Experience World Class Fishing Along Mexican Coastlines

The first of the three advertisements that I will analyze discursively were featured in the September/October 2009 issue of ELITE Traveler magazine. In this issue, the Mexico advertisement takes up a total of six pages! The six pages are adorned with not only pictures of Mexican waters, boats, docks, beaches, giant marlins, coastlines, beach fronts, and luxurious resort accommodations, but a hefty amount of text anchoring the pictures in description of the experiences to be had at Mexican fishing sites. Quite contrasting visual imagery than what we are constantly bombarded with within mainstream media's negative portrayal of Mexico that I mentioned on my home page (both visually and textually within newspapers and magazines).

In fact, it is this new visual imagery that is utilized by the Tourism board to seduce new travelers. The theme of this particular ad is the unique experiences of fishing to be had while in Mexico. The experiences offered vary from regular fishing, fly-fishing, sport fishing, trophy angling, and participation in rich fishing tournaments. The first of the six page ad (displayed to the left) displays a half page photograph of a practically cloudless blue sky hovering above rocky green cliffs that run down into blue, crisp ocean water. Also pictured in the image is what appears to be a large deep sea fishing boat. Within the remaining pages of the ad, similar images of blue skies and ocean water, fishing boats, and sandy beaches are depicted. What could be more enticing than these beautiful images?

At this point I find it particularly interesting to point out how these analogous images of Mexico's fishing experiences pose drastically similar visuality to the ways that both French and British travel writers of the early 1800's successfully described the new tourist destination of Algeria (an island off the coast of France), and with these writings gained international exposure. In her article entitled: Algeria in and out of the frame: Visuality and Cultural Tourism in the Nineteenth Century , Deborah Cherry explains how Algeria became the "mise-en-scene" for an abundant amount of paintings, photographs, etc, as a kind of tourism "in which visual pleasures and ocular excitements were at a premium", significant too, were the exchanges between the relays between elite and popular forms, the intermediality of this visualization of Algeria. Also conspicuous was the incursion of the visual, the introduction of Western visual systems that not only framed but made intelligible a strange and unfamiliar land" (41). (41).

Although at first site this quote might seem like a mouthful, it offers the basis upon why the six-page fishing advertisement incorporates many different sized photographs (described earlier) to adorn the descriptive fishing narrative (like the ones placed towards the right). These represent the visual pleasures paralleling the photographs describing the Algeria beach scene mentioned by Cherry. Furthermore, the narratives in the ad describing the "richest fishing tournament on the planet", or the "jet-set locale" of Cancun, or the "best of the best in big-game fishing", all represent the continual high- end Mexican fishing experiences only reserved for elite travelers parallel the relays "between elite and popular forms" (41) expressed in Algeria's tourism narratives during the early 1800's. The last paralleling strategy used by the tourism board that I suspect represents the seductive effort behind such "fun in the sun" images are how they, like the early touristic images of Algeria, display western visual systems to encase a comprehensible framing around an unfamiliar environment, (in this case Mexico's best fishing coastlines).

I would like to turn your attention to the right to help explain what I mean when I mention the western framing of these ads. the Elite Experiences fishing ad display Caucasian families sharing fishing moments, and taking in the sun. These ads also cultivate western perception of beach culture by displaying blue lined parasols along sandy shores (displayed one left side of second page), tourists snorkeling amongst clear blue water (pictured at far left side of second page), and Caucasian families enjoying fishing amongst luxurious fishing boats. Starkly similar to the Algerian visual imagery displaying "Europeans travelling through the terrain, walking, on horseback, by carriage, or painting and sketching" (Cherry 53).

Furthering Cherry's theory of framing, Jacques Derrida, defines the practice of framing pictures according to western perception as "pictorializing" which attempted to enclose "Algerian land and peoples within the frameworks of Western aesthetics and visual conventions. The aesthetic is of paramount importance in the 'worlding' of Algeria, for it is one of the mechanisms that produce the work of art as art, which make it 'into an object to be understood' as art" (54). Yet again we find the Mexico Elite Experiences Ads correlating to the photographs and art depictions of Algeria 200 years before because they frame foreign Mexican coastlines as recognizable places familiar to tourists.
The striking commonalities present between Mexico's tourism fishing ad and early Algerian touristic writing and art depictions is that they both represent the ways in which specific locations of the earth were pictorially or textually described as places to be seen and experienced by many. Along with these representations, both touristic displays make attempts at seducing tourists to both locations included framing pictures and texts that appealed to the desires of international tourists abroad. They both serve as testament to the interrelationship of visual culture and tourism, and the ways in which they both depend on each other to captivate travelers the world over.

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Cherry, Deborah. "Algeria In and Out of the Frame: Visuality and Cultural Tourism in the Nineteenth Century." Visual Culture and Tourism (2003): 41-58.