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4: Modernizing Capital: Constant Innovation and the Expression of Progress
- University of New Mexico Press
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134 Chapter 4 Modernizing Capital Constant Innovation and the Expression of Progress From their beginning, department stores thrived on innovation and novelty. Their readiness to adopt new retailing practices, new products, and new displays placed them as the representative institution of a progressive age. Yet while these stores reflected the values of a modernizing culture, they also shaped and constructed that culture. Department stores may have admitted a broad swath of Mexican society, but the image they created and sold with their architecture, displays, organization, and consumer rituals solidly represented the aspirations and material culture of the gente decente. Department stores anchored a host of fixed-location retail stores (casas de comercio) such as jewelry and home decoration stores that moved the market off the street and into a controlled private-public marketplace. In these locations retailers spent considerable effort, imagination, and capital displaying goods on the store floor, in street windows, and in sales literature such as print advertisements and catalogs in a way that tapped into the broader culture’s association of goods and modernity and then invested goods with significance that encouraged a particular way of viewing the world. In short, department stores sold the material culture of modernizing Mexico, or more specifically of a gente decente vision of a modern Mexico. Modernizing Capital 135 So powerful were they in their role as producers of cultural meaning that department stores did not even need goods to sell this image of modernity. Department stores led the business community in transforming the visual reality of the capital through their breathtaking architectural styles and highly conspicuous position within public rituals such as holiday parades. Efforts to rationalize, beautify, and remake the city as an expression of Mexican economic and cultural progress reach back into the colonial period. The 1856 Ley Lerdo accelerated this project by prying urban land from Church control and opening the door to the greater commercialization and secularization of the capital. Not until the government of Porfirio Díaz, however, did the national leadership have the resources and internal unity to undertake fully this task. Historians have concentrated on the myriad efforts of the Porfirian government to transform the city into a showcase of Mexican economic and cultural modernity. As photographs of Porfirian Mexico City clearly reveal, however, department stores and other modern retailers played a monumental role in expressing Porfirian progress to Mexicans and foreign visitors alike. The brilliance of department stores is that they capitalized on a longdeveloping trend in Western societies whereby people invested in—and derived meaning from—the man-made cultural artifacts that constructed their environment to an ever-growing degree. The work of material culture anthropologists helps us consider this phenomenon.1 Goods are invested with connotations of class status, race, age, gender, and other categories by which cultures bring order and sense to the world around them. The meaning of goods, however, is not necessarily cross-cultural. The significance of colors, materials, and styles are equally culturally specific .Moreover,thegoodsusedbyonesocietymaybeunknowninanother. Numerous scholars have observed the increasingly important role of goods in Western society over the past half millennium, spurring and spurred on by increasing trade and commercial capitalism. The abundance of goods appears equally in artistic depictions from the Italian Renaissance, seventeenth-century Holland, and colonial Mexico, where paintings pointedly feature the inaugural procession of the new viceroy passing through the abundance of goods offered in the Parián market in Mexico City. Conspicuous consumption and the meaning of goods did not originate in the late nineteenth century. But a cascade of technological progress and corresponding advances in production, transportation, and communication accelerated [54.227.104.229] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 19:50 GMT) Chapter 4 136 the significance of goods in nineteenth-century societies. Not only did the economic engines of modern society achieve the mass production of traditional goods, but they created a plethora of new ones. These goods often suited the specific cultural requirements of the leading class of this economic transformation: the bourgeoisie. Examples of this include new leisure goods such as parlor games and beach paraphernalia or the explosion of home appliances and furnishings catering to the middleclass obsession with the home as a site of consumption. Department stores and other leading retailers of the Porfirian Age served not only to bring these goods to Mexico and popularize them but also to educate Mexicans as to their use and social significance as defined by the bourgeois culture of France or perhaps England, Germany, or...