La construcción de una imagen turística para la ciudad de Buenos Aires en las guías de viaje de la primera mitad del siglo XX

Abstract

Nowadays, the tourist industry offers us travel destinations through certain repeated images to be fixed as iconic. When thinking about Buenos Aires, the obelisk, the Plaza de Mayo and the Palace of Congress are some of these places proposed as city representations. So, at what point did these images emerge? What were the selection criteria? To whom were they meant for? What did they say (and still say) about the city? We start from the hypothesis that there is a "touristic image" of Buenos Aires that accompanied the construction of the nation-state, but also was part of the development of new technologies and the increasing commodification of leisure in a context of the emergence of mass society. In view of the importance of the travel guides in this process, we analyze a series of photographs that, circulating in reading materials under various denominations ("traveler's manual", "traveler's guide", "guidebook”) intended to show the city to potential visitors. There we observe which tales and images were selected and how they were organised, taking into account the need to show a modern and cosmopolitan city.

Keywords

• tourism
• Buenos Aires
• urban history
• tourist image
• tourist guides