The Picture Postcard as Historical Evidence: Veracruz, 1914

Abstract

When you look at these picture postcards, you sense how they felt — these invading U.S. sailors and marines at war with Mexican soldiers and civilians defending their territory. These photos are not the work of professionals, although a number of salaried photojournalists in 1914 recorded the American landing at Veracruz for their respective publications. Instead, these are, by and large, simple snapshots, unplanned, some unfocused, taken at a moment's opportunity by the participants themselves. They picture the way in which common combatants hoped to remember the event, and how they wanted others to view it. All the more so, because these are not simply photographs, but also postcards, the images reinforced with handwritten messages and mailed elsewhere to share the experience of Veracruz and to indicate how they felt about it. Americans full of bombast and arrogance in their display of Old Glory, disdain the enemy. Mexicans, returning the fight (some of it in posed pictures), eager to display the destruction caused by the foreign intervention and to mourn their dead. Picture postcards such as these beg analysis, yield insights, raise questions; they are a new and fascinating piece to be fitted into the puzzle of history.

QSL: Subliminal Messaging by the Nuclear Industry in Germany during the 1980s

“…While the value and cultural heritage significance of picture postcards is a well-established field of academic enquiry [1,5,7,9,10], in particular in colonialism studies [2,3,6,8,11,12], QSL cards, as a specific subset, have seen no serious attention to date. Fruitful areas of future investigation are their chrono-spatial patterning, particularly in terms their iconography.…”

“…There is a considerable body of literature that examines the production [1] and consumption of picture postcards and the messaging their imagery contained [2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10]. The image selection and framing of postcards, through their stereotyping of landscapes, points of view, infrastructure and developments, conveys political messages to the viewer, messages that the audience of the time would have well understood [5,11,12].…”

The Evidentiary Value of Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century Postcards for Heritage Studies

“…In this paper, we are only concerned with picture postcards using photographic images as their basis. A large body of scholarship deconstructs the imagery shown on the picture postcards, especially those of colonial and exotic locales such as Tahiti [28,29], Senegal [30], New Caledonia [31], French Indo-China [32], Korea [33], Arabia [34], Mexico [35] and German Micronesia [36].…”

“…As Vanderwood noted, when discussing postcards depicting the Battle of Veracruz (between U.S. and Mexican forces in 1914), the choice of subjects in the postcards sent back depended on the viewpoint of the sender, where "U.S. militarymen [sic] on occupation duty wanted people in the States to believe that they were suffering dangerous and rig-orous hard-ship duty," while Mexican defenders wanted to portray their vigilance and steadfastness [35].…”

Un fotógrafo en la Revolución Mexicana: Mauricio Yáñez y las batallas por Culiacán, 1911–1912

“…This article presents previously unpublished details about the life and work of the Jalisco photographer Mauricio Yáñez, who owned photo galleries in Culiacán andMazatlán between 1908 and1914. Our analysis focuses on his production of postcards at the outbreak of the Mexican Revolution and coverage of the battles for Culiacán between 1911and 1912, when Maderista (1911 and…”