The Gothic Mansion of don Guillermo de Landa y Escandón: Notes on Elite Masculinity and Interior Decoration in Nineteenth-Century Mexico

While work on modernity's effects on the dynamics of gender in interior spaces has yielded insights on domestic feminine spaces, little work has been done on how these same spaces helped to produce new masculine subjectivities. Domestic spaces in elite urban and suburban homes like the study, library, armory, smoking rooms, and drawing rooms (or salons) allowed men to explore and articulate their evolving sense of self and citizenship, particularly through their selection and display of furnishings, artwork, and collectibles. Departing from the premise of historians and geographers about the centrality of the home and its contents to the manifestation “of our relationship to a group and our own personality,” this paper analyzes intimate correspondence, memoirs, novels, and records of purchases from ca. 1780 to 1920, focusing specifically on how members of the aristocracy explored their gendered identities through the meaning generated in their interior décor schemes. A significant portion of the narrative focuses on the case of the Landa y Escandón home built on the Paseo de la Reforma over the late 1890s and early 1900s.