Silvia Rodriguez refers to this visual consumption (equally applicable to a painted landscape or sightseeing tour) as the “tourist gaze,” describing it as a “romantic gaze” that comes from “a position of middle-class privilege and seeks an experience of ‘solitude, privacy, and a personal, semi-spiritual relationship with the object of the gaze.’” She adds, “The core whiteness of this gaze lies not only in imperialist nostalgia or antimodern escapism, but, most importantly, in the selectively racialized landscape it projects.” Sylvia Rodriguez, “Tourism, Difference, and Power,” in The Culture of Tourism, the Tourism of Culture: Selling the Past to the Present in the American Southwest, ed. Hal Rothman (Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 2003), 188.