Mexican Culture, Craftsmen, and Local Communities Photo Archive, 1940s-60s

Mexico Photography

Photograph

Mid-century Mexico photo archive of markets, colonial architecture, rural households, and regional custom, recording Mexico everyday labor, Indigenous craft, traditional dress, and iconic national scenery. The photos primarily show on the ground local customs, basket vendors seated behind stacks of woven wares, pottery sellers in street market display, women posed before hanging textiles and earthen vessels, and a rural family gathered outside an adobe or jacal dwelling. These photos document monumental Mexico City life, smaller scenes of household economy and village life, cathedral plazas, bullfighting spectacle, Indigenous and mestizo craft traditions, and rural environments. Photo archive of 20 real photo and photographic postcards, varying postcard format sizes, Mexico, mid twentieth century. Visible captions identify scenes including “Vendedores de canastos. Mex.,” “Lacandon y textiles mayas C.D. de Las Casas Chis. Mex.,” “A Mexican Family / Mexican Casa / Adobe Huts,” “El Zocalo Mexico D.F.,” “La Quebrada Acapulco Gro.,” “Patio de la fonda en San Blas, Nay.,” and “En Xochimilco, Mexico.” The archive includes broad scenic and civic views of cathedral architecture, plazas, volcanic landscape, lake and garden settings, cliffside resort construction at Acapulco, and waterfront or canal-side leisure scenes. Other cards focus closely on cultural and economic life: men in broad-brimmed hats selling baskets in market space, pottery laid out for sale in the street, women cooking outdoors in a scene labeled for the Mexican army, a bullfighter in the arena, a fruit or pottery market display, a palm-thatched dwelling marked “A Mexican Home,” and portraits tied to Chiapas and the Lacandon region. The archive belongs to a period when postcards were a primary vehicle for circulating Mexico as both modern nation and regional mosaic, with tourism, ethnographic curiosity, and nationalist image-making all folded into the same marketable format. Light surface and edge wear; overall very good condition. The combination of major landmark views with market, household, and Indigenous-associated scenes gives the archive a grounded record of how mid century Mexico was pictured through work, craft, and regional custom.

Item #23194

Price: $820.00