By its very nature, the art of traveling removes tourists from their home culture and places them temporarily in a different cultural milieu, whether in an adjacent city or in a village halfway across the world.
- McKercher and du Cros, Cultural Tourism: The Partnership between Tourism and Cultural Heritage Management 2002
Over the course of my lifetime, I have been interested in travel and tourist activities. With our modern ability to span the globe in a matter of hours, the astounding rates of tourism and its importance to understanding both local and global processes have seemingly become intertwined with our pursuit of daily existence. For the city of San Diego, California, the Visitor Industry is the third largest revenue generator, following manufacturing and military. Because of the industry’s influence and significance to San Diego’s continuing urban development, it is essential to assess tourism’s impact on the spaces and people that serve to attract all of these visitors. Moreover, linkages between tourism, space, history, and commoditization are investigated across locations, but it is within a city setting that anthropologists have a unique opportunity to study the varied activities that shape a dense, multifaceted and peopled environment.
For this discussion, I would like to focus on a place in San Diego where I conducted my thesis research: Old Town San Diego State Historic Park (referred to as Old Town, OTSDSHP, and the Park). OTSDSHP is a historic urban public park that has developed over the years as a popular tourist destination in San Diego. It is a 12-acre California State Park situated in the heart of San Diego and averages over 5 million visitors annually. Old Town is advertised as the “birthplace of California” and is described as a living history site that uses human interpreters, as well as symbolic representations, to bring to life and teach about the past in our current present. The Park is dedicated to public education, but business operations – with pragmatic concerns of visitor attendance rates, stretching limited budgets, and upholding concessionaire guidelines – continue to muddle the effectiveness of education through history and entertainment. The Park’s “historical significance”, its Interpretive Period, encompasses three unique stages that include major, permanent transformations to Southern California’s landscape: the Mexican Period (1821 – 1846), the Transition Period (1846 – 1856), and the American Period (1856 – 1872), as well as displaying a tad bit of American Indian presence throughout the years. OTSDSHP hinges its continuing evolution as a contemporary tourist location, complete with “authentic” buildings, material culture, employee attire, performances, and cuisine, on this 50 year Interpretive Period.
OTSDSHP can be described as a dreamscape produced for visual consumption and is a place in which Park operators inscribe cultural narratives into Old Town’s built environment. These cultural narratives are played out through the Park’s structural layout, period attire clad employees, multiple commercial operations, as well as Park tours and themed special events held throughout the year. What makes OTSDSHP intriguing is that visitors continue to swarm through Old Town’s buildings, engaging with historical interpreters who tell stories about ourselves by talking about what we imagine the past to have been. San Diego history continues to breathe through present tourist activities, and is constructed by our present ideologies and beliefs about who we are today and who we were (or ideally should have been) in the past. This complex array of placed and misplaced histories, narratives, and personalities all coming together in a distinct location is really quite captivating.
Although OTSDSHP is a distinct location, the Park is representative of the city of San Diego, other living history sites across the nation, and urban public spaces abroad, as well as being tied to larger global processes of theming, commoditization, and tourism. This is because physical spaces, structures, and cultural constructions serve as metaphors for larger populations and environment. I also believe that the displayed themes at Old Town symbolize even more because of Old Town’s setting within the large urban area of San Diego. The exotic, fetishized elements are additionally highlighted because Old Town takes visitors away from surrounding busy city life and transports them not only in place, but also through time. Scholars write that many tourists traveling to living history sites are symbolically transported into actually believing that they are a part of an unspoiled and authentic community. Although spaces are obviously updated with functioning toilets, ATM machines, and electronic cash registers, Old Town makes the stage look authentic through buildings and activities of employees in period attire specific to the Old Town Interpretive Period.
As cultural consumers, visitors are attracted to places that portray particular themes and depictions of life. These places are influenced by cultural norms and trends, putting on display to the public modified and favorable versions of reality. The theming of Old Town’s space is not simply to make the place look respectable, but also to display a particular image that embodies something more than itself. It functions in a fluctuating consumer environment, playing off visitor desires and their willingness to accept the stories told through theming as real, meaningful, and authentic. In Old Town San Diego, important connections are made through the commoditization of San Diego history and by unifying ideas and symbols to create a joyful location to visit. Although the actual history can be important, it is not as significant as how history is reshaped and subsequently interpreted by the ephemeral visitors. Even though tourists have not experienced the 1800s westward expansion and settlement themselves, their participation at Old Town provides a sense of place and identity.
Tourism in Southern California has always had a dual nature. It has been part of the development of a physical infrastructure, while also combining goods, settlers, businessmen, and tourists with the exploration of land. Furthermore, close ties between place building and image building endure, creating a close link between the development and continual reinvention of Southern California’s physical landscapes and social environments. It is important to remember that Old Town is not necessarily creating an artificial fantasy (because the area does indeed have an actual history), but rather staging a version of it in the real past, as documented by experts and historians, with modern amenities to ensure visitor comfort and positive visitor experience. The Park plays off visitor desires in order to continue operations and produce an imagined, historical California landscape and social environment considered to be a multi-faceted form of education and recreation to all who visit.
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Originally published in Anthropologies, Issue 2: Anthropologies of Tourism
www.anthropologiesproject.org
Tuesday, May 3, 2011
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