Travelers, Latin American

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Travelers, Latin American

The movement of persons over great distances has been a central feature of Latin American history and culture from pre-Columbian times. Aztec, Inca, and Maya societies developed extensive transportation, communication, and administrative networks that required regular travel to maintain. Similarly, during the Spanish colonial era, hundreds of thousands of conquistadors, missionaries, explorers, and immigrants ventured across the Atlantic Ocean and then fanned out over the continent in search of adventure and a better life. Travel, however, is a self-financed leisure activity associated with the Enlightenment and the emergence of a middle class; it is an activity that is intended both to complete the traveler's education and consolidate his or her social status. Unlike political exile, travel is a voluntary activity characterized by destinations and durations that are self-determined. Although there are hundreds of diaries and travel accounts written by foreigners who came to Latin America in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the corpus of works produced by and about Latin Americans abroad is significantly less well developed.

THE COLONIAL PERIOD

During the colonial era, Latin Americans travelers generally chose Europe as their destination in order to display the results of their family's good fortune in America, to seek a higher education, or to take up a place at the royal court. Few ventured beyond Spain or Portugal, although some pious individuals and members of the clergy spent time in Rome. The most famous seventeenth-century Spanish American traveler-resident was Garcilaso de la Vega, who relocated to Spain as a teenager, settled there permanently, and produced great works of literature about his Peruvian homeland and mixed Inca and Spanish heritage. Padre António Vieira did the same for Brazil during the years he spent in Lisbon and Rome.

By the eighteenth century, the United States became an attractive destination for patriotic Latin Americans interested in material conditions closer to home, and in particular the experiment in republican state construction. The Venezuelan precursor to Latin American independence, Francisco de Miranda, made a famous tour of the United States in the eventful years 1783–1784 and left a memoir filled with insightful observations; he also traveled throughout Europe and Russia from 1785 to 1789 and was perhaps the first Latin American to visit Istanbul. After the expulsion of the Jesuits from the Spanish Empire in 1767, large communities of American expatriates congregated in Rome and Leghorn, where they wrote histories of their native lands and their religious order as well as descriptive accounts of American geography and natural history. The wars for independence also displaced thousands of Latin Americans. In London, a large and prominent community gathered which included Francisco Antonio Zea, Servando Teresa de Mier, Agustín de Iturbide, Lucas Alamán, Andrés Bello, Simón Bolívar, Antonio José de Irisarri, Mariano Egaña, Hipolyto José da Costa, Vicente Rocafuerte, José Joaquín de Olmedo, Bernardo O'Higgins, and Bernardino Rivadavia. Others lived and worked in the United States: Manuel Torres, Luis Aury, Vicente Pazos Kanki, Mariano Montilla, Juan Germán Roscio, Pedro Gual, and José Álvarez de Toledo. The Argentine general José de San Martín settled in Belgium in 1823 and traveled with his daughter throughout the continent.

NINETEENTH CENTURY

The phenomenon of travel as a self-conscious, intentional, voluntary endeavor began to expand dramatically in the early decades of the nineteenth century. With the conclusion of the wars for independence and the advent of steam-powered transport, Latin Americans traveled abroad in unprecedented numbers. Some, like the Cuban José Maria Heredia, traveled for adventure and to study other countries and conditions in order to gain useful knowledge; in 1823–1824 he lived in the United States, traveling and keeping detailed notes of his observations and writing his famous ode to Niagara Falls. The Colombian Francisco de Paula Santander left the tense political conditions in his homeland for three years in Europe and the United States, where he toured factories, attended theatrical productions, met with politicians and intellectuals, and kept an extensive diary from 1829 to 1832. Many other prominent Latin Americans undertook tours of the United States or Europe in the middle decades of the nineteenth century, including the Argentine Tomas de Iriarte, the Peruvian scientist Mariano Eduardo Rivero y Ustariz, and the Chilean Benjamín Vicuña Mackenna. The Argentine statesman Domingo Faustino Sarmiento is probably the most famous Latin American traveler of the nineteenth century. Long an admirer of the United States and Europe, he traveled abroad often to study their cultures and institutions, particularly their educational methods. He met the pedagogical theorists Horace and Mary Mann, solicited an honorary degree from the University of Michigan, and kept a detailed travel diary which has been published in English.

Taking the grand tour continued to be an important milestone for Latin Americans of the upper class: Young girls were thought to benefit from exposure to language, fashion, culture, and art; young boys were expected to broaden their intellectual and sexual experiences while gaining exposure to economically useful innovations in science, agriculture, finance, and industry. In the later decades of the nineteenth century, Paris and its delights attracted an increasing number of tourists who wanted to put themselves at the center of new movements in art, literature, music, and dance. At the same time, changing trends in immigration, the growth of a leisure class, the diversification of trade markets, and a growing curiosity about non-European cultural models meant that Latin American travelers also started to venture beyond the traditional destinations. Latin American scientists sent expeditions to China and Japan; some anarchists and radicals visited Russia; abolitionists made pilgrimages to Africa. Travel became an increasingly common way to solidify one's own credentials and affiliations at home, by gaining experience and credibility abroad.

TWENTIETH CENTURY

The connection between travel and identity grew stronger in the twentieth century and was a major factor in the social revolutions in Mexico, Cuba, and Nicaragua. For example, leftist Latin Americans from all countries flocked to the Soviet Union in the 1920s to show their solidarity with the socialist regime and to receive training and credentials that would strengthen their work at home; others traveled to Spain in the 1930s to express their political allegiance to either the Fascists or the Socialists in the Civil War. Travel is also a form of consciousness-raising, a way to step outside the confines of one's own native reality and encounter the problems of others. Latin America's most iconic revolutionary, Ernesto "Che" Guevara, began his intellectual journey as a stereotypical youthful backpacker, who set out to see his continent on a motorbike in 1951–1952 and was profoundly changed by the experience. His transformation from an asthmatic medical student to a socially conscious political activist is well documented in the travel journal he kept, available in English and made into a film called The Motorcycle Diaries (2004).

Travel has been an important rite of passage for upper-class Latin Americans for nearly two centuries. In more recent decades, the expansion of affordable transportation options (both domestic and international), a growing tourism infrastructure, and the emergence of a global youth culture have meant that more and different groups of Latin Americans are able to travel.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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Karen Racine

Encyclopedia of Latin American History and Culture