Mexico, our monumental neighbor to the south, blessed with a rich indigenous culture and a deep relationship with the arts, is also, somewhat paradoxically, a perfect locale to capture, reproduce, and share via postcard ephemera. It is only appropriate then, that one of the country’s foremost intellectuals of the twentieth century, Carlos Monsiváis (1938-2010), chose the title Mexican Postcards (1997) for his collection of quick, thoughtful essays on his country’s culture and society. Each piece in the volume mirrors the snapshot character of a postcard, providing readers a concise, limited, yet emblematic and even profound glimpse into the everyday social fabric of the U.S.’s closest neighbor. It could be argued that the only reasonable way to appreciate Mexico—its muralism, its Aztec ruins, its rugged landscape—is by way of the humble postcard.
The beauty and ambition of midcentury Mexican postcards was underscored for me during a visit to Bowling Green State University’s Browne Popular Culture Library. Inside the library, a squat brick tower jutting up from an Ohioan cornfield, one finds oneself amid a cavalcade of Mickey Mouse dolls, Pokémon cards, and Wonder Woman fan fiction. The library also has a veritable cache of postcards from Latin America and especially, Mexico; this offers an invaluable resource for tracking visual representations across the first half of the twentieth century—the period when, as historian Mauricio Tenorio argues, Mexico was understood as a “Brown Atlantis”—where revolutionary thought fermented and the Pan-American Highway promised access to exotic adventures. Everyone wanted to meet Frida Kahlo, everyone wanted to visit Teotihuacán, all while dreaming up global politics anew. Perusing these postcards reminds us of a long-forgotten time; an era when the United States at least promoted the idea that we were—as the designation of the U.S. policy suggested—“Good Neighbors” for Latin American nations.
Of the diverse scenes depicted in the postcards, by far and away the most frequent subject is some archaic form of labor, performed almost exclusively by Indigenous individuals. Illustrations of rural, Indigenous society often appear staged. They are simultaneously picturesque, prejudicial, but also empathetic, exoticizing “primitive” authenticity by foregrounding archaic forms of labor—handloom weaving, pottery, adobe brickmaking, and subsistence farming—as if they were timeless relics of a simpler past. Supposedly “archaic” forms of labor were presented as the dividing line between civilization and barbarism. Effectively, the border between Mexico and the United States was imagined as constituted by divergent forms of work.
Among the most prominent artists featured in Bowling Green State University’s postcard collection is Miguel Gómez Medina, who was a Mexican illustrator whose career spanned the first half of the twentieth century. He stands as Mexico’s most important contributor to the Golden Age of Pictorial Mapmaking, a period spanning roughly 1920 to 1960, having created numerous notable large-format pictorial maps depicting different regions of Mexico and Guatemala. Beyond his large-format poster maps, Medina produced map postcards as well, which were generally published through Fischgrund Publishing.
This publishing house, in turn, was known for its postcards, maps, and art prints. Intriguingly, some postcards reproduced images created by Mexican muralists like Diego Rivera and José Clemente Orozco; after all, Mexican Muralism emerged from the need to promote pride and nationalism after the Mexican Revolution, bringing mural painting back as an artistic form with strong social potential and making art accessible to all. The movement fundamentally challenged traditional distinctions between elite and popular art. Postcards allow us to take home our own mural, in miniature. Other postcards at Bowling Green are the product of Curt Teich & Company, based in Chicago. Founded in 1898, the company eventually became the world’s leading postcard producer before shutting down in 1978. The company’s extensive collection—comprising millions of postcards plus design documentation and manufacturing records—was later given to the Newberry Library in Chicago.
Few academics have examined the complex intercultural and international relationship which these postcards epitomize. Yet, worth mentioning are Ligia T. Domenech’s Us According to Them and Linda Egan and Mary K. Long’s Mexico Reading the United States, which have illuminated the dynamics of representation and misrepresentation that characterize literary and visual exchanges between Mexico and the United States. Both reveal how popular narratives contribute to the construction of national and cultural identity. In terms of work on Mexican postcards of the time, Susan Toomey Frost’s Witness to War: Mexico in the Photographs of Walter Elias Hadsell, illustrates how postcards often successfully blurred the line between journalism and artistry.
All told, BGSU’s Mexican postcards task us to examine (or perhaps, reexamine) the roots of the U.S.’s cultural attitudes toward one of our closest neighbors, Mexico.
Kevin Anzzolin holds a PhD in Romance Languages & Literature from the University of Chicago. He is the author of Guardians of Discourse: Literature and Journalism in Porfirian Mexico, published by University of Nebraska Press (2024), a work that received an Honorable Mention from LASA-Mexico for Best Book in Humanities in 2025. He currently teaches at Christopher Newport University. You can find more of his work here.
