In addition to the millions of deaths due to coronavirus, the pandemic has shaken the global economy, particularly the tourism industry. Leisure travel has been and continues to be an important part of many Latin American economies. This volume's contributors offer a chronologically and geographically expansive examination of the history of tourism in Latin America and the Spanish-speaking Caribbean. Held together by an introduction that situates 12 chapters loosely into a broader historiography of modern tourism in the West, the volume is divided into four parts and traces private and state efforts to generate a tourism industry, from the late nineteenth to early twenty-first centuries. The 12 chapters each draw on a set of archival and secondary sources.

Part 1 focuses on international travel. It includes four chapters that emphasize the multiple ways the development of new transportation and communication technologies, from railways to aviation, encouraged private citizens to cooperate often with foreign state and non-state actors to jump-start a burgeoning tourism sector. A few of the chapters show that international travel was not only unidirectional to Latin America. In an excellent, if oddly placed chapter, Meri Clark explores the travels of Colombian writers Soledad Acosta de Samper and José María Samper in Europe. Following on their close encounters with Europeans, the Colombian marital duo cautioned their Latin American readers about elevating Europeans and encouraged them to view themselves as equals.

Part 2 explores the development of national tourism and offers the most cohesive discussion of the promise and perils of state-led tourism development. This four-chapter set covers Chile, Peru, Mexico, and Ecuador across a century, from the 1870s through the 1930s. Contributors explore the rise of state-led tourism and its consequences in four distinct case studies. To attract foreign and, more importantly, domestic tourists, populist governments before and after the Second World War eagerly or reluctantly poured in financial resources to stimulate tourism as a key industry of the national economic development plan.

Part 3 is devoted to politics, projects, and postwar possibilities. With only two chapters, it explores the development behind tourist projects like Tikal in Guatemala and the beach resorts in the Dominican Republic. Both chapters reveal the ways Latin American tourism became the battleground for contestations over how to build tourist infrastructure and construct tourism narratives. Part 4 concludes with two chapters that focus on dark tourism in Mexico and Colombia. Both chapters show how present-day tourists seeking thrills are attracted to topics such as narco-trafficking or resource extraction. These places become either sites of entertainment or sites to distort historical truths.

Given the broad coverage of the volume in both space and time, it was surprising to find an underwhelming introduction that does not fully frame the book. While recognizing that the rise of leisure travel in and international travel to Latin America is part of a global trend, the introduction does no more than summarize the chapter content and offer a limited yet intriguing warning about the sustainability of tourism. Although some chapters in the second half of the book allude to this question of sustainability, it was by no means an organizational frame for the volume.

Even with an underdeveloped introduction and no conclusion, this volume as a whole and as individual chapters makes important contributions to the history of tourism. The volume draws attention to the importance of tourism as a significant part of economic development, particularly state-led efforts since the 1920s. It also raises questions about the intersection of tourism and national identity constructions along gendered and racial lines. More specifically, the volume suggests some avenues for considering how tourist development projects were and are simultaneously inclusive and exclusionary. This collection will become a go-to book for any scholar or student interested in tourism history in Latin America and the Caribbean.