With Love from San Antonio: Settler Souvenir Postals and Mass Reproductions of “Mexicans”

ABSTRACT

The persuasive power of souvenir postal cards has been overlooked in scholarship. This essay examines how settlers in San Antonio, at the turn of the twentieth century, used souvenir postal cards strategically to produce knowledge about their city and its place in the modern nation, to market it to White tourists and other settlers as a “bordertown,” and to continue to dispossess and subordinate native Coahuiltecan, Tejano, and Mexican locals. Examples in this essay are drawn from a corpus of 300 real-photo postcards (1904–17) to consider their modes of production, images, captions, messages, and affects en masse. Through this essay, I show that souvenir postal cards are a way settler colonialism and coloniality/modernity worked, evidencing on local and global scales networked interest and cooperation between dominant imperial nations and groups to mass-(re)produce themselves and impose their structural patterns of power.

KEYWORDS:

• Archives
• coloniality/modernity
• settler colonialism
• visual studies

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ In this essay, I capitalize “White” to recognize it as a racial construction and culture and to avoid implicitly affirming Whiteness as “the norm.” I also capitalize “Indigenous,” “Black,” and “Brown” to recognize cultural identities bestowed and assigned bodies in the United States from which community, personhood, and inequitable systems are forged. In the fourth section, I refer to bodies as “Brown(ed)” or “White(ned)” to reference processes by which these assignations are made.

² See Martinez, The Injustice Never Leaves You.

³ While colonial archives and settler archives both emerged from empire to gather information about and produce as-such the state, “settler archives” are differentiated by scholars who claim theory must account for the “unique features” of archives whose work must negotiate and erase the prior and continuing presence of Indigenous communities in places settlers have claimed (Adams-Campbell et al. 110).

⁴ Settler colonialism, characterized by Patrick Wolfe as a “structure, not an event” (388), is the process of settlers’ arrival in and settlement of land priorly occupied by Indigenous communities. Settlers are different from other colonizers because they “come to stay” (388), to exercise their sovereignty over and in the place of Indigenous people. Coloniality, as understood by Anibal Quijano, is a logic and condition of domination, management, and control over land, people, and knowledge veiled by rhetorics of modernity, progress, and evolution that emerges during colonialism and remains long after.

⁵ Referencing Michael Taussig’s work on colonialism and “cultures of terror,” Sarah Holland says we must rediscover “who resides in the nation’s imaginary ‘space of death’ and why we strive to keep such subjects there” (4). I reference Holland here to underscore San Antonio’s colonizers’ material and strategic production of neglected city spaces to hold together and doom to early death racialized Coahuiltecan, Tejano, mestizo, and Mexican bodies.

⁶ While Wayne Martin Mellinger has rhetorically examined cartoon postcards’ racialized caricatures of Black bodies in the 1910s, and Catherine Palczewski has examined antisuffragette postcards from 1909, both focus on illustrated rather than photography-based postcards.

⁷ Historian David Cannadine has referred to this time as “the heyday of invented tradition” (108) in Britain and Europe when national and imperial ideologies were reinvented in such a way that dominant symbols of the nation became inseparable from imperial ones. Incidentally, some of the earliest souvenir postals of San Antonio were printed by Raphael, Tuck & Sons in London.

⁸ I selected postcards to include in this article that most clearly demonstrate San Antonio’s colonized/ing tropes. These twenty-eight cards are broadly representative of the entire archive, although further nuances could be carved out.

⁹ “Barrios” refers to a town or district in Spain and Spanish-speaking countries. In the United States, “barrios” references the Spanish-speaking quarter of town and has evolved to imply high levels of poverty.

¹⁰ Modernity is the idea of itself as the endpoint of historical time, Europe as the center of the world, and Western civilization as the apex of experience. Mignolo argues coloniality is the darker side of Western modernity, a complex matrix of power created and controlled to recreate the world in Europe’s image. “Colonial/modern” is a statement that each is constitutive of the other.

¹¹ Nelson Maldonado-Torres argues “it would be best to distinguish between an epistemic colonial difference that allows one to perceive the coloniality of knowledge, and an ontological colonial difference which reveals the presence of the coloniality of being” (254). He thus distinguishes between the imposition of Eurocentric ways/hierarchies of knowing and the imposition of Eurocentric ways/hierarchies of being human, bound by the imposition of Western epistemology and ontology to race.

¹² In The Darker Side of Modernity, Mignolo traces the evolution of Western conceptualizations of race. Prior to secularization in the 1800s, “Christian scales for humanity” were deployed; “racialization did not say ‘You are Black or Indian, therefore you are inferior.’” Rather it said, “[Y]ou are not like me [made in God’s image], therefore you are inferior.” Whiteness, among other traits, was tied to God. After secularization, “God” became “nation” and race became more tied to “skin color” and “blood” linked to “nation” (17).

¹³ Mexican identity, both Indian and Spanish, was particularly difficult to obtain. Mexicans could be “considered White in one town and not in another. White in Santa Barbara in 1880 but not in the same city in 1920, White for the purposes of naturalization law but not for the school board, or White for the 1920 but not for the 1930 one” (Fox and Guglielmo 335).

¹⁴ Lynching postcards were so popular that, in 1912, the US government authorized postmasters to censor their circulation. This attempt was not made for the sake of Black Americans or other racialized minorities but to avoid promoting lawless and uncontrollable White mobs. Ersula Ore addresses these images and missives in Lynching: Violence, Rhetoric, and American Identity.

¹⁵ In a conference presentation, I examine the significance of “Dead Mexican Bandit” and “Mexican Revolution” postcards in San Antonio cards’ citational context and how the city’s messages did not contradict but depended on their threat to Brown(ed) bodies and their (re)assurance of control to White(ned) ones.

¹⁶ While Ridolfo and deVoss write about velocity in the context of digitality, postcards were arguably a high-velocity, even “viral,” mass media form before digital virality. The US post office delivered thousands a day.

¹⁷ Since the Alamo fell and Texians swarmed to collect pieces of the fallen wall, San Antonio has invited (White) people to come as settlers and tourists to the “shrine of Texas liberty.” Richard Flores argues “the Mexican” is the exteriorized enemy Other “the Texas Modern” constitutes itself against in every charge to “Remember the Alamo,” cited by vigilante mobs as “reason enough” in the 1800s to expel, kill, or otherwise seize property belonging to Tejano and Mexican families. A.M. Gibson noted in the 1860s that “Killing a Mexican [in Texas] was like killing an enemy of war. … It carried a certain immunity with it” (cited by R. Flores 32).

¹⁸ See Hernandez-Ehrisman, Inventing the Fiesta City.

¹⁹ See Montejano, Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas, 1836–1986.

²⁰ San Antonio is not geographically located on the US border—it is 157 miles away at its closest point— however, it has long been conflated and conflated itself with the US Southwest boundary.

²¹ There are no postcards of “A German Grandma” or “Austrian Beggars” or “Brits at Supper.”

²² These allusions also reference rampant “vanishing race” imaginaries to obtain “the Mexican Indian” as another conquered people “doomed” to “disappear” amid modernity’s unstinting progress.

²³ As Lisa Flores traces in 1920s immigration discourse, such characterizations fed crucial tenets of “narratives of need” (381) to imagine “Mexican peons” as ideal laborers, content with conditions White workers wouldn’t stand.

²⁴ City brochures from the 1950s invite visitors to venture to the Westside to enjoy the sights of “the old town … for those interested in Latin drama and Indian color” (Ramsdell 257).

²⁵ Consistently in postcards, White bodies are illustrated with more detail and care than Mexican bodies. For example, in Figure 3, the man’s and boy’s bodies are disfigured and decapitated. Meanwhile, in Figure 19, White bodies just as “far away” are clearly defined.

²⁶ Within San Antonio’s community at this time, property-owning Tejano and Mexican families tended to self-identify and were identified by others as “Spanish” and, therefore, European and White. Wealthy families in Mexico did the same to align with Whiteness and deny they were “Indian” or mestizo like the landless, laboring classes they subjugated.

²⁷ See Torres, Voices from the San Antonio Missions.