Postcards from the Río Bravo Border: Picturing the Place, Placing the Picture, 1900s–1950s by Daniel D. Arreola (review)

Daniel D. Arreola, with this book, adds yet another dimension to his vision of Mexican border towns, first elaborated in his pioneering work with James R. Curtis, The Mexican Border Cities: Landscape Anatomy and Place Personality (1993). Because Arreola has long been an avid collector, accumulating some 7,000 postcards representing scenes from Mexican border towns mostly professionally photographed from the 1900s to the 1950s, he was able to use his own collection to highlight the “stranger’s path, or tourist route” (4) depicted in the photos. Arreola categorizes the photos under eight rubrics: gateways, streets, plazas, attractions, business and landmarks, and everyday life. Over the decades, such sites were photographed repeatedly, giving Arreola a basis for reconstructing and depicting changes in border-town life. In the process, he scoured archives to uncover useful information about projects (bridge building and transportation), events (floods), and businesses (bars, restaurants, nightclubs) that have been buried by post-1950 demographic and economic change in the region. His efforts are especially enlightening for the ‘big three’ in his coverage: Matamoros, Reynosa, and Nuevo Laredo, all in Tamaulipas, but are also noteworthy regarding the less familiar towns of Ciudad Acuña and Piedras Negras in Coahuila.

Postcard photos presumably helped to shape non-border residents’ view of the border and were undoubtedly designed to cater to the interests of the tourist trade, occasional and seasonal, but also to stimulate the interest of potential off-border residents who might harbor thoughts of relocating to areas like the lower Rio Grande Valley to pursue livelihood as farmers or businessmen. This shaped the content of the photographs as much as they shaped the perceptions of potential tourists or new settlers. Arreola’s selection of postcard photos will be appreciated by anyone with an interest in border life of the first half of the twentieth century, aside from whatever role or impact the photos may have had on tourists or others during that period.

Arreola considers “high photo density for a site” to provide a means for researchers “to analyze place serially, through time” (128–129). He illustrates this with juxtaposed photos (1920s and 1940s) of the Juárez Monument and kiosco in the Reynosa plaza. In this instance, the plaza became demonstrably more aesthetically attractive thanks to decorative plantings of native trees and shrubs. It goes without saying that photos from any source taken at different times of the same place, activity, or subject will provide researchers with visible markers of change.

There are, of course, inevitable limitations in coverage of border postcard photos. For example, the phenomenon of the zonas de tolerancia was not acceptable subject matter for postcards. Yet, these sites surely did as much as anything else to stereotype border towns as “exotic” places where, to borrow lyrics from Ry Cooder’s song “Skin Game” (for the movie The Border), “Mexico, Mexico, a boy can be a man down in Mexico.” Even though these activities in cross-border cities and stored in the memory banks of untold numbers of male visitors, were not the stuff of picture postcards, they were partially captured in images by freelance photographers sold (or not) to the patrons of establishments in the zona de tolerancia.

Despite such source limitations, Arreola is to be congratulated for his dedication and perseverance as a collector of postcard images and, more so as a cultural geographer, for his thoughtful interpretation of them through careful archival research and for his imaginative larger vision of Mexican border life and history.