The history books of America and Western Europe demonstrate their people as greedy, land-obsessed conquerors, always looking for more land to claim, be it occupied or not. The readers of these history books are taught that this quest for land was necessary and good—the more land claimed in the name of England, Spain, or anywhere in the West, the better. The land was exploited and was only looked at in terms of the potential gain it could bring its owner. After all the land that was fit to claim was claimed (and then subsequently fought over and reclaimed), the people of our past carved out our ideologies and began exemplifying what would be our way of life: a white, Christian patriarchy with a strong work ethic and an emphasis on capitalism and "freedom." In her book "On the Beaten Track," Lucy R. Lippard identifies the difference between a tourist and a traveler. A tourist, she says, is more constricted in terms of experience while a traveler is freer. While both are relatively upper class (not everyone can afford a vacation), what separates the two are their views of the land upon which they set foot: the tourist, as Jamaica Kincaid points out in “A Small Place,” sees the land as his "freedom," his property, while the traveler, like Sal Paradise or Dean Moriarty in “On the Road,” views the land as full of new experiences and how this newness relates to the Self.
Jack Kerouac's "On the Road" exemplifies perfectly a traveler's views and purposes for movement. The Beats of the 1950s were concerned with environmentalism and leaving the land pure and untouched. Instead of it being there for their pleasure, the Beats allowed the strange land and different culture to affect them in a certain type of spiritual and personal growth. They were spontaneous and open to experiences not incorporated into a travel schedule (for there generally wasn’t one). The Beats espoused a traveler's prerogatives by embracing the new experiences and trying to leave as few finger prints as possible.
“Many towns are not so much potential destinations as service stops along the way to more desirable places. Considered negligible, they are unseen, recalling tourism in its innocence, when travelers were strangers, providing entertainment for locals, when the passing tourists looked out upon views that were the same before they came and after they left,” (Lippard, 14).
Sal and Dean “passed through” places physically, as travelers, but allowed each place to affect them much more than that. They left things relatively how they were found, untouched (except for the women) with a yearning to understand and, if permissible, participate in the culture of their location. “There’s no suspicion here, nothing like that. Everybody’s cool, everybody looks at you with such straight brown eyes and they don’t say anything, just look, and in that look all of the human qualities are soft and subdued and still there,” Dean said of the people in Mexico. “Dig all the foolish stories you read about Mexico and the sleeping gringo and all that crap—and crap about the greasers and so on—and all it is, people here are straight and kind and don’t put down any bull. I’m so amazed by this,” (266). During their time in Mexico, neither Sal nor Dean had any expectations of the people or the land—only that it would be different. “Now, Sal, we’re leaving everything behind us and entering a new and unknown phase of things. All the years and troubles and kicks—and now this! so that we can safely think of nothing else and just go on ahead with our faces stuck out like this, you see, and understand the world as, really and genuinely speaking, other Americans haven’t done before us—they were here, weren’t they? The Mexican war. Cutting across here with cannon,” (264). Sal and Dean do not exploit their new surroundings in the way that Kincaid’s “tourist” exploits the land, but instead hold the differences in high regard and with and immeasurable respect: “the sun rose pure on pure and ancient activities of human life,” (266).
While Sal also exemplified the post-tourist in his constant struggle of how the land and the experience of being there related to the Self, he also had more respect for the land, recognizing that he did not own anything he experienced throughout his travels, except what he rarely bought with his own money. The Beats were known for being environmentalists and for being conscious of their influences. They were largely against popular consumerism and would instead trade or work for their necessities. After meeting and falling for Terry, she and Sal planned to pick grapes in Bakersfield, California to earn some money before moving back to New York. “We arrived in Bakersfield in late afternoon. The plan was to hit every fruit wholesaler in town. Terry said we could live in tents on the job. The thought of living in a tent and picking grapes in the cool California mornings hit me right. But there were no jobs to be had, and much confusions, with everybody giving us innumerable tips, and no job materialized,”(83). Because Sal and Dean only had limited resources, they were not vital to the San Francisco or Mexican life or economy. In fact, Sal finds that young women cotton picking in Mexico can accomplish more picking than he, a white male, can. Displaying an idealist attitude, Sal tried wherever he went to be incorporated into the everyday lives of the natives. In this sense, Sal and Dean were the antitheses of the modern day tourist who, in places such as Belize, Jamaica and Mexico, provides the main economic industry—his exploitation of the strange land and its people is vital to the economy of these places through his incessant consumerism and need for “all-inclusive packages” and souvenirs for friends and family back home.
Jamaica Kincaid addresses the tourist in all his ugliness in “A Small Place.” She points an unremorseful finger at “the tourist,” a position in which many of us, as Westerners have been. Ignorant of other cultures, the tourist has high expectations for a good time, and there are many factors that could ruin this: rainy or cold weather, unfriendly people, bad food, illness, etc. But, for the natives, this is another day. Kincaid explains the motives for a tourist’s movement “because being ordinary is already so taxing, and being ordinary takes all you have out of you, and though the words ‘I must get away’ do not actually pass across your lips, you make a leap from being that nice blob just sitting like a boob in your amniotic sac of the modern experience to being a person visiting heaps of death and ruin and feeling alive and inspired at the sight of it,” (16).
In Larry Krotz’s “Tourists: How Our Fastest Growing Industry is Changing the World,” he explains the drastic effect that tourism is having on the world, mostly poorer places in the world, places to which Westerners attempt their “escape”:
“What the marauding army of tourists primarily leave behind is a radically American culture. Riding in the travelers’ suitcases, western, basically American culture—sporting its other self-appointed guise as world or global popular culture—intrudes everywhere. It is both cart and horse, in advance of and as a result of, tourism. In some ways, the culture precedes the tourists in order to welcome them, to make them feel ‘at home.’ If it is believed, for instance, that the American traveler will only go where he or she can watch CNN, as the British masses earlier would only go where they could get chips with their meals, CNN will certainly (and quickly) find a way to be there… This has two effects, the first being that it changes the culture of the places visited. The second effect is that for the visitor, it becomes increasingly impossible to get away. If you are American, it is more and more difficult ever to leave America behind,” (195).
Ultimately, tourism to poverty-stricken nations is exploitation in its most extreme.
“A tourist is an ugly human being. You are not an ugly person all the time; you are not an ugly person ordinarily; you are not an ugly person day to day,” (14) Kincaid says of the tourist. He is only ugly when he comes to places like Kincaid’s homeland, Antigua, with the expectation that the land is at his disposal. When a tourist is on “holiday,” he tends to forget that there are natives of this strange land. He seems to forget that it is a strange land in general, coming with the expectation and assumption that commodities like television and T-shirts will be waiting for him. In the film “Life in Debt,” Kincaid narrates, reading an excerpt from “A Small Place”:
“For every native of every place is a potential tourist, and every tourist is a native of somewhere. Every native of everywhere lives a life of overwhelming and crushing banality and boredom and desperation and depression, and ever deed, good and bad, is an attempt to forget this,” (18).
This idea is juxtaposed over images of crispy, sunburned faces lounging on a beach. That’s what beaches are for, right? These same Westerners are pleasantly surprised upon exchanging their American dollars for some funny new coin and doubling their currency. With this instant increase in capital, tourists buy and spend and treat themselves nonstop. They stay at luxury suites, which were only built in these countries to please the tourists. They spend hundreds of dollars on cheap goods to help them remember that time they got away from it all in the tropical heat on a white sandy beach.
“Every native would like to find a way out, every native would like a rest, every native would like a tour,” Kincaid continues. “But some natives—most natives in the world—cannot go anywhere. They are too poor. They are too poor to go anywhere. They are too poor to escape the reality of their lives; and they are too poor to live properly in the place where they live, which is the very place you, the tourist, want to go—so when the natives see you, the tourist, they envy you, they envy your ability to leave your own banality and boredom, they envy your ability to turn their own banality and boredom into a source of pleasure for yourself,” (19).
But where are these natives of the foreign lands? They do not all work as tour guides. “Wednesday is the day everything changes over. On Wednesday the big chartered airliners from North America…make their turnarounds at Phillip Goldston International Airport [in Belize], where they pick up the seasoned veterans, holidayed-out, and leave behind new groups of fresh, pale, eager new faces,” writes Krotz (65). In places like Belize, destination locations that Krotz calls “flavors of the month,” the main industry is tourism. Businesses cater to these strangers and put a tremendous emphasis in making their patrons feel anything but “home.” At these destinations, tourists take advantage of the dry season that can have devastating effects on the local crops. They take for granted the bilingual locals who have learned to speak the language of the Other. The fact that all-inclusive luxury suites are not the lives that the locals lead does not even cross the mind of the tourist; they protect themselves from stepping foot into the ghettos of Kingston, Jamaica or Oaxaca, Mexico and only remain sunning in the beach or buying pieces of coral reefs to take home and show people back at the office. Ignorance plays a large part in tourisms popularity. The culture of the land is never taken into account (except, of course, for the food). Once a certain location catches on in terms of its paradise-like feel, the escaping tourists must move on like a herd in search of a watering hole. They feed the economy briefly and then bring their money elsewhere, to exploit a lesser-known tropical paradise.
While the difference of the views on land is largely different between tourists and travelers, views can be seen as equally selfish. While the Beats acknowledged the other cultures and their different ways of life, they still used them to relate to themselves, involving these differences in their personal and spiritual growth. However, if tourism were to come to a halt, many countries would be even more impoverished than at present and would have to rely on an entirely new mode of production. But perhaps if these people were made aware of the Other that they are visiting, the true nature of how these people live, they would spend their money in more pertinent ways: through shopping at farmer’s markets, experiencing both the city life and the relaxed beach life, and staying outside of the ritzy, Americanized resorts. If tourists, with all of their money, took the points of view of the traveler, much good could be done with a mutual respect: the money helping the economy and the appreciation of differences amongst how people live day to day. For, Jamaica Kincaid was not placing the blame on Sal or Dean, who neither helped nor harmed their destinations; she places the blame on the ugly tourist with expectations of perfection that the natives are forced to achieve for the traveler’s pleasure. Just as a tourist stops being ugly when they stop being a tourist, according to Kincaid, a tourist becomes a traveler when they stop expecting the foreign lands to provide for them an all-inclusive experience.
