'Consumers of good tastes' marketing modernity in Northern Mexico, 1890-1910

Mexican Studies - Estudios Mexicanos

Volumn 13, Issue 2, 1997, Pages 227-269

  Bunker, Steven B ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA   (Canada)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 84963774068     PISSN: 07429797     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/1052016     Document Type: Review

References (118)

1. Monterrey News, 17 September 1910, 1
2. See, for example, Stephen H. Haber, Industry and Underdevelopment: The Industrialization of Mexico, 1890-1940 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989);
3. and Mario Cerutti, Burguesía, capitales e industria en el norte de México: Monterrey y su ámbito regional (1850-1910) (Monterrey: Alianza Editorial, 1992).
4. Two recent efforts to analyze a consumer culture in Mexico include Nora Pérez-Rayón, "La publicidad en México a fines del siglo XIX: Expresión del progreso económico y la modernidad porfirista, transmisora de nuevos valores y modelos culturales," Sociológica 9, 26(September 1994):195-222;
5. William H. Beezley, "The Porfirian Smart Set Anticipates Thorstein Veblen in Guadalajara," in Rituals of Rule, Rituals of Resistance: Public Celebrations and Popular Culture in Mexico, ed. William H. Beezley, Cheryl English Martin, and William E. French (Wilmington, Delaware: SR Books, 1994), 173-90.
6. For more information on the gente decente and their developmentalist ideology, see Knight, The Mexican Revolution, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), especially vol. 2, 510-511;
7. William E. French, "Prostitutes and Guardian Angels: Women, Work, and the Family in Porfirian Mexico," Hispanic American Historical Review 72, 4(November 1992):529-53;
8. William H. Beezley, Judas at the Jockey Club and Other Episodes of Porfirian Mexico (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 3y1987).
9. For artisan efforts to gain membership in respectable society, see Alan Knight, "The Working Class and the Mexican Revolution, c. 1900-1920," Journal of Latin American Studies 16(May 1984):51-79;
10. and William E. French," 'Progreso Forzado'. Workers and the Inculcation of the Capitalist Work Ethic in the Parral Mining District," in Rituals of Rule, Rituals of Resistance, 191-212.
11. Knight, The Mexican Revolution, vol. 1, 40.
12. Monterrey News, August 29, 1905, 4. The term "consumers of good taste" arose in a newspaper article praising the sophistication of patrons who imbibed the various award-winning beers of the Cervecería Cuauhtémoc.
13. From 1873 to 1910 freight rates drop from 10 cents/km/ton to 2.3 cents/km/ton, Haber, Industry and Underdevelopment, 16.
14. Knight, The Mexican Revolution, vol. 1, 40.
15. Alexander Saragoza, The Monterrey Elite and the Mexican State, 1880-1940 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1988), 41.
16. For an introduction to northern development, see Guillermo Beato and Domenico Sindico, "The Beginning of Industrialization in Northeast Mexico," The Americas 39, 4(April 1983):499-518;
17. Haber, Industry and Underdevelopment;
18. Miguel Tinker Salas, In the Shadow of the Eagles: Sonora and the Transformation of the Border during the Porfiriato (Berkeley: University of California Press, forthcoming 1997), chapters 2 and 9;
19. and Mark Wasserman, Capitalists, Caciques, and Revolution: The Native Elite and Foreign Enterprise in Chihuahua, Mexico, 1854-1911 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984).
20. For more on this Mexican middle class cult of domesticity, see French, "Prostitutes and Guardian Angels."
21. Knight, The Mexican Revolution, vol. 1, 40;
22. and Knight, "The Working Class and the Mexican Revolution," 53.
23. For a concise summary of newspapers from Mexico City and several states, see Aurelio de los Reyes, Los orígenes del cine en México (1896-1900) (Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1983), 7-21;
24. on the debate over the impact of advertising, see Michael Schudson, Advertising, The Uneasy Persuasion: Its Dubious Impact on American Society (New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1984);
25. Pérez-Rayón, "La publicidad en México";
26. and Ellen Gruber Garvey, The Adman in the Parlor; Magazines and the Gendering of Consumer Culture, 1880s to 1910s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996).
27. Haber, Industry and Underdevelopment;
28. and Rosalind Williams, Dream World: Mass Consumption in Late Nineteenth-Century France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 10.
29. Saragoza, The Monterrey Elite, 5.
30. Mario Cerutti, Burguesía, capitales e industria en el norte de México, 180.
31. See, for example, Monterrey News, 30 August 1908, 6; 19 December 1908, 3 of the Christmas supplement.
32. The Monterrey News, 29 August 1905, 4.
33. El Correo, 16 January 1905, 1.
34. See, for example, El Correo, 1 February 1905, 1, as well as the two weeks preceding and following this article.
35. Haber, Industry and Underdevelopment, 48.
36. Tony Morgan, "Proletarians, Politicos, and Patriarchs: The Use and Abuse of Cultural Customs in the Early Industrialization of Mexico City, 1880-1910," in Rituals of Rule, Rituals of Resistance, 156.
37. El Correo, 3 February 1906, 4.
38. Morgan, "Proletarians, Políticos, and Patriarchs," 155-156.
39. El Correo, 20 April 1906, 4; 16 April 1906, 4;
40. Morgan, "Proletarians, Politicos, and Patriarchs," 155.
41. El Correo, 18 April 1906, 4.
42. Morgan, "Proletarians, Politicos, and Patriarchs," 155.
43. El Correo, 9 February 1909, 1.
44. "Todo esto 'no es un réclame, pero es verdad'"
45. Juan Manuel Aurrecocchea and Armando Batra, Puros Cuentos: la historia de la historieta en México, vol. 1 (Mexico: Editorial Grijalbo, 1988), 122.
46. For background on many of the patent medicines sold in the United States and Mexico at this time, see Sarah Stage, Female Complaints: Lydia Pinkham and the Business of Women's Medicine (New York: W. W. Norton & Co. Inc., 1979).
47. El Correo, 8 February 1908, 3.
48. The Monterrey News, 22 August 1908, 3.
49. William French, '"The Amo Muncho': Loveletters from Porfirian and Revolutionary Chihuahua" (paper presented at the Canadian Historical Association Meeting, Calgary, June 1994).
50. El Correo, 28 June 1906, 3.
51. El Correo, 27 October 1906, 4.
52. The Monterrey News, 11 July 1908, 3.
53. El Correo, 30 August 1908, 4.
54. For information on Chinese merchants, see Tinker Salas, Shadow of the Eagles, chapter 2.
55. Monterrey News, 6 October 1907, 8.
56. For information on French-owned department stores, see Maurice Proal and Pierre Martin Charpenel, L'Empire des Barcelonnettes au Mexique (Marseille, France: Editions J. Laffitte, 1986);
57. and José Ceceña Cervantes, México en la orbita imperial (Mexico: Ediciones "El Caballito," 1970), 72-75.
58. Susan Porter Benson, Countercultures: Saleswomen, Managers, and Customers in American Department Stores, 1890-1940 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986), 76.
59. For female workers, see Monterrey News, 19 December 1909, p. 1, of the Christmas supplement.
60. See El Correo, 8 June 1908, 1;
61. For this duality of female shopper and male breadwinner, see the cartoons in the Monterrey News, 25 March 1909, 4, and 9 April 1909, 4;
62. and in Rachel Bowlby, Just Looking: Consumer Culture in Dreiser, Gissing and Zola (New York: Methuen & Co., 1985), 18-35, 81, and 89.
63. See, for example, Monterrey News, 15 April 1906, 20; 29 April 1906, 13.
64. For these lists, see, for example, El Correo, 8 June 1908, 1; and 14 January 1909, 4.
65. For the active promotion of shopping by telephone by both telephone companies and department stores in Canada, see Michèle Martin, "Hello Central?" Gender, Technology, and Culture in the Formation of Telephone Systems (Montreal, Quebec: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1991), 147.
66. See, for example, the El Nuevo Mundo department store ad in El Correo, 19 October 1908, 4.
67. Botica del León, Monterrey News, 15 December 1907, 12.
68. See, for example, El Correo, 29 February 1908, 3; 19 October 1908, 4;
69. also Monterrey News, 15 December 1907, 3.
70. Monterrey News, 15 December 1907, 3.
71. El Correo, 6 February 1909, 4; 20 October 1908, 4.
72. See, for example, El Correo, 29 February 1908, 2; 18 August 1908, 3;
73. and Monterrey News, 31 August 1909, 3; 12 September 1909, 2.
74. El Correo, 14 January 1908, 4.
75. Bowlby, Just Looking, 32;
76. and William R. Leach, "Transformation in a Culture of Consumption: Women and Department Stores, 1890-1925," Journal of American History 71, no. 2(September 1984):336.
77. For Day of the Dead advertisements placed by El Nuevo Mundo, see, for example, El Correo, 27 October 1909, 4.
78. Monterrey News, 12 December 1907, 8; 15 December 1907, 12.66.
79. Bowlby, Just Looking, 2.
80. Bowlby, Juct Looking, 2.
81. Guy Debord, La Societé du Spectacle (Paris, France: Éditions Champ Libre, 1973)
82. cited in Bowlby, Just Looking, 1.
83. Monterrey News, 12 December 1909, 2, of the Christmas supplement.
84. Saragoza, The Monterrey Elite, 42.
85. Cynthia Wright, "Feminine Trifles of Vast Importance': Writing Gender into the History of Consumption," in Gender Conflicts: New Essays in Women's History, ed. Franca Iacovetta and Mariana Valverde (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992), 232.
86. El Correo, 1 January 1909, 3.
87. William Leach, "Strategists of Display and the Production of Desire," in Consuming Visions: Accumulation and Display of Goods in America, 1880-1920, ed. Simon J. Bronner (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1989), 107.
88. Jean Franco, "Women, Fashion and the Moralists in Early Nineteenth-Century Mexico," in Homenaje a Ana María Barreneehea, ed. Lia Schwartz Lerner and Isaias Lerner (Madrid: Editorial Castalia, 1984).
89. For further debate on fashion across the industrializing world in the late nineteenth-century, see Mariana Valverde, "The Love of Finery: Fashion and the Fallen Woman in Nineteenth-Century Social Discourse," Victorian Studies 32, 2(winter 1989):169-188;
90. in Mexico, see French "Prostitutes and Guardian Angels," 548.
91. Monterrey News, 19 December 1909, 8.
92. A study of Mexican department store organization will form the cornerstone of this author's dissertation, based on the archives of Mexico City's first department store, El Palacio de Hierro.
93. Benson, Countercultures, 75-123.
94. Beezley, Judas at the Jockey Club, 20.
95. For more on the Chihuahua Blues, see the Chihuahua Enterprise, 16 September 1899, 8; 24 March 1900, 1;
96. Monterrey News, 6 July 1909, 1.
97. For information on the Mexican cinema, see de los Reyes, Los orígenes del cine;
98. and Aurelio de los Reyes, Cine y sociedad en México, 1896-1930, vol. 1, Vivir de Sueños (1896-1920) (Mexico: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1981).
99. El Correo, 13 January 1908, 4.
100. Kathy Peiss, Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New York (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986), 146.
101. Ottawa Journal (Ottawa, Ontario) cited in the Monterrey News, 1 July 1910, 4.
102. On the music, see Monterrey News, 7 March 1906, 3.
103. El Correo, 31 January 1908, 4; 20 January 1908, 1. The Bell Family Archive is located in the Special Collections of Mary Couts Burnett Library at Texas Christian University, Fort Worth, Texas. It includes advertisements, show programs, newsclipping, and other papers on Richard Bell and his entertaining family during their careers throughout Mexico.
104. Monterrey News, 3 December 1908, 2.
105. El Correo, 15 November 1906, 3;
106. and Monterrey News, 25 December 1907, 6; 17 December 1907, 3.
107. Monterrey News, 24 March 1906, 8.
108. For the donated park, see Monterrey News, 14 June 1905, 8.
109. Monterrey News, 24 March 1905, 8.
110. For a similar display of gendered dining arrangements see William H. Beezley, "Dining with the Dictator and Crowning the Virgin: Forging Images of Mexico's New Society" (paper presented at the Canadian Historical Association Meeting, Learned Society's, Calgary, June 1994).
111. El Correo, 26 January 1909, 1.
112. Monterrey News, 29 August 1905, 4.
113. El Correo, 26 January 1909, 1.
114. On the development and technical prowess of the Cervecería, see Barbara Hibino, "Cervecería Cuauhtémoc: A Case Study of Technological and Industrial Development in Mexico," Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos 8, 1(winter 1992):23-43.
115. Junta de Festejos de Santa Rita to Don José Asúnsolo, Jefe Político del Distrito de Iturbide, Chihuahua, 13 May 1908, expediente 34, caja 68, AHM; Chihuahua Enterprise, 29 May 1909, 1.
116. See, for example, Chihuahua Enterprise, 16 May 1908, 10.
117. Chihuahua Enterprise, 14 September 1901, 1.
118. Monterrey News, 2 March 1906, 1; 6 March 1906, 6.