Creating Mexican Consumer Culture in the Age of Porfirio Díaz

1: Personalized Progress: The Production and Marketing of the Machine-Rolled Cigarette

12 Chapter 1 Personalized Progress The Production and Marketing of the Machine-Rolled Cigarette On Christmas Eve 1907 Madame Calvé came to town. Never one to miss out on free publicity, the famous French opera singer visited one of the republic’s largest stages: the El Buen Tono cigarette factory in Mexico City. At the invitation of the general director, Ernesto Pugibet, Madame Calvé toured the state-of-the-art industrial facility that symbolized all that Mexico’s leaders wanted their nation to be. Stepping out of her automobile she met the warm applause and proffered flowers of top government officials, factory directors, and two thousand neatly dressed workers. Above the assembly towered the Longines clock, imported from Switzerland not merely to decorate but to instill in industrial workers the time discipline of a modern labor force. Entering the factory , Madame Calvé toured the main shop floor, where young women dressed in white smocks and sashes in the national colors attended to the two hundred high-speed French machines that rolled and cut over 3.5 billion cigarettes each year (figure 1). Continuing on, she proceeded through “Porfirio Díaz” corridor—the long, marble-floored spine of the factory—to inspect the connecting work areas, modern lithographic presses, opulent administrative offices, vast tobacco warehouses, and other departments. The delegation finished its tour with a champagne Personalized Progress 13 lunch in the magnificent boardroom, where Pugibet announced that factory lithographers would print all of the posters, programs, and handbills promoting Madame Calvé’s Mexican tour, grandly concluding by presenting the renowned diva with a new brand of cigarettes named for her to commemorate her visit.1 The performance proved a public relations success for El Buen Tono, MadameCalvé,andtheDíazregime.Uponmakingherfarewell,Madame Calvé promised to return the next day in her costume as Carmen for portraits with both workers and high officials. As an experienced performer in the world of spectacle and appearances, Madame Calvé recognized the stage set—and the leading role played—by El Buen Tono in the Porfirian drama of modernizing Mexico. Cheap and ubiquitous, machine-rolled cigarettes symbolized Mexico ’s economic and cultural progress more than any other mass-produced consumer commodity during the Porfiriato. To smoke the cigarettes of El Buen Tono and its two major industrial competitors was to demonstrate Figure 1. French opera star Emma Calvé poses with cigarette rollers at the El Buen Tono cigarette factory. Note the cigarette-rolling machines on the left. Source: El Mundo Ilustrado, January 5, 1908, 22. Chapter 1 14 oneself as modern. This chapter explores the production and marketing changes involved in making this happen, examining the mechanization and consolidation of the tobacco industry, the industry’s collaboration with the Porfirian state, and the industry’s leading role in introducing new advertising techniques and consumer technologies to promote its brands to Mexican consumers. A study of the industry’s marketing, particularly that of El Buen Tono and its general director Ernesto Pugibet, provides a colorful and entertaining exploration of Porfirian urban culture as it demonstrates how the city served as “consumer culture’s classroom.”2 In pursuit of a mass market for mass production, tobacco marketers contributed to the making of a Mexican mass culture. Yet as in any classroom setting, the supposed pupils were far from passive. Rather than simple manipulation and imposition of change from above, the iconic status and commercial success of the machine-rolled cigarette was far more complex and derived in part from consumer demand and changing tastes and attitudes. Companies worked hard to win over urbanites through visual display and exhibition , pouring immense resources and creative energy into reaching as wide an urban and national market as possible. In Mexico City tobacco advertisers marketed in every possible neighborhood and venue in the growing city, from the pulquerías in the Tepito barrio to affluent gatherings at the Tivoli de Eliseo. Tobacco advertising in the press and on the street combined with industry-sponsored spectacles enacted not only to sell branded and machine-rolled products but also to advance simultaneously individual and group identities as consumers and citizens. By offering to fulfill individual aspirations with consumer choice these promotional efforts tapped into and encouraged individualization—the emergence of the individual, distinct in identity from a larger group entity—that defined Porfirian (and, indeed, Western) cultural trends.3 At the same time, spectacles and print advertising constituted and promoted a larger...