Jácome’s Department Store as Borderlands Institution: Culture and Commerce between Arizona and Sonora, 1950–70

This presentation will address the important and largely overlooked role of department stores in the history of borderlands consumption.  An important but largely forgotten public figure, Alex G. Jácome was a department store owner and Tucson’s honorary vice-consul to Mexico.  My presentation will focus on his career from 1950 to 1970, when his commercial business helped define Cold War relations between the United States and Mexico, and brought thousands of customers from Sonora into Tucson.  The store’s history shows how border residents began during the 1950s to recognize some of the lasting effects of the World War II era, and how the impact of Tucson’s economic and demographic boom shaped regional ethnic and racial formations.  Jácome’s department store stood at the intersection of ethnic politics, international commerce, and trans-border political cultures, which together defined the Arizona-Sonora borderlands. 

In my presentation, I will make three main arguments about Jácome’s Department Store.  First, postwar migrations into the border region both from Mexico and other parts of the United States created a messy ethnic and national landscape.  Second, Mexican consumers played a prominent role in shaping Jácome’s department store, a small part of the broader story of how elite Mexicans influenced southern Arizona during these years.  These Mexican shoppers who traveled to Tucson to shop at Jácome’s complicate our notions of cross-border migration.  And third, Jácome’s department store helps us understand a critical member of the Mexican American elite in Tucson during the 1950s and 60s.