The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

The Prints of José Guadalupe Posada
12.2 | “Los crimenes del Chalequero” (The crimes of “the Spoiler”) Broadsheet published
by A. Vanegas Arroyo, 1890. In prints such as these, clues to location are reduced: there is
perhaps a waterside, and there is a building’s silhouette, but despite a strong sense of space,
we are told nothing about place; we cannot decide whether this is a city, its margin, or somewhere
else. Dislocation is of course also represented in the severed and occluded heads.
Vanegas Arroyo to “the news” and the relationship of the bits of paper on
which these pictures were printed and sold to newspapers. Everyday life and
its antithesis, the world of events, are not permanent features of human existence;
they have been produced in culture as part of the way that men and
women have come to terms with living an urbanized, industrialized/commodified
life. 6 News was most intensively produced in the newspaper, for
whose triumph the development of Western cities, both as places of trade
and as seats of government, has been necessary. 7 Everyday life has been produced
in a range of ways, in which the regularities of wage labor and the activities
of the state have been important; thus we cannot conceive of the
everyday and the world of events as producing each other, without also understanding
them as being the product of the development of capitalist
economies and of the nation-state. “News” and “the everyday” map uncomfortably
onto the categories through which these chapters interpret the city,
the categories of strangeness and familiarity, but the mapping is a productive
one: the newspaper is illuminated if we think of it as presenting the
world as familiarly strange.