Arieta's poblanas ,

摘要

The city of Puebla figured prominently in the imagination of prominent Liberal writers such as Guillermo Prieto, Manuel Payno and Ignacio Altamirano. Smaller yet more conflictive than the national capital, bastion of the Catholic Church but also the first highland city to witness newly arriving European tastes, fashions and technologies, the nineteenth-century dialogue between tradition and modernity was more starkly visible in Puebla. 1 From the early 1840s Mexican writers and artists sought to identify the "national" in the customs and costumes of everyday life. 2 Guillermo Prieto confessed that Mexico City's cultural complexity defied his efforts to describe the capital's types and customs: What I struggle to characterise, but with little success, is the physiognomy of that society, made up of entire sections whose relations to each other, seen close to or from afar, seem completely ill-matched....like small shards of glass that form unexpected and precious shapes in a kaleidoscope, so those various elements form shapes, with the difference that in the kaleidoscope that I have invented, the shapes that appear are monstrous, deformed and opposed to any logical and rational description.