
The University of New Mexico
NEWS RELEASE
Contact: Carolyn Gonzales 277-5920; cgonzal@unm.edu
Oct. 25, 2006
UNM J.B. Jackson Lecture explores Mexican stereotypes through postcards
Daniel Arreola, geography and Latin American Studies professor at Arizona State University, presents an illustrated lecture, “The Picture Postcard Mexican Housescape: Visual Culture and Domestic Identity,” Friday, Oct. 27, from 4:30 – 6 p.m. in Northrop Hall room 122 on the University of New Mexico main campus. His illustrated lecture is an interpretation of Mexican housescapes—a house and its immediate landscape— as they are illustrated in popular historic postcards.
In the early 20th century, postcards presented a stereotyped view of Mexican Americans residing in primitive dwellings and typically in rural habitats. The stereotype contributed to a common primitive image of people of Mexican heritage in the United States. The representation became a factor in American society's view of Mexican American people, place and domesticity.
Arreola will describe how picture postcards captured this traditional landscape visually according to types of dwellings and by regional identity. He will compare the visual image of the Mexican housescape presented in postcards to the ethnic literature about Mexican domestic environments to corroborate that a particular image was constructed about the group in the 20th century.
“The postcard image of the Mexican housescape reinforced the view of Mexicans as primitive and rural, although most Mexicans in America during the period in which the postcards were current resided in central cities and on the margins of urban places rather than in rural districts. We see how an ethnic group has been both socially marginalized and spatially disenfranchised according to perceived landscape association,” Arreola said.
Arreola earned a doctorate in cultural geography from the University of California at Los Angeles, and he has lived and taught in three of the four American states that line the U.S.-Mexican border. He has published extensively in scholarly journals and in book chapters on topic relating to the cultural geography of the Mexican-American borderlands.
Arreola's presentation is the final lecture in the UNM School of Architecture and Planning's fall John Gaw Meem Lecture Series and is designated the J. B. Jackson Memorial Lecture. The lecture is free and open to the public.
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