Mexican Postcards

In this first translation in book form of his work, Latin American social commentator Carlos Monsivais presents an extraordinary chronicle of contemporary life south of the Rio Grande, ranging over subjects as various as Latino hip hop, Dolores del Rio, boleros, and melodrama. Monsivais's chronicles are laconic and satirical, taking as a constant theme the conflicts between Mexican and North American culture and between modern and traditional ways of life.

Just a trolley ride from El Paso, Ciudad Juárez was a popular destination in the early 1900s. Enticing and exciting, tourists descended on this and other Mexican border towns to browse curio shops, dine and dance, attend bullfights, and perhaps escape Prohibition America. In Postcards from the Chihuahua Border Daniel D. Arreola captures the exhilaration of places in time, taking us back to Mexico’s northern border towns of Cuidad Juárez, Ojinaga, and Palomas in the early twentieth century. Drawing on more than three decades of archival work, Arreola uses postcards and maps to unveil the history of these towns along west Texas’s and New Mexico’s southern borders. Postcards offer a special kind of visual evidence. Arreola’s collection of imagery and commentary about them shows us singular places, enriching our understandings of history and the history of change in Chihuahua. No one postcard tells the entire story. But image after image offers a collected view and insight into changing perceptions. Arreola’s geography of place looks both inward and outward. We see what tourists see, while at the same time gaining insight about what postcard photographers and postcard publishers wanted to be seen and perceived about these border communities. Postcards from the Chihuahua Border is a colorful and dynamic visual history. It invites the reader to time travel, to revisit another era—the first half of the last century—when these border towns were framed and made popular through picture postcards.

"Postcards from the Sonora Border: Visualizing Place through a Popular Lens, 1900s-1950s examines the urban landscapes of Mexican border cities through picture postcards. This volume aims to capture the evolution of Sonora border towns over time, and create a sense of visual "time travel" for the reader by relying on Arreola's personal collection of postcards"--Provided by publisher.

Postcards from the Baja California Border uses popular historical imagery--the vintage postcard--to tell a compelling, visually enriched geographical story about the border towns of Baja California.

Selection of art from sacred pre-Columbian book teems with figures of kings, warriors, priests, sacrificial victims, and mysterious images.

The authors are particularly interested in the picture postcard as a source of historical documentation. This collection is thoroughly annotated and nicely produced.

A history in postcards of Mexican tourist towns in the first half of the twentieth century, with nearly two hundred illustrations. Between 1900 and the late 1950s, Mexican border towns came of age both as tourist destinations—in some cases by luring Americans who wanted to escape Prohibition—and as emerging cities. Commercial photographers produced thousands of images of their streets, plazas, historic architecture, and tourist attractions, which were reproduced as photo postcards. Daniel Arreola has amassed one of the largest collections of these border town postcards, and in this book he uses this amazing visual archive to offer a new way of understanding how the border towns grew and transformed themselves in the first half of the twentieth century, as well as how they were pictured to attract American tourists. Postcards from the Río Bravo Border presents nearly two hundred images of five towns on the lower Río Bravo: Matamoros, Reynosa, Nuevo Laredo, Piedras Negras, and Villa Acuña. Using multiple images of sites within each city, Arreola tracks changes both within the cities as places and in the ways in which they’ve been pictured for tourist consumption. He also shows how postcard images, when systematically and chronologically arranged, can tell us a great deal about how Mexican border towns have been viewed over time. This innovative visual approach demonstrates that historical imagery, no less than text or maps, can be assembled to tell a fascinating geographical story. “This is masterful cultural geography with rich visual materials, delivered in a unique and compelling fashion.” —Journal of Latin American Geography

A truly popular art form, the glamorous paintings of Mexican calendar girls have a long and fascinating historyas advertisements, enticements, and emblems of Mexican cultural heritage and pride. The result of years of research, this playful and informative book reproduces more than 150 vibrantly colorful calendar images, plus archival photographs and other materials that illuminate their creation. A fully bilingual text gives an overview of the calendars' social and cultural history, along with biographies of the talented artists who created them. Also including a foreword by the renowned Mexican cultural critic Carlos Monsivis, Mexican Calendar Girls presents this popular and delightful art as never before.