Creating Mexican Consumer Culture in the Age of Porfirio Díaz

3: Capital Investments: Porfirian Department Stores and the Evolution of Mexico City Retailing

99 Chapter 3 Capital Investments Porfirian Department Stores and the Evolution of Mexico City Retailing Nothing made modernity more tangible for urban Mexicans than the department store. Born in 1891, midway through the Porfiriato, the Mexican department store signaled a maturing and deepening consumer market capable of supporting no less than nine such stores by the Revolution. Respectable society and their political leadership invested themselves deeply in these institutions. Stocked with the goods of a modern national and global economy, serving as an institution of the gente decente, and securing an urban transformation program jointly undertaken by the state and private capital, the department store symbolized the apparent triumph of the Porfirian modernization project and the ascendance of its dominant class. The department store functioned as an essential cultural primer, educating its customers on how to look, behave, think, and therefore be modern. Department stores marked the latest refinement in a transnational process whereby members of modern nation-states learned that citizenship meant engaging in proper consumption activities as well as production. Still, the history of what most consider the “classic” department store in Porfirian Mexico is in its infancy.1 While Porfirians chattered incessantly about the significance of department stores, the academic Chapter 3 100 historiography addresses this issue only tangentially. John Lear and others touch on the stores’ labor relations but most scholars dismiss them as elite institutions.2 Only Jürgen Buchenau, in his research on Casa Boker, the famous German hardware store in Mexico, has given the department store its due as a modernizing institution in Porfirian Mexico.3 CasaBoker,praisedbyPresidentDíazas“oneofthebestornamentsof the capital and a demonstration of its culture,” was undoubtedly a department store.4 It had distinct merchandising sections, although the Bokers emphasized hardware and only grudgingly moved into other product lines. Moreover, they did not pursue modern advertising and display techniques until much later in the Porfiriato. What this study considers is the stores along the lines of the Bon Marché in Paris or Wanamakers in Philadelphia. Such stores maintained an inventory weighed heavily toward a mix of garments, fashion accessories, and home furnishings, among other items, as well as employing modern advertising and display techniques designed to cultivate desire. Often mentioned but never carefully examined, the Porfirian department store and, more generally, the evolution of retailing in nineteenth-century Mexico remain poorly understood. Part of this absence in the historiography stems from the difficulty of writing business histories in Mexico. Mexican family companies and corporations alike are far more guarded with their archives than other North American firms, assuming records even exist.5 Fires, neglect, and the troubles of the Revolution further diminished sources.6 These difficulties with sources, combined with the ideological imperatives of the Porfirian Black Legend produced by the Revolution, continue to shape the popular image of Porfirian department stores as vendors of imported goods and preserves of the elite who could afford them. This stereotype, like any other, possesses an element of truth, but this chapter will demonstrate that department stores were far more complicated institutions than the standard characterization allows. A variety of sources help to answer questions of store ownership, staffing, customers, retailing practices, provenance of goods sold, and cultural role in Porfirian society. Despite the lack of studies in Mexico, since the early 1980s historians of Europe and the United States have enriched an existing historiography of department stores in these centers of modern consumerism by incorporating social and cultural dimensions into their work.7 These establish a baseline of comparison with stores established in “peripheral” nations such as Mexico. Newspapers, including those of the American and French colony, join travelers’ Capital Investments 101 accounts, commercial directories, and the archives of Finance Minister José Yves Limantour in piecing together the characteristics of general retailing as well as department stores. Rare access to the surviving copiadores of the Palacio de Hierro department store provides insight into the internal workings of arguably the most important of these stores and verifies secondary accounts. Finally, a surge of interest in regional history in France supports this endeavor. Over the past three decades historians of the Barcelonnette region in southeastern France have marshaled findings in local and Parisian archives to account for the nearly incredible role of the Barcelonnette immigrants in the economic development of Mexico prior to the Revolution in 1910.8 This cultural history strives for inclusivity, taking into account not only how department stores...