Combining images and text, marquillas cigarreras, the illustrated cigarette packaging produced in Cuba during the second half of the nineteenth century, depict a wide range of themes, including picaresque scenes of everyday life in Havana. These scenes adroitly map out the conditions of Cubanidad, or Cuban-ness. Although Cuba remained a Spanish colony until the War of Independence at the close of the nineteenth century, throughout the century Cuban nationalist sentiment rose, and cultural as well as industrial production was increasingly identified as a sign of Cuban, not Spanish provenance. Marquillas brought together the quintessentially Cuban natural resource, tobacco, and the state-of-the-art print technology, chromolithography, in a commodity that symbolically and materially represented the modern nation coming into being. In this article, I look at marquillas as sites for the production and dissemination of national identity. Particularly relevant to this are marquillas that depict scenes of daily life populated by archetypal figures such as the mulata, the negrito, and the gallego. The mulata is featured in the series entitled Vida y muerte de la mulata. Loosely based on Hogarth's series of engravings The Harlot's Progress, the fifteen vignettes of the series trace the rise and fall of a mulata adrift in Cuban society, affording a particularly rich view of nineteenth-century Cuban manners. Through the analysis of 'Vida y muerte de la mulata', I discuss relations of Cubanidad iterated through negotiations of race, gender, and class. In addition to their role in national identity formation, the discussion of marquillas cigarerras also foregrounds the role of popular visual culture in imagining national identity.
El dolor de Colombia en los ojos de Botero is a departure thematically and philosophically for Fernando Botero in many ways because the artist frankly depicts the multi-faceted violence that rages in his country. The fifty works, oil paintings and drawings completed by the Medellín native between 1999 and 2004, were on display in the summer of 2006 at the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Currently several of the same pieces are among those touring North America through 2010 as part of the retrospective, The Baroque World of Fernando Botero. For a complete listing of exhibition dates and locations see Arts Services International's site: http://www.artservicesintl.org. This paper will explore the complications inherent in representing the suffering found in these pieces as well as the uniquely Latin-American style the artist has developed to address the difficult aesthetic issues associated with violence. Starting from the theories of Elaine Scarry (1985), the essay will look at the primary metaphors used to portray human pain and affliction: the agent/weapon of the pain and the wound or bodily damage. It will also detail the ways in which Botero manipulates these archetypal rhetorical devices, in conjunction with his iconic gordos, to achieve a hyperbole that matches the exaggerated reality of the violence in Colombia.
Publisher: Department of Iberian and Latin American Studies at Queen Mary