‘Your home—away from home’: Tourist homes and hospitality as resistance

Joseph Cheers speaks with Ethan Bottone about his research inot the Green Book.

Abstract

Tourist homes, private residences that rented rooms to traveling guests, were once a popular form of tourist accommodation in the United States. Reaching their peak in the early 20th century, tourist homes largely became obsolete as hotels and motels were able to provide relatively inexpensive and standardized forms of hospitality. As a result of their meteoric rise and fall, and the private nature of the lodging, tourist homes have been neglected in studies of historical tourism and hospitality. However, tourist homes occupied an important position in providing welcome and other forms of hospitality to travelers, particularly Black Americans, in the first half of the 20th century, and this role deserves to be recovered and recognized. An exploration of tourist homes listed in the Green Book, a Black American-centric travel guide published during the Jim Crow Era, reveals that tourist homes not only lodged travelers overnight, but also significantly contributed to forms of mobile resistance against white supremacy. Specifically, through a conceptualization of hospitality as resistance, tourist homes enabled opportunities for Black Americans to gain economic and social capital through processes of welcoming and establishing ‘Black counterpublic spaces’. Particularly through constructions of home-like environments, tourist homes presented spaces that served as moorings within larger mobility networks, countering white supremacist attempts to immobilize and disadvantage Black Americans. Given these contributions to resistance and Black mobility, tourist homes deserve to be included in studies of tourism, hospitality, and Black geographies as important sites of welcoming, resistance, and resilience.

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