For the Tourists' Gaze and Imagination: Images of San Antonio's Late Nineteenth-Century Market Culture

In the late nineteenth century, San Antonio was a city looking to make its mark on the American scene. Founded in 1718 as an outpost of the Spanish Empire, this mysterious frontier town had intrigued multiple generations of Americans. However, limited transportation options had made it difficult to access for the average traveler. The introduction of the first direct railroad line into San Antonio in 1877 opened the city to a growing stream of tourists who were anxious to explore this previously isolated area. That access, combined with the concurrent rise of inexpensive commercial photography, was instrumental in reshaping San Antonio’s self-perception. In addition, the national image of this unassuming former frontier town itself was transformed by the visual stories local photographers were profitably narrating through their film. Contemporary tourist literature may have emphasized San Antonio’s mild, spring-like winters and rolling landscapes as its feature attractions, but the visual narrative created through the photographer’s lens was much more focused on depicting an exotic, historicized Spanish fantasyland.

Through methods grounded in visual and material culture studies, this paper will examine the city-story encapsulated in one crucial San Antonio tourist space, the outdoor marketplace on Military Plaza, in order to better understand the understudied impact of commercial photographers in redefining San Antonio to its own residents and the larger American public in the late nineteenth century. I argue that San Antonio’s Military Plaza marketplace was one of the many placemaking settings exploited by the city’s photographers to create the long lasting narrative of San Antonio as an exotic picturesque fantasy, one that tourists were hoping to find then and which to a certain extent, they still expect today.