Placing Oneself

Ever since discovery of the Americas travel accounts about Latin America have proliferated, the majority of them written by Europeans. Neil L. Whitehead suggests that the importance of travel accounts about Latin America appears to derive from the fact that "the very first documents to emerge from the New World were travel accounts" (122). Today, however, there seem to be few texts written by Latin American authors and a scarcity of studies on Latin American travel writing. Indeed, Jason Wilson suggests that "there is not a strong tradition of Latin American empirical observation or of Latin American travel writing, and even less on travelling within the Latin American continent" (803). However, despite the apparent lack of recognition of travel writing in Latin America, there is a body of texts that belong to what is known as the 'travel chronicle' (crónica de viaje), which is, as Thea Pittman explains, the common term to describe a non-fictional narrative that tells the story of a journey ("Postmodernity..." 77). This type of narrative belongs to the peculiar genre of the crónica, that is, a hybrid type of writing located in between literature and journalism, in the same category of disciplines such as history, sociology, ethnography, etc.