Tourism & the Caribbean: Women and Travel

In The Pursuit of Happiness Bianca C. Williams traces the experiences of African American women as they travel to Jamaica, where they address the perils and disappointments of American racism by looking for intimacy, happiness, and a connection to their racial identities.

Gerassi-Navarro brings together U.S. and Latin American Studies with her analysis of the travel narratives of Frances Calderón de la Barca and Elizabeth Cary Agassiz. Inspired by the writings of Alexander von Humboldt these women, in their travels, expand his views on the tropics to include a social dimension to their observations on nature, culture, race, and progress in Brazil and Mexico.

This study considers writing by Caribbean women, such as the slave narrative of Mary Prince and the autobiography of Jamaican nurse Mary Seacole, and works by women whose travels to the Caribbean had enormous impacts on their own lives, such as Aphra Behn and Zora Neale Hurston. Ranging across cultural, historical, literary, and class dimensions of travel writing, these essays give voice to women writers who have been silenced, ignored, or marginalized.

The nineteenth century was a period of peak popularity for travel to Latin America, where political independence was accompanied by loosened travel restrictions. Such expeditions resulted in numerous travel accounts, most by men.

This pioneering study surveys nineteenth- and twentieth-century narratives of the West Indies written by white women, English and Creole. It introduces a fascinating wealth of relatively unknown material and constitutes a timely interrogation of the supposed homogeneity of Caribbean discourse, especially with regard to 'race' and gender.

Known for her beauty and angelic voice, Mercedes Santa Cruz y Montalvo, la Belle Créole, was a Cuban-born star of nineteenth-century Parisian society. She befriended aristocrats and artists alike, including Balzac, Baron de Rothschild, Rossini, and the opera diva La Malibran. A daughter of the creole aristocracy, Mercedes led a tumultuous life, leaving her native Havana as a teenager to join her mother in the heart of Madrid's elite society. As Napoleon swept Spain into the Peninsular War, Mercedes' family remained at the center of the storm, and her marriage to French general Christophe-Antoine Merlin tied her fortunes to France. Arriving in Paris in the aftermath of the French defeat, she re-created her life, ultimately hosting the city's premier musical salon. Acknowledged as one of the greatest amateur sopranos of her day, she nurtured artistic careers and daringly paved the way for well-born singers to publicly perform in lavish philanthropic concerts. Beyond her musical renown, Mercedes achieved fame as a writer. Her memoirs and travel writings introduced European audiences to nineteenth-century Cuban society and contributed to the debate over slavery. Scholars still quote her descriptions of Havana life and recognize her as Cuba's earliest female author. Mercedes epitomized an unusually modern life, straddling cultures and celebrated on both sides of the Atlantic. Her memoirs, travel writings, and very personal correspondence serve as the basis for this first-ever English-language biography of the passionate and adventuresome Belle Créole.

In late 1831, at the age of 29, Mary Gardner Lowell and her young son George accompanied her husband, the leading Boston financier and merchant Francis Cabot Lowell II, on a voyage to Cuba, a newly popular destination for the Boston gentry. They spent several weeks on the island travelling from the bustling commercial city of Havanna to the slave plantations of Matanzas province, before making their way up the Mississippi River by steamboat on the return home.

Circe y Lucía son dos amigas cubanas que decidieron construir su vida fuera de la isla. Vivieron juntas en Sao Paulo y posteriormente Lucía se marchó a Roma junto a su marido Bruno. Hasta que se reunen nuevamente y la vida aparentemente estable del matrim

Mia Leonin spent the first sixteen years of her life believing her father was dead. All she knew of the man came through stories told by her mother. At times he had been a surgeon, at others a psychiatrist. In truth, he had been a fantasy. Shortly after her sixteenth birthday, Leonin learned from her mother that her father, a Cuban exile, was very much alive and living in Florida. Her attempts to contact him, however, were thwarted until four years later, when she left home in search of her roots. She meets her father, but trying to discover the truth behind him proves to be a more daunting task. Her journey takes her to Miami, Colombia, and Cuba, and her search for cultural identity leads her to create memories, friendships, and romances. She finds moments of connection and redemption, ending up in Havana not as a cultural tourist but as an illegitimate daughter of Cuba looking for validation. What she discovers is an island bereft of fathers and brimming with paternalism. As she becomes entangled with two different men, she descends further into the Havana of poverty, humiliation, and despair, as well as the ever-inventive city that is as passionate as it is contradictory. Insightful, imaginative, and often poetic, Havana and Other Missing Fathers is Mia Leonin's recollection of this journey and her longing to learn more about her origins. In the end, she must learn to accept the answers she discovers as well as the questions that remain.

When a mysterious manila envelope reached the hands of Henry "Milt" Reeves, no one could have anticipated the story that waited inside. Enclosed he found a manuscript written half a century earlier and yellowed with age. Each fragile page unfolded the first-person story of a trip Dorothy Chapman Saunders had taken to Mexico in 1948 and 1949 with her husband and seasoned ornithologist, George, to conduct field surveys of waterfowl and white-winged doves for the U.S. government. In Chico, George, the Birds, and Me, Saunders adeptly describes the birds they saw and the survey work they did. She also charts the other details of their journey as they traveled in a jeep they dubbed "Chico." A gifted naturalist, Saunders offers an engaging, lively account that reflects her education, experiences, and many capabilities as a traveler, newspaper reporter, journalist, marksman, pilot, and scientist. Her observations will give new insight to those interested in natural history, ornithology, adventure, travel in Mexico, and women in science.

This is the story of the author's fieldwork experience & the friendships she developed while living with the people from southern Mexico.

Adela Breton (1849-1923) was a Victorian gentlewoman whose parents supported her education and artistic training. Anthropology and the "new" science of geology appealed to her father and soon captured her own interest. After her father's death in 1887, Adela began a lifetime of travel, exploring past cultures and landscapes. Often camping or staying in small villages, accompanied only by her Indian guide and companion, she created a pictorial account of the Mexican countryside in the 1890s. Famed archaeologist and fellow Briton Alfred P. Maudslay, aware of Adela's talents, asked her to return to Mexico and check his copies of the murals at the ruins of Chichén Itzá in the jungles of the Yucatán. This was the turning point in her career that would lead to international recognition as an archaeological copyist, researcher, and interpreter of the rapidly disappearing painted walls of ancient Mexico. Today her artwork is the only detailed color record of many aspects of the Pre-Columbian past. When the Mexican Revolution of 1910 ended her travels to Mexico, she turned her inquiring mind to linguistics and began her study and copying of rare colonial-era documents. Mary McVicker writes of Adela Breton, her independence from the strictures of Victorian life, her career as a pioneering artist-archaeologist, and the enduring significance of her work.

"In 1920, an unknown journalist named Katherine Anne Porter first sojourned in Mexico. When she left her "familiar country" for the last time in 1931, she was the celebrated author of Flowering Judas and Other Stories and had accumulated a wealth of experiences and impressions that would inspire numerous short stories, essays, and reviews, as well as the opening section of her only novel, Ship of Fools." "In this perceptive study of Porter's Mexican experiences, Thomas Walsh traces the important connections between those events and her literary works. Separating fact from the fictions that Porter constantly created about her life, he follows the active role that she played in Mexican political and intellectual life--even to the discovery of a plot to overthrow the Mexican government, which eventually figured in Flowering Judas." "Most important, Walsh discerns how the great swings between depression and elation that characterized Porter's emotional life influenced her alternating visions of Mexico. In such works as "Xochimilco," Porter saw Mexico as an earthly Eden where hopes for a better society could be realized, but in other stories, including "The Fiesta of Guadalupe," she depicts Mexico as a place of hopeless oppression for the native peoples." "Mexico, Porter once said, gave her back her Texas past. Given the unhappiness of that past, her feelings toward Mexico would always be ambivalent, but her Mexican experiences influenced all her subsequent works to some degree, even those pieces not specifically Mexican in setting. Walsh's study, then, is an essential key for anyone seeking greater understanding of the life or works of Katherine Anne Porter."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Alice Dixon (1851-1910) was born into a comfortable middle class life in London that she eagerly left behind to travel to Yucatán as the young bride of Maya archaeologist Augustus Le Plongeon. Working side by side as photographers and archaeologists, the Le Plongeons were the first to excavate and systematically photograph the Maya sites of Chichén Itzá and Uxmal. After spending eleven years in the field, she devoted the rest of her life to lecturing and published books and articles on a wide range of topics, including her exploration of Maya civilization, political activism and social justice, and epic poetry. Alice's papers became public in 1999 and included photographs, unpublished manuscripts, correspondence, and a handwritten diary; over two thousand of her prints and negatives survive today in public and private collections. Combined with Lawrence Desmond's biography of this remarkable woman's life, her diary offers readers a rare glimpse of life in the Yucatán peninsula during the final quarter of the nineteenth century, and an insider's view of fieldwork just prior to the emergence of Mesoamerican archaeology as a professional discipline.

Normal0falsefalsefalseMicrosoftInternetExplorer4  Mary Ashley Townsend was a novelist, newspaper columnist, and poet laureate of New Orleans who made several trips to Mexico with her daughter Cora during the last two decades of the 19th century. She collected her impressions of many aspects of life in that country--flora, fauna, architecture, people at work and play, fashion, society, food--and wrote about them during a time when few women engaged in solo travel, much less the pursuit of travel writing. Her collected work was still in progress when she died in a train accident in 1901, and was never published. Renowned Latin Americanist Ralph Lee Woodward Jr. discovered Townsend's manuscript, along with many of the author's personal papers, in the Special Collections division of Tulane University's Howard-Tilton Library. In addition to annotating the text, he has written a critical introduction to the work that provides excellent background information about the author and places the work in its historical and cultural context. Townsend's writing provides an unusual feminine perspective on Mexico as she describes the country during the middle years of the Porfirio Diaz dictatorship, a pivotal time in Mexican history. Though Townsend does not delve heavily into politics her observations of people's lives provide a valuable source for social historians of the period. Here and There in Mexico will make new contribution to the field of Latin American studies and to the travel literature genre, both as a primary source for historians and as a well-written account of a southern woman's impressions of Mexico during a crucial period in that country's development.    

Author of novels, memoirs, and travel writings, Maria de las Mercedes Santa Cruz y Montalvo, better known as la Condesa de Merlin (1789-1852), is arguably one of Cuba's most engaging authors; yet until now her works have gone largely ignored. Born in colonial Havana to an aristocratic Creole family, the future countess of Merlin left Cuba for Spain at an early age. Later, her marriage to the French count Antoine Christophe Merlin and the invasion of French Napoleonic troops precipitated another move to France, where she became one of the belle dames of Paris and began her literary career. She returned only once to Cuba after the death of her husband in 1840, a journey that produced Viaje a la Habana. Upon her return to Paris, Merlin expanded this into La Havane, an ambitious three-volume account of the political, social, and economic organization of the island. From the viewpoint of feminist and psychoanalytical theory, Gender and Nationalism in Colonial Cuba brilliantly explores the many ways in which issues of gender have contributed to Merlin's virtual absence from the canons of literature and from the discourses on Cuban national identity. Merlin's double identity as both Cuban and French is symbolic of the Cuban exiled condition, a fact taken up by contemporary exiled Cuban writers who see the countess as an alter-ego. Mendez Rodenas seeks to restore Merlin as the first woman writer in Cuban literary history to articulate a sense of national identity, as well as being Cuba's first female historian. She focuses on Merlin's travel writings because they examine such issues as slavery, independence, nationhood, the role of women, education, and local literature. Together her writings construct an alternative, gendered history of nineteenth-century Cuba that must be acknowledged as both functional and authentic. By situating Merlin at the intersection of the discourses of gender and nationalism, Mendez Rodenas reveals not only her pioneering role but also the need to expand current critical categories to account for the specificity of the Latin American literary tradition. In the process of restoring Merlin to her appropriate place in the canon of Latin American literature, she broadens our understanding of colonial Cuban history and expands our knowledge of the ways in which travel writing can influence a country's national literature .

Most recent books about Chiapas, Mexico, focus on political conflicts and the indigenous movement for human rights at the macro level. None has explored those conflicts and struggles in-depth through an individual woman's life story. The Journey of a Tzotzil-Maya Woman of Chiapas, Mexico now offers that perspective in one woman's own words. Anthropologist Christine Eber met "Antonia" in 1986 and has followed her life's journey ever since. In this book, they recount Antonia's life story and also reflect on challenges and rewards they have experienced in working together, offering insight into the role of friendship in anthropological research, as well as into the transnational movement of solidarity with the indigenous people of Chiapas that began with the Zapatista uprising. Antonia was born in 1962 in San Pedro Chenalhó, a Tzotzil-Maya township in highland Chiapas. Her story begins with memories of childhood and progresses to young adulthood, when Antonia began working with women in her community to form weaving cooperatives while also becoming involved in the Word of God, the progressive Catholic movement known elsewhere as Liberation Theology. In 1994, as a wife and mother of six children, she joined a support base for the Zapatista Army of National Liberation. Recounting her experiences in these three interwoven movements, Antonia offers a vivid and nuanced picture of working for social justice while trying to remain true to her people's traditions.

As a first-hand account of the weird mysteries and horrors of voodoo, Tell My Horse is an invaluable resource and fascinating guide. Based on Zora Neale Hurston's personal experiences in Haiti and Jamaica, where she participated as an initiate rather than just an observer of voodoo practices during her visits in the 1930s, this travelogue into a dark world paints a vividly authentic picture of ceremonies and customs and superstitions of great cultural interest.

Candace Slater takes us on a journey into the Amazon that will forever change our ideas about one of the most written-about, filmed, and fought-over areas in the world. In this book she deftly traces a rich and marvelous legacy of stories and images of the Amazon that reflects the influence of widely different groups of people--conquistadors, corporate executives, subsistence farmers --over the centuries. A careful, passionate consideration of one of the most powerful environmental icons of our time, Entangled Edens makes clear that we cannot defend the Amazon's dazzling array of plants and animals without comprehending its equally astonishing human and cultural diversity. Early explorers describe encounters with fearsome warrior women and tell of golden cities complete with twenty-four-carat kings. Contemporary miners talk about a living, breathing gold. TV documentaries decry deforestation and mercury poisoning. How do these disparate visions of the Amazon relate to one another? As she fits the pieces of the puzzle together, Slater shows how today's widespread portrayal of the region as a fragile rain forest on the brink of annihilation is every bit as likely as earlier depictions to obscure important aspects of this immense and complicated region. In this book, Slater draws on her fifteen years of experience collecting stories and oral histories among many different groups of people in the Amazon. Throughout Entangled Edens, the voices of contemporary Amazonians mingle with the analyses of such writers as Claude L#65533;vi-Strauss, Theodore Roosevelt, and nineteenth-century naturalist Henry Walter Bates. Slater convinces us that these stories and ideas, together with an understanding of their origins and ongoing impact, are as critical as scientific analyses in the fight to preserve the rain forest.

"Sankofa, an Akan word meaning, "one must return to the past in order to move forward," is the story about the transformation of Mona, a self-absorbed Black American fashion model on a photo shoot in Africa who is spiritually transported back to a plantation in the West Indies. She experiences first-hand the physical and psychic horrors of chattel slavery, and eventually the redemptive power of community and rebellion as she becomes a member of a freedom-seeking Maroon colony. A story about the transformation of a self-possessed African-American woman sent on a spiritual journey in time to experience the pain of slavery and the discovery of her African identity. The story about the transformation of Mona, a self-possessed African-American woman sent on a spiritual journey in time to experience the pain of slavery and the discovery of her African identity.

The selections, recorded from the period 1850-1930, include travelogues by European and North American women who visited Argentina alongside pieces by Argentinean women who describe trips to the United States, Europe, the Middle East, and the interior of their own country. The pieces show that women writers in colonized and colonizing countries share literary and ideological perspectives and discuss race and gender in similar ways, often using the form of travel writing to discuss highly charged political issues.