The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

Notes
1 Among the major secondary sources on
Mexican political and urban history of the Porfiriato
(the “reign” of Porfirio Diaz, effectively
from 1876 to 1911) are F.-X. Guerra, Le Mexique
de l’Ancien Régime à la Révolution, 2 vols. (Paris:
L’Harmattan, 1985); A. Knight, The Mexican
Revolution, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1986); J. M. Hart, Revolutionary
Mexico: The Coming and Process of the Mexican Revolution
(Berkeley: University of California Press,
1987).
2 See R. Tyler, ed., Posada’s Mexico (Washington,
D.C.: Library of Congress, 1979); J. Rothenstein,
ed., J G. Posada, Messenger of Mortality
(London: Redstone, 1989); R. Berdicio and S.
Appelbaum, Posada’s Popular Mexican Prints
(New York: Dover, 1972); in Spanish, J. Soler, et
al., eds., Posada y la Prensa Ilustrada: Signos de
Modernización y resistencias (Mexico City: MU-
NAL, 1996). See also T. Gretton, “Posada’s
Prints as Photomechanical Artefacts,” Print
Quarterly 9, no. 4 (1992): 335–356; T. Gretton,
“Posada and the ‘Popular’: Commodities and Social
Constructs in Mexico before the Revolution,”
Oxford Art Journal 17, no. 2 (1994): 32–47.
3 R. Williams, The Country and the City (London:
Chatto and Windus, 1973), offers an introduction.
4 J. Monnet, La Ville et Son Double: Images et
Usages du Centre: La Parabole de Mexico (Paris:
Nathan, 1993), pp. 19–23.
5 Ibid., pp. 30–36.
6 See H. Lefebvre, La Vie Quotidienne dans le
Monde Moderne (Paris: Gallimard, 1968); translated
into English by S. Rabinovitch as Everyday
Life in the Modern World (London Transaction,
1984).
7 For Mexican journalism in this period, see
M. del Carmen Ruiz Castañeda, L. Reed Torres,
and E. Cordero y Torres, El Periodismo en México,
450 años de Historia Mexico (Mexico City: Editorial
Tradición, 1974), and F. Toussaint Alcaraz Escenario
de la Prensa en le Porfiriato (Mexico City:
Buendía, 1989).
The words news and newspapers bring the connection
between the cultural form and the commodity
to mind in a particular way. In Spanish,
noticias and periodico do not make the same connection,
but they draw attention to other aspects
of the analysis: the “public address” dimension of
The Prints of José Guadalupe Posada
what in English is called news, and the crucial
part played by regularity in the cultural role of
the newspaper.
8 See P. Bailey, “Conspiracies of Meaning:
Music-Hall and the Knowingness of Popular
Culture,” Past and Present, no. 144 (1994):
138–179; M. E. Diaz, “The Satiric Penny Press
for Workers in Mexico, 1900–1910: A Case
Study in the Politicization of Popular Culture,”
Journal of Latin American Studies 22 (1991):
497–526.
9 Guerra, Le Mexique de l’Ancien Régime, vol. 1,
passim.