On the (Pan American) Road: Visual Construction of Latin America for the US Tourist Gaze

Constructed between the 1930s and the 1960s, the Pan-American Highway was envisioned as a hemispheric infrastructure project connecting the Americas from the U.S.–Mexico border to Patagonia, under conditions of U.S. political and economic hegemony. Within this pursuit of power, visuality played a decisive role. The Bureau of Public Roads (BPR), the U.S. governmental agency responsible for highway construction in Latin America, dispatched photographers to document not only the roadworks but also the surrounding landscapes, settlements, communities, and populations, with particular attention to Indigenous groups.

These visual practices placed Latin America under the U.S. gaze and sought to introduce the region to U.S. audiences as a space of opportunity, mobility, and consumption. Tourism emerged as a central mechanism of Pan-Americanism, as photography translated infrastructure into spectacle and territory into destination.

Drawing on extensive collections of BPR photographs and maps preserved in U.S. national archives, this presentation examines the visual construction of Mexico and Central America for the U.S. tourist. The region was framed as a new frontier for adventure and entrepreneurship, geographically close to the historical North American frontier yet rendered exotic through representations of nature, culture, and temporal difference. Simultaneously, it was imagined as a space of regeneration and leisure, and as an emerging tourist destination suitable for the U.S. middle-class family. Crucially, these images also shaped the figure of the U.S. tourist, defining appropriate roles, desires, and modes of engagement south of the border, thereby naturalizing hemispheric power relations through tourism.