Rural Life, Indigenous Culture, and American Interests in Early 20th Century Mexico, 1900s-1920s Photo Archive

Mexico, Indigenous

Photo Archive

Rural Life, Indigenous Culture, and American Interests in Early 20th Century Mexico Photo Archive. Mexico, ca. 1900s-1910s. Eight original photographs, various formats including mounted gelatin silver prints and real photo postcards, measuring from 3.5 x 5.5 in. to 8.25 x 11 in. One image with typed printed commentary on verso from The Philadelphia Museums. One image captioned in negative: "Alcalde y Atopil, Huauchinango, Mexico." Another inscribed in manuscript on mount: "El Bura Timber pasture, State of Durango, Mexico."

A compelling vernacular archive of eight photographs documenting Mexican rural labor, indigenous communities, landscape, and architecture during a period of significant upheaval and modernization in the early 20th century. The images range from scenic landscape portraits to ethnographic representations and sites of U.S. economic interest, highlighting Mexico's complex sociopolitical structure before and during the Mexican Revolution (1910-1920). One of the most evocative images is a large mounted print titled "MAKING TORTILLAS, MEXICO" produced by The Philadelphia Museums, accompanied by a printed commentary. The scene shows seven Indigenous women and one man preparing food outdoors alongside a railroad track. The detailed caption offers a contemporaneous ethnographic interpretation: "Tortillas are the bread of the 'peons' or common people... In this photograph the younger woman is grinding corn on a metate... The cakes are never allowed to brown and are without salt or seasoning of any kind." While steeped in early 20th-century colonialist framing, the commentary provides documentation of traditional subsistence practices and Indigenous material culture in the chaparral zone of central Mexico.

Another significant photograph captures a procession of mounted riders traveling through a striking avenue of poplar trees in a dusty rural valley, likely northern Mexico, where laborers and soldiers stand or sit along a walled roadside. In the background, mountains rise above cultivated fields. A separate image, inscribed "Palace of Cortez - Cuernavaca," shows a lone child in wide-brimmed sombrero facing the 16th-century Spanish fortress. Several images foreground Indigenous identity and rural lifeways. A real photo postcard labeled in the negative "Alcalde y Atopil, Huauchinango, Mexico" depicts two indigenous Mexicans with long hair and striped sarapes, standing and sitting before a log fence. Another photograph features two women and a child outside a thatched dwelling, with the standing woman wearing an embroidered huipil and banded skirt suggestive of Zapotec or Mixtec attire.A mounted image marked "El Bura Timber pasture / State of Durango, Mexico" and signed on verso by J.S. McVaughan, references American business activity in northern Mexico. This photograph of a horseman in a pine forest likely documents American resource extraction during Porfirio Díaz's regime, when U.S. companies controlled large tracts of Mexican land and timber under controversial concessions. Also present is an image of men and oxen working agave fields—possibly in maguey cultivation for pulque or mezcal production—and a panoramic railroad-side labor camp showing Mexican workers, goods, and livestock. Minor edge wear and toning; overall very good condition.

Item #22474

Price: $450.00