Journal of Social History

Freije, Vanessa;

doi: 10.1093/jsh/shz071pmid: N/A

The rise of mass media altered the nature of political governance and civic engagement in Mexico. At midcentury, rapid urbanization and public education introduced an ever-greater number of people to radio broadcasts, comic books, and nationalistic films. Benjamin T. Smith’s new book, The Mexican Press and Civil Society, 1940-1976: Stories from the Newsroom, Stories from the Street, argues that “newspapers, rather than individual experience, interpersonal gossip, radio, or TV, became the key mediators between citizens and the state” (1). In so doing, Smith challenges longstanding assumptions about literacy, print media, and everyday politics, demonstrating that the press was integral to the political lives of ordinary Mexicans. In the book’s first section, “The Reading Public,” Smith shows that newspaper readership rose dramatically from the 1940s to the 1970s. This chapter draws upon ethnographies, U.S. advertising agency data, and media surveys to give greater texture to literacy figures. Drawing out compelling anecdotes, Smith renders Mexican cities as teeming with paper advertisements, cheaply printed song sheets, and broadsides. He also documents the high circulation of sports and crime tabloids and regional periodicals. In so doing, he contributes to an emergent body of scholarship, which argues that Mexican worldviews were forged through engagement with print media. Scholars have long assumed that print media was hopelessly corrupted by the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI), which ruled Mexico from 1929 to 2000. The PRI nurtured a symbiotic relationship with private media and employed surgical attacks against dissenting reporters. While the imbrication of political and private media interests are well-known, Smith elucidates how this practice evolved over time, charting an increasingly sophisticated strategy for curbing dissent, particularly in Mexico City. The government created institutions like the Consejo Nacional Publicitario (1959), which brought private advertising in line with state priorities (64), and by the 1960s, state funding (in the form of subsidized newsprint, loans, advertising, and direct payments) provided Mexico City print media with significant financial support. Institutional and material imperatives, alongside the shared worldview and class background of politicians and news directors, encouraged a culture of self-censorship in national print media. However, Smith shows that even in Mexico City this control was never complete and satirical magazines and later radical leftist publications offered platforms for dissent. Smith further demonstrates in Chapters 5, 7, and 8 that the state control over the regional press was much less complete. As in Mexico City, regional news editors and politicians often shared a conservative political background and solidified interpersonal bonds by fraternizing in bars and brothels (160). However, most state governments lacked the financial means to fully co-opt regional newspapers, though loyal journalists could still receive handouts like plots of land. Smith notes that “politics in the provinces was much more open and competitive,” and this was reflected in the combative exposés of regional print media (169). At the same time, violence against reporters was more frequent outside of Mexico City, and Smith finds evidence of over 200 attacks on provincial newspapers between 1940 and 1960, with the states of Baja California Norte, Tamaulipas, Veracruz, Oaxaca, and Jalisco suffering the highest number of attacks (170-1). This systematic documentation is, to my knowledge, the first of its kind and thus deepens our understanding of how violence against journalists mapped out over space and time. In these chapters, Smith narrativizes a dense and varied archive of press payouts, sociability, censorship, and media exposés to highlight the limits of and spaces for dissent within the pages of the regional and Mexico City press. The most compelling parts of The Mexican Press and Civil Society are the chapters anchored on the life histories of key press figures. These chapters illuminate processes of ideological and personal transformation, balancing the materialist and structural approach of the rest of the book. In Chapter 4, for example, Smith explores Yucatecan newspaper director Mario Menéndez Rodríguez’s transformation from “Catholic schoolboy” to leftist guerilla, a process that illuminates the wider Cold War landscape of radicalization and repression. Meanwhile, Chapter 8 focuses on Judith Reyes, a folk singer who in the early 1960s bucked social convention by divorcing her husband and founding a populist newspaper in Chihuahua City. By offering insight into under-analyzed journalists, these chapters illuminate the agency that individuals could exercise within constricted circumstances. A third biographical chapter on media magnate José García Valseca highlights how a regional newspaper chain thrived through a combination of individual entrepreneurship, “gangster journalism,” and alternating alliances with industrialists and politicians. By the 1960s, García Valseca’s media empire included popular comic books, sports tabloids, and a chain of thirty-seven regional newspapers, which accounted for around 23% of all newspaper sales in Mexico. While García Valseca’s conservatism and political alliances were reflected in his newspapers, Smith complicates that idea that the chain merely served state interests. For instance, García Valseca’s Sol chain often blackmailed state governors in exchange for positive coverage (or silence), but they also contributed to civil unrest by denouncing corruption and electoral fraud. Smith highlights how corrupt journalistic practices could nonetheless produce scandals that articulated with broader social concerns (208). In the final two chapters, Smith demonstrates that “even during the heyday of the PRI, the press and grassroots politics were not antithetical but instead closely interwoven” (8). He focuses on two small newspapers, Momento/El Chapulín and Acción, from Oaxaca City and Chihuahua City respectively. At these artisanal publications, reporters looked to working-class people and peasants as sources for their articles, and directors provided extensive space for readers’ letters that voiced popular grievances. Though these newspaper ventures were not immune to censorship—Judith Reyes was hauled off to jail twice—they nonetheless contributed to civic protest movements. Crucially, these chapters decenter the Mexico City media and illuminate how grassroots newspapers forged geographically-limited public spheres as early as the 1940s. Moreover, they contribute to Smith’s broader claim that the journalists themselves, and not teachers or priests, were the key mediators between the PRI state and civil society (279). Written in vibrant prose, The Mexican Press is a pleasure to read and is appropriate for undergraduates. The chapters can also stand on their own, which is a notable plus for assignments. Smith’s book will also interest graduate students and scholars of print media, Mexican politics, and civil society. The book, in short, is an excellent contribution to a growing body of scholarship that reconsiders Mexico’s print media as a site of political engagement and intermediation rather than quiescent obeisance. © The Author(s) 2019. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: [email protected] This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)