Posada's Broadsheets: Of Love And Betrayal

POSADA’S

BROADSHEETS OF LOVE AND BETRAYAL

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Posada’s Broadsheets: Of Love and Betrayal The University of Texas at San Antonio January 25 - February 26, 2012 This book has been published in conjuntion with the exhibit, Posada’s Broadsheets: Of Love and Betrayal at The University of Texas at San Antonio Art Gallery.

The University of New Mexico University Libraries is home to an extraordinarily rich collection of books, photographs, broadsides and broadsheets, and music documenting the rich history of Mexico and Latin America. Beginning early in the last century and continuing today, the University Libraries has steadfastly reaffirmed the natural extension of its history and tradition with that of Mexico and Latin America. Among the outstanding collections housed in the University Libraries is a comprehensive archive of the work by José Guadalupe Posada, as well as the Mexican printmaking cooperative, the Taller de Grafica Popular (TGP), who drew

Curated by Teresa Eckmann, Ph.D.

upon Posada’s legacy. I would like to acknowlege University Library staff members Stella de Sa Rego and Russ Davidson for their fine work establishing our Mexican print collections.

ISBN: 978-0-0831130-4-1

This exhibition will mark the first time these important broadsheets and broadsides will be on exhibit. The University Libraries is extremely pleased with the wonderful work done by Dr. Teresa Eckmann in curating this exhibition. Her selection of images highlights the humorous to didactic, romantic to religious and political, and of course Posada’s signature “Calaveras.”

Editor: Teresa Eckmann, Ph.D. Curatorial Assistant: Gabriella Boschi Scott Additional Contributors: Marco Aquino, Alana Coates, Adriana Miramontes Olivas, Melanie Raposo, Gabriella Boschi Scott Designer: Cornelia W. Swann

We extend our thanks to Dr. Richard Greenleaf for his financial support of this project and the staff of The University of Texas at San Antonio Art Gallery for their support.

Michael Kelly Associate Dean for Scholarly Resources and Director of the Center for Southwest Research and Special Collections

750 Copies printed by Brenner Printing, San Antonio, Texas Major support for this exhibition is generously provided by: The Elizabeth Huth Coates Charitable Foundation of 1992 Texas Commission on the Arts The University of Texas at San Antonio Department of Art and Art History UTSA Art Gallery University of New Mexico University Libraries, Center for Southwest Research

Copyright © 2012 The University of Texas at San Antonio, Department of Art and Art History

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POSADA’S

BROADSHEETS OF LOVE AND BETRAYAL

Presented by University of Texas at San Antonio Department of Art and Art History UTSA Art Gallery

In Collaboration with University of New Mexico University Libraries Center for Southwest Research

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Posada’s Broadsides: An Introduction

By Teresa Eckmann, Ph.D., Curator

Surely no bourgeoisie has had such bad luck as the Mexican in having had so just a portrayer of their customs, actions and doings, as the genial and incomparable Guadalupe Posada.

— Diego Rivera, 19301

Posada’s Broadsheets: Of Love and Betrayal is comprised of fifty-four original prints by José Guadalupe Posada (b. 1852), the adept illustrator of late-Porfirian era Mexican society. These entertaining broadsheets (a two-sided news leaf with text and accompanying images), and additional single-sided broadsides, contain tantalizing headlines, stories of intrigue, rhyming verse, and dramatic graphics. Themes on exhibit here include calaveras, crime, natural and sensational disasters, devotion, superstition, and popular song. This ephemera was produced with penny-presses in editor Antonio Vanegas Arroyo’s publishing house on inexpensive paper sometimes brightly colored with vegetable dyes, and widely distributed and consumed by the largely uneducated and often illiterate masses. Posada, whose engraving workshop was located in the very heart of Mexico City’s zocalo district, on Callejón Santa Teresa (today Licenciado Verdad) just down the street from Vanegas Arroyo’s publishing outlets, offered his engraving services to the former beginning in 1892. Together, up until Posada’s unfortunate death of enteritis early on in the Mexican Revolution, precisely on January 20, 1913 at the age of 61, and preceding his employer’s death by four years, this dynamic duo produced diverse material in print including illustrated children’s stories, recipes, love letters, popular song books, puzzles, calavera skull rhymes, prayer books, corrido ballads, and more. Many such examples are held in the University of New Mexico’s Center for Southwest Research (CSWR) Special Collections, from which the prints on exhibition have generously been loaned.

The current selection of broadsheets and broadsides is drawn predominantly from the 361-piece Fernando Gamboa Collection, as well as two additional collections, the Mexican Broadsides Collection and the Manilla and Posada Print Collection. This is the first time since their acquisition in the late 1990s that these prints have left Zimmerman Library’s tower, where they are protectively housed, to travel 722 miles for public viewing. The above collections have been digitized and are available for study at http:// econtent.unm.edu. There is, however, nothing quite like the experience of seeing the physical object up close and personal, with its edges worn by time (a century or more), and its ink tangible on the paper’s surface.

My interest in bringing this exhibition to the UTSA Art Gallery, to our academic community and beyond, is a personal one. As a graduate student at UNM I had the privilege to work with Special Collections, first under a three-year Nina Otero Warren Fellowship (2001-04) granted by CSWR under the guidance of Russ Davidson, and 4

subsequently as a Center for Regional Studies post-Doctoral Fellow (2005-08) under Mike Kelly, performing research, archival duties, and the digitization of several pictorial collections. These included the Sam L. Slick Collection of Latin American and Iberian Posters, the Taller de Gráfica Popular Collection, and most relevant to the current exhibition, the Fernando Gamboa Collection of Prints by José Guadalupe Posada. I was also generously awarded a Richard E. Greenleaf Visiting Library Scholar Award in the summer of 2010 by UNM’s Latin American and Iberian Institute and the Division of Iberian and Latin American Resources to work with the Gamboa Collection in preparing Posada’s Broadsheets. I cannot stress enough the tremendous cultural and intellectual value of library-held pictorial archives, whose conservation, exhibition, availability for direct study, and accessibility to the public through digitization, is imperative.

Furthermore, the collections management experience gained by young scholars in working with these primary documents (such as that of myself and many other previous CSWR fellows) is invaluable.

This exhibition catalogue contains object essays by five students enrolled in my fall 2010 UTSA graduate art history seminar, Latin American Art: Exhibition History and Collecting Practices. In “Pormenores de la última ejecución: Modernization, Broadsheets, and Crime in Porfirio Díaz’s Mexico,” Adriana Miramontes Olivas studies several Posada prints depicting the plight of Jesús Bruno Martinez, ringleader of the famous La Profesa robbery. She examines race in Porfirian Mexico in relation to the crime and sentencing of the crime’s perpetrators. Marcos Aquino examines the life and circumstances of another famed criminal, “El Tigre de Santa Julia,” Jesús Negrete, here treated by Posada as a popular hero with his accompanying corrido. Through an acute analysis of Posada’s print Cadaveres de madre e hija, with “José Guadalupe Posada: Violence, Gender, Space, and the Production of Fear,” Gabriella Boschi Scott paints a gruesome picture of violence against women in Porfirian Mexico. In “La tragedia de Belén Galindo,” Melanie Raposo considers the perils of Porfirian machismo and the resulting uxoricide illustrated by Posada. And lastly, in “An Amusing Display of Death: La calavera de Cupido,” Alana Coates points to precedents for Posada’s famed calaveras in the Danza Macabra, Memento Mori, and La portentosa vida de la muerte as she analyzes the broadside, “Cupid’s Skull-Rhyme.”

Posada’s Broadsheets is the result of a collaborative effort between UTSA and UNM. I want to thank UTSA’s Department of Art and Art History for its support of this project—in particular, Department Chair Greg Elliott, UTSA Art Gallery Director Scott Sherer, Gallery Coordinator Laura Crist, and Preparator John Hooper. Cornelia Swann, Director of UTSA’s Visual Resources Center designed the exhibition catalogue, and AHC graduate student Gabriella Boschi Scott composed many of the illuminating object labels and assisted me in editing the catalogue essays. I further want to thank the aforementioned authors for their contributions to this exhibition catalogue. Additionally, Andy Benavidez, of the local Benavidez Picture Framing, framed the exhibition prints.

I am deeply grateful to UNM’s Director of the CSWR Michael T. Kelly, Dean of UNM Libraries Martha A. Bedard, Coordinator of Inter-American Studies Suzanne Shadl, and the UNM Friends of the Library for championing this project.

Notes 1. Diego Rivera, “José Guadalupe Posada” in Las obras de José Guadalupe Posada (Mexico City: Mexican Folkways, 1930), n.p.

Pormenores de la última ejecución: Modernization, Broadsheets, and Crime in Porfirio Díaz’s Mexico

By Adriana Miramontes Olivas

In a process of modernization, Mexican society during the Porfiriato era (1876-1911) was marked by a strong desire to assimilate European, more specifically, French customs and ideas. Both the government and a corporate group of Mexican elites worked towards the industrialization of the country aided by foreign investment and support from intellectuals. The Porfiriato era was marked not only by constant change and international influences, but also by strong racism that segregated a large part of the population. “Persons close to the Díaz government establishment were heavily influenced by Comtian positivism, and tended to see crime as caused by environmental or racial factors which led, in turn, to moral or spiritual degradation.”1 Indeed, the working classes benefited the least from the changes the government was imposing in a supposed attempt to improve the living conditions for all Mexicans. Stereotypical labels of corrupt, degenerate, criminal, and alcoholic were used to refer to citizens of the lower classes, and it was these labels that contributed to their alienation from basic public services such as security and education. The segregation of the lower classes would later allow a criminal group to define a strategic plan to enter one of Mexico City’s upper class neighborhoods to perform a robbery. José Guadalupe Posada would depict this crime and its consequences in several broadsheets including Pormenores de la última ejecución.

It was during the Porfirian era when urban planning was redefined marking the future of a country for centuries. “In 1875, regulations represented the first attempt to impose a sense of order on neighborhood development, since many of those already in existence had evolved informally throughout the nineteenth century.”2 As a result of the revised urban planning regulations, neighborhoods were then clearly established according to social status. Ironically, wealthier sections of Mexico City were more heavily patrolled than the most densely populated areas that immigrants from the countryside and the working classes were establishing. One example is the barrio of Tepito. “By the 1880s the neighborhood had shed its indigenous name but had retained the poverty, transforming it into a dangerous zone in the eyes of metropolitan observers.”3 It was this set of laws, regulations, and practices that condemned most of Mexican society who belonged to the working class. During the late 1880s “90.8 percent [of the population] was deemed to be lower class, 7.8 percent were held to belong to the middle class, and 1.4 percent were counted as upper class.”4 It was as a result of this system of social inequality that discrimination and economic struggle developed. The government and the elites were more concerned with México’s foreign image than with the living conditions of the majority of the population. It is within this environment that the life of Jesús Bruno Martínez was shaped.

On February 20, 1891 Jesús Bruno Martínez, Aurelio Caballero, Carlos Sousa, Gerard Nevraumont, and Nicolas Treffiel, entered La Profesa jewelry store in one of the wealthiest neighborhoods of Mexico City, robbed, and then killed the owner (Fig.1).5 The thieves left with jewelry and cash valued at approximately four to eight thousand pesos. The group was later captured and sentenced to several years in prison, except for Martínez who was sentenced Fig. 1 to death. According to Patrick Frank, scholar and curator of Latin American art, Martínez was the one of the gang who looked more “Mexican” and therefore he received the harshest punishment.6 This is a prime example of the racist practices in place during the Porfiriato. Government officials not only discriminated against the poor, but also against non-Europeanized subjects such as Martínez. Mexico City’s police were racially profiling any individual dressed as an Indian.

Ironically, in La Profesa’s robbery, all five conspirators were dressed in European-style fashion. Their non-native attire allowed all five men to walk around the neighborhood unnoticed and enter the jewelry store.

The La Profesa crime not only attacked established Porfirian notions of order and security, but the stability of a nation ruled by a dictator. This crime was widely publicized prompting Posada and his artistic contemporaries to create several broadsheets on the subject.

The crime was so shocking [because] it was well-planned, and had to be carried out in cold sobriety rather than in a heat of passion… [Also] a team, rather than an individual, committed the crime. It was a transgressive crime, crossing class boundaries in a bold and audacious way. It was later discovered that the robbers were aided in their efforts to enter the store by their welldressed appearance.7 Pormenores de la última ejecución (Fig. 2) by Posada depicts the tragic ending that Martínez suffered after the famous robbery. This broadsheet, created in Antonio Vanegas Arroyo’s workshop, presents a firing squadron executing Martínez. Of the group, Treffiel, Nevraumont, and Sousa were French descendants, Caballero was born in Michoacán, and Martínez’s birthplace was unknown. As explained by Steven Blair Bunker in Creating Mexican Consumer Culture in the Age of Porfirio Díaz, “Trial records told little of Martínez’s history beyond his criminality, a significant omission that may have tied into his being the most Indian of the group and thus fitting the description of the positivist and social Darwinian criminal.”8 Because authorities were unable to find sufficient evidence to convict a specific murderer, they based their final decision on discriminatory practices and the suspects’ testimonies.

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Fig. 2

José Guadalupe Posada, Pormenores de la última ejecución, late 19th–early 20th C., broadside, intaglio print, full sheet, Fernando Gamboa Collection, PICT 999-019-0080 6

Fig. 3

José Guadalupe Posada, La fuga de Jesús Bruno Martínez de Belén, late 19th–early 20th C., broadside, intaglio print, full sheet, Fernando Gamboa Collection, PICT 999-019-0037

After the criminals robbed and killed Tomás Hernández Aguirre, stabbing him nine times at his shop at Number 6 Calle San Francisco, they went to one of their households.9 It was there that one of the perpetrators spread the word about the identity of the real killer: “Treffiel pulled Sousa aside and told him that Martínez had killed Hernández.

Sousa later told the police that Martínez had in all likelihood killed Hernández, but he was not sure, pointing out that Nevraumont may have also stabbed the elderly man.”10 Even though Nevraumont had initially been sentenced to death, his capital punishment ruling was later overturned. Martínez was imprisoned at Belén in the capital awaiting execution when he escaped for several hours, only to be recaptured later. In Posada’s print, La fuga de Jesús Bruno Martínez de la cárcel de Belén (Fig. 3), Martínez is dressed as the stereotyped Mexican charro [no longer as a French man] as he appears hanging from a rope while descending the prison’s building near a train railway in a quiet isolated environment. “He was spotted immediately by a security guard of the railroad company and taken to a nearby police station…”11As is evident in Posada’s print, the timing Martínez chose for his escape was rather poor.

Later, a depressed yet arrogant Martínez (Fig. 4) awaits his capital punishment. He sits in prison, legs crossed, one arm over the table and the other in the air as if emphatically arguing with someone. He anticipates his tragic ending, once again depicted in the stereotypical clothes of the Mexican charro, the same clothes that contributed to his death sentence in a culture dominated by elite and foreign influences. While awaiting his execution, and as described in Posada’s print Pormenores de la última ejecución, Martínez allegedly exclaimed, “Lo que siento es que voy a morir como cacahuate…” (I fear that I will die as a peanut) referring to his refusal to die all alone as an insignificant, wrongly accused man. Additional printed text indicates “Aseguraba que ni ante los hombres ni ante Dios, podía acusarse como autor del asesinato de Don Tomás Hernández Aguirre, que ya lo había dicho varias veces; pero, que nada podía hacerse puesto que a él lo habían escogido.”12 Although he had been selected as the main perpetrator of the crime and sentenced to death, he rejected the idea of dying by himself. He had previously written on the walls of his cell, “Soon they are going to kill me but I don’t care. I will kill Cabrera.”13 As one of his last petitions, Martínez asked to see the police chief, Mr. Cabrera. He exclaimed “¡Viva la muerte!” (Long live death!), and then attacked Cabrera for imprisoning him unjustly.14 After the attempt on Cabrera’s life, Martínez was immediately killed. Before being executed Martínez proclaimed for the last time that he was not the assassin, but Nevraumont.15

Fig. 4

José Guadalupe Posada, Jesús Bruno Martínez en las bartolinas de Belén, late 19th–early 20th C., broadside, intaglio print, full sheet, Fernando Gamboa Collection, PICT 999-019-0049

In Posada’s Pormenores de la última ejecución Jesús Bruno Martínez was executed by a group of five soldiers dressed in elegant uniforms. The print is filled with drama and action. The soldiers are aiming at Martínez as they fire their guns. Martínez has fallen to the ground and is about to die. He looks skyward as he holds a cross to his chest with his right hand. The overall drama of Posada’s image conveys a feeling similar to that of the Romantic painting Third of May, 1808 (1814) by Francisco Goya, while the unsurprised spectators on the upper right corner of Posada’s print are reminiscent of Edouard Manet’s Realist piece Execution of Emperor Maximilian (1868-69), except that in Pormenores de la última ejecución one of the spectators is a priest. In his broadsheet, Posada emphasized the firing power of the guns through the depiction of numerous lines. Martínez shot, and suffering on the ground, has no Mexican sombrero.

His left leg is fully extended while the right is in a painfully contorted position. The drama and pain of this experience is emphasized by the depiction of Martínez’s wide7

Martínez died. In reaction to the events, Martínez’s crime, capture, escape, and ultimate death were recorded in Posada’s prints.

Despite the modernization of the country, the established European technology and customs, the country’s rearrangement of neighborhoods, and security provided in the upper class areas, the working class group of Jesús Bruno Martínez and his gang were able to enter the neighborhood and commit a crime that culminated in robbery and murder. Their plan was simple: dress as European and conform to established stereotyped notions of fashion and style to fool guards and passersby. This threatened not only a community, but the stability of dictator Díaz’s government and public image.

To prevent additional scandal and destabilization of the country, Martínez, the subject of numerous prints such as Pormenores de la última ejecución by José Guadalupe Posada, was executed.

Notes:

Research. Trans. Adriana Miramontes Olivas.

1. Patrick Frank, Posada’s Broadsheets: Mexican

13. “La Profesa,” Crímenes Célebres 140-43; “Robo de

Popular Imagery 1890-1910, (Albuquerque: University

La Profesa” Legajo 973475, TSJDF; El Universal Gráfico,

of New Mexico Press, 1998), 21.

March 4, 1926, May 28, 1927 in Garza, 128.

2. James Alex Garza, The Imagined Underworld: Sex,

14. Posada’s Broadsheet, Pormenores de la última

Crime, and Vice in Porfirian Mexico City, (Lincoln:

ejecución, University of New Mexico, University

University of Nebraska Press), 15.

Libraries, Center for Southwest Research.

open eyes and mouth frozen in an eternal scream. Posada produced two prints on the same subject—that of Martínez’s execution. In Posada’s Execution of Jesús Bruno Martínez (Fig. 5) Martínez appears to be dancing while the soldiers rearrange themselves. While this work is passive with little drama, Pormenores is dramatic and full of deadly action and tension.

3. Garza, 18.

15. Bunker, “Hot Diamonds, Cold Steel,” 357.

4. José E. Iturriaga, La Estructura Social y Cultural de

16. Bunker, “Hot Diamonds, Cold Steel,” 355.

It is ironic that one of the wealthiest neighborhoods of Porfirian Mexico City was the site of one of the most famous and cold-blooded crimes in the country’s history. The organized and well-planned crime of the La Profesa jewelry store was labeled as one of the most terrible and it marked the beginning of organized crime in modern México. Despite the location of the store and the security available in this upper class Porfirian neighborhood, the thieves were able to commit an atrocious crime by utilizing established rules and stereotypes when they dressed as high class citizens or gente decente with suits and hats of European style. Moreover, the group of thieves was comprised of individuals of French and Mexican descent, which facilitated their unnoticed entry into the neighborhood. These Frenchmen and the Mexicans collaborated to break such established ideologies. Unfortunately, it was this same collaboration between races which shaped their final destiny allowing the European descendants to live while the most indigenous looking Mexican was executed. Four of the thieves were sentenced to long-term sentences in prison while one, Jesús Bruno Martínez, was convicted of murder and sentenced to death. In his trial, Martínez exclaimed, “It seems to me that I am accused of murdering Mr. Hernández because I am Indian and ugly…”16 His statement was one that highlighted the discrimination perpetrated against him by his own gang, the lawyers, judges, and other members of Porfirian society. It was in this modern elitist Mexican society that Jesús Bruno

Fig. 5

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México (México, D.F.: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1951), quoted in Moisés González Navarro, Historia

Illustrations:

Moderna de México: El Porfiriato, Vida Social (México,

Fig. 1. José Guadalupe Posada, La Profesa Robbery,

D.F.: Hermes, 1957), 387, quoted in Frank, 168.

1891, intaglio print. (Not in exhibition).

5. Garza, The Imagined Underworld, 121.

Fig. 5. José Guadalupe Posada, Execution of Jesús Bruno

6. Frank, Posada’s Broadsheets, 109.

Martinez, 1892, intaglio print, Collection of the Instituto

7. Frank, Posada’s Broadsheets, 107.

Cultural de Aguascalientes. (Not in exhibition)

8. Steven Blair Bunker, “Hot Diamonds, Cold Steel: The La Profesa Jewelry Store Robbery,” in Creating Mexican Consumer Culture in the Age of Porfirio Díaz, 1876-1911. Dissertation Graduate Faculty of AddRan College of Humanities and Social Sciences, Texas Christian University, May 2006. Dissertations and Theses Full Text ProQuest, UTSA, (Accessed December, 2010), 348.

9. Garza, The Imagined Underworld, 112.

10. “Robo de La Profesa,” Legajo 973475, TSJDF in Garza, 124.

11. Frank, Posada’s Broadsheets, 115.

12. He stated several times he could not be convicted, before God or men, of killing Mr. Tomás Hernández Aguirre, but he had been chosen and nothing further could be done as stated in Posada’s Broadsheet, Pormenores de la última ejecución, University of New Mexico, University Libraries, Center for Southwest

El Tigre de Santa Julia

By Marco Aquino

In the process of modernizing Mexico during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Porfirio Díaz administration soon realized the importance of the country’s image to attracting potential foreign investors and immigrants. Díaz and his científicos adopted the phrase “Order and Progress” as the era’s official slogan, reflecting increasing concern over managing the country’s social order. Robert Buffington explains, “The positivist emphasis on political, scientific solutions found an especially sympathetic audience among Porfirian científico intellectuals eager to create the effective disciplinary system necessary to economic and social development.”1 Social constructs such as race, gender, and class were used by the Díaz administration to categorize, monitor, and exploit its citizens. José Guadalupe Posada’s broadsheets produced for the Venegas Arroyo workshop illustrate a marginalized sector of society, confronting the social pressures placed upon them by the dominant upper class.

Porfirian criminologists such as Carlos Roumagnac borrowed heavily from European criminological theories and adapted them to specific Mexican situations.2 Influenced by the Italian Enrico Ferri, Roumagnac distinguished between “born criminals” and those “capable of regeneration.”3 According to Rougmanac, alcohol was among the causes of crime thought to poison future generations who would inherit criminal behavior from their parents.4 Other believed causes included environmental and hereditary factors. For example, criminologist Julio Guerrero cited atmospheric pressure and miscegenation as predominant causes for criminal behavior.5 In Crime and Citizen, Buffington states, “discursive changes were hardly the dramatic break with the past touted by generations of social reformers. From their inception, and in spite of their self proclaimed modernity, Mexican criminology and penology rearticulated traditional elite concerns about the nation’s marginal groups…”6 The exploitation of Mexican rural laborers reached its height during the Porfiriato. An 1883 law meant to encourage foreign colonization, allowed land companies to survey and buy rural land whose owners were unable to prove ownership.7 Most landowners were poor, illiterate, and unable to prove ownership over their land, which had simply been passed down to family members over several generations. Within five years the land companies possessed over sixty-eight million acres of rural land. By 1910, over half of all rural Mexicans lived and worked on haciendas owned by a select number of wealthy families.

Following in the footsteps of his father, at the age of eighteen, Jesús Negrete signed a two-year contract to work as a laborer on a hacienda.8 As payment, the company store or tienda de raya extended “credit” to the laborers. However, merchandise at these company stores was priced significantly higher than if paid for with cash elsewhere. All too often, laborers like Negrete found themselves in debt by the end of their contracts.

By law, workers were bound to continue work at the hacienda until their debt was paid.

Unable to pay his debt and unwilling to continue working, Negrete fled the hacienda and

Fig. 1

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The focus of the image is centered on the figure of Negrete who is depicted as much larger than the three figures surrounding him. Here, Negrete is presented as the aggressor directly facing the police officers as he shoots his gun. A second police officer throws his hands in the air as a sign of his surrender or defeat. The female figure (presumably Ramona Cabrera) is seen in the background walking away, as if to say she wants nothing to do with the incident. The accompanying text originally issued with the illustration is an attempt to narrate in chronological order the various crimes committed by Negrete. As pointed out by Frank, Negrete is never referred to as a bad man, although his accomplices are described as having “vile instincts.”15 After his death Negrete was transformed from common criminal to mythical hero. Elisa Speckman Guerra points to his humble beginnings as an illiterate, rural laborer and his confrontations with authority as an element to his transformation to popular hero.16 After his final capture Negrete was charged with first-degree murder and sentenced to death.17 Spending two years in the Lecumberri penitentiary, Negrete learned to read and write. As described by Guerra, Negrete played against current ideas of the “born criminal” by claiming he could be “rehabilitated” and lived an exemplary life while in prison.18 Despite these attempts, on December 20, 1910, Negrete was transferred back, once again, to the Belen jail where he was to be executed.19 Fig. 2

engaged in a life of crime. Negrete was later credited for terrorizing hacienda owners such as the robbery in 1900 of the Hacienda de Aragón where both the administrator and majordomo were wounded.9 Known as “The Tiger of Santa Julia,” Jesús Negrete, depicted by Posada in El cancionero popular (Fig. 1) with accompanying rhyming verse that narrates his tale, became a popular hero among the masses despite being portrayed as a common criminal by the mainstream press. His alias, “The Tiger” refers to his ability to escape authorities.10 Negrete’s greatest feats include an escape from the infamous Belen jail, the robberies at the Hacienda de Aragon, and murder of two police officers. The publishing house of Antonio Vanegas Arroyo undoubtedly contributed to the legend of Negrete by producing several broadsheets chronicling his many crimes and eventually his capture and execution. Unlike the mainstream press, which downplayed Negrete’s feats, the Vanegas Arroyo press presented a more objective view of the bandit.11 He undermined the Díaz regime (targeting military and government buildings) and made a mockery of rural and urban police by evading them on several occasions.12 His appeal to the lower classes was in his attack on the social institutions that had excluded him.

In the re-strike print, The Crime of El Tigre de Santa Julia (Fig. 2), Posada depicts Jesús Negrete as he escapes from police officers after a domestic dispute.13 One of his several mistresses, Ramona Cabrera, has given Negrete, hidden in a sarape, a gun which he uses to shoot Officer Arnulfo Sánchez. According to Patrick Frank, the shooting of the police officer would be interpreted differently depending on the viewer’s social class. The Porfirian elite would view Negrete as a common criminal and Posada had to be careful not to offend them. The mestizo lower classes, leery of police officers, would view the image with “far less moral condemnation.”14 10

During the Porfiriato Posada’s broadsheets demonstrated the country’s preoccupation with criminality. Both the lower classes and upper classes craved scandalous news stories with gritty details of a variety of crimes committed. The lower classes followed the stories of bandits such as Jesús Negrete who was seen as a popular hero for challenging oppressive social institutions and authorities, while the elite singled out criminals such as Negrete in order to reinforce their purported “scientific” criminology.

In death, Negrete became a mythical hero aided in part by Posada’s broadsheets, corridos, and popular Mexican literature.

Notes 1. Robert M. Buffington. “Revolutionary Reform: Capitalist

9. Elisa Speckman Guerra “I Was A Man of Pleasure, I Can’t

Development, Prison Reform and Executive Power in

Deny It: Histories of Jesús Negrete” in True Stories of Crime

Mexico” in The Birth of the Penitentiary in Latin America:

in Modern Mexico, ed. Robert M. Buffington and Pablo

Essays on Criminology, Prison Reform, and Social Control,

Piccato, (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico, 2009), 65.

ed. Ricardo D. Salvatore and Carlos Aguirre (Austin:

10. Ibid., 57.

University of Texas Press, 1996), 176.

11. Ibid., 75.

2. Robert M. Buffington. Crime and Citizen in Modern

12. Ibid., 65.

Mexico (Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 2000), 59.

13. Ibid., 65.

3. Ibid., 60.

14. Frank, Posada’s Broadsheets, 120.

4. Ibid., 60.

15. Ibid., 119.

5. Ibid., 56.

16. Guerra, “I Was A Man of Pleasure,” 93.

6. Ibid., 167.

17. Ibid., 83.

7. Michael C. Meyer, William L. Sherman and Susan M.

18. Ibid., 83.

Deeds, Course of Mexican History, 7th ed. (New York:

19. Ibid., 85.

Oxford University Press, 2003), 439.

8. Patrick Frank, Posada’s Broadsheets: Mexican Popular

Illustrations:

Imagery, 1890-1910 (Albuquerque: University of New

Fig. 2 José Guadalupe Posada, Crimen del Tigre de Santa

Mexico Press, 1998), 117.

Julia, 1903, n.d. Re-strike print, Fernando Gamboa Collection, PICT 999-019-0207. (Not in exhibition)

Jose Guadalupe Posada: Violence, Gender, Space, and the Production of Fear

By Gabriella Boschi Scott

Cadáveres de madre e hija (Fig. 1), an undated type-metal engraving by José Guadalupe Posada, is an image without associated text, presumably used to illustrate a sensational story. Posada, the legendary Mexican satirical illustrator who worked during the regime of Porfirio Díaz, was an acute and sensitive interpreter of popular sentiment who, while avoiding direct political commentary, used humor to highlight social injustice and to caricature the upper classes. The Porfiriato, a regime whose values were embodied by the slogan “order and progress,” saw the rise of capitalistic society in Mexico through a modernization plan that resulted in loss of political and personal freedom for the masses and increased class stratification.

A white-line engraving that conveys a powerful sense of immediacy and gloom, this image shows two dead and almost fully decomposed women (one of them a child) on a blanket or tarp on the floor, while a group of observers looks on and appraises the situation in a detached, scientific manner. Because of the lack of caption or information about the illustration, we are forced to pose as investigators as well, looking for clues in the image as well as the historical context. The scene takes place in an interior that retains many characteristics of an outdoor location: unfinished brick walls, no furniture other than a utilitarian table, what looks like bare cement or dirt floors and an unidentified and dim source of light. The only decorative details are a crucifix and various images arranged in altar-like fashion above the table. A window opening on complete darkness indicates a night setting; the window has been slanted so that its perspective is inconsistent with the rest of the picture, a device that has the effect of making the left wall, and the corpses, look like they are flowing out of the picture. This creates a zone of separation from the rest of the scene and gives the corpses, arranged diagonally, frontal exposure to the viewer.

The composition is emphatically split in the middle at the room’s corner, formally separating the two groups of people, with the two cadavers on the left representing the passive, disempowered, losing side of the divide. They are portrayed as the site of crude forensic inquiry: supine, exposed, barefoot and unrecognizable, because of lack of distinguishing attire and because their faces are reduced to bare skulls due to advanced decomposition, while the group of men to the right is in compact alignment, carefully groomed, middle-class and in charge, intensely focused on the “reading” of the scene.

The gentlemen can be loosely identified as a detective, a policeman, a judicial authority and possibly a forensic investigator. They are hieratically dignified, with the women’s bodies being positioned in a lower area and looking proportionally much smaller – this

Fig. 1

could mean that the men are more socially prominent by comparison or that they are of European descent and the women are indigenous, with the first ethnic group being typically larger, taller and better fed.

The location could be characterized as the interior of a home, but what kind of home?

Certainly it is not a bourgeois apartment, as we would expect to see furniture, objets d’art and rugs, which are indispensable fixtures in such elegant dwellings. German intellectual Walter Benjamin, while dissecting and interpreting urban Parisian life of the 19th century, wrote about how the bourgeoisie could be distinguished by the movable objects it acquired to adorn its abodes: “To dwell means to leave traces. In the interior, these are accentuated…the traces of the inhabitant are imprinted in the interior.”1 He concluded that the privilege to leave traces, in the form of material, “plush” objects, is a monopoly of the bourgeoisie.2 Poverty distinguishes itself in that it leaves no traces of the dweller–the poor are doomed to subsist on perishables, unable to leave a mark on their personal space because of their inability to amass material objects.

Such an impoverished home, in the Mexico City of the Porfiriato, would likely have been tainted by some or all of the social ills that have been enumerated by historians and social critics: addiction to pulque, a cheap alcoholic beverage, illegal unions, gambling, prostitution, rape, and incest.3 A subtext of domestic violence pervades the scene, with the feeling that hardship somehow degenerated into abuse and murder, and the suspicion that, while the violent crime has been consummated, oppression and betrayal are far from over for these wretched women. The usual suspect, the man of the house, is nowhere to be seen, but his conspicuous absence is filled by proxy by the group of men intent on investigating the obvious.

11

Mexico City during the Porfirian age was a collision of poverty and unsanitary conditions.

By 1890, tens of thousand of campesinos had been displaced by railroads and expansion of latifundia, and found refuge in the city.4 The wealthy may have conveniently ignored that their reckless exploitation of the country’s agricultural and subsoil resources was the primary cause of this mass migration, and, being resentful of having to cohabit with these peasants and derelicts in the urban environment, they reacted by erecting mansions, parks, government and office buildings against the desolate backdrop of the slums. Nowhere was the parasitic nature of capitalism so starkly illustrated as in the Mexico City of this period, except possibly for the labor reserves that are found, nowadays, in developing countries, such as the area of Northern Mexico in proximity of the U.S. border. If poverty meant hunger for the rural poor, for the urban poor it meant hunger, sickness, crowding, stress, loss of dignity and despair. The extreme conditions of city life were accompanied by increased opportunities for distraction from the hardships and oppression: this brought about a host of deviant behaviors that, if practiced by the members of the upper class, constituted leisure, whereas if practiced by the lower classes they were classified as clear signs of degeneration and perversion: drinking, gambling and frequenting prostitutes.5 Violence, rape, incest and murder among the wealthy were labeled as extraordinary dramas, dealt by the police and the press with the utmost privacy and consideration for the family, and very infrequently made it to the front page. While private life was truly private for the wealthy, it was a public affair for the poor, who spent a lot of time on the streets and whose “homes” were essentially beehives,6 and one could expect their affairs to be much more accurately chronicled for public consumption because of their frequent interaction with their peers. Posada was a prolific illustrator of crimes of the lower classes, and the fact that Cadáveres was the subject of a broadsheet aimed for popular distribution confirms that it was, with high probability, associated with a low-class crime.

Be it a premeditated, sadistic murder or a crime of passion, violence against women was, and is, a social construct that responds not simply to social pressures, but to the relative position that woman holds in a society’s value scale. It can be argued that, as Pablo Piccato states, “marital instability and the need to control the family’s labor were the factors which…made sense of private violence”7 in the lower classes of Porfirian Mexico, but the determinant of who was the subject and who was the object of the control was the patriarchal system, whose highest expression was the totalitarian state, trickling down in society through various forms of repression.

Mexico City, during the Porfiriato, experienced a wave of killings that were eerily reminiscent of those of Jack the Ripper in Victorian England, as they shared the common characteristics of taking place in destitute areas of the city (Whitechapel and Peralvillo, sites of prostitution in London and Mexico City respectively), and the fact that the victims were prostitutes, had been raped and were brutally and bizarrely wounded after they were killed.8 While the Mexican crimes were attributed to Francisco Guerrero, nicknamed “El Chalequero,” who was apprehended, tried and convicted, “Jack the Ripper” was never identified or arrested, and continued to claim victims and to live on in popular fantasy. The penny press, constituting a cultural bridge between the increasingly literate urban low-middle classes and the prurient upper classes, provided a detailed chronicle of the crimes of both killers. While the British press provided numerous photographic reports of the crimes and their whereabouts (as Jack the Ripper remained unidentified), Posada illustrated a large number of 12

broadsheets relating to Francisco Guerrero’s crimes, his trials and his imprisonment.

Both killers were made larger than life by the press, and both drew attention to the dismal, miserable living conditions of the urban areas that were the backdrop for the crimes. In both cases, these figures served as fall guys for previous unsolved crimes, and had the effect of reinforcing what Judith Walkowitz defines as the “myth of male violence against women, a story whose details have become vague and generalized, but whose ‘moral’ message is clear: the city is a dangerous place for women, when they transgress the narrow boundaries of home and hearth and dare to enter the public space.”9 The recent series of murders in Ciudad Juarez, in which prostitutes and maquiladora workers have been serially and ritually tortured, raped, murdered and mutilated echoes the other two (El Chalequero and Jack the Ripper) not just in the gory details, but also another, more important element— it has the characteristics of a genocide; patriarchy, through its process of dehumanization of women, has colonized the female body as a territory for exploitation and political affirmation. Such colonization and dominance is not simply external, but also internalized by the victim and self-inflicted: it is well known that women (and all marginalized groups, in general) are the most effective enforcers of patriarchal/dominant roles. The mythologized, extensively documented but insufficiently corroborated crimes of El Chalequero, Jack the Ripper and the monster of Juarez (if we believe that only one person is behind each regional series of crimes) are, primarily, cautionary, fear-inducing tales aimed at removing women from the public sphere in which they are seeking actualization professionally and socially.10 In all the cases the victims involved, be they prostitutes, maquiladora workers, or both, had found self-reliance through the only professions available to their socio-economic group, thus acquiring a portion, albeit small, of the public space that is a male dominion.11 This redirecting of women, through fear for their safety, away from the public sphere and towards the home as the only safe region is clearly disingenuous; statistically more than 63% of female homicides worldwide are committed by a family member or an acquaintance—something that the victims of Cadáveres de madre e hija would probably confirm if they had the opportunity to write their true story.

The continued insistence in broadcasting sensationalistic crimes that highlight, for women, the safety of home rather than the desirability of the public arena, confirms the Porfirian fourth estate as a formidable enforcer of patriarchal roles and advantages. The power of graphic images of violence to control and shape public opinion by escaping mediation through rational process cannot be underplayed, as it is used without impunity by many legal and illegal entities: governments, political parties, terrorist organizations, drug cartels and activism. On one hand, it is a power grounded in the panoptical imperative that communicates: be afraid, police yourself, and, if you are in danger, seek refuge in the safe arms of the patriarchal system. On the other, it serves the purpose of singling out, for latent aggressors, a potential victim they may have overlooked: in the case of femicides, it has the effect of redirecting aggression away from other targets, such as political entities, law enforcement or corporate systems and onto the female body, reinforcing the idea that it exists at the lowest rung of the ladder of aggression, and therefore the risks associated with abuses are lower: border journalist Diana Washington Valdez refers to the Juarez killings as “safari in Mexico.”12

Posada’s extraordinary powers of observation and expressionistic talent served a press whose intention was not to subvert the political status quo, but to stir class animosity and emphasize alterity through lampooning and distortion, nursing discontent while firmly steering the masses away from the concept of rising above their own condition.

Posada was not a political artist, but rather a faithful chronicler of popular sentiment, denouncing social injustice but refraining from pointing fingers, muzzled as the press was by the iron-fisted Porfirian censorship.13 Because this press could not effectively deliver governmental critique, it fell flat in pointing to the agents of change. Posada’s use of humor as an element of subversion is sharp but selective, and not without a moralistic tone: religious themes are treated rather seriously and traditionally and the institution of family is glorified as the ultimate social good. Women’s code, in particular, is narrowly defined by Posada: those who dare deviate from scripted roles as suffering nurturers, faithful wives or hapless crime victims (the only forms of heroism allowed to women in society, as corroborated by broadsheet literature) are punished by caricaturization as viragos, degenerate demons, Medusas and Furies. While male transgression is, in many of Posada’s chronicles, the marker of a “sinner who would be saint,” nurturing personal desires, interests and longings is unthinkable for a woman in Posada’s universe, and a sure sign of depravity. He glorified male banditry as a form of social protest, but consistently chastised female defiance.

Curiously, although Posada may have constructed this ominous, grave image simply as a pictorial chronicle of a newsworthy event, he involuntarily revealed the real discourse that dominated the civic standing of women versus men and of the lower versus the higher classes at the time of the Porfiriato and, one could argue, to this day. One of the clues is found by observing the movement of the action, which in Posada’s work as pointed out by Frank, frequently “flows…from perpetrator to victim,” in this case, from right to left.14

Notes 1. Benjamin, Walter, and Rolf Tiedemann. The Arcades

2010. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3177712

Project. Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1999, 9.

10. Koskela, Hille. “Gendered Exclusions: Women’s

2. Salzani, C. “The City as Crime Scene: Walter

Fear of Violence and Changing Relations of Space.”

Benjamin and the Traces of the Detective.” New

Geografiska Annaler, Seies B HUman Geography 81,

German Critique 34, no. 1 100 (2007): 165-87.

no. 2 (1999): 111-24.

doi:10.1215/0094033X-2006-022, 177-178.

11. Wright, Melissa. “From Protests to Politics: Sex

3. Garza, James Alex. The Imagined Underworld: Sex,

Work, Women’s Worth, and Ciudad Juárez

Crime, and Vice in Porfirian Mexico City. Lincoln:

Modernity.” Annals of the Association of American

University of Nebraska Press, 2007, 16-33.

Geographers 94, no. 2 (2004): 369-86.

4. Johns, Michael. The City of Mexico in the Age of

12. Washington, Valdez Diana. Harvest of Women:

Díaz, Austin: University of Texas Press, 1997, 12.

Safari in Mexico : the True Story about the Gender

5. Garza, “The Imagined Underworld,” 16-33.

Murders of Juarez, Mexico, 1993-2005. Los Angeles:

6. Garza, Ibid., 73-74.

Peace at the Border, 2006.

7. Piccato, Pablo. City of Suspects: Crime in Mexico

13. Stavans, Ilan. “José Guadalupe Posada,

City, 1900-1931. Durham, NC: Duke University Press,

Lampooner.” The Journal of Decorative and

2001, 105-106.

Propaganda Arts on Behalf of the Wolfsonian’-FIU, 56.

8. Garza, Ibid., 38-70.

14. Frank, Patrick, and José Guadalupe Posada.

9. Walkowitz, Judith R. “Jack the Ripper and the

Posada’s Broadsheets: Mexican Popular Imagery,1890-

Myth of Male Violence.” Feminist Studies 8, no. 3

1910. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press,

(Autumn 1982): 542-74. Accessed November 23,

1998, 23.

Illustration: Fig. 1 José Guadalupe Posada, Cadaveres de madre e hija, n.d. Re-strike print, Fernando Gamboa Collection, PICT 999-019-0175. (Not in exhibition)

By graphically and theatrically juxtaposing dominance and marginalization, Posada communicates without ambiguity who controls the discourse, the grand narrative of power, and who yields to it. The group of four men illustrates, with iconographic precision, the monolithic aspect of that patriarchy that through ideology, economic power and law enforcement has managed to appropriate the discourse. With the crucifix hanging behind them as reinforcement of their moral legitimacy, they will proceed to write the woman and child’s history, through their optic and to serve their agenda. Focused on a specific sensational event, but subconsciously immersed in the civic realities of his time, Posada created, in Cadáveres de madre e hija, an allegory of the social networks of power of the modern city.

13

La tragedia de Belén Galindo

By Melanie Raposo

Posada’s broadsheet, La tragedia de Belén Galindo (Fig. 1 & 2), chronicles the woeful tale of a young newly married wife,1 who is falsely accused of infidelity by her motherin-law. As the opening paragraph in the original text indicates, “Pobrecita de Belén!” is then murdered at the hand of her revenge-seeking husband, Mendoza. In its original form, this imagery was wrapped in text and positioned fully on the right side of the broadsheet while on the left side of the broadsheet, stood Belén, tall and proud with her hands on her hips. Posada, who often recycled images, used the latter figure as the iconic Adelita, a female soldier or camp follower (wearing the same dress as Belén), in a Cancionero popular broadsheet (Fig. 3). In the verso version of La tragedia (Fig. 2), the husband is presented to the viewer in full charro dress; he stands over his dead wife, with a look not of passion or regret, but of bewilderment. Posada’s proud Belén lays motionless on the floor, with her judge, juror and executioner standing above her.

Posada recounts the tragedy of Belén Galindo with striking imagery. A young woman, Belén, lies motionless on the floor; while her husband, enraged by the accusations of adultery that his “devoted” mother has leveled against his wife, stands above Belén, gun in hand. However, one can reason that within the cultural norms of the time, the unfortunate events that took place that night might not have been perceived by the reading public as so unusual or extraordinary. “Jealousy proved passions, and in the popular press, an adulterous or coquettish woman deserved her fate. In the law as well, adulterous women were more strongly censured than were straying husbands and men could be exonerated if they killed their wives when they found them in the marital bed with another man.”2 It is certain that Belén was a victim of slander at the hand of her mother-in-law. She was not found in the act of adultery; however, the alleged infidelity brought to the husband’s attention by his mother was enough for him to seek revenge.

He must, after all, protect his honor and keep his machismo intact. “Society believed that a man ought to react forcefully, and sometimes violently, when he was wronged by a woman.”3 Interestingly enough, at the end of the story the mother-in-law was “brought to justice” for her slanderous words; however, whether the husband was convicted of any crime, let alone for murder remains undisclosed.4

Familiarization with the social and cultural norms of the Mexican experience during Posada’s era may help shed light on stories of victimized women such as Belén.

Posada’s late 19th century Mexico was a society based on, and ruled by male dominance. This patriarchal system not only manifested itself in the governed bodies, but also domestically and culturally as well. It is important to understand that the Spanish conquest, occupation, and mixing of races (mestizaje) most assuredly imposed this Iberian system of male dominance onto Mexican society. In Octavio Paz’s El Laberinto de La Soledad (1950), Paz states that the mestizo has an equal pattern of “oppression and repression,” and the “illegitimate origin of the mestizo stemming from the lack of women in the conquering Spanish expeditions made him a disenfranchised and marginalized individual from birth.”5 Incidentally, because of the marginalization of the mestizo race, forced Iberian social system, and absence of women within the 14

Fig. 1

Fig. 2

Spanish expeditions, machismo, an outwardly complex and pervasive scheme within the Mexican culture, was established. Under Spanish Colonial rule, the mestizos were essentially ignored by the ruling elite and were forbidden from owning any property or having any public rights. “Their second-class status, therefore, gave rise to a mode of behavior which resulted in feelings of inferiority and frustration.”6 Such feelings created an instinctive response in the form of aggression—behavior commonly labeled machismo—used to counteract the anticipated abuse and persecution of the ruling class. The concept of machismo displayed itself in all aspects of Mexican life, particularly in social settings and family life.7 The husband was allowed greater freedoms and responsibilities in Mexican culture at the time. He was expected to guide and protect the family from any influences he deemed unsatisfactory. The husband was also given the duty of maintaining the family’s integrity and façade to the public, and furthermore ensuring the moral integrity of the women in the household.

If machismo is a trend among men, then what is the cultural tendency for women in society during Posada’s time? Porfirio Díaz served as Mexico’s President from 1876 to 1911.8 A dictator by all accounts, his time of oppressive rule is known as the Porfirian era. Kathryn A. Sloan explains in Runaway Daughters: Seduction, Elopement and Honor in 19th Century Mexico that Diaz sought to modernize and secularize society.9 His mass privatization of communal landholdings (ejidos) essentially diminished women’s historical rights to property and reinforced their subordination to a patriarchal authority.10 Effectively, women were given distinct roles to fill in 19th century Mexico: the status of mother, spiritual advisor and moral upholder were all assembled under one value system, marianismo.11 This counterpart to machismo is based on the Virgin Mary

(María).12 Along with this ideology, there is a twofold view of woman: she is a saint, respected wife, devoted mother and the symbol of family honor, or she is a “fallen woman,” (malinchista) irredeemable in the eyes of society. “The choice is hers as she has to be one or the other, without possibility of compromise.”13 The former of the two, the role of mother, is so highly respected and honored inside the Mexican culture, that the role of macho is given special leeway when it comes to his mother.

It is only at the death of his mother that a man can cry publicly without humiliation or risk to his machismo. In fact, the bond between mother and son is so strong it would not be uncommon for the mother to remain closely connected to her son even after he marries—and it would not be unusual for a mother to have a great amount of input and involvement in her son’s marriage. In the case of Belén Galindo, the relationship of mother and son effectively ended her life.

Patrick Frank states in Posada’s Broadsheets: Mexican Popular Imagery, that over half of Posada’s broadsheets deal with crime, and many of these stories were the most extreme—the more sensational the better.14 “The sheets spoke for the urban lowerclass mestizo and show a strong tendency to see things from their viewpoint rather than from that of the established.”15 For the lower-class, these broadsheets provided entertainment; they also provided lessons in love, morality and romance. These types of broadsheets had a purpose: to elicit moral condemnations16 and warn against the pitfalls or misfortunes of romantic love. The vast majority of broadsheets fell under the heading of human interest stories. Many broadsheet readers could relate to the plight of the victim or the madness of the criminal. Parents could retell the story to their children to reinforce lessons, such as obedience to parents, behaving honorably, and not letting passion rule the mind.17 Causes of crimes usually sprang from personal morality and family relations gone awry, such is the case of our tragic heroine, Belén Galindo.

The tragedy of Belén Galindo is not only about a young wife falsely accused of being a “fallen woman” by her mother-in-law, or how her sudden death delivered at the hands of her husband was a direct result of that slander. But also equally tragic was the system catering to and enforcing the idea that uxoricide could be morally justified.

More apparent is the evidence that 19th century Mexico was strictly influenced and manipulated by a system of honor. This system was based on the belief that a man must sanction and direct the role of women in society. In this case, because both mother and wife were constricted by the narrow role allowed them by the Mexican patriarchal system through the precepts of marianismo, they were essentially victimized by it. Undoubtedly, the collision of machismo and marianismo, two social paradigms designed to preserve the patriarchal system, ultimately contributed to both women’s demise.

Fig. 3 José Guadalupe Posada, El cancionero popular, Tiburcia, late 19th–early 20th C., broadsheet, intaglio print, half sheet, Fernando Gamboa Collection, PICT 999-019-0019

market involve antagonistic negotiations, believing one has outsmarted the other on the exchange of goods.

This process is a result of macho behavior but also because it not only results in saving money, but gives

Notes 1. In the original text, it states that she had only been

to the judge. That is the last time Mendoza is mentioned.

one the prospect of bringing down an opponent.

married for 10 days.

After that, the story, only addresses the “ingrato”

8. With the exclusion of a four-year term served by

2. Katheryn Sloan, Runaway Daughters: Seduction,

(ungrateful) mother-in-law.

Manuel Gonzalez from 1880 to 1884.

Elopement, and Honor in Nineteenth Century Mexico,

5. Stella Clark. “Machismo: Friend or Foe.” CSU San

9. Sloan, Runaway Daughters, 72.

(University of New Mexico Press, 2008), 71

Marcos. Accessed December 15, 2010.

10. Sloan, Runaway Daughters, 70.

3. Sloan, Runaway Daughters, 92.

http://public.csusm.edu/public/sclark/machpap.html

11. Clark, “Machismo,” paragraph 12.

4. In the original text, the judge and police arrive at the

6. Clark, “Machismo,” paragraph 10.

12. Clark, “Machismo,” paragraph 12.

crime scene. The husband, Mendoza, explains his story

7. For example, simple tasks like purchasing items at

13. Clark, “Machismo,” paragraph 12.

14. Patrick Frank, Posada’s Broadsheets: Mexican Popular Imagery 1890-1910, (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1998), 19. (Frank devotes an entire chapter on sensational and shocking crimes).

15. Frank, Posada’s Broadsheets,10.

16. Frank, Posada’s Broadsheets, 6.

17. Sloan, Runaway Daughters, 81.

Illustrations: Figs. 1, 2 José Guadalupe Posada, La tragedía de Belén Galindo, late 19th–early 20th C., broadsheet (recto and verso), intaglio print. (Not in exhibition)

15

An Amusing Display of Death: La calavera de Cupido

By Alana Coates

Broadsides such as José Guadalupe Posada’s La calavera de Cupido (Fig. 1) were typically printed around the annual November 2nd celebrations of the Day of the Dead.

Calaveras satirize the living in terms of the dead. The origins of calaveras such as this can be traced through the study of the Danza Macabra, Memento Mori, and 18th century illustrated books such as La portentosa vida de la muerte mexicana. In addition to a close look at the latter in relation to calaveras, I will examine the significance of the clothing, or lack of clothing, that adorns skeletons, and how this attire was used to personify type, action, and rank.

Mexican calaveras find their origin in Europe through the Death Dance or Danza Macabra. The Grim Reaper, the traditional depiction of death, can be recognized as a hooded, cloaked skeleton carrying a scythe. In the Death Dance, however, this bringer of death is unclothed, while his victims are clearly identified by their clothing as to their rank in the church, or social level (Fig. 2). The skeleton, personified as death, mocks these persons from the elite class as he leads them to their grave. The moral here is that death is an equalizer—insomuch as class and rank within the society of the living will no longer matter after death.1 Images such as these are found all throughout Europe. Their widespread use is attributed to the commonality of death brought on by the Black Plague of the mid-fourteenth century, as well as high infant mortality rates.2 In the Memento Mori (Fig. 3) art tradition, skulls were placed in paintings with the underlying message to remember one’s mortality. Unlike the light-hearted calaveras, Memento Mori images are intended to evoke morbid and somber thoughts. The latter imagery cautions the viewer to pay attention to how one conducts their life.

Expert in nineteenth century Mexican graphic arts and the author of numerous publications on Posada, Mercurio López Casillas states that, “the first manifestations of death with a festive character appear in the second half of the eighteenth century.”3 These took the form of commercial items sold in Mexico City to commemorate the Day of the Dead. Another connection he makes is with the illustrated book written by Friar Joaquín de Bolaños from Zacatecas. His book La portentosa vida de la muerte mexicana (The Portentous Life of Mexican Death) included illustrations by printmaker Francisco Agüera Bustamante.4 This story was meant to be an amusing display of death, as its main character, an unclothed skeleton, appeared in humorous situations commonplace to the living. La calavera de Cupido exemplifies the connection of Mexican calaveras to skull and skeleton motifs from the past found in Danza Macabra, Memento Mori, and La portentosa vida de la muerte.

This broadside exhibits a grid of eight single figures, four couples, and a small decorative vignette at the top of a tiny centered skeleton jumping out of (or onto) a bed while

16

waving to the viewer. Rhyming verses beneath each illustration address some element of desire relevant to each character, whether of human attraction or vice. For example, the first calavera in the top left corner represents a cleric—a priest or other high-ranking member of the clergy. His attire indicates his position in the Church. Depicted in robe and crown, he holds a book; his frozen gesture suggests preaching at the pulpit. The accompanying text suggests that he is a glutton for food, and perhaps for little girls as well.

To the right of the cleric is a “beautiful little blond girl.” The accompanying verses warn against vanity, as they allude to her love affair with fashion. The reader is reminded that beauty, no matter how precious, is as fleeting as a fast ship, “como un bergantín velero.” Her calavera illustrates her proper appearance and status as a well-to-do lady.

Proudly posing in profile and showing off her Sunday hat, she wears a fashionable dress with an upright collar.

The adjacent female skeleton has similarly had a love affair with dress and appearances.

Her verses reveal that she fervently pursued the young boys in church striving constantly for their attention. Dressed in flamboyant fashion, she wears a flowing fur coat. Her skull has an awkward, frontal head ornament—likely a hairdo given that the verses recount that in her ignorance she has curled her hair so tightly that she turned into an ugly calavera, “Con chinos, que su tontera, la hizo ser fea calavera.”

The last calavera in the top row is a police officer depicted with a cap, a jacket adorned with badges, and a rifle by his side. His passion is also not of a tangible nature, as his love affair is perhaps with power, rank, and recognition. Beaten to death by the “bad guys,” he became a calavera.

The center row of images and verses narrate the story of a single couple. The male calavera wears a sombrero. His body language is vigorous and enthusiastic as he serenades a female skeleton wearing a china poblana dress. Down on one knee, he pleads for love, passion, and compassion. Then wrapping his arm around her waistline, he asks if she is faithful, and invites her to go with him cajoling: “Pues venga, mi calavera.” He then punches the air rejecting the idea of renouncing the marriage, since apparently, she did not wait for him. In the final scene of the sequence another male calavera, dressed as a soldier, sweeps her away. Her wide-open mouth expresses sheer delight rather than terror. The verses indicate that she cheated on her husband in his absence, and explain that a German carried her away. The moral of the former sequence correlates thematically with Posada’s broadsheets of bandits, where women are always alleged to be the demise of man.5

On the bottom row, the first woman is, once again, overly concerned with money and material things. The second character, like the females above him, is a dandy—a man dressed in his finest attire; he is adorned with spectacles, cane and top hat.

Accompanying text accuses him of immoral behavior. Drinking appears to be the vice of the third character depicted, another female, who is dressed in a robe-like garment. The final character of this broadsheet is dressed as a campesino (Indian peasant) wearing a sombrero and sarape while enjoying a drink. As the narrator of the epitaphs above, he claims to have come out of the grave to tell the stories of La calavera de Cupido.

William Beezley, historian specializing in late nineteenth and early twentieth century Mexico, describes the social context of broadsides such as these. Beezley concludes that these epitaphs served as a way for the commoners of society to vent about the elite class without getting in trouble for it. They could laugh and poke fun at the establishment.6 Stanley Brandes, a social and cultural anthropologist, declared the broadsheets as a form of “peaceful protest.”7 Broadsheets and their accompanying verses, he explains, were a way for publishing houses such as Vanegas Arroyo’s (for whom Posada worked), to ridicule the contemptible aspects of the upper class and clergy members safely without repercussion from authorities.

The festive nature of calavera engravings can also be found in sugar skulls and pan de muerto sold during the Day of the Dead celebrations, as well as in their less ephemeral artistic ancestors such as the amusing skeleton figure in La portentosa vida de la muerte. The relationship of Posada’s calaveras with the artistic tradition of the Death Dance is what I find most fascinating. In the Death Dance, death was represented as a skeleton who led a clearly personified figure to the grave. Death was the equalizer, in that the personified figure’s rank no longer mattered once death appeared to take them away. The artist of the calavera, as exemplified in La calavera de Cupido, has conflated these characters—perpetrator and victim—that were once depicted separately. In other words, the skeleton, which once represented death, is now dressed in the clothing of the persona that signified a certain member of the elite society or a particular rank within the clergy. Since broadsheets were made for, and sold to people of the poorer class, and the verses that accompany them clearly poke fun at the social elites, it is evident that Posada was not trying to evade the moral message of death as an equalizer. This print contains members of the foolish upper class alongside a campesino, demonstrating a range of social strata.

In conclusion, La calavera de Cupido demonstrates that long-standing traditional artistic motifs are conjoined in the Mexican calavera; however, it is clear that Posada added his own twist by condensing the characters of the Death Dance into one. The European printmaking traditions depict a morbid and mocking skeleton that Posada transformed into the calavera as an amusing display of death. The act of removing the personification of death perhaps plays out as the ultimate broma, practical joke. Death, in the end, awaits us all, just as the skeleton already exists beneath our flesh.

Fig. 1 José Guadalupe Posada, La calavera de cupido, late 19th–early 20th C., broadside, intaglio print, full sheet, Fernando Gamboa Collection, PICT 999-019-0014 17

Fig. 3

Fig. 2

Notes:

Illustrations:

1. Stanley Brandes, Skulls to the Living, Bread to the

Fig. 2 German School, Dance of Death, 16th century,

Dead: the Day of the Dead in Mexico and Beyond (Malden:

Pen and brown ink, brush and brown ink, watercolor and

Blackwell Pub., 2006), 60.

gouache, with touches of gold, Image© The Metropolitan

2. Brandes, Skulls to the Living, 59.

Museum of Art. (Not in exhibition)

3. Gregory Dechant and Mercurio López Casillas, Images of

Fig. 3 Pieter Claesz, 1628, Still Life with a Skull and a Writing

Death in Mexican Prints (Mexico: Editorial RM, 2008), 19.

Quill, Oil on wood, Image© The Metropolitan Museum of

4. Dechant and López Casillas, Images of Death, 19.

Art. (Not in exhibition)

5. Patrick Frank, Posada’s Broadsheets: Mexican Popular Imagery 1890-1910 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1998), 95.

6. William H. Beezley, Rituals of Rule, Rituals of Resistance: Public Celebrations and Popular Culture in Mexico (Wilmington: SR Books, 1994), 98.

7. Brandes, Skulls to the Living, 64.

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Manuel Manilla, Calavera tapatía, late 19th–early 20th C., broadsheet, intaglio print, full sheet, Fernando Gamboa Collection, PICT 999-019-0016

Manuel Manilla, Panteón antiguo epitáfios, late 19th–early 20th C., broadside, intaglio print, half sheet, Fernando Gamboa Collection, PICT 999-019-0077 19

Manuel Manilla, Gran baile de calaveras, late 19th–early 20th C., full sheet, broadsheet, intaglio print, Manilla and Posada Print Collection, PICT 000-428-0001 20

José Guadalupe Posada, Las calaveritas picosas: verdes y color de rosas, broadside, late 19th–early 20th C., intaglio print, half sheet, Fernando Gamboa Collection, PICT 999-019-0018

José Guadalupe Posada, Grán baile de calaveras, late 19th–early 20th C., broadside, intaglio print, full sheet, Manilla and Posada Print Collection, PICT 000-428-0004

José Guadalupe Posada, Las bravísimas calaveras guatemaltecas de Mora y de Morales, late 19th–early 20th C., broadsheet, intaglio print, full sheet, Fernando Gamboa Collection, PICT 999-019-0013 21

José Guadalupe Posada, Calaveras de coyotes y meseras, late 19th–early 20th C., broadside, intaglio print, full sheet, Fernando Gamboa Collection, PICT 999-019-0017 22

José Guadalupe Posada, Panteón de menudencias, late 19th–early 20th C., broadside, intaglio print, full sheet, Fernando Gamboa Collection, PICT 999-019-0078

José Guadalupe Posada, La calavera de Don Quijote, ca. 1909, broadside, intaglio print, full sheet, Manilla and Posada Print Collection, PICT 999-023-0002

José Guadalupe Posada, Gran calavera eléctrica, late 19th–early 20th C., broadsheet, intaglio print, full sheet, Fernando Gamboa Collection, PICT 999-019-0043 23

José Guadalupe Posada, Don Pepito contempla a las presentes, late 19th–early 20th C., broadside, intaglio print, full sheet, Fernando Gamboa Collection, PICT 999-019-0032 24

José Guadalupe Posada, Espantoso crímen nunca visto!, late 19th–early 20th C., broadsheet, intaglio print, half sheet, Fernando Gamboa Collection, PICT 999-019-0034

José Guadalupe Posada, Crimen nunca visto!, late 19th–early 20th C., broadsheet, intaglio print, half sheet, Fernando Gamboa Collection, PICT 999-019-0029

José Guadalupe Posada, Lamentable y espantoso ejemplo, late 19th–early 20th C., broadsheet, intaglio print, half sheet, Fernando Gamboa Collection, PICT 999-019-0052 25

José Guadalupe Posada, ¡Horrible y espantoso crímen!, late 19th–early 20th C., broadsheet, intaglio print, half sheet, Fernando Gamboa Collection, PICT 999-019-0046 26

José Guadalupe Posada, El jurado de la Bejarano, late 19th–early 20th C., broadside, intaglio print, full sheet, Fernando Gamboa Collection, PICT 999-019-0051

José Guadalupe Posada, Guadalupe Bejarano en las bartolinas de Belén, late 19th–early 20th C., broadside, intaglio print, full sheet, Fernando Gamboa Collection, PICT 999-019-0045

José Guadalupe Posada, Pleito de casados que siempre estan enojados, late 19th–early 20th C., broadsheet, intaglio print, half sheet, Fernando Gamboa Collection, PICT 999-019-0079 27

José Guadalupe Posada, ¡¡Las mujeres martiriadas!, late 19th–early 20th C., broadsheet, intaglio print, half sheet, Fernando Gamboa Collection, PICT 999-019-0066 28

José Guadalupe Posada, ¡Horrible asesinato!, late 19th–early 20th C., broadsheet, intaglio print, half sheet, Mexican Broadsides Collection, PICT 000-425-0118

José Guadalupe Posada, Los autores del crímen de la Profesa, late 19th–early 20th C., broadside, intaglio print, full sheet, Fernando Gamboa Collection, PICT 999-019-0010

José Guadalupe Posada, Lamentos, recuerdos, y tierna despedida, late 19th–early 20th C., broadsheet, intaglio print, half sheet, Mexican Broadsides Collection, PICT 000-425-0072 29

José Guadalupe Posada, Martirio de una niña, 1893, broadside, intaglio print, full sheet, Fernando Gamboa Collection, PICT 999-019-0056 30

José Guadalupe Posada, Balazos en la calle, 1892, broadside, intaglio print, full sheet, Fernando Gamboa Collection, PICT 999-019-0011

José Guadalupe Posada, Los sangrientos sucesos, late 19th–early 20th C., broadsheet, intaglio print, half sheet, Mexican Broadsides Collection, PICT 000-425-0035

José Guadalupe Posada, Ya la autoridad echo garra, late 19th–early 20th C., broadsheet, intaglio print, half sheet, Fernando Gamboa Collection, PICT 999-019-0105 31

José Guadalupe Posada, La destrucción del mundo, late 19th–early 20th C., broadsheet, intaglio print, half sheet, Mexican Broadsides Collection, PICT 000-425-0129 32

José Guadalupe Posada, Ejemplar y ciertisimo suceso…, late 19th–early 20th C., broadsheet, intaglio print, full sheet, Fernando Gamboa Collection, PICT 999-019-0033

José Guadalupe Posada, La grandísima inundación de Guanajuato, late 19th–early 20th C., broadsheet, intaglio print, full sheet, Mexican Broadsides Collection, PICT 000-425-FF27

José Guadalupe Posada, El mosquito Americano, late 19th–early 20th C., broadsheet, intaglio print, half sheet, Fernando Gamboa Collection, PICT 999-019-0060 33

José Guadalupe Posada, Castigo del cielo, late 19th–early 20th C., broadsheet, intaglio print, half sheet, Fernando Gamboa Collection, PICT: 999-019-0048A 34

José Guadalupe Posada, Los lamentos de las tortilleras, late 19th–early 20th C., broadsheet, intaglio print, half sheet, Mexican Broadsides Collection, PICT 000-425-0071

José Guadalupe Posada, Muerte de Aurelio Caballero por el vómito, en Veracruz, late 19th–early 20th C., broadside, intaglio print, full sheet, Fernando Gamboa Collection, PICT 999-019-0062

José Guadalupe Posada, Las 97 mujeres envenenadas, late 19th–early 20th C., broadsheet, intaglio print, half sheet, Fernando Gamboa Collection, PICT: 999-019-0067 35

José Guadalupe Posada, Ejemplar acontecimiento! Un espíritu maligno, late 19th–early 20th C., broadsheet, intaglio print, half sheet, Mexican Broadsides Collection, PICT 000-425-FF24 36

José Guadalupe Posada, Cogida de Rodolfo Gaona, late 19th–early 20th C., broadsheet, intaglio print, half sheet, Fernando Gamboa Collection, PICT 999-019-0022

José Guadalupe Posada, El niño sin craneo, late 19th–early 20th C., broadsheet, intaglio print, half sheet, Mexican Broadsides Collection, PICT: 000-425-0128

José Guadalupe Posada, Cerdo con cara de hombre, late 19th–early 20th C., broadsheet, broadsheet, intaglio print, half sheet, Fernando Gamboa Collection, PICT 999-019-0035 37

José Guadalupe Posada, Importantísimo milagro, late 19th–early 20th C., broadsheet, intaglio print, half sheet, Mexican Broadsides Collection, PICT 000-425-0095 38

José Guadalupe Posada, La muerte de su Santidad León XIII y detalles de su penosa enfermedad, late 19th–early 20th C., broadsheet, intaglio print, half sheet, Fernando Gamboa Collection, PICT 999-01900063

José Guadalupe Posada, La milagrosa imagen, late 19th–early 20th C., broadsheet, intaglio print, half sheet, Fernando Gamboa Collection, PICT 999-019-0058

José Guadalupe Posada, Nuestra Señora de la Soledad de Santa Cruz, late 19th–early 20th C., broadsheet, intaglio print, full sheet, Fernando Gamboa Collection, PICT 999-019-0068A 39

José Guadalupe Posada, A nuestra señora de Guadalupe, late 19th–early 20th C., broadsheet, intaglio print, full sheet, Manilla and Posada Print Collection, PICT 000-428 40

José Guadalupe Posada, Señor de Ixtapalapa, late 19th–early 20th C., broadsheet, intaglio print, half sheet, Fernando Gamboa Collection, PICT 999-019-0102

José Guadalupe Posada, El cancionero popular, el pulquero, late 19th–early 20th C., broadsheet, intaglio print, half sheet, Fernando Gamboa Collection, PICT 999-019-0020

Manuel Manilla, Nuevos versos del apasionado, late 19th–early 20th C., broadsheet, intaglio print, half sheet, Fernando Gamboa Collection, PICT 999-019-0076 41

José Guadalupe Posada, Mi grandota, late 19th–early 20th C., broadsheet, intaglio print, half sheet, Fernando Gamboa Collection, PICT 999-0190-0057 42

José Guadalupe Posada, Versos de Valentín Mancera, broadsheet, late 19th–early 20th C., intaglio print, half sheet, Fernando Gamboa Collection, PICT 999-019-0099

JosĂŠ Guadalupe Posada and Son

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