Even scholars of tourism can overlook the fact that, just over a century ago, areas home to booming beach resorts were thought by many to be backwaters or even a ‘white man's grave’ (p. 2). How the American tropics transformed into an appealing destination for white travellers from the North forms the central question of Catherine Cocks's Tropical Whites. More importantly, Cocks's analysis reveals how the growth of tourism in the tropics altered traditional notions regarding the relationship between race, culture and nature. Tropical Whites approaches tourism in the Americas largely through the lens of cultural studies. However, Cocks's analysis highlights the intertwined nature of travel culture with economic development, politics, transportation and science. Thus, her interdisciplinary approach makes Tropical Whites a useful, and enjoyable, resource for scholars of tourism in all fields.
Cocks claims that tourism helped delegitimise earlier notions that tied one's race, and implicitly civilisation, to climate. According to these earlier views, any white traveller to a tropical region would be in danger of racial degeneration. In the early twentieth century, however, the promotion of tourism to the tropical regions of the Americas popularised larger theoretical shifts that increasingly viewed race and culture as distinctly different categories. Tropical experiences were now viewed as opportunities that offered new, different and often positive cultural experiences for white travellers. Even more, Cocks argues that, as tourism cast the tropics and their people in increasingly positive terms, this ultimately began to question long-held notions of the white racial supremacy.
Some readers may object that many of the case studies analysed by Cocks, including Southern California, Southern Florida, and many areas of Mexico, are not technically tropical environments. However, the book makes a convincing case that many early twentieth-century observers viewed these regions, alternatively labelled by Cocks as the ‘Southland’, as tropical, or at least fundamentally different. Cocks traces how these previously discarded environments emerged as desirable zones for travel and leisure organised around distinct themes that progress in a roughly-chronological fashion from the 1890s to the early 1940s.
In the book's first chapter, Cocks highlights how tourism interests, keen on promoting travel to the southlands, built on developments in germ theory and modern horticulture to highlight how the climates in places like California and Florida posed no threat to travellers, but actually boasted healthy crops and sunshine. The increased use of photography showing orderly orange groves and modern facilities in these efforts lent proof to claims that the tropics were healthy and civilised. The connections between economic change and the selling of travel to the tropics are also explored in Chapter 2 where Cocks documents how railway companies and ocean steam lines also promoted tourism to the tropics to bolster their bottom lines. Cruise lines in particular helped shift views on the tropics from a place of permanent colonisation to a temporary, and beneficial, site of leisure.
In Chapter 3, Cocks illustrates how tourism promotion argued that, contrary to earlier beliefs, heat, humidity, and sun all were beneficial for white travellers. Cocks argues that such discourse was possible thanks to the role of tourism in separating race from culture. According to tourism promoters, ‘people could enter new environments and alter their homes and lifeways to suit without becoming fundamentally unlike themselves’ (p. 73). This new confidence in whites’ ability to live and play in tropical environments without losing their racial identity permitted the growth of beach tourism and culture, the theme of Chapter 4. The introduction of the bathing suit and the phenomenon of acquiring a tan became signs of health, not threats to visitors’ whiteness.
As the tropics became ever-less threatening, white travellers felt confident to visit and experience sites in the Caribbean more explicitly linked to sexuality or temptation. Chapter 5 explores how tourism's promise of sexual liberalism as revitalising and healthy encouraged the growth of travel to sites like Havana. The sixth chapter shifts the analysis to tourism promotion by Latin American countries. Unlike earlier interactions with North American arrivals or capital, tourism posed little threat to national sovereignty. Even more, Latin American nations sought to employ the modernising discourse of tourism to recast their own national identities in a more positive light.
If one can raise any objections to Cocks’ argument, it is that she may overstate the extent to which the changing views of the tropics led to, in her words: ‘a redrafting of the meaning of humanity, producing one more prone to admit the value, if not the equality of non-white people’ (p. 185). In supporting this view Cocks argues that tourism drew upon notions of romantic racialism and heterosexual liberalism to re-evaluate the tropics. The former trend promoted the cultural value of non-white people while the latter recast (consensual and heterosexual) sexuality as healthy. Cocks highlights how white travellers often internalised these trends in their positive re-evaluation of the tropics, but provides less evidence on how such interactions recast tourists’ views towards tropical residents. The mere fact that the tropics became popular only when tourism assured whites could travel there without fearing racial degeneration seemed to only re-affirm their own notions of superiority. Cocks notes how suntans, cruises and visits to Havana nightclubs appealed to white travellers due to the fact that such conditions were temporary. Travellers could always return north and with their claims of white identity intact. Residents of the southland did not have (and often still lack) access to the same privileges.
While these final claims can produce a lively debate, what is certain is that Tropical Whites makes a compelling case for examining tourism's potential to re-imagine geography and climate.
Each chapter presents a case study showing how tourism drew upon trends in medicine, development, sexuality and even horticulture, to radically-recast how whites viewed the southland of the Americas. Scholars in multiple disciplines will find it an intriguing approach to the study of tourism.
