Typecasting in Nineteenth-Century Mexican Tarjetas de Visita

Cartes de visite, known as tarjetas de visita in Mexico, were one of the first visual mass media to be widely collected and circulated among the upper and middle classes in the mid-nineteenth century. Commissioned by upper- and middle-class consumers, they enabled the control of one’s image, the expression of one’s personal identity, and the presentation of oneself as prosperous, successful, and essentially modern. Through photography, the upper strata of society promulgated select representations, thus creating and reaffirming social and racial hierarchies and attitudes. Individuals collected tarjetas de visita of friends and family, and of landscapes and urban scenes, and pasted them into albums. These personal albums became a way to demonstrate one’s personal and business connections and to reinforce one’s status in society. At the other end of the spectrum were photographs of laborers, vendors, and indigenous figures. Photographed initially by itinerant European photographers and then by Mexican photographers, these lower-class figures were seen not as individuals but as racial and social types, also to be amassed and collected. This paper will examine the ways in which tarjetas de visita constructed social, racial, gender, and national identities and will consider the relationship between photographer and subject in these constructions. Photographs of marginalized types contributed to the proliferation of stock characters that emblematized national identity and reaffirmed hegemonic structures in the nineteenth century. These photographs raised questions of authenticity and reality. They shifted perceptions of the gaze and provided varying viewpoints of everyday people and their lives in nineteenth-century Mexico.