The City Courteous:
Tourist Schools and the Engineering of Santa Fe’s Pro-Tourism
Civil Governance

Originally from Cicero, Indiana, Samuel Reitenour received his BA in History from Indiana University in 2021 and is currently a PhD Candidate at the University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP), where his research has focused on the economic and political histories of tourism destination communities. His dissertation, “Courtesy Is Cash: A History of the Tourist Economy in Santa Fe, New Mexico,” addresses tourism as a sector of the economy and a source of employment. It traces the processes through which residents were recruited to help establish and maintain Santa Fe’s tourism industry and follows residents’ competing visions of their city’s economic future across the twentieth century. He has conducted archival research in association with this project at seven repositories across New Mexico and Arizona and has presented on Santa Fe at the annual conferences of the Western History Association, the Historical Society of New Mexico, and the International Conference on Tourism and Leisure Studies. Outside of his dissertation project, Reitenour works as the Graduate Assistant for the Conference on Latin American History, serves as a contributing proofreader for Texas Tech University Press, and was recently selected as an Editorial Fellow for Sharing Stories from 1977: Putting the National Women’s Conference on the Map, a public humanities initiative at the University of Houston. He previously served as a member of the Research Team at Native Bound Unbound, a digital initiative aimed at recovering archival records of Indigenous enslavement across the Americas. Upon completion of his PhD, Reitenour will pursue a career in the publishing industry and has recently begun freelance copyediting.