The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

Part II: Filtering Tactics
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Tom Gretton
12.1 | “Valona dedicada a los foráneos que llegan a la ciudad de México” (Greeting-song
dedicated to all the foreigners and strangers who are coming to Mexico City). This image
may have been made to mark celebrations for the centennial of Mexico’s independence in
1910. It is in any case unusual for a broadsheet representing Mexico as a “modern” capital,
with specific monuments and locations, “advanced” street furniture, and a culture of leisure
and spectacle. All this closely observed specificity shows a city displayed for and largely peopled
by “foreigners,” and, as such, represented as both strange and familiar to Posada’s “popular”
audience.
the Western world. Posada’s prints worked against the grain of this powerful
cultural dyad. They do this both by distributing the values we take it to
polarize across the two poles and by radically reducing the difference between
the poles. In these prints, ignorance, mischance, cruelty, crime, dissolute
excess, violent injustice, and disruptive economic change characterize
both the urban and the rural world: the cosy equation of the urban with the
modern and its values, the rural with the traditional and its values, can
scarcely be applied. For the most part, however, Posada’s pictures reduce the
experiential difference between living in the capital and living elsewhere in
Mexico. We must read this intervention in the context of modernizing Mexico,
as well as of other cultural forms in which the modern country-city relationship
was rather more fully reproduced; but we also need to read it in
relation to the specific history of the country-city polarity in Mexico.
Mexico’s pueblos, fixed settlements with a corporate identity devised
and recognized by the Spanish rulers of the New World, had long been