Travelers and explorers have always been a primary source of geographic, scientific, and ethnographic knowledge, and their descriptions of the flora, fauna, art, history, economic activity, or customs of a country were of paramount importance in shaping the external image of the flourishing nations of the nineteenth century. It was precisely in this era that the formidable development of transport and communications, based on the steam engine and the telegraph, gave rise to a veritable travel fever that constituted the origin of present-day mass tourism. The number of travelers grew exponentially, and with them their accounts, their visions of the other, which accumulated and repeated themselves, forming national stereotypes that persist to this day and that powerfully affected even how peoples see themselves.
It would be hard to find textual consequences of contact with the Other more direct than travelers’ accounts, so that their discourses offer excellent raw material for reflecting on otherness and identity. Whether Americans traveling through their own country, Americans traveling through other countries of the Americas, or travelers from other continents crossing Latin America, all these visions, repeatedly captured in periodicals and books, would go on forming a mosaic with an increasingly defined image–though not for that reason a truer one–of what America is.
More specifically, travel literature has always been the primary written source for spreading knowledge (more or less truthful, more or less fantastical) about Native American peoples throughout the world, and even in the nineteenth century this body of texts retained its relevance, especially in addressing Indigenous peoples who remained on the margins of Western culture, called at the time “wild Indians,” barely contacted, often conflictively, by soldiers, scientists, or missionaries. In any case, in describing local customs, travelers also gave their testimony about the “tame Indians,” integrated into urban life and undergoing transculturation, and also wrote about the mestizo population.
In the nineteenth century, as steam power eased the experience of travel, in addition to soldiers, scientists, and missionaries, other kinds of travelers also began to write about their experiences, including journalists, writers, painters, photographers, politicians… This new wave of travelers, overlapping with the previous one, would prefer a more subjective style of writing, one of “impressions,” especially attentive to the emotional and aesthetic reactions provoked by the experience of travel. Moreover, these new travelers would give particular attention to urban realities.
Exceptionally, women also wrote about their travels through Latin America. Although from a quantitative standpoint nineteenth-century women travelers carried little weight, qualitatively their importance lies in offering a singular and alternative point of view that differs from that of male travelers, as Mary Louise Pratt showed in Imperial Eyes, complementing the broad picture of travel literature of the period.
