Latin American Posters:
Public Aesthetics and Mass Politics
Edited by Russ Davidson
Oversize F1414.2 .L32983 2006
New Book Island, 2nd floor
This is one of those books where I’m like, “OH! SHINY!” and I can’t resist picking it up off the shelf. I’m sure that some of you out there have a Che Guevara poster on your wall, as it is a staple in every college revolutionary’s room. But there is a whole world of Latin American posters out there that do not involve immortalizing the Argentine socialist. Latin American Posters does just that, displaying a select number of over ten thousand advertisements and propaganda from the twenty-two Latina American countries and Spain housed at the University of New Mexico Libraries. The Sam L. Slick Collection of Latin American and Iberian Posters is composed of ephemera gathered by Slick, a retired professor of Spanish. As Ilan Stavans, well-known scholar, writes in his essay, the people of El Salvador were not getting their news from traditional outlets, but with the posters throughout the streets. If you only got your news from flyers and posters, how would that change your perception of the world?
