The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

Part II: Filtering Tactics
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Tom Gretton
These objects represent and produce a cultural position both between
the Old World and the New and at the edge of the New World. They
give their consumers a way of inserting themselves into the print culture of
news, but through their form they offer a way of refusing an insertion into
regularity, the normal concomitant of such access. And as they co-opt, parody,
ironicize, and on occasion simply refuse the discourses proper to the different
sorts of reportorial genres that are invoked, these commodities
construct readers who know how to read, and thus implicitly how to speak,
the languages concerned, but who wear their knowledge in a “knowing”
way. As these readers take on a persona, rather than a selfhood, they become
both insiders and outsiders, as far as the news goes. 8
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My working hypothesis about the cultural dynamics of Mexico City while
Posada was producing prints there is simple. At this stage in its development,
Mexico City tended to attract people with a relatively high degree of
“modern” cultural competence, people who had undertaken the hazardous
removal to the capital generally not because they had been pushed out of
their previous socioeconomic perch but because they had left it by choice—
though of course agrarian change was also pushing the dispossessed and the
defeated toward the cities. Mexico City had a diversified and diversifying artisan
economy, and a vigorous consumer economy. At this stage its growth
did not primarily result in proletarianization and impoverishment; instead
the forms of labor that predominated gave rise to a relatively rich development
of a politically oriented nonelite sociability in clubs and circles, rather
than through proletarian unionization. It also produced a high and sharply
rising literacy rate in the city, a development that must be attributed in
great part to the new immigrants to the capital. However, upward cultural
aspiration and upward economic mobility were, then as now, poorly correlated,
as were the historical realities and the mythic structures of life in a
capital city. The threat of falling added urgency and anxiety to the desire to
rise; and the reality of doing neither, but of surviving conditionally on the
edges of respectable competence, also needed to find its mythic forms.
In this capital city there was a successful and expanding elite, a
small, diverse, and riven group of landowners and agribusinessmen, mineowners,
lawyers, bond and power brokers, industrialists and traders, arrivé
journalists, and senior servants of the state. There was also a middle class, in
both senses. First, a group of people did white-collar jobs: teaching school,
managing and running offices and small businesses, staffing telephone
switchboards and shop counters; they were a potential source both of re-