Postcards from the Chihuahua Border: Revisiting a Pictorial Past, 1900s–1950s by Daniel D. Arreola (review)

Drawing upon an unlikely source, author Daniel D. Arreola presents a model for how postcards can teach historians to read the landscape and find broader historical trends there. Postcards from the Chihuahua Border is a work of both geography and history and visually reconstructs the Chihuahua border towns of Ciudad Juárez, Ojinaga, and Palomas. Arreola asserts that postcards are markers of change over time because they offer a “serial view of place” (29). With the exception of Paul Vanderwood and Frank Samponaro in Border Fury: A Picture Postcard Record of Mexico’s Revolution and U.S. War Preparedness, 1910–1917 (University of New Mexico Press, 1988), Arreola believes that scholars have overlooked postcards as both documents and textual evidence.

Postcards from the Chihuahua Border unfolds over four parts. Part I, composed of two chapters, studies the border geographically and historically from the early to mid-twentieth century. Arreola examines the everyday significance of postcards by delving into how publishers chose their subject matter and production methods.

Part II concentrates solely on Ciudad Juárez, making up the bulk—six chapters—of the study. Ciudad Juárez is the star of this book because of its importance in the region, its unique relationship to nearby El Paso, Texas, and the availability of objects for analysis. Through postcards, Arreola explores its transit systems, tourist border-crossing experiences, popular venues, commercial tourism, and daily life. As El Paso residents increasingly traveled to Ciudad Juárez regularly, they created a thriving tourism market, creating a “visitor identity” that contributed to trade and a regional population surge.

When Prohibition passed into law, Ciudad Juárez became a prime destination for its bars and breweries, and postcards documented this trade. City business owners also showcased the town’s food and entertainment venues, and postcards from the region reinforced this image. Additionally, curio shops and historical sites drew tourists, which helped the growth of El Paso and Ciudad Juárez. Postcards depicting street scenes showed how people lived as the city grew.

Part III covers much of the same thematic ground but is devoted to the towns of Ojinaga and Palomas, Chihuahua. These towns receive much less attention from the author, which reflects their size and where they live within the popular imagination of the U.S.–Mexico border region. Part IV concludes the work by reinforcing its theoretical framework and providing a short discussion about the author’s intervention in the current scholarship focused on the border.

Arreola accomplished his goal of bringing attention to an often-overlooked historical artifact in an accessible text that is both illuminating and entertaining. Postcards demonstrate that seemingly innocuous objects can transmit a great deal of information through their subject matter, the miles they traveled, and who sent and received them, while their production can also document advancements in technology. The book contains an extensive array of beautiful color-postcard images, maps, and advertisements from the period.

Although written for a general audience, the book does not lack academic rigor. Postcards from the Chihuahua Border is an interdisciplinary work that can be used by historians, anthropologists, and geographers. The book sheds light on processes and themes as diverse as foreign relations, tourism, modernization, and business practices but is not jargon-laden, making it a text for the intermediate student, professor, or undergraduate classroom.