How we love academic perspectives on American pop culture, especially when they relate to travel and travel writing. This interesting article, written by University of Pennsylvania associate history professor Amy S. Greenberg, argues that Survivor Guatemala: The Maya Empire has more to do with American empire than anything. She traces America’s fascination with the tropics back through history—back, in fact, to antebellum travel writing. “Survivor was a sequel from the start,” she writes. “The appeal of the tropics as idealized location for the triumph of American enterprise and individualism is nothing new and, in fact, is a reoccurring theme in periods of American imperial expansionism.”

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In his essay Why We Travel, Pico Iyer writes that we travel, in part, to “learn more about the world than our newspapers will accommodate.” I was reminded of that recently while traveling in Mexico. Aside from migration-related news, we in the U.S. see little coverage of life south of the border. But it seems that our newspapers don’t accommodate much news about Central America even when it involves a major disaster. That was brought into relief for some recently after Hurricane Stan hit Mexico, Guatemala and El Salvador.

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Lonnae O’Neale Parker’s 7-year-old daughter, like a lot of American kids, was growing up measuring her worth by her collection of electronic gadgets, Powerpuff Girls and all things Barbie. “Look at these fragile children,” Parker thought to herself, “with their underdeveloped sense of self-reliance and overdeveloped sense of entitlement.” So she took her daughter, Sydney, on a month-long visit to Guatemala, in part “to dematerialize my material girl,” she writes in a recent Washington Post story.  Her touching account of their trip details Sydney’s introduction to a way of life very different from their own. In one instance, a beggar asks Sydney for her Coke, and Parker wrestles with just how to explain the grinding poverty to her child. “I’m not sure I had the words to let a 7-year-old know how bad off you must be to beg for soda from tourists,” Parker writes. “Some things, I decided, my child would have to process on her own.”