The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

Part II: Filtering Tactics
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Tom Gretton
mail, might live anywhere, and thus we are reminded of the penetration of
the countryside by commodities and signifying practices derived from the
city. But many Mexican men (and probably women) bought from the newsboys,
and thus consumed journals as part of the experience of being at home
on the modern city street. They also read regularly; buying a newspaper was
a way of turning the modern, event-saturated urban world into its antithesis,
daily routine. The fully developed buyer of the urban paper gets a paper
on the way to work and another on the way back, pointing to a second mediation,
this time between the worlds of private and public. This is a striking
evolution; before woodpulp technologies made newsprint paper almost
a free good after the 1870s, the raw material on which newspapers were
printed was relatively scarce and expensive. Then periodicals were paradigmatically
read in institutions where they could be shared: clubs, libraries,
coffeehouses, and bars. Thus where once journals had been a defining feature
of the public realm, now they came increasingly to define the spaces and
process of the intersection of public and private.
In 1892, shortly after Posada began to make blocks for him, Vanegas
Arroyo explored a way of co-opting the prestige of the newspaper as a
cultural form without committing his consumers to meet the newspaper’s
cultural requirements of regularity and cultural location. He began to publish
the Gaceta Callejera (Street Gazette), which had a numbered sequence and
the same sort of masthead as a periodical. However, every issue announced
below the masthead that “esta hoja volante se publicará cuando los acontecimientos
de sensación lo requieran” (this newssheet [literally, “flying leaf”]
will be published when sensational happenings require it). From our point
of view, Vanegas Arroyo had things the wrong way around; we know that it
is news that has to be produced according to the requirements of the papers.
But as he and his clients saw it, the occasional newssheet option had its own
advantages. It offered the possibility of building brand loyalty; it avoided
the legal burdens that regular publication laid on printer and publisher
alike; it marketed news in the pure state achieved by the special edition; and
it did not require its purchasers to turn themselves into the sort of regular
guys who bought newspapers—in fact, it offered them the option of entering
the market for news in a way that worked against the classifying dynamic
of the dominant news commodity.
But for the most part Posada and Vanegas Arroyo kept an even
greater distance between their enterprise and the newspaper. The randomly
published newssheets, the bogus news reports, the corridos and ejemplos that
Vanegas Arroyo produced commodified news of and commentary on things
that, it was claimed, had happened, so they were like newspapers. Through
their street vendors they shared a point of sale with newspapers, and a point