Postcards in the Porfirian imaginary.

• Date: 22 March 2007
• Author: Osorio, Alejandra
• Published date: 22 March 2007
• Author: Osorio, Alejandra

BY STUDYING THE POSTCARD DURING THE DICTATORSHIP OF PORFIRIO DIAZ, A PERIOD know n in Mexico as the Porfiriato (1877-1911), (2) I will attempt to reveal the ways in which the mass production of a series of celebrated representations of Mexicanness established a particular imaginary around competing nationalist themes of progress and tradition.

The postcard owes its specificity to its utility: designed to send both an image and text, the postcard breaks with the use of the private letter and exposes the other side of the card to the general public. It is no longer dedicated to the guarding of words and delicately perfumed pages, but rather to the selection of a particular image among many others and the few words that a signature finalizes--words that differ greatly from those of the letter writer of days past. As Huerta, by way of Walter Benjamin, reminds us, open text and serial images are the imaginaries that ordered the modernity of the times. The photograph first, and the postcard later, inaugurated the era of the mechanical reproduction of art: "We don't care much about making or discovering for ourselves these small artifacts that please our aesthetic intimacy. Now they come already made and in series" (Huerta, 1982: 10).

The "golden age" of postcard production and consumption coincides with Porfirio Diaz's dictatorship. The Diaz regime praised European intellectual modernity and U.S. technological modernization. For example, his inner-circle advisers were a group of intellectuals called the "cientificos" (scientists), mainly thinkers returning to Mexico after studying abroad. Also noteworthy was the substantial significance of foreign investment in Diaz's modernization schemes, such as the U.S. financing of the railroad system. However, Diaz has been known for the racialization of his cultural politics. He had an obsession with all things European, mainly French, as the imagined root of all things "civilized." Perhaps this is why he hid his own Indian heritage, which was largely disguised in official portraits presenting him as "white."

I will attempt to shed light on the modes of visual representation, both social and governmental, that created and re-created a particularly Mexican social and cultural imaginary during the Diaz era. The study of postcards is of vital importance during a period of strong state normalization, as was the case during the Porfiriato. Postcards are vital instruments through which to investigate the forms of national representation that, under the concept of state progress and modernization, institutionalized a series of cultural goods and homogenized symbols of the national imaginary. The postcard, I argue, contributed significantly to the state's discourse on how, what, and who should be represented as "typically Mexican."

Images Inundate Daily Life at the End of the 19th Century

I begin with the assumption that our current relationship with images is determined by the technologization of certain arts and occupations, facilitated by the longing for modernity found at the heart of society at the end of the 19th century. If the printing press had already revolutionized the printed medium beginning in the 16th century, it was not until the 18th century that two inventions would irrevocably massify the visual and imaginary world: the perfecting of lithography and the development of the photograph.

Lithography allowed for the first mechanized reproduction of illustrations and was used to develop a vast variety of magazines and illustrated periodicals. Then photography, and the photomechanical processes derived from it, permitted the faithful capture and reproduction of what the human eye perceived as "reality," significantly altering all representational arts up to that moment. The perfection and distribution of products derived from these media--lithography in the middle of the 19th century and photography and photomechanics at the end of the same century--gave rise to a new relationship between the image and the visual imaginary: that which one imagined as "real" depended increasingly on verification by the image. Together, these advances in image-making and their implications for the social perception of reality marked profound cultural and social changes at the heart of society at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries (Ortiz, 2003: 26).

Before mass reproduction was possible, the image had been a source of social and official validation, maintaining a sacred and distant character. In the words of Waiter Benjamin (2004), images still conserved the "aura" that kept them on a spectrum far removed from social life. The possibility of reproducing not just one, but thousands of copies of almost any image robbed the original of its private character and revealed its private life to the public eye. This, in terms of social life in that era, meant it attained a commonness that in 20 years would appear in advertisements, posters, and ephemeral publicity, as well as in the exchange and collection of serialized images, in albums of family history, and in illustrated print media, to name a few.

Photographic reproduction of images massified them, while actually serving to homogenize the world under aesthetic and technological criteria established by the European powers. Furthermore, this practice helped to fundamentally change the relationship between an event and its representation: to achieve social verisimilitude, that which happens should now be registered photographically.

The photograph altered a substantial relationship to "reality": only that which is photographically documented actually exists. Truth and existence are subject to the photographic print. From this perspective, to operate a camera meant to be a visual witness to the truth, which could no longer be sustained in any other way or through any other format. From the beginning, the photographic image served to register anything that needed to be authenticated or, at whatever level, documented or promoted, to obtain validity and social prominence: social life in the big cities, political and governmental activities, family events, new products and services, spectacles and their stars, and the infrastructure of progress.

Therefore, in the early 1900s people in the Mexican cities such as Puebla, Guadalajara, Merida, Zacatecas, Guanajuato, and the capital, Mexico City, had already established some sort of link with this series of images, which inundated their public and private lives daily and had diverse implications for their symbolic imaginaries. The context in which postcards became popular had much to do with the new relationship between "reality and...