During the nineteenth century, when Latin American nations were seeking ways to define home territory as distinct from their colonial legacies, some leading intellectuals sought inspiration in a modernizing hemispheric neighbor, the United States. “Northern Sights: Gender and Race in Latin American Nineteenth-Century Travel Narratives of the United States” analyzes how nine letrados interrogated gender and race as they related to imaginary geographies. By examining multiple and even contradictory socially-constructed representations of the “United States Man” (Chapter 1), the “United States Woman” (Chapter 2), and “The United States as a Multiethnic Nation” (Chapter 3), this project challenges the predominant North to South trajectory in travel writing studies that implicitly considers Latin America to be a passive recipient of cultural modernity developed elsewhere. Drawing from Benedict Anderson, I argue that travelogues contributed to the consolidation of the nation-building project and to letrado dominance within this project. This study, comprised of three chapters with an introduction and a conclusion, illuminates how these authors established their positions in nascent national canons as well as challenged notions of United States exceptionalism through the genre of travel literature.