The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

The Prints of José Guadalupe Posada
12.3 | “Fusilamiento del que se comió a sus hijos” (The execution of the man who ate his
children). After 1891. Posada made a number of versions of the firing squad, which Vanegas
Arroyo used and adapted over and over again. This is a strangely familiar image, bringing
to mind Manet’s Execution of the Emperor Maximilian as well as Goya’s Third of May.
There is no evidence to prove it, but Posada probably saw prints of both.
cution. In relation to the definition of news, and the mapping out of its limit
cases, neither the murders nor the executions were specified in the imagery:
we get gore, but we do not get details. The points of the sequence at which
news becomes most like its antithesis, the blotting out in death of all individual
particularities, are emphasized.
There are also ways in which we can consider the relationship of
Posada’s pictures in the sheets on which Vanegas Arroyo printed them to the
newspaper, rather than to news as a cultural genre. Journals of opinion
tended to have names that inscribed their readers either into measured time
(El Diario, El Diario de Hogar, El Tiempo, El Siglo XIX), into a relationship
with the constructed nation (El Pais, El Mundo, El Universal, La Patria, El
Monitor Republicano), or into a public discourse (El Heraldo, El Imparcial, El
Partido Liberal). To buy a paper was to buy and wear a particular sort of
badge that marked one as belonging in a distinctive way to a restricted social
group.
In addition, newspapers both represented an insertion into the
global culture of capital and mediated an insertion into the city. They represented
the connectedness of Mexico to the rest of the world, not only by
reporting world news but also through such devices as carrying the address
of a Paris or New York advertising and subscription agency below the masthead,
or reprinting news items or caricatures from papers published in London
or Chicago. Subscribers, getting their copy more or less reliably by