:Blessed with Tourists: The Borderlands of Religion and Tourism in San Antonio.

In his introduction, Thomas S. Bremer does two things. First, he takes note of the similarities between the practices of tourists and the practices of religious adherents. In both cases, he argues, we find a deep attachment to particular places; a desire for authenticity and aesthetically pleasing experiences; the articulation of some particular identity; and an emphasis on the “commodification of objects, experiences, and even people.” Second, he states his overall analytic goal, which is to explore the ways in which religion and tourism intersect in one particular context: the missions of San Antonio, Texas. The main problem with this book, unfortunately, is that the bulk of the material presented bears only a tenuous tie to this goal. Chapter one provides an overview of the settlement of San Antonio, with a focus on the missions established there, from the early colonial period through the late nineteenth century, and the ways in which San Antonio was—and was not—made accessible to tourists. Chapter two looks specifically at the emergence of the Alamo (Mission San Antonio) as a tourist site. There are a few brief remarks about the anti‐Catholic sentiments implicit in the accounts of the Alamo developed for tourists, and about attempts by Texans of Mexican descent to provide alternate versions of the Alamo narrative, but for the most part religion is not central to the discussion. Rather Bremer focuses on the rapid deterioration of the original buildings (occasioned in part by the fact that early tourists took away small bits and pieces of stone as souvenirs), and on the various disputes over commercialization of the site and how best to commemorate the 1836 battle. Chapter three provides an overview of the process by which mission sites other than the Alamo came to be preserved as tourist sites. Bremer's discussion here focuses heavily on the contributions made by particular individuals (notably Father Francis Bouchu, Ethel Wilson Harris, and Archbishop Robert E. Lucey). Chapter four looks mainly at the attempts to inject religious elements into the experience of the HemisFair 1968, the world fair held in San Antonio in 1968. Since most of these attempts were unsuccessful (in the end, Bremer notes, most people who attended the fair could not recall the presence of religious events, even though some such events were staged), I half expected that Bremer would use this case to identify the conditions that need to be in place for religion and tourism to merge effectively. Unfortunately, the closest that he comes to this sort of speculation is the suggestion that it would have cost too much money.