Creating Mexican Consumer Culture in the Age of Porfirio Díaz

by Steven B. Bunker

Overview

In Gabriel García Márquez’s novel One Hundred Years of Solitude, a character articulates the fascination goods, technology, and modernity held for many Latin Americans in the early twentieth century when he declares that “incredible things are happening in this world.” The modernity he marvels over is the new availability of cheap and useful goods. Steven Bunker’s study shows how goods and consumption embodied modernity in the time of Porfirio Díaz, how they provided proof to Mexicans that “incredible things are happening in this world.”

In urban areas, and especially Mexico City, being a consumer increasingly defined what it meant to be Mexican. In an effort to reconstruct everyday life in Porfirian Mexico, Bunker surveys the institutions and discourses of consumption and explores how individuals and groups used the goods, practices, and spaces of urban consumer culture to construct meaning and identities in the rapidly evolving social and physical landscape of the capital city and beyond. Through case studies of tobacco marketing, department stores, advertising, shoplifting, and a famous jewelry robbery and homicide, he provides a colorful walking tour of daily life in Porfirian Mexico City. Emphasizing the widespread participation in this consumer culture, Bunker’s work overturns conventional wisdom that only the middle and upper classes participated in this culture.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780826344564
Publisher:	University of New Mexico Press
Publication date:	12/15/2012
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	364
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

Steven B. Bunker is associate professor of history at the University of Alabama.

Table of Contents

Illustrations vi

Preface ix

Acknowledgments xi

Introduction 1

1 Personalized Progress: The Production and Marketing of the Machine-Rolled Cigarette 12

2 Selling in the City: The Growth of Popular Advertising 57

3 Capital Investments: Porfirian Department Stores and the Evolution of Mexico City Retailing 99

4 Modernizing Capital: Constant Innovation and the Expression of Progress 134

5 An All-Consuming Passion: Desire, Department Stores, and the Modernization of Crime 174

6 Hot Diamonds, Cold Steel: The La Profesa Jewelry Store Robbery 205

Conclusion 232

Notes 238

Selected Bibliography 306

Index 324

Editorial Reviews

"Steven Bunker has written a very well researched, original, and fascinating account of consumer culture in Mexico City during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries."

—A Contracorriente

From the Publisher