Creating Mexican Consumer Culture in the Age of Porfirio Díaz by Steven B. Bunker (review)

Steven Bunker sets the tone for this study of consumerism with a cover image of an elegantly dressed man, in top hat and frock coat, strolling the streets of fin-de-siècle Mexico City. Although seemingly a member of the Porfirian aristocracy, he was in fact a human billboard, equipped with a battery-powered sign that unexpectedly flashed advertisements for El Buen Tono cigarettes. Electric Man (El Hombre Luminoso) illustrates not only the dazzle of Mexico’s nascent consumer society but also three scholarly interpretations of consumption. A social power perspective associated with Pierre Bourdieu emphasizes the distinction and emulation factor of high-status goods such as clothes and cigarettes. A Marxist interpretation of the Frankfurt School insists that consumers are duped by the flashing lights of capitalist advertising. Finally, a symbolic approach pioneered by Mary Douglas examines the crafting of personal identities through goods, or how ordinary Mexicans perceived the spectacle of Electric Man. Bunker seeks to offer a cultural interpretation of mass consumption and to refute a Marxist view of Porfirian Mexico, but his symbolic analysis often returns to the themes of distinction and emulation.

This book contributes to both a growing literature on Latin American consumption and a revisionist view of the dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz by documenting the “inconspicuous consumption” of the urban working classes. Focusing on machine-rolled cigarettes and department store goods, Bunker argues that the culture of consumption rather than wealth per se defined the category of “gente decente.” He further disturbs the boundaries of respectability by examining the growth of property crimes such as shoplifting, supposedly by plebeians passing as gente decente, which he interprets as a modernization of criminality.

Bunker also advances Mexican business and immigration history by examining the role of the French colony in consumer goods industries in the Porfiriato, particularly the tobacco magnate Ernesto Pugibet and department store owners from the Barcelonnette region in southeastern France. French businessmen collaborated in marketing their products, for example, El Buen Tono cigarettes and Moctezuma brand beers. Nevertheless, Bunker attributes the success of Barcelonnette department stores to their willingness to forsake French suppliers and obtain goods from throughout the North Atlantic world.

The author seeks to interpret the symbolic meanings of consumption through innovative comparisons such as the carnivalesque experience of sale days. He shows how cigarette brands fueled consumer aspirations and quotes the Mexican Herald on the department store, where “the rich lady, who has her liveried coach without, stands side by side with the poor, weather-beaten Indian from the mountains. And there is that with which to satisfy them both” (p. 133). Often, however, Bunker attributes that satisfaction to status emulation or to criminality. Both motivations were doubtless present, but for a book seeking to revise the Porfirian black legend, they do not take us far past científico ideology. The scope of this study is limited in two other important ways, geographical and methodological. Bunker’s examples are drawn primarily from Mexico City, and he generalizes to the provinces with scattered references to Luis Gonzílez’s Pueblo en vilo (1968). Moreover, this is not a social history of consumption. One of the few attempts to quantify the market, using gross consumption figures, is the calculation that as many as five million people could have had access to machine-rolled cigarettes if they smoked at a rate of one pack a week. From my own observations, two packs a day would be closer to the average, suggesting fewer but more avid consumers.

This book offers an important first study of modern consumer society in Porfirian Mexico. If the cigarette billboard and department store window offer little insight into popular attitudes, Bunker ably illuminates the manufacturing of consumer dreams through cigarette rolling machines, printing presses, and even the blueprints of Electric Man.