Indio Rosa
c. 1930
Designer
Designer Unknown
Printer
Fabrega, Barna
DIMENSIONS
38 x 28 in. (96.5 x 71.1 cm)
OBJECT NUMBER
PH.9695
COUNTRY OF ORIGIN
Spain
CREDIT LINE
Poster House Permanent Collection
KEYWORDS
Cigarettes, Man, Native American, Paper, Tobacco

Many Native nations hold tobacco as sacred medicine, using it in ceremony and prayer for millennia before European contact. Here, that revered act is turned into casual commercialization, presented as a distinctly unsacred pastime for mass consumption and endorsed by an “authentic” smoker. Published in Spain, this poster demonstrates that the use of Indigenous figures in marketing was not limited to the English-speaking world. The product itself, a brand of cigarette rolling papers, is named “Indio Rosa” (Pink Indian), presumably a reference to the “red” slur used to describe Native skin. In addition to using Indigenous figures to add an “exotic” or “authentic” quality to advertised tobacco products, such imagery helped recruit more Native smokers, driving addiction rates in Indigenous communities to twice that of the national average. 

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