Abstract
The theme of modernity as a category of historical analysis brings these four monographs together. This is not a new area of study, yet it continues to open new lines of historical inquiries with fresh interpretations, questions, and perspectives, particularly regarding how historians understand urban spaces. What unites these four historians of such diverse research interests and time periods is their agreement on two concerns. First, they agree that the way citizens understand themselves as part of the city also alters the way they shape the city. Accordingly, specific parts of the city determine the way men and women behave in those or other areas. Second, the authors agree that the way the city is modernizing also shapes citizens behavior. Hence, citizens play a substantial role in modernizing the city, altering the urban spaces.
Histories of modernity are all encompassing and, most of the time, riskier than detailed histories of industrialization, urbanization, or capitalism. Yet, these authors illustrate what is at stake in including histories of modernity when discussing the urban landscape. Ageeth Sluis argues, “We recognize modernity by the markers that render it visible” (11). In these four books, those markers are changing gender urban roles, urbanization, both technological and commercial innovation, as well as what it means to behave in a “modern” way. In using modernization to analyze urban spaces, I will examine two specific aspects of each book: first, the types of urban spaces that women and men encounter in the city; second, how by following them through the city, we learn and experience new forms of urbanity.
The first influential recent book that treats modernity in Mexico City is Ageeth Sluis’s Deco Body, Deco City: Female Spectacle and Modernity in Mexico City, 1900-1939. Sluis’s book is a highly original cultural history that explores urban planning projects, downtown markets, Bataclán Theater, and pornography in Mexico City during the era of Plutarco Elías Calles (1924-1935). Sluis examines the influence of Art Deco as a product of modernity and the process of modernization in Mexico City. Women and men alike utilized the concept of Deco to negotiate the transition from a dictatorship under Porfirio Díaz (1876-1911) through the Mexican Revolution (1910-1917), while remaining conscious of global social movements. Sluis argues that ideas of gender played a significant role in the “processes to modernize and civilize Mexico’s citizenry” (13), as well as the urban landscape as a way to instill modernity.
What accounts for this? The revolution had the unintended consequence of bringing more women into the city, making them more physically and socially mobile. As a result, women became more visible. However, women threatened the traditional landscape of the city with greater mobility and visibility. Women were no longer relegated to the home and could take their activities to the street. Yet, the change in the way women moved and appeared within the city was also a requisite for urban reforms, public work projects, and modernity. Sluis contends that the theater industry was one example of how changes in the city and behaviors were facilitated. Sluis utilizes what she calls the “Deco Body,” which demonstrated the shifting beauty ideals from a nineteenth-century aesthetic personified in the theater diva to the new ideal beauty embodied by the movie star. She discusses the theater diva Esperanza Iris, who moved to Mexico City in 1902 from Tabasco to become a stage actress. Twenty years later she and her adopted city changed dramatically. While Iris’ first role was as a newspaper boy, she quickly became one of Mexico City’s most popular theater divas, so much so that her performances on and off the stage influenced ideas of femininity and masculinity that articulated throughout the city. Women and men watched as Iris dealt with her scandals, her love-struck admirers, and her play with conventions. As her life and behavior spilled off the stage into the world outside, Iris plotted a new path of female sexuality and autonomy in the cosmopolitan city, thus, altering the image of women in public life. Women throughout the city used public spaces, such as the theater.
Sluis argues that “Deco Bodies” were used to negotiate and contest the ideals of male authority that characterized revolutionary reform, and were the blueprint for new architectural projects. As more than just an ideal of beauty, “Deco Bodies,” with their sleek postures and slender figures, epitomized disciplining the human form in the name of modernity. The pornography magazine, Vea, used images of the modern city as a backdrop for their pornographic pictures of women. These women were often styled in the Deco form thereby establishing a connection between city landscapes and desire. Vea allowed viewers to see that female bodies could represent health, beauty, and sexual freedom, which coincidentally were aligned with a cosmopolitan modernity. Through architecture, the ideal of the “Deco Body” reshaped urban vistas. Art Deco offered Mexican architects the familiar concept of generating beauty based on the female body, but this now meant simplified, elongated forms. Mexican architects looked to the modern “Deco Bodies” to build beautiful, healthy, and desirable structures befitting the visions for cosmopolitanism.
Sluis argues that the neighborhood Condesa in Mexico City was the only Art Deco neighborhood in the city. It was conceived as an upscale, middle-class neighborhood that reflected ideas of modernity based on Western architectural innovations. Upper- and middle-class residents aspired to live in this neighborhood. More importantly, it was the backdrop to the modern “Deco bodies” in Vea’s pages. The Art Deco Condesa neighborhood illustrated a city that began to take on a feminine form exhibited through fine lines of structure. Mexico City citizens learned to envisage a city as a particular feminine form of the future through new buildings and new bodies.
Like Sluis’s book, Anna Alexander’s City on Fire: Technology, Social Change, and the Hazards of Progress in Mexico City, 1860-1910 addresses how people shape the environment they live in. Like Sluis, Alexander examines fire as byproduct of modernity in a rapidly changing Mexico City at the turn of the twentieth century. She examines how the threat of fire altered the city. Alexander demonstrates the unintended consequence of increased risks and how it bred a culture of fear in the city between 1860 and 1910. As an agent of change, Alexander argues that fear led citizens to actively and consciously transform their city to deal with the threat. Urban space was made and remade according to how citizens understood the potential fire, as well as how public services and technology were distributed, which was usually done so unequally. Thus, fire was not only a result of modernization, it was also an instrument for the modernization of technology and science of and in the city.
Residents’ pleas for urban safety aided the development of new types of technology to combat fire. Citizens voiced their concerns and anxieties about fires, thereby highlighting the menacing danger of certain spaces within the city. Residents wanted city officials to bring order and control to the city as a way to prevent fires from occurring in the first place, or at least, to manage them effectively. In response, urban planners and public health officials regulated what they considered “disorderly spaces” in the city, even going as far as entering people’s homes and deeming their daily habits as a risk. Alexander notes that these steps were not enough and officials used, what she calls, “the science of regulation” (26) to assuage concerns. As such, city officials implemented fire control practices that restricted fires yet also worked as a mechanism of social control, giving public health officials reason to monitor and regulate behavior in the name of health. Fire codes and fire zoning laws transformed the way that citizens moved and behaved within the city. For instance, officials mapped the boundaries of city center based on the location of drainage ditches or waterways: and fire cores were often delegated to work zones, which resulted in the regulation of behaviors in the workplace. Ironically, the pleas that begged for the control and prevention of fires were the same ones that led to the regulation of behaviors, even within private spaces. Thus, Alexander’s work demonstrates how people both altered the city they lived in at the same time that those alterations within the city changed the way those people behaved in the first place.
Fire brigades also helped to fight fires. Like Sluis, Alexander considers the visibility of men and women within urban spaces and the effect this has on the way people behave within the city. Firemen’s visibility on the street was a preventive measure because it assuaged residents’ fears about fires. More importantly, the fire brigade represented the ordered and progressive city. Foreign investment was a requirement for the order of mission and progress. The fire brigade offered protection to industrialists, even if just in appearance, as it rendered the country as a stable place to live and conduct business. City officials provided the fire brigade with uniforms and state-of-the-art weapons, which Alexander contends, portrayed authority in society. The fire brigade was at times more for show than it was for help. Alexander points to an instance in 1895 when an electrical fire was started at a celebration for the Virgin of Guadalupe near the center of the city, and the firemen showed up too late to offer any real assistance. The fire brigade and new fire codes gave people a false sense of security. Their visibility reminded citizens not only that fire existed but also that the city had somehow become immune to fires. The fire brigades led people to behave in more reckless ways because they thought the risks of fires had decreased.
In contrast to the public visibility of men in the city, Alexander addresses the intimate space of the home as a means not necessarily to combat fires, but as an example of the treatment of fire-related injuries. Wives and mothers within the home fell back on traditional medical practices to help aid burns, even within the ever industrializing and modernizing city. Alexander notes that “capital residents began to understand the changing dynamics of their city through experiences of pain and suffering on the body” (130). The emerging community of medical experts who attended universities, read medical journals, and earned state supported credentials were the most equipped practitioners in the city to handle the health concerns of citizens. Although the perception was that local healers lacked training in comparison to this network of physicians and public health officials, they were ultimately the ones who made decisions about how to treat injuries, and other broader health concerns within the home. Local knowledge prevailed and survived in homes, regardless of the practitioner’s medical experience or credentials. One need not venture further than the kitchen to attain the ingredients needed to treat health concerns, concoct cure-alls, or soothe the afflicted. Specifically to treat burns, women prepared paste solutions out of salt, water, and baking soda to relieve burn pain, or put coffee grinds on more severe third-degree burns. Wives and mothers only sought professional help when traditional models prevailed. Whereas Sluis demonstrates that women were changing their roles inside and outside the home, Alexander reveals how traditional roles endured throughout the same time period.
Elaine Carey’s Women Drug Traffickers: Mules, Bosses, and Organized Crime traces the lives of female drug traffickers in Mexico throughout the twentieth century. Although Carey has a transnational focus, I analyze her discussion of Mexico City. Carey reveals a story about women who organized and were in charge of drug trafficking rings. In so doing, Carey challenges the traditional rhetoric that women were only used as mules or pawns in the drug trade. Women transported drugs as well as created their own networks in which they rose to positions of prominence and became their own bosses. Carey argues that women exploited their traditional roles as caregivers and trusted matriarchal roles within Mexican society to blend in. Ensuring the well-being of their families incited women to forge communal networks and market systems, allowing them to survive and remain active in the drug trade longer than their male counterparts. Carey examines the livelihoods, social survival strategies, and business skills of women in the drug trafficking business. Her sources, however, limit her to the most notorious drug traffickers—those big enough to warrant sufficient attention and get caught.
Like Sluis and Alexander, Carey examines a specific consequence of modernization in Mexico: the drug trade. And similar to Alexander, Carey demonstrates that effects of modernization did not always benefit all Mexicans; they did, however, offer citizens new opportunities to flourish in an emerging informal economy. Thus, Carey reveals how women’s roles were altered with the modernization of the city. In turn, women’s changing roles complicated masculine constructions of the informal economy. Her discussion of María Dolores Estéves Zuleta, also known as Lola La Chata, is one of her more compelling chapters on women who took advantage of the rapidly transforming urban spaces. Lola la Chata came from a lower class family who lived in La Merced Market, Mexico City, and by the 1940s became Mexico’s most notorious heroin dispenser and boss. La Merced was a dangerous neighborhood known for its high poverty and crime rates, which grew due to an influx of migrants from the countryside and an increasing formal and informal economy. Young Lola learned from her mother, who owned a food stall selling pork rinds and coffee, and later, marijuana and morphine. Lola entered the trade at the age of thirteen, working as her mother’s mule running drugs from the stall in La Merced. Lola and her mother were not unique in the buying and selling of drugs; many people bought and sold in the streets for local consumption. Lower class citizens, like Lola and her mother, kept up with the modernizing city by participating in the informal market. Lola and her mother’s role within La Merced market as drug peddlers also reinforced and gave way to the reputation of the neighborhood as a dangerous one. Likewise, La Merced provided Lola and her mother the opportunity to become a drug boss.
Although the city and the roles of men and women within the city were also altering, some perceptions about what gendered roles should be remained. Lola was such a conundrum to authorities because “she ruptured the expectations of what it meant to be a woman” (125). Lola perceptibility as a caregiver was taken for granted, and therefore she remained unnoticed for so long. Yet, Lola also used this to her advantage by starting a family that provided her with kin networks to build her trade. She married an ex-police officer, Enrique Jaramillo, who owned an auto repair shop. The shop served as a distribution center, and Enrique’s police contacts provided Lola an invaluable network that could protect her and give her information about Mexican authorities. When she was arrested the last time in 1957, she made a clear statement asking not to implicate any more innocent people, taking full responsibility for the narcotics traffic and business. Lola reversed concepts of the patriarchal family, in which men dominated and protected the women, by disassociating her employees and assuming accountability of her actions.
Lola’s success as a woman, and a continued interest in narcotics smugglers on both sides of the border contributed to her eventual visibility by authorities. Lola, visible within and around the city, was overlooked for much of the 1920s but began to appear in official documents in both the United States and Mexico around the 1930s. Lola evaded authorities on both sides of the U.S.–Mexican border; she was the nemesis of Harry J. Anslinger (head of the FBN), a subject of Dr. Leopold Salazar Viniegra (a prominent medical figure in Mexico’s mid-century drug policy), and even managed to make it into William Burroughs Cities of the Red Night as an exotic deviant. Carey argues that it was Lola’s ability to elude capture as well as her shrewd business skills that helped to shift Mexico’s heroin business on a more permanent footing.
Mary Kay Vaughan’s Portrait of a Young Painter: Pepe Zuñiga and Mexico City’s Rebel Generation is quite different from Sluis, Alexander and Carey’s monographs in two substantial ways: first, the book is a biography, and second, the book mainly focuses on men. Vaughn examines the life of Pepe Zuñiga in post-1945 Mexico City. Zuñiga is an Oaxacan-born artist who migrated from the countryside to Mexico City with his family in 1943. Vaughan examines Zuñiga’s and his family’s struggle to survive in the city while living alongside other rural migrants. Vaughan uses Zuñiga as a speaker for other youths who were coming of age in the 1960s to discern “the effects of the freedom-seeking, affective subjectivity” that marked this period (212). Vaughan uses a biographical approach that is “more interested in how an individual life reflects and illuminates historical processes” (5). Thus, Vaughan uses an analysis of memory and subjectivity to reveal the shared experiences that influenced historical events of Mexico in the 1960s, particularly the 1968 student movement.
Although a slightly later period than what Sluis, Alexander, and Carey discuss, Mexico City post-1945 is still a city that is expanding economically and culturally. In 1957, Zuñiga secured a job as a radio technician for the transnational company RCA Victor. In 1959, however, he changed course and enrolled as a student at La Esmeralda, a state-sponsored art school, to become an artist. It was during his time at La Esmeralda that he attempted to break away from family traditions to become his own self. Zuñiga learned to master new techniques but more importantly, he met and interacted with people from different social and regional backgrounds. These friendships led to the formation of a Bohemian community in which new forms of expression were created, and by extension, a new public sphere. Vaughan examines this new public sphere through the tenants of the new movement Nueva Presencia, founded in 1962 by Benito Messeguer. Nueva Presencia, as a neohumanist movement, “celebrated personal liberty, human empathy, and emotion expression seeking to break free of societal, aesthetic and political fetters” (157). Vaughan’s main argument is that it was within this emerging environment of a critical public sphere that Zuñiga and his generation questioned the state, guiding the mobilization of the boisterous student movements of the 1960s. Thus, the same “freedom Seeking subjectivities” that drew Zuñiga to paint were the same ones that propelled him and others to fight against state violence and repression (27).
Contrary to Sluis, Alexander, and Carey, Vaughan does not focus on the physical changes or spaces wrought by modernization. Instead, Vaughan assesses a more private, intimate space and change in the behaviors of men and women, resulting in a push for more civil liberties and democratization of the public sphere. The change in public sphere effects the physical space of the city. The new generations of citizens, who emphasize individual freedom and push for democracy, share a collective consciousness that changes the public sphere. Although Zuñiga’s struggles were individual, they also formed part of a larger collective consciousness. To make her point, Vaughan studies theater, cinema, art, textbooks, and songs that Zuñiga and his generation consumed, and, therefore, informed the sentiments, principles, and visions of the student movement. Vaughan’s discussion of mass media reveals the ways in which it taught him to reject the violent masculinity he observed as a child, and instead become a more tender man. In his work and personal life, Zuñiga “embodied the transformations of male sensibility” and used the feminine to express his “longing for freedom and expression” (222). In so doing, Zuñiga critiques traditional masculinity, one that celebrated violence, and instead embraces the “joy in love” of the neohumanist philosophy (17). Zuñiga is one example of the types of subjectivities that shaped and informed the student movement. It was the 1960s youth movement that highlighted and developed highly individualized forms of expression of personal feelings.
While these books differ wildly in terms of content, time period, and arguments, they are delicately interwoven by a discussion of the city and modernization. Through this analysis new approaches to a history of modernity are discovered, approaches that involve the ways in which the spaces of the city change the behaviors of the people who inhabit them. Such analysis, as is illustrated, is a dialectical process. Citizen’s behaviors also shape and alter the spaces they inhabit. Perhaps what stands out the most from this discussion is the examination of change in behaviors within urban spaces as a result of modernization in Mexico City. Future research on urbanity should not take for granted how inhabitants transform the spaces in which they carry out their daily lives. These works illustrate that citizens often dictate the way an urban space is used, its reputation, and even urban reforms.