Zapatistas en Sanborns (1914): Women at the bar

Abstract

For the photo-historian and indeed the historian tout court, the Casasola Archive represents an invaluable and unique source of photographic images of the Mexican Revolution. Currendy administered by the Mexican government and housed in the Instituto Nacional de Antropologia e Historia (INAH) in Pachuca (Hidalgo), the Archive totals some 600,000 negatives and originates in the work of Agustin Victor Casasola as both photographer and collector. Casasola and his brother, Miguel, started their careers as photojournalists for the government-sponsored newspaper El imparcial in 1905, some five years prior to the outbreak of the Mexican Revolution in 1910. In 1912 Victor Agustin Casasola founded the Agencia de Informaci6n Grmca, with the aim of collecting together photographs by a range of photographers in order to the sell them to the foreign and national press and thereby to compete with the foreign journalists who were arriving in Mexico to cover the historical events that were to make a profound impact on the course of twentieth-century Mexican history.1 This article aims to explore the sanctioned meanings and readings that circulate around one particular iconic photograph from the Casasola Archive, Zapatistas en Sanborns, by taking the spectator on a mini 'guided tour' around the bar that occupies a central position in this photograph. By positioning the spectator in different locations around the bar, my strategy will be to demonstrate how an understanding of the gender dynamics of this bar is integral to the photograph's significance. It will be my contention that meaning in this photograph is condensed in the bodies of the two women at its centre. Yet if they are the locus of signification, I will suggest that according to the logic of the bar, these women are rendered practically invisible.

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