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![[Black and white photo of native American with mask.]](./img/posada-04791u-detail.gif)
Engraving by José Guadalupe Posada
Mexican engraver José Guadalupe Posada was largely forgotten by the end of his life, and died in poverty. He was, however, soon to be quoted as a crucial inspiration for the muralist movement in his country, and as his work continued to grew in importance, his images became touchstones of national identity for Mexicans everywhere.
Throughout his career, Posada regularly provided artwork for more than 20 different periodical publications. His engravings also ended up in broadsides, chapbooks, posters, programs, books, brochures, and advertisement. In 1890 he started working for the publishing house of Don Antonio Vanegas Arroyo, and continued this cooperation until right before his death in 1913. His most famous work stems from this period.
During a recent visit to the Library of Congress, we dug out some of our favorite Posada prints, and from those we offer a gallery we’ve called Posada’s Calaveras: From the A. Vanegas Arroyo broadsides.
“The chief objection to the term ‘race’ with reference to man is that it takes for granted as solved problems which are far from being so and tends to close the mind to problems to which it should always remain open.”
Philippe Bourgois and Jeff Schonberg spent over a decade doing fieldwork with two dozen homeless heroin and crack addicts on the streets of San Francisco, and produced an extraordinary wellcrafted documentation of this dystopian side of American society.
Their book, Righteous Dopefiend, is an ethnographic tour de force, and we’re stoked to bring you an excerpt.
While he has also reported the dead end lives that, for instance, Bourgois and Schonberg document in Righteous Dopefiend, anthropologist Michael Agar tries to describe what he calls, in an email to American Ethnography, “that first seductive dance with the drug, the song of the opiate siren, the early high times before biology takes over biography.” Agar is a veteran of anthropological research on drug addicts, and has worked with, among others, the U.S. Public Health Service and a New York State treatment program going by the Soviet science fiction name of Narcotic Addiction Control Commission. In his book Dope Double Agent: The Naked Emperor on Drugs, Agar writes:
“I finally got around to trying heroin myself. (…) A guy I’d helped out with a couple of phone calls asked me if I’d ever used it. No, I hadn’t. Wasn’t I curious? Of course I was.”
Heroin is, he concludes after his experience, “the perfect whatever drug.” Read about it in this excerpt from Dope Double Agent.
“The sun was coming out just as if it was before my face, the rays spreading out every way. My heart surely felt good to see it, so good, such a beautiful world!”
Read on in Morris Edward Opler’s A description of a Tonkawa peyote meeting held in 1902.
Photo: Martin Hoyem
Back while he was doing fieldwork among lowriders in the southwestern states of USA, American Ethnography’s owner and editor Martin Hoyem photographed the people he met and their cars.
Here’s a gallery of Hoyem’s photos from his fieldwork. We’ve called it Southern California Lowriders: Los Angeles 2005.
“Sir, I was just now sitting around working on a Revell 1:25 model kit of a Kenworth® W900, and the absorption and joy of the work put me into some deep, deep contemplation …”
More on our feedback page.
We’re celebrating the remodel of American Ethnography’s web pages, by offering our T-shirts for $19.95. And that’s including shipping, no matter where you are in the world! It’s ridiculous, that’s what it is!
To finance our independent research project – Car Customizing & Outlaw Aesthetics – we created a limited edition serigraph. They’re hand printed by us here at American Ethnography – black ink on 100% cotton fiber paper.
We think they came out good, and you’ll find them in our online store.
Have you got some good stuff you think American Ethnography Quasiweekly should cover? Please send us an email and tell us about it!
