against War: Views from the Underside of Modernity, war is naturalized in the Caribbean context of multiple overlapping colonialities. This “attitude of war” was at work in the expansion of European empires (such as the colonial entanglements between the UK and Jamaica), and the decimation of people, knowledge, and cultures that took place over the centuries. For Maldonado-Torres, this “attitude of war” was at the heart of colonialism, and colonialism, Güiraldes observes in this paragraph, was at the heart of `World War I.

Following the intervention of King George V, and after much discussion between the UK Colonial Office and the War Office (which at first rejected black Caribbean soldiers), on May 19, 1915, approval was finally given to raise a West Indian contingent. The “British West Indies Regiment” was established on October 26, 1915 and sent off to Europe and German East Africa to fight under the British flag. Over 20,000 soldiers served in the regiment, two-thirds of whom came from Jamaica and embarked in the port of Kingston. Following Mary Louise Pratt’s Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation, it is worth noting that, also in 1917, when Güiraldes observes this recruitment in Jamaica, the neighboring island of Puerto Rico

17 Ivi, p. 125.

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was given US citizenship and soon afterwards its soldiers were sent off to fight in the war.

Güiraldes reviewed his notes from Jamaica and completed his novelistic travelogue in Paris, at the end of the war. In November 1919, he reminisced about the war: «casi diría que olvido más la guerra en Paris que en Buenos Aires, donde ha sido mi pesadilla constante»18. Together with Alfredo González Garraño, Güiraldes was the founder of the Buenos Aires chapter of the Comité Nacional de la Juventud pro ruptura de las relaciones con Alemania (which vigorously opposed the neutrality stance of President Yrigoyen). It is evident from this passage of Xaimaca that Güiraldes associates war and environmental destruction with la barbarie. The civilización/barbarie dichotomy, in fact, was long associated with “the journey”, as both metaphor and lived experience. Joseph Conrad famously traveled on one of the first steamboats on the Congo River in 1890. He saw the colonial hypocrisy and violence along its banks and afterwards wrote Heart of Darkness, a book that would influence César Vallejo and other Latin American writers.

Güiraldes wrote Xaimaca in the midst of World War I, a period of massive colonial restructuring, global destruction, and a loss of faith in Western paradigms of progress and modernity. In the early 1920’s, another Latin American writer, the Colombian José Eustasio Rivera was sent on a boundary commission into the Amazon: the acclaimed regionalist novel La vorágine (1924) is inspired by that journey. The protagonist of Alejo Carpentier’s Los pasos perdidos is given a chance to escape society (civilización) when sent on an expedition into the jungles (barbarie) of Orinoco in search of indigenous musical instruments. In 1935, the Mexican writer Salvador Novo published Continente vacío (viaje a Sudamérica). The following 18 I. BORDELOIS, Genio y figura de Ricardo Güiraldes, Buenos Aires, Editorial Universitaria de Buenos Aires, 1966, p. 87.

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year, the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss traveled through Brazil and published Tristes Tropiques upon his return to France. That same year, the French playwright Antonin Artaud traveled through Cárdenas’ Mexico and wrote México y viaje al país de los Tarahumaras. The titles of Stefan Zweig’s Brazil, Land of the Future (1941) and Egon Erwin Kisch’s Descubrimientos de México (1944), are emblematic of these tendencies that show the “discovery” and utopian potential of Latin America in the interwar period.

Eduardo Mallea notes in his autobiographical reminiscences, La guerra interior (1963), that he wrote most of Nocturno Europeo on a ship returning from Europe to Argentina in 1934. In this book, Mallea describes a scene in Florence where the novel’s protagonist stands in front of Michelangelo’s David. While admiring the statue, he thinks of the lifeless, flat pampas of his native Argentina. Much travel writing has been written, in fact, not about travel but about “home”. Travel is an investment: «an activity linked to a series of gains and losses, at the center of which stands the figure of the home»19. Much travel writing, I would add, has been written not about places seen in the present but about places “lost” in the past.

In sum, the three authors addressed in this essay “send” postcards to a lost utopia: Darío refers to the “lost” Spain of the not so distant, yet unmodernized past; Henríquez Ureña speaks to the “lost” humanistic Cuba of the 19th century; Güiraldes writes about the real loss, that of black Jamaican soldiers whose lives were lost in the war.20 In doing so, they engage early 20th

19 G. VAN DEN ABBEELE, Travel as Metaphor: From Montaigne to Rousseau, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1992, p. 12. 20 For an analysis of the complex interlocking themes of Latin America and Utopia, see the following collected volumes: Cruelty and Utopia: Cities and Architecture in Latin America, Baez, Eduardo Ed. (Princeton Architectural Press, 2005), K. BEAUCHESNE, A. SANTOS (eds.), The Utopian Impulse in

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century travel, fiction writing, and utopian thought as witnesses of social transformation and active participants in the emerging global trajectories of Latin American literature. Their texts prefigure Boaventura Dos Santos’ idea that a subject can conceive of the world on its own terms and with agency in its own hands (Epistemologies of the South). By critically engaging with tourism, war, and ecological dystopia, Darío, Henríquez Ureña, and Güiraldes demystify journeys of mass cultural consumption and in doing so, dismantle or unsettle past utopias. The travel chronicles they write from Spain and the Caribbean all contain notes about utopia lost: they scrutinize tourism as a commodification of place and contribute to a re-writing of not only the travel chronicle but also the idea of a utopia.

Latin America, (Palgrave 2011), and Utopias in Latin America: Past and Present, Pro Juan Ed. (Sussex Academic Press, 2018).

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<http://archivoiiac.untref.edu.ar/uploads/r/null/b/4/c/b4c7801b4df75130e126777288cbdfe2c5bbb618ea4b100cbfef9c21f6814188/298.pdf> (Last consultation: 8-2-2019).

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