ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the 1920s and 1930s postcards by little-known photographer Mauricio Yáñez depicting Mexican vendors selling craft products, and regional archetypes performing popular dances. Through photography and circulation via the modern medium of the postcard, Yáñez updated nineteenth-century Mexican typologies and costumbrista images and participated in the development of tourism, part of the modernization process that Mexico underwent following the Revolution of the 1910s. Like other visual culture of the era, Yáñez’s postcards purposefully construct an image of national consolidation through the exaltation of local culture. Simultaneously, they point to racial and class tensions and engage the development of a local photographic tradition. The images feed into a romantic notion of the tourist experience and suggest Mexico as a timeless, rural locale. Depictions of vendors promote an idealistic vision of Mexican folk art despite mass production and easy availability of the products thanks to the modernization of the craft industry. Yáñez’s folkloric types replicate the festive image of the country promoted in 1930s films. The photographer’s snapshot aesthetic suggested the modern tourist experience as authentically Mexican, while his elision of signs of modernization, class, and regional difference fall in line with the official construction of a unified national identity steeped in rural tradition.
