The automobile tour for Americans in the 1930s was a way to discover their country. Through tourism, they could grasp the notion of nation in new ways. Tourism is a ritual of citizenship and Americans should be thinking in terms of behavior and belief, values and lifestyles, symbols and meanings.1
Migrants brought their traditions with them. The automobile travelers also brought and shared their culture wherever they would go. It was a symbiose where both residents and travelers learned from each other. The migrants had no choice than learning from those new places and it brought diversity to the West.
The guidebooks reflect the expansion of tourist opportunities and the changing concepts of the nation. They were addressed to all Americans.2
I decided to map the American Guide “California: a guide to the Golden State”. I oriented my research around the theaters in California throughout the guide. The idea was to get a better understanding of which theaters and plays were highlighted by the government in the 1930s.
The Green Book was a travel guide published between 1936 and 1966 that listed hotels, restaurants, bars, gas stations, etc. where black travelers would be welcome.
The photograph below represents a screenshot taken from black travelers’ friendly places between Los Angeles and San Francisco represented by the heatmap view. Some places concentrated in those two cities are similar to the one we can find in the American Guide.
Nevertheless, places in between differ. The places visited by the American Guide are on the coast while the ones from the Green Book are deeper in the lands.
This naturally leads to understand that segregation and racial bias impacted tourism. Indeed, African American would discover a different road trip from what the American Guide would recommend. African American activists used maps and visualizations to understand and explain detrimental effects of slavery in the country.3
With the Green Book and the American Guide mapped, we can also visualize the inequalities related to tourism. African Americans would not get to see the same place, restaurants, bars and much more. These inequalities create a two-face tourism.
Black and white travelers were looking for entertainment and cultural exchange. They wanted to discover their country and see what regions had to offer. Nevertheless, it is obvious that African Americans did not have the chance to enjoy the same itineraries. Tourism was also marked by social inequalities.
Geographic Information Systems (GIS) help to geolocate social justice movements, visualize historical and present racism, and highlight racial issues.
Thanks to StoryMapJS tool, I was able to map the American Guide of California. Mapping some places of the tours helped to come up with a new understanding of the Guide and the life of people at the time. We can click on an area of interest and discover what happened at the time and interact with different kind of sources.
When exploring primary sources spatially, we can better understand their organization and process. As a matter of fact, mapping the American Guide of California helped to visualize the itinerary followed which was determining for the government in the 1930s.
