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Desire among the Ruins: The Politics of Difference in American Visions of Porfirian Mexico

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 December 2012

JASON RUIZ
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Abstract

Travel to Mexico became instantly faster, smoother, and cheaper for Americans when workers finally linked US and Mexican rail lines in 1884. Following the opening of the international rail connection, Americans went south of the border in droves and produced a wide array of representations depicting Mexico under the dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz (1876–1911, a period known as the “Porfiriato”). Travelogues, picture postcards, stereographs, and magic-lantern slides with Mexican themes all circulated heavily in US popular culture during this time. This essay examines the politics of difference in these representations – chiefly travel writing and postcards – arguing that travelers and other observers played a crucial but overlooked role in popularizing the view of Mexico as a logical field for capitalist (and sometimes territorial) expansionism. By positioning Mexican bodies as both desirable and dangerous, I argue, the creators of travel discourse set the stage for contradictory and ambivalent views of Mexico that reverberate in the United States even today.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 46 , Issue 4 , November 2012 , pp. 919 - 940
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2012

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References

1 Montellano, Francisco, C. B. Waite, Fotófrafo (Mexico, DF: Grijalbo, 1994) 123Google Scholar.

2 It is difficult to ascertain exactly how many travelers from the United States entered Mexico during the Porfiriato, partly because the border was much more porous during that period than it is today. While I cannot account for the exact number US citizens who ventured into Mexico, the boom in travelogues and other representations of travel to Mexico – including the countless brochures, timetables, and photographs produced by US-owned rail lines in Mexico – suggests that the Mexican holiday became a popular new option for Americans of means.

3 I borrow this idea of Mexico as both close and alien from Streeby, Shelley, “Joaquín Murrieta and the American 1848,” in Rowe, John Carlos, ed., Post-nationalist American Studies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 166–96.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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10 Dozens of travelogues produced during the Porfirato and throughout the 1920s and 1930s acknowledge Waite. Others used Waite photographs without crediting him.

11 Respectively, these photographers hailed from the United States, France, and Germany. While the study at hand emphasizes American visions of Porfirian Mexico, it is important to note that Mexicans developed a rich photographic culture of their own during this time, one into which the Díaz regime tapped to establish and affirm its power. The work of Olivier Debroise, Mark Overmyer-Velázquez, and other scholars of photography in Mexico shows that scores of Mexican-owned studios operated in the country throughout the Porfiriato.

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15 I use the term “Indian” throughout this essay in an effort to mark (and not to reproduce) the erasure of ethnic diversity in Mexico in travelers' accounts and the collapsing of ethnic differences into a generic, monolithic category.

16 For particularly illuminating examples of travelogues by women see Blake, Mary Elizabeth and Sullivan, Margaret F., Mexico: Picturesque, Political, and Progressive (Boston: Lee and Shepard Publishers, 1888)Google Scholar and Wright, Marie Robinson, Picturesque Mexico (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott and Company, 1897)Google Scholar in addition to those mentioned in this essay.

17 The Birth of a Nation (dir. D. W. Griffith, Epoch Film Company, 1915).

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25 Some examples include such fare as Maid in America, Spanglish, and Quinceañera, which revises this trend by presenting a working-class queer Latino as the object of desire for his upwardly mobile gay white neighbors. I am especially inspired by Felicity Shaeffer-Grabiel's recent work on Latin American “cyberbrides” in my effort to understand the needy, desirable Latina. See Shaeffer-Grabiel, Felicity, “Flexible Technologies of Subjectivity and Mobility across the Americas,” American Quarterly, 58, 3 (Sept. 2006), 891–914CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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27 Ibid., 39, emphasis in original.

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29 Ibid., 193.

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33 In the book manuscript upon which this essay is based I discuss at length the emergence of the “manageable mestizo,” which some writers argued more adequately reflected the needs of American capital in Mexico. Some travelers even argued for the mestizo as an end to Indian difference, suggesting that if mestizo people would “associate” with “the white side of their family” (in a sort of armchair eugenics), the Indian could be eradicated in just a few generations and Mexico would be less racially distinct from the United States.

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35 Morrill, unnumbered Foreword.

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37 Ibid., 117.

38 Ibid., 105.

39 One prolific photographer who took many such images was Otis A. Aultman of El Paso, Texas, who crossed the border many times to photograph dead bodies after border skirmishes.

40 Amateur and professional photographers alike produced such images. While my focus here is on commercialized images, many Americans who lived and worked in Mexico made snapshots for their personal albums. See the P. S. Glenn Photograph Album, 1913, Benson Latin American Collection, University of Texas at Austin – the Glenn album depicts the bloody aftermath of the battles of Reynosa and Matamoros, including images of dead bodies lying the streets and waiting to be burned en masse.

41 James E. Long Photograph Collection, Benson Latin American Collection, University of Texas at Austin.

42 Chase Littlejohn Photograph Collection, Benson Latin American Collection, University of Texas at Austin.

43 Albert J. Schmidt Lantern Slide Collection, Benson Latin American Collection, University of Texas at Austin. A series produced by the McIntosh Stereopticon Company of Chicago included dozens of photographs of dead fighters from both sides of several conflicts, as well as photographs of leading figures in the war.

44 Chase Littlejohn Photograph Collection, Benson Latin American Collection, University of Texas at Austin, Image 45 (children), Image 46 (building), Image 47 (soldiers).

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