This article analyzes the Romantic quest for disappeared indigenous societies in travel texts by John Lloyd Stephens, particularly in Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas and Yucatan (1841) and Incidents of Travel in Yucatan (1843). Stephens asserts the Imperial presence of the United States in his Humboldtian narrative, which outlines his project of recovery and appropriation of these ruins for his envisioned Museum of the Americas. Through his self-representation as a Hero who uncovers the mysteries of the New World, Stephens projects Orientalist imaginative geographies onto Mexico and Central America in order to contain these new spaces within the U.S. nationalist project of capitalist expansion and political and cultural hegemony.