Pátzcuaro, Romantik und Kommerzialität (Pátzcuaro, Romanticism and Commercialism), the history of the city of Pátzcuaro in Michoacán, is the collective labor of a University of Hamburg student study group that visited Pátzcuaro in the summer of 1990. The students analyzed the growth of the city and its tourist trade and reflected on their research method.
This book is a useful guide for any student study group because it exposes the process by which this group explored the city’s history, language, sociology, geography, folk customs, and culture. The method involved gathering information through bibliographical, archival, and interview sources. Chapters 3, 6, and 8 explain the methodological aspects; chapters 1, 2, and 7 provide historical and contemporary descriptions of Pátzcuaro; and chapters 4 and 5 (over 50 percent of the book) present the data and analysis of Pátzcuaro’s hotel and tourist business. Twenty-seven photos, three tables, and five maps (including two city plans, one from 1895 and one from 1977) help tell the story.
The study divides the hotels (currently 32) between those small and midsized establishments often run as family enterprises (a staff made up 50 percent or more of extended family members), which serve largely national travelers, and other mid-sized and larger establishments, usually with less than 50 percent family members on the staff and catering to foreign tourists. While this slim volume does supply some history of Pátzcuaro, which was a village in the colonial era, the specific research aim of the study group was to describe the impact of tourism on the development of the city. Domestic and foreign travelers have stopped in Pátzcuaro since the seventeenth century, when pack trains passed through. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the city and the surrounding region benefited from the lumber industry. Fishing on Lake Pátzcuaro and the presence of handicrafts and Indian culture on Janitzio Island in the lake were important elements in the growth of the tourist trade, stimulating the related businesses of fishing excursions, visits to Indian villages, restaurants serving local specialties, and folkloric performances.
Tourism grew rapidly between the 1920s and the 1950s, fed by U.S. artists, intellectuals, and middle-class travelers. Foreign tourism continued to dominate the area in the 1960s and early 1970s, but economic disorder and violence in the Michoacán state elections and elsewhere in Mexico beginning in the late 1970s greatly reduced that trend. Tourism revived in the late 1970s and 1980s through visits by Mexican pilgrims and vacationers. Pátzcuaro’s population grew to 17,300 in 1970 and exploded to about 120,000 in 1990. The rapid growth seems related to the economic downturn of the 1980s and the earthquakes that hit Mexico City in the middle of that decade. Some families apparently decided to seek a livelihood outside the capital.
This monograph is useful for scholars who want more information about the consequences of tourism for an individual site. Furthermore, it has didactic utility for students who plan to undertake foreign field research.
