“Se Prohibe Anunciar”: The Uneasy Relationship between Advertising Entrepreneurs and the Mexico City Ayuntamiento during the Porfiriato

This paper aims to revise scholars notions of how Porfirian Mexico City “looked” while demonstrating the fractured and contested urban politics of “order and progress” in the capital.  After establishing how public advertising changed the urban visual landscape from the 1870s onward and how this changing material culture fit into the modernization project of an ordered, commercial and modern capital, I will then explain and analyze the relationship of two important groups executing and overseeing this transformation: advertising space brokers and the Ayuntamiento.

Recent scholarship is demonstrating new insights on Porfirian modernization offered by methodologies emphasizing consumption, material culture, and an urban locus. New technologies of color, image reproduction, and advertising systems transformed the visual landscape and material culture of cities during this period not only in more “developed” North Atlantic nations but also in Mexico.  In terms of a possessing the infrastructure of a modernizing consumer culture, Mexico City was often in the regional global vanguard of such categories as establishing department stores (1891). For the purposes of this presentation, the capital also shared the transnational experience of unregulated advertising overload in its public spaces, a development that simultaneously represented both national progress and a threat to urban order and decorum for many members of respectable society.  Advertising entrepreneurs known as space brokers enticed city leaders in the Ayuntamiento with ordered progress, offering new revenue and the rationalizing of public advertisement in return for monopoly rights to public space.  While both employed a discourse of order and progress, their vision of a modern Mexico City did not overlay perfectly as this presentation will demonstrate.