Tourist Itineraries

Abstract

This essay offers a rumination on the many routes that offer to solve the unfinished business of modernity, unfinished business marked by the experience of nostalgia, the complex emotional mélange of longing, desire, and history. I use autoethnography to untangle the webs of signification around my relationship to Europe in general, and Spain in particular, as a site of personal “heritage,” linking its role in my performance of self with the production of otherness that is necessary to construct a self. I incorporate my memories of the Audrey Hepburn film Sabrina, which, along with many other classic Hollywood films and literature, provided an imaginative resource for a romanticized vision of Europe. This is complicated by a diasporic Cuban identity that circulates ideas of longing and home along the routes of Hispanidad—the cultural and migratory navigation between the spaces of Latin America, the United States, and the Iberian Peninsula.