Thinking about themes of typography and cultural identity, my colleague Mikael Calandra Achode suggested looking at Mexican Blackletter by Cristina Paoli, a book that explores how a style of lettering has been culturally re-appropriated in Mexico, adorning countless stores, shapes, service providers, that it “speaks volumes about contemporary Mexican culture” (Paoli, 2006, p.5).
Reasons for this:
– Colonial Spanish background, present in consciousness but also architecture and cities
– Associations with Christianity, rooted in European religious traditions
– Cultural love of ornaments, colour and contrast, both playful and mysterious
All over the world newspapers and rustic establishments such as pubs and shops use blackletter in their mastheads and signage, communicating a sense of passage of time, tradition, etc.
Blackletter was forbidden by the Nazis, connected to Jewish culture.
Popular in the context of heavy metal and punk, mystic and obscure connotations.
Religious connotations, particularly Catholicism.
The book speaks to how signs, symbols, a style of lettering can can adopted by different cultures and also mean different things for those cultures. Shows how lettering and type design have the potential to speak about cultural identity but also that these letterforms might have different meaning for different communities.
“From talking to the people that decorate their body with it, or that draw the letterform on a sign, I have discovered that Mexicans feel that blackletter communicates “tradition,” or that “normal letters” – Roman type – just wouldn’t be good enough for the particular message they need to express.” (Paoli, 2006, p.23)
“Many who elect to employ blackletter for tattoos, signs and anything else imaginable believe that it takes the written message to a ‘religious’ level and therefore, implicitly, associates the message with a kind of transcendence. In speaking with people, words such as ‘tradition,’, religion’ and historical’ continually surfaced.” (Paoli, 2006, p.23)
Paoli, C. (2006) Mexican Blackletter. New York: Mark Batty