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parsed(2013-08-01) - pubdate: 2013-08-01
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pub date: 1375333200
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Postcards from the Río Bravo Border

Picturing the Place, Placing the Picture, 1900s?1950s

August 1, 2013 | Hardcover
ISBN: 9780292752801
$49.95
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Description

Between 1900 and the late 1950s, Mexican border towns came of age both as tourist destinations and as emerging cities. Commercial photographers produced thousands of images of their streets, plazas, historic architecture, and tourist attractions, which were reproduced as photo postcards. Daniel Arreola has amassed one of the largest collections of these border town postcards, and in this book, he uses this amazing visual archive to offer a new way of understanding how the border towns grew and transformed themselves in the first half of the twentieth century, as well as how they were pictured to attract American tourists.

Postcards from the Río Bravo Border presents nearly two hundred images of five significant towns on the lower Río Bravo--Matamoros, Reynosa, Nuevo Laredo, Piedras Negras, and Villa Acuña. Using multiple images of sites within each city, Arreola tracks changes both within the cities as places and in the ways in which the cities have been pictured for tourist consumption. He makes a strong case that visual imagery has a shaping influence on how we negotiate and think about places, creating a serial scripting or narrating of the place. Arreola also shows how postcard images, when systematically and chronologically arranged, can tell us a great deal about how Mexican border towns have been viewed over time. This innovative visual approach demonstrates that historical imagery, no less than text or maps, can be assembled to tell a compelling geographical story about place and time.

About this Author

Daniel D. Arreola is a Professor in the School of Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning and an Affiliate Faculty with the School of Transborder Studies at Arizona State University. A past president of the Association of Pacific Coast Geographers, he is the author of The Mexican Border Cities: Landscape Anatomy and Place Personality, Tejano South Texas: A Mexican American Cultural Province, and Hispanic Spaces, Latino Places: Community and Cultural Diversity in Contemporary America.

ISBN: 9780292752801
Format: Hardcover
Pages: 280
Publisher: University of Texas Press
Published: 2013-08-01

Reviews

Arreola is able to capture the voices (and images) of borderlands residents themselves, the very people who have been most heavily impacted by current policy changes even as their voices have been marginalized and their histories have been decontextualized. . . . [his] use of "view of place" and "place of view" allows him to capture the changing nature of Mexican border towns and to breathe life back into these multidimensional spaces.

This is masterful cultural geography with rich visual materials, delivered in a unique and compelling fashion. . . . Very stimulating and well-written.

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