About Provincial Modernism in Mexico. La Casa de la Semana in Jueves de Excélsior

Abstract

The emerging modern ways of living would provoke discussions in their lifestyles. The Social Sciences, but specifically the Humanities and its disciplines, believed every social change began in domestic spaces, at the nuclear family, so they wondered what and how would be right to live in modern times: if the collective and serial, or the individual and isolated. Thus, promoted by the positivism promise, housing and house arise, in ideological opposition, as an answer to the question that intensifies after the Second Great War. Under other motivations, this discussion would replicate in Latin-American cities. Specifically México would be a reference to this theoretical debate of if the house would turn out to be the manifestation of its modernity due to the rising revolutionary bourgeoisie that would adopt its principles. This sense of class would be emphasized in small cities where, unlike hegemonic cities, it would not be the product of an ideological positioning, but an aspirational eagerness of an ideal learned world, mainly, by the access to period publications. This work reflects on this discussion and its scopes, from a phenomenological posture and a historiographic method. To do so, Tepic, Nayarit is taken as a case study; a viceregal city of western Mexico that, as well as its provincial analogous, besides lacking previous studies, the houses of this incoming post-revolutionary society, would reflect the imposture of magazine modernism that advertised, as a catalog sale, allegedly universal, progressive and scientific designs.