Research Catalog

Postcards from the Río Bravo border : picturing the place, placing the picture, 1900s-1950s

Title: Postcards from the Río Bravo border : picturing the place, placing the picture, 1900s-1950s / by Daniel D. Arreola.
Author: Arreola, Daniel D. (Daniel David), 1950-
Publication: Austin : University of Texas Press, 2013.

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Status	Format	Access	Call Number	Item Location
Request for On-site Use Request Scan How do I pick up this item and when will it be ready?	Text	Use in library	HT127.7 .A774 2013	Off-site

Details

Additional Authors

William P. Clements Center for Southwest Studies, issuing body.

Description

xix, 258 pages : illustrations, map; 27 cm

Summary

Between 1900 and the late 1950s, Mexican border towns came of age both as tourist destinations and as emerging cities. Commercial photographers produced thousands of images of their streets, plazas, historic architecture, and tourist attractions, which were reproduced as photo postcards. Daniel Arreola has amassed one of the largest collections of these border town postcards, and in this book, he uses this amazing visual archive to offer a new way of understanding how the border towns grew and transformed themselves in the first half of the twentieth century, as well as how they were pictured to attract American tourists. Postcards from the Río Bravo Border presents nearly two hundred images of five significant towns on the lower Río Bravo-Matamoros, Reynosa, Nuevo Laredo, Piedras Negras, and Villa Acuña. Using multiple images of sites within each city, Arreola tracks changes both within the cities as places and in the ways in which the cities have been pictured for tourist consumption. He makes a strong case that visual imagery has a shaping influence on how we negotiate and think about places, creating a serial scripting or narrating of the place. Arreola also shows how postcard images, when systematically and chronologically arranged, can tell us a great deal about how Mexican border towns have been viewed over time. This innovative visual approach demonstrates that historical imagery, no less than text or maps, can be assembled to tell a compelling geographical story about place and time.

Subject

Genre/Form

History.
Pictorial works.

Note

"Published in cooperation with the William P. Clements Center for Southwest Studies, Southern Methodist University."

Bibliography (note)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Contents

List of Illustrations -- Preface and Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- I. Places and Postcards -- 1. Río Bravo Border Towns -- 2. Postcards -- II. Postcard Views -- 3. Gateways -- 4. Streets -- 5. Plazas -- 6. Attractions -- 7. Businesses and Landmarks -- 8. Everyday Life -- III. Sight into Site -- 9. View of the Place, Place of the View -- Appendix: Postcard Writings -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index.

ISBN

9780292752801
0292752806
0292752814
9780292752818

LCCN

2012044413

OCLC

ocn820678665
820678665
SCSB-9414577

Owning Institutions

Princeton University Library