Hispanic Research Journal

Summary

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.