Mexico, from the Types of All Nations series (N24) for Allen & Ginter Cigarettes 1889

This small card, part of Allen & Ginter’s “Types of All Nations” series, was printed to be included in packages of cigarettes. It’s a chromolithograph, a color printing process that involves using multiple lithographic stones, each applying a different color to achieve the final image. What’s fascinating here is how this relatively complex, labor-intensive process was put in service of mass-produced ephemera. Chromolithography allowed for affordable color images, fueling a boom in advertising and collectibles. The smooth, almost hyper-real quality of the print gives the image a sense of authority, even as it flattens out any real understanding of Mexican identity. Consider the sheer volume of these cards that would have been produced, the layers of labor involved in everything from mining the stones to printing the images. By examining the material and the making, we can see how this small object connects to much larger issues of labor, representation, and consumption in the late 19th century.