ABOUT THIS BOOK

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.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Daniel D. Arreola is a Professor in the School of Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning and an Affiliate Faculty with the School of Transborder Studies at Arizona State University. A past president of the Association of Pacific Coast Geographers, he is the author of The Mexican Border Cities: Landscape Anatomy and Place Personality, Tejano South Texas: A Mexican American Cultural Province, and Hispanic Spaces, Latino Places: Community and Cultural Diversity in Contemporary America.

REVIEWS

Arreola is able to capture the voices (and images) of borderlands residents themselves, the very people who have been most heavily impacted by current policy changes even as their voices have been marginalized and their histories have been decontextualized. . . . [his] use of “view of place” and “place of view” allows him to capture the changing nature of Mexican border towns and to breathe life back into these multidimensional spaces.

— American Historical Review

This is masterful cultural geography with rich visual materials, delivered in a unique and compelling fashion. . . . Very stimulating and well-written.

— Journal of Latin American Geography

Arreola’s book brings to life the intrinsic charm of five historic border cities along the lower Río Grande. Using a lifetime collection of classic photographic postcards, the author presents a half century of American border tourism and Mexican urban development. The superb and illuminating text brings forth a wonderful world of food, bars, curios, sights, plazas, street scenes, people, and architecture. Borderland studies that focus on revolution or immigration should not lose sight that the classic border cities were places of transcultural charm, where both Mexico and the United States learned to value and appreciate each other. Modern residents of the borderland will embrace this work for both its intellectual sophistication and its stunning visual presentations.

— John Miller Morris, Professor of Geography, University of Texas at San Antonio; author of Taming the Land: The Lost Postcard Photographs of the Texas High Plains

This is a labor of love that . . . stands to make an important contribution to the use of vintage postcards as a source of historical understanding. As well, it stands to put into better historical-geographical perspective the experience of early twentieth-century visitors to Mexican border towns. The author deals with postcards not only as a kind of visual culture, but also as a kind of popular culture. And he deals with tourism as a means of comprehending cultural difference. His is a study of how landscapes in a specific region of cultural divide were once pictorially represented for commercial profit—in other words, how those places were ‘othered’ for American tourist consumption. None of these emphases have been previously given their due in book form.

— John A. Jakle, Professor Emeritus of Geography, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; coauthor of Remembering Roadside America: Preserving the Recent Past as Landscape and Place and author of Postcards of the Night: Views of American Cities

TABLE OF 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