Creating Mexican Consumer Culture in the Age of Porfirio Díaz

6: Hot Diamonds, Cold Steel: The La Profesa Jewelry Store Robbery

205 Chapter 6 Hot Diamonds, Cold Steel The La Profesa Jewelry Store Robbery Very fashionable just now are pearls . . . —Prince Fortunatus, journalist, Two Republics, May 19, 1891, 4 Among other brilliant toilettes . . . were those of Mrs. Sánchez Navarro (one of the finest in the room—ingénue dress of green and pink broche, and old point lace—wonderful jewels). —Two Republics, May 20, 1891, 4, reporting on a ball at the Mexico City Jockey Club A vixen sneered at a lioness because she never bore more than one cub. “Only one,” she replied, “but a lion.” —Aesop On the night of February 20, 1891, five men, wearing five finely tailored suits and carrying one sharp knife, slashed through the patina of order and progress that Mexican elites and social reformers had cultivated and polished over the preceding fifteen years of rule by President Porfirio Díaz. By brutally killing and robbing the jeweler don Tomás Hernández Chapter 6 206 Aguirre in his own store, Gerard Nevraumont, Nicolas Treffel, Anton Sousa, Jesús Bruno Martínez, and Aurelio Caballero laid bare the social and cultural tensions and intellectual currents of the rapidly modernizing Porfirian society. Although they committed only one crime together, their crime, the ensuing manhunt, the trial, and the media coverage of the event offer a vivid and comprehensive window into the relationships among crime, commodification, and modernization in Porfirian society.1 Hernández undoubtedly prided himself on his and his store’s place in Porfirian society. Through his ownership of—and identification with— La Profesa, he became a well-known and well-respected family man in the community, and his nephew had even taken up his trade in Guanajuato. La Profesa was not a large store, attached both physically and commercially to the enormous La Esmeralda jewelry store next door (figure 20). Nevertheless, it displayed some of the finest pieces of jewelry in the city, and with La Esmeralda it helped to bedeck in sparkling wealth the most elegant ladies of Mexico City society for their appearances at the balls of the Jockey Club and other elite institutions. La Esmeralda, too, had endured since the beginning of the regime of Porfirio Díaz, sparkling as the symbol of an increasingly materialistic and commodified culture. Other large stores existed at this time, like the Spanish-run La Elegancia dry goods two blocks to the northwest and the French-owned Palacio de Hierro—the first department store in Mexico—that opened later that year; yet few came close to the sheer opulence and concentrated retailing capital that La Esmeralda and La Profesa possessed.2 Together, the two establishments housed not only watches by Longines , necklaces of pearls, and bracelets of diamonds but also, in these commodities , the hopes, assumptions, and philosophies of the ruling members of Porfirian society, who looked to Western Europe and North America for economic and cultural inspiration. Located on the trendy streets of Plateros and San Francisco, where many of the city’s wealthiest citizens lived and major businesses resided, the stores acted as a center point of the social space Porfirian reformers sought to carve out for the middling and upper classes, the gente decente. In this space grew an image of society as perceived by its respectable members: a rationally ordered consumer paradise free of the dangerous and criminal lower class. Here they could liberally enjoy the fruits of social order and material progress that now seemed ripe after fifteen years of cultivation by the Díaz government. La Profesa and La Esmeralda represented all of this, and in 1891 they metaphorically held their place as one of the finest jewels in the Porfirian crown.3 Hot Diamonds, Cold Steel 207 The Crime That certainty of personal safety, social order, and linear national progress was rattled on the night of February 20 when the five robbers threatened to destroy this oasis of civilization. Planning had begun six months before, but that afternoon they took care of last-minute details. The dapperly dressed Martínez, Caballero, and Treffel lounged on benches in the Zócalo gardens, watching the street life pass the Monte de Piedad pawnshop and the cathedral, waiting for Nevraumont and Sousa to finish Figure 20. The famous La Esmeralda jewelry store, located next door to the smaller La Profesa jewelry store. Source: Archivo General de la Nación, Fondo Instrucción Pública y Bellas Artes, Colecci...