Magazines, Tourism, and Nation-Building in Mexico by Claire Lindsay

Author:Claire Lindsay
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9783030010034
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

The advertisement comprises elongated lettering announcing the brand while the caption (‘No se discuten’ [They’re indisputable]) is superimposed on the image of a cigarette packet, the product/signified here merging with its correlative, or the sign, itself. The entire picture is framed by a vertical whisper of smoke from an ignited cigarette resting on an ashtray in the lower left-hand side of advertisement, connecting a corrugated frame at its head and foot. That smoke trail and those linear, willowy calligraphic forms—alongside the exaggerated flourish of the letter G of cigarros, and the ‘de’ of ‘Son de El Buen Tono’ in the advert’s lower right hand side—speak to contemporary ‘art deco’ design (an international ‘form of modern minimalism’, Hammill and Smith 2015: 89) and also recall the shape of the very product being advertised, correlating aesthetic and product in their common, cosmopolitan modernity. The absence of any human figure and the cigarette’s angle in the ashtray, which is positioned in the advert’s outer frame, invite the participation of the reader/spectator: they point to an internal absence that ‘anticipates the receiving subject’ and also imply a narrative of some kind. The lit cigarette indicates the (albeit short-term) absence of a smoker (and raises a number of questions: ‘Who are they?’, ‘Where have they gone?’, ‘What interrupted his/her smoking?’); it indicates an absence into which the reader can merge and take ‘his’ place (and, as I shall clarify below, it is likely to be a he), to savour that elegant, fine-tasting, smoke.

In other issues of Folkways, El Buen Tono’s Número 12 brand is promoted in similar terms, though in plainer half-page adverts, the largest font size of caption reserved for the brand name, followed by that of the manufacturing company: ‘Todos los fumadores de buen gusto aseguran que [El Número 12] … es el mejor cigarro que se conoce’ [All smokers of good taste agree that Number 12 is the best cigarette around] (In so far as they rely entirely on captions such advertisements might at first glance seem reminiscent of wholesale or trade advertisements, though it is likely that they speak to a pre-1930 preference for textual advertisements) (Fig. 3.3).

Fig. 3.3Número 12 advertisement, Mexican Folkways

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