Antique & Vintage Postcards

Rising like a concrete echo of Teotihuacán from a busy Mexico City boulevard, the Monumento a la Raza commands this razor-sharp real-photo postcard with its stepped pyramid form crowned by a soaring eagle — a 1940 monument by architect Luis Lelo de Larrea celebrating Mexico's indigenous heritage, here flanked by a gleaming pre-war automobile that grounds the image firmly in the early 1950s. Published by FENA (Foto Estudio Nacional, Mexico City), numbered 510, this is one of the sharpest and most compositionally striking RPPC views of this oft-overlooked monument. The reverse carries a 1951 red meter stamp from Correos Mexico (25 centavos, MAQ M-231 / PERM PB-231, dated 30 VII 51) and a businesslike Spanish-language message from Eduardo in the San Álvaro-Tacuba district of Mexico City, writing to the R.T. French Company in Rochester, New York, requesting the manual "El Canario" — a tantalizing commercial vignette bridging Mexican and American commerce at the midpoint of the twentieth century.