Childhood and Modernity in Cold War Mexico City 9781350040021, 9781350040052, 9781350040045

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Childhood and Modernity in Cold War Mexico City

Childhood and Modernity in Cold War Mexico City Eileen Ford

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2018 Paperback edition first published 2020 Copyright © Eileen Ford, 2018 Eileen Ford has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p.ix constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover image © Oscar Lewis. From the University of Illinois Archives, by kind permission of Susan Rigdon. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-3500-4002-1 PB: 978-1-3501-2775-3 ePDF: 978-1-3500-4004-5 eBook: 978-1-3500-4003-8 Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

To Danny

Contents List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Introduction 1 Children Encounter the City: Mobility, Leisure, and Work through the Eyes of its Youngest Inhabitants 2 Educating the City of Children 3 Popular Culture and Entertainment through the Lens of Childhood, 1934–63 4 Catholicism, Global Politics, and Gender in the Making of Mexican National Identity 5 Documenting Childhood: Discourses and Images of Children in Print Media and Photography Conclusion: Childhood and the Limits of Modernity Notes Bibliography Index

viii ix 1 23 49 83 119 145 175 181 217 235

List of Illustrations Figure 1.1 Boy working in gas station, 1966, Hermanos Mayo collection, courtesy of the AGN Figure 1.2 Children’s Recreation Area Chapultepec Park, 1957, Hermanos Mayo collection, courtesy of AGN Figure 2.1 Students commemorate the 100-year anniversary of the national anthem, September 1954, courtesy of Historic Images Figure 2.2 Cultivating the land is patriotic, circa 1930s, Enrique Díaz, courtesy of the AGN Figure 2.3 Girls learning to use washboards, circa 1940s, Enrique Díaz, courtesy of the AGN Figure 3.1 School children visit radio expo, 1944, Enrique Díaz, courtesy of the AGN Figure 4.1 Boy celebrates first communion, October 1949, author’s personal collection Figure 4.2 Benediction of animals, 1946, Enrique Díaz, courtesy of the AGN Figure 5.1 Barefoot girl with infant in tow watching carnival ride, circa 1940s, Enrique Díaz, courtesy of AGN Figure 5.2 Girl riding carousel (1946), Enrique Díaz, courtesy of AGN Figure 5.3 Toy giveaway, circa 1940s, Enrique Díaz, courtesy of AGN Figure 5.4 Girl reading on rubble, circa 1940s, Enrique Díaz, courtesy of the AGN Figure 5.5 Children waiting for toy distribution, December 1938, Enrique Díaz, courtesy of the AGN

38 41

53 56 60 100 128 131 155 159 160 166 167

Acknowledgments I wish to acknowledge many individuals who have assisted me in the completion of this book. It started as a dissertation at the University of Illinois at UrbanaChampaign where I was fortunate enough to have several generous and rigorous scholars who trained me during graduate school. I thank my dissertation committee members, Antoinette Burton, Joe Love, Cynthia Radding, and Mary Kay Vaughan, for mentoring me and challenging me over the years. Early on as an undergraduate student, the late Mark Leff taught me to love history in a way that changed my life. A special thanks to Antoinette who has offered guidance and support at crucial moments in graduate school and beyond. It is safe to say that without Antoinette, this book would not have been written. Not only a brilliant scholar, she is also a testament to kindness and feminism in words and deeds. Thanks to the various institutions that supported this project financially. In graduate school, several fellowships supported the beginning of this book’s research. My research in Mexico City was carried out with funding from the Fulbright-Hays Dissertation Research Fellowship, and for that I am eternally grateful. The University of Illinois awarded me a Dissertation Completion Fellowship that provided much needed time to write. The Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies and the Department of History at the University of Illinois provided summer travel grants to explore the archives of Mexico City during the project’s inception. In Mexico, I am grateful to the numerous friends, colleagues, and mentors who have contributed to this work. To my fellow historians, some of whom I met while working on the dissertation in Mexico and some later, I am grateful for your conversations and support. I thank especially Ageeth Sluis, Anne Rubenstein, Pamela Voekel, Gladys McCormick, Stephanie Ballenger, Nikki Sanders, Sarah Buck, Rob Alegre, Jaime Pensado, María Teresa Fernández Aceves, the late Ann Blum, Eric Zolov, and also Carmen Nava for her unfailing generosity. This project would not have been possible without all the assistance of many archivists and librarians in Mexico City. I am especially grateful to Roberto at the SEP archives and all the good-natured men and women working at the Biblioteca Miguel Lerdo de Tejada, the Hemeroteca Nacional, and the Archivo General de la Nación who helped a fledgling academic find her way.

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Acknowledgments

I have been fortunate to meet academics at various institutions and conferences along the way. Thank you to Valentina Tikoff, Benton Williams, Robert Moore, and Bianca Premo for your kindness and conversations. I appreciate the assistance of Susan Rigdon in the Anthropology department and the archivist Chris Prom at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign for securing permission to use the photograph on the book cover. I thank James Marten and the anonymous reviewers who read and commented on a much earlier version of Chapter 5 that appeared in the Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth. To the anonymous reviewers who have read parts of all of this manuscript in its earlier version, I am very grateful for your suggestions, comments, and queries. I also thank Emma Goode at Bloomsbury Academic for supporting the project. At a teaching institution, funding for research is hard to come by. Therefore, I am all the more grateful for what I have received from various departments or programs at California State University, Los Angeles. The Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality provided a one-course release and the university’s Research and Creative Leave Award provided one quarter off from teaching duties. Dean Pamela Scott-Johnson provided funding for the creation of the book’s index. I owe a tremendous debt to my colleagues at California State University, Los Angeles. I am grateful to be part of such a wonderful department and thank them all for their unfailing commitment to teaching at a public university and to their students. Several colleagues read drafts of chapters or the book proposal or just generally helped me survive the demands of balancing a heavy teaching load, committee work, and research and writing. Some have just been exceptionally kind and have given me a sense of community. Special thanks to Choi Chatterjee, Chris Endy, Enrique Ochoa, Birte Pfleger, Sara Pugach, Scott Wells, Ping Yao, and Holly Yu. To all the amazing students I have met over the years, thank you for reminding me daily of why teaching is an important and worthwhile endeavor. They have also informed the vision of this book, which has changed since it was a dissertation. If I have hope for the future, it is only because I have met students who are intelligent beyond any instruction they may have had and colleagues who are deeply committed to social justice. Finally, I wish to thank my friends and family members for their encouragement, support, and love over the years. There are too many to mention individually but their support and enthusiasm for this project have been remarkable. Friends and family have given generously, lending me cars, driving me places, feeding me, and even letting me stay in their homes when traveling between work and research places. My friends and family in the

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Chicagoland area have always welcomed me back home and provided a muchneeded respite. To all the friends in Long Beach, California, who made me feel at home in a new city and for making the completion of this book more fun, thank you. I am truly grateful. Thanks especially to some of my closest family members among an extended family of so many loved ones: to Kay Payne, John and Lisa Phaby, Madeline and Owen Phaby, Rosemary Ford, and Kathy and Danny Ford for being with me throughout this endeavor.

Introduction

On July 18, 1966, newspaper readers in Mexico City encountered the first of a daily, thirteen-part installment called “Children without Childhood! Abandoned by Fortune!” Detailing the plight of Mexico City’s children in the periodical La Prensa, this dramatic opening headline conveys the level of uneasiness present in the city regarding the demographic explosion of children and the level of poverty many of them faced. The series reveals the anxiety felt over the dire straits of many of the capital’s children as it described in words and photographs heart-wrenching scenes of children living in poverty. Rafael Pérez Martin del Campo wrote: Thousands of children—those abandoned by fortune—wander night and day down the principal streets of the city, selling chicles, shining shoes, offering lottery tickets, imploring for bread in the cafes, twenty children in centers of vice or singing in passenger buses. This army of poor children, with an uncertain look, dry lips, half-dressed, with broken shoes and many even shoeless, exhibits its misery to the passersby, the hunger of various hours, of each day.1

This “army of poor children” was seen as an invading body by some commentators, a troublesome force with which to be reckoned. A variety of experts—Juvenile Court judges, teachers, law professors, and welfare workers— gave their opinions about the most urgent problems the city’s children faced, including child labor, delinquency, hunger, and parental neglect. Leticia Acevedo Millán, the director of the Asistencia Social de la Secretaría de Salubridad y Asistencia (Social Assistance for the Ministry of Public Health and Assistance), explained that while each day the government worked on building schools and other centers that offered assistance to children, the efforts were insufficient because the demographic explosion exceeded all calculations.2 The series highlighted class stratification found in the mid-1960s in the capital and revealed the inadequacies of Mexico’s democratization in the postrevolutionary and Cold War eras. While such concern was legitimately about children’s well-being, descriptions in print media also revealed fears of economic crisis, disintegration of the traditional family structure, and repressive state policies

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Childhood and Modernity in Cold War Mexico City

in what was supposed to be a democratic society in the modern world. Two years after this exposé appeared, a few generations of young people—those children whose parents were direct beneficiaries of the revolution—rose up to protest against the ruling party and their exclusion from the political process as they organized the 1968 student movement. While the youth angst came to a head in 1968, the origins of societal discontent can be traced back to a time considerably earlier than that fateful year.

Managing the city of children This book examines children’s experiences and adult conceptions of childhood in Mexico City from 1934 to 1968. While the country suffered a tremendous population loss of more than one million due to death and migration during and after the 1910 Mexican Revolution, the resurgence in the five decades thereafter was remarkable. By the mid-1960s, the problem was apparent: the city’s population had simply swelled too quickly and the child population, aged fourteen years and under, represented the largest segment. The child population exploded in Mexico City during this era; by 1970, children of fourteen years of age and under represented approximately 41.5 percent of the urban population, up from 32.9 percent in 1930. Their collective presence in the capital informed the identity of the city and, conversely, the urban environment itself shaped these postrevolutionary and Cold War generations. Children increasingly became a central target audience for secular and religious reformers and producers of popular culture and consumer goods. The demographic explosion taxed the educational system and worried government officials and social critics alike; the lack of adequate schools and public places for play—to say nothing of child labor and delinquency—was alarming. The continued existence of child labor was an important indicator that Mexico had failed to achieve the economic promises of its revolution. Children’s experiences in the city were certainly class-specific and gendered. Nevertheless, the city worked as an instructor in cultural, social, and political terms to all children. Children from the middle and upper classes often faced more restrictions on their activities, and parents and guardians more closely monitored with whom these children spent time. Boys were more easily visible in the city than girls, but this too was class-specific. Young girls from the urban poor population were forced to work and moved about the city more frequently than their upper and middle class female peers whose innocence

Introduction

3

and sexual honor remained a paramount concern for those from these social classes. Girls without better prospects often worked as domestic servants in other people’s households; for these girls, childhood looked considerably different than those protected, idealized childhoods of their more fortunate peers. Yet, both boys and girls could be found throughout the city either on their own, in age-specific groups, or with their families engaged in a variety of activities. Children living and working on the streets of Mexico had greater freedom in physical mobility but also faced greater potential dangers than their better-off counterparts. Popular culture in the form of print media and popular films reflected and informed adult concerns about unsupervised children in the city. State officials expanded the scope of educational projects and sought to reach children at an earlier age through kindergarten programs and educational outreach in working-class or poor communities. But largely the state failed in exerting complete authority over this booming child population. Though the state fervently sought to inculcate its messages and ideologies among the growing masses of children through state-designed school curriculum, it would be impossible to gauge the actual individual reception and adaptation of the messages and ideologies. Nevertheless, we can see that their upbringing and education led that generation of children to believe in promises of the revolution, despite those promises being mostly rhetorical by the late 1940s and 1950s. Students growing up in this era believed in their constitutional rights and cited these rights in the face of political oppression during the 1968 student movement.3 In the context of Cold War Mexico, the ideas of the Catholic Church and the state regarding children converged on several levels. Both institutions utilized strategies that privileged incorporating new, modern aspects of mass media to influence children and both church and state reinscribed gender norms with a modern, cosmopolitan face. The Secretaría de Educación Pública (SEP: Ministry of Public Education) promoted ideologies that communicated a hierarchy of modern nations, like its use of the United Nations and exchanges between children in allied countries, for example, in its curriculum. In a similar vein, Catholic prescriptive literature undergirded state goals as it promoted a missionary zeal that firmly placed Mexico among the so-called “First World” nations in its racialized and developmental framework. Both the SEP and the church utilized mass media to encourage children to consider their place in a democratizing, modern nation in need of a disciplined workforce by stressing the middle-class ideologies of a male breadwinner and female domesticity. The SEP produced radio programs and print media for children, educators, and

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Childhood and Modernity in Cold War Mexico City

mothers, and the church produced publications for parents and children and monitored popular culture more generally. This study takes as its beginning and ending points two important markers for the construction of modern childhood in Mexico. The bulk of the time period considered lies firmly within the Cold War era; nevertheless, it backtracks a few years to take into account the political and cultural developments that were fundamental in shaping notions of childhood in the Mexican context. In 1934, mass-produced, mass-consumed children’s radio entertainment in Mexico first debuted on the station XEW through the character Cri-Crí. The same year marked the beginning of socialist education in Mexico—a relatively short-lived experiment whose controversial reception in the 1930s and end in the 1940s shows a tumultuous time in the development of Mexican politics and a struggle over control of the nation’s children and emblematic of church-state conflict. This study concludes with the metaphorical end of innocence in 1968 as government forces mowed down hundreds in the Tlatelolco massacre of student protestors and bystanders, including children.4 Not surprisingly, mistrust of the government among young and old alike accelerated in the wake of that massacre. As one eleven-year-old boy put it: “After what happened at Tlatelolco, me and my buddies are going to carry sticks and stones around with us, and if we come across a granadero (riot policeman) or a soldier by himself, we’ll let him have it!”5

Historical context and historiography Mexico’s Cold War milieu reflected issues related to inter-American diplomacy and domestic problems, stemming from a largely authoritarian government and more generally from structural socioeconomic disparities. While the government certainly can be characterized as authoritarian by the midtwentieth century, the power of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI; Institutional Revolutionary Party) was not absolute. Historians have recently written about Mexico and other Latin American nations within the Cold War context. As international relations scholar Renata Keller demonstrates, Mexican leaders in the early 1960s supported Fidel Castro and his followers’ successful 1959 revolution and articulated its similarities to Mexico’s 1910 Revolution; some openly condemned the US-orchestrated Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961. Former President Lázaro Cárdenas (1934–40) even boarded a plane to fly to Cuba during the crisis, though the military grounded his plane under orders

Introduction

5

from President Adolfo López Mateos.6 Indeed, the relationship between the two countries was instrumental in the early days of Cuba’s revolutionary foment: revolutionaries seeking to oust authoritarian Cuban President Fulgencio Batista used Mexico as their home base in the 1950s to train, strategize, and launch the movement. The Cuban Revolution “unwittingly exposed a contradiction coded deep in the DNA of Mexican politics: the tension between the country’s revolutionary past and its conservative present.”7 Mexico alone refused to sever ties with the island, despite the Organization of American States’ instructions that all member nations do so in July 1964. Though the US officials initially disapproved of Mexico’s stance, eventually they understood the potential benefits to both countries.8 Mexico was certainly affected by the US-Soviet global struggle, but domestic politics in the post–Second World War era took precedence over how that struggle unfolded in Mexico. Mexico’s ruling party used the law of social dissolution, Article 145 of the Constitution, to intimidate and punish political opponents and to censor other protestations against social inequality. By the 1950s, domestic security agencies like the Dirección Federal de Seguridad (created in 1947) worked in close cooperation with US intelligence agencies. The law of social dissolution, enacted in 1941 by President Ávila Camacho in the face of fascism during the Second World War, would be applied to “any foreigner or Mexican national who in speech or writing, or by any other means, carries on political propaganda among foreigners or Mexican nationals, spreading ideas, programs or forms of action of any foreign government which disturb the public order or affect the sovereignty of the Mexican state.”9 In 1950, the law was amended and expanded under President Miguel Alemán to award lengthier prison sentences for those charged with crimes under the law. As historian Jaime Pensado has shown, the law was used to punish and jail dissidents, including students, in the late 1950s and 1960s.10 This product of the Cold War became one of the most contentious issues of the student movement in the late 1960s; repealing the law of social dissolution represented one of the six formal demands made by the movement.11 In addition to student protests circa 1956–1970s, labor organizations and workers protested in the 1950s and often incurred the wrath of government officials and security forces. Historians Robert Alegre, Gladys McCormick, and Tanalis Padilla have analyzed organized resistance by railroad workers and agricultural laborers in Mexico City and in the countryside.12 Dramatic changes in the relationship between the church and state characterized the post-1940 period. Despite revolutionary aims to secularize and “de-fanaticize” Mexican society, 95 percent of the population reported

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Childhood and Modernity in Cold War Mexico City

Catholicism as their faith in 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s.13 While the acrimony between the two institutions has been well documented for the 1920s and 1930s,14 the increasingly harmonious relationship between the church and state in the Cold War era has received less attention. Fortunately, notable exceptions exist. Historian and political scientist Soledad Loaeza points to the restoration of church power in Mexico, especially during the period from 1940 to 1965. She finds that by the middle of the twentieth century, the church’s “complicidad equívoca” (ambiguous complicity) with the state contributed to the authoritarian stability of the PRI and increased political visibility and political power of the institution that was so embattled with the state in the 1920s and 1930s. Sharing an ideological basis, the state no longer viewed the church as a threat to its power but rather as an ally in the post-1940 period. Indeed, Loaeza maintains that the state used the church “as an agent of social cohesion to consolidate the political structure.”15 What would have seemed like impossible bedfellows a few decades before made perfect sense by the mid-twentieth century. From the early twentieth century through the 1960s, Mexico City witnessed tremendous social and cultural changes, in addition to the political and economic transformations previously highlighted. The 1910 Revolution displaced many individuals and led to a massive migration from the countryside, especially of women who had lost husbands, fathers, and/or brothers, and arrived in the capital in search of work. Mexico City’s physical growth was astonishing by many measures; in 1940, Mexico City boasted over 3,000 streets that contained on any given day a number of the 35,000 automobiles and 10,000 trucks present in the city. New subdivisions such as Lomas de Chapultepec, Chapultepec-Polanco, and Hipódromo Condesa had emerged, and social-class distinctions were made legible in that process as these wealthier neighborhoods stood in stark contrast to their working-class counterparts.16 Between 1940 and 1960, about 1.8 million rural migrants arrived in Mexico City, mostly settling in the east and the southern parts of the city. Rural migration continued and new arrivals often settled in Gustavo A. Madero, Iztacalco, Ixtapalapa, in the east and in Alvaro Obregón and Coyoacán in the south of the city.17 Changing social mores and gender roles as well as concerns about the sexual behavior accompanied the rapid changes of Mexico City’s twentieth century. Concerns about girls’ innocence and sexuality, of course, were not new in the Cold War era, yet they took on a different shape as other social and cultural changes accelerated the influx of competing foreign influences and “modern” ways of behaving changed the nature of previous meanings of sexual propriety. Parents and citizens in general had some very convincing reasons to worry about

Introduction

7

the safety and purity of their young female population. Reports of chilling tales detailing how city life threatened girls’ and women’s virginity and physical safety abounded. At the turn of the century, Federico Gamboa’s novel Santa (1903) narrated a cautionary tale of a rural adolescent girl’s downfall—ushered in by her sexual interaction with a soldier and subsequent ostracism by her protective and hard-working brothers. Santa’s migration to the capital city thereafter led her to living and working in a brothel as she descended into alcoholism and complete moral and physical ruin. Gamboa’s account later reached iconic status as its numerous reincarnations made it popular to subsequent generations, long after its debut at the turn of the century. It was made into both a silent film in 1918 and, later in 1931, remade as Mexico’s first “talkie” or film with dialogue. Thereafter, two films were made based on the novel as well as a pornographic comic strip and, by 1978, a telenovela.18 But it was not just popular culture that provided stories of girls’ vulnerability; real-life tragedies hit home as many parents worried about letting their children out of their watchful eyes. In February 1938, eight-year-old Olga Camacho went to the grocery store to run an errand for her mother and never returned. Her innocence did not protect her; she was raped and murdered. A 24 year-old soldier named Juan Castillo Morales confessed to the crime. She was soon buried and many mourners, young and old, attended the services. One newspaper account recorded the solemn scene as follows: “The hundreds, heads bowed reverently, filed slowly past for a last glimpse of the tragic figure before the coffin was closed and lowered beneath the earth. Many, including little children carrying small bouquets clutched in tightly clenched fists, laid flowers on the grave.”19 Girls’ sexuality remained a concern in Mexico City in the late 1920s and 1930s; a large number of girls’ cases brought before the Juvenile Court pertained to errant sexuality and it was assumed by officials that their sexual activity was related to illegal prostitution and parental neglect. The same was not true for boys in the Juvenile Court as societal expectations normalized their early sexual exploits. Many young female domestic servants suffered sexual assault at the hands of their employers; conversely some girls escaped sexual abuse from a stepfather or other relative by fleeing the home environment and finding employment as a domestic servant.20 Films also expressed concern over girls’ incipient sexuality or the consequences of sex out of wedlock, such as Nosotros los Pobres (We the Poor; 1947), Una familia de tantas (A Family among Many; 1948), and Los olvidados (translated into English as both The Young and the Damned and The Forgotten; 1950), to name but a few. By the 1960s, the counterculture youth movement had embraced rock and roll music as its anthem, and changing gender roles and sexuality were part and parcel of that milieu.21

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Childhood and Modernity in Cold War Mexico City

If the 1920s and 1930s showcased the promises of modernity and the implementation of revolutionary reforms, the 1950s and 1960s laid bare their shortcomings. As early as 1943, Mexican intellectuals began questioning if the frequently invoked revolution even still existed and also criticized its leaders. Critics like Jesús Silva Herzog (1943) and Daniel Cosío Villegas (1947), both economists and historians, wrote important articles that lampooned highranking government officials for unduly profiting from certain projects and highlighted how prior revolutionary reforms had either been abandoned or so transformed as to be unrecognizable by the late 1940s and early 1950s.22 One father put it more bluntly in the wake of the Tlatelolco massacre: “If the one thing the Student Movement has accomplished is to strip the Mexican Revolution bare, to show that it was a filthy, corrupt old whore, that alone is enough to justify it.”23 This father’s use of a sexually suspect woman as a metaphor for the emptiness of the revolution is also telling of how gender norms and expectations were often slow to change. Cold War politics meant that Mexican officials conveniently labeled student strikes beginning in the mid-1950s, like the one at the Instituto Politénico Nacional (IPN; Polytechnic Institute), as communist conspiracies. While the Communist Party was divided and not especially powerful in Mexico in the mid-twentieth century, the rhetorical power of anti-communism was quite strong. The ruling party relied on a mix of co-optation and oppression in the Cold War era, effectively creating a dictablanda or soft dictatorship. Recently, scholars have analyzed the power of the Mexican state as more nuanced than previously theorized and point to both the authoritarian measures which it sometimes resorted as well as its relative weaknesses and the inability to control various sectors of the population.24 Regardless of how strong or how weak scholars judge the Mexican state to have been in the Cold War era, the draconian crackdown on student protestors in 1968 speaks of the brutality the state was willing and capable of exerting and, equally important here, the genuine threat officials perceived in these generations of dissenters. That these students were labeled communists and subversives speaks of the power of anti-communist rhetoric in Cold War Mexico. In her analysis of the 1950s, Soledad Loaeza states: “The shapeless shadow of the Communist threat actually served to hide the real sources of apprehension for many Mexicans, which came from two profound social cleavages that could precipitate internal strife and confrontation. These were increasing social inequality and the tensions derived from opposition between modernity and tradition.”25 Indeed, by the end of the 1960s, Mexico’s inequality in income distribution was the worst in all of Latin America except for Brazil

Introduction

9

and Honduras.26 The “Mexican Miracle” certainly failed to have a positive effect on the daily lives of those at the bottom of that income distribution.

Children’s health and well-being in Mexico and beyond Initiatives to address children’s rights, health, and general well-being took on new importance in the twentieth century as organizations created transnational or international links to combat child poverty. Save the Children, the first international organization committed to children, materialized in the wake of the First World War; it was founded by the wealthy English sisters Eglantyne Jebb and Dorothy Buxton. Similarly, and informed by Save the Children’s agenda, in the aftermath of the Second World War, the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) was established in 1946 at first as a temporary organization, which was made permanent in 1953. As historian Jennifer Morris argues, UNICEF “ran programs that were complicit not only in supporting U.S. foreign policy efforts, but also for influencing social norms by perpetuating the U.S. post-war family ideal as well.”27 By 1950, UNICEF had expanded into Latin America, offering aid to mothers and children in sixty-four countries across four continents in total.28 But informal networks between various humanitarian agencies and/ or individuals associated with those agencies had existed long before these international institutions emerged or had formal relationships with specific countries. Of course, concern about Mexican children’s physical, emotional, and intellectual well-being did not materialize out of thin air in the mid-1930s, the point at which this study begins. Historians of Mexico have analyzed children and family through education, child labor, adoption, the rise of the welfare state and, to a lesser extent, juvenile delinquency.29 Historical developments in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries indicate an increasing concern with children’s education, hygiene and health, and the detrimental effects of child labor and delinquency. The Mexico City Poor House, for example, transformed from its original goal of rounding up beggars of all varieties in the late eighteenth century to one that exclusively housed orphans in the 1880s. This transformation revealed, at least in part, a changing notion of which social groups were considered worthy of government assistance, and in 1884, the former poorhouse became the Hospicio de Niños (Children’s Hospice) where young orphan charges were expected to learn valuable labor skills.30 Examples abound of government preoccupation with mothers and their children in or around the

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Childhood and Modernity in Cold War Mexico City

turn of the century. Señora Díaz, wife of President Porfirio Díaz, founded the Casa Amiga de la Obrera (Friend of the Working Woman House) and included daycare in its program when it was inaugurated on December 1, 1887. Female street vendors and factory women used the services of the institution so that their children might receive medicine, food, and religious education. Yet, the institution catered to the children without fathers and gave preference to those whose mothers were under thirty years of age.31 During the Porfiriato, in the decades prior to the Mexican Revolution, concerns about the well-being of the nation’s children were largely symbolic as they failed to reach the majority of the country’s boys and girls: the notion of an ideal childhood was most certainly dependent on class, and in terms of racial preferences, dependent on being lighter-skinned. As Ann Blum has demonstrated, a fundamental shift occurred from the 1880s to the 1940s; by the end of that period Mexico had become a more child-centered society. More specifically, between 1920 and 1940, because of the emergence of new public services for the youngest members of society, “the public debate about them helped narrow the ideological, if not the material, divide between protected and working childhoods.”32 One of these new services was the Tribunal para Menores, the Juvenile Court, founded in 1926, which dealt with largely poor children. In what Blum terms “interlocking domestic economies,” state policies toward foundlings and adoption practices translated into a circulation of poor children used for domestic labor in homes of the elite, especially prevalent in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. While adoption practices changed over time to reflect the state’s desired notion of family formation for emotive reasons rather than for labor, child delinquency and labor threatened this ideal.33 Government officials were concerned about juvenile delinquency, yet “postrevolutionary juvenile offenders benefitted from well-meaning but largely ineffective welfare and educational institutions.”34 Through her analysis of Juvenile Court documents, Blum has argued that parents and children adopted the language of reciprocity and affection in their descriptions of child labor in the 1920s and 1930s, and that some convinced judges, who ruled in their favor. Thus, while child labor in Mexico was outlawed in the 1917 Constitution, in practice it continued and was also socially sanctioned in many cases.35 Historian Elena Jackson Albarrán’s recent work on children and state-disseminated cultural nationalism in the 1920s and 1930s places children as not only objects of government reform, but also political beings with tremendous agency to affect change, though this group largely included the upper-and middle-class children and mostly excluded rural children. These studies have contributed

Introduction

11

significantly to our understanding of children vis-à-vis official policies and educational curriculum. Yet, these studies privilege the role of the state at the expense of other mitigating institutions and cultural forces. Eric Zolov has shown the importance of looking at Mexico’s counterculture movement and rock music in the decades leading up to the 1968 Student Movement and the subsequent Tlatelolco massacre. It was, he convincingly argues, “a cumulative crisis of patriarchal values” for both the state and for the middle-class family and, therefore, marks 1968 Movement as “a social and cultural event as much as a political one.”36 New research on youth culture in the post-1940 era using biography has provided “insight into the socializing, educational experiences that produced the subjectivities of this generation” through the perspective of one man’s life.37 While analyses that privilege identity or subjectivities provide important insight into these analytical categories, an overemphasis can obscure the importance of socioeconomic disparities in the Cold War era as motivating factors for dissent. For much of the twentieth century in the Western world, the economic contribution of children has been conceived of in opposition to their emotional value to parents and society, at least in the ideal formulation. Compulsory education contributed to notions of childhood as a separate life stage in which children needed to be segregated into age-specific spaces and given the opportunity to learn the fundamentals of a basic education. Competing nationalisms played an important part in the construction of a modern childhood. Industrialization and urbanization, in many locations across the globe, brought with them concerns about child labor and safety, especially at the turn of the century. For the US case, Viviana Zelizer argues that near the end of the nineteenth century, children ceased having economic worth to the family economy but became “emotionally priceless.” Yet for Mexico, the model does not fit so easily, especially when we consider how working-class children and parents negotiated worlds of well-intended reformers and an economic reality that meant many children continued to work. Historians have demonstrated that the Western model has not materialized in the same way in non-Western countries and for certain populations within the Western world.38 The history of childhood and youth is a growing field, one that now has journals and conferences dedicated to its study in a wide range of geographic and temporal settings.39 While the majority of these studies are situated within the context of Western Europe and the United States, that has changed in the last decade or so. Pioneering studies of childhood in Latin America have changed the way scholars look at the region and its political and economic development, pushing others to ask

12

Childhood and Modernity in Cold War Mexico City

how an analysis of childhood and youth can alter existing scholarship. For colonial Lima, historian Bianca Premo has demonstrated how the “new politics of the child” informed sociocultural and legal discussions on emotional bonds to children after the Enlightenment. For the modern era, Nara Milanich has shown how the triumph of the liberal state circa 1850–1930 in Chile helped to codify a class of dependent citizens, namely by altering a sociocultural system that had previously supported children through fictive kin relationships.40 Recently, innovative studies of childhood in the Cold War era outside of Mexico have contributed to the larger historiography of childhood in important ways. During the baby boom in the United States, domestic policy changed from one that was aimed at the neediest children before the Second World War to one that was designed to address all children’s needs during the Cold War. Some historians have employed comparative or transnational analyses to look at childhood during the Cold War without being bound by the constraints of one nation. For example, Margaret Peacock makes use of textual and visual analyses to demonstrate the power of conceptions of childhood and highlights the similarities between the two superpowers’ marshaling of the child for political strategies. Sara Fieldston shows how bringing children and women to the forefront changes our understanding of the relationship between foreign policy and the private sphere; child-rearing and emotive bonds were instrumental in forging modern democratic citizens modeled on US influence in foreign locales. My work builds on these textual, visual, and gendered analyses while using social and cultural history; it also moves the Cold War outside of a binary Soviet/ US paradigm to show its complexities in Mexico.41 It shows the demographic significance of Mexico City’s more dramatic child population explosion and the difficulties inherent in the implementation of child-centered policies in a democratizing, developing country. It also seeks a closer balance between the intersection of discourse and lived reality as it challenges the dominant paradigm of what constitutes a modern childhood. Modernity wrought a  complex, conflicted version of childhood during the postrevolutionary decades and Cold War, and children experienced it very unevenly in the nation’s capital. Popular culture, various government and religious institutions, and business entities promoted consumerism, leisure, and a protected childhood for all. In his study of the US business culture in Mexico, Julio Moreno argued that Mexican advertising images “reconstructed Mexican national identity” in the 1940s and that they “suggested that Mexicans could experience individual freedom, abundance, happiness, excitement, and self-realization through the consumption of products.”42 Middle-class and elite

Introduction

13

city dwellers surely bought and enjoyed consumer goods, but Mexican national identity could not be remade entirely through advertisements and consumer behavior. Moreover, by the end of the 1960s, social inequality had increased. While the trappings of modernity appeared throughout the capital around the turn of the century, these were uneven and inconsistent; by the mid-twentieth century the limitations and failures of modernity were evident. Modernity is a tricky concept to define; yet its prevalence in contemporary discourse and its usefulness as an explanatory and theoretical tool make that endeavor important. As historian Ageeth Sluis puts it when speaking of modernity in Mexico City circa 1900–40, conceptually “modernity appears quite intangible and, as an always moving target and ideal, never quite complete . . . [nevertheless] we recognize modernity by the markers that render it visible.”43 Some hallmarks of modernity included industrialization, urbanization, modernization of the infrastructure and attention to hygiene, and a near reverence for science and technology. The construction of efficient, modern housing complexes like the massive Nonalco-Tlatelolco complex (1964) designed by famed architect Mario Pani provided urbanites with physical manifestations of modernity.44 Likewise, the construction of highways and other large-scale engineering projects impressed the city’s inhabitants and provided visible evidence of Mexico’s advanced status among industrialized nations. Technological innovations—everything from escalators, household appliances, automobiles and airplanes to radios, cinema, and televisions—were important characteristics of modernity; the promises of middle-class lifestyle and consumerism that accompanied these technological wonders also determined to what extent a nation had achieved or aspired to modernity. Leisure activities like going to the cinema and watching television constituted modern ways of behavior that were reinforced by other consumer behaviors. That Mexico City experienced many of these developments at the same time that its child population exploded made the relationship between a proper or ideal childhood and modernity all the more visible. Beginning in the early twentieth century and accelerating in the Cold War era, popular culture was transmitted via mass media, and the circulation of universal symbols and ideals not bound by the nation-state appeared with increasing frequency. Consumer products like the white presliced bread launched by Pan Bimbo and the company’s bevy of other mass-produced sweet pastry-like products were specifically marketed to the exploding child population in the 1940s and 1950s; cartoon animals like bears, ducks, and penguins donned the packages of such products and “gradually became indelible elements of children’s imaginary.”45 The name of the Mexican company’s bread—Bimbo—a mix of the English words

14

Childhood and Modernity in Cold War Mexico City

Bingo and Bambi (from the 1942 Walt Disney film) represented an important consequence of modernity.46 Modernity also signaled the absence of certain phenomenon as well, especially child labor and child poverty. Yet, as we shall see, child labor and poverty persisted and some children failed to experience anything resembling that idealized version of childhood that modernity recommended. Examining modernity through the lens of childhood provides a unique perspective into postrevolutionary and Cold War Mexico City.

On methodology This book postulates that the distance between discourse and lived reality was not as distinct as one might think, at least for a sizable portion of the child population. Heightened concern over the state of children in capital—and in the nation—as it appeared in the press provides evidence of anxieties about their present condition and the potential danger Mexico faced in coming decades if children were not given the proper attention they needed. The existence of continual popular discourse nevertheless means that the concern was real and indicative of some children’s lived experiences. Discussions of childhood in peril in the press coincide with a variety of other types of historical sources to corroborate the veracity of such claims. Childhood and Modernity in Cold War Mexico City asks: what conditions did children face in Mexico City during the postrevolutionary decades and the Cold War era, and what hardships did they endure? Why did they face hardship, and had the situation improved, declined, or remained the same after the revolution? What efforts were made to improve children’s lives and by whom? As a work of social and cultural history, the book looks at the intersection of discourse and lived reality, as close as the archives allow us to get. Relying on a wide variety of newspapers, magazines, oral history interviews, census materials, first hand accounts of the city, and various cultural productions like film and radio programs, the following account paints a picture of not one single childhood in Mexico City but many childhoods, some of them seemingly devoid of the fundamental markers of the “modern” childhood experience. Oral history carries with it the potential pitfalls of memory and interviewee expectations about what the scholar may deem important or worthy of recollection. Moreover, it is “clear that we do not store judgment-free snapshots of our past experiences but rather hold on to the meaning, sense, and emotions these experiences provided us.”47 But it is precisely these meanings and emotions that make these recollections so poignant and valuable to the researcher. The

Introduction

15

exuberance and the sense of autonomy in age-specific outings like cinema going on the one hand, and the hardships of child labor on the other, represent the hard-to-find emotive gems that historians cherish. Government institutions and the Catholic Church expended tremendous energy, time, and money developing programs and curricula for the nation’s youngest inhabitants. Therefore, official documentation from the state, largely through the SEP, and from the church forms an important component of this analysis. Nevertheless, part of the methodology of the project is to use nontraditional sources like comic-bookstyle popular and religious publications for children. The importance of mass media and culture in shaping identity and as reflective of societal ideas in the historical era under consideration makes their inclusion crucial to this book. Secular and religious educational programs combined with mass consumerism and popular culture did not prevent children (and parents) from making their own choices; lessons learned at school, at church, at the movies, etc., were all subject to children’s own interpretations and adaptations. This form of children’s agency as historical actors does not diminish their everyday agency in making important decisions, though they may not necessarily be construed as “positive” types of agency. Countless impoverished boys and girls decided, out of privation and desperation, where to sleep on a city street, where to obtain food or shelter, and even with whom they should interact or avoid. Their choices framed within the limitations configured by socioeconomic status nevertheless gave them some semblance of power.48 Many historians have engaged with Michel Foucault’s notion of “technologies of power” and have conceived of state power as oppressive if not practically all encompassing. Government censorship of print media, film, and television as well as the collusion between government and private enterprise in the development of each provide easy examples of this phenomenon. Additionally, the parade of children, all in formation, through the central plaza or streets of Mexico City demonstrates how children’s bodies were subject to state power. On the other hand, many have taken James Scott’s Weapons of the Weak to such an extreme that agency materializes at every turn. The appeal of Scott’s idea in studying childhood is clear: it emphasizes the ability of individuals to exert control within nested systems of dependency or institutions of power like the state and, on a smaller but perhaps at times more forceful level, the family. Yet, the principal disadvantage with this approach is that it overemphasizes the ability of individuals to escape structural inequalities. While children in postrevolutionary Mexico City certainly exercised agency and exerted control over their lives, they did so only within the confines of structural inequality and

16

Childhood and Modernity in Cold War Mexico City

their precarious position as dependent minors. That is, children faced authority on multiple levels as parents, government officials, and other adults in the teeming metropolis scrutinized their behavior.

Organization of the book The book is organized thematically. Chapter 1 examines the capital city in an era that witnessed the demographic explosion of the child population due to declining infant mortality and steady birth rates coupled with the rural-to-urban migration that characterized the postrevolutionary and Cold War decades. The explosion of Mexico City’s child population meant that the number of children aged fourteen years and under went from 403,937 in 1930 (32.9 percent of the total population) to 2,850,644 in 1970 (41.5 percent of the total population), dwarfing child populations in cities like New York, for example, in the same time period. Using census data, oral history, and memoir accounts of childhood experiences, this chapter demonstrates how children were physically mobile and argues that the city worked as a classroom for many children, shaping their early social and political views. Far from living sheltered lives, most children were mobile and traversed the city for leisure, work, and other day-to-day activities. Despite official prohibitions on child labor, children continued to work for wages. While child labor can certainly be viewed as exploitative from the perspective of an idealized, protected childhood, this chapter shows children’s agency in the same process. Child labor conflicted with notions of how children should be treated in a modern, democratic nation, but for children stuck in the throes of rapid change being economically active was often a means of survival for the family economy in the short term. In the long term, the failure of Mexico’s revolution to adequately reduce social stratification in the capital city made it a laboratory for political dissent. The state attempted to deal with the burgeoning urban child population in the postrevolutionary era through changes to its educational project, which is the subject of Chapter 2. By the early 1940s, socialist education had dissolved and the state project in the subsequent decades reflected the needs of industrial capitalism. Through an examination of the kindergarten movement, we see that the government targeted younger children than it had previously and attempted to intervene in parent-child relationships. The SEP envisioned the jardines as a way to transform not only the youngest members of society but also the neighborhoods in which they lived and their parents as well, as they sent

Introduction

17

“happiness brigades” out to the poorest areas so that children not yet enrolled in kindergartens might take part in kindergarten activities. The kindergarten movement’s focus on childhood development, including age-specific play and happiness as a fundamental aspect of a modern childhood, contributed to the redefinition of childhood during this era. The state focused on mothers and relied on female teachers and administrators to carry out its project. Transnational influences and comparative measures of modernity crept into the curriculum and the SEP sought to present Mexico as a modern, democratic nation both to Mexicans and to foreigners. Cross-cultural exchanges with children in other countries and the celebration of the United Nations in city classrooms connected students to children and countries other than their own. School officials traveled internationally to represent Mexico and learn about other educational systems, offering a measurement of modernity by comparatively discussing educational innovations. By the late 1940s, the SEP openly acknowledged the problem the growing child population had caused in the capital: the lack of school facilities for primary school education. In order to deal with this problem, the state called on the private sector to help address the lack of facilities and aid in raising funds and actual construction of new schools. In 1947, the SEP reported concern about “the momentous problem of the excess school population in the Federal District, with deficient educational possibilities.”49 The press played no small part in this effort and they publicized the campaign and covered the role of wealthy businessmen and the occasional celebrity who contributed to the new-school construction campaign. By mid-1959, the SEP announced it would produce free, obligatory, standardized textbooks for primary school students in an effort to improve learning and reduce the cost parents endured, especially in private schools. Over the next few years, parents objected to the program, arguing that the SEP was reducing their right to choose what type of education their children received. Parents fought increased incursions into the parent-child relationship and the growing power of the state. This occurrence also speaks to the increased power of the Catholic Church by the 1950s, a theme that is addressed more fully in Chapter 4. Relying mostly on internal documentation and the annual reports of the SEP and, to a lesser extent, on press coverage, especially for the new school campaign and textbook controversy, we see the state reacting to the demographic explosion in a haphazard and largely inadequate way. Nevertheless, the state molded expectations about an ideal childhood. In the post-1940 period, the SEP turned to the demographically, economically and politically important child population in the capital city from its earlier focus on the countryside and promoted gender-specific activities, especially for

18

Childhood and Modernity in Cold War Mexico City

young children in kindergarten, encouraging the male breadwinner ideology of industrial capitalism. Beginning in the 1930s, a distinct children’s culture developed, separate from the adult audience–oriented popular culture that had proliferated in the capital city. This new, child-centered form of popular culture encouraged children to identify with their peers and instructed the city’s adults to recognize the developmental stages as separate from the adult world. This is the subject of Chapter 3. In the 1940s and 1950s, after the socialist reforms of the 1930s that had promoted a more self-contained nationalist vision waned, the influx of foreign influences in Mexico City contributed to children’s worldviews as both Mexican and part of a larger global order. Children consumed images and listened to song lyrics that promoted their right to play and enjoy the stage of childhood as a right inherent to children living in a modern nation. Beginning his broadcast in 1934, Francisco Gablindo Soler brought to life his signature character, Cri-Crí, a singing, violin-playing cricket. His weekly radio programs designed specifically for children told stories of adventure and play and taught them lessons about politics and social life. Inherent in his songs and stories were discussions of gender norms and racial ideologies, reflecting contemporary adult notions of what was important for children to learn. The weekly radio broadcast was accessible to most children in the Federal District as they could listen on neighbors’ radio sets even if their parents were not privileged enough own the device. The SEP took advantage of Cri-Crí’s popularity and used many of his songs in school, especially in the kindergartens of the city. Gablindo Soler’s program was aired until 1961. Other forms of children’s entertainment existed alongside this important radio program. For example, Walt Disney received support from the Mexican government in the effort to promote good relations with the country’s neighbors to the north. Even before the Second World War had ended, Disney had toured Latin America, including Mexico, in order to create his Good Neighbor–policy animated films. Films like Saludos Amigos and The Three Caballeros (Hello Friends and The Three Gentlemen) placed Mexican and other Latin American characters in settings that promoted pan-American hemispheric unity. At the same time, mainstream cultural productions aimed at a wider audience reflected societal concerns about and expectations of children and youth. Critically acclaimed films like Luis Buñuel’s Los olvidados (translated into English as both The Young and the Damned and The Forgotten; 1950) depicted childhood in peril as the city corrupted boys, leading many astray and to a life of crime. Other films like Nostoros los pobres (We the Poor; 1947) and Una familia de tantas (A Family among Many; 1948) portrayed changing family

Introduction

19

dynamics in the urban capital, the first sentimentalizing poverty and the latter highlighting the sociocultural transformations experienced during this era, especially the tensions between tradition and modernity. By the late 1950s, Los pequeños gigantes (The Tiny Giants; 1958) portrayed the triumph of the reallife Mexican team that won 1957 Little League World Series against their much bigger and better-equipped US opponents; it situated children at the center of optimistic stories of nationalist pride and symbolic of hope for the future. State censors allowed some critique of socioeconomic conditions in Cold War Mexico but forced filmmakers to edit the more controversial aspects of that film that depicted the boys as living in poverty. Catholic lay organizations included younger children in their postrevolutionary projects, empowering them to become agents of change in their families, neighborhoods, and across the globe, at least in theory. How and why this process unfolded is examined in Chapter 4. Lay organizations dedicated to especially middle-class and elite children promoted a Catholic vision that was at once distinctly Mexican but also universal in its spiritual messages. In addition to traditional catechism classes and parochial schooling, the church adapted its strategies to complement and compete with secular forms of entertainment and mass media for children. Nevertheless, the church sought to counter messages and ideologies, especially from the United States, which it considered threatening to Mexico’s Catholic traditions. After the major church-state conflict of the late 1920s was resolved and militant Catholics brought more under the control of the hierarchy, the church increased its power, especially through lay organizations founded by women and dedicated to children. The Acción Católica Mexicana (ACM: Mexican Catholic Action) women’s lay organization Unidad Femenina Católica Mexicana (UFCM) began publishing Pequeña magazine for girls in 1935 and Piloto for boys in 1940. Very clear gender distinctions materialized in the prescriptive literature produced by the UFCM; women in these literature advocated and replicated the same limited roles that Mexican women actually were relegated to in the church and in society. The UFCM targeted girls for their campaign, not only emphasizing especially girls’ innocence and virginity but also educating them in ways of proper etiquette and behavior in a secularizing, modern Mexico. The prescriptive literature for both boys and girls included ideas of racialized hierarchies and social-class distinctions that characterized Cold War Catholic ideology across the globe. Political developments figured regularly in the magazines devoted to child readers, and missionary reports encouraged Mexican children to position themselves in relation to other developed countries rather than seek solidarity with other locations in the global south.

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Childhood and Modernity in Cold War Mexico City

Chapter 5 examines idealized images of childhood and discussions of children in peril that proliferated in magazines and newspapers in the years following the institutionalization of Mexico’s revolution. On the one end of the spectrum, in advertisements and society pages, children were depicted in happy, age-specific activities like birthday parties, holiday gatherings, and religious celebrations like first communions; all these images promoted a middle-class consumerism tied to the concept of a modern childhood. On the other end of the spectrum, editorials and other news articles lamented the problem of children living and working in poverty on Mexico’s streets. Popular discourse about childhood in print media reflected concerns about Mexico City’s rapidly changing environment and contributed to a growing body of voices that criticized the failures of the revolution. While the state possessed a considerable degree of power in the Cold War era, including the surveillance and subsidizing of print media, representations of child poverty allowed journalists and photographers to safely and subtly critique the ruling party. Important collections of photojournalists, namely, Enrique Díaz, Héctor García, Nacho López, and the Hermanos Mayo, among others, provided powerful images that showed childhood in Mexico City in all its complexity, revealing the multiplicity of childhoods in the modern metropolis. In both the written word and through imagery, contributors to print media highlighted child labor, children living in poverty, and the social disparity that persisted in Mexico’s capital despite the much-touted reforms in the name, if not in the spirit, of the revolution. At the same time, certain positive developments celebrated the progress of Mexican modernity in its quest to redefine childhood for all children in terms of protection, education, and agespecific play. Despite critiques about the failure of the ruling party to bring about a dramatically different social structure, images and discourses of both idealized childhood and children in distress contributed to a more inclusive idea of what childhood should constitute, even if only in theory. These images and discourses of childhood aided middle-class and elite readers to position themselves in a social hierarchy by comparing and contrasting what type of childhood they were able to provide to their own children, or by how far they had changed their position in society since the time of their own childhoods. The chapter ends with a brief discussion of print media coverage after the release of American anthropologist Oscar Lewis’s Los hijos de Sánchez in 1964. Consider the cover image of this book, a photograph taken by Lewis during his extensive field work in the 1950s at the Casa Blanca vecindad in Mexico City. Lewis, a controversial individual in Cold War Mexico City after the publication of Los hijos de Sánchez, later became a target of scholarly debate regarding his

Introduction

21

“culture of poverty” thesis that many saw as an essentializing of the poor. Despite these controversies, his large body of work has provided researchers with a tremendous amount of archival data about not only interpersonal relationships and family life, but also material conditions of daily urban life in the capital during this time.50 The perspective that Lewis, not a professional photographer but an anthropologist by training, uses informs the message the photograph gives of children in Cold War Mexico. The children are adequately clothed and wear shoes, and apart from the girl with her arms crossed and a serious look on her face on the far left, the children are visibly smiling at the photographer above. This visual image contrasts starkly with the mental image of childhood in the capital city conjured by the discursive description of street children in the 1966 exposé decrying the “army of poor children” with which the introduction begins. These children in the cover photo, certainly not homeless or abandoned though perhaps lacking in some of the components of which middle-class and elite city dwellers considered a modern childhood, look mostly content. Childhood and Modernity in Cold War Mexico invites the reader to consider both these vantage points as valid and representive of realities—among a range of realities—of modern childhood in the capital city.

1

Children Encounter the City: Mobility, Leisure, and Work through the Eyes of its Youngest Inhabitants

Between 1930 and 1970, the child population in the Federal District exploded as infant mortality rates dropped and rural migration to the city continued. The child population, the largest demographic group in the city, affected the city’s development and the city, conversely, influenced the boys and girls growing up in its environs. Children’s movement throughout the city illuminates their multileveled sense of belonging and place, as they moved between homes, schools, neighborhoods, and within the city more generally. Children’s mobility within the rapidly changing landscape of an industrializing city and their presence and interaction with the urban environment informed their understanding of the class, gender, and racial hierarchies of Mexican society. Thus, the city itself was an influential force in the social and political formation of those children raised during these critical decades leading up to the 1968 student movement. The city shaped the lives of its children, and their collective presence in Mexico City reminded the adult population of the importance of childhood as a developmental stage and its protection as vital to the future of the nation. The transformation of Mexico City during the prosperous post-1940 decades provided capital dwellers with certain shared frames of reference and a sociocultural identity that was simultaneously Mexican—with Mexico City as emblematic of the nation—and, at times, transnational. For all the “tradition” that surrounded the vestiges of pre-conquest structures, colonial churches, and government buildings dating as far back as the Spanish conquistadors, Mexico in the middle of the twentieth century also housed vast movie palaces, department stores, and skyscrapers. Yet a city is much more than its physical environment. For sociologists Robert E. Park and Ernest W. Burgess, the city is

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Childhood and Modernity in Cold War Mexico City

“a state of mind” as well as “a body of customs and traditions, and of organized attitudes and sentiments that inhere in these customs and are transmitted with this tradition.” They argue that “the city is not, in other words, merely a physical mechanism and an artificial construction. It is involved in the vital processes of the people who compose it; it is a product of nature, and particularly of human nature.”1 To uncover the intricacies of this human interaction, oral histories and published memoirs point to the tremendous sense of importance placed on the city as an actor in children’s everyday lives. Oral history interviewees specifically commented on the transformation of the city during this era, and some lamented the more recent changes in the city as destructive to its previous splendor.2 Children’s mobility constituted an integral part of their childhood experience and made them distinct from their rural counterparts. Boys and girls in Mexico City learned to place themselves within the context of a Mexican national identity that was decidedly urban and cosmopolitan. Children spent their days and evenings in a variety of settings and with people from all walks of life; childhood was replete with daily adventures and the dramas, big and small alike, of city life. Twentieth-century Mexico City has fascinated its inhabitants, visitors, and scholars who have produced copious amounts of writing on the urban wonder, its uniqueness leading one historian, in his collection of essays on the city, to ask: “How could a place be an alive historical actor?”3 Its development during the twentieth century was situated within a complex nexus of state power at the local and national levels; political and economic developments shaped the city’s infrastructure and physical reality.4 Such a framework sees the city as an entity to be controlled, manipulated, and managed by the state and fails to address the interaction of the individual with the urban milieu; in the words of historian Mauricio Tenorio-Trillo, “passive actors cities are not.”5 The city also functioned as a classroom and educator, especially for the malleable child population. Thus, age as a category of analysis—much like gender, class, and race—emerges as a tool to better understand the postrevolutionary and Cold War eras in Mexico City. Indeed, illuminating the experiences of children gives us a more nuanced and complete vision of the city during the transformative decades following the institutionalization of the Mexican Revolution. Historians turning their attention to the city have analyzed it through various lenses but not from the perspective of its children. In the first three decades of the twentieth century, government officials sought to control crime and enact punishment on offenders upsetting state power and order. Yet the urban poor negotiated their environment, collaborated with fellow city dwellers, and resisted state power when possible. Ageeth Sluis’s work on the “deco body” reveals

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25

a symbiotic relationship between the development of the city and women’s bodies in the 1920s and 1930s to demonstrate how the urban milieu affected and was affected by the physical. The city was imagined by various artists and intellectuals as they constructed a vision of what one historian has termed the mythical “Brown Atlantis” from the 1920s to the 1940s.6 Art historian Luis Castañeda argues that design and architecture leading up to the 1968 Olympics functioned as a means of social control but also makes it clear that resistance to these changes materialized.7 But historians have not considered how children experienced this rapidly changing urban environment and how it shaped their intellectual, political, and personal development in this era. While children experienced different versions of the city based on social class and gender, all children enjoyed some level of mobility throughout the city and, therefore, possessed shared frames of reference, even if the frequency of certain locations varied widely. On the one end of the spectrum, some boys and girls, undoubtedly, lived more restricted and class-specific existences. Gender certainly affected children’s mobility and the concomitant dangers associated with moving throughout the city. Unaccompanied girls were subject to additional threats to their bodies and morality, according to many parents and other concerned citizens. Even privileged children attended public events and visited the city’s landmarks where they would have encountered, however casually, an array of individuals of all ages and socioeconomic backgrounds. On the other end of the spectrum, laboring boys and girls experienced less protection from the city’s underbelly and participated in city life more or less unfettered. Children’s mobility and encounters with the urban milieu largely took the shape of activities that can be classified as follows: work, school, leisure, and the activities of day-to-day life (i.e., shopping, attending church, etc.). Each of these activities demonstrates children’s agency as historical actors and points to the influence of the city in their development. Within the broader framework of urban life, poverty and child labor existed side by side with other more protected versions of childhood experiences: taken together, they reveal the complexity of class stratification in post-1940 Mexico City. Nevertheless, to concentrate solely on the sufferings and material deprivation of the poorest children would obscure the wide variety of the experiences of children and at its most extreme throw into question the very existence of childhood itself in this setting. The multiplicity of childhoods reveals that a single definition is not applicable to Mexico City and certainly not one conceived by twentieth-century US or Western European perspectives. At the same time, the coexistence of many childhoods and the mobility of children

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Childhood and Modernity in Cold War Mexico City

in the city effectively politicized certain segments of the population. In order to get a better sense of the world that these children lived in, a brief discussion of the broader social, political, and economic forces of the period is instructive.

The Federal District: City of children Historically, Mexico City has been an important economic and political seat of power since before the Spaniards arrived in the bustling city of Tenochtitlán during the age of conquest in the early sixteenth century. In colonial times, Mexico City was the premier viceregal capital in Spanish America and at the turn of the nineteenth century, the largest urban capital in the Americas.8 By the late nineteenth century, officials began transforming Mexico City into a shining example of the nation’s progress, constructing wide boulevards and opulent monuments that were reminiscent of Paris.9 While the city always has played an important role in politics, changes in demographic and economic structures of the country during the twentieth century catapulted Mexico City into a new place of prominence. As one might expect, the Mexican state has defined and governed the urban area in a number of ways.10 In 1911, Francisco I. Madero reinstituted the municipality as the main form of governance in the city, giving back the local control that had been denied during the Porfiriato (the time period when dictator Porfirio Díaz ruled Mexico; 1876–1910).11 By 1928, political infighting in the municipal government severely hindered the functioning of the city and the municipality was abolished.12 At this point in time, the federal government reclaimed jurisdiction over the Federal District, and the President himself appointed the city’s Mayor until 1988. By the early 1940s, the course of Mexican politics and the nation’s economy had taken a drastic turn to the right from the socialist projects of the 1930s.13 Presidents Ávila Camacho (1940–46) and Miguel Alemán (1946–52) concentrated on developing the nation’s economy through rapid industrialization, with Mexico City at the political and economic forefront of power. Ávila Camacho articulated his vision of the revolution’s transformation in this era: The Mexican Revolution has been a social movement, guided by historical justice, which has been able to satisfy, one by one, all essential popular demands. . . . Each new era demands a renovation of ideals. The clamor of the Republic demands now the material and spiritual consolidation of our achievements, by means of a powerful and prosperous economy.14

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Miguel Alemán took this directive even further in embracing industrial capitalism; many consider his presidency to be the most transformative of the twentieth century.15 Along with this ideological shift in politics came a major redistribution of the population as peasants from the countryside inundated the nation’s capital in search of employment, hoping to join the growing ranks of industrial workers. The changing economic and political relationship with the United States represents yet another dramatic development of the post1940 period. After Mexico got involved in the Second World War, the people of Mexico City experienced an increase in political, economic, and cultural interactions with a country long considered to be the ultimate enemy.16 The Mexico City an observer might encounter in the 1930s was unimaginably distinct from the sights, sounds, and smells of the current megalopolis once described as a “monstrous inflated head, crushing the frail body that holds it up.”17 The increase in the number of people residing in the capital marked one of the most striking changes of the period. In 1940, the estimated population for Mexico City was about 1.8 to 1.9 million people, a number that skyrocketed to approximately 9 million by 1970.18 Children represented an increasingly larger percentage of the city’s total population, and their presence shaped the urban environment. The capital, teeming with boys and girls, became a space that communicated the importance of children’s role in the future of the nation. As designated in census breakdowns between 1930 and 1970, Mexico City refers to the twelve quarters (Cuarteles I–XII) around the historic city center (Constitution Plaza, the National Palace, and the Metropolitan Cathedral). Mexico City lies within the larger entity of the Federal District, which contains an additional twelve delegations: Azcapotzalco, Coyoacán, Cuajimalpa, Gustavo A. Madero, Iztacalco, Ixtapalapa, La Magdalena Contreras, Milpa Alta, Alvaro Obregón, Tlahuac, Tlalpam(n), and Xochimilco.19 Together, the Federal District contains twenty-four subdivided geographic areas (twelve from Mexico City proper and twelve delegations in the Federal District).20 In terms of the sheer increase in the number of city dwellers, one figure illuminates the rapidity of population growth. The number of areas (24 total) within the city that boasted more than 100,000 residents leaped from five in 1930 to nine (1940) to fourteen (1950) to eighteen (1960), until nineteen out of the twenty-four areas of the Federal District contained over 100,000 residents in 1970. Indeed, by 1960 both Cuartel I and delegación Gustavo A. Madero had more than 500,000 people residing in each district. In 1970, delegación Gustavo A. Madero contained 1,186,107 individuals and Cuartel I, Azcapotazalco, and Ixtapalapa each contained over 500,000 residents. Between 1940 and 1960, about

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1.8 million rural migrants arrived in Mexico City, mostly settling in the east and the southern parts of the city. Rural migration continued and new arrivals often settled in the Gustavo A. Madero, Iztacalco, Ixtapalapa in the east and in Alvaro Obregón and Coyoacán in the south of the city.21 Increasingly, children’s collective presence in the city could be felt throughout the post-1940 era as the total number of children skyrocketed and children’s percentage of the total population steadily climbed.22 Government officials frequently commented on the explosive population growth. In July 1966, Leticia Acevedo Millán, the director of the Asistencia Social de la Secretaría de Salubridad y Asistencia, explained that while each day the government worked on building schools and other centers that offered assistance to children, the efforts were insufficient because the demographic explosion exceeded all calculations.23 While the country suffered a tremendous population loss of more than one million due to death and migration during and after the Mexican Revolution, the population resurgence in the five decades thereafter was remarkable. By the mid-1960s, the problem was apparent: the city population had simply swelled too quickly and the child population, aged fourteen years and under, represented the largest segment. The following summary of the Federal District’s child population is striking: Year 1930 1940 1950 1960 1970

Total number of children 403,937 605,569 1,096,101 1,996,950 2,850,644

Children as percentage of population 32.9 34.5 35.9 41.0 41.5

By 1970, the Federal District was indeed a city of children. By way of comparison and to put the presence of children in Mexico City in perspective, a brief look at New York City in the same period is instructive. For New York, the 1,688,184 children in 1930 were much greater in number than the 403, 937 found in Mexico City, but the percentage was much lower, 24.4 percent for New York and 32.9 percent for Mexico City. In 1940, the largest US urban child population actually dropped, as did its percentage of the population when less than one-fifth of the population was aged fourteen years or under. Even in 1950, children constituted only 20.8 percent of the population in New York City. The number grew in 1960 to 23.9 percent and fell only slightly in 1970 to 23.7 percent. By 1970, the child population of Mexico’s capital dwarfed that of New York City: 2,850,644 compared to 1,871,745.24 The child population in the entire

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United States in 1950 stood at 1.4 million and would increase dramatically over the next decade.25 Little wonder that Mexico City’s growth befuddled national and municipal officials.

Symbols of modernity and signs of discontent During the postrevolutionary and Cold War decades, symbols of modernity appeared with increasing frequency, and the physical growth of the city was astonishing. For the most part, during this era, the city expanded outward rather than upward. Because the city is built on top of a lake, very tall buildings represented the ultimate architectural and construction challenge. The addition of multistoried buildings and manufacturing plants changed Mexico City from a tranquil place full of wide boulevards into an industrializing, “modern” city. In 1964, the massive housing complex Nonalco-Tlatelolco designed by Mario Pani was unveiled at the Plaza of the Three Cultures and showed city dwellers the importance of modern, efficient housing for workers alongside ancient ruins of the Templo Mayor of Tlatelolco and the colonial building of the Church of Santiago de Tlatelolco.26 Most children growing up in the era traveled on foot or by bus or tram but the changes were evident throughout the period. Moreover, the press reported frequently and with much fanfare on the opening of important symbols of modernity and state power in the capital. When the National Museum of Anthropology opened in 1964, a plethora of state officials including President López Mateos, Secretary of Education Jaime Torres Bodet, and the appointed “Mayor” or regent Ernesto P. Uruchurtu posed for pictures with lead architect Pedro Rámirez Vázquez (1919–2013), also the head of the 1968 Olympic committee. Events like the opening of the museum demonstrated the relationship between state power and cultural architects of modernity and its importance in educating the masses.27 Massive construction projects changed the shape of the growing city and echoed increasing social disparities both symbolically and literally. The construction of Presidente Juárez housing project (1952) designed by Mario Pani was made possible by the 1949 demolition of the National Stadium, a monument to revolutionary change and national identity that was commissioned in 1924 by José Vasconcelos, the then Secretary of Education.28 The completion of the circumferential highway the Anillo Periférico in 1964 increased vehicular transportation in the city at the same time it “served to segregate its urban fabric, facilitating the urban flight of the city’s upper-income residents, who traveled by

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car, away from the poorer areas of Mexico City’s edges, including those in the city’s southernmost limits.”29 The Aztec Stadium, the largest stadium ever built in Mexico during its time, was inaugurated in May 1966 and became one of the main venues for the Olympic Games. The stadium, located at the intersection of la Calzada de Tlapan and the Anillo Periférico, expanded the city’s boundaries in the southeastern part of the city, which had been predominantly rural. Photographic evidence shows children riding their bicycles in the empty parking lot shortly after its completion, circling the magnificent structure. Besides impressing adventurous children, the construction site prompted protests in 1965 and 1966 by small landowners who lost ejidos in the process. Despite the size and importance of the Aztec Stadium, the stadium at Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM: National Autonomous University of Mexico) constructed in 1953 and site of the opening and closing ceremonies bore “the greatest symbolic burden brought along by the Olympics” as the university was one of the most important locations for political protest in the months leading up to the games.30 By the late 1960s, children were living in a city that not only boasted the tallest structure in Latin America, La Torre Latinoamericana, but also witnessed the construction of a massive subway system, El Metro (the Metro; 1967–70).31 In early 1968, it appeared that Mexico City’s hosting of the 1968 Olympic Games would be the shining example of the state’s modernization project. When the Metro started operations in 1969, “the first major public work unveiled” after the protests and massacre it represented the contradictions of modernity as it featured pre-Hispanic motifs and symbols for the illiterate to navigate the subway.32 US-born Lance Wyman (b. 1937) designed both the signature logo for the 1968 Olympic Games and signs for the first three Metro lines; the imagery responded to “the challenge to embody Mexican cultural specificity while remaining in tune with universalizing and internationally palatable modernist trends.”33 Children were aware of their environment and lived in the midst of social and political developments in which they participated.34 In 1938 when President Lázaro Cárdenas (1934–40) nationalized the oil industry, children turned out to pledge their support, carrying placards declaring, “Our cooperation to pay the oil debt: Tuesday, no milk; Thursday, no meat; Saturday, no fruit; Sunday, no bread.”35 Whether or not children actually sacrificed basic foodstuffs to help pay the national debt is beside the point. Children’s participation in political manifestations provided them with a framework for understanding the relationship between the state and civil society. City life shaped the children

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who came of age during this pivotal period of rapid industrialization, continued institutionalization of the revolutionary party, and mass participation in politics in Mexican history. The political and social dramas that transpired during the postrevolutionary and Cold War eras permeated the imaginations of boys and girls in the city. Manifestations of economic progress coexisted with visible clashes between industrial capitalists and the state on the one hand, and the working class on the other. Boys and girls witnessed the subtle scenes and dramatic spectacles of class politics during their daily movement through the city. These relations of power could take on monumental proportions—like that of striking railroad workers in 1959—as well as the more mundane events occurring in everyday life. For instance, the recollections of Daniel Esparza Lepe, a workingclass engineering student at the IPN, born in the early 1940s, reveal a great deal about economic disparities and the impact that they had on personal developments: I’m from a peasant family in the country. I’m twenty-five years old and I’ve seen friends my age die the same way they were born: fucked by the system. My family moved to the Federal District because they were starving to death. At first we stayed with some aunts of ours out near Atzapotzalco. My father was a bricklayer. When I was still in grade school, I began working in an oxygen bottling factory. . . . What I wanted most was to get ahead so my family wouldn’t have to suffer any more, to endure things I’ll never forget: the way they treated my mother in houses where she worked as a laundress and all that. There were places where instead of paying her money they’d say, “Here, take this food home with you”—and I could plainly see that it was table scraps. When you’re starving you have to put up with that, but it made me mad.

He had been discouraged since he started working at the factory at the age of twelve and explicitly cited the lack of workers’ rights and the “do-nothing, government-approved union” the Confederación de Trabajadores de México (CTM: Confederation of Mexican Workers) who only collected dues and allowed workers to be mistreated.36 Economic and political protests from a wide variety of vantage points occurred in Mexico City and different forms throughout the Cold War era. In January 1950, union leaders for taxi drivers staging a strike were attacked by the police; the union headquarters were raided and two people died. In June 1951, approximately 4000 youths protested and the government sent in the riot police, injuring 150 demonstrators. After a failed presidential bid

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in an election plagued by fraud, supporters of Miguel Henríquez Guzmán protested in the heart of the capital in 1952. As protestors clashed with police and federal troops, a bloody riot ensued in the historic Alameda Park.37 As Jaime Pensado has demonstrated, in the 1940s and 1950s “key authorities and intellectuals [came] to view politicized students as potential threats to national unity and economic progress.” At the same time, young working-class protestors from the IPN led a critique of the unevenness with which the “Mexican Miracle” arrived in the capital and “a new generation of intellectuals [emerged] whose academic essays, novels, and films would openly (or indirectly) question the PRI’s trajectory of repression and express a critical stance toward the outcome and legacy of the Mexican Revolution.”38 The 1956 strike of twenty-five thousand students from the IPN signaled the beginning of massive political activism by Mexico’s youth in the Cold War era. Seen as a real threat by the ruling party, “a concerted campaign of provocation and violence to discredit student protestors by various powerful individuals began to take shape.”39 The strike ended when President Ruiz Cortines called in two thousand soldiers and four hundred police officers; authorities arrested student protestors, some of them remained in prison for more than two years and the army occupied the IPN campus until the end of 1958.40 Also in 1956, primary school teachers in the capital demanded a raise and new union leadership under Othón Salazar and Encarnación Pérez; the devaluation of the peso just two years earlier had increased the cost of living. By 1958, a series of demonstrations and a citywide strike led to an increase in salaries; yet violence continued and Salazar and Pérez were arrested.41 As Robert Alegre has shown, railroad workers became increasingly politicized in the post–Second World War era as the ruling party attempted to control their unions, leading to massive strikes in 1958–9.42 Thus, multiple voices contested the inequalities prevalent during the economic “miracle” despite the ruling party’s attempts to suppress them. Clashes between striking workers and the police appeared not in isolation, but within a city that showcased a wide range of socioeconomic realities. As Diane Davis demonstrates, the class structure on the local level does not necessarily reflect the class system from a national perspective.43 That is, the class structure in Mexico City differed considerably from that in the countryside; the middle class constituted a much larger percentage in the capital than in rural areas. The appearance of wealth, as evidenced by consumer products in shop windows, fancy cars, and expensive clothing, added to the notion that Mexico City was an increasingly prosperous place. Children participated in

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this culture of consumerism either by experiencing it firsthand or aspiring to it, thus contributing to their identity as a generation.44 The Mexican government courted parents’ money and educated a new generation of Mexicans on the values of consumerism by sponsoring annual toy fairs in the city, beginning in 1943.45 By the early 1950s, the work of government officials, industrialists, and advertisers ensured that Cold War Mexican nationalism developed in tandem with and advocated consumerism. In 1947, Sears Roebuck opened in Mexico City to massive crowds and 100,000 Mexicans passed through its doors in the first three days.46 In this milieu, children of the post-1940 period learned to identify with a consumerist ideology and the middle-class values it encouraged. Not surprisingly, the infiltration of consumer products and cultural productions from the United States translated into a broader transnational identification with sociopolitical and class ideologies. Nevertheless, material conditions varied widely and many children were excluded from direct participation in this process even if they witnessed it on a daily basis. Poverty remained an obstacle for many in the post-1940 period but there was a sense that Mexico was on the path to becoming a modern, industrialized, capitalist nation. The appointment of Ernesto P. Uruchurtu as Mayor in 1952 signified a turning point in class politics in the Federal District. Uruchurtu had been Secretary-General of the PRI, just after it was renamed from its former incarnation as the Partido de la Revolución Mexicana (Party of the Mexican Revolution, or RRM) in 1946.47 Possessing a particularly harsh attitude toward squatters and the “invasion” of rural migrants, Uruchurtu ruthlessly cleared squatter settlements and forbade informal commercial activities in the city center. The Mayor feared losing his middle-class electoral base and tried to prevent the flight to the suburbs by upwardly mobile, middle-class residents. In effect, Uruchurtu pitted the urban poor against the middle class.48 He governed Mexico City for an unprecedented fourteen years (nearly three full terms) until the PRI ousted him in 1966 largely due to his clashing with President Díaz Ordaz over the Metro and protests over the demolition of squatter settlements.49 While children may not have been familiar with Uruchurtu or his specific policy changes, they were not depoliticized beings. One mother from the wealthy area of Lomas de Chapultepec explained to her young son: “He [Uruchurtu] did a lot for our city. He tore down the filthy old markets and built new ones and took the peddlers and the beggars off the streets. See how beautiful the city is now with the flowers he planted—and the fountains.”50 Children participated in or were privy to discussions of city politics and class hierarchies.

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Childhood and Modernity in Cold War Mexico City

Mobility, labor, and class stratification The importance of the urban milieu in children’s lives and their mobility within the city attest to the role of city as educator and demonstrate their collective effect on the greater population. Not all children enjoyed the same level of physical mobility across the city and a child’s mobility varied largely according to gender, class, and skin color—though this last variable is difficult to document. Moreover, movement can be defined in several ways and with varying levels of restrictions. Not only were there differences in the physical locations that boys and girls were able to occupy, but there were also differences in terms of the time of travel, the circumstances surrounding travel, the type of transportation, and the people with whom they explored the city. All these mitigating circumstances influenced the amount and nature of children’s contact with the urban environment. Additionally, some rather ingenious tactics could further limit certain effects of the city. For example, during Araceli’s three-hour (round trip) commute to a parochial school far from her home, an accompanying nun severely limited her ability to soak in the sights and sounds of the city from her bus window as she required the girls to recite the rosary for the duration of the trip.51 This same girl also reported that “her first nighttime outing” occurred on her fifteenth birthday, a very special occasion for Mexican girls, when she experienced festivities in the Zona Rosa in the company of relatives. Thus, adults, most often parents, had varying levels of control over children’s mobility and what they experienced while outside of the home and school. Nonetheless, the city remained a constant presence—although a continuously changing one—in the lives of the city’s youngest inhabitants. Capitalino children primarily identified themselves as residents of the city, they often had a sense of life in the countryside as well. Many children took excursions outside Mexico City and visited extended family members, usually the birthplace of a parent. This movement also provided a means of reinforcing their identity as capitalinos and defining themselves in relation to the rural “other.”52 The more fortunate went on vacation to places like Acapulco, for example, and the wealthiest children traveled internationally. Olivia Peralta, teacher and wife of literary and radical political heavyweight José Revueltas, took their children to Acapulco in December 1955. “This morning was beautiful, we swam a lot in Coleta [beach], the children climbed . . . and the fun never ended.”53 Extravagant holidays and even more modest vacation experiences differentiated better-off children from their poorer counterparts. Photographs of children with their siblings or parents provided tangible evidence of their ability to enjoy certain

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privileges of their class status and were used to reminisce about such experiences later. Such was the case with Mexican-born academic Ilan Stavans and his family who visited the resort area when he was a little boy.54 Movement in and out of the city could also take the form of proper migration especially when urban conditions were thought to be the cause of family problems. Roberto reported that as a young boy he, his mother, and his stepfather moved from the capital to Zacatecas in hope of alleviating the stepfather’s alcoholism. Unfortunately, the idea that the city—and all its opportunities for vice and debauchery—was largely to blame for the stepfather’s alcoholism proved completely unfounded. Once they moved to a farm in Zacatecas, Roberto quickly became solely responsible for the agricultural labor as his stepfather slid back into alcoholism and abandoned him and his mother.55 Catholicism, while at times restricting the lives of children, also afforded them substantial mobility throughout the city. Restrictions placed on girls’ middle- and upper-class mobility meant that visits to various historic churches provided a welcome excuse for excursions throughout the city. Georgina recalled visiting many different churches because her grandfather was particularly fond of certain churches. Georgina (b. 1954) reminisced, “With my grandfather I went out to visit the churches . . . he took me to Tlatelolco, he took me to the Cathedral [Metropolitan, in the Zócalo], he took me to Coyoacán, they were his favorite churches.” She dressed up for these occasions, donning gloves and a hat that made her look like “an old maid” (“yo salia muy mona”).56 Thus, as she made her way to Tlatelolco, the cathedral in the Zócalo, and other parts of the city, she also became a spectator in the grander drama of daily urban life. Children were therefore not isolated from Mexico City’s broader cultural milieu. While children traversed the city, they bore witness to the boys and girls living and working on the streets of Mexico City. The presence of child labor in the Federal District attests to the existence of a reality that was decidedly “anti-modern” and directly in conflict with the state’s socioeconomic project and its accompanying proclamations of modernity. While the Mexican Constitution proclaimed child labor illegal (under the age of twelve and with several restrictions for those sixteen and under), evidence of children laboring in the city abounds.57 Part II of Article 123 of the 1917 Mexican Constitution addressed labor regulations and placed the following restrictions on child labor: “Unhealthful or dangerous work is prohibited for women in general and for young persons under sixteen years of age. Industrial night work is also prohibited for these two classes and they may not work in commercial establishments after ten o’clock at night.” In part III, the constitution states: “Young persons over twelve

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and less than sixteen years of age shall have a maximum work day of six hours. The labor of children under twelve may not be the subject of a labor contract.”58 Despite the restrictions placed on child labor by the 1917 constitution, this labor code proved to be more of a revolutionary ideal than a lived reality. As historian Susana Sosenski has shown, in the early 1930s, some young people brought before the Juvenile Court were contributing anywhere from 27 to 80 percent of the family income.59 In the mid-twentieth century, while the expanding urban industrial sector created new jobs, the percentage of individuals working in the informal sector increased from 9.7 in 1950 to 14.5 in 1970, a change of 49.5 percent for the country as a whole. This period witnessed the beginning of the growth of the informal sector throughout Latin America, a trend that would intensify after 1970.60 In Mexico City, children often worked in the informal market, either to support themselves or to contribute to the family economy. Because of its prohibition, child labor is somewhat difficult to document. While quantifying the number of child laborers would be impossible, accounts from individuals who left memoirs, oral histories, and carefully mining newspapers and archival documents reveal the numerous laborers who were also children. Through her analysis of Juvenile Court cases, Ann Blum has convincingly argued that, for the period 1920–40, child labor continued despite its prohibition. One change that occurred was children, if they were pushed out of the formal economy due to age restrictions, simply entered the informal economy. “Most of the informal work available to boys put them on the streets selling newspapers, shining shoes, running errands, or carrying goods in the city’s many markets. Girls were most likely to find work as domestics.”61 Moreover, Blum argues that children’s participation in paid labor fit models of family reciprocity if not government officials’ ideas of modern childhood practices. Even with bans on child labor, government officials admitted that child labor represented a significant problem. A representative of the Juvenile Court, Eduardo Gutiérrez, commented on this problem and argued that while some children worked out of necessity, “in other cases, they are exploited by their own parents.”62 Officials repeatedly stated that educational and welfare efforts would not change the situation of children working rather than attending school without convincing their parents that children needed to be in school rather than earning an income.63 And children, some extremely young, worked in factories, bakeries, carrying water, hauling goods, and selling any variety of things out of economic necessity. For example, mid-twentieth century singer and songwriter sensation Salvador “Chava” Flores Rivera (1920–1987) worked in a factory with

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his mother, making neckties, when he was a child. He earned a few pesos a week for this work at the age of thirteen, in the early 1930s. He and his mother were left with little choice after his father passed away.64 Poverty forced many children to cobble together an income, and they proved remarkably resourceful in doing so when necessary. Manuel Sánchez, American anthropologist, recalled, “I liked to work when I was a boy . . . I remember how good I felt when my father hugged me, and said, ‘Now I have someone to help me.’ I was a shoemaker’s assistant in a workshop a few blocks from our house. I used to work until late at night; there were times when we worked all night long. I don’t think I was over nine years old then.” He continued, “My second job was making belts, then I sold lottery tickets in the street,” and also detailed working as a mason’s assistant and as the night watchman in a bakery.65 In the late 1940s and early 1950s, the previously mentioned Roberto worked at a variety of occupations. At the age of eight, he labored in a market, carrying baskets and, one year later, worked in a shirt factory, fastening buttons on shirts at night.66 While we cannot say to what degree Roberto’s work experience was typical, it nonetheless demonstrates how the government failed to enforce labor regulations. Indeed, the terms of his employment in the shirt factory violated both the age and night time restrictions articulated in the constitution. Children working in factories brought unwanted attention to industrialists disobeying the law and especially when government officials were asked to look into such instances by representatives of international economic partnerships or US embassy officials. In August 1943, a group of clubwomen from Chicago and New York expressed outrage regarding child labor they had witnessed during an organized tour of a Mexico City glass factory. According to these women and a subsequent follow-up visit by the US Embassy in Mexico City, children constituted roughly one-half of the small factory’s labor force. The commentary provided by the women and the embassy reveals the more insidious side of Mexico’s rapid industrialization during the Second World War. In this case, approximately fifteen children labored in the glass factory located at Calle Carretones #5 for 20 pesos a month. Mrs. Elizabeth Curtiss Cervantes, a citizen of the United States, purchased the majority of this factory’s production and about 20 percent of its products were exported to the United States and sold in department stores like Marshall Fields of Chicago and Lord and Taylor of New York. While the clubwomen characterized the situation as “slave labor,” the Counselor of the Embassy, Herbert S. Bursley maintained: “Prevailing conditions are not unduly onerous and it is believed that the children employed there are generally kindly treated.” Nevertheless, in his report to the US Secretary

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of State, he reported: “Working conditions are extremely poor and unsanitary and some of the boy apprentices were observed working barefooted, with the consequent attendant risk of being cut or burned from broken or liquid glass.” Indeed, several children appeared in photographs wearing huaraches and others were shoeless, creating a perilous working environment.67 The disparity between Bursley’s two comments is instructive. He expressed no real outrage because the children were “generally kindly treated,” indicating that child labor was common enough in Mexico City to be discussed in such terms. On the other hand, his description of the risk to children’s physical well-being reveals, at least on some level, that children should be protected from dangerous conditions. Children employed outside the home traveled within the city to places of employment and experienced a much broader range of encounters with the city on a daily basis than did nonlaboring children. Outside the structured space of the school, Mexico City became a full-time classroom for some boys and girls whose working lives began relatively early in life.68 In the late 1950s, the young women living in a vecindad located in colonia Morelos worked in several types of employment, including factory work and selling goods. Two of the girls worked selling goods at markets in Lagunilla and Tepito, both located due north of the Zócalo.69 These same girls considered some of their female coworkers to

Figure 1.1 Boy working in gas station, 1966, Hermanos Mayo collection, courtesy of the AGN.

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be dear friends. They exchanged gifts for birthdays, symbolically demonstrating their independence (from parents and family) and their participation in an agespecific world. Children, especially working children, participated in overlapping worlds replete with adult interaction, but they also formed bonds with other children and lived within that smaller social realm consisting only of children. In their assessment of children’s interactions, Iona and Peter Opie speculate as to why the child-to-child world is less explored: Possibly because it is more difficult to find out about, let alone understand, we largely ignore the child-to-child complex, scarcely realizing that however much children may need looking after they are also people going about their own business within their own society, and are fully capable of occupying themselves under the jurisdiction of their own code.70

Despite the fact that the child-to-child world is more difficult to uncover, it cannot be underestimated as a site of identity formation. The city facilitated this type of socializing outside of the extended family unit, especially for children from the lower levels of the social hierarchy.

Leisure and children’s communities For those children who could afford it, public leisure activities gave them time to interact with their urban environment and to build relationships with other children. Child-centered spaces, like playgrounds and parks, attested to the importance of the nation’s children and served as reminders of their place in the proclaimed economic progress of the nation. Children could be found in nearly every social setting—strolling with balloon in tow through the Alameda Park or Chapultepec Park with family members, attending church services, or visiting the market or movie theater.71 During his tenure as regent, Ernesto P. Uruchurtu turned his attention to the largest public space in Mexico City, Chapultepec Park, and increased its size and amenities dramatically. Between 1958 and 1964, laborers worked diligently to expand the size of the park by 400 acres at the cost of 150 million pesos. The newly expanded Chapultepec Park, the largest park in Latin America, delighted children with a zoo and an amusement park.72 Children often participated in leisure activities with their peers and enjoyed a level of autonomy and mischief when they ventured outside the supervision of adults. Alejandro (b. 1954), living in the historic center, attended the cinema

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frequently and in addition to the three theaters within the four blocks of his home, he also traversed the city to view films at the following theaters: Florida, Acapulco, Prado, and the Regis. One anecdote reveals the tremendous amount of physical mobility and relative autonomy that some children experienced. He recalled attending a children’s mass at San Sebastian on Sunday mornings before going to the cinema: I remember that we commissioned a friend so that while we were in mass, they went to the cinemas that were all around, so that they could see what was there, what was the matinee, and the matinee consisted of three movies for one peso, so you would go into the cinema at ten in the morning and leave at two in the afternoon, being in the cinema the whole morning, but anyway, in the middle of mass the emissaries returned and said “in that theater, there’s this, in that theater, there’s the other.”73

Next, they would send one child to purchase the tickets and the group would spend the late morning and early afternoon in the movie theater. Many children enjoyed a level of independence that affected their development and the time spent in the company of individuals of similar age. Theaters could also function as sites of mischievous behavior for children enjoying the company of their peers without parental supervision. According to one man who recalled his childhood, he and his friends often went to the local movie theater and saw movies without purchasing tickets. He described sneaking into the theater through a window in the bathroom. On one particular day, the boys’ luck ran out when they were discovered by the movie theater manager and they had to escape through a window in the bathroom rather than face the wrath of the manager directly.74 Even some of the city’s poorer children visited the cinema and participated in the city’s leisure activities. When interviewed in the late 1950s, one fourteenyear-old girl living in the colonia Morelos reported that she frequently went to the movies and named seven theaters in the city she had visited (Palatino, Bahía, Acapulco, Nacional in Teresa de Mier, Real Cinema, Arcadia, Sonota).75 Another girl in the same vecindad reportedly went to the movies every Tuesday and Thursday. While less-privileged children clearly did not possess the luxury of attending movies at their whim, their socioeconomic status did not exclude them from leisure activities. Interaction with the city took many forms and even the most mundane outings might include an impromptu tour of the city’s landmarks. Physical reminders of Mexico’s long and vivid history peppered the cityscape. The

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National Anthropology museum,76 Chapultepec Park, the National Palace, and the Cathedral served as history lessons to boys and girls.77 Observing these cultural and historical landmarks contributed to children’s cultural and social identities. In 1966, one chronicler of the city commented: In late years, municipal and federal authorities have awakened to the fact that Mexico City—at least, that portion of it that occupies the old island of Tenochtitlán and land adjacent to it—is a museum in itself. Handsome colonial convents and private mansions have been painstakingly restored to their former elegance to house public and commercial establishments as well as museums; and ten colonial plazas, together with the structures bordering on them, have been carefully reconstructed.78

In September 1964, outgoing President Adolfo López Mateos attended no less than six official inaugurations of new museums on six consecutive days, thus underscoring the importance of the museums and the nation’s patrimony in the eyes of the public.79 Many children attended family outings to Xochimilco, a festive location in the south of the city where people enjoyed boat rides on some of the last remaining canals like those of the pre-conquest city of Tenochtitlán. Visitors often posed for family photographs while relaxing in a tranjinera, the individually

Figure 1.2 Children’s Recreation Area Chapultepec Park, 1957, Hermanos Mayo collection, courtesy of AGN.

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named colorful boats that carried children and families on a floating picnic, documenting their participation in leisure activities.80 The festivities were replete with music and favorite culinary dishes. As child after child watched the spectacle of this Sunday family activity, they witnessed the ongoing culture that Mexicans shared. The surge in the child population caused concern about the availability of appropriate spaces for the city’s children. The municipal government provided children with their own space in Chapultepec Park, the city’s largest park. The recreation center featured a puppet theater, an outdoor play equipment, a library, and a sandbox when it was inaugurated in 1957 by Secretary of Education, José A. Ceniceros Andonegui.81 Children, at times, inhabited a world that consisted of their peers and they learned to identify with their fellow young urbanites. In 1958, the increasing availability of parks and recreational areas for children made headlines as a reported eighty-eight recreation centers existed “where the children enjoy games and entertainment appropriate for their age, which were reserved during all the past eras, as a privilege for the economically powerful classes.” The construction of child-centered spaces enriched the lives of boys and girls and gave them a safe place to congregate with other children. Nevertheless, enthusiastic reports that declared the democratization of childhood in the nation’s capital citing the availability of these play areas “without distinctions of class” were overly optimistic and failed to recognize the plight of children working and living in an oftentimes harsh urban environment without the protections afforded to other children fortunate enough to be born to parents who occupied a higher status in the social hierarchy.82

Danger and modernity in the lives of children If the sights and sounds of industrialization startled city residents, the effects were perhaps more profound upon its youngest inhabitants. Photojournalist Héctor García captured the perils of modernity in a 1947 photograph depicting a little girl and a man when they are nearly crushed by a speeding automobile while crossing a busy intersection.83 Yet, despite the very real dangers the urban environment threatened, the city offered exhilaration and excitement as well. New building construction and the clanking noises of the city’s industrial spaces served as reminders of Mexico’s progress. Mexico City boasted 25 percent of the nation’s industrial employment in 1950 (up from 19 percent in 1930) and 46 percent in 1960.84 Large corporations like Ford opened plants in Mexico City in

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the post-1940 era, contributing to the city’s industrial production and feeding the economy.85 Children’s urban experiences taught them about Mexico City’s role in modernization and the nature of class politics. Being witness to the everyday politics of city life informed the social and political consciousness of a generation of children. One Cuban visitor related his impressions of Mexico City in 1943 and maintained that while the “magnificent buildings and giant monuments” captured his imagination, so too did the plight of the Indian. The poor Indian that passes by on the sidewalks or “Banquetas” as they call them here, carrying on their backs boxes, baskets, lumber, etc., in large quantities, whose cords then rest on his forehead, while leaning forward and . . . he tries to balance the goods, looking so forlorn in front of the luxurious windows, like the novel traveler.86

In a city full of recent migrants from the countryside, children witnessed class and ethnic divisions on the streets of the capital. Social conditions affected the physical mobility of children, but perhaps more significantly, shaped the formation of a child’s identity and class consciousness. Araceli remembered her colonia Morelos (in delegación Gustavo A. Madero— one of the most populated) of the early 1960s as “very poor and the path [was] very ugly, very dangerous . . . so [much so that] my mother did not like us to go out.” She later recalled: One time the noise in the street awakened us and there were some gangs that were fighting . . . and . . . they [parents] would not let us lean out the window, because . . . leaning out the window is bad manners. But the traffic could be heard and the blows (golpes) and after several of the street boys were injured, with fractures and things like that, my mother was so worried about the insecurity, and we changed to the south of the city to Villa Coapa.87

The danger of the street instilled fear in protective parents, and children were cognizant of the reasons for parental concern. Poverty impressed upon its observers the social stratification that existed in Mexico City around the middle of the century. When recalling his middle-class childhood in 1950s, Jonathan Kandell described his impression of the capital’s poor men and women. He categorized the poor women as either ambulant vendors or beggars “with barefoot infants in tow, [who] staked out street corners, wrapped their heads in black-gray shawls, and stretched out a hand to beg for

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coins.”88 In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Alejandro lived three streets from the Zócalo in the historic city center and attended a school in the heart of La Merced. He remembers: “It affected me, fighting with very poor children, yes, it touched me to see children that arrived barefooted because they didn’t have any money.”89 Other children witnessed the discrimination that poor children encountered. Marta identified her colonia Roma of the 1940s and 1950s as middle class. She reported that until she went to secondary school, her parents did not allow her to go over to friends’ houses. Her parents’ objection rested on the socioeconomic status of her friends, who were “daughters of people from the market” but in school, Marta stated, “you could not see the difference.” She explained: “We all wore uniforms and sometimes my mother would say ‘how can you go around with this girl? She’s the daughter of the vegetable vendor.’ Magdelena was a very nice girl and I loved her a lot and this never occurred to me.”90 During the 1940s and early 1950s in Mexico’s capital, many children contributed to the family economy. Born in 1941 in the neighborhood Tepito (now notorious for its black market, drugs, and violence) Olga was the oldest of ten children living in the one-bedroom apartment that also housed her father’s workspace. She remembered the neighborhood with pride saying it was nothing like it is now and that it was full of boxers and luchadores (participants in lucha libre, the popular Mexican wrestling sport). Her father was a tailor and the kitchen served as both his workroom and the couple’s sleeping quarters where they slept on the floor. The ten children shared the one bedroom and they had three beds between them all separated by gender; the four girls shared a bed, and the six boys slept three to a bed. She and the older girls helped their mother with cooking and cleaning, childcare, and ironing the clothes her father produced. When the boys were old enough, they helped the father make suits. Olga attended school briefly but never went beyond the fourth grade. She reported having very few toys but she and her siblings played with a yo-yo, a top, a jump rope, marbles, and bones they colored. In the corner of the bedroom, she and her sister made a make-shift house by cutting pictures of beds, furniture, and kitchen appliances out of magazines and pasted them on the walls. When Olga turned fourteen, she entered the paid labor force as a nanny and maid for a family with children where she earned 80 pesos a month. She used part of her salary to contribute to the family economy. The family was poor, Olga repeatedly stated, usually relying on beans and tortillas, sometimes chilaquiles, though they occasionally had some meat, once a week.91 Children considered themselves in relation to other children and were aware of the struggles some children from troubled homes faced and how their social class shaped their lives. Remembering his childhood in the historic city center,

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three blocks from the Zócalo, Alejandro played with marbles and toy cars with many children, some of whom later became “delinquents” and ended up in jail or as drug addicts: “Boys who lived in families very . . . how would you say it . . . wasted families (pues ya desechas familias) with many problems with alcoholism”; “they did not have the same opportunities nor the same education that we had and with time they made a different life for themselves than ours.” He also attended the Casa Amiga Obrera in the heart of the Merced for workers of the Ministry of Public Health and Assistance: “It touched me . . . to deal with very poor children that arrived shoeless because they did not have any money.” He further recognized the importance of giving children breakfast and the afternoon meal, especially to those children who lived in the vecindades, whose parents had no resources to feed their families. Some children brought meager amounts of food from the school back to their families that had no food. Even those children whose economic circumstances might have been precarious or solidly working-class experienced important markers of a modern childhood: playtime with other children. Political scientist Judith Adler Hellman reported of one of her interviewees: “Roberto grew up in the center of Mexico City in an old three-story colonial house built around a central courtyard . . . when he was a boy in the 1950s, this was a common form of popular housing, with an entire family occupying each of the individual rooms opening onto the courtyard. Roberto says it was a crowded and noisy place, but he has very good memories of a childhood spent playing with other boys and girls in the patio of this colonial house.”92 “Modern” childhood in Mexico City may have had a different face than the one reformers and government officials aspired to, but the fact was that children’s experiences and memories constituted a stage of life undeniably distinct from that of their adult counterparts. Even when children were shielded from the harshest conditions of working themselves, they bore witness to political dramas that affected the city’s population, especially the working classes. Roberto who had fondly remembered playing in the patio also reported that he remembered conversations about formal politics and labor conditions his parents faced. He said: When I was a boy, my mother was a factory worker, so I heard plenty of discussion at home concerning the conditions of the workers in the factory, the efforts to build an independent union, the complicity of the oficialista union leaders with bosses. This is the kind of thing we discussed around the dinner table. . . . The other political talk I remember from childhood was the chat in the courtyard among the neighbors concerning the PRI: that the PRI only came around at election time to hand out gifts; that the PRI bought votes; that the

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Childhood and Modernity in Cold War Mexico City PRI never kept its promises; that the politicians were corrupt. That was the sort of thing I heard as a boy: not much talk about what to do about any of these problems, but the people certainly were not taken in by the priísta rhetoric. Later these expressions of discontent were clarified for me by the political analyses of some of the teachers I met in secondary school.93

Many children were cognizant of the shortcomings of Mexico’s sociopolitical structure early in life. To foreign children growing up in Mexico’s capital, the disparity between their relative privilege and the conditions that other children faced struck them as unfair as they witnessed daily injustices, both large and small. Crawford Kilian, son of Mike and Verne Kilian who were “lower-middle-class exiles” forced out of the United States in the early 1950s during Cold War persecution of Hollywood radicals, described living in Tacubaya where the ditch near their house served as the neighborhood’s toilet. He said: “The homes around us were shacks of cardboard and sheet metal, sometimes built in a day.” While he and his brothers attended school, he recognized that “the children who swarmed the dirt streets would never see the inside of the classroom.”94

Conclusion In the decades after the conflagration of Mexico’s 1910 Revolution, the growth of Mexico City was astounding by any measure: the sheer number of residents, the congestion associated with automobile and industrial traffic, and all the accompanying social problems of modernization. In 1934, one boy returning to his birth city he had left for Torreón at the age of five later remembered, “I was dazzled by the capital. Such movement, so many people.”95 To say that the city at the turn of the twentieth century hardly resembled its successor by the late 1960s would be an understatement. The total population swelled, industrial facilities dramatically increased, and El Metro—a modern system of rails—raced through the city. The transformation that Mexico City residents witnessed from the early 1940s to the late 1960s can hardly be overstated. Perhaps the most obvious to its inhabitants was the sheer increase in the number of people residing in the urban environment. The fact that children constituted an increasingly larger percentage of the city’s inhabitants between 1930 and 1970 signifies that the city became a “city of children.” In documenting children’s work, leisure, and aspects of daily living, the unevenness of Mexican modernity becomes

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apparent. David Harvey argues that modernity is largely a myth because of all its complexities and unevenness. He maintains that “it is impossible to create new social configurations without in some way superseding or even obliterating the old” and posits that “if modernity exists as a meaningful term, it signals some decisive moments of creative destruction.”96 If we conceptualize modernity as a discourse to be interrogated and as a process rather than an ending point, we can begin to understand the environment in which these children grew up. Ideology and rhetoric associated with modernity were adopted in Mexico as a means of “elevating” the country’s status in the international arena and as the logical next step in the revolutionary path. Through an analysis of children’s experiences in the city, we see how the “Mexican Miracle” came at a high cost for some Mexican children, while other more fortunate children experienced a more prolonged period of childhood. Regardless of these variations, all children inhabited the city as a physical and symbolic place. The cityscape provided them with some shared sense of identity, even if the precise definition of being a capitalino remained deeply personal. The economic and political transformations taking place in the heart of the nation influenced the children of Mexico City. Several factors converged to create the appearance, and at times reality, of a middle-class milieu in Mexico City during the post–Second World War decades. The factors were connected to transnational, national, and local cultures, economies, and politics. Yet extreme class-based differences prevailed; in fact, the majority of the city’s inhabitants occupied the lower rungs of the class structure and a very small percentage maintained the upper echelons. As a demographic group, children constituted the majority of the audience watching the political, economic, and social dramas that the city delivered on a daily basis. Children’s experiences and observations of city life informed their subsequent political and social consciousness, ultimately laying the groundwork for their later political activities. Some participated in the student protest movement of 1968 as young adults. Others, as Jaime Pensado has demonstrated, joined PRIista groups and infiltrated the student movement. The massacre of student protestors and sympathizers at Tlatelolco embodies the ultimate assault on the nation’s innocence. Elena Poniatowska, one of the most influential intellectual figures of twentieth-century Mexico, chose to open her damning account of the 1968 massacre in the following way: There are many. They come down Melchor Ocampo, the Reforma, Juárez, Cinco de Mayo, laughing, students walking arm in arm in the demonstration, in as

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Childhood and Modernity in Cold War Mexico City festive a mood as if they were going to a street fair; carefree boys and girls who do not know that tomorrow, and the day after, their dead bodies will be lying swollen in the rain, after a fair where the guns in the shooting gallery are aimed at them, children-targets, wonder-struck children, children for whom every day is a holiday until the owner of the shooting gallery tells them to form a line, like the row of tin-plated mechanical ducks that move past exactly at eye level, click, click, click, “Ready, aim, fire!” and they tumble backward, touching the red satin backdrop.97

Children were in fact among the victims of the massacre, but they were not the overwhelming majority of those gunned down that October day. By 1968, childhood as a concept had been transformed into a widely accepted period of deserved innocence and youthful optimism. Poniatowska, therefore, began her account of the day’s deadly events by portraying the victims as children and representing the historical moment as a loss of innocence for the nation. This chapter has documented children’s increasing numbers, the effects of their collective presence, and physical mobility in the city. Moreover, it has argued that childhood experiences in the urban environment contributed to their politicization within the context of Mexican national identity, although amid transnational influences. Next, the examination turns to ask how the state dealt with the increasing number of children and the influx of competing cultural and societal forces in the daily lives of the city’s children. As we shall see, the state reacted by adapting aspects of popular culture to reach children and harnessed their collective presence to demonstrate their importance to the nation.

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Educating the City of Children

The state redefined childhood during the postrevolutionary period and Cold War era, including even the youngest members of society in its project of nation building. Through the SEP, the state versed children in the ways of citizenship— at once distinctly nationalistic and Mexican yet thoroughly immersed in the global—and hoped that the education of children would enlighten parents and the neighborhoods in which they lived as the city’s population swelled. While attempting to intervene in the relationship between parents and children was a risky endeavor, the state averted major confrontation by including parents, mostly mothers, in its outreach programs and, more importantly, because of its inability to implement a paradigm of strict social control. The increasing strength of the Catholic Church, the subject of Chapter 4, also contributed to limiting state power. As the Cold War period unfolded, mass media eclipsed parents in being the preferred mode of transmitting information to children. The SEP used mass media, especially radio and print media for a variety of uses: to spread pedagogy and curriculum content to teachers and children, to instruct mothers about proper childhood activities and care, and to advertise their accomplishments and to solicit assistance from the private sector when necessary. The postrevolutionary demographic explosion in Mexico City created an enormous and complicated challenge for the ruling party. There were too many children present in the city and so many without much semblance of what child experts considered to be a proper childhood in terms of education, age-specific activities, and play, and sometimes one lacking even more the basic needs of food, shelter, and hygienic conditions. Many of these youngsters were the offspring of rural migrants to the city, and their parents (or oftentimes single parents) were frequently poor, uneducated, and struggling financially. Through the Ministry of Public Education, the state sought to transform its future and current citizenry into productive workers and citizens for the ruling party

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aspiring to fashion Mexico into an industrialized, modern democratic nation. In 1942, the SEP reincorporated preschool education under its tutelage and began the process of centralizing the jardines de niños (kindergartens) in terms of curriculum, pedagogy, and teacher training. Through publicity campaigns in city newspapers, the ministry called on the private sector to help combat the problems wrought by the rapid increase of the child population. The campaign for the construction of new schools, desperately needed in the Federal District, began in 1948 with a call from President Miguel Alemán. There simply were not enough buildings to accommodate the population that had to be educated and schooled, and the material conditions of the facilities that existed varied widely across the city and its economically stratified population. By 1959, SEP officials introduced a new plan that would require all schools to adopt obligatory standardized textbooks: in part to provide all students with the opportunity to learn without concern for the cost of books but also partly to manage the political and economic ideas communicated therein. While these developments are not structurally or ideologically analogous, each represents a shift in policies regarding children and childhood, particularly in relation to the demographic changes in the capital city. All three of the aforementioned changes in education provide excellent junctures to closely examine the relationship between the state, children, and parents. This chapter intervenes in the historiography of education and the postrevolutionary period in Mexico more generally to show how the state reacted to the new demographic reality in the capital and constructed a version of childhood based on the needs of the growing economy and changing Cold War politics. The extant literature on children’s education focuses mostly on education in the 1920s and 1930s—particularly how the rural peasantry contested and negotiated state intervention to participate in the country’s cultural revolution and, to a lesser extent, the education of college-age youth in 1950s and 1960s. Historical studies of educational policy and affiliated outreach programs have rightly focused on the effects on, negotiations with, and contestations by rural populations during the 1920s and into the 1940s. In these decades, the heart of revolutionary policy regarding education rested squarely in the countryside; it was designed to increase literacy rates, to secularize and modernize the rural population, and to bring campesinos into a newly formed Mexican nation.1 New research on youth culture in the post-1940 era using biography has provided “insight into the socializing, educational experiences that produced the subjectivities of this generation” through the perspective of one man’s life.2 Analyzing educational policy changes our understanding of how the state approached the needs of generations of younger children during the Cold War

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era when the state sought economic growth and the expansion of political power, both domestically and internationally. When we consider the history of education after the decades of revolutionary institutionalization (1920–40) after the SEP was founded and expanded its power institutionally, we witness a more sophisticated approach to both the means of education and the accompanying goals. A look at how these policies unfolded in an urban environment in the decades after 1940 affords the opportunity to uncover the state’s uneven and incomplete efforts to deal with the exploding child population with all its concomitant issues. Strategically, the state’s tactics were innovative in the extensive use of mass media and use of the collective and individual physical presence of the child’s body to communicate childhood ideals.3 The importance of media for these children continued into their adulthood too. Hence children raised during this era and who later participated in the 1968 student movement demanded that discussions with then Secretary of Government and future President Luis Echeverría be broadcast over radio and television. Governmental refusal was one of the reasons that negotiations broke down and the conflict escalated.4 The SEP, founded in 1921, brought to fruition revolutionary leaders’ insistence on education as a means of societal uplift and a path to self-governance for Mexico. President Alvaro Obregón placed education within the structure of the federal government and charged José Vasconcelos with running the ambitious endeavor. Vasconcelos had yet to put his ideas regarding the “cosmic race” into print but his vision for Mexico was meant to be transformative, especially for the many indigenous populations throughout the nation. In this milieu, indigenismo (indigenism) and mestizaje (racial mixing) were officially celebrated, even though government programs ultimately aimed to assimilate indigenous populations. The educational project of the 1920s and 1930s attacked illiteracy and religious fanaticism and superstition, and instructed parents and children about hygiene and vaccinations. Women teachers of the SEP often engaged women in local communities to assist in their projects—women and adolescents learned how to administer smallpox vaccines to other community members—thus including them in nation-building project.5 SEP goals included more than the fundamentals of reading, writing and arithmetic; the institution was charged with delivering the social, political, and cultural ideologies of the revolution to the farthest corners of the countryside. The importance accorded the project is reflected in the money allocated by government officials. During Cárdenas’s presidency, federal expenditure on education continued its steady climb from earlier years to reach 13.6 percent in 1937, which remained the highest percentage of education to total expenditure until 1963 when López Mateos’s educational outlay totaled 14.2 percent of the total federal spending.6

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The SEP harnessed technology and mass media to execute its educational policies. Through radio transmissions, print media, and film the SEP communicated its project of citizenship instruction and linked its projects with modernity and Mexico’s future success as a nation. Such techniques demonstrated a modernist ideology and the sophistication of the state to its citizens. Recognizing the growing influence of secular culture and the transnational flow of media, the state included these forms of communication in its programs. Because officials employed these popular methods in policy and curriculum, historians should be attuned to the importance of studying culture in combination with socioeconomic and political trends in the postrevolutionary period. As such, this analysis continues the project begun by those historians who insist that cultural history is vital to any analysis of the era.7 The methods used by the SEP, as well as the messages conveyed, emerge as important developments that require analysis. The state’s use of technology, while not new, expanded in scope and sophistication during the 1940s and 1950s. In some ways, the project represented a continuation of radio transmissions from the socialist project of the 1930s when Cárdenas distributed radios to schools throughout the countryside to increase audiences for state policy. Indeed, the SEP’s first radio transmission debuted in 1924, with the inauguration of President Plutarco Elías Calles from the National Stadium.8 Adapting to the influence of transnational and domestic culture (and the continued importance of the Catholic faith), the state continued to expand its reach, at least in part, by utilizing the very forms of cultural communication with which it was competing for children’s attention. This proved particularly important in the Federal District as it became the nation’s showcase to international audiences in political and cultural terms. The spotlight focusing on Mexico City culminated in the capital city’s hosting of the October 1968 Olympic Games, the first ever held in Latin America. The children of the Federal District became a medium through which the state communicated its goals regarding modernity and economic progress. The SEP employed the collective presence of children in the city’s public spaces to convey the importance of childhood as a developmental stage with distinct physical, intellectual, and emotional needs. Citizens could hardly ignore a gaggle of children, especially if they were performing music or dance en masse, marching in patriotic festivals, or playing joyfully. In September 1954, boys and girls in the Federal District gathered in elaborate formation at the city’s central plaza, the Zócalo, to commemorate the 100-year anniversary of Mexico’s national anthem. A press summary of the event read: “Commemorating the 100th anniversary of the Mexican national anthem, several thousand white-clothed school children

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form for a ceremony in Constitution Plaza, before the National Palace in Mexico City. Some 25,000 students and spectators were on hand for the ceremony, which opened a two-day Independence celebration.”9 Children were both participants in the performance of patriotism and symbols of nationalism to onlookers. In parks and near historic monuments, boys and girls participated in age-specific activities under the guidance of teachers and officials. Mexicans could see that their government understood the unique needs of children, celebrated their importance, and advocated their separation from adult society. Moreover, the messages implicit in these spectacles became more explicit in the social outreach programs in which even kindergarten-age children were thought to be not only malleable in terms of education and socialization, but also capable of transforming the home and neighborhood environments in which they lived. Children in the Cold War era represented a means for the state to reach into the private lives of parents. During the postrevolutionary decades, the state had attempted to intervene in the private life of the family, through welfare programs and adoption politics.10 In this case, the SEP hoped that children themselves would be agents of change in their own homes; lessons learned in

Figure 2.1 Students commemorate the 100-year anniversary of the national anthem, September 1954, courtesy of Historic Images.

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hygiene would be implemented in the home and that the happy environment of the jardín de niños would positively influence life outside the confines of the school. The school environment would ameliorate the lives of children living in poor material conditions and, hopefully, effect change in the milieu of the home. While the state targeted children directly, the state also found the children to be a useful contact point with their parents. Still, the educational project never reached all children as many parents took their children out of school to help in the house or to work for wages outside. Additionally, the boys and girls who did attend primary school and experienced the SEP’s programs in a variety of ways did not always accept all aspects of the curriculum; certainly some aspects were rejected or their meanings were interpreted differently by them. Likewise, teachers—though agents of the state—maintained some level of control over their own classrooms and execution of SEP agendas. Recalling his first day of school in mid-1930s Mexico City, Manuel Sánchez said, “The first day my mother brought me to school I was frightened and burst out crying. When the teacher wasn’t looking, I ran right back home. Señorita Lupe, my first teacher, was strict and would throw the eraser at anyone who was out of order. Once she gave me such a blow with a ruler that it broke on my wrist.”11 Officials and parents seemed to be arguing over the very issue of who ultimately had control over the nation’s children. Anti-SEP agitation did not spring anew in the early 1960s. Rather, parents had contested state power when the SEP launched its massive rural education campaign and attacked the power of the church in the 1920s and 1930s. But the early 1960s were quite different from the tumultuous decades of the institutionalization of the revolution (1920–40). The state and the Catholic Church no longer clashed in monumental ways as the two entities reached a conciliatory relationship. In fact, the church had increased its influence in the Cold War era and the PRI bolstered its power through the social cohesion Catholicism provided.12 While the state had consolidated its power in the post-1940 decades, officials’ characterization that the opposition to obligatory textbooks was baseless, according to the constitution, failed to convince many parents. The SEP linked its educational project to transnational currents in politics and pedagogy. Educators represented the nation in international conferences and communicated with specialists in their field outside of Mexico.13 SEP officials, like Rosaura Zapata who headed the Department of Preschool Education, often studied in Europe and the United States before taking their posts in Mexico. Jaime Torres Bodet, Minister of Education during the presidencies of Ávila Camacho and López Mateos, served as Mexico’s General Director of United

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Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) from 1948 to 1952.14 In addition, the international arena entered the schoolroom in more direct ways. By incorporating UN objectives into curriculum, the SEP widened the worldview of students and inserted Mexico in international political and social discussions. In the state’s view, educational policy and pedagogy served as measurements of modernity within the international community. The Mexican state recognized this and SEP officials, at times, commented directly on this phenomenon. The discussion in this chapter focuses on three pivotal developments in the post-1940 educational project: the reincorporation of the kindergarten into the SEP hierarchy, the new-school construction campaign, and the reform of education known as the Eleven-Year Plan. Through an analysis of these three developments in educational policy, it is clear that the state attempted to cement and centralize its authority over children; the state harnessed the media (especially newspapers and radio) to publicize its programs to citizens; children participated in public demonstrations of childhood in the Federal District; and parents exerted their authority and, at times, resisted state incursion into the lives of their children and reaffirmed their rights as parents.

A brief background of education If the success story of the revolution was the implementation of rural education in the 1920s and 1930s, then educating the growing ranks of children in the Federal District represented the focal point of federal education programs in the post-1940 period. The Mexican government considered children to be a fundamental aspect of state policy even before the revolution and its institutionalization. Patience Schell demonstrates how concern about children shifted from purely physical/biological issues during the Porfiriato (1876–1910) to “children’s minds” in the postrevolutionary era.15 Historian Elena Jackson Albarrán demonstrates this new child-centered focus through her in-depth analysis of the postrevolutionary educational project in the 1920s and 1930s. The SEP used art programs, publications like Pulgarcito, radio programs, and puppet shows to communicate ideas about good citizenship in a time of intensive cultural nationalism. Children were active participants in the revolutionary political and civic culture. Yet, despite the SEP’s successes in “forging a sense of generational unity among children,” a large divide existed between rural and urban counterparts.16

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By the late 1930s, the SEP maintained that children had the right to simple, hygienic, and happiness-conducive educational facilities. A report from the period 1934–40 maintained that “every child has the right to fresh air to do his work, practice his games, natural exercises and respiratory movements that constitute his best physical education.”17 Socialist education in the 1930s sought to remove religious indoctrination from the process of education and wrest control from the Catholic Church. In December 1934, reformed Article 3 of the constitution made socialist education the state policy. Catholic inhabitants of the country objected to the removal of all religious components to education and the emphasis on a rational, scientific concept of the universe: many considered the education of boys and girls together to be particularly scandalous.18 In the early 1930s, Narciso Bassols, Minister of Public Education from 1931 to 1934 supported sex education in public schools and parents were outraged.19 Through the socialist educational project, President Lázaro Cárdenas (1934–40) sought to educate children not only to increase literacy rates and instruct them in traditional subjects, but also to form “habits that will prepare them for a socialist society” and for a life of active participation in government. By the end of

Figure 2.2 Cultivating the land is patriotic, circa 1930s, Enrique Díaz, courtesy of the AGN.

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the 1930s, the state promoted the education of even younger children. In its discussion of kindergarteners, the SEP proclaimed: “The child is to be considered as an agent of social transformation and as a real and effective element of the community in which he acts.”20 As a potential “agent of social transformation,” the kindergarten-age child commanded attention in the eyes of the state. Similarly, primary schools reflected this socialist outlook in the late 1930s. “The social action of the socialist primary school represents one of the indispensable activities for the formation, in the student, of a concept of social responsibility and of solidarity with the proletarian classes.”21 The SEP focused student learning on “the justice of the Mexican revolution” (including its social and economic origins) and the injustice of capitalist exploitation and imperialism.22 Education in subjects like history, politics, natural sciences, and economics provided boys and girls with lessons in civics. Lessons on nature provided instructors with the opportunity to impart to students a “rational concept” of the universe and an understanding that “all social phenomena are of material origin.”23 Through a type of scientific socialism, the SEP hoped to combat the persistence of religiosity in Mexican culture and society. Instruction in economic principles comprised one objective of the SEP: “The essential function of all human collectivity consists in extracting from nature the necessary means for the subsistence and happiness of man. The most important object of daily social activity is economic production, the exchange and distribution of produced articles.”24 Clearly, the SEP intended that students would receive an education in the means of production. The emphasis on economic productivity and rationality in school curriculum was related to the government’s attempts to foster the growth and development of the economy. Objection to socialist education took many forms. By the early 1940s, the state relaxed its anticlerical policies in favor of a more conciliatory posture. Still, protest over state educational policy remained until socialist education was gradually abandoned. For example, the cover art of Jueves de Excélsior (the weekly magazine of the daily newspaper Excélsior which was distributed on Thursdays) vividly demonstrates that objection over socialist education. One cover from 1941 depicts an indigenous woman labeled “the nation” protecting a shoeless child from a lab-coat–clad doctor attempting to inject the boy with a needle labeled “socialist education.” The doctor is explicitly labeled Sánchez Pontón, the then Minister of Education. The caption reads: “Sánchez Pontón is ready to administer the medicine. An exotic doctrine imposed on Education, but the people hate it. With firmness, the Nation says to the Minister of State: You are wrong, licenciado, I do not want this injection!” Behind Minister Luis Sánchez Pontón

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appears an image of Stalin.25 Pontón, born in Puebla in 1889, had as a student leader in 1910 asked for the resignation of Porfirio Díaz, the then President of Mexico. Sánchez Pontón held his post as Minister of Public Education only until 1941, being “one of the first of the radical holdovers from the Cárdenas period to be forced out of a cabinet post.”26 Ultimately, the state reacted to these objections by altering the language of the article and removing the most explicitly socialist sections of the law on a few occasions in the early 1940s. These changes began during the presidency of Ávila Camacho (1940–46), the first leader since the revolution to publicly proclaim that he was Catholic. In the post-1940 period, socialist education ceased to be a SEP priority both because the people rejected it and because it no longer fit Mexico’s political and economic milieu. The church hierarchy and Catholic citizens reacted favorably when Ávila Camacho reformed Article 3 in December 1945 and interpreted it as sign of warming relations between the two institutions, and a reaffirmation of the importance of the family in educational choices.27 Moreover, most astute observers also recognized it as a sign of increasing conservatism in the political sphere. The SEP focused on educating children to be productive citizens in Mexico’s quest for modernity and to have an understanding of the nation’s place in the international community. The next section looks at the remaking of childhood by the state through preschool education and social outreach in the Federal District.

Kindergarteners as political subjects The kindergarten movement in Mexico affected childhood in two essential ways: it repositioned the minimum age at which children should become active participants in society and came into contact with the state; and it underscored the importance of this early stage in the overall, long-term development of the individual. In the early 1940s, a clear shift in the organizational structure of preschool education indicates that the state, and its accompanying experts, considered children six years old and younger to be educable beings, not just individuals to be looked after in a physical sense. Indeed, the SEP promoted the idea that the youngest members of society were important beings in their own right; kindergarten-age children could be influential in their homes, schools, and communities. In 1938, the jardines de niños or the kindergartens left the SEP to become part of the Secretaría de la Asistencia Pública (SAP: Ministry of Public Assistance)

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until returning to the SEP once again in 1942.28 In 1948, the SEP elevated the organizational structure of the jardines from Departamento de Educación Preescolar (Department of Preschool Education) into the Dirección General de Educación Preescolar (General Directorate of Preschool Education),29 “considering the importance of this educational cycle.” Rosaura Zapata led this new Dirección.30 In 1949, a presidential decree founded the “Normal School for Teachers of Jardines de Niños,” signaling the importance placed on specialized training and oversight of education for instructors dealing with this stage of childhood. Organizationally, the SEP struggled to place the entity within a space it deemed appropriate and to accommodate the need for adequately trained teachers for kindergarten-age children. Concern about preschool-age children, that is aged six and under, had existed years before the department was reincorporated into the SEP. By the late 1930s, the SEP had determined that the kindergarten-age child should be considered “an agent of social transformation and as a real and effective element in which they exist.” In accordance with the socialist project, kindergartens were to form “habits that will prepare them for socialist society.”31 Field trips to railroad and aviation locations showed kindergarteners the importance of communication and transportation developments—so vital to a smoothly functioning economy—in the modernization of Mexico. The SEP encouraged teachers to have children perform collective work in their gardens and to “convince children of the advantages of the modernization of domestic tools.” Children were to make visits to state-run institutions designed with the “well-being of the proletarian child” in mind.32 Even though the place of the jardines de niños within the Mexican government might not have been clear structurally, the importance of socializing and educating children, even at a very young age, had been recognized for years before the reorganizations of 1942 and 1948 materialized. The SEP’s promotion and regulation of jardines de niños was a gendered project: curriculum allocated some attention to separate activities for boys and girls, and teachers and high officials appear to have been exclusively female. Replicating domestic ideology within the jardines allowed the state to encourage the male breadwinner ideology in its youngest members of society. Despite women’s economic, political, and social subordination some women claimed their right to participate in the paid labor force and the bureaucracy of the state; women served as teachers, inspectors, and as heads of the preschool division within the SEP. Moreover, the SEP overwhelmingly targeted mothers for its social outreach programs, thus underscoring the gendered specificity of parenting for young children in the eyes of the state.

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During the school day, students engaged in classroom activities and organized games outside in the patio. Teachers encouraged children to participate in genderspecific activities. Despite their own breaking of gender norms by working outside the home, teachers often insisted that boys and girls stick to activities thought to be appropriate for their gender. According to Rosaura Zapata, boys preferred images of aviators, soldiers, and carpenters in children’s books. She maintained: “The girls like drawings with activities appropriate to their sex, such as playing with dolls, carrying out domestic activities (sweeping, washing, [and] ironing).”33 There are other instances of collective activity: in the jardín de niños “Lauro Aguirre” in Mexico City, boys and girls equipped with individual easels participated in art classes outdoors;34 in another example, working with clay at little tables aimed to “awaken imagination and skill in the little schoolchildren.” While photographs depict boys and girls engaging in these activities in equal numbers, gender-specific activities also existed. One group of kindergarten girls learned to iron with small electric irons, assisted by teachers at their side.35 Girls’ domestic work was seen as vital to the success of their adult lives as women who were devoted to and conducted modern, orderly homes. The children appearing in these photographs represented a public-relations opportunity for the SEP to communicate its success, however unevenly it existed in the Federal District, and to portray proper child-rearing in action.

Figure 2.3 Girls learning to use washboards, circa 1940s, Enrique Díaz, courtesy of the AGN.

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With the intention of centralizing pedagogical materials, the SEP organized a collection of children’s songs and games and communicated them over radio airwaves. During the 1947–48 school year, the daily transmission (9:00–9:10 pm, Monday through Friday) of lesson plans on the radio allowed teachers in the countryside to hear what the inspectors, directors, and teachers in the Federal District outlined for their own kindergarten classrooms. Because the “pedagogical resources are more limited” in the countryside, the SEP reasoned that these teachers would benefit from an organized format.36 The state also used radio communication to reach kindergarteners directly and to connect them to one another; in the process it fostered a sense of “imagined community” among them based on age and culture.37 Rotating the broadcasts from various jardines within the Federal District, the state solidified its influence and fostered connections between young children, however mediated by the state these connections might have been. In the early 1950s, the SEP divided radio transmission into three different types. The first addressed children directly and was created by teachers and children from jardines de niños of the Federal District. Broadcasts to mothers characterized the second part of the SEP program and aimed “to guide them in the education of their children.” The SEP based the mothers’ program on family education and the needs of children, ending each segment with an anecdote conveying a problem and a recommendation as to how they should deal with it. Programs dedicated to teachers formed the last type of SEP broadcasts from jardines de niños. According to SEP reports, “the transmissions for children contain narration of stories, staged by the children themselves in the children’s theater, songs, games, rhymes, riddles, rhythms, children’s orchestras and programs with selected music appropriate for children.”38 The presence of young children in public places reminded parents that children should be participating in child-centered activities, preferably those organized by the SEP. The collective presence of children’s bodies signaled the importance of childhood to city residents observing such spectacles. When hundreds of children attended the children’s party celebrating spring in the city’s largest public space, Chapultepec Park, they participated in an age-specific culture and performed the SEP’s version of childhood.39 In one ceremony, twelve children from each of the various participating kindergartens in the Federal District attended to collect Mexican flags being distributed in June 1947.40 Nationalist demonstrations served to instruct children of their belonging to— and importance to the future of—Mexico. Kindergartens expanded their scope outside of the formal classroom in an effort to reach more children in Mexico City. According to the 1944 official report,

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the SEP included nonstudents in the jardines de niños by creating “Children’s Thursdays” so that all preschool-age children could enjoy the age-appropriate environment of the jardín, regardless of whether or not they were actually enrolled in the school.41 In addition to opening up school grounds for non-enrolled students, teachers led “Happiness Brigades” into the poorest neighborhoods of the city. The purpose of these brigades was to offer underprivileged children the opportunity to enjoy puppet shows, songs, and games, all with an educational content.42 Again, the notion of the child’s right to happiness, regardless of the socioeconomic status of their parents, emerges as a theme. In addition, the militaristic image conjured up by “brigade” suggests that the state considered itself a force combating poverty and fighting against conditions in the city for the good of its children. In 1942, Christmas celebrations in jardines included the distribution of Christmas trees supplied by the SEP for the enjoyment of both the enrolled students and “the poor children of these barriadas invited by the teachers.”43 The fact that the SEP distributed Christmas trees is significant as it represented a competing holiday tradition with the beloved Mexican Catholic tradition of Los Reyes who left gifts for children in their shoes on January 6, the Feast of the Epiphany. These manifestations of benevolence served the state well. As children enjoyed age-appropriate, educational activities, the Mexican government extended its reach into the poorest neighborhoods and into the lives of parents residing there. In the early 1950s, “Happiness Brigades” continued to deliver educational projects and fun activities for children to enjoy in public parks and neighborhood spaces. During the 1951–52 school year, nearly every jardín de niños in the Federal District held “Children’s Thursdays” in order to “form in all of them habits of sociability, of courtesy and of good manners, strengthening in this manner the bonds of confraternity that should exist in every human being.”44 This universalizing language suggests a standard to which all Mexicans ideally would aspire. While it was understood that these traits should “exist in every human being,” the very fact that this idea needed to be articulated demonstrates that the SEP thought many parents lacked the ability to instill these ideas in their children. At the same time that the SEP expanded its scope within Mexico City, kindergarten education allowed the government to increase the international visibility of Mexico’s kindergarten program. Children attending kindergarten experienced a broadening scope of mediated interaction with other children. For example, in 1944 the SEP organized an exchange between jardines de niños from Mexico and those located in other countries like the United States,

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Argentina, Chile, Guatemala, El Salvador, and Peru.45 Exchanges between kindergarten classes affected students’ positioning of themselves in the world. They conceived of themselves as Mexicans within a wide range of possible nationalities. During the 1948–49 school year, the SEP intensified exchanges between kindergarteners, particularly in relation to the United Nations. An informational exhibition was organized so that the teachers could learn the “literature, music, games, dances, and regional dress of each country” and then pass the information on to students in their classrooms. Similarly, the jardines de niños held a “United Nations Week” and established exchanges of toys, children’s drawings, music, and stories with a greater number of kindergartens.46 The following school year (1949–50), the SEP sponsored a celebration in the Parque de la Lama where children interpreted music and dance from other countries as well as displayed work that would be sent to children in different countries.47 The week dedicated to United Nations continued, and during the 1950–51 school year children from jardines de niños reportedly filled all the parks in the Federal District for public celebration.48 The state sought to impart to children “a global concept of life” through these interactions and included boys and girls in public demonstrations of national identity.49 In constructing and performing the national identity of others, children in the Federal District participated in a process that facilitated their own identity formation as Mexicans. International exchanges of toys and other materials between kindergarten classes generated responses from several places. In 1949, Principal Elizabeth Neterer of Seattle, Washington, wrote to express her gratitude upon receiving the toys and scrapbooks: We are delighted to have been the ones selected to receive these delightful gifts and we want you to know how much we appreciate and enjoy them. . . . Our boys and girls will wish to send some of you toys and drawings to your boys and girls, so you can expect to hear from us again.50

Similarly, Virginia Lee Forbis of Wheaton, Illinois, wrote to express her gratitude for the packages her class received and proclaimed: “Today my class is the envy of the entire school!”51 Interactions between classrooms on an international level provided excitement for kindergarteners and teachers alike. The expansion of the kindergarten program in Mexico provided the state with international exposure. The Mexican delegation to the Organización Mundial de Educación Preescolar (OMEP: World Organization of Preschool

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Education) attended the August 1950 conference in Vienna where they showed a film of Mexican children at work in jardines de niños. Later, at the request of the US delegation to the OMEP, the film was also shown in Washington, D.C.52 After visiting kindergartens in the United States in the late 1940s, Rosaura Zapata reported her findings: “I can confirm to you Mr. Subsecretary that I found not one novelty in the work that they are carrying out and I am certain that our Jardines de Niños are at the vanguard of similar institutions in the U.S.”53 Mexico participated in an arena of educational discussions and enjoyed prestige as a result. These transnational influences worked in reverse as well: SEP officials often traveled to other countries to study at foreign universities or to informally evaluate foreign facilities through school visits and observations.54 During the 1950–51 school year, the SEP encouraged mothers not to think of the preschool-age child as a “man in miniature” but rather as “a growing being, whose incipient personality needs respect, strengthening and not nullification by contempt . . . but rather a reinforced personality in a home environment of peace, happiness, cooperation and optimism that makes him succeed in life, [because] during the Segunda infancia the foundation of their existence is already structured.” Through its outreach program to mothers, the SEP stressed the importance of early childhood in the formation of the individual. To that end, the SEP distributed a pamphlet to mothers, representing the “first collaboration to the pedagogy of the Mexican home” in order to “build world peace in the peace of the home.”55 The questions posed to mothers in this pamphlet summoned them to an active role in the development of kindergarteners and indicate the shortcomings that the SEP perceived in current parental involvement. Mothers would ask themselves: How do you ensure the happiness of your child? Do you offer him a healthy, beautiful, and tranquil environment in the home? Do you ensure rhythm in his life? Do you listen to your child, understand him, and help him with his problems? Do you make him participate in home life as a real and effective element? Do you participate in the happy moments and those that are not? Do you fulfill promises you make to him? Do you direct him in the formation of good habits? Do you give him the proper alimentation for the development of his being? Do you offer him the means for restful sleep, giving him the best hygienic conditions?56

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Do you take part in your child’s play? Do you accompany her in her outings? Do you offer him the toys that are necessary in his life? Do you ensure that he plays with children of his own age? Does your child attend a Jardin de niños?57 These questions reflect the aspirations of the SEP rather than a reality of involvement mothers had in this version of childhood. The SEP’s questions to mothers constituted a tall order for many women to fulfill. Posed in the form of a self-reflective pamphlet, the SEP’s message conveyed the notion that if mothers were not answering the questions with the obviously correct answer of “yes,” then perhaps that the mother should consider sending her child to a jardin de niños. The state encouraged mothers to participate in the nation’s quest for modernity via a realignment of their relationships to their own kindergarten-age children.58 The structure of the SEP’s program reveals that mothers remained the primary target of parental education. Mothers of children attending one jardín de niños could attend a course titled “Expressions of applied art in the home.” The twohour class convened on Thursdays and, according to correspondence from an inspector, seventy women were enrolled for the class in July 1946.59 During the decade after the SEP reincorporated the jardines de niños, the definition of early childhood became more complex and the state expected mothers to participate more actively in their children’s lives. By the early 1950s, SEP officials stressed the importance of health in early childhood, based on an assertion that “the health of the adult is established in the first six years of life.”60 Likewise, according to “modern psychological studies,” the personality of a child was formed, by and large, in the first six years of life.61 Alongside hygiene, they attempted to inculcate children with “habits of good taste, order, work, cooperation and, above all, an optimistic attitude toward life: in the jardin de niños the little one learns to be cheerful and happy.”62 The jardin de niños would instill happiness in children, something which the SEP determined that if it were left up to parents, might not occur. As in the “Happiness Brigades,” the state intervened in the life of young children where parents were thought to have failed. Special celebrations like one dedicated to “The Day of the Child” ensured that kindergarteners would spend “a day full of happiness” as they received candy and toys or attended functions at the circus or movies, regardless of parents’ ability to provide these activities on a regular basis.63 Happiness was a recurring theme in the discourse of the SEP. Speaking of her disillusionment when encountering a cold environment in a jardín, Rosaura

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Zapata lamented the absence of “laughter and shining eyes” and the unfortunate sight of “lethargy and indifference in the little bodies.” In this situation, Zapata maintained that the jardín de niños failed to promote children’s “well-being precisely in the years that offer the existence of the most plasticity to achieve it.”64 SEP officials increasingly advocated state intervention in the early years of childhood because the period offered the best chance of success. During the 1951–52 school year, the General Directorate of Preschool Education inaugurated the Institute for the Improvement of the Child’s Situation in the Home and the Jardín de Niños (Instituto para Mejoramiento de la Situación del Nino en el Hogar y en el Jardín de Niños). The purpose of the institute was to educate teachers and mothers about the emotional needs and behavioral norms of the kindergarten-age child. To that end, the SEP sponsored conferences twice a month in the Manuel M. Ponce room in the Palace of Fine Arts. Within the imposing marble structure, teachers and mothers had the advice of doctors, psychologists, and child-specialists at their disposal. More than likely, the mothers the SEP was specifically targeting were not the ones who filled the seats at the conferences. Attending mothers were at least comfortable enough to pass through the intimidating palace doors and enter the realm of the state that awaited them inside. Regardless, the SEP declared it a success and noted that mothers and educators attended the conferences “making this union between the home and the jardin a reality, [which is] indispensable for the success of our educational labor.”65 In addition to these conferences, the SEP harnessed communication technology and screened movies to demonstrate how mothers should implement child-rearing practices and structured “an environment of hygiene, happiness, and work in the home and in the jardin de ninos as a complete unit, [creating a] bastion for the better formation of the child for the future.” Increased state power would necessarily affect the level of parental authority. The following schools in the Federal District all formed libraries filled with resources for mothers and teachers to help raise children properly: Brígida Alfaro, Estefanía Castañeda, Ricardo Castro, Matiana M. de Aveleyra, Manuel Cervantes Imaz, Manuel M. Ponce, Fray Pedro de Gante, and E. Pestalozzi.66 Clearly, the SEP wanted to educate mothers about the importance of appropriately raising their children and the state’s future citizens. Including mothers directly in state building, this strategy interfered in the private realm of the family life. The abundance of advice mothers received from the SEP indicates that the state worried that these parents were not properly doing so already.67

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The SEP intended the jardin de niños to impart social and cultural norms not just in the classroom, but also in the home and the community at large. Commenting on this effect, the SEP declared: “The jardines de niños are leaving their beneficent influence in the community, forming true paradises for the little one that lives in terrible hygienic conditions and for whose health it is an inappreciable benefit to spend various hours in an environment of beauty, hygiene, and happiness.” These children would then carry these standards back to their homes and slowly impress upon their parents the need to improve these conditions in the home. The SEP linked the work of the jardin de niños teacher with the greater good of Mexico. Zapata maintained that it was a teacher’s “happiness that constitutes a sedative to the sadness and melancholy of our race,” which “we find accentuated in the child of the indigenous communities, of the working class or of the morally abandoned.”68 As in other reformers’ visions, racialized and class-based ideologies informed the mission and the execution of the SEP’s program.69 In the SEP’s vision, kindergarteners would act as mini-agents of the state, promoting hygienic homes and national order. Regardless of the effectiveness of such tactics, SEP strategy reveals how seriously it addressed children as part of its citizenry. According to the SEP, the jardin de niños “Leonor López Orellana,” represented a beacon of “light and happiness” among the poor dwellings of the neighborhood where visitors reportedly asked themselves, “how is it possible that these clean little children, happy and vivacious, could come from these habitats where no shred of comfort or hygiene can be seen?” The linkage of “light and happiness” with the jardin de niños and the subsequent assertion that these conditions were absent from homes in the neighborhood convey the SEP’s disapproval of present home conditions. The SEP cited the following jardines de niños as having the same beneficial relationship to their poor neighborhood surroundings: “Héctor Pérez Martínez,” in the barrio Atlampa; “Amelia B. de Casas Alemán,” in the Colonia Escuadrón 201; “Ponciano G. Padilla,” near Panteón de Dolores; “El Pípila,” in Madereros; “Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz,” in Ixtacalco.70 The inspector of one zone noted that the majority of these jardines were “buried deep in the poorest barrios of the capital” and that the population there “needs to improve its living conditions, as much materially as morally.”71 The SEP presented this relationship with the home as a vital part of the education of children in jardines de niños. SEP officials failed to seriously consider how this might upset the balance of power in the home at a time of increasing state power. At times, the SEP received complaints from parents about various perceived deficiencies in jardines de niños. In 1942, one parent wrote to Rosaura

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Zapata to complain about the candies and sweets being sold at the jardin the child attended. According to the letter, the child became intoxicated after consuming treats purchased at the school. The parent signed the letter illegibly and failed to name the offending jardin “for fear of a personal reprisal against my child.” The complaint prompted Zapata to circulate a letter to all inspectors of jardines in the Federal District regarding the alleged intoxication and reminding them that they had been repeatedly told not to sell such items.72 Even though the SEP sought to include youngsters into its fold and tried to wrest control from parents, parents possessed moral authority and exercised the right to intervene on behalf of their children. Moreover, the previous incident demonstrates the difficulties inherent in the organizational structure of the educational system. SEP policy might dictate clear guidelines but individual teachers and administrators could choose to ignore such directives. In addition to developing and centralizing preschool education, the SEP desperately needed to increase the number of classrooms for the city’s primary school children. In the next section, we see how the SEP addressed the lack of adequate educational facilities in the nation’s capital and how it reveals the variegated material conditions of children’s lives in the urban environment.

Scarcity of schools in the Federal District Even if every child in the Federal District had possessed the luxury of time and parental support to attend a jardin de niños or primary school, the reality of too few schools prevented many children from attending. It is difficult to know with any precision the number of children who went without schooling, but the fact that the SEP publicly acknowledged the problem and that the press frequently reported on it means that it presented a real concern that contemporaries discussed frequently. This section of the chapter addresses the campaign for new-school construction (both primary schools and jardines de niños) and demonstrates how it brought the public into the nation through their participation in this project. The campaign underscored the educational needs of children and linked its importance to the future of the Mexican nation. As early as 1944, SEP officials recognized the difficulties inherent in educating the city’s children. With so many children to educate (sometimes in a relatively small area), SEP officials remarked that this presented but one of many problems, noting that the “demographic composition of peasants (campesinos), workers, artisans, servants, professionals, civil servants, etc.”, proved to be “very difficult to manage as

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a consequence of their diversity of culture, political position, and distinct interest.”73 As an intermediary between these “diverse” parents and their children, the school would be a socializing and modernizing influence. SEP officials noted the social stratification present in the city and challenges that it posed to them. Moreover, the mention of the “diversity of culture” reflected the middle-class status of the educational reformers and the class-based messages it conveyed to all students. By the late 1940s, a lively discussion of the school problem appeared in Mexico City’s daily press. In an article about the school construction, one author linked national and ethnic identity with children’s education: “It is necessary that once and for all, the image of the Mexican Indian, suffering, stoic, naïve, and uncultured, be abolished.” The image, the author maintained, constituted a “burden for the nation” that had to be remedied. Children, it seemed, represented the best place to begin.74 If children received a proper education, the notion of Mexico as a nation of “backward” Indians would fade into the background of the international collective memory. As historian Stephen E. Lewis has demonstrated, that celebratory SEP policy regarding the indigenous people of the 1920s and 1930s changed dramatically during the early 1940s. According to Lewis: “National priorities shifted had to the rapidly industrializing cities, and Mexico’s entry into World War II in 1942 resurrected calls for national unity and the dream of a culturally homogenous nation.”75 The Cold War–era social and political milieu promoted assimilation of indigenous groups. In addition to the state, the Mexican Catholic Church articulated its approval of Catholics’ participation in the endeavor. The church and the ruling party abandoned earlier hostilities associated with anticlerical reform and Catholic agitation of the 1920s and 1930s in favor of a more mutually beneficial relationship in the post-1940 era. The archbishop of Mexico, Luis María Martínez, publicly recommended that Catholics support the new-school construction program. Jueves de Excélsior printed a copy of the excitativa alongside this same article. Using official church documents, the press and the state communicated to citizens that the school construction program enjoyed the support of the church.76 In 1947, the SEP reported that it worried about “the momentous problem of the excess school population in the Federal District, with deficient educational possibilities.” The problem would be addressed by an “emergency plan” that would utilize 240 available classrooms and the construction of 200 “emergency classrooms of a special type,” could increase the classrooms for city children.77 In that same year, the SEP reported an increase in teaching personnel within the ministry, which translated to “the total elimination of, in the Federal District, the problem of teachers without work.”78 The General Directorate called the Federal

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District’s “scarcity of school buildings one of the most important problems of the moment” and tried to ameliorate the situation by a variety of means. For example, the SEP increased school enrollment in primary schools by creating 27 “escuelas vespertinas and 25 escuelas nocturnas to accommodate a total of 6,598 new students.” The SEP also rented two private properties to create two new schools with a total of six hundred students. In addition to constructing new classrooms on existing federally owned buildings, the SEP built some completely new buildings so that twenty-eight new classrooms were available to accommodate 1400 students in each of the school shifts.79 As the scarcity of schools was a problem that was acknowledged repeatedly, a committee was formed specifically to build new schools. During the 1949– 50 school year, the Comité Federal Pro Construcción de Escuelas (Federal Committee for School Construction) erected new jardines de niños in Ixtacalco and Observatorio, Tacubaya (both located in the Federal District). The SEP relied in part on private initiative to equip and staff the schools. For example, the Society of Mothers paid the salaries of sixteen teachers and one assistant in various jardines de niños in the Federal District during that same school year.80 The SEP relied on the press to publicize the campaign and to make its progress visible to society at large. The Comite Coordinador de la Campaña Pro Construcción de Escuelas (The Coordinating Committee for the Campaign for School Construction) issued a public letter in Jueves de Excélsior, thanking the publication for the cooperation it provided in the campaign to construct new schools. In the letter, the committee commended the enthusiastic response to the new-school campaign, stating “all social sectors of the country have responded to the call of the President: the Army, workers, campesinos, the clergy, artists, banking, shopkeeper and, of course, the press.”81 The publicity surrounding the campaign for new-school construction served to remind Mexicans that their government provided for them and their children but also reinforced the notion that their participation remained vital to the success of the program. Just as it had employed radio technology in the jardines de niños, in this project too, the SEP took advantage of mass communication. In this instance, the state used print media to convey its messages and involve the citizenry in the school construction project.82 According to newspaper accounts, the city’s industrialists contributed significantly to the new-school construction campaign. The Banco de México built a new school in Milpa Alta with room for six hundred students. The Unión Nacional de Productores de Azúcar, S.A., constructed a school in the colonia Defensores de la Republica (the school carried the same name) with a capacity

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for 2400 students. Additionally, the paper company Loreto y Peña Pobre in San Angel donated money to fund the school “Alberto Lanz” with a capacity for six hundred students.83 Aarón Sáenz, President of Banco Industrial y de Comercio, S.A., Financiera Industrial Azucarera, Seguros Atlas, Fianzas Atlas, y Banco Inmobiliario Atlas, S.A., announced that he would fund a school according to SEP specifications and entrusted the selection of the location to the SEP. Bruno Pagliai, General Manager of the Hipódromo de las Américas, offered to pay for the construction and equipment, including furniture, for a school with the capacity to hold six hundred students. Perhaps even more noteworthy was the fact that when wealthy citizens failed to offer their services or fulfill promises, the press publicly admonished them. The report goes on to chastise Fernando Casas Alemán then regent of the Federal District, for not yet beginning to fulfill his promise of building a school in the colonia Moderna.84 Gual Vidal, then head of the SEP, asked for the cooperation of private individuals and businesses.85 Agents of print media certainly fulfilled their duties in publicizing the lack of schools in the city and in detailing the progress to remedy the situation. The participation of the public in this campaign materialized and public manifestations of support played a key role. According to one account, more than a hundred thousand school children from the Federal District paraded around the historic city center on May 14, 1948. The parading children celebrated the donations and progress made toward school construction and perhaps reminded city residents of the task that still needed to be completed. Beginning from the historic monument to King Carlos IV, el caballito, the children marched through the city and later passed by the balcony of the National Palace where the President participated from the balcony.86 For spectators, the children’s parade demonstrated the importance of children to the nation’s future, specifically their education, and conveyed the notion that the state valued its youngest members of society. For its child participants, the activity reminded them of their inclusion in the nation while placing them in the midst of a real-life civics lesson.87 Coordinating the fund-raising efforts and ensuring that the actual construction of new schools completed was a slow process. Parents from the school “Siete de Enero” in Tacubaya wrote to the director of primary school education in the Federal District, Enrique Huerta Luna, regarding the status of their fund-raising efforts. The group reported that it had secured the land and over 6000 pesos for the building costs. Fortunately for this group of parents and students, they managed to secure 5000 pesos from Mario Moreno, better known as Cantínflas, one of the most famous Mexican film stars of the time. The parents contributed the remaining 1100 pesos.88 The celebrity affiliation this

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school secured undoubtedly aided their cause with the SEP and provided the institution with a ready-made publicity event. While parents and students awaited the construction of new schools, some made do without a proper school building in the meantime. Students at the “Santa Cruz de las Salinas” school in the Federal District received instruction outside sitting on the “good earth” or uncomfortable rocks while the construction of their school proceeded.89 More fortunate students at the school “Día del Arbol” celebrated the first anniversary of their new school by planting trees and participating in a ceremony that unveiled a new slide in the recreation area.90 Despite success stories such as this one, newspaper coverage of school conditions frequently cited children sitting on crates because their schools lacked desks and chairs. Parents wishing to send their children to private schools had to shell out the necessary funds. The private bilingual school “France-Amerique” located at Avenida Pirineos 770 in the wealthy neighborhood Lomas de Chapultepec offered preschool instruction for children aged three to six for 25 pesos per month and primary school education for 30 pesos per month, in addition to the 8 pesos registration fee, according to the school’s brochure from 1945. Students at this private school attended class from 9:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m., which included daily English instruction.91 Residents in wealthier sectors of the capital had greater options for educating their children, and some considered the acquisition of English as important to their class-based aspirations. Even in private schools overcrowding remained a problem. A 1949 inspection of the private school “Madrid” indicates that the number of students in each classroom surpassed the supposed maximum number of fifty students. In keeping with conservative gender norms, the primary school maintained separate buildings for boys and girls, located at Avenida Mixcoac #68 and Emprese #2, respectively. Inspector Natalio Cerecedo Cortina reported that when he questioned the director of the school about the attendance rate, the director replied that the previous inspector had authorized the school to have more than eighty students in each group. Additionally, the inspector noted that the teachers were of Spanish origin and that “not one Mexican teacher” could be found, thus violating the Ley de Trabajo, which stated that 75 percent of teachers had to be Mexican.92 While the SEP sought to control what transpired in public and private schools subject to its oversight, clearly its ability to do so was limited in some cases. The material conditions of schools in the Federal District varied tremendously. Inspector Maria de la Luz Ramirez recorded the conditions of the private school

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“Modern America” in colonia Del Valle of the Federal District. The lengthy 1953 report detailed the physical conditions of the school and judged the aesthetic environment. The newly constructed school building was made of concrete and had tiled floors. The inspector opined that the building “provides hygiene and comfort that Modern Pedagogy demands.” On the walls, the different shades of green “were selected scientifically to avoid visual deficiencies in the students.” The inspector enumerated the number of washrooms and drinking fountains for boys and girls, pronouncing them “sufficient in number and in a state of perfect order.” In addition to the eight “spacious classrooms,” the building contained a music room, a room for special classes, and two large patios for recreation, where they were planning to construct a court for basketball and volleyball.93 The glowing review this private school earned contrasted sharply with the reality some other children experienced, and highlights the disparities between conditions in some private schools and public facilities. The request for incorporation from another private school, “Cristina F. De Merino” in colonia Portales from the school’s director reveals a quite different scenario for children from this “poor neighborhood.” The school, which received children without tuition, did not have flooring in the hallways or the playground and the rooms lacked doors and windows. Regardless, the school received incorporation shortly after petitioning.94 The range of children’s experiences in school varied according to the socioeconomic background of its neighborhood’s inhabitants. Through the auspices of the SEP, many parents entered the bureaucracy of the state. Parents appealed to the SEP in the hope that their children’s educational facilities would be improved. A group of over forty mothers signed a letter to the Minister of Public Education on behalf of the primary school in Santa María Ticomán located in the delegation of Gustavo A. Madero in the Federal District. The delegation was one of the fastest growing areas of the city, and by the last census in 1950 completed before this 1953 petition, the area counted 82,694 children, who comprised 40.37 percent of that delegation’s total population. In 1940, the child population in Gustavo A. Madero had been just 15,574 youngsters. By 1960, it had skyrocketed to 264,759 boys and girls; little wonder there were not enough schools. The mothers wrote to inform the Minister that the building was in “a state of complete ruin” and that over five hundred children attending were in “imminent danger.” Appealing to the Minister, the mothers referred to “our innocent little children” in the hope that their plea for safer schooling facilities might be answered. The mothers complained that the school had no lavatories or potable water. The children were forced to carry their own

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seat and a little table with them as the school did not provide these. Flooding had caused the school to close for a period of three months and mothers feared that the walls might crumble, calling it a “real death threat to our children.”95 While the outcome of this appeal is not known, its very existence demonstrates the dilapidated conditions of some schools and the vested interest that many parents had in their children’s well-being. Parents—emboldened by the rhetorical importance placed on children to the nation—looked to the state to resolve problems like this one. Despite public and private efforts to address the scarcity of schools in the Federal District, the problem persisted and even those children with educational facilities possessed no guarantee of the conditions in which they were expected to learn. In one instance, a group of local businessmen in conjunction with local mothers wrote to President Adolfo López Mateos (1958–64) regarding the unsatisfactory condition of the jardin de niños in their neighborhood. The letter, written at least a decade after the original presidential appeal to the public regarding the new-school-construction campaign, was an appeal regarding the jardin “Bertha Dominguez” located in the colonia Morelos. The jardín had existed since 1945 and the complaint was that the walls were in such a state of disrepair that they posed a serious danger to the children. The concerned group of mothers and businessmen asked that an inspection be done by the SEP and that an architect survey the school. They also explained that because the majority of these children came from humble origins, they often came to school with empty stomachs. They added that the children were the future of the country and “we hope that they should not be abandoned.” They requested physical inspection of the school building and school breakfasts for some of the 350 children attending the jardin de niños.96 Clearly, the SEP had not resolved the problem of adequate facilities and appropriate school conditions. Perhaps it should come as little surprise that the organized campaign and the publicity surrounding new-school construction would occur during the presidency of Alemán (1946–52). For it was during these years that federal expenditure for education as a percentage of total expenditures dipped to its lowest point during two separate years, 1949 (7.5 percent) and then again in 1952 (7.1 percent).97 A juxtaposition of the mostly optimistic reports in the press on new-school construction with the actual conditions of schools and their lack of adequate facilities reveals evidence that the state had not achieved its goal of solving the “monumental” problem in the Federal District. From the late 1940s, the SEP reacted to the growing city population of children by publicizing the need for more schools and by asking for the assistance of

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private citizens in the endeavor. While many individuals heeded the call of President Alemán and participated in this process, the results proved uneven at best. The state called upon private initiative to help organize and finance the provision of educational facilities for children as it increasingly asked parents to cede more control over their own children. When President López Mateos announced plans to revamp primary school education in December 1959, some parents reacted negatively and vigorously expressed their opposition.98

Parents and the SEP clash over textbooks Because the state considered children to be political beings and future citizens, the educational system sought to more effectively educate and inculcate them, particularly by the late 1950s. Historically, parents wishing to send their children to school needed to interact with the bureaucracy of the state since the inception of federal education. For example, children entering primary school for the first time had to be six years old, present proof of vaccination, not suffer from contagious disease, and be presented by a parent or guardian responsible for each child.99 By the late 1950s, the state attempted to increase its hold over the city’s youngest inhabitants. Again, the SEP used print media to communicate ideologies and goals, sometimes reproducing portions of speeches made by high-level officials in the press. Through the standardization of textbooks in the early 1960s, the SEP hoped to more effectively control the formation of the nation’s children. The relationship between political indoctrination and education is unmistakable in a speech given by the Minister of Education, Jaime Torres Bodet on July 29, 1959. He declared that the goal of education was to form “a Mexican ready for the moral test of democracy, understanding democracy not only as a legal structure and a political regime, always perfectible, but rather as a system of life constantly oriented to the economic, social, and cultural improvement of the people; a Mexican interested above all in the progress of his country, . . . a Mexican resolved to consolidate the political and economic independence of the patria.”100 It was this “system of life” that the SEP tried to convey to children during an era when the state aimed to consolidate its power over its citizenry. In early 1962 Jaime Torres Bodet, boldly stated: “The future of Mexican children is in the textbooks.”101 Disagreement over the meaning of the role of the state in children’s lives characterized the historical moment, especially since the middle class and the Catholic laity had gained ground in the political arena by mid-

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century. When the SEP unveiled its obligatory textbook plan, some parents protested, despite the fact that the SEP distributed the textbooks free of charge. In December 1959, the President approved the Plan Nacional para la Expansión y Mejoramiento de la Educación Primaria (National Plan for the Expansion and Improvement of Primary Education), later referred to as the Plan de Once Años (The Eleven-Year Plan).102 According to contemporary SEP explanations, “the profound changes of our time” necessitated the reform of primary school education, and officials specifically cited the changes that had occurred since the Second World War.103 The Minister of Education maintained that the instruction would give the student “the moral training of the next citizen, not only as a subject of the State, but rather a personality conscious of his rights but no less conscious of his obligations to his family, his school, his city, the entire nation.”104 While the scope of a child’s obligations was reportedly national, the Federal District represented the benchmark for education, according to Torres Bodet. The reform was intended to standardize education so that “the school of any poblado/small village . . . will be as Mexican and as useful as any good school in the capital.”105 During a July 1959 meeting, the Comisión Nacional de los Libros de Texto Gratuitos (National Commission of Free Textbooks) announced an invitation to all printers and bookbinders to submit proposals to the SEP for the development of sixteen million books, one for each of the six years of primary school.106 The new textbooks were part of a larger program to reform education. SEP officials noted that improvements in the system would de-emphasize rote memorization.107 Through the press, the SEP introduced educational reforms to the public and sought to convey an image of openness and democratic participation in the process. However it would soon become clear that, at least in terms of the implementation of obligatory textbooks, parents had little power in overturning the state’s initiative. In the 1950s, journalists and parents sometimes commented on the high price of textbooks in newspaper articles, years before the implementation of López Mateos’s reforms. In 1954, one newspaper commentary suggested that the government create a monopoly for the production of textbooks, maintaining that it constituted an area where government control was justifiable and desirable. Citing the constitution’s provision of obligatory, free primary school education, the author noted that in recent years it more accurately resembled the “privilege and benefit of some.”108 It is doubtful that parents would have known that the then Minister of Education José Angel Ceniceros had completed a law degree in 1925 with a thesis titled “Penal Law of Bolshevik Russia.” Later, from 1944 to 1947,

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he served as the Ambassador to Cuba, well before the Cuban Revolution but undoubtedly was keenly aware of the rapidly radicalizing politics on the island.109 According to a 1957 newspaper report, the SEP exhorted the directors of private schools “not to abuse the economic condition of the parents” by submitting lengthy school supply lists, “as is their custom.”110 Even if students attended public schools, parents were still expected to cover the cost of books and supplies. Given the precarious economic situation of many city dwellers, these costs could be significant or even prohibitive in sending their children to school. During a ceremony on January 12, 1960, Torres Bodet presented the first free textbook (for the first year of primary school) to President López Mateos. Also in attendance were the head of the textbook commission, Martín Luis Guzmán, and the head of the government-subsidized paper company Productora e Importadora de Papel, S.A. (PIPSA), Agustín Arroyo Ch. President López Mateos reminded conference attendees: “This is an historic date because it begins to fulfill a promise made to the Mexican people and a debt that the Revolution has with its own people.”111 While the President invoked the power of revolutionary ideology, his rhetoric failed to convince some parents that their rights over their children were not being challenged through the standardization of textbooks. The unequivocal response by the Minister of Education reveals how fruitless this opposition became. In his February 1962 speech Torres Bodet reacted to the opposition of the free textbooks: “One organization, that is called the National Union of Parents, has insisted on determined condemnation of the free textbooks and of the school programs existing since February 1961.” Torres Bodet next explained the specifics of the program so that “the public is not confused.” His reply rests largely on the idea that the textbooks, because they are free, would improve the chances of fulfilling the promise of education for all as dictated by the constitution. Torres Bodet represented the obligatory textbooks as an equalizing force capable of combating poverty and noted the “free textbooks are within the reach of all hands.” He reasoned “because everyone has them, they serve all schoolchildren democratically, without unjust discriminations, imposed by the economic situation of their parents.” Torres Bodet’s comments reveal continual state gestures to the shortcomings of parents in raising the future citizens of Mexico. In addition, he acknowledged the economic inequalities that continued to plague Mexico, more than five decades after the initial fighting of the revolution began. The opposition to the textbooks had little to do with providing books to those who could not afford them previously. Rather, it centered on ceding control to

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the state and jeopardizing that of the Catholic Church. The Unión Nacional de Padres de Familia (UNPF), a Catholic organization, was founded in reaction to the promulgation of Article 3 of the 1917 Constitution. As Valentina Torres Septién points out, the organization had been on the defensive since its creation.112 The organization’s campaigns to alter state educational policy appeared periodically in the press since its inception. In the early 1940s, members of the UNPF collected signatures and sent them to the President and Minister of Education, urging them to reform Article 3, and the state eventually relented.113 In 1950, the UNPF published open letters to the President in various periodicals asking for “freedom in education,” invoking the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Man recently discussed by the United Nations in Mexico.114 The organization’s invocation of the international decree reveals the influence of such international organizations and the perceived importance its messages would carry in the eyes of the Mexican state. According to Torres Septién, during the presidency of Ruiz Cortines (1952– 58) the government consistently ignored the associations of parents yet private schools functioned “without being bothered by the authorities” and without inspection.115 Reasserting its authority in the early 1960s, the SEP (as embodied by Minister Torres Bodet) reacted strongly to the opposition of obligatory textbooks. Returning to the speech of Torres Bodet, the harsh tone with which he concluded reveals the limitations placed on parents’ authority by the state. Parents certainly voiced their displeasure with specific policies, but the state allowed only so much interference in curriculum or state control of education. Minister Torres Bodet sternly advised parents of their options: They say that the obligatory free text book is illegal. Surprising, that over the years, the obligatory character of the officially authorized commercial textbooks has not aroused the same criticism. . . . In conclusion, then, those who deem that the obligatory use of free textbooks violates any of the guarantees established by the Constitution, can appeal to the federal tribunals in defense of the right they believe they have.116

The Minister’s reaction to the controversy reveals the increasing power of the Mexican state over the post-1940 decades. For the vocal parents who opposed the standardized textbooks, the benefit of free textbooks paled in comparison to their loss of influence in determining the content. In terms of the larger picture, it was perhaps more indicative of the opposition some parents demonstrated against the increasing control of the state over their children.

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Conclusion In the post-1940 period, education officials devoted considerable attention to the material well-being and happiness of children as education extended beyond instruction in the traditional subjects. The international arena entered the classroom and the state considered transnational forces and audiences important in policy decisions. Through the SEP, the state successfully expanded its reach in the Federal District, though with some limitations. For those children whose parents either did not want to send them to a jardin de niños or simply could not afford to do so, social outreach efforts either provided minimal benefit or appeared to be intrusive indoctrination to the intended recipients. In what other ways did the SEP fail to achieve its goals? SEP officials could not afford to expend too much energy on the jardín de niños demographic group as primary school education remained a problem throughout the period. Despite much publicity to the efforts made, the SEP was unable to provide adequate educational facilities for the rapidly expanding population of children in the Federal District. Yet, by the 1960s, the SEP was sufficiently powerful to reject challenges to state authority as evidenced by the textbook controversy. This chapter demonstrates how the SEP centralized preschool education and sought to regulate activities in the jardines de niños. Kindergarten-age children, no longer beings to be simply watched over, learned the precepts of citizenship and participated in public demonstrations of childhood. These youngsters received indoctrination in Mexican national identity and existed in a political milieu. The state reached out to children in poor neighborhoods through activities designed to draw in boys and girls not attending jardines. According to the SEP’s vision, the jardin represented a refuge of cleanliness and happiness for children in some neighborhoods. The SEP maintained that children learned good habits and values that, by extension, reached parents in the privacy of their homes.117 By the late 1940s, the Mexican state reacted to the growing number of children in the Federal District and the lack of appropriate educational facilities to serve them. It called on members of society to participate in this project, which ultimately would serve to uplift Mexico. As far as the conditions of schools were concerned, we see that the reality failed to live up to the rhetoric of the SEP. Despite goals to provide all children with the necessary material conditions to thrive, the economic reality meant that not all children benefited from the SEP’s efforts, despite good intentions and rhetoric insisting that every child mattered to the public good.

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The controversy that emerged in early 1960s after the implementation of the obligatory textbook program demonstrates the SEP’s growing assertion of authority over children’s intellectual and moral formation. Despite the objection of some parents to the standardization of primary school textbooks, the state claimed that they had no basis on which to oppose the program. Nevertheless, state power was limited. By 1970, national figures for completion of primary school (all six years) were bleak: 70 percent of the population fifteen years of age and older had not completed their elementary education. In Mexico City in 1980, less than 40 percent of heads of household had completed primary school.118 While the SEP increased its presence in the postrevolutionary and Cold War eras, it is clear that most children went in and out of the school system during the course of their childhoods; indeed, many never completed the intended obligatory primary years. The SEP, in accordance with state policy, privileged the Federal District over the countryside. Teachers from the states looked to educators in the capital for guidance in the form of enrichment conferences, radio broadcasts, and curriculum suggestions emanating from Mexico City. The methods used by the SEP to connect individuals and convey its messages are also illustrative of the innovation and flexibility of the state. In March 1949, the SEP created the Departamento de Educación Audiovisual (Department of Audiovisual Education).119 In the classroom, the SEP used technology to educate children. Newspapers, conferences, pamphlets, radio broadcasts, and workshops educated parents, mostly mothers, on the goals of the SEP and on how to properly raise children. In addition, the SEP mobilized the children themselves to act out public manifestations of idealized childhood in ceremonies, organized play, and parades in the Federal District. Through public education, the state sought to remake childhood and affect the political and social formation of children. The SEP redefined childhood by pushing back the ideal age at which children were to leave the home for extended periods of time for socialization and instruction. According to the state’s plan, children would learn better in a controlled environment and also benefit from interaction with others of their age group. In the postrevolutionary and Cold War era, the Mexican state represented a powerful force in the construction of childhood and pursued an educational policy designed to increase its influence among children at the expense of parental authority. The state reached into children’s lives at an early age and moved beyond the formal confines of the classroom. Using mass media, technology, and the organization of children themselves, the state indoctrinated children with Mexican national identity at the same time that it allowed transnational currents to enter the classroom.

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Table 2.1 Ministers of Education in Mexico (1921–70) President

Minister of Education

Álvaro Obregón (December 1, 1920 to November 30, 1924)

José Vasconcelos (October 2, 1921 to July 1924) Bernardo J. Gastélum (July 2, 1924 to November 30, 1924)

Plutarco Elías Calles (December 1, 1924 to November 30, 1928)

José Manuel Puig Casauranc (December 1, 1924 to August 22, 1928) Moisés Saénz (August 23, 1928 to November 30, 1928)

Emilio Portes Gil (November 30, 1928 to February 5, 1930)

Ezequiel Padilla (November 30, 1928 to February 5, 1930)

Pascual Ortiz Rubio (February 5, 1930 to September 4, 1931)

Aarón Sáenz (February 5, 1930 to October 8, 1930) Carlos Trejo y Lerdo de Tejada (October 9, 1930 to December 9, 1930) José Manuel Puig Casauranc (December 9, 1930 to Sepember 22, 1931) Alejandro Cerisola (Sepember 22, 1931 to October 15, 1931) Narciso Bassols (October 21, 1931 to Sepember 2, 1932)

Abelardo L. Rodríguez Narciso Bassols (September 4, 1932 to November 30, 1934) (Sepember 5, 1932 to May 9, 1934) Eduardo Vasconcelos (May 9, 1934 to November 30, 1934) Lázaro Cárdenas (December 1, 1934 to November 30, 1940)

Ignacio García Téllez (December 1, 1934 to June 15, 1934) Gonzalo Vázquez Vela (June 17, 1935 to November 30, 1940)

Manuel Ávila Camacho (December 1, 1940 to November 30, 1946)

Luis Sánchez Pontón (December 1, 1940 to Sepember 12, 1941) Octavio Véjar Vázquez (Sepember 12, 1941 to December 20, 1943) Jaime Torres Bodet (December 23, 1943 to November 30, 1946)

Miguel Aleman Valdés (December 1, 1946 to November 30, 1952)

Manuel Gual Vidal (December 1, 1946 to November 30, 1952)

Adolfo Ruiz Cortines (December 1, 1952 to November 30, 1958)

José Ángel Ceniceros (December 1, 1952 to November 30, 1958)

Adolfo López Mateos (December 1, 1958 to November 30, 1964)

Jaime Torres Bodet (December 1, 1958 to November 30, 1964)

Gustavo Díaz Ordaz (December 1, 1964 to November 30, 1970)

Agustín Yáñez (December 1, 1964 to November 30, 1970)120

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Table 2.2 Number of Jardines de Niños121 Year

Federal District Federales

1943 1944 1948 1949/50 1950/51 1951

86 89 117 115 116 120

Particulares 75 100 68 73124 82125 64

Rest of the Republic Federales 220 255 (no data)123 342126

Particulars 63 75122

3

Popular Culture and Entertainment through the Lens of Childhood, 1934–63

Beginning in the 1930s, Mexico witnessed the advent of a distinct children’s media culture that flourished over the next several decades as radio, films, and later television increasingly catered to the youngest members of society with their innovative programs and content. The availability of new forms of communication increased during the period and reached more and more of the city’s—and the nation’s—children. Even when households lacked these new technological contraptions, boys and girls could pay a few pesos to watch or listen at a neighbor’s house, on street corners, or in the window of shops for free. Government-set price limits on the cost of admission to movie theaters also expanded the child audience for this form of entertainment; even the poorest children in Mexico City had recollections of seeing films during their formative years. At times, the proliferation of mass media in the postrevolutionary decades not only competed with but also complemented messages coming from other sites of influences such as the government, the Catholic Church, and adult authority figures like parents. The race was on to control the minds and proclivities of Mexican children, and there were many competing messages emanating from different sites of influence. The formation of the nation’s children was a messy affair and the multiple sites of influence often overlapped. In fact, the government was intimately involved with cultural productions from the very beginning but the exact nature of the relationship changed as political ideologies and the ruling party evolved over time and also varied depending on the medium of information dissemination. Not only did a new subculture that was directed at children emerge during this era, but cultural productions that used children as their subject matter in the larger popular culture also became more common. Children figured prominently as subjects on the silver screen, and directors and writers used the trope of childhood to explore larger sociopolitical issues. Both types of

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cultural productions—those aimed at children and those depicting children— demonstrate their societal importance in postrevolutionary and Cold War Mexico. The importance of mass media in the lives of children and youth who were raised during this era was unmistakable. When political dissent reached its boiling point in the 1968 student movement, mass media played an important role in expressing their demands and communicating with students. Students demanded negotiations be televised (they were not) and images created for the media campaigns related to 1968 Olympic Games were appropriated and used by student protestors.1 During the 1968 student movement, students often parodied radio and television commercials in their chants and songs of protest.2 Ironically, the state’s promotion of popular culture in the postrevolutionary and Cold War decades encouraged the evolution of a youth culture with its own distinct identity. During the two decades of the revolution’s institutionalization (1920–40) into a mostly stable political apparatus, a cultural revolution occurred in tandem, which bolstered the power of the state. Literacy rates increased, thanks to federal educational projects that began in 1921, and the state skillfully employed old and new mediums to communicate messages of the revolution by using proscriptive visual, written, and audio forms to illustrate state ideology. Mexico’s internationally renowned mural movement of the 1920s and 1930s led by Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, and David Siquieros under the direction of the SEP communicated the ideals of the revolution and the history of Mexico from the pre-Conquest era through those dramatic days of revolutionary fervor.3 The murals were a handy way for the state to connect with a population that still lacked basic literacy immediately following the revolution. The state used cultural nationalism to consolidate its power and to encourage the development of a domestically produced mass culture. This occurred perhaps most famously in Mexican cinema, which expanded rapidly during the Second World War, and later produced a “Golden Age” of highly acclaimed and popular films. In part due to Hollywood’s dedication to bolstering the war effort and promotion of hemispheric unity during the global conflagration of the Second World War, Mexico developed a national film industry with the help of domestic government protectionism and subsidies. Mexican cinema’s first film with dialogue, Santa (Female Saint), debuted in 1931 and told the story of a deflowered young woman who falls into prostitution in the capital city after her family shuns her.4 The emergence of talkies changed the film industry because the previously silent films’ universal appeal crumbled as dialogue was introduced and national cinemas developed in many countries. The state’s

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project of cultural nationalism in the 1930s and early 1940s allowed for the development of Mexico’s film industry; Mexico produced 752 films in the 1940s, more than three times the number made in the previous decade.5 Foreign influence in popular culture expanded even further during the Cold War era: as a result, Mexican children grew up with a wide variety of domestic and foreigninfluenced cultural productions. Private enterprise played no small role in the development and expansion of popular culture for and about children. Cinema and radio took a backseat as state policy later favored a relationship with private enterprise in the new medium that proved so important in the 1950s and 1960s: television. Children frequently constituted either the object or subject of mass media production. The intersection of children’s lives and developments in mass media and politics provides a remarkable opportunity for an investigation of the importance held by both in society. In October 1934, the voice of Francisco Gabilondo Soler’s signature character, Cri-Crí, first appeared in the homes of Mexican children over the radio waves, entertaining and acculturating them in the process. During the Second World War, Walt Disney enjoyed a harmonious relationship with President Miguel Alemán as he toured Mexico, gathering material for any one of his several Good Neighbor policy films that were hits in Mexico. As the Cold War accelerated, the relationship between the two countries warmed even though Mexico kept its revolutionary rhetoric alive by positively portraying Cuba’s revolutionaries on television newscasts6 and subsequently recognizing its government. Television news reports also covered Soviet Vice-Prime Minister Anastas I. Mikoyan’s Mexico City visit on November 19, 1959, including his meeting with President López Mateos and Minister of Education, Jaime Torres Bodet.7 As children became the subjects of films in Mexico, societal concerns and historic triumphs emerged on the silver screen, using children to communicate these ideas to the masses. Films like Nostoros los pobres (We the Poor; 1947) and Una familia de tantas (A Family Among Many; 1948) showcased life in Mexico City, the first romanticizing poverty in a vecindad and the latter articulating family dynamics and generational conflicts in the midst of tensions between tradition and modernity. From a much more sinister perspective, Luis Buñuel’s Los olvidados (translated into English as both The Young and the Damned and The Forgotten Ones; 1950) featured a gritty portrayal of Mexico City’s deleterious effect on boys without good parental role models. Hugo Butler’s Los pequeños gigantes (The Tiny Giants; 1958) celebrated Mexico’s triumph over the United States in the 1957 Little League World Championship. Taken as a whole, these cultural productions provide a window unto changing forms of mass media entertainment

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and how children and childhood related to sociopolitical developments. By the early 1960s, television viewing had largely eclipsed in popularity the other forms of entertainment. The presence of children as participants in popular culture and as its subject matter indicates their increased importance to society, film and television producers, and the state. Historians and scholars of media studies have addressed various aspects of each industry’s separate development and to a lesser extent, the meanings of content produced for mass consumption in the decades from 1930 to 1970. Scholars have analyzed the development of the radio industry, the content of Cold War television and its close relationship between private business interests and state power, and how the state gradually privileged television over cinema during the so-called “pax priísta.”8 Given the importance of Mexico’s “Golden Age” of cinema to the country’s status in the international film world, many have written about the development of the industry and the content of these films. Nevertheless, scholars have not employed the lens of childhood to examine how this perspective changes our interpretation of popular culture more broadly. Mary Kay Vaughan provides an interesting look at the intersection between an individual painter raised during this era and Cri-Crí. But none of these scholars has considered why children constituted such an important target audience for all mediums during these decades and to what effect on a grander scale. Producers of mass media targeted children because they were the largest demographic group, they were malleable and receptive to new forms of entertainment and socialization, and they were important future (if not current) consumers and citizens. Of equal importance here are the reasons why children and childhood frequently became the subject of cultural productions and the effect of this phenomenon: their presence and the discussion of issues affecting them underscored the larger societal importance placed on young people and the effect, felt for decades to come, was that they were immersed in a complex world of political and social messages brought to them by the new mediums. By the late 1960s mass media had eroded to some degree the more traditional sites of power and authority over youth. Carlos Monsiváis articulated the importance of television’s introduction and its effects on the family when he labeled it “the great interlocutor to whom the family conversation gave way.” In a retrospective analysis regarding the importance of television to childhood memories dating from the 1960s to the 1980s, Monsiváis recalled, “the image of childhood quickly became inseparable from that of TV.”9

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Cri-Crí and the creation of a childhood culture Cri-Crí, a little violin-playing cricket, ushered in a new child-centered culture that proved not only wildly popular but also widely accessible to children in the capital, beginning in the 1930s. The appearance of a long-running children’s radio program constituted the first marker on the historical timeline of children’s popular entertainment. On Monday, October 15, 1934, over the airwaves of radio station XEW, Francisco Gabilondo Soler first appeared in the homes of children where he would become a staple for nearly three decades. When the voice inside the radio asked: “And who is that señor?” (Y quién es ese señor?) radio listeners in their homes enthusiastically shouted: “The singing cricket!” (El grillo cantor!)10 For the next twenty-seven years, Mexican children would gather around the radio and listen to his stories and songs composed especially for them.11 During the live broadcast, Gabilondo Soler created a framework for children to imagine the particulars of his characters and stories.12 Accompanied by piano, violin, marimba, bells, double bass, animal noises, and other sound effects, he told children about his adventures and the lessons he learned along the way.13 The success of the radio program would prove to be a long-lived but singular phenomenon in children’s entertainment in Mexico. The popularity of Cri-Crí spread beyond the weekly radio broadcast as children learned the songs and sang them at home, at play, and in school, especially in the jardines de niños of SEP. The popularity of Cri-Crí represents a phenomenon that can be explained partially by the fortuitous timing in the Mexican radio industry’s development and partially by the wide-reaching appeal of Gabilondo Soler’s songs. When CriCrí debuted in 1934, decades before television would compete with radio for an audience, a mass market for children’s entertainment had just begun to open up in Mexico. The radio station XEW, owned and operated by Emilio Azcárraga Vidaurreta, was the most powerful station in Mexico. By the end of the 1930s, it had “positioned itself as a virtual cultural branch of the Mexican state.”14 During the Second World War, US propaganda and advertising dollars primarily reached Mexico through Azcárraga’s radio networks, like XEW which aired Gabilondo Soler’s programs.15 While the cinema certainly offered an alternative to radio programs throughout the decades that Gabilondo Soler’s program aired, the widespread availability and relative low cost per program meant that children in Mexico could listen to Cri-Crí regularly. Even if a child could not afford the price of a movie ticket, he or she could find an open spot near a radio to listen

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to a program free of charge. In the 1950s, some children paid a small fee to their friends’ parents or acquaintances for the luxury of watching a television program in a neighboring tenement or apartment.16 Gabilondo Soler’s prolific career influenced generations of children and left its imprint on Mexico’s cultural landscape. Born in Orizaba, Veracruz, in 1907, he later taught himself to play the piano, showing the first inklings of what he would become in his adult life. After the divorce of his parents, he spent lots of time with his beloved grandmother. While the divorce affected him, his was reportedly a happy childhood even though he tired of school rather quickly— though never of learning, he was mostly self-taught—and found solace in the music that nature provided him through the songs of birds and the noises of nature, like the rustling of leaves and the babbling of brooks. By the time he was eight years old, his mother had left for Mexico City. When he was twelve, he abandoned his formal schooling and traveled between his grandparents’ house in Orizaba and his mother’s place in Mexico City. There he assisted his mother financially by selling candies at schools to augment her earnings.17 By 1928, he was married and started a family, making his home in colonia Santa María de Rivera. Continuing his love of astronomy, Gabilondo Soler volunteered at the Observatory and worked in a cabaret on Calle Brasil called “la primavera,” making 5 pesos a night.18 Over the course of his career, Gabilondo Soler composed over two hundred songs for his radio program, many of which he later recorded and sold as compilations. The first decade of his career was the most prolific and he wrote most of his songs in this period. In 1946 he released his first album of recordings Cuentos Musicales del Grillito Cantor. Ten years later, his first full-length album appeared, Cri-Crí, el Grillito Cantor, followed by four more in the late 1950s.19 Thousands of admiring children and adults reportedly lined up outside the radio station to catch a glimpse of the famous composer when the program went off the air in 1961. One newspaper columnist reported that although the program was ending, the work of Gabilondo Soler would live on in the memory of all children, and estimated that the music had brought happiness to millions of children.20 Gabilondo Soler’s influence reverberated throughout Mexico’s cultural landscape and touched others such as those involved in the production of literature. References to Cri-Crí appeared in cultural productions reminiscing about that time period. In his novel Battles in the Desert (1963), José Emilio Pacheco writes about the experiences of growing up in 1940s’ Mexico City. The young boy in the novel reported that until he heard his first bolero, he had only heard the national anthem, church music, and the songs of Cri-Crí.21 One of

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Mexico’s most famous cultural critics, Carlos Monsiváis, reported that he had listened to Cri-Crí as a child: “Obligatorily; I was a child in the Federal District. . . . Every Sunday, the absolute ritual, inescapable, was to listen to Cri-Crí.”22 The character’s cultural importance continued long after his show went off the air, as can be evidenced from the fact that Gabilondo Soler’s compilations were later sold on street corners as pirated copies and in boxed sets in stores like Sanborns. Cri-Crí’s popularity translated into the film world as well; between 1942 and 1997 his songs appeared in thirty films. In addition to songs performed by CriCrí’s creator Gabilondo Soler himself, his compositions were also sung by Tin Tan (aka Germán Valdés), Pedro Infante, and Vicente Férnandez on the silver screen. In 1984, Televisa organized a tribute to Gabilondo Soler in honor of the fiftieth anniversary of his first radio program. The magnitude of his popularity drew international superstars, including Spanish tenor Plácido Domingo, French singer Mirielle Mathieu, and Mexican pop star Emmanuel (Jesús Emmanuel Arturo Acha Martínez), to perform his songs; the cricket fashioned for the event was made in the style of Jim Henson’s Muppets; and Gabilondo Soler recreated his first radio broadcast for the live audience.23 During the nearly three decades of tremendous success enjoyed by this radio program, Mexico witnessed a corresponding shift in the definition of childhood. In many ways, Cri-Crí’s popularity signaled the opening up of childhood in Mexico City; the concept that all children deserved, at least in theory, to experience “childhood” gained widespread acceptance in the 1940s and 1950s as experts and producers of entertainment viewed children’s play as vital to all children’s development. The accessibility of the radio program meant that many children could engage in the world of fantasy that was created by Gabilondo Soler especially for children. Indeed, radio ownership rates in Mexico skyrocketed from 450,000 in 1940 to 2,000,000 by 1950.24 For those children who listened to Cri- Crí, the radio program provided a common childhood experience that gave them a sense of belonging to society not only as Mexicans and but also as children. Children learned important social and cultural values from mass media in addition to those gained from the influences of the family, the state, and the Catholic Church. Radio programs like Cri-Crí socialized children and promoted national pride in children and inculcated them with the importance of education, family, and Mexico’s cultural traditions. The character played an integral part in children’s earliest political imaginations and provided them with some of the basic tools to position themselves within Mexican society and the world at large. Children participated in this “imagined community,” even before they could read, through their radio listening, comic-book reading, and movie attendance.25 Gabilondo

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Soler’s messages communicated lo mexicano (the essence of being Mexican) to generations of children and became an integral part of Mexican children’s cultural upbringing and education.26 Gabilondo Soler promoted values that encouraged children to live in harmony with nature, to appreciate family and its values, to understand the importance of education, to recognize the social and political structure of society. He facilitated an awareness of national identity at a time when international influences poured into Mexico.27 Even though Gabilondo Soler named his character Cri-Crí, a French word for cricket, the songs, by and large, promoted specifically Mexican culture. In one story, the main character tells another: “In many of my songs I speak with Mexican modismos (slang). I’m afraid that in faraway lands the children do not understand what I am trying to say.” The other character replied that if they did not understand anything, he hoped they liked the music.28 Cri-Crí performed music for Mexican children and stressed the national scope of his lyrics and stories. At the same time that his music preached lo mexicano to children in Mexico, Gabilondo Soler’s music reached children around the globe, putting Mexico on the map in a world of shrinking cultural boundaries.29 Moreover, Cri-Crí instructed children to deal with a rapidly modernizing society, advice that eased the difficulties of growing up in the city, especially for children who had migrated with their parents from the countryside. They listened to songs about going to school, getting a haircut at the barbershop, using the telephone, and clocks and the importance of time. Cri-Crí also critiqued the social inequalities that persisted despite government rhetoric that proclaimed otherwise. In “El jicote aguamielero” Gabilondo Soler told the story of a worker bee that proclaimed his love to an arrogant queen bee. When the bee is rebuffed by the queen he responded: “I read that we were equals, according to the Constitution. I believed in the society without classes, but now I see that it is not.” While Gabilondo Soler communicated the persistence of social inequalities to Mexican children, he also provided them with the language and framework to understand what the revolution had promised his generation (i.e., equality, constitution, and a classless society). But children’s entertainment also offered children nationalistic songs like Mi Bandera and others that conveyed ideas about religious and cultural customs in Mexico during the Christmas season like Los Reyes Magos and Nochebuena (including a reference to Saint Nicholas). In the postrevolutionary decades, Mexican Catholic traditions and new traditions that were being adopted—and adapted—from outside the country, like Santa Claus, appeared with frequency in mass media and popular culture. Indeed, the stories and lyrics of Cri-Crí demonstrate that popular, secular culture was often intertwined with Catholicism.

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Children learned how to interact with one another in culturally appropriate ways and how to perform gender roles properly. The songs and stories of CriCrí promoted gender-specific roles to Mexican children. Many of Gabilondo Soler’s songs portrayed women as the bearers of Mexican cultural traditions; he depicted mothers and grandmothers as the moral and emotional caregivers of the family and, by extension, the nation. Cri-Crí praised the self-sacrificing mothers and grandmothers of Mexico and predicted that without these “beautiful abnegating mothers” disorder would prevail; children learned that it was their mothers who overcame “the thousand little problems of the home” and that they deserved respect and admiration.30 Indeed, Gabilondo Soler attributed the inspiration for many of his songs to his childhood relationship with his grandmother who had raised him in Orizaba. In the midst of rapid social and cultural change in the capital city, radio programs reminded young girls of their gendered responsibilities and encouraged subservience to males. Cri-Crí gave many Mexican children their first glimpses into a world outside of Mexico. Gabilondo Soler’s expansive musical tastes and extensive travels translated into a montage of stories, lyrics, and musical compositions from numerous foreign countries.31 Cri-Crí related his adventures to Mexican children against a backdrop of the latest music from the United States, South America, and the Caribbean (including music like danzón, tangos, polka-country, jazz, and fox-trot) in addition to Mexican-style rancheros and corridos. Gabilondo Soler promoted national identity using a multitude of musical influences and encouraged a cosmopolitan vision of Mexico, which circulated inside and out of the national boundaries of Mexico.32 Shrinking cultural boundaries also worked in reverse: children in Mexico City consumed foreign images, particularly through the emerging industry of transnational children’s entertainment; this process that began with Cri-Crí only accelerated in later decades with Walt Disney productions and other comic and film characters. Through Cri- Crí’s stories and lyrics, children became versed in the languages of race and ethnicity. Gabilondo Soler composed songs and told stories about characters from Russia, China, the United States, and also discussed skin color. Racialized lyrics promoted a hierarchy of race that privileged whiteness over other skin tones; of all his “exotic typologies” Gabilondo Soler’s work most often addressed characters of African and Chinese descent.33 One song entitled “Cucurumbé” tells the story of a negrita (little black girl) by the sea and how she envies the seashells, the moon, and the foam of the waves for their whiteness. In an effort to whiten her face, she bathes herself in the waves. In the end, she

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happens upon a fisherman who tells her that she has a pretty face. While this story ultimately communicated the beauty of the nonwhite character, it also betrays how society valued whiteness. The gendered message reveals that even as young girls, females were expected to be visually pleasing to male eyes. Through the media, children learned and imbibed the constructed notions of desirability and attractiveness, which were produced especially for them. Cri-Crí delivered messages about Mexican cultural and social identities “below the level of consciousness.”34 Visual cues also instructed children to value certain races and ethnicities over others. Gabilondo Soler’s album covers depicted racialized images visually in a powerful and easily recognizable format for children. A glance at Gabilondo Soler’s rendition of his character Negrito Sandia (little black watermelon boy) and the orientalized Asian character is enough to understand the racially loaded imagery’s effect upon children. As never before, Mexican children recognized themselves to be Mexican in a world full of many different nationalities, races, and ethnicities. During the 1940s, the SEP responded to Cri-Crí’s success and used Gabilondo Soler’s music when it suited its purposes. The children’s theater produced by the Ministry of Fine Arts35 (under the administration of the SEP) included Cri-Crí in its repertoire on at least two occasions in the mid-1940s. In November 1945, Cri-Crí presented “el rey Bombón” to a group of Mexico City children. Then again in May 1946, the singing cricket enchanted boys and girls with “rey del bosque esmerelda.”36 Gabilondo Soler performed his songs while the state reaped the benefits of its association with this popular figure among children. Despite the widespread use of Cri-Crí songs in jardines de niños and his undisputed popularity, the SEP prohibited the use of some his songs in public schools in the 1940s. After some public declarations that claimed Cri-Crí represented a salubrious influence on children, the SEP reacted by naming a relatively small number of specific songs that it deemed inappropriate. The SEP censored songs such as: “La patita,” “La J de la jota,” “El pavito,” and “La cocada.”37 The song “La patita” related a story of a mother duck’s struggles to feed her children without the assistance of her husband; when she returns from the market, her ducklings ask her what she has brought them to eat and she tells them she has nothing, calling her husband “lazy and shameless.”38 Gabilondo Soler’s lyrics underscored the reality of poverty some children faced at the hands of a non-providing patriarch, an idea that challenged the tenets of Mexican machismo and the male breadwinner. In 1964, Excélsior published an open letter to Cri-Crí by a teacher named Maria Figueroa de Garcia Sancho. She stated: “It is sad and embarrassing

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that you are denied the place you deserve—that in your very own country you are denied the right to sing your songs freely. Through these lines, I will try to right the wrong that has been done to you.” Figueroa goes on to praise Gabilondo Soler’s work and relates the positive influence he is had on Mexican children during her years as a public school teacher.39 The open letter was in response to a 1959 circular written by Rosaura Zapata, the head of the Ministry of Preschool Education (Departamento de Educación Preescolar).40 Zapata and Luis Sandi, director of the Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes (National Institute of Fine Arts), had stated that Gabilondo Soler’s songs were not appropriate for use in the SEP schools, allegedly because they were difficult to pronounce.41 The SEP first prohibited all Gabilondo Soler ’s songs and later, responding to pressure from the public, chose a select few to label as inadequate or inappropriate. In spite of Zapata’s circular, children continued to sing Cri-Crí in the jardines de niños, in their homes, and wherever they played. Indeed even after the radio program ended, record sales indicated how popular his music remained: between 1963 and 1994, Cri-Crí had sold over eight million records.42 Gabilondo Soler successfully articulated an image of Cri-Crí as not only Mexican, but also as a cultural production that worked against the “invasion” of foreign influences. Evidence suggests that Gabilondo Soler tried to distance himself from the less amiable aspects of the radio industry. José Gordillo, a children’s educator and painter, maintained that Gabilondo Soler “was able to defend us from the invasion of cosmopolitan expressions; in some capacity was able to defend us from the Colgate slogan. Gabilondo allowed children to show their preferences for festive songs, he let us listen to them over mass media and sing them in a spontaneous manner.”43 Decades after his radio program went off the air, Gabilondo Soler remained a revered figure and admirers wondered how Gabilondo Soler “managed to save his Cri-Crí from the commercialization and alienation” that came with the radio business.44 Gabilondo Soler represented himself as completely uninterested in commercial ventures. He considered himself to be an artist and definitely not a businessman.45 Gabilondo Soler contrasted his motives and interests with those of the Disney Corporation. When describing the corporation after the death of Walt Disney, Gabilondo Soler stated: [It was] already dehumanized: they produced everything commercially and Disneyland was founded, and another in Florida, and they wanted to make another one here in Mexico. When they arrived, the authorities told them: well, it’s very good that your things work in the United States, but in Mexico they have

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According to one account, Walt Disney personally visited Gabilondo Soler in the early 1940s at his home and proposed a business venture between them. Disney wanted to make an animated feature-length movie based on the CriCrí character. Gabilondo Soler reportedly thanked Disney for his interest and complimented him on his work and then declined the offer: “Nonetheless, I do not wish this future for my little cricket that you have offered me. In Mexico it is the only free and healthy inspiration that children have had, it would be unjust to betray them.”47 Gabilondo Soler had communicated the idea that in Mexico, children’s happiness could not be commodified; this stood in stark contrast to the characterization of the American ideal of childhood, in this case with Walt Disney as the American representative. Gabilondo Soler related the previous incident (and mocked it) through one of his radio stories. Children listened to Cri-Crí tell the following story: Cri-Crí received a letter that seemed like a telegram, a telegram because it was brief and concise. In three lines plus four words and a final point, the visit of a music publisher’s representative was announced. The next Thursday at five! It was like this: on the indicated day and with a punctuality that would make a clock stop, a tall thin guy [Walt Disney] called at the door of Cri-Crí. Without wasting time on bows, performance, nor questions about the health of the family, the representative of the company showed his credentials and a notebook of checks. The important publisher wanted to buy Crí-Cri’s songs. That gigantic company devotes itself to printing all the scales in grand scale. The recent arrival asked Cri-Crí if he was available to compose one hundred songs each week, during a five-year contract, or 26,000 songs in a five year period. Cri-Crí was left with his mouth open. In the course of a year, he was able to conclude only one song and ruined another. The representative assured him that only one intensive production leads to opulence. Look señor, don’t tell me about riches-responded Cri-Crí—I don’t want to hear about riches, they would make me blacker than the Negrita Cucurumbé [one of Soler’s characters].48

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The lyrics clearly mock the social and cultural characteristics and values of Disney, and implicitly, those of his home country. Cri-Crí related to children the materialism of the United States and the desire of its residents to commodify Mexican culture. In contrasting the fast-paced, capitalist way of life in the United States with a culturally bountiful, slower-paced Mexico, Gabilondo Soler offered Mexican children a view of their national identity and encouraged them to be proud of that heritage. While his songs also criticized aspects of Mexican culture, by and large they celebrated the beauty and greatness of Mexico. Gabilondo Soler promoted a pure, Mexican image of his character and portrayed himself as an artist free of commercial interests. He considered his songs to be works of art, poetry put to music. He argued that his songs should not be expressed in films because this would alter his creations.49 Gabilondo Soler spoke of the gravity of the situation when he reported how hard he had fought against turning Cri-Crí into an animated film character because “this would have killed Cri-Crí.” The interviewer responded: “It’s true, you have always let the people imagine Cri-Crí … you have not broken the fantasy.”50 Despite the image of Cri-Crí as uniquely Mexican and a noncommercial entity, Gabilondo Soler’s work contained transnational influences and his radio program inevitably promoted a degree of consumerism to children. Through commercials and radio program sponsors, Cri-Crí’s broadcasts encouraged children to purchase Larin chocolates, Pascual soft drinks, and other products like those made by Nestle–Milo of Sweden and Colgate–Palmolive of the United States. Boys and girls lucky enough to savor a piece of candy made by the company Modelo also encountered lyrics and renderings of Gabilondo Soler’s characters inside the packages.51 The singing cricket was associated with numerous products and introduced children to the consumerism to which many in Mexico City aspired; the radio program was often sponsored by manufacturers of candy and foodstuffs marketed to children.52 Modernity had arrived to Mexican children through the twin vehicles of nationalism and consumerism.

Walt Disney in Mexico and the origins of an international children’s culture The Mexican government welcomed Walt Disney the man, facilitated his work in Mexico, and encouraged coverage of his visits and films in the press during the 1940s. In so doing, the Mexican state had a hand in the proliferation of

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things Disney in Mexico and encouraged the popularity of the foreign-produced movies and comics. Children may not have made the explicit connection that these cultural productions were affiliated with the United States but the widespread availability of films and comics for children contributed to a distinct age-specific children’s culture in Mexico. Entertainment for children encouraged societal acceptance that children needed and deserved playtime and leisure to properly develop into modern children. During the Second World War children grew up in a culture replete with transnational imagery, a phenomenon that only accelerated during the Cold War era. Between 1941 and 1943, Walt Disney and a cadre of company artists and musicians toured Latin America, including Mexico, in order to gather material for the Disney’s war effort and Good Neighbor policy productions. During his years as an Ambassador of pan-Americanism in the early 1940s, Disney and his entourage toured Latin America (not just Mexico) extensively. The US State Department paid up to 50,000 dollars to underwrite each film and the traveling expenses—up to 70,000 dollars—for Disney and his entourage totaling nineteen individuals. The relationship between Disney studios and the US government blurred the lines between private industry and wartime state directives to a remarkable degree; by the end of 1941, the studios in California were “housing mountains of munitions, quartering antiaircraft troops, [and] providing overflow office space for Lockheed personnel.”53 Through their investigations of Disney and Nelson Rockefeller as Coordinator for Inter-American Affairs, scholars of visual culture Lisa Cartwright and Brian Goldfarb concluded that the “intersection of corporate, government and cultural interests in Rockefeller’s office alone indicates the degree to which empire-building takes place through a dense network of overlapping and seemingly contradictory affiliations and agendas.”54 Children in Mexico were unaware of these affiliations when they watched Disney movies and read comic books, yet the connections between corporate interests and political influence clearly existed. The mainstream media in Mexico City (informally regulated by the state) reported on Disney’s visits to Mexico without fail. Stories chronicling Disney’s appearance at children’s hospitals and asylums conveyed the message to Mexicans, particularly to parents, that he truly cared for Mexican children. Reporters took great care to name the various government officials with whom Disney met, including the director of various government institutions related to children, tourism officials, and even the President of the republic. The Mexican government erased any doubt that may have existed about Disney’s importance when it bestowed the Águila Azteca medal—the highest honor a foreigner could

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receive—upon him in 1943. On August 29, 1943, the Mexico City movie house El Cine hosted a gala featuring some of Hollywood’s biggest players, including Disney, Louis B. Mayer, and James A. Fitzpatrick—admittance to the event was by invitation only as issued by Mexico’s Secretaría de Gobernación (Ministry of the Interior). During the ceremony, the national anthems of Mexico and the United States were played and an exchange of flags took place as onlookers showered the movie moguls with flowers.55 In celebrating the industry’s power, Foreign Minister Ezequiel Padilla lauded the popular medium’s effect on the masses.56 In his role as an Ambassador of US Good Neighbor policy, Disney produced movies like Saludos Amigos (Hello Friends; 1943), The Three Caballeros (The Three Gentlemen; 1945), and fifteen health and literacy films for distribution in Latin America.57 Both feature-length films were intended to facilitate pan-Americanism and cross-cultural identification between the United States and its neighbors in Latin America. The movies, translated into Spanish, featured a combination of real-life actors and animated characters. These movies encouraged Mexican children to identify with their American counterparts and their cultural mores. Conversely, these movies, depicting Donald Duck in several Latin American countries with his “native” friends, also promoted a US-based image of Mexicans and Latin Americans more generally. Mexican children viewed their images (and images of their Latin American neighbors) through the prism of Walt Disney. Audiences in Mexico found connections between their own beloved cultural productions and Disney’s films. For example, the title song “We’re the Three Caballeros” was sung in English but to the tune of “Qué Lindo es Jalisco”/“How Lovely is Jalisco,” a song from the wildly popular 1941 Mexican film with the same title, starring “the quintessential singing charro (cowboy)” Jorge Negrete.58 Nevertheless, the feature films and educational shorts promoted a hierarchy of nations, and in the case of health and sanitation educational videos, racialized notions of poverty and disease.59 Saludos Amigos, the first of Disney’s movies to promote pan-Americanism, featured Donald Duck, Gaucho Goofy (from the Argentine pampas), and José Carioca (the cigar-smoking, caçacha-drinking, samba-dancing Brazilian parrot). The movie, a mix between animation and live action, showed El Pato Donald’s tourist activities in South America, including Lake Titicaca, the Argentine pampas, and Rio de Janeiro. Perhaps not surprisingly, the film uses the United States as a benchmark against which to measure the Latin American countries. Children and other viewers gazed upon Peruvians playing “strange and exotic music” where there were only two classes, “those who walk against the wind and those who walk with the wind,” a reference to the division of

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Peruvian society where you either carry a basket on your head (against the wind) or not (with the wind). While this movie underscored the social and cultural differences between the various regions in Latin America and the United States, it also drew comparisons. For example, rural Argentines danced something akin to the “old time square dances of North America” and Gaucho Goofy (portrayed as more or less a transplanted cowboy) found himself in the midst of “a real wild west show,” according to the film’s narrator. The film gave Mexican viewers a glimpse of Latin America’s modernity, exemplified by the vignette describing the mail delivery between Santiago, Chile, and Mendoza, Argentina. Pedro, the little airplane in the story, represents man’s ability to tame nature, in this case, the menacing highest peak of the Andes. The Three Caballeros, the follow-up movie to Saludos Amigos, featured Donald Duck, José Carioca, and the new character Pancho Pistolas, a Mexican gun-wielding, shrieking rooster. Mexican children consumed a foreign image of Mexico as the film’s narrator retold a brief history of Mexico, beginning with the image of the Mexican flag and the founding story of the eagle and the serpent. The film also communicated Mexican cultural activities such as regional dances and music and stressed its traditions, like the Christmas posadas and piñata. Thus, Mexican children learned about their cultural heritage and political history through the lens of the North American animator in “an allegory of ‘First World’ colonialism par excellence.”60 Donald engaged in adventures with his respective hosts in Brazil and Mexico. The Mexican portion features a segment where Donald and Pancho visit the beaches of Acapulco, replete with Mexican bathing beauties—featuring real-life actresses including Carmen Molina and Dora Luz. The highly sexualized cartoon underscored and rearticulated Mexican masculinity, stressing sexual prowess as a necessary characteristic. Moreover, Mexican women appeared as sexual objects and carefree bathing beauties. The movie enjoyed success in Mexico and cultural critics often argued that the North American cartoons were a much more wholesome influence on Mexican children than domestic cultural productions. Films contributed to children’s understanding of beauty and gender norms.61 Much like the effect of Cri-Crí, the impact of Disney films and comics had a ripple effect and other cultural productions referenced them. About the movie Bambi, Pacheco’s main character, a largely autobiographical account of Pacheco’s life, from Battles in the Desert reported: “I saw the Walt Disney movie when I was three or four, and they had to drag me out of the theater in tears because the hunters had killed Bambi’s mother.”62 Along with films of Disney, the character mentioned the cartoons that featured Popeye, Woody Woodpecker, and Bugs

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Bunny as being influential during his childhood.63 Children in other Latin American countries with close ties to the United States at the time like Cuba experienced a similar influence. Speaking of his childhood in 1940s Cuba, José Piedra remarked: Before the TV monopoly, films were a crucial way to gain an international conscience, and for me, and I suspect many other small-town children, a favorite medium and model to judge a given culture’s position in the world order. . . . I attribute my own initiation into American life and world history, from the platform of a small-town Cuban childhood, precisely to such a US marketing strategy, and ironically, to my viewing of the film The Three Caballeros and my self-conscious humming of the best-selling song “We’re Three Caballeros.”64

Children in Mexico, and many other countries in Latin America, witnessed the beginning of Disney’s entertainment empire for children at its inception. For adults, the image of Disney’s Three Caballeros held such cultural currency in Mexico City that the weekly magazine Jueves de Excélsior (the weekly magazine of the daily newspaper Excélsior which was distributed on Thursdays) featured a political cartoon of three prominent politicians dressed in the characters’ costumes and dancing.65 Disney characters could be found throughout print media in Mexico. The December 1944 issue of the ladies’ magazine Negro y Blanco featured Santa Claus, Donald Duck, Pluto, Mickey Mouse, and Pinocchio. Speaking from the vantage point of the United States, Hollywood executives in their capacity as affiliates of government programs explicitly made connections between motion pictures and their objectives of spreading US influence. In 1943, John Jay Whitney, former director of the Motion Picture Division for the US Office of Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs (CIAA), expressed the urgency of film’s role in the program: “More than ever before, the necessity of hemisphere solidarity is of supreme importance, and it is becoming daily more apparent that no other medium of expression can equal the motion picture in achieving this objective of unity.”66 During the first half of 1942, sixty-nine “non-theatrical shorts” were shipped to Latin America.67 In June 1942, the US Congress approved a fund of $2,704,000 for the film division and over 28 million dollars for Rockefeller’s Office.68 In part, these efforts were due to Rockefeller’s realization that public opinion polls conducted in Mexico in 1940 and 1941 showed that Mexicans were “predominantly anti-American and in many cases supported Germany.”69 Just one year after Congress supported funding for the film division, the CIAA reported that it had already shipped 190 films to Latin America and that one hundred more were in different stages

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of production.70 By April 1944, the CIAA had shipped 283 films to Latin America, as well as provided 228 projectors for the demonstration of these films.71 While film producers were likely to mention the pan-Americanism promoted in the movies in a firmly positive light, social scientists quickly picked up on the room for abuse and negative possibilities. In the foreword to 1950 study of film industry, Paul Lazarfeld made the comparison that “while the British Empire discharged its trusteeship through the proverbial colonial civil servant, the ‘American Empire’ does so through the help of its information and communications officers.” He further noted that “influence” was replacing “coercion” and that the mass media represented a vital element of that influence.72 Contemporary researchers conducted studies and found that movies affected attitudes, especially in regard to racial attitudes.73 Hollywood executive Gerald Mayer maintained that American films that depicted the “American way of life” caused foreigners to emulate, rather than feel bitterness toward, Americans. As he boldly stated: “There has never been a more effective salesman for American products in foreign countries than the American movie.”74 More recently, Steve Watts, historian of Walt Disney and his corporation, put it this way: “Donald Duck helped shoulder an important task in the country’s new stance: to reassure Latin Americans of their importance to the United States, and to reassure

Figure 3.1 School children visit radio expo, 1944, Enrique Díaz, courtesy of the AGN.

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U.S. citizens that the culture and values of their southern neighbors, while strange and interesting, were really not so different.” Disney was “a pioneer in the exportation of American values in the early 1940s,” a phenomenon that would become increasingly important during the Cold War.75 Produced and distributed to promote US interests, these films were interpreted by children as they pleased. Nevertheless, Disney films produced shared reference points and a common language of childhood. Disney’s influence in Mexico was bolstered by the proliferation of comics and other consumer products. Disney distributed four different Spanish versions of its comics throughout the continent. Unlike some other Latin American editions, the Mexico edition drew almost exclusively from the United States.76 Thus, the Mexican comics and books read by children in Mexico City would have mirrored the productions from the United States. By 1956, Disney comic books produced in Mexico contained the phrase “magazine approved by the Ministry of Public Education” and continued to do so at least into the mid1960s.77 The Mexico City publisher Editorial Novaro reprinted the 1956 book Donald Duck Prize Driver in 1960. The publisher translated the book from English into Spanish and printed thirty-thousand copies of El Pato Donald Automovilista (Donald Duck the Automobilist).78 Through such media, Mexican children learned how to live in a bustling metropolis like Mexico City; a policeman rewards Donald for being the most improved safe and courteous driver, with the help of his three nephews. Children learned about the importance of safety in a modern city and respect for authorities in regulating that safety. In addition to navigating city life, children learned consumer skills and international imagery. The promotion of Disney characters in various forms, including books, comics, and other material containing the characters’ likenesses not only filled the coffers of Disney but also promoted Mexican children’s identification with things outside Mexico. Children with relatively well-off parents could expect to receive clothing or toys from the United States. For example, in the 1950s American anthropologist Oscar Lewis reported that one mother bought her sixyear-old daughter six pairs of Mickey Mouse socks during her annual shopping trip for her children.79 The growing number of migrant workers returned to Mexico with toys and gifts from the United States for their daughters, sons, nieces, nephews, godchildren, etc. Disney items and other foreign-produced material, coexisted with the cultural productions from Mexico. The intermingling of these various national and foreign types of entertainment shaped Mexican children in such a way that they received messages of strong national identity as Mexicans

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yet also became cognizant of other cultures and how they functioned politically and socially. The concerted publicity campaign to paint a rosy picture of Disney products and Disney-endorsed lifestyles for Mexican parents and children was bolstered by an influx of Spanish cinema trade publications produced for Latin America (including some produced by Hollywood), which reported on the production of North American movies and traced the lives of the stars. Publications devoted to cinema, like Cinelandia and Cinemundial, often featured several pages of stories about the technological innovativeness of Disney movies, the latest miraculous production, and upcoming possible movie ventures. When Disneyland opened in Anaheim, California, on July 17, 1955, readers in Mexico learned about the twenty-five thousand visitors to the theme park and the attractions it had to offer. Even if the international trip was beyond the economic reality of most Mexicans, they too could participate in the emerging international trend in children’s entertainment by seeing the movies and buying merchandise. Better yet, they could win one of five Disneyland vacation packages that Sears Roebuck gave away to Mexico City shoppers during the Christmas season.80 Apart from a few radical critics, many observers in Mexico argued that US cartoons provided their children with more wholesome entertainment than most Mexican media available to children did. In 1947, a Catholic publication registered its protest against a Mexico City movie theater because it had “put together a children’s program with two Walt Disney movies, which is a very admirable thing to do; but between the two showings they have put a MEXCIAN NEWSREEL with scenes from a swimming pool.”81 Conservatives in Mexico were much more concerned about showing semi-clad bodies in movies and the proliferation of comic books, some of which were considered almost pornographic. While the church repeatedly expressed concern over the influence of cinema on children, it overwhelmingly endorsed Disney. Catholic magazines for children, which were produced by various segments of the influential lay organization Acción Católica (Catholic Action), contained images of Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, and Bambi by the 1940s, and also included posthumous celebrations of Disney’s life till the early 1970s at least.82 In addition to promoting Disney directly to children, the church also conveyed the acceptability and value of Disney films to parents. In the weekly pamphlet Apreciaciones, the Legion of Decency rated films and the possible dangers they posed to Catholics’ souls. Disney movies were always classified as A-1, “Good for everybody.” As Anne Rubenstein has demonstrated, most conservative cultural critics of the 1940s endorsed Disney

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and thought the cartoons to be morally purer than the alternatives available to Mexican children.83 Children attended movies frequently and the experience opened many worlds to their developing minds. Recalling his earliest memory, film director Juan López Moctezuma reported: “My first childhood memory is about when I was able to go alone to the theater across from my house. It was the old Primavera Theater, and I lived directly across the street from it. From the time I was five years old, they let me got alone. Entering that world was for me the discovery of a vocation. Every day I went to the movies—every day. There were films that I saw as many times as they ran them.”84 Whether they were animated feature-length films by Disney, Hollywood productions, or Mexican-produced melodramas or comedies, films left an indelible imprint on ordinary Mexicans throughout the period. Children were not just frequent members of the movie audience, they were also subjects of the popular medium.

Children and families as subjects on the silver screen In the Cold War era, films inculcated adult and also child viewers with cultural and political messages that communicated the importance of children to society. Moviegoers saw tales of children in danger and in need of protection by society and the state. Children were significant participants in sociopolitical dramas, not just in Mexico but also in the international community. Popular films like Nostoros los pobres (We the Poor; 1947), Una familia de tantas (A Family among Many; 1948), Los olvidados (The Forgotten Ones; 1950), and Los pequeños gigantes (The Tiny Giants; 1958) portrayed family dynamics and featured children as important beings in their own right. The popularity of cinema in Mexico provided a perfect means to communicate sociocultural ideas about childhood to the general population. Moreover, films represented perhaps the most modern of technologies: the wonder of its production, the glamour of its stars and the creation of widely recognized celebrities, and the content of the film itself. For many Mexicans, films provided a way to understand a changing society where modernity and tradition coexisted in delicate balance.85 Nosotros los pobres, one of Mexico’s most successful and beloved films, holds “a cultural status in Mexico equivalent to The Wizard of Oz in the United States,” according to film scholar Sergio de la Mora.86 The main character of the film was played by Pedro Infante. Infante’s iconic status was cemented by his untimely death in a 1957 plane crash; with his death, Mexico’s Golden Age of

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cinema ended. When the plane carrying Infante’s body landed in Mexico City, between fifty thousand and one hundred thousand people were in attendance. The press characterized the onlookers as “children of various ages, peddlers, workers, peasants” and remarked on the working-class status of participants in the events surrounding Infante’s funeral procession and the riot that ensued.87 Photographs taken during the burial show many children at the scene, some crying and others being hoisted above their parents to catch a glimpse of the ceremony that marked the historic, tragic passing of Mexico’s beloved actor. The scene soon turned violent; police pushed some spectators in the crowded space near Infante’s grave and a riot erupted, injuring between 140 and 210 people. Historian Anne Rubenstein analyzes the riot surrounding the burial and argues that it can be read as “a tension between the discourses of modernity and tradition, gender anxiety, and working-class fury.”88 The working class had lost their hero and with him, perhaps the notion that there was glory in the daily struggle for survival, which his films depicted. Infante played Pepe el toro, the working-class hero, a carpenter by trade living in a Mexico City vecindad, in the trilogy of films Nosotros los pobres (We the Poor; 1947), Ustedes los ricos (You the Rich; 1948), and Pepe el toro (Pepe the Bull; 1952). According to historian Mauricio Tenorio-Trillo, Nosotros los pobres “constructed an urban form of acceptable proletarian interiors for massive consumption by all classes” and “depicted love, community, and life in a vecindad, with extensive close-ups of the patios and interiors, in a sort of romantic ethnography of how the other half lives.”89 Infante acted in 59 films (and had the starring role in 55 of these) and recorded over 300 songs over the course of his career. In his personal life, his passion for visibly modern leisure activities like motorcycle riding and flying planes “symbolized a risky modernity.”90 Fans identified with the actor’s character Pepe el Toro “because they themselves were struggling to adapt to modernity and the social problems caused by the urban explosion.” In fact, one admirer said of Nostoros los pobres: “While I was watching the film, I felt as if I was reliving parts of my own life . . . . I completely identified with Pepe el Toro, especially during certain tragic moments in his life. For example, the scene where he is in pain after seeing his son’s burnt body. I lived through similar experiences since my little boy almost died from drinking gasoline.”91 Infante’s character, a “charismatic and playful father figure” interpreted children’s songs composed by Cri-Crí in Pepe el toro.92 So closely was Infante’s character Pepe el toro identified with the man himself that after his death, a photonovel called La vida y los amores de Pedro Infante (The Life and Loves of Pedro Infante; 1957) depicted Infante in heaven as a carpenter making toys for children.93 In

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this imagination of his afterlife, Infante was a carpenter like his famous main character’s occupation; it was not a jump for readers to liken the men to Jesus Christ through their shared occupations. His public persona included references to his devotion to the Virgin of Guadalupe, communicating to audiences that the man had not lost his ties with the traditional Catholic and Mexican nationalist identity despite his incredible fame and wealth.94 The melodrama Nosotros los pobres offered viewers a sentimentalized version of urban poverty. The opening scene depicts two dirty children rummaging through a garbage can where they discover a book that tells the story of a poor neighborhood near the edge of the city. In that storybook beginning, the viewer is introduced to the main characters of the neighborhood and given a message from the film’s director, Ismael Rodríguez. The prologue gives an immediate sense of sympathy for and identification with the poor: “My intention has been to present a faithful picture of these characters of our poor neighborhoods— existing in all large metropolises—where, next to the seven deadly sins, all the virtues and nobilities and the greatest of heroism blossom: the one of poverty!” The poor are “simple and good people, whose only sin is having been born poor.” The film depicts the neighborhood as a lively, thriving place where its inhabitants sing, whistle, drink, work, love, cry, and suffer. Pepe and his daughter Chachita love each other deeply and both display profound love and respect for the paralyzed and mute mother of Pepe. Chachita repeatedly bemoans being motherless, Pepe telling her that her mother died in childbirth. In reality, Pepe’s sister Yolanda is Chachita’s mother but Pepe raises the girl as his own so as not to taint the child with her mother’s sins. It is not until Yolanda is on her deathbed that Chachita learns the truth. Through the main character Pepe, we see a morally upright character who continually finds himself in difficult situations not of his own making, the most extreme of which is being wrongly accused of murder and sent to prison. Gender norms are communicated in the film as women are subservient to men and self-sacrificing. Pepe displays many aspects of machismo; he fights (but only when necessary), women love him, he is honorable, and holds a grudge against his sister and will not forgive her sexual impropriety and loss of honor. Yet, the film’s overwhelming tone is one of love and camaraderie. The characters love Chachita and gather to serenade her with the traditional Mexican birthday song, Las Mañanitas, and present the girl with a cake, flowers, and gifts. Catholic imagery also infuses the film; a priest presides over funeral services in the cemetery, Chachita prays the rosary over her dying abuelita (grandmother), and when all the family’s belongings were repossessed, including her doll and the grandmother’s wheelchair, Chachita asks God why

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he has abandoned them, emphasizing that the poor are also God’s children. At the end of the film, Pepe is exonerated and his love interest throughout the film, Celia, form a happy family unit as he and Celia marry at the end.95 Other films of the Golden Age communicated ideas of modernity and changing social norms and their effects on the family unit. Alejandro Galindo’s Una familia de tantas premiered at the Cine Opera on March 11, 1949, in Mexico City. The film opens with a panoramic view of Mexico City from a rooftop dwelling and then enters a private home, providing a glimpse into the inner workings of a middle-class family. The film tells the story of the Cataños, a middle-class family in Mexico City headed by a severe patriarch Don Rodrigo and his submissive wife Doña Gracia. The film unfolds mostly within the confines of the family home and narrates the family dynamics between the parents and their five children. Daughter Maru encounters Roberto del Hierro, a vacuum cleaner salesman when she is left alone, and the two begin a relationship that is kept secret initially. Rodrigo struggles with social changes wrought by the revolution and post–Second World War prosperity. Roberto sells the American-named “Bright O’Home” line of sleek, modern appliances representing modernity and the influence of the United States, including a vacuum and a refrigerator to Rodrigo. The father desperately seeks to control the budding sexuality of his children as he forces his son to marry his pregnant girlfriend and tries unsuccessfully to prevent Maru’s marriage to Roberto, the vacuum cleaner salesman. He also beats his oldest daughter Estela because she is caught kissing her boyfriend in the street. Visual studies scholar Andrea Noble notes that the “film places much visual emphasis on the confinement and containment of the female characters as subject to unbending patriarchal law” yet in the end, it is male characters of the father and son Hector “who are most trapped by tradition” as they “adhere to an outmoded model of masculinity.”96 Fear of corruptive outside influences jeopardized the family unit and the children’s sexual purity. The conflicts presented in the film represented middle-class anxieties about changing social mores as well as educated viewers in the new modern ways of consumerism. Yet, the film conveys new, more modern ways of thinking about companionate marriage rather than glorifying the unbending will of the patriarch. The relationship between Roberto and Maru exemplifies the possibilities of a companionate marriage with more open communication. As a salesman of modern appliances, Roberto’s character acknowledges and verbalizes the weight of women’s domestic chores, offering them time-saving devices like the vacuum or a refrigerator. As Julia Tuñón has shown, the antiquated values associated with the father are reflective of an earlier time as evidenced by the giant portrait of Porfirio Díaz on the wall.97

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Alejandro Galindo, writer and director of Una familia de tantas, was a leftist and “populist” filmmaker. He had grown up in the throes of the revolution, born in Monterrey on January 14, 1906, and his father was a lawyer associated with the Madero family, the same Madero family whose son Francisco led the call to revolution. The revolution forced the family to relocate to Mexico City, where Galindo’s father died in 1912. Subsequently, the Galindo family fell on hard times. Galindo preferred the cinema to school; he worked informally at the studios of Germán Camus when he ditched school. Despite his mother’s protestations, Galindo left his studies and Mexico City for Hollywood. By the time the Great Depression hit, Galindo had experience in film laboratories and even wrote Spanish scripts for Columbia Pictures. The economic catastrophe and advent of sound threw the film industry into turmoil. Galindo returned to Mexico City and embarked on his long career in filmmaking.98 Narratives of danger and the corrupting influence of the city on children found their way to the silver screen and showed parents and other viewers the potential downfall of society’s youth. Luis Buñuel’s 1950 film Los olvidados portrayed the city’s dark underbelly through the eyes of a few young, nearly all male, protagonists. Buñuel, a Spaniard by birth, had arrived in Mexico City in 1946 where he lived for many years, eventually as a Mexican citizen.99 Buñuel’s vision of the city depicted many young boys as hardened criminals, often through a series of increasingly dramatic crimes. The city is clearly a villain in this story; poverty and emotionally trying interpersonal relationships are seen as abounding in the burgeoning capital. The movie opened with the following assertion: “This film is based entirely on real life facts and all of the characters are authentic.” The sequence explicitly compared Mexico City to New York, Paris, and London, where behind the façade of wealth lurked a darker side. The narrator asserted: “The day will come when children’s rights are respected.” Both the comparison to these world-class cities and the declaration that the rights of children would be respected at some future point indicate the belief that Mexico had become or was becoming a part of the international community of modernized nations. When Buñuel directed his cameras to the city’s children he directed the eyes of the nation and international community to the plight of children negotiating the modern city.100 But the opening scene comparing Mexico City to other cities was not part of Buñuel’s original plan; he had added it to ameliorate possible criticism.101 Buñuel’s vision reflected at least one reality among several possible childhood experiences found in the city. In the press, photographs of and discourses on childhood in peril paralleled Buñuel’s film. Newspaper articles depicted images of mangy dogs superimposed over street

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children; the exact same image appears in the film near the tragic end. In fact, Buñuel reportedly developed his idea for the film after reading an article about the brutal discovery of a child’s body in a garbage dump. He later toured various parts of the city taking photos and notes about the conditions he encountered and consulted files of the Juvenile Court and the psychiatric department affiliated with it.102 The film portrayed a breakdown of the Mexican family and a generational conflict wherein some of the younger characters repeatedly demonstrate disrespect toward their elders. Young Pedro, the product of rape, remains unloved by his cold mother who works as a domestic to support herself and her three other young children. Specific scenes from the movie demonstrate the very real anxiety for peasants migrating from the country to the city in search of increasingly industrialized employment. An early scene shows a bustling Mexico City market, with the viewer’s attention increasingly directed to a small peasant boy, Ojitos (small eyes), who is crying and is dressed in traditional Mexican garb. He has been abandoned by his father who had come to the city looking for employment. The film communicated that peasants are susceptible to, and likely to fall victim to, the vices of the big city. The young peasant represented the goodness and naïveté of the rural migrants as he was lost and scared in the big city. An older blind man, Don Carmelo, effectively uses him for labor in the guise of protection and shelter, all the while berating him and lamenting the loss of the olden days under Porfirio Díaz when women knew their place and children respected their elders.103 It is through the city’s boys that the viewer is introduced to varying degrees of criminal behavior, from maliciousness to the lesser evil of being victimized by unfortunate circumstances. Young boys were the perpetrators of violence in this drama. Jean Franco points to the significance of all the characters (except Julián) being fatherless. She argues: They are fatherless at a particular historical moment—when the Mexican state is consolidating its paternal authority over its citizens. This double dimension allows Buñuel to depict an antisocial hero, Jaibo, without idealizing the benevolent reformist solution of the state; for Jaibo’s evil genius is far more powerful than the feeble solutions of reform school and education.104

Through a series of increasingly dramatic occurrences, Jaibo threatens Pedro in a variety of ways, seduces his mother, and ruins his chances at redemption at the escuela granja, the reform school he has been sent to after mistakenly being accused of a theft Jaibo committed. Pedro cannot escape Jaibo just as he cannot escape poverty and trouble with the law. In the end, both Pedro and Jaibo meet

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their deaths, Pedro at the hands of Jaibo and Jaibo is killed by policemen’s bullets. The harsh narrative of delinquency and youth produced an image of Mexico City that warned parents about the vulnerability of their children. Film scholar Ernesto Acevedo-Muñoz gives great importance to the film as a critique of Mexico’s revolutionary rhetoric and likens its criticism to Daniel Cosío Villegas’s famous 1947 essay declaring the revolution dead and Octavio Paz’s Labyrinth of Solitude in its level of contestation.105 The film portrayed the city as posing various threats to children’s innocence, clearly articulating not only how the city encouraged criminal behavior by children, but also it posed threats to the sexual innocence of both boys and girls. The absence of sexuality represented an important marker among the differences between childhood and adolescence and adulthood. Meche is attacked in the barn by Jaibo after agreeing to give him a kiss in exchange for a few coins. Perhaps even more disconcerting is that when the elderly Don Carmelo similarly threatens her virtue near the end of the film, she is forced to endure his unwanted sexual advances as he comments on her beauty and scent. But girls’ sexual innocence was not the only concern expressed in the film. Pedro is accosted by a pedophile who tries to entice him with money; the well-to-do man is only deterred after a policeman walks up. And Jaibo, though clearly not a child but a young man who portrays himself as, pretends or acts so damaged by the early loss of his mother that he uses that as an excuse to seduce Pedro’s mother. Los olvidados debuted in Mexico City on November 9, 1950, with a small audience of viewers including the famed muralist David Siqueiros and Lupe Marín, wife of Diego Rivera.106 But its debut was not an uncomplicated endeavor; there had been problems with Mexico’s censors. Even if ordinary individuals had not seen the film, anyone reading a newspaper would have seen countless editorials about the film and interviews with Buñuel reprinted in papers and magazines. The child performances also merited attention and readers learned about how Alfonso Mejía secured the lead role as Pedro. A contest had been held and over two hundred boys had auditioned for the role of the film’s protagonist. Out of five finalists, Buñuel chose Mejía, a boy who grew up in the Federal District and attended Escuela Secundaria Número 23. He had never studied acting before securing the role, but his performance in Los olvidados captured the attention of moviegoers in Mexico and internationally. According to an article that appeared just ten days after the film’s debut in Mexico City, Mejía, “with only one intervention into film, has placed himself at the head of child actors in Mexico.” The article concluded: “His brilliant acting in ‘Los olvidados’ has

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placed him on par with child actors like Bobby Driscoll and Bobby Henrey.”107 Comparisons of Mejía to American child actor Bobby Driscoll, the star of many Walt Disney live-action films in the late 1940s and early 1950s, and to Frenchborn child actor Bobby Henrey placed Mexico on the international map of child stars in cinema. Mejía won the Ariel award (the Mexican equivalent of an Oscar) for best child actor for his performance in the film as did Roberto Cobo who won best young actor in his role as Jaibo. According to Buñuel, Los olvidados caused controversy in the artistic and intellectual communities, even among some involved in the film’s production. The film’s hairdresser quit during the filming of the scene in which Pedro’s mother refuses to give him some of the meat she has brought home. The film’s producer, Oscar Dangiers, and director of photography Gabriel Figueroa, both expressed concern about the film’s content during production. Lupe Marín, wife of Diego Rivera, allegedly refused to speak to Buñuel after viewing the film because she was so upset.108 Some were so offended that there were calls for his expulsion from the country.109 The filmmaker maintained that “the Mexicans came round soon enough” after the film won the prize for direction at the Cannes Film Festival.110 The general public, it seems, remained more or less indifferent. One reporter speculated why the artistic value had been lost on most Mexicans: “Los olvidados” is, without question, the best picture that has been made in Mexico, harsh and painful and distressing, [it] produces a devastating effect, of a dark and miserable life that is almost not life; but the public did not like “Los olvidados.” And it is natural, we have become accustomed to the Mexican churros and the Yankee caramels, that we no longer know how to distinguish the good when it is presented.111

Critics of the film also interpreted the vision of Buñuel as a foreigner’s attack on Mexico’s national identity. Clearly, Buñuel intended the film’s message to be a political and social commentary: “Form should not distract the spectator from the work’s content. The film’s moral should remain in sight without being concealed by ornamental details.”112 The fascination with his work continues; at least two book-length examinations of the film in the last decade or so contain reproductions of his original script with Buñuel’s notes and his photographs used for research on the city in preparation for the production.113 While Buñuel’s film forced middle- and upper-class Mexicans to see abandoned or disadvantaged children on the silver screen and endlessly discussed in domestic and international media, a very different film used children to express hope and triumph in the face of adversity: Los pequenos gigantes (The Tiny Giants; 1958).

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The “Little Giants”: Heroes and ambassadors during the Cold War On August 23, 1957, the Mexican team from Monterrey, Nuevo León, roundly defeated their US opponents to claim the Little League World championship title in Williamsport, Pennsylvania. For the team led by ambidextrous pitcher Angel Macías, the 5-foot-tall, 88-pound, 12-year-old boy, the win was even more impressive as he pitched a perfect game, giving up no hits and delivering eleven strikeouts. This was the first time a Mexican team had participated in the Little League series. Newspaper reports made much of the difference in height and weight of the little leaguers: Macías faced a “batter who dwarfed his teammates and himself by 35 pounds and by five inches per man, Macías breezed through in amazing style.” All work ceased in the city of Monterrey before the game commenced and a play-by-play telephonic account blared over loudspeakers in public spaces throughout the city. After the win, the city erupted and “fire engines raced through the streets with sirens roaring while crowds milled about the squares singing exultantly.”114 Newspapers in Mexico celebrated the win and especially the “prodigy” Macías, who was the humble son of a blacksmith as the press dubbed him “the precocious Mexican phenomenon.”115 The pitcher received a standing ovation in front of a crowd that numbered fourteen thousand fans in Williamsport though the real fanfare occurred after the stunning victory. The entire team made headlines; managed by César Faz and the team administrator Harold Haskins, the boys visited tourist attractions in the United States and made official state visits before returning to Mexico. The win was all the more impressive since the boys had only been playing as a team for less than a year and came from very humble origins. According to Haskins: “These boys never had anything. Some have never even been in the center of Monterrey. For some, the shoes they wore to play baseball were the first shoes they had in their lives.”116 Photographs of the boys surrounded by Mexican and foreign dignitaries made their way into all major daily newspapers in Mexico as they boys were lauded as tiny Ambassadors and exemplars of Mexican can-do attitude. The outpouring of euphoric support for the boys included offers of scholarships to attend the Universidad de Nuevo León and other institutions, the construction of a proper ballpark for boys to play in, and a daily newspaper from Monterrey began a campaign to obtain a house for each of the fourteen ballplayers.117 After their stunning win in Pennsylvania, the entire team, Faz, Haskins, and Mexican Ambassador Manuel Tello visited the White House and Congress on

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August 27, 1957. During the visit to Congress, then Senate Majority Leader Lyndon B. Johnson spoke to the boys: “The United States feels proud of the triumph reached by the boys from Mexico, our sister Republic.” Johnson also made mention of “formidable” disadvantages the boys faced: “But in that wonderful world of sports victory is not always for the strongest and the biggest. There are other factors that cannot be measured: persistence, inspiration, and the will to win.”118 They had lunch with Vice-President Richard Nixon who noted that in addition to being good athletes, they boys were “excellent representatives of their country.”119 Later President Eisenhower met the boys for a chat and a photo opportunity. The good-natured visit had its humorous moments as well. Eisenhower gave each boy an autographed baseball with the words “Stolen from Dwight D. Eisenhower” and a roar of laughter could be heard after one boy asked whether they might be sent to jail if someone saw them with the baseballs.120 Fanfare over the boys only increased when they returned to Mexico and readers in the capital city read about them as front-page news for days on end. The Mexico City daily newspaper El Universal featured interviews with some players and their parents.121 Supporters reportedly numbering ten thousand greeted them at the airport despite the rain and the crowd lifted Macías on their shoulders in a triumphant celebration of patriotism.122 Convertibles provided by the Ford Motor Co. transported the boys around the city. They made a pilgrimage from the roundabout at Peralvillo to the Basílica de Guadalupe, where they brought the championship pennant to lay at the feet of the Virgin of Guadalupe.123 Symbols of youthful optimism, Catholicism, modern consumerism, and nationalism converged in one glorious day. The Cinderella story was the stuff movies were made of—and a film was soon made about the “tiny giants,” with the screenplay written and directed by a Canadian-born Cold War–exile living in Mexico, Hugo Butler. In the context of Cold War America where Butler worked, political intolerance spearheaded by Senator Joseph McCarthy created an environment in which many filmmakers and artists had been forced to testify and possibly denounce colleagues with ties to any radical political organizations. Butler had left the United States in 1951 before being subpoenaed to testify in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee about alleged communism in Hollywood.124 Butler and his wife moved to Mexico where he continued his career after being blacklisted in Hollywood. He worked with Luis Buñuel on his 1954-film Robinson Crusoe as a scriptwriter, using a pseudonym. Also involved in this production were Óscar Dancigers (producer) and Edward Fitzgerald (art director), both of whom had worked with Buñuel on Los olvidados.

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Los pequenos gigantes debuted in Mexico City at the theater Ofreón on June 9, 1960. Advertisements hailed the film and its depiction of champions from “a humble shantytown to Los Pinos and the White House.”125 Thus, the little giants’ successes conjured up the possibility of social mobility from the lowest level of housing to the houses where the Mexican and US Presidents resided. El Universal featured a still frame of Macías sleeping and dreaming of “winning a championship for Mexico” beneath an altar honoring the Virgin of Guadalupe.126 On June 11, moviegoers at the Orfeón also received an autographed photo of the ambidextrous pitcher Macías, “the humble Mexican boy who did what no other boy in the world could.”127

The advent of television and the end of an era The emergence of Mexican television occurred with tremendous state influence though the industry developed a commercial model rather than a strictly government-run model. In 1947, President Alemán sought advice on the new medium from Carlos Chávez, director of the Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes (National Institute of Performing Arts). Under the direction of Chávez, a comparative study of US and European systems was conducted by broadcast engineer Guillermo González Camarena—developer of a color television transmission system—and the well-known intellectual Salvador Novo. González Camarena reasoned that a commercial model was the most attractive option for Mexico, given the technical and financial considerations. Sponsors like General Motors, Nescafé, and Max Factor paid for the earliest broadcasts and shows featured the corporate sponsors’ names in their titles.128 Later, advertising spots or commercials provided the bulk of revenue, and by 1968, advertisers spent approximately 40 million dollars a year to promote their products via Mexico’s two million television sets.129 In 1955, the three most important figures in early television Emilio Azcárraga Vidaurreta (owner of radio station XEW), González Camarena, and Rómulo O’Farrill, joined forces and created one joint parent company, effectively establishing a monopoly. While the state exercised control over the industry in a variety of ways from its inception, it was not until 1960 that federal legislation appeared to formally regulate television. The many provisions of the law provided more government influence and control over content, largely through the Ministry of the Interior. According to specialist in the history of Mexican television, Celeste González de Bustamante, the new law “aimed to counteract the onslaught of foreign, particularly US programming” and demonstrates “the government’s increasing concern over television content

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and illustrate the explicit strategy employed to limit foreign cultural flows.”130 The provisions included mandatory government programming and restrictions on programs not in Spanish or ones that contained unflattering racial or ethnic portrayals. Nevertheless, as Andrew Paxman has argued, the legislation was not as powerful as it might have seemed; lawyers from the television industry assisted in writing the law.131 Before the 1960 legislation, citizens complained about the content of some television programming and lobbied to censor material they deemed offensive. Organizations like the League for Decency and the Federal Association of Parents of School Families lobbied President Ruiz Cortines and Mexico City Regent Uruchurtu in the mid-1950s to prohibit lucha libre (the theatrical Mexican wrestling matches with masked participants) and kissing from appearing on the small screen. The first broadcasts included Alemán’s presidential informe and a tribute to mothers, sponsored by the newspaper Excélsior.132 After the initial years of exploring possible types of television broadcasts, news reporting came into its own. The first newscast aired in Mexico featured coverage of First Lady María Dolores Izaguirre de Ruiz Cortines and the wives of other government officials distributing toys to needy children on January 6, 1954, the religious holiday of The Three Kings or Feast of the Epiphany.133 Television producers soon realized the potential market for children’s programming and children were targeted as a niche market. In 1955 the first children’s show, Teatro Fantástico (Fantastic Theater), aired in Mexico, produced and directed by Enrique Alonso, who was known more commonly by his nickname, Cachirulo. Born Enrique Fernández Tellaeche in Mazatlán, Sinaloa, on August 28, 1924, he adapted stories from around the world and wrote hundreds of songs for television. In the mid-1950s, Alonso was an interesting bridge between different types of entertainment; Alonso performed in theater and was a very close friend of theater diva Maria Conesa, even writing her biography later in his life. The television show enjoyed a very long run, from 1955 to 1969, and featured Cachirulo performing live—all actors and actresses had to memorize their lines—and in black and white before the advent of color television. The format revolved around fairytales and he told stories replete with beautiful princesses, ogres, fairies, princes, peasants, and giants. Alonso and cast filmed Teatro Fantástico at Studio A in Televicentro, precursor of the giant conglomerate Televisa, and sponsored by La Azteca—producer of chocolate products including candy bars “Chocolate Presidente” and the chocolate drink mix “Chocolate Express,” which advertised the beverage’s vitamin benefits. During

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the program, rudimentary superimposed cartoons, advertising these chocolate bars and drinks to the children, moved across the screen periodically; symbols of modernity and childhood imaginations like a moving train, a boy launching a rocket, and imaginary knights jousting. The broadcast ended with Alonso sitting at a table surrounded by the chocolate products of Azteca company, touting their benefits and suggesting consumption patterns—at the park, at the movie theater, after school. He even read a list of children’s names who had written to the program; he ended the program with a warm and enthusiastic “Adios, amigos!”134 Children were increasingly a target audience for television programs and advertisers saw the benefits of sponsoring children’s programs to expand demand for their consumer products. Children’s television programming also coincided with another technological innovation: color broadcasting. The first color television broadcast in Mexico aired in 1963 and was a program called Paraíso infantil (A Child’s Paradise) on Channel 5, XHGC.135 The creator of a color television system, Mexican engineer Guillermo González Camarena, was part of the earliest developments in Mexican television, including his role as the convincing proponent of a commercial television model in Mexico after the publication of the so-called Novo Report (1948) which he coauthored. The station XHGC took out a full-page advertisement on Friday, February 8, 1963, announcing the show that night from 6:00 p.m. to 7:00 p.m., enticing viewers with “Television in Color for the First Time in Mexico.” The station detailed the locations of the fourteen color television sets it had distributed to commercial centers throughout the city for the broadcasting milestone. In retail shops like Sears Roebuck, Liverpool, and Sanborns, viewers gathered to see the latest technological accomplishment. Performers on the live variety show included Omar Jasso, Xavier López “Chabelo,” “El Tío Herminio,” Ricardo y Linda, Bozo, with Nicho González and Genaro Moreno as the announcers. Thousands reportedly flocked to the fourteen television sets showing the color programming. One reporter marveled that the different colors in the actors’ clothing was readily apparent. After the first broadcast of Paraíso Infantil in color, each nightly broadcast from 6:00 p.m. to 7:00 p.m. of various shows on XHGC would be in color.136 By the late 1960s television programming expanded, and increasingly adults and children alike spent considerable amounts of their leisure time in front of it. López and his main character “Chabelo” later launched a family program of its own, En familia con Chabelo (At Home with Chabelo), which began in 1968 and aired Sunday mornings until 2015.

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González Camarena envisioned television as a means to educate people and reduce illiteracy. He passed away in an automobile accident a few years after the first color transmission.137 His death was met with a large outpouring of grief and expressions of admiration from various sectors of the media, and from business and government officials. González Camarena had been traveling with his two children and another girl when his car had collided with a bus in Puebla on April 18, 1965; he died instantly, the unrelated girl died at the hospital, and his two children survived with only minor injuries. Upon his untimely death at the age of forty-five, his many accomplishments were lauded in the press. He invented three systems of color television and applied for a US patent in 1942. Many public officials attended his memorial and funeral services in Mexico City. Then Minister of Education Agustín Yáñez called it an “irreparable loss”; the two had collaborated on audiovisual education for the SEP and just two weeks earlier González Camarena had accepted the position as technical advisor for the audiovisual division. Also present was the director of the newspaper Excélsior, Manuel Acosta Becerra, whose daughter, María Antoineta, was now González Camarena’s widow. The media moguls in Mexico were linked in many ways through business and personal relationships that bound associates together.138 Beginning in the 1930s, children experienced a mass culture that socialized them to their subjectivity as children and citizens of Mexico and the larger transnational community; a process which only accelerated in the subsequent decades.139 Adults experienced popular culture that alerted them to children’s importance as a separate demographic group and the promise they brought for the future nation. By the 1960s, television began eclipsing other forms of entertainment for children. When Mexican television began its broadcasts in 1950, it marked a moment in time when the country was at the international vanguard of the new medium; Mexico was the sixth country globally to broadcast and the first Latin American nation to do so. In 1950, a television set cost 4,000 pesos, and therefore was too expensive for most Mexicans to own. Nevertheless, programs could be seen on televisions in shop windows, restaurants, and other semi-public places.140 From the earliest programs we see the importance of children to the nation and how the state demonstrated this through the new medium. Television stations were quick to tow the party line in its news coverage; student demands in 1968 were ignored and the Tlatelolco massacre’s death toll severely diminished. Putting it bluntly Carlos Monsiváis said that the stations “skated lightly over the Tlatelolco massacre,” which was all the more egregious “after ferociously attacking the student movement” in the months leading up to the massacre.141 Critics lamented the effects of television, especially on Mexican

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traditions and family life. Monsiváis put it this way: “It interfered abruptly with the routines of the home, undermining conventions of family life, which would never be restored. By this new employment of free time, the family itself was changed, almost without noticing, due to the drastic reinvention of its habits of conversation, leisure, and visual judgment. The fortresses of traditionalism were rapidly breached since just by switching on a machine one’s isolation from the world (one’s ‘castle of purity’) was abolished.”142

4

Catholicism, Global Politics, and Gender in the Making of Mexican National Identity

This chapter harnesses the content of Pequeña, a girls’ magazine produced by Catholic laywomen in postrevolutionary Mexico, as a means to understand how the church successfully manipulated nationalist discourses and moved them to the right of previous radical revolutionary state ideologies that proved so controversial in the 1930s. Pequeña ran from the 1930s to the 1970s and exemplifies how the church mobilized a faith-based publication as a media vehicle to promote a Mexican identity that was one with the global missionary aspirations of the larger Catholic Church.  That girls should have been the special target of this campaign should come as no surprise, given the centrality of virginity and a certain species of domestic motherhood to both ecclesiastical and nationalist visions. Moreover, because women in lay organizations constituted the backbone of church power in the 1930s in the wake of revolutionary anticlerical legislation, their focus on girls seems all the more logical. Through Pequeña, which was aimed at middle- and upper-class Mexican girls whose families were invested in social distinction at the site of both race and class, Catholic women constructed a form of Mexican Catholic national identity that oriented girls—and the mothers they would become—toward the outside world while insisting on the uniqueness of Mexican culture and heritage. In so doing, they marshaled a view of Mexican Catholicism that was at once local and cosmopolitan, and offered a script for children that linked their spiritual ambitions to national identity. In many ways, the church may have “won” the longer-term war with the revolutionary government and the Mexican people, despite having lost significant battles in the period immediately following the armed revolution in Mexico. What we see is a church both on the offensive and the defensive in the postrevolutionary and Cold War eras. While the Catholic Church may have been a global hegemon in crisis by the mid-twentieth century,

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its foothold in Mexico was considerably stronger, in part due to its skillful use of laywomen to promote its projects; the focus on children and girls in particular; and its adaptability in the onslaught of secular, sometimes transnational, societal, and cultural forces. Anti-communism undoubtedly bolstered the strength of the church in Mexico. Nevertheless, the church, especially its lay apparatus, was not simply a reactionary figure in the decades under consideration; between the 1930s and the–1970s, the church was a driving force and creator of culture itself, with both secular and religious components. Women were key figures in creating this culture. A close reading of Pequeña provides us with an opportunity to understand the dynamic between the church and state in an era of rapidly changing relations to not only one another but also in relation of each to civil society. In fact, the overlap and mutually constitutive aspects of the relationship between the three entities is an important part of the story. In Pequeña, as we shall see, Catholic authors continually reminded Mexican Catholic girls of their “traditional” obligations as carriers of morality while still acknowledging the changing landscape of little girls’ lives by providing advice about behavior in a rapidly modernizing urban environment. The comic-book-style publication functioned as a form of socialization, entertainment, and proselytizing tool. It was brimming with photographs, stories, letters, recipes, drawings, games, puzzles, and, of course, religious imagery. As I shall argue below, Pequeña’s attention to five discursive threads—(1) domestic education, (2) etiquette in the modern urban setting, (3) innocence and emotive love, (4) politics and positionality in global order, and (5) poverty as anathema to modernity—generated both an ideal Mexican Catholic girl and helped to locate her, sometimes uneasily, in a transnational Catholic worldview. The importance of the church in the daily lives—symbolically, subliminally, and literally—of children cannot be overestimated. Yet, this chapter is not about children’s religiosity or spirituality. It traces the dominant discourses found in Catholic texts produced by adult women for little girls as a way to unearth the major concerns and agendas about girlhood, religion, and national identity circulating at the time. The methodology does not assume that children in Mexico read these publications and then internalized their messages uncritically. In fact, it would not be surprising if some of the correspondence supposedly written by children was actually penned by the adult women responsible for producing the magazine. Ultimately, this does not much matter nor does it diminish the value of this source base. While it would be fascinating to understand how children read these texts, processed them, and then negotiated their meanings—ultimately

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rejecting some messages, transforming their meanings and internalizing some—the archive simply is not there.1 Therefore, this analysis is framed as an indication of the female church laity’s hopes, desires, and fears about Mexican children, particularly middle-class and elite girls. This chapter draws on the theoretical underpinnings of Joanne Hershfield, among others, in that it takes visual culture and print media as a means to analyze popular discourse, in this case about childhood. Hershfield articulates the problem between “vision” (or more broadly defined as reception, in this case) and “representation” when she states: “Vision and representation, the production and consumption of images, cannot be teased apart; they are intimately connected as part of a complex social system of signification that involves the production, circulation, and consumption of images.”2 The importance of popular discourses on girlhood deserves a deep reading. For Hershfield, “people look to images to help them make sense of reality; for suggestions on how to be in the world, how to act, to move through particular spaces, and how to dress, as well as how to relate to other individuals and material objects and spaces. In this sense, pictorial representations operate as part of the complex process of self-identification or the self-fashioning of identity.”3 If we accept Hershfield’s concept then we can assume that many of the images and discourses used in Catholic writings worked in much the same way. Another way to approach the question of reception is to demonstrate the prevalence of the discursive threads found in Pequeña in other texts, religious and secular, circulating at the time. This chapter shows that issues discussed in Pequeña resonate with and find parallels in other texts, both secular and religious, from the same era. While it is beyond the scope of this book to understand children’s reception of the political, social, cultural and gendered content of the discursive threads of Pequeña, the importance of these discursive threads can be corroborated in other forms of print media from the era. During an era of exploding mass media, several scholars have located similar discourses. For example, Anne Rubenstein finds that the construction of the stock character the chica moderna (an emotionally and financially independent modern girl) in comic books necessitated the inclusion of her counterpoint in the more traditional, long-suffering mother. Parental anxieties about changing cultural mores can be located in other forms of archival evidence and print media from the era. For one father, the connection between popular entertainment for children and moral turpitude was clear. In a letter dated 1944 to President Ávila Camacho, one father expressed his fear of the influence a popular secular comic book had on his daughter when he stated: “I have had to take my youngest daughter out of school because I have learned

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that one of her female classmates rents for one cent, to the other girl students, ‘Pepín’ and others of these little magazines. Better that my daughter lose this year’s schooling, than that they turn her into a prostitute. Next year I will have to make the sacrifice of sending her to a private school, where with true zeal and full justification, they guard against those magazines reaching the hands of the girls.”4 The church sought to provide a viable alternative to new diversions and girls were often feared to be the most vulnerable, particularly in terms of their incipient sexuality. As such, the fear of unchecked sexual expression, with the prostitute at its most extreme, figured prominently in the modern Mexican collective imagination. According to Sergio la Mora in his survey of novels and films from twentieth-century Mexico, “the prostitute is constructed as the Other of the desired model of proper Mexican womanhood.”5 The invocation of either the prostitute or proper woman necessarily evokes the other in the minds’ eye. Furthermore, the relationship to modernity is equally noteworthy: “The prostitute is the central emblem of Mexico’s conflicted modernity. She simultaneously displays and masks the contradictory and uneven processes of industrial developmentalism.”6 That girls should be of such concern to the Catholic Church in the face of such sociocultural change is perhaps predictable even if the variety of forms it took is not. The church chose to harness mass media, in addition to more traditional forms of indoctrination, to communicate its messages to children. A closer look at the historical context is now in order. By the 1930s, the Catholic Church actively promoted the growth of lay organizations in response to government suppression of clerical activities. The state began enforcing the 1917 Constitution’s restrictions on clergy in 1926, a decision that led to a three-year bloody clash, known as the Cristero Rebellion, between militant Catholics and the government.7 Mexican Catholic Action (ACM), created in 1929, represented the increasing role of the laity in spreading social and religious doctrines of the church, especially in the face of sanctions against the clergy.8 Women were instrumental in the lay organization from the beginning. While they often emphasized women’s traditional roles in the home and society, these women often transcended these exhortations in their own personal and professional lives. Sofia del Valle, an important leader in ACM, never married but rather committed her life to the organization, educating women and organizing female wage laborers in various industries.9 A battle over sex education and socialist curriculum during the Cárdenas administration (1934–40) nearly caused another war.10 In the most extreme cases, public school teachers were run out of town or even killed for promoting what some Catholics considered scandalously immoral teachings.11 The

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Catholic hierarchy instructed priests to use the ACM to exert its authority and to circumvent the state’s surveillance and anticlerical restrictions. Catholic parents’ organizations launched a publicity campaign against socialist education and the SEP more generally in the 1930s. In the early 1930s, Narciso Bassols, Minister of Public Education from 1931 to 1934, supported sex education in public schools. Proponents of sex education in the SEP reasoned: “The child should know that the act of pleasure is in itself neither bad or sinful, but like any other act can be turned into something negative under certain circumstances.”12 Outraged Catholics responded forcefully and vociferously. In 1934, the Union Nacional de Padres de Familia (UNPF: National Union of Parents) threatened a national truancy strike and received press coverage in major daily newspapers, in part because links between parents’ groups and the church were obscured to a certain extent in the press. Catholic parents’ groups relied on propaganda like pamphlets and booklets to spread the message condemning socialist education. One such piece of propaganda, A Fact, A Secret, A Danger! (1934) encouraged women to talk to their husbands, children, and servants to explain the dangers of socialist education, claiming it was part of a global plot to expand communism.13 The inclusion of servants in the directive underscores that elite and middle-class women were the target audience of much of lay groups’ proselytizing efforts. Women pushed back against the state’s anticlerical campaigns, using the rhetoric and tools of domesticity. By 1939, on the eve of the upcoming presidential election, Cárdenas steered the course of the revolution in a somewhat unexpected direction when he snubbed his friend and confidante, Francisco Múgica, in favor of Ávila Camacho as his chosen successor. That Cárdenas passed over the leftist Múgica in favor of a more conservative, Catholic candidate reveals the extent to which the revolution had shifted and the degree to which church–state relations had normalized. As early as 1936, Cárdenas delivered several speeches that pointed to the softening of his anticlerical stance. By May 1938, Mexican bishops encouraged Catholics to contribute to the state effort to repay the oil debt after expropriation: “Catholics are not only allowed to contribute to this end in a way they see most fit, but also such a contribution will be eloquent proof that Catholic doctrine encourages the fulfilling of citizens’ rights, and lends a solid spiritual base to true patriotism.”14 Ávila Camacho cemented the improved relationship when he publicly embraced his Catholicism and denied that Article 3 conflicted with his religion. Under his successor, Miguel Alemán (1946–52), the church and state ideologies aligned not just under anti-communism but also under the general fear of US influence in Mexico. For the church, Protestantism represented a significant and pernicious

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threat to the Catholic souls in Mexico, one of the many potentially dangerous exports from the neighbor to the north.15 While the real revolution had ended by the late 1930s and early 1940s, what replaced it in terms of dominant discourses in civil society? By the 1950s, anticommunism represented one of those dominant discourses and allowed the Catholic Church to increase its power. As Soledad Loaeza eloquently phrases it: “The United States first projected the ghost of anti-Communism over the entire hemisphere. Nevertheless, thanks to the intervention of the Catholic Church, the ghost toured the region day and night. Every country received it with its own fears and fantasies; every country welcomed it into its bosom and allowed it to sit at the head of the table, where it guided conversations, controlled individuals’ behavior and their expectations, and protected morality and etiquette.”16 The dinner-table metaphor is particularly apt here as it was women and girls who were expected to advance the ideologies of the ACM, like charity, social justice, and anti-communism, through domesticity. The state was forced to heed the desire of its Catholic citizens when government restrictions on clergy and state incursion into the private lives of the family went too far. Beginning in the 1940s, the church experienced a less hostile relationship with the Mexican state, as evidenced by President Avila Camacho’s (1940–46) public proclamation of his Catholic devotion, something a President had not vocalized since the Porfiriato (1876–1911). The church took advantage of warming relations with the state and, according to historian Patience Schell, “sought to reclaim its role as arbiter of public morality.”17 Not only did the church reclaim that role, but it did so under the guise of nationalist discourse aimed at children, mostly girls. In the decades that followed, children became the single most important group in the church’s campaign to bolster its position in Mexican society and to preserve Catholic morality in the country. This chapter contributes to the historiographical debate on the relationship between children and the state, in this case by arguing that Mexico’s female Catholic laity helped shape a national identity grounded in Catholicism that benefited both the church and the postrevolutionary state. It pushes the debate forward chronologically and looks at the importance of Catholicism in the construction of national identity vis-a-vis girls. An analysis of Pequeña furthers the historiography of the church in Mexico by considering the role it played in the formation of national identity, the construction of girlhood, and the work of a female laity. Historians have given tremendous attention to the Catholic Church and religion in Mexico.18 Much of the work on the 1920s and 1930s focuses on church–state relations and often takes a regional

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focus, concentrating on the role of the Cristeros (Soldiers of Christ) or the aftermath of the rebellion.19 Recent scholarship by Edward Wright-Rios provides insight into the relationship between church hierarchy and female devotional cults in Oaxaca during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.20 For Paul Vanderwood, the act of taking popular religiosity and devotion seriously provides us with a nuanced understanding of how everyday people created their own spiritual reality and how it conflicted with the directives of church hierarchy. In a provocative historiographical essay, Adrian Bantjes laments the lack of historians’ attention to religion and the church in the post-1940 era.21 This chapter pushes the chronological period forward into the post-1940 era by studying the convergence of religious ideas and popular culture. Additionally, it supports the ideas put forth by Kristina Boylan in relation to women’s central role in upholding the power of the church in the postrevolutionary decades. She maintains: “Catholic activists, the majority of them women, strengthened the church in Mexico when its social standing had deteriorated due to leaders’ intransigence.”22 Political scientist and historian Soledad Loaeza’s work is most important to this discussion as she analyzes the “restoration” of Catholic power in midtwentieth century Mexico. By the end of the 1950s, the Catholic Church in Mexico enjoyed one of the most favorable positions in society in comparison to other Latin American nations. The nation witnessed an increase in the number of priests, from 4220 in 1945, to 6365 in 1960, to 8451 in 1968 (though priests per person diminished very slightly due to population growth). The number of nuns in Mexico more than doubled in a fifteenyear period: in 1945 there were 8123 and by 1960 the number had increased to 19,400.23 Loaeza underscores the fundamental importance of women in the restoration of church power: “The ideological and political context of the fifties enabled the Church to restore the moral authority and the social influence it had known in prerevolutionary times. Women were at the center of this pursuit.”24 And women’s reliance on girls as the future of Catholic power was predicated on the creation of a national identity that was Mexican and Catholic and disseminated in various ways. The ACM was the most powerful lay organization in Mexico; in 1953 it counted over four hundred thousand members, with 80 percent of its members women.25 The Catholic Church’s main weapon against communism and the onslaught of secular influences in the postrevolutionary and Cold War eras was its large arsenal of publications. The Legion of Decency, in cooperation with the archdiocese of Mexico City, began publishing and distributing Apreciaciones

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(Interpretations) in 1933. In the beginning it featured mostly movie reviews and ratings and later comic-book warnings.26 From 1940 to 1942, the production of religious newspapers nearly doubled, increasing from 45 to 84. By 1960 that number had skyrocketed to 186. In 1942 alone, the church distributed nearly eleven million free magazines and pamphlets, mostly to women and children, detailing the threats of communism. Additionally, two hundred thousand copies of Life and Reader’s Digest—both “giants of Anti-Communism”—were translated into Spanish and sold in Mexico.27 In the 1950s, anti-communism allowed for the development of a new coalition between the church and business. Perhaps it should come as little surprise that faith-based publications for children encouraged domesticity for girls and wage labor for boys. By the early 1960s, Catholics often opposed the influence of the Cuban Revolution and anticommunist messages appeared in many of its publications.28 Before tracing the discursive threads of national and international identity and mapping their gendered dimensions in Pequeña, I begin by offering some context for the Catholic Church's preoccupation with children, and especially with the girl child.

Catholicism in the everyday lives of children The physical church structure and the many Catholic symbols served as constant, if not conscious, reminders to children of their identity as Mexican Catholics. In free association drawings created in 1944 by children in Tepoztlán, a village widely studied by anthropologist Oscar Lewis located about 50 miles from Mexico City, the church and the rural school, physical centers of rural life, were the most often depicted items.29 Likewise, in middle-class neighborhoods of Mexico City, the church building and the plaza in front of it constituted the central location for the community’s residents.30 In a large Mexico City vecindad studied by Lewis in the 1950s, children gazed upon shrines of its two patron saints, the Virgin of Guadalupe and the Virgin of Zapopan, at the two entrances to the complex and in their own homes and watched as residents crossed themselves as they passed.31 While it is difficult to assess how children experienced and interpreted religious acts and symbols, their presence and participation in religious activities is well documented. Mexicans perceived that even young children could be spiritual beings. The members of one family living in the Casa Blanca vecindad in the nation’s capital agreed that all their children, except the youngest, had a devotion to the Virgin

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of Guadalupe. The youngest child, they reported, was devoted to the Virgin of Zapopan, and often could be found sleeping under her shrine at the entrance of the complex.32 Children sometimes visited the church without their parents in small groups and delivered flowers as symbolic offerings for the celebration of a particular saint’s day. The Catholic Church touched the lives of Mexican children in a multitude of ways. Children attended mass, catechism classes, and religious festivities, as well as participated directly by making sacraments like first communion and confession and baptism (usually as infants).33 The church emphasized the importance of a child’s first communion, both as a Catholic ritual and as a step in the indoctrination process. ACM invested time and money into catechism materials, such as booklets and pamphlets explaining sacraments. It first published Mi Primera Comunion (My First Communion) in 1945, and by 1960 the publication was in its tenth edition, with seventy-five thousand copies printed in 1960 alone.34 The fact that even poor parents often made the material sacrifices necessary to buy special clothes and host parties for a child’s first communion indicates the importance many placed on such rituals, sometimes regardless of their own formal participation in the church. One boy reportedly cried when his mother refused to let him take part in confession because he did not yet have the appropriate clothes, suggesting the importance some children placed on participating and the sense of inclusion or excitement it gave them.35 When discussing the year when children prepared to receive the sacrament, Archbishop Luis Maria Martínez reported: “How much importance should be given to this year . . . not only for the importance and dignity of the First Communion, but because it is the basis of Christian life for time and eternity! How many have been Saints from their First Communion!”36 This sentiment evidences the spiritual side of children’s development, but the church also sought to include them in the social and cultural aspects of Mexican Catholicism. In many ways, this subtler project contributed to the development of a Mexican Catholic nationalist identity in children and maintained the cultural significance of Catholicism in a rapidly modernizing, secularizing society. Impressively, the church maintained power in the face of these changes. The Catholic Church recognized the presence of increasingly secular leisure activities for children, particularly in Mexico City, and adapted to the situation by incorporating children into religious celebrations and sponsoring festivities especially for them. Some priests attempted to reach poorer children by offering catechism classes in their Mexico City vecindad, thus making their attendance more likely.37 Children participated in special masses organized through the

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ACM, carrying the flags of their parish and municipality to take the Eucharist as a group. In 1944, Father Carlos García noted in his diary that December 23 was a special day for the children in his parish. They had an assembly where some 320 children made confession, attended mass, and enjoyed a theatrical presentation. Afterwards children took exams in religion and the church distributed prizes to the youngsters.38 Through activities such as these, the church sought to combine religiosity with social activities and fun, thus adapting its Christianization techniques for children and simultaneously recognizing the desired requirements of modern childhood development. Beginning in 1930, the church organized children into gender-segregated clubs, with the Unidad Femenina Católica Mexicana (UFCM: Union of Mexican Catholic Women) directing their activities. In an effort to reach Mexican girls, the UFCM (the ACM’s women’s lay organization) began publishing Pequeña magazine for girls in 1935 and Piloto for boys in 1940. These publications not only spread the church’s religious teachings, but also contained advice about

Figure 4.1 Boy celebrates first communion, October 1949, author’s personal collection.

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civil society. As such, the church conveyed ideas about proper gender roles, citizenship, and Mexican Catholics’ global position, and provided advice to boys and girls about how to negotiate their way in a rapidly modernizing society. The Catholic Church increased the ACM’s control of children’s lay activities in the 1950s. In September 1955, it created a new organization within ACM to insure coordination of all activities related to children, including Asociación de Niños de Acción Católica (ANAC: Association of Boys of Catholic Action) (boys aged four to ten), the vanguardias of Asociación Católica de la Juventud Mexicana (ACJM: Catholic Association of Young Mexican Men) (boys and adolescents aged ten to fifteen), and the Secciones Preparatorias (Prepatory Sections) (girls aged four to fifteen).39 While these children’s groups had been established in the 1930s and 1940s by the ACM, beginning in 1955 the Comisión Central de la Infancia (Central Commission on Childhood) coordinated all children’s activities within the church. The commission regularly sent out to all groups within ACM directives and programming guidelines on matters relating to children. Centralization by the ACM of all children’s activities represented, in part, an assertion of patriarchal authority by the church over Mexican children. Centralization in 1955 suggests that the church increasingly sough to exert greater influence over children. Through its lay organizations the Catholic Church encouraged children to participate in supervised celebrations of religious holidays and rites of passage and sacraments essential to the faith. The development of religious revistas infantiles (children’s magazines) came at a time when the church was competing with not only state education, but also the proliferation of several new forms of entertainment. By the early 1940s, comic books and movies (and later television) represented two of the most influential and controversial cultural mediums available to children. In this case, the religious revistas were the product of increasing lay power within the church and their desire to reach children inside and outside of formal Catholic training. The magazines competed with less virtuous forms of entertainment, most notably the wildly popular comic books, dozens of which could be found on every street corner of Mexico City by the early 1940s. By 1960, Mexico City newsstands carried over one hundred different comic books.40 These comics, the church noted, cause the loss of innocence in children and “the acquisition of vices and customs contrary to Christian purity.”41 The church continually warned parents to shield their children from the pernicious effects of comic books and other inappropriate reading. The UFCM enlisted boys in the struggle by sponsoring a short-essay contest titled, “Why does a good Christian boy not read unsuitable children’s magazines?”42 The church indicated that Catholic publications for

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children were meant to provide alternatives to comic books, or at the least to counter some of their immoral messages. Catholic lay organizations and the hierarchy worried over US cultural influences entering Mexico and supplanting religious traditions. The church seemed especially concerned about the influx of foreign ideas about Christmas and its effect on Mexico’s children. By the 1950s, the presence of Santa Claus in advertisements and the department stores of Mexico City threatened to eclipse the importance of the Catholic Reyes Magos (Three Kings, or the Magi) who left gifts in children’s shoes on January 6 every year. In 1958, the commission recommended telling gift givers that presents should indicate that they were from Baby Jesus and not from Santa Claus. The church instructed children to make nativity scenes at home so that the “Christmas tree does not supplant the nacimiento (nativity scene).”43 The UFCM, through its publication Acción Femenina (Women’s Action), instructed Catholic women to promote the nacimiento over Santa Claus in their homes. The church, struggling with transnational cultural influences, learned to accept and incorporate aspects of it, while promoting “authentic” Mexican Catholic practices like the nacimiento, piñatas, and the Three Kings. The fact that the church found it necessary to stress the importance of the nacimiento and Baby Jesus over Santa Claus demonstrates that the transnational images and influences were gaining ground in Mexico, especially by the late 1950s, and reflects Catholics’ anxiety about this development. While the church experienced better relations with the Mexican state, it was also forced to deal with the development of a growing secular culture in Mexico City. The Catholic Church, through its lay organizations, urged parents to monitor what their children read and viewed on the screen. Catholic discourse most often cited neglect on the part of parents, not the children themselves, as the problem. With the Easter season approaching in 1941, the Legion of Decency (a Catholic lay organization committed to regulating entertainment) initiated a campaign to encourage Catholics to abstain from immoral entertainment and reminded them of “the enormous responsibility that weighs upon parents who neglect this point regarding their children.”44 In one editorial about the dangers of comic books, the Legion of Decency urged parents “to prevent by all means, peaceful or not, these abuses from continuing to penetrate the life of the home.”45 The church also encouraged children to influence those homes that lacked Catholic devotion.46 It considered children as spiritual individuals capable of influencing their parents, parents who perhaps were not only failing to provide their children with religious encouragement but were also “sinners” themselves.

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Figure 4.2 Benediction of animals, 1946, Enrique Díaz, courtesy of the AGN.

Having established the presence of the Catholic Church in children’s lives, the discussion now turns to specific content found in the girls’ magazine Pequeña, as well as some discussion of the boys’ magazine Piloto for comparison.

National identity, modernity, and politics in Pequeña Through its children’s magazines and activities, the church promoted very gender-specific roles for boys and girls. Church discourse centered on girls’ domesticity while emphasizing boys’ relationship to the state, to wage labor, and to modern technology. These gender-based differences in literature justified women’s subordination in the domestic sphere and promoted male privilege in the economic and political spheres.47 Most of the magazines’ content in the postrevolutionary period and especially the Cold War era buttressed state objectives in terms of educating women and girls on the importance of household skills and linked labor in the home with emotional fulfillment and service to the nation. Domestic education, the first of the discursive threads found in Pequeña,

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was present in images and photographs of girls performing household tasks, in recipes, fictionalized stories, and advice columns. The church emphasized that Mexican girls, as future women, had special obligations to Mexico’s future, and placed the nation’s status in the hemisphere in girls’ hands. All girls, the magazine stressed, would one day: “Be good women, hard-working, clean and studious, they are what Mexico needs to return to being a great nation, the first, the most advanced of America.” To accomplish this, the author tells girls to return to the “traditional virtues of the Mexican woman who was profoundly religious and dedicated to her family, children and home.”48 As such, the church promoted domesticity in girls and entrusted them with a special religiosity. In fact, Pequeña used language and images that often blurred the distinction between these two characteristics. Girls engaging in domestic duties demonstrated their religiosity and girls embodying religiosity performed their roles as the “traditional” (i.e., family-centered, pious, homemaker) Mexican woman had. The Legion of Decency repeatedly cited the pernicious effects of what they perceived to be attacks on the insolubility of marriage and the family in movies and other forms of popular entertainment.49 The church grappled with changing gender roles in society at large and sought to counter these effects by promoting “traditional” gender roles in children. Despite decades of feminist organization, Mexican women obtained national suffrage only in 1953 and many worked outside the home for wages, despite official rhetoric that stressed “traditional” women.50 The church considered housekeeping skills a mandatory and desirable factor in the social and personal development of little girls. Pequeña magazine featured a recipe page in every issue and continually provided detailed instruction for nearly every household task imaginable, from removing onion odors from kitchen knives to hanging pictures without damaging walls. While some advice focused on helping mother, other articles encouraged girls to take on small tasks themselves, like light cooking and cleaning, mending clothes, and caring for younger siblings. Readers were visually bombarded with images of girls acting out domesticity. Images of girls enacting domesticity, joyfully laundering clothes and washing dishes or admonishing their dolls, construed domestic work as either a natural proclivity of the female sex or merely as fun, worthy of reenacting for play’s sake. For girls, the church linked caregiving and domesticity with emotional love and fulfillment of religious and secular gender roles. The third discursive thread—the importance of emotional relationships—was often linked with domesticity and also spirituality. The church encouraged girls to take housework seriously, both to learn skills for future use and to fulfill current obligations as girls in the household. One

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article suggested helping mother with the younger children, washing, ironing, mending clothes, cleaning furniture, and sweeping as the ideal way to spend a week home from school.51 Messages of charity frequently intertwined with instruction in domestic skills, adding another dimension of moral authority for girls. Another article expanded the list of domestic chores, encouraged girls to make contact with extended female family members, and suggested they cook the recipe listed in Pequeña and invite a poor child over to share it. Only one such article appeared in the boys’ magazine Piloto, but the suggestions for vacation were very different. The magazine reminded boys to fulfill their duties with God, parents, and siblings, but also suggested “diversions, games, [and] strolls.”52 Articles often stressed that domestic activities would please and demonstrate a girl’s love for her mother. Girls’ perceived power was bolstered by their inclusion in the magazine as direct participants, highlighting their inclusion in and significance to the religious community. In this vein, an article in the February 1942 edition of Pequeña detailed interviews with eight girls and asked them if they liked housework and how they helped their mothers. Not surprisingly, all the girls responded enthusiastically about their love of housework and listed their favorite domestic chores. One girl reported: “If a girl really loves her mother she should help her.” Another said: “When I help her, she loves me more and I love her more.” From an early age, girls learned that housework was a female task and should be a labor of love. In their girlhood, they would serve their mothers and siblings as practice that would serve them well as wives and mothers in the future. One author stressed the seriousness of domesticity by reminding girls “from the time you are a little girl you have to prepare yourself so that your life as a woman will not be a failure.”53 But having a domestic role or being particularly moral had its benefits as well. Accordingly, many authors hinted that this role could be empowering. For example, one article explained to little girls that it was for their own good that they were docile because “a woman is stronger and more powerful the more quickly and submissive is her obedience.”54 The author claimed that docile and obedient girls possessed more influence over their parents and teachers, whereas girls with a tenacious character were less loved. Stories and advice columns stressed submission to authority and obedience as necessary for girls’ emotional happiness and spiritual fulfillment. Clearly, representatives of the Catholic Church worried that an increasingly secularized and modernized Mexican society threatened the hold of the church over young girls and the women they would become. The church responded to the increasing array of children’s leisure activities and their participation in urban life by providing advice and guidelines. The

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second discursive thread found in religious publications—etiquette in a modern world—appeared in various formats in Pequeña, largely through advice columns. The rapid growth of Mexico City during these decades meant that girls and boys needed to learn a new code of etiquette for daily life in a big city, especially if they were to make this transition without compromising on their religious and moral convictions. Pequeña provided such advice in articles titled, “Rules of Urbanity” and “You Have to Live in Society.” Going to church, the cinema, restaurants, museums, libraries, and shops, all required a set of guidelines. Most advice about girls’ behavior in public places emphasized not disrupting others or calling attention to oneself. Entreaties about proper behavior outside the home stressed the importance of being demure and submissive. The author instructed girls that if entertainment provokes laughter, the girls should laugh at the right moment and without guffawing or roaring. If a girl particularly liked something exhibited at a museum, she was cautioned not to make strong exclamations, shout, or applaud.55 Pequeña encouraged girls to perform their gender roles in a variety of public and private spaces. Advice columns often instructed girls how to behave and informed them about the effect their behavior would have on others. One article aptly summed up the lengthy list of characteristics of the ideal girl: she should be “the smile of the home.”56 Within the family, a girl should be “like a lovely angel that reminds one of God.” In church, her “composure and fervor” should inspire devotion in others while in public she should be noted for her modesty.57 We can only assume that the observance of these prescriptive behaviors meant that laywomen worried that girls were not fulfilling these ideal roles. Such advice columns positioned girls’ authority within the private sphere, the “holy zone” (bedroom, kitchen, and church) and sought to curtail or restrict their inclusion in the public sphere.58 When contemplating how to act like a good Christian, girls should think about how the Virgin Mary behaved as a girl. All the girls loved her and she made all her companions happy, the author wrote. “She is your model, you are her daughter and good girls imitate their mothers.”59 Girls often read about their two mothers: the one on earth and the Virgin Mary in heaven. The continual association of women, particularly mothers, with the Virgin Mary reinforced the notion that females possessed a special religiosity and moral influence within the family and society at large.60 According to the church, children, particularly little girls, could influence others through their spirituality. One pious girl, Teresita, was able to transform her father into a devout practicing Catholic through her prayers, offerings, and subscription to Pequeña. Because the girl could not yet read, her father read

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the magazine to her and was inspired by her devotion. The article ended: “This is a true story. Now do you see how easy it is to be an apostle with the help of Pequeña?”61 In other stories, visions of the Virgin Mary impressed parents and empowered children with a special religiosity.62 The church constructed childhood as a period of innocence—the third discursive thread—and emphasized its importance for girls. Fear of girls’ budding sexuality frequently merited commentary in the magazine. One poem urged girls to protect carefully “this divine innocence that decorates your existence” and “never besmirch your innocence nor tarnish this whiteness, keep yourself always pure, and forever happy you will be.”63 Thus, the connection between innocence/ purity and whiteness was made explicit. In Pequeña, the cover girls, happy and playing, were portrayed as white, in contrast to the poor children who were overwhelmingly portrayed as nonwhite. In essence, the meanings of national identity found in Pequeña privileged a racialized, light-skinned version of Mexican culture. The ideologies of national identity and race coalesced with the magazine’s attempts at positioning Mexican children within the global context and discussion of politics. The Catholic Church stressed the Hispanic foundations of Mexico, rejecting state ideologies of liberalism and mestizaje (racial mixing). 64 Similarly, in rural Jalisco, darker-skinned girls lamented their exclusion from parades associated with religious celebration because they “only picked the prettiest whitest girls … the whole town knew, that only the best, the prettiest girls could be on the floats.” The fourth and fifth discursive threads—politics and positionality and poverty as  anathema to modernity—are often so intertwined that they are difficult to separate  into discrete categories. Nevertheless, these last two themes will be discussed  separately for the sake of clarity while still pointing to their interconnectedness. The construction of Mexican childhood during the postrevolutionary and Cold War eras occurred contemporaneously with and was informed by the portrayal of foreign children and international political events. While the majority of Pequeña articles focused on children in missions, some also considered those affected by war and those belonging to indigenous groups living in the rural areas of Mexico. As such, Catholic publications for girls taught them to look at foreign conflicts and to position themselves in relation to the racialized “other.” Seemingly adult topics like war and economic deprivation frequently found their way into the minds of children. In the early 1940s, the church commented on the Second World War and reminded girls that while they were enjoying the gifts left in their shoes by the Three Kings, they should consider their good fortune. Surely the Three Kings could not deliver gifts to children in war zones while dodging bullets and machine-gun fire, one author pointed out. Therefore,

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she urged girls to keep in mind that when they received “their new doll, lovely little stove, or set of dishes,” that children in war areas had no toys or house, and were cold and scared because they had lost their mothers.65 The message meant to convey the good fortune that Mexican girls—or at least a certain privileged class of girls—experienced materially and emotionally in relation to foreign girls. Such content instructed girls to position themselves as modern elites in the international order and, in the process, strengthened their identity as Mexican Catholics. Pequeña urged girls to be thankful for their parents who provided food, clothes, and a room with a bed. Without parents, the author cautioned, readers would starve to death and freeze. This piece ended by stating: “With reason, poor orphans are worthy of pity.”66 These comparisons served a purpose other than inflicting guilt: they informed the construction of Mexican childhood. While the focus is on the good fortune of its Mexican readers presumably of the middle class or elite, the literature positions them in contrast to poor children, both inside and outside of Mexico. Mexican children, these portrayals implied, enjoyed a life with their parents, toys, food, clothing, and shelter. While most children in Mexico City did live with the most basic of necessities, the variation in living conditions in the capital during this period was tremendous. Many children lived in extreme poverty and a substantial number worked. The church put forth an idea of Mexican childhood that was class-specific and racially lighter-skinned. Children who could afford to participate in this rendering of childhood entered modernity in the eyes of the church. The influence of the Second World War and Cold War politics in Pequeña can be readily identified in its emphasis on the Christianizing work of mission projects, particularly in Africa and China. In their descriptions and illustrations of missions, the church emphasized the unique physical characteristics of foreign children and how their lives differed, materially and culturally, from those of Mexican children. Implicitly and explicitly, discourse about foreign children positioned Mexican children as superior. In an era before the popular usage of the term “Third World,” Mexicans and Latin Americans more generally would not have necessarily considered themselves in relation to others residing in postcolonial nations or the global south, a distinction while meaningful to scholars today, would not have made much sense to girls at the time.67 The magazines instructed Mexican children to pity those children whose existence so clearly differed from their own and promoted a vision of civilization that corresponded to a racial hierarchy. This discourse supplied middle- and upper-class children in Mexico City with an array of language and ideas to apply to poor and indigenous children within their own country.

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When discussing an inspirational African convert, one author described Tómas as “a lovely negrito, his head looked like it was full of raisins, he had enormous black eyes, huge lips, and jet-black skin.”68 Constructions of blackness could be juxtaposed with Mexican identity. One fascinating example is a story entitled La Negrita Catacumbé (The Little Black Girl Catacumbé). This rather lengthy story related the adventures of a group of girls after viewing a movie about a gang of mischievous children.69 The excited girls would have liked to imitate the group, but they did not have a black companion like the kids in the movie. A discussion follows wherein one girl states that “it’s much more fun to have black brothers and sisters.” Another girl disagrees and argues that a cousin would be a more appropriate familial relationship with a black child. The mother overhears and smiles, telling the girls that having black relatives is impossible. The insistent girl continues until the mother finally concedes that in the end, “black, white, and Chinese and all the races, we are all brothers because we are all children of God.”70 The language here is telling: since Mexicans in this story are neither black nor Chinese, they are implicitly defined as white. Blackness is removed from the realm of possibilities in describing the Mexican race. The girls in this story then pretend to make a film during recess; this highlights the importance of mass media and leisure in the construction of childhood. The enthusiastic girl has her face painted black to portray the negrita, and when she returns to the school building and washes off the paint, she dirties the bathroom and herself in the process. The girl, in the end, is left with stinging, paint-filled eyes and wonders if she will go blind. Perhaps, this story suggests, being a negrita is not much fun after all. Mission reports written for children emphasized skin color. A 1944 Piloto article posed the following question to Mexican boys in its title: “Do blacks have souls?” The author explains that, in Africa, “there are unexplored regions, where man has not yet arrived to adapt them to the human way of life.” The article continues by describing the conversion process of a little boy whose baptism gave “his soul a whiteness that contrasted with the blackness of his skin.” In this case, the story ended with the same question, but it implied that the answer was yes. The recently converted boy had saved a priest and a protestant (who subsequently converted to Catholicism) from an alligator attack.71 The magazines supplied children with material other than mission reports to learn about race. Comics within the religious magazines also portrayed foreign darkskinned people as savages and uncivilized. One comic told the story of a boy who travels by airplane and finds himself in a strange land surrounded by blackskinned natives with bone jewelry, grass skirts, and carrying shields and spears.

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The novelty of air travel at this time and its association with modernity make this contrast even starker. The boy awakens from the nightmare just as the savages are about to cook him and feast upon his body. Messages such as these instructed children to characterize dark-skinned indigenous people as uncivilized. Mexican children were taught that they too could participate in the missionaries’ project. The missionary projects of the Catholic Church were transnational in nature, given the various organizations and countries involved. It is worth noting that the literature directed at Mexican Catholic girls indicated that Mexico was not part of the list of nations associated with these other “heathen” regions. The magazine often categorized race as black, white, Chinese, and other. In one such case, a nun relates her experiences with children in China to Pequeña readers in Mexico. She declares that she has never seen a child in Mexico so poorly treated as those in China. When she contemplates the inhumanity of Chinese children being tossed out naked to die in the elements, she thanks God that Mexican children have been born in a Catholic country.72 One way they could conquer infidel children was by joining the Obra de Santa Infancia (Sacred Childhood Society). Through prayers and a small contribution, girls could save these children’s souls. In this story, one girl asks another: “Wouldn’t you like to buy chinitos (little Chinese children) or negritos (little black children) for baby Jesus?” The answer is an emphatic yes and the girls set out to work toward this goal. In another article about missions in China and Africa, a girl relates how “for only $2.50 you can order a baptism for a chinito isn’t that marvelous . . . and we, all the girls in my section, will give $0.10 each” so that two or more children can be baptized.73 By contributing 10 centavos, children could become little missionaries and participate in the church project of Christianizing and civilizing poor dark-skinned children. Boys read about the unfortunate Chinese boys from missionary reports in their magazine. The magazine articulated the sad story of three Chinese boys, two of whom had been baptized (and their names changed from their Chinese given names to José Rafael and José Arturo) and one who had been sold into servitude by his pauper grandparents. Boys were invited to send in letters to Rosario Ortiz of the UFCM who would then forward them to the Christian boys, or to send a donation to help “buy back” the less fortunate one. The magazine published letters from some boys of the Colegio “Felix de Jesus Rougier” of Coyoacán (a wealthy area of Mexico City). José Luis Andreu wrote to “José Rafael”: It gives me great pleasure that you are baptized and can go to heaven. Is your land, Wuhu, pretty? Mine is very beautiful and even more so, our Queen the

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Virgin of Guadalupe; here in my school we love her a lot. Say hello to José Arturo and Kiao Mao. I promise to send you religious cards and marbles. You tell me what more I can send to you.74

Other boys also reported that they would send marbles (the missionary’s report indicated that the Chinese boys played with little rocks because they did not have any marbles) and one indicated he would send a subscription to Piloto.75 While boys learned to be concerned about their less-fortunate counterparts in China, they also learned to define themselves in opposition to this lesscivilized racial other. The mission reports linked civilized children with toys and linked racially distinct (and nonwhite) uncivilized ones as lacking material possessions. Articles employed racial and cultural symbols of the supposedly uncivilized missionary lands. In one report where the precise geographic location of the missions was unclear, the text is surrounded by images of chopsticks and racialized caricatures of a Chinese person donning a pointy hat. Mexican children were shown praying for their pagan counterparts, as shown in an image from the edition dated July 5, 1962. As Edward Said and others have argued, these tropes of the other constituted an important aspect of self-definition in the Western world. Children sometimes portrayed the “other” through play and dress up. For example, when one parish held their Mission Day presentation, they dressed up a boy and a girl to be a Chinese subject and a missionary nun in their display. Children also dressed up like inditos (little Indians) to go to mass on holidays such as the Virgin of Guadalupe and Corpus Christi in Mexico City.76 The custom of dressing children up like inditos for Corpus Christi still thrives in present-day Mexico City. The act of dressing up like Indians relegated Mexico’s indigenous people to a part of the country’s past and signaled a departure from the indigenismo (a nationalist ideology that celebrated indigenous culture) of mural art and government discourses of the early postrevolutionary period that celebrated Mexico’s indigenous contributions as foundational to contemporary society.77 Representations of poverty abroad influenced the language employed by the church in the discourse about poverty in Mexico. For example, during the Second World War, one writer asked the girls if, in the middle of their games, they ever thought about all the sadness in the world. The author reminded readers that when they are on the street, they always see a sick, hungry, suffering, poor person begging for charity. Readers are instructed to ask God to alleviate these sufferings, because as girls, they are the most suitable and He will grant them what they ask.78 The church continually reminded children of their obligations to

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poor people. In one story, a grandmother advises her granddaughter to help the poor because, she explains, it is like doing something for Jesus. Juanita blushes as she remembers her rude behavior toward various needy individuals, such as avoiding eye contact with poor people.79 Mexico City, by the early 1950s, was in the throes of rapid industrialization and mass migration from the countryside. The church, through its instructional literature for children, highlighted the class and ethnic differences between middle-class and elite Mexicans and the increasing number of poor residents in the capital. It also used intergenerational connections, especially between grandmothers and children, to promote the importance of religion in everyday life. The magazines were designed for children of Mexico’s growing middle class and those from the elite, especially in cities. Girls supposedly participated in the magazine by sending in questions and the answers were subsequently published. Alicia wrote to Pequeña stating that she would like to help poor people. “My mother says that there are many, but how can I help?” the girl inquired. The reply suggested collecting and selling old newspapers and donating the money to a widow with many children but warned, “Be careful in selecting the person you want to help, because there are many needy people of pure laziness.”80 Charity should be given to only deserving poor people, this writer cautioned. Surprisingly, the language used by the little girl implies that her knowledge of poor people in Mexico consisted of second-hand information from her mother, not that she herself had perceived them. Most articles portrayed deserving poor people as orphans or widows and their many children. One article suggested that girls teach an illiterate person how to read, like the “muchachita (female servant) that helps your mother in the bedroom, or the little daughter of your cook or gardener.”81 Boys also read about their obligation to the poor in Mexico. One morality tale related the story of a young boy who broke his piggybank in order to help the son of the family’s doorman attend school. These stories conveyed the doctrine of Christian charity while simultaneously teaching children about social hierarchy in Mexico. By the early 1960s, the specter of communism loomed even larger in the minds of the Catholic hierarchy and laity. Children were not exempt from their exhortations. Pequeña readers learned about the sad situation of Cuban children who were reportedly taken from their parents and sent to indoctrination camps in the aftermath of the 1959 revolution. Class differences were explained in another article when the author asks: “Is the inequality that exists between men an injustice? No; because it comes from our nature and this is how God has provided for the good of society.” Moreover, the article stressed that it is up to each individual

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whether they take advantage of or waste their opportunities for improvement.82 While the church–state informal arrangement functioned well in the 1940s, by the mid-1950s, the episcopate began critiquing the state project and unequal distribution of wealth in Mexico.83 Nevertheless, staunch anti-communism and fear of competing economic models ensured that lay organizations roundly criticized Cuba and praised capitalism in their literature for children. Some articles explicitly compare foreign children and poor indigenous children in Mexico. For example, one author promoting missions reminds girls that they should think about the millions of souls that do not know el Señor (God), like the “savages” in Africa who have never heard His name, the Chinese and Japanese who worship stone idols, and, in Mexico, the people who are “completely ignorant of the true religion, . . . the Tarahumaras in the north of the republic.” This author encouraged girls to send their old scapulars, religious cards, personal adornments like necklaces, or any other inexpensive and striking object. “All of this can help more than we could imagine, as these people, far from civilization, need the stimulus of material things.”84 In Piloto, one missionary report focused on the Tarahumara’s seven thousand heathen souls and encouraged boys to pray and to send in a donation that would be sent to the missionaries there in the north of Mexico.85 In these cases, the church explicitly links the Tarahumara indigenous group in Mexico with African, Chinese, and Japanese heathen savages because they are not Catholic and lack one of the key components of modernity: material possessions. The church frequently defined levels of civilization in its mission lands. Pequeña readers learned about African missions, a place one author stated, where civilization had not yet arrived. She reported that these people lived in huts and did not have houses or clothes like Mexicans did, much less “stoves or the marvelous electrical appliances you have in your kitchen.”86 When the World Day of the Missions was celebrated in October 1968, the church encouraged children around the world to consider their poor little brothers and sisters. It urged Mexican children to pray for their hermanitos (little brothers and sisters) in faraway countries as well as those near their own house who did not know of Jesus and suffered in poverty and hunger.87 Even in the early 1940s, the UFCM also highlighted the difference between Mexico City’s children and residents in the Mexican countryside. “The children of Chachalacas [in the state of Veracruz] do not have a life full of comforts and games like those of Mexico [City]” because they work from age of twelve in the fields, one author reminded Mexican boys.88 In October 1945, one article celebrating Dia de la Raza (Day of the Race, October 12 celebrated as Columbus Day in other countries) noted that their

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race was a mixture of Indian and Spanish and that both deserved respect and veneration. Indian and Spanish came together to form one race, the author maintained.89 By the early 1960s, the magazine relegated indios to a more remote place in the collective memory. In an essay celebrating Dia de la Raza in 1962, the writer noted, “Thanks to Spain, we belong to the Latin race and are a civilized country, as before the Conquest, there were only diverse tribes of barbarous customs.”90 Two years later, one article described Mexicans as follows: “We Mexicans are not, thanks be to God, a race that has resulted from a mixture of many races, as happens in some countries, but that we have only one origin and because of this we all inherited the same tradition.” The article points out that after the Conquest, Spaniards married Indians, “and their children were Indians, but also Spaniards . . . it was a distinct race, a new race. After many, many years, they had forgotten if their mother was Otomi, or if their grandfather was Tlaxcalteca and then everyone, all the children of Spaniards and indias were called, as you know, Mexicans and they formed one nation: Mexico.”91 The study of Catholicism and an analysis of Pequeña in the postrevolutionary and Cold War eras illuminate the changing nature of the relationship between the church and state and the importance placed on children by both institutions. First, the church used publications for children to spread Catholic ideology and Mexican national identity—and they were anything but apolitical. As sources, they provide us a unique opportunity to see the concerns, fears, and agendas of its producers through the lens of a more “simplified” format aimed at children. Catholic laywomen held tremendous power in mid-twentieth-century Mexico and they looked to girls to uphold the power of the church in the future, especially in the face of external ideas about changing gender roles, sexuality, and the increasing inroads the “American way of life” was making in Mexico. Messages regarding racial hierarchies and politics, domestic skills, comportment, and the importance of emotive love for girls all found their way into every issue spanning a period of more than thirty years. Envisioned as an organization fulfilling the perceived needs of future Mexican Catholics—and by extension, the nation—the UFCM drew on international events and made references to global issues while insisting that the messages represented a distinctly Mexican identity. Anti-communist directives originating from Vatican made their way into Catholic publications for boys and girls in Mexico, sending strong messages of middle-class identity in the process. By the late 1960s, the ecclesiastical hierarchy in Mexico was more open to the outside world, especially in the wake of the Second Vatican Council. Lay Catholics increased their power within the institution as well.92

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Pequeña offered some Mexican girls a script with which to position themselves within a global context with a sense of strong national Catholic identity. The degree to which other influences altered or reinforced these scripts is still in question. While this chapter is most definitely not a history of children’s lived religious experience, it points to the ways in which the Catholic Church used women, girls, anti-communism, and fears of foreign cultural and economic influence to increase its power. Future research is necessary to determine a social history of children’s experiences with the Catholic Church in the post-1940 period, perhaps to better illuminate the experiences of children, and through oral histories, the meanings afforded by these experiences. Pequeña’s agenda models both the “flow” of transnational ideologies regarding race, culture, and politics and the frictions it could produce at the intersection of national and global identities, especially in their gendered forms. Yet as historians deploy it, transnational need not suggest merely an easy flow across borders or an absence of contention about or struggle over the meanings of such movement.93 Anna Tsing’s metaphor of “friction” seems particularly useful in describing the transnational component of Mexican national identity as we see it in later twentieth-century Catholic media directed at girls. Rather than flow, she argues, we should be alive to the points of friction that transnationality makes visible in specific historical circumstances.94 Such friction reminds  us that all forms of transnationality take place in historically specific times and places that are saturated with unequal relations of power and material conditions, as anthropologist James Ferguson alerts us to in his work on postcolonial Africa.95  Ferguson also warns scholars of the dangers in dismissing aspirations toward modern Western ways as simple mimicry. The print media designed for Mexican middle- and upper-class girls is in many ways a predictable site for examining these questions, but it is by no means the only one to which historians of twentieth-century Mexico need to turn their attention. In fact, the use and regulation of mass media represented but one aspect of the church’s influence over children, a domain in equal need of much more detailed historical work. Mexico in the post-1940 period experienced a complex transformation during an era of warming relations between the church and the state, rapid industrialization and economic growth, and large-scale rural-to-urban migration. The state-promoted nationalism of the 1920s and 1930s had waned and the new forms of national identity found in the middle of the twentieth century looked very different. As Gilbert Joseph, Anne Rubenstein, and Eric Zolov put

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it, “the market powerfully complemented the state in the production of social citizenship.”96 In this instance, we see that the Catholic Church also participated in the “production of social citizenship” in the post-1940 era through mass media. To return to Tsing’s metaphor about friction, where the rubber meets the road, a thorough analysis of Pequeña in conjunction with a quick but careful survey of contemporary print media, culture, and official documents alerts us to the savvy actions taken by Catholic laywomen. If we imagine riding a bicycle, these women may have lowered their feet slightly, not to quickly halt “progress” but to slightly slow the movement so as to assess and steer a course with which they felt most comfortable. Women were instrumental in upholding church power and they entrusted girls with the same task in the present and future. The evidence under consideration overwhelmingly demonstrates how Mexican national identity—as conceived by Catholic laywomen—cannot be divorced from global or transnational concerns and that anti-communism bolstered this project. At least for the twentieth century, national histories take on a distinctly different visage when considered through the lens of transnationalism.97 Although the transnational work of the Catholic Church has been acknowledged by historians,98 its role in shaping the national identity of children in postrevolutionary and Cold War Mexico via media has not been as deeply explored.  Yet both officials and laypeople were keenly aware of the stakes of shaping Mexican Catholic identity, and they understood that boys and girls were among the most impressionable targets for such a project. The development of children’s literature in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s provides an opportunity to examine how this campaign unfolded and what the stakes were for both the church’s use of media as a carrier of the “universal” message of Catholicism and the particular exhortation to Mexican identity.

5

Documenting Childhood: Discourses and Images of Children in Print Media and Photography

In October 1951, a bakery owner in Mexico City shot fourteen-year-old Gabriel Orozco when he discovered his young employee trying to leave the bakery with bread in his pockets. Orozco had been contributing significantly to the family income since the tender age of ten. The Orozco family was headed by a widowed laundress who struggled daily to feed her family of seven children. To support the children after the death of her husband, the mother left them alone while she worked from early in the morning until late at night. Gabriel worked rather than attend school. At the age of eleven, he labored for 1 peso per week at an automotive shop, a pittance when beans, rice, and lard cost 1.4, 1.5, and 4.8 pesos per kilogram, respectively.1 Several years later, he found employment as a baker’s assistant, earning 6 pesos a day. Gabriel’s employment was not unusual; many children contributed to the family economy, especially if they had lost a parent. After the shooting, newspaper and magazine accounts condemned not only the baker’s violence but also the larger problem of poverty in the city. The family lived in the colonia Gertrudis G. Sánchez, which Jueves de Excélsior described as a “proletarian neighborhood, without lights, without drainage, without hygiene.” The weekly magazine lamented: It seems incredible that someone could be capable of killing over a few pieces of bread. And nevertheless, this somber squalid drama, is only one of thousands that every day develops in our beautiful city. . . . This is a call of attention to the authorities, who should ensure a better distribution of wealth in our society, and to society itself that has the duty to defend its members from homelessness, as a means of self-protection.

The shooting did not prove fatal and authorities released the bakery owner from jail. The baker’s release, the author maintained, represented “another of

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the greatest legal injustices: the penal code applies only to the poor. For the rich, for the influential, they have invented numerous excuses that permit them to enjoy a certain impunity.” The author connected social justice to the trope of civilization, complaining that no charges had been brought against the owner: “There is no law in Mexico, nor in any other civilized country, that punishes those who steal because of hunger.” This narrative of child labor and theft was transformed into a story about child victimization and class struggle; society was to blame for this boy’s fate. The story of the baker’s young assistant provides a window into the importance placed on children in Cold War Mexico City print media, which portrayed children as innocent subjects in need of protection or as potential threats to Mexico’s modernization project.2 Representations of childhood in Mexico during the postrevolutionary and Cold War eras reflected societal anxieties about modernization, specifically rapid industrialization, continued rural migration to the city, changing gender norms, and the influx of foreign ideas and culture. Despite the impressive economic growth that the country had experienced during the post-1940 period, the revolution and its subsequent institutionalization had hardly succeeded in achieving social equality, as Mexico City’s elite flaunted wealth that belonged to a few. This glaring inequality posed a challenge to the ruling PRI, whose Cold War–era slogan of “national unity” attempted to contain more radical political ideas. Print media’s representations of children used a dichotomy of extreme poverty on the one hand and a modern, middle-class consumer culture on the other. Boys and girls appeared either as beneficiaries of economic growth enjoying the trappings of an idealized childhood or as street urchins living and working in poverty. These journalistic depictions of children formed part of a growing number of voices criticizing the ruling party, effectively challenging the proclaimed successes of the revolution long before the highly visible 1968 Student Movement. Of equal importance, journalists’ representations of children and childhood through photography and related media transformed the very definition of childhood during the Cold War. Print media coverage of both extreme poverty and idealized, middle-class childhood contributed to the increasing importance of modern childhood as an ideal for which Mexicans, both as parents and citizens, should strive. The ideal of modern childhood, an ideology ascendant in much of the world at this time, consisted of nurturing children physically and emotionally, ensuring time for education and play, and marking childhood as a distinct stage before adulthood and separate from the concerns of the adult

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world. Clearly, child labor conflicted with the notion of a modern, protected childhood. The middle-class ideal of a comfortable “modern” childhood became a widespread ideal in Mexico City thanks, in large part, to journalistic representations of social inequality, reinforced by the PRI’s political concerns during the Cold War era. Journalistic representations of childhood on both ends of the spectrum allowed readers to situate themselves appropriately in their class within the social hierarchy, based on the type of childhood their children were experiencing. During the postrevolutionary and Cold War decades, when the Mexican government controlled the production and even the sales price of newspapers, photojournalists and journalists found that images of children provided a means to critique the failings of the state and its economic policies and their corresponding social ramifications. The state-owned Productora e Importadora de Papel, S.A. (PIPSA; Paper Producer and Importer, Inc.) subsidized the newspaper industry by selling paper stock to companies that cooperated in portraying the party in a favorable light. The arrangement functioned well for the state. During the period 1940–76, no publication independent from PIPSA lasted more than a year.3 Even though print media was largely mediated through the state, images of childhood served to communicate problems associated with modernization. Beginning in the 1940s, three dailies—Novedades, Excélsior, and El Universal—dominated the Mexican newspaper industry. Excélsior (the daily from which the weekly magazine Jueves de Excélsior originated) was founded in 1917 and subsequently taken over by members of the politically and economically powerful “Monterrey Group.” By the late 1940s, the newspaper was part of a collective headed by Rodrigo de Llano. The daily newspaper sometimes contained articles from the North American Newspaper Alliance and often relied on the Associated Press for news coverage. Thus, Excélsior, while viewed as more divorced from state concerns than other newspapers like the official party paper El Nacional,4 was influenced to a large degree by the United States and has been identified as representating a middle-class perspective.5 Perhaps the fact that El Nacional functioned as a “semigovernment organ” and that the reading public was aware of this fact contributed to the idea that the other major dailies remained relatively free of government influence. Yet, the ruling party had its hand in the production of all major print media of the era.6 In addition to the daily newspapers, illustrated weekly magazines like Hoy, Mañana, and Siempre! (Today, Tomorrow, and Always) enjoyed tremendous success from the 1930s until about the mid-1950s in Mexico.7 By allowing the press to critique

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the economic and political failings of the PRI within a small space—the imagery of children—the Mexican state projected a veneer of democracy. Room for dissent existed—no matter how constructed and censored that dissent was— in the political and social environment of Mexico City. A close analysis of photographs, illustrations, and articles written about children and childhood allows us to see a critique of social inequality and the dangers that modernization posed to the city’s children. Famous Mexican photographers like Hector García, Enrique Díaz, and Nacho López photographed children in the city environment, working, playing, and some struggling to survive. Whereas other writers, such as American anthropologist Oscar Lewis, whose exposé of urban poverty as told through one family caused a sensation when it was translated into Spanish in 1964, fared less favorably. While aspects of the deprivation he documented appeared in some newspaper and magazine articles, no other account contained the shocking amount of details describing what children and young people experienced in urban poverty. An indictment of the city, its poverty, and—as some conceived it—of the Mexican family itself, Lewis’s Los hijos de Sánchez (The Children of Sánchez) caused a firestorm, and a campaign was started to ban Lewis and the book from the country. Historians have recently turned their attention to popular culture—especially when communicated through mass media—as one of the most powerful forces in Mexican societal change in the era between 1940 and the early 1970s; the second half of that period was commonly hailed as the “Mexican Miracle” due to its impressive economic growth.8 An interrogation of the representations of children and the evolving concept of childhood provides a glimpse into Mexico City society and the political economy of these decades. It also allows us to see the unevenness of the PRI in the postrevolutionary and Cold War eras. At times, the state-monitored press was allowed to criticize socioeconomic conditions by invoking the plight of poor children, but other times, the PRI used journalism to enhance its image in the eyes of its citizens or to communicate the party line. There were, of course, limits to how dramatically journalists could criticize government officials or actions. The limited coverage in the press of the Tlatelolco massacre of protesting students substantiates this point. This chapter first turns to a broader discussion of the power and usefulness of photography and print media in the historical and comparative perspectives. Next, an overview of photography of the child by three of Mexico’s most influential photographers—Hector García, Enrique Díaz, and Nacho López—follows and provides a contextualized analysis of their photos and ideologies.9 The rest of the chapter looks at daily newspapers and some magazines, especially the

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weekly Jueves de Excélsior to determine how childhood images appeared in the print media and to what effect.

The power of representation in historical perspective From the earliest days of photography, individuals have used the medium to document, persuade, and inform the public about social conditions and problems. Two examples from the United States are illustrative. Jacob Riis, police reporter and social reformer, used photography to document and lament the squalid conditions that immigrants faced in New York tenements near the end of the nineteenth century. Riis’s How the Other Half Lives (1890) enjoyed widespread popularity in the United States. In her analysis of Riis’s narrative technique, historian Katherine Bullard argues that he drew on imperial travel narratives to explain the tenements and relied on principles of difference to construct that narrative. The photographs “at once invite brotherhood or sisterhood with the viewer but also remind the audience of the distance between middle-class neighborhoods and the slums. The source of connection was most often children.”10 Similarly, representations of child poverty in Mexico City dailies reinforced readers’ class-based distinctions. Photographer Dorothea Lange brought widespread attention to the plight of the rural and urban poor as well as the politically oppressed in the United States. In the 1930s and 1940s, Lange photographed migrant workers, Japanese internment camp victims, and poverty-stricken individuals of the Great Depression era.11 While individual reception of these works—indeed of all photography—may be difficult to gauge, their collective impact on society and politics has been addressed in scholarly literature. According to German-born French photographer Gisele Freund: More than any other medium, photography is able to express the values of the dominant social class and to interpret events from that class’s point of view, for photography, although strictly linked with nature, has only an illusory objectivity. The lens, the so-called impartial eye, actually permits every possible distortion of reality: the character of the image is determined by the photographer’s point of view and the demands of his patrons. The importance of photography does not rest primarily in its potential as an art form, but rather in its ability to shape our ideas, to influence our behavior, and to define our society.12

In exactly these ways, images of children affected popular discourse and allowed for critiques of the state and dominant classes in Mexico.

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The power of photojournalism and print media more generally in shaping societal attitudes and even domestic policy has been demonstrated by several scholars. Wendy Kozol found that Life magazine promoted “a cultural idea of family” during a time of uncertainty and upheaval in the post–Second World War United States. She points to the power of this cultural idea, stating “pictures and stories claimed merely to reflect a shared social reality, a claim that ignored the active role of cultural representation in constructing and shaping knowledge.” Moreover, Kozol associates media representations of the family with governmental concerns, where both “defined society and measured the effects of political policy in domestic terms.” While Kozol is explicitly concerned with images of the nuclear family, Paula Fass has directly linked press coverage to ideas circulating about youth, psychiatry, and delinquency through her analysis of the Leopold and Loeb case in Chicago beginning in the 1920s.13 For Mexico, several scholars have contributed to a relatively new discussion about images of children. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Mexicans used photography to document, cope with, and ritualize the death of very young children. Gutierre Aceves has argued that the ritual of “child-death,” in which the bodies of dead children are dressed, celebrated, and photographed, is linked to the cult of the Virgin Mary.14 While highly personal and distinct from images found in print media, the photographs of angelitos (cherubs, or little angels) suggest that many individuals employed photography to grieve and to demonstrate the emotional value of children, especially those taken from the earthly world at a tender age.15 A recent collection of essays demonstrates the growing attention scholars in Mexico are dedicating to the analysis of childhood images. Alberto del Castillo Troncoso has argued that during the Porfiriato, science and journalism shaped the construction of childhood in Mexico City. He has maintained that “scientific arguments, journalistic texts, and the diversity of images and representations contributed to the diffusion of a collective imaginary that raised awareness . . . in the capital regarding the serious problems that afflicted the child population and to redefine some concepts around this stage.” Through his analysis of images, Castillo located child participation in labor conflicts and an increase in “social control” of street children. On the other hand, images of innocence and purity were associated with elite children. Castillo has argued that during the Porfiriato, problems pertaining to children were beginning to be seen as “a matter of the State.”16 Historian of visual culture John Mraz has considered the role of illustrated magazines and the work of photojournalists, though his work does not focus on children except for his discussion on some of Nacho López’s

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photoessays.17 For the postrevolutionary and Cold War eras, I argue that images of children contributed to the opening up of childhood and the production of a more democratic category of childhood. This analysis also shows us how unevenly that supposed “miracle” of economic development unfolded in the capital city.

Mexican photographers document childhood Images possess a certain aura; they are staged or performed and are open to individual interpretation. They represent a powerful means of suasion, particularly as postrevolutionary Mexico City witnessed a tremendous boom in mass media production like radio, cinema, newspapers, and magazines. Images are both reflections of constructed ideologies and shapers of public opinion and social norms. Looking through an analytic lens of childhood provides a more nuanced understanding of the postrevolutionary and Cold War periods in Mexican history and documents Mexican children’s historical agency in everyday life. Many artists and intellectuals included children in their subject matter. In his collection of essays I Speak of the City, historian Mauricio Tenorio-Trillo has documented the voices of artists, intellectuals, writers, and filmmakers interested in Mexico City in the first half of the twentieth century. Immediately after the revolution, in the 1920s and 1930s, many of these individuals featured the city in their reporting, “including its morally unacceptable parts.” He finds that later in the 1940s and 1950s, individuals such as Manuel and Lola Álvarez Bravo, Nacho López, Agustín Jiménez, and Juan Guzmán offered a glimpse into what he considers the real city (as opposed to the idealized “Brown Atlantis”) and depicted children frequently in their work. According to Tenorio-Trillo, by 1940 photojournalists had been reporting on poor urban children for two decades. Tina Modotti’s work in the 1920s shows children working in the markets and in any number of everyday scenes. Tenorio-Trillo also links many of these images explicitly to Buñuel’s work in the coming decades, labeling them as a sort of “prologue.”18 What materializes in many of these images is sympathy for the poor, especially poor children. For example, in the work of Manuel Álvarez Bravo “one senses the same fundamental alliance with the proletariat, through a sustained attention to the existence of ordinary people of Mexico.”19 Álvarez was born on February 4, 1902, in Mexico City and attended a Catholic school in Tlalpan between 1908 and 1914, even though the revolution often

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interrupted class sessions. As a child, Álvarez reportedly witnessed the death and destruction wrought by the revolution as he happened upon dead bodies in Mexico City.20 Many of Álvarez’s photographs feature children, including his famous Boy urinating (1927), Girl watching birds (1931), Public thirst (1934), among others. The Mother of the Shoeshine Boy and the Shoeshine Boy (1950s) depicts the pair taking a break, sitting on the sidewalk sharing a snack, a testament to the prevalence of informal child labor on Mexico City’s streets. Despite official prohibitions on child labor, it continued unabated in the decades under consideration. Prominent Mexican photojournalists, like the internationally acclaimed Héctor García, recognized the detrimental effects of the population increase and rapid industrialization that urban dwellers experienced. Many of García’s works include children and most contain a high level of social criticism. For example, Between Progress and Development (1950) clearly identifies the potential dangers that modernity posed to children, in this case a young boy wedged between two large imposing automobiles, as if the cars—quintessential symbols of modernity—might crush the innocent child. His dress is also noteworthy: he is wearing traditional clothing of the rural countryside, including a wide-brimmed hat and is without shoes. He is the focal point of the photograph as he appears exactly in the center and his head is barely level with the cars’ hoods. In the background near the edge of the image appears an advertisement with “USA” the only word clearly legible. Niño entre el vientre de concreto (Boy within a Womb of Concrete) (1949) depicts a boy seeking shelter, perhaps to catch some sleep, in the most inhabitable looking space, crouched within a small window of concrete. The boy’s leg is exposed because his pants are so badly torn and he is barefoot. His hands are folded in front of his face; whether in a gesture expressing shame or in an attempt to get some sleep, García lets the observer decide. He was awarded the National Prize for Journalism for this photo.21 García was born in 1923 in the barrio la Candelaria de los Patos, one of the poorest in Mexico City. The fourth of five children, García experienced firsthand the deprivations and malevolent side of the capital that he so often photographed later in life. In 1937, García found himself in a correctional facility for minors in Tlalpan (the southern part of Mexico City) and by 1940, parentless after the death of his mother. Like the baker’s young assistant, Gabriel Orozco in the opening vignette to this chapter, García had stolen bread out of hunger. The director of the reformatory at Tlapan provided the boy with a camera, which marked the beginning of his devotion to the art. During the Second World War, García joined the ranks of Mexicans who crossed the border

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to labor in the United States under the Bracero Program.22 Upon returning to Mexico City in 1945, García began working as an office boy at a magazine called Celuloide where he worked with famous writers like Salvador Novo and José Revueltas. He had taken photos of social protests for years but his formal study of photography and filmmaking in the late 1940s represented a turning point in his career. The director of Celuloide encouraged his work and arranged for him to study with Manuel Álvarez Bravo and Gabriel Figueroa, the cinematographer who later worked with Buñuel on Los olvidados. Subsequently, his career took off and he began working for several big publications. In 1953, he founded Cine Mundial, a popular magazine about the film industry (both inside and outside of Mexico) with Miguel Ángel Mendoza. During the 1950s, García worked as a photographer and became very involved in the 1958 labor movement and strikes of the railroad workers in the city. García won the National Prize for Journalism three times during his very successful career, first in 1958 for his work in Excélsior, in 1968 for his coverage of the Tlatelolco massacre in the magazine Siempre!23 García’s vision of Mexico City differed drastically from the rhetoric of the “Mexican Miracle” that contemporary boosters began trumpeting by the midtwentieth. García himself recognized the power of photography to document life when he profoundly yet simply stated, “Life and history have changed since the appearance of photography. Before, it was very difficult to have proof that everything occurred the way history said it did. Now photography leaves no doubt.” His ideas provide insight into the mindset of a man raised in Mexico City, as well as into the social, political, and cultural implications of photojournalism. There is a definite sense that photography, as García viewed it, had an inherent obligation to document the “truth” and that it can be used to facilitate political and social change. García also stressed the accessibility and democratic nature of photography: all one needed was a camera and some film. “Photography is a tool,” García said, “that has no other purpose but to serve objectively without the blemish of emotions. It is the most universal and human mean of expression that we have.”24 While many would disagree with his belief in photography’s objectivity, García adamantly believed that by photographing suffering children, among other politically charged subjects, he was both documenting their existence for the sake of history and putting into motion a process by which these social concerns would be addressed. The hardships that García endured as a child probably influenced his politics and heightened his sensitivity to the suffering of others. Nevertheless, he believed in the objectivity of photography and its power to influence society.

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For García, the relationship between his work and modernity was unmistakable. “Photography is the inexcusable companion of modern life, of children, of the young, of the old.”25 In 1947, García’s Between the Wheels of Progress depicted the perils of the city’s environs in a photograph of a little girl and a man running to cross the street, barely escaping the rapidly oncoming automobiles. The two human subjects in this photograph, a child and a man dressed in indigenous garb, encapsulate the threat that modernity posed to Mexico’s people and by implication, its traditions. One photograph featuring a filthy, disheveled, little boy wearing rags and eating a tortilla on the city streets is called Social Product (1962). In 1966 he photographed a group of about twelve ragged children huddled together playing on the sidewalk in Colonia Guerrero and titled it Before Family Planning.26 If the meaning of García’s work was lost on some at first glance, the titles left little room for ambiguity in assessing García’s politics. Children often appeared in other photojournalists’ work, like that of Enrique Díaz, one of the most important photojournalists from the mid-1930s to the early 1950s. Yet, Diaz’s photographs indicate a very different ideology and worldview from those of García. Politically, he was considered center–right and his work fell in step with the party line, often glorifying the President in his works. Indeed, historian John Mraz has counted that in 1951 alone, Díaz had published works on President Miguel Alemán in one half of a magazine’s issues. Díaz retired from the magazine Mañana at the end of 1950, completely retiring from the profession a few years later.27 Yet, his body of work especially from 1938 to 1946 contains many images of children at school or official events like field trips or special ceremonies. His photographs do not contain a harsh social critique like those of Hector García or Nacho López, yet he frequently documented children’s leisure and school activities, celebrating the joys of childhood. In 1940, he photographed children performing and playing piano in a children’s concert organized to celebrate Mother’s Day at the Academia del Profesor Manuel Rodriguez Vizcarra.28 In “Niños de las escuelas visitan la exposición de la radio/School children visit the radio exposition” (1944) Díaz photographed a group of curious girls hovering over a technological demonstration, surrounded by phonographs, microphones, radio receivers and even a post on the wall advertising the coming of television, six years before the first official public broadcast in Mexico.29 Other photos by Díaz featured girls learning to use washboards for current or future domestic labor in school settings. He often photographed children at play and in various social settings throughout the city. Díaz liked to photograph children reading in various parts of the city, like this image of two boys resting on a sidewalk reading in each other’s quiet company. Some photos depicted children caught within the

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Figure 5.1 Barefoot girl with infant in tow watching carnival ride, circa 1940s, Enrique Díaz, courtesy of AGN.

complex struggle between modernity and economic deprivation. In a particular striking example of the social inequalities of the capital city, we see a well-dressed little girl wearing ribbons in her hair enjoying a carnival ride, while another little girl, without shoes, holding an infant in her rebozo stands and stares at her.30 The emotions conjured up by Díaz’s photograph resonate with a scene from Buñuel’s Los olvidados in which Pedro pushes the carousel around as his job, while other more fortunate children enjoy the ride. Next, we turn to one of Mexico’s most well-known photojournalists of the 1950s, Nacho López. Ignacio López Bocanegra (1923–86), known as Nacho López, was a freelancing photojournalist who taught photography and later moved into cinema production only to return to photography again later in life. Born in 1923, López attended school during the socialist years and, later in life, reflected on its importance: “The socialist education that I received as an adolescent during Cardenas’s regime left profound traces on my soul. We sang ‘The Internationale’ and knew that ‘The bourgeoisie is insatiable and cruel’; at the cry of ‘Arise, hungry victim!’ we battled in our dreams against the capitalist system.”31 López liked to photograph everyday activities—he had an affinity for the working-class populations—and rarely covered actual events thought to be “newsworthy” while they developed. López studied under Manuel Álvarez

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Bravo and also taught photography in Venezuela in the late 1940s and later at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México.32 In the 1950s, his career blossomed and he produced several photoessays that dealt with children and poverty. López reflected on his art and acknowledged the class-based distinction that was inherent in the publishing world: “When the world of aristocracy is photographed with attitudes of little or no respect—the mass media, which is linked to economic power—avoids publishing them. The lumpenproletariat is publishable; the ‘well-off ’ only appear in accordance with the interests that are interwoven with those they have instrumentalized.”33 Nevertheless, López was able to use the medium to expose these class-based distinctions and to criticize the failings of the institutionalized revolution that were evident by the 1950s. Most of his work focused on the downtrodden. Several of López’s photoessays covered children living on the streets or child poverty more broadly. In fact, López himself remarked in an interview: “Children have always awakened a great tenderness in me, above all, poor children. I see, together with their poverty, their dignity and joy.”34 Historian of visual culture John Mraz has written extensively about photography in modern Mexico and especially about Nacho López. López mostly produced gut-wrenching photos of children in poverty, haunting images of children living in shacks or on the streets. Nevertheless, he empowered them in some instances, showing newsboys or children playing near trash dumps as smiling or mischievous or making toys out of trash. “Yo también he sido niño bueno/I too have been a good child” appeared in the illustrated magazine Mañana on December 23, 1950, just in time for Christmas. “Yo también” focuses on poor children and their impending disappointment that inevitably will occur on January 6, when their hopes of receiving a toy will be dashed. López followed up December’s “Yo también” with a similarly themed photoessay in collaboration with Carlos Argüelles called Noche de Reyes (Night of Kings [January 6, when children receive gifts in their shoes]) on January 13, 1951. The last photo is this essay shows a child sleeping on the street and the caption underscores his lack of a proper childhood and ends with the line: “He’d be satisified with much less than a toy: perhaps a piece of hot bread and a sip of coffee.”35 While López may have been the most famous photojournalist offering photoessays on poor children that year, he certainly was not the only one. A few months before “Yo también” appeared in Mañana, “Ángeles con caras sucias (Angels with dirty faces) regaled readers with the plight of poor children; Alberto del Razo’s “Los otros niños” (The other children) appeared four months after López’s “Yo también.”36

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Nacho López detailed the lives of the urban poor, including children, in many photoessays of the early 1950s. Exposés like “Una vez fuimos humanos /We were humans once,” “Filósofos de la noticia/Philosophers of the news” detailed the lives of children living and working in poverty, like the newsboys featured in the latter. Yet, no photoessay was more heartbreaking than his “El drama de los niños desvalidos/The drama of the destitute children,” which he published in Mañana in 1956 with Luis Suárez. The opening photo in the essay is a close-up of a young disheveled boy crying profusely and seeking shelter. The article begins: There’s a small commotion at the Shelter’s door. A boy is crying in a strange way. “It’s the little mute boy,” we hear. A man tries to calm the filthy child, who emits the most primitive cries and moves his hands rapidly. The little mute boy is known in the Shelter. He’s been picked up several times in the doorways of San Juan Letrán. Later they come and take him home, but he always reappears in the street. He cries all the time.

López connected the story of this mute boy to the larger struggle of street children living and working in Mexico City: “Others, in the street, continue to be exposed to the cold of the night and the cold of a society that has margins of vice and corruption. It exploits beings who are like men in boys’ bodies: they sell magazines they can’t read, illusions they can’t know, gum they don’t chew, or they beg when there are no clients.”37

Child poverty and idealized childhood in Mexican print media Journalists and photojournalists could hardly ignore the city’s burgeoning child population and with good reason. By the early 1950s, the ramifications of the steady birth rate and increasingly lower infant mortality rates began to materialize in Mexico City. The total number of children (aged 14 years and under) skyrocketed and the percentage of children of the total population steadily climbed. As noted in Chapter 1, the child population increased from just over 400,000 children in 1930 to over 2,850,000 by 1970. As Mexico City increasingly became a city of children, urban poverty involving children in Mexico City was unnerving to social critics in the position to report these calamities. Questions of homelessness and poverty among children were linked to contemporary fears about moral corruption in the city in general. But not all images of childhood were so bleak.

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In popular magazines and newspapers, journalists, photojournalists, illustrators, and advertisers all offered the Mexican public several images of the city’s children. Some photos and images depicted happy children playing, celebrating birthdays, and participating in religious ceremonies, such as first communion. Children could be seen posing for society-page photos outside church after the communion ceremony or in professionally staged poses of religiosity. Photographs of elaborate children’s birthday parties appeared frequently in print media, both in photographs and descriptions of the event in society pages. Many of these celebrations included many children enjoying treats like cake and soda, thus promoting age-specific activities for youngsters.38 One six-year-old boy’s party was described beneath his photo that showed him in a bow tie and suit jacket: “The little guy cut the cake and blew out the candles surrounded by his little friends, in an atmosphere of unbounded happiness.”39 Some parents organized the birthday festivities around themes complete with children’s costumes. These photographs depicted extravagance that most children would never experience firsthand. Yet idealized images of childhood contributed to a collective belief that childhood should be experienced and celebrated. These images instructed readers that a modern childhood should be fun. Photographic evidence depicts children participating in leisure activities designed especially for them. Mexican children from different socioeconomic backgrounds participated in the culture of childhood, even if the frequency and conditions of their experiences varied. One photograph by Enrique Díaz portrays a little girl riding the carousel in an open public space of Mexico City. She wears what appears to be a party dress with white leather shoes and anklet socks, and her hair is fashioned in ringlets and topped with a large bow. Her photograph attests to the presence of child-centered activities and the ability of some children to participate in these constructed forms of entertainment.40 During the Cold War era, an increasingly positive relationship between the church and the state was ushered in, and children appeared with frequency in the press, in images and articles that depicted celebrations of first communions and baptisms. Announcements in society pages of religious ceremonies also underscored the middle-class consumer culture of dresses, veils, and gloves for girls and suits for boys. At the same time, such announcements allowed children and their parents and godparents to position themselves in their desired position in the social hierarchy of the city. Adults reinforced their own statuses through the childhood they provided to the children around them. One “lovely little girl” dressed all in white, with her prayer book, candle, and rosary posed for a picture after her receiving first communion at the Mothers of Charity Convent,

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Figure 5.2 Girl riding carousel (1946), Enrique Díaz, courtesy of AGN.

located at 114 Francisco Sosa. The announcement named the little girl, her godparents and biological parents, and noted that a delicious breakfast had been served after the mass.41 Despite the fact that many images portrayed religiosity and innocence in the city’s children, their experiences with the church and their attitudes toward the institution sometimes contradicted the one-sidedness or at least class-based distinctions of these representations. Many children did in fact experience their first communion in the capital with varying degrees of the idealized components. The work of anthropologist Oscar Lewis reveals that even some of the poorest families struggled to provide the necessary money for the clothes and party associated with the sacrament.42 During the Christmas season through January 6 when Mexican children received gifts in their shoes in celebration of the Catholic holiday of Epiphany, readers could expect full coverage of the toy and clothing giveaways often sponsored by political groups or prominent individuals. In 1941 the Secretaría de Salubridad y Asistencia (Ministry of Health and Welfare) organized a committee that raised funds for the distribution of jackets and toys to children during winter and the Christmas season. In the process, childhood was sentimentalized and politicized.43 During the 1940s and 1950s, women’s participation in formal politics remained relatively insignificant; women did not win the right to vote

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in national elections until 1953. But in a broader sense, women’s political influence could be found in countless places and events.44 The first lady became an important figure in the press and, by extension, a significant arm of the PRI. Moreover, when public officials distributed material prizes of childhood to underprivileged children, the state communicated its power and situated its authority above that of parents. When parents failed to provide their children with the modern comforts associated with an ideal childhood, the state used the opportunity to bolster its image and influence. The media frequently depicted poverty and the exploitation that children faced in this era. The idea of child poverty came through in a variety of ways: child labor, homeless children, child victims of crime and immorality, and children as future criminals if delinquency and neglect were not properly addressed. Numerous covers of Jueves de Excélsior presented readers with images of poor children, often contrasting the poor child/children with the abundance, or with images that depicted the frivolity of the city’s wealthy residents. For example, many Christmas season covers depicted an encounter on the street between a poor boy and a wealthy individual. The magazine was aimed at the middle-class; images instructed readers to situate themselves in between the poor child and callous wealthy individual. On December 22, 1955, the magazine cover titled

Figure 5.3 Toy giveaway, circa 1940s, Enrique Díaz, courtesy of AGN.

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“Contrasts of Winter” featured a rich, extravagantly dressed woman walking her dog. The light-skin-toned woman wears a fur coat and bright blue leather gloves and high heels as she carries a box of dog biscuits under one arm, a look of disdain on her face as she avoids looking at the boy. A small dog dressed in a sweater is in tow and sniffs the boy as they pass by. The viewer is clearly meant to sympathize with the boy; wearing a short-sleeved shirt with patches, baggy trousers, and no shoes, one is left to wonder why he has no such outer garment to keep him warm, or biscuits to eat for that matter, unlike the dog. The boy’s countenance is endearing, as he wears a smile despite his poverty. The viewers recognized their own middle-class status; the illustration invoked sympathy for the boy and contempt for the elite woman who callously looks down her nose at his circumstances.45 The most heart-wrenching articles addressing child poverty were about homeless, hungry children. In February 1940, Jueves de Excélsior printed an article about more than two hundred children living next to a garbage dump. During the winter, the Departamento de Beneficencia Pública (Department of Public Welfare) had been giving out four hundred rations of a hot drink accompanied by a piece of bread. The author reported that the children jumped up and down and cheered when the truck stopped to make its delivery. “Some of them assailed the truck and greeted us with affection, giving us the thanks we did not deserve. They are all under ten years of age and look poor. It seems that the atole [a pre-Hispanic warm maize-based drink] with bread turned out to be for them something similar to a daily gift from the Three Kings.”46 The popular press treated poor children with empathy and emphasized their innocence. Products of the government’s modernization projects, these children were photographed en masse as proof of the failures of the industrial capitalism, and by implication, the revolutionary government. The connection between immorality and child poverty displayed the very real threat that some Mexico City residents felt that negative cultural influences posed to their children. The Legion of Decency worried about the suitability of movies and comic books for children. In 1933, the organization started printing leaflets (Apreciaciones) for distribution to parents regarding movies, and by the early 1940s attacked comic books as well.47 For example, an article detailing the work of the Legion of Decency, the Catholic lay organization that policed morality, featured a large photo of two children sleeping on the street.48 Declining morals, it seemed, led to the breakdown of traditional family structure and put children at risk on several levels. One editorial cartoon poked fun at the extremes people went to in order to protect their children. In this case, a mother

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equipped her two young children with blinders so that when they walked down the city’s streets, they were unable to see the movie posters depicting scantily clad women, sometimes in compromising positions.49 Conservative Catholics represented just one segment of the population concerned with childhood in peril in the Cold War decades. Fears about the dissolution of the family were prevalent by the mid-twentieth century. Unhealthy diversions and the general vice of the city were a threat to the family and the nation’s children, according to depictions in print media. In the article “The crisis of our time,” for example, one author quoted the Secretary of Education Ceniceros as stating: In this period the home no longer has the same force, the same power of authority that it did in other times; the home has weakened for various causes, principally because . . . powerful centers of diversion and entertainment, that lead the young, like they lead the adult, on occasion, to abandon the home, if not physically, [then] mentally or morally.50

The dangers posed by “powerful centers of diversion and entertainment” were as much physical as metaphorical. The rapidly changing nature of Mexico City’s cultural landscape by the middle of the twentieth century ensured that some Mexicans were concerned about the influx of foreign ideas and cultural productions associated with the increasingly cosmopolitan, international face of the city. For example, Santa Claus represented one such foreign “invasion” that threatened to eclipse Mexico’s Catholic traditions. As historian Susana Sosenki has argued, Santa Claus represented the North American tradition and the association of consumerism and the materialism with the Christmas season. This “invasion” was thought to be both a threat to Mexican culture and the national economy. On the other hand, los Reyes Magos (The Three Kings) “evoked the national, understood as a collection of rituals based in the posadas, Christmas punch, piñatas, and the Catholic liturgy that accompany the Christmas festivities in Mexico.”51 In the popular press, images of Santa Claus were plentiful by the 1950s, but journalists still pushed the Mexican tradition of los Reyes Magos, calling them “100 percent Mexican” as opposed to Santa Claus whose origin they stressed had come from a religion different from Mexico’s Catholicism. Several articles particularly stressed the fear of the Christmas tree replacing the nativity scene as the most important visual symbol of the season. Visual images—both photographs of real children and illustrations—conveyed the tension between Mexican traditions and transnational influences that many Mexicans felt. The cover photo of the magazine Mañana from January

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1956 depicts two small children placing a letter in the post office box with the caption “letter to los Reyes Magos.”52 Sosenki notes that while the prevalence of Santa Claus and the continuation of the Reyes Magos meant that middle- and upper-class children may have doubled their gift-receiving opportunities, for the masses both days of gifts remained unattainable.53 Still, Santa and los Reyes Magos continued to appear in print media and both the foreigner in the red suit and the Catholic symbols were linked to consumerism. In early January, advertisements from department stores like Sears Roebuck, El Puerto de Liverpool, Palacio del Hierro, Sanborns, and lesser-known shops featured toy and clothing sales for children with the Three Magi as an important part of the ad copy. As Epiphany approached, one commercial center offered a free snack of the Chocolate “Express” drink (the same touted on the television program Teatro Fantástico and again noting its vitamin content), cookies, and soft drinks to store visitors with any purchase.54 A photograph of a little girl surrounded by superimposed images of los Reyes Magos was even used to sell national savings bonds near the holiday, “the ideal way to express our feelings” the ad promised.55 At Liverpool, parents could buy their children any number of toys for the January 6 holiday: dolls, bicycles, skates, a child-sized “cleaning set” containing a broom and dustpan, tiny pots and pans, stuffed animals, and even a plastic “Ratón Miguelito” (aka Mickey Mouse).56 Nevertheless, many poor children received no gifts. The comparison between poor children and animals often found its way into print media. Rebeca Iturbide, famous Mexican actress and mother, described them in the following manner: They walk [around] incessantly without shoes and with rags in place of clothing. They sleep on the ground worse off than animals, because at least they [the animals] have skin that is adequate to defend themselves from the inclemency of the weather. For these poor children, their only blanket is the newspaper that they find in the streets, covering themselves with them and sleeping [huddled] together, almost on top of one another, to give heat to their malnourished bodies.57

Significantly, Iturbide’s description was eerily similar to the images Luis Buñuel provided in the last scene of Los olvidados, when Jaibo was associated with a mangy dog. While impossible to link these two renditions directly, it seems that print media informed and was informed by other social and cultural expressions of childhood and youth. The fear that these unfortunate children would turn into adolescent, and later adult, criminals ran rampant. One political cartoon depicted a monstrous figure

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labeled “Delinquency” standing in the midst of a dense cluster of buildings in central Mexico City, ready to wreak havoc on the modern city.58 The press promoted the idea that childhood formed the basis for the individual’s character and morality as an adult. Mexico City readers found warnings like “Child Delinquency Grows” splashed across pages of print media. Society incurs inescapable obligations with the new legal situation. In the raids of criminals carried out by the police, it is common to discover that the head of the gangs of delinquents are truly children. It is the terrible consequence of abandonment in which thousands of children live without government protection, without the support of the state, and without regard from that society to which we are referring. . . . It would be unfair to hope for good men from a childhood condemned to irreparable hunger and vagrancy.59

This article warned that abandoning children and “brutally persecuting” adult criminals would not have the desired effects. State institutions devoted to children and fears about juvenile delinquency date back to the early nineteenth century when a section of the Poor House was reserved especially for them. During the Porfiriato, the first correctional school was founded in Tlalpan and Mexico’s Juvenile Court was established in 1927. In 1938, the Juvenile Court reviewed the cases of about 2000 children and about 1300 went to the correctional schools. In 1958, the court heard the cases of 6705 children and sent 1960 to correctional schools.60 Because child labor (by children under fourteen years of age) was illegal, reliable statistics are unavailable. Nevertheless, journalistic and photographic evidence illuminate the plight of working children. In 1949, several photoessays appeared in the magazine Presente detailing child labor and calling it “Mexico’s number one problem.”61 One such essay appeared on January 6, 1949, the very day wealthier children would be receiving their gifts from the Reyes Magos. A full-page image of a little boy washing a car confronted middle-class readers, with the photo caption reading: “He’s not ten yet, and he’s left school to solve his problems by himself.”62 The image, its caption and the accompanying article, evoked a comparison to slavery. Children were visible performing all sorts of informal labor throughout the city, selling lottery tickets, shining shoes, and hawking all sorts of goods. In 1950, Nacho López photographed one little boy selling religious images outside the Basilica of Guadalupe on the day dedicated to the brown Virgin, December 12.63 Laboring children, especially boys, were discussed continuously in the press. Regarding child labor, one reporter noted: “Children who barely know how to walk and nevertheless must carry out very

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heavy tasks, they are abundant in all parts of the city.” The article maintained that housewives reported that in every market in the city, children between the ages of five and fifteen were plentiful, making a living by carrying baskets for customers.64 The Hermanos Mayo collective also documented children laboring throughout the city, as shown by their image “Niños Trabajando en Gasolineras/ Boys Working in Gas Stations” (1966). The piece is all the more striking, given the size of the boy who barely seems big enough to hop onto the hood of the large automobile to service it.65 Yet even images of poor children documented moments of childhood joy and play. One photograph depicted a young girl, barefoot and sitting on rubble, engrossed in reading a children’s magazine. Images of children dressed in rags with dirty faces projected, at times, child camaraderie and smiling faces.66 To relegate all children living in conditions of poverty to a state of “non-childhood” denies their ability to experience aspects of joy, leisure, play, and mischief in their early years. Photographic evidence reveals that children from various socioeconomic backgrounds managed to carve out a space in the new culture of childhood. Such was the case with Lola Álvarez Bravo’s Los gorrones/The Freeloaders circa 1955. The image, taken from beneath some bleachers, depicts contented boys gazing down beneath, with their baseball gloves in hand. Álvarez Bravo (1903–1993) uses an angle that communicates the playfulness of childhood and the joy children found in leisure activities, in this case baseball. The complete archival description reads: “street urchins; boys lying on bleachers, viewed from underneath,” and conveys a sense of mischief more than any association with abject poverty that “street urchins” might suggest, though other photo captions were not quite as optimistic. Like in much of historical writing and photography, the perspective frames the interpretation. Writers, illustrators, and photographers employed children in images and discourse in their discussions of domestic and international politics. Children often appeared in political cartoons or magazine cover images to depict contentious political issues. The battle over socialist education was a prime example. One cover from 1941 depicts an indigenous woman labeled “the nation” protecting a shoeless child from a doctor attempting to inject the boy with a needle labeled “socialist education.” The shot is being administered by a lab coat clad doctor explicitly marked Sánchez Pontón, the then Minister of Education. The caption reads: “Sánchez Pontón is ready to apply the medicine. An exotic doctrine imposed on Education, but the people hate it. With firmness, the Nation says to the Minister: You are wrong, licenciado, I do not want this injection!” Behind Minister Sánchez Pontón appears an image of Stalin. Other

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Figure 5.4 Girl reading on rubble, circa 1940s, Enrique Díaz, courtesy of the AGN.

covers dealt with the same subject matter, showing a dark-skinned boy wearing a tattered school uniform labeled “article 3,” attempting to trade it for a new one labeled “free instruction” with the caption: “I need a new uniform because I don’t like this one anymore.”67 Articles and images linking childhood and the fear of communism appeared frequently as well. The potential dangers of communism were highlighted and sometimes represented as mischievous children. In a cover from March 1949, an optimistic school teacher labeled as “government” sits at his desk as two young boys under the desk play with matches and a bomb marked “Communism.” The caption reads, “OPTIMIST: Don’t worry, I have my boys well controlled!”68 In keeping with the anti-communist sentiment prevalent in Mexico during the Cuban Revolution and on the rise in the 1960s, one political cartoon dated January 6 featured a small, simply dressed boy being threatened by a large,

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Figure 5.5 Children waiting for toy distribution, December 1938, Enrique Díaz, courtesy of the AGN.

menacing Cuban revolutionary holding him by the collar. The letter that the little boy holds behind his back is addressed to the Reyes Magos, and it says: “Three Kings: I want a visa to leave Cuba.”69 The next day the same newspaper featured an article detailing the toy and treat giveaway that had been held in celebration of the Epiphany, on January 6, 1963, for about one hundred Cuban children living in exile in Mexico City.70 The quality of life for children and the availability of appropriate spaces for the city’s children became a measurement of modernity and progress. For example, “Health and Happiness for Children of the Capital” detailed the increasing availability of parks and recreational areas for children, praising President Adolfo Ruiz Cortines (1952–58) and Regent Ernesto P. Uruchurtu (1952–66) in the process. The headlines declared the democratization of childhood in the nation’s capital: “Equipment and diversions for children in all parts [of the city].—The metropolitan modernization arrives to the proletarian classes—88 recreation centers for the children, without distinctions of class.” These parks were presented as a type of insurance: money well spent on the needs of today’s children was also an investment in reducing potential future threats (and financial drains) to society. In discussing the efforts to improve the conditions

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of the city for children, the author characterized what life was like for children who lacked these benefits: These children lacking the resources for a better life, have been seen obligated to pass long hours every day on the ground, in the stockyards, in the gutter, between rocks and quagmires and forging in their spirit a miserable conception of existence, that reduces their ambitions, drowning all desire and twisting their predilections, inducing them to envy and hatred of their fellow mankind and toward a society that does not care about them.

In describing the parks and pointing to their larger social ramifications, the author described the new parks as spaces “where the children enjoy games and entertainment appropriate for their age, which were reserved during all the past eras, as a privilege for the economically powerful classes.”71 Through its attentiveness to the needs of the city’s children, the state conceived itself as a necessary and beneficent partner to modernity. In addition to demonstrating the positive impact of state projects, press coverage contributed to the notion of a more democratic childhood. The caption under a photo of the children’s park at Rio Consulado proclaims that the expensive equipment is no longer the privilege of the few because it has been made available to “the proletarian children by the authorities of the City of Mexico.”72 The municipal government also granted children their own space in Chapultepec Park, the city’s largest. The recreation center featured a puppet theater, outdoor play equipment, library, and sandbox when it was inaugurated in 1957 by Secretary of Education Ceniceros.73 These public spaces and their appearance in the press provided visible evidence that a modern childhood replete with play should be experienced by children from a wide variety of backgrounds. Parallel to these public investments, private developers used the ideal of modern childhood to appeal to the concerns of Mexico City’s wealthier residents, citing security and modern amenities as advantages. In their advertisements for the “Colonia Churubusco Country Club,” the developers touted it as a living environment made desirable and necessary to certain social sectors of society by the growth and industrial development of the city. “We present ‘a true colonia’ to the public of Mexico,” declared the ad. The project developers made it clear why the Colonia Churubusco Country Club was necessary: “It has been projected as an ideal solution for multiple problems of urbanization.” Not only was it located in “the healthiest location in the city,” which was especially important for children, the ad noted, but it also included a park “with gymnastic equipment

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and a children’s city that will be the delight of the children.”74 A subsequent advertisement for the colonia featured a photograph that showed the developed property encircled by a ring of illustrated children playing and holding hands around the cluster of homes, below which was the caption “Absolute Security For The Children.” The developers reported that they were interested in the security of children at play, and sought to eliminate the negative effects of traffic and “pernicious companies.” In stark contrast to the bleak picture of life outside the Colonia Churubusco, inside its confines children could expect a “children’s city, with their houses to their proportions, their furniture, their Ayuntamiento (local government), [and] their church, the child will become accustomed to social coexistence, which creates a moral base and will have, without the child realizing it, a constant lesson of civic-mindedness.”75 This advertisement displayed an optimism correlated with the early 1940s as Mexico City’s growth and child population had not at that point completely overwhelmed the city and its available resources. Clearly, it also appealed to a class-specific idea of protected childhood, something which other representations of family life and the city vociferously contradicted. One of the most important and controversial accounts that circulated in Mexico City was Oscar Lewis’s Los hijos de Sánchez, published in Mexico in Spanish in 1964 after its tremendous success in its English version, The Children of Sánchez (1961). American anthropologist Oscar Lewis and his team of researchers conducted painstakingly detailed research in Mexico City in the 1950s. Lewis was especially interested in what he termed a “culture of poverty” that existed in many vecindades or tenements and how the living arrangements fostered unhealthy familial and social relationships. The Spanish edition of the book was published by Mexico’s most important academic press, the Fondo de Cultura Económica in October 1964. By late February 1965, Mexico City’s booksellers had sold all copies of the titillating exposé.76 The book’s depiction of the Sánchez family and their life in the Tepito neighborhood of Mexico City brought outrage and condemnation of Lewis. He had changed the family members’ names and the name of the vecindad to protect their anonymity but included the most intimate details of each family member’s life in the account. In the wake of its publication, members of the Sociedad Mexicana de Geografía y Estadística (SMGE; Mexican Society of Geography and Statistics) launched a movement to ban the book and exile Oscar Lewis. When the preeminent anthropologist Margaret Mead read the English version in 1962, she wrote in a letter to Jason Epstein, Editorial Director of the publisher Random House, Inc., and to Lewis saying, “I think Children of Sánchez is one of the outstanding contributions of anthropology—of all time.”77 The book

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inspired over five hundred newspaper and magazine articles to be written about it and, according to a study conducted by a member of the SMGE, by 1965 no other book published in twentieth-century Mexico had incited more writing and debate than Los hijos de Sánchez had.78 Cleary Lewis had struck a nerve. Nevertheless, the uproar was a very serious affair; the SMGE detailed a litany of charges against Lewis including the following: he had fabricated the entire story of the Sánchez family, his work was subversive and violated Article 145 (the law of social dissolution) and therefore he could potentially serve twenty years in prison, and that he worked as a spy for the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).79 By April 1965, the storm subsided as Mexico’s attorney general decided that bringing charges against Lewis and the book’s publisher would do more harm than good. Nevertheless, the Fondo de Cultura Económica (one of Mexico’s most prestigious publishers) relinquished publication rights and its director of seventeen years, Arnaldo Orfila Reynal, was forced to resign.80 Los hijos de Sánchez proved upsetting not just because of its depictions of poverty but also because of the shocking behaviors the book portrayed as commonplace among the urban poor: drunkenness, promiscuity, marital infidelity (or men maintaining multiple households), incest, domestic violence, sexual assault, fighting, gang affiliation, and delinquency. Public discussions of sexuality and especially children’s budding or precocious sexuality proved particularly upsetting. Manuel, the oldest son, reported his first knowledge of sex when he walked in on neighbors having intercourse when he was about eight years old. He recalled: After that, I wanted to experience it for myself and tried to get the girls of the vecindad to play “papá and mamá” with me. My mother had a girl to help her in the house, and I played that game with her, whenever we were alone. One day she went to the roof to hang up clothes and I followed her. “Come on,” I said, “let’s do it.” I tried to raise her dress and pull down her pants, and just as she was about to give in, I heard someone tapping at the window.81

Readers of Los hijos de Sánchez in Mexico City learned of Marta’s sexual assault at the hands of her boss when she was in third grade.82 Marta was the youngest of the Sánchez children who was in her 20s at the time Lewis conducted the interview. Her general description of the neighborhood surely shocked many: Every day someone was robbed, or murdered or violated. There is a story about a girl in Tepito who had a boyfriend. He was one of the worst kind. Once he invited her to the movies. He had prearranged with some other boys to take her home through the market, and there they grabbed her, dragged her into one of the stalls and they all raped her.83

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The pages of Los hijos de Sánchez were filled with accounts such as these. Wellto-do residents of the city could not have imagined that such a detailed level of depravity existed in the same city in which they resided. The press reported extensively on the Lewis controversy, poking fun at the government as well as criticizing Lewis. On March 17, 1965, renowned Mexican cartoonist and social critic Ruis’s work appeared in the publication Siempre!. The cartoon featured a disheveled bum and showed a tongue-in-cheek description of possible options explaining the existence of Los hijos de Sánchez. The first option was “a Communist invention” and the last was “by decree they do not exist.”84 Eduardo del Río, more commonly known by his pen name Ruis, skillfully highlighted the ruling party’s most often-cited charge against anyone who dared to expose social inequality or to protest the government: they were immediately labeled subversive and a communist threat. He also showed the power the PRI possessed and the folly sometimes associated with it: by simply stating that the Sánchez family did not exist, city dwellers were expected to accept the ruling party’s assertion as factual. The grittiness of the book, and no doubt the controversy that surrounded it, caused Luis Buñuel to write to the anthropologist and say that a film version true to the book would be the highpoint of his career.85 A few years later, Fidel Castro wrote a letter to Oscar Lewis and pronounced the book “revolutionary” and “worth more than 50,000 political pamphlets.”86 Lewis’s work exposed the fundamental flaws in Mexico’s supposed “miracle” of economic growth in the Cold War era. Print media in the postrevolutionary and Cold War eras offered Mexico City readers a variety of interpretations of Mexican childhood: all of them true for at least some children growing up in the Federal District.

Conclusion Discourses of childhood reveal that there was indeed an economic miracle for some of the city’s inhabitants and that the middle-class consumer culture was actually a possibility for some of the target audience of newspapers and specialized magazines that promoted such lifestyles. The press encouraged readers to participate in consumer culture by using the latest technological advances. By the mid-1960s, the idealized version of childhood had evolved as parents read advice columns about documenting childhood joy. “How to Achieve the Best Photos of Your Children” advised parents on techniques of photography:

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“To capture the magical moments of childhood, the aficionado has to view the world through the eyes of the child. It is a world without complications, full of wonderful things and great surprises.” The writer advised that the photo should be taken with purpose in mind but without the subjects formally posing. The photos that would be most treasured were those that evoked “a passing moment of happiness, the impulsive activity, the fleeting expression.” The article featured two photographs of light-skinned girls engaged in the activity of painting, thus underscoring the idealized version of childhood and leisure activities associated with it. As the concept of a modern childhood matured, parents needed to not only ensure that their children were happy and participated in fun activities, but they also needed to document these moments as evidence that such joyous childhood of their children had existed.87 But this narrative was quite different from the opening story of young Gabriel Orozco, shot by his employer for stealing bread. Many journalists, photographers, and other writers like the anthropologist Oscar Lewis used the topic of childhood and family to highlight how the economic gains between the 1940s and the 1970s were inequitably distributed. The Mexican state projected an image of childhood that was fundamentally linked with the ideology of modernity. Whereas children were most often associated with the benefits of modernity in the eyes of the state, in reality they became the vehicle through which Mexican society chose to articulate the perils of modernity: industrialization and urbanization. While economists and politicians heralded this era as the “Mexican Miracle,” the term begs the question: For whom was it a miracle? Who was left out of Mexico City’s impressive development? Based on an analysis of print media coverage of social issues, it is clear that many children fell outside the boundaries of what contemporaries deemed an appropriate modern childhood. Yet, ideologically the portrayal of children on both extremes of the economic spectrum contributed to rising expectations that a comfortable childhood ought to be open to all children in Mexico City. Moreover, photographic evidence documents the historical agency of children growing up in the urban environment. Whether laboring, playing, or simply participating in mundane activities, children were constantly present in the daily life of the capital city. The attention given to children by photographers and journalists more generally highlights the importance accorded them by society. The images and discourses surrounding childhood in the modern era contributed to a prevailing ideology that all children should experience childhood as a distinct stage of life and separate from the concerns of the adult

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world. Yet, the ideology was unevenly realized and it was the children themselves who ultimately worked within the confines of their environment to carve out a childhood space. The 1968 Student Movement and subsequent Tlatelolco massacre mark a watershed in Mexican history from today’s perspective; yet plenty of evidence points to the fact that discontent and protestations about social stratification appeared frequently in the postrevolutionary and Cold War eras, decades before the appalling massacre. An examination of print media and photography from the period indicates that continual attention was given to the problems children faced in the growing metropolis. In many ways, discussions of problems faced by the city’s poor or laboring children constituted one of the safest ways to critique the government. When journalists and photographers pointed out the problems of child labor and poverty in editorials, exposes, and in their art, it fell within the acceptable boundaries of criticism. When the American anthropologist’s best-selling book was translated into Spanish, the response was considerably less favorable. An acknowledgment of child labor and child poverty, as uncomfortable as it may have been, could not be denied by any citizen or government official who walked the city streets with any frequency. A full-fledged exposé of one Mexico City family’s interpersonal relationships dealing with sex, alcoholism, and violence was another thing entirely.

Conclusion: Childhood and the Limits of Modernity

In December 1964, newspaper readers in Mexico City encountered a frightening report on the problem of single mothers and the dire consequences their children faced. In addition to women having to carry children on their backs in their rebozos while they worked, the author also warned that children left alone would be subject to “a collective assault by rats” that would “deprive the defenseless child of life as the rodents made a feast of his delicate little body.”1 While the problem of rats feasting on children was not a common threat to the majority of the city’s young population, many children nevertheless faced real physical danger of many sorts and some found themselves in spaces where rats abounded. Newspapers reported on these dangers frequently; in 1957 the newspaper Excélsior estimated that the medical costs of injuries caused by rat bites to be 4 million pesos that year alone. In 1963, a young single mother from the poor colonia Santa Cruz Ameyehualmo left her young infant in a box that served as a crib while she went to collect water. When she returned, she found a rat biting her baby’s face; the mother stopped the attack but not before the baby lost her nose.2 While some newspapers surely counted on sensational accounts such as these to sell copies, the fact of the matter was that their reportage of such events did represent a reality—although an extreme one—of urban life in the socially stratified capital. Even social scientists witnessed daycare centers in the city where “the coexistence of children with rats” occurred, in this case in Guarderia Infantil No. 11 in the center of la Merced market.3 Lamenting the existence of physically dangerous and unsanitary conditions in the press was far easier than directly criticizing the PRI and the socioeconomic conditions its policies created for the urban poor. Similarly, single mothers, while clearly a reality, were easy scapegoats who were blamed for the difficult and risky situations their children were exposed to; rather, the lack of educational and employment opportunities or the limits of the well-intentioned welfare system that had been put in place by the early 1940s should have been recognized as the root of such problems. By the late 1960s, the fallacy of Mexico’s supposed

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“miracle” was exposed. The desperation of the ruling party on the eve of the 1968 Olympic Games was palpable. Demonstrations of discontent had occurred at least since the mid-1950s and grew increasingly vocal in the next decade. An examination of childhood in Mexico City during the late 1930s through the 1960s makes visible the limits of modernity in a multitude of ways. Child labor, children living on the streets, and reports of children in physical and/or sexual danger in the postrevolutionary, democratizing nation’s capital betrayed in particular the persistent social inequality evident to many observers and, more generally, the failures of Mexico’s institutionalized revolutionary government. A critical connection between modernity and childhood existed, both in the eyes of contemporary social and political critics and through the perspective of historians’ analyses from the vantage point of hindsight. From today’s perspective, the intersection of many aspects of a modern childhood and of modernity’s theoretical components is evident. Many of the hallmarks of a modern childhood had materialized in Mexico City by the mid-twentieth century: a variety of welfare institutions devoted to infants and children, constitutionally mandated, compulsory, free primary school education, the existence of modern playgrounds and parks, and the development of a middle-class ideal of consumerism and leisure activities. By the mid-1960s, Chapultepec Park had been massively expanded and upgraded, world-class museums like the National Anthropology Museum had opened, and by the end of that decade the Metro was zooming individuals across the city. The state could be lauded for significant reform programs, developments like the Instituto Mexicano de Seguridad Social (Mexican Institute of Social Security) and family dining halls. The government attempted to alleviate the problems related to children who had been left to fend for themselves or to help parents educate and feed children while they worked. Yet, as some scholars have shown, these efforts also bolstered the PRI’s power and the bureaucracy that allowed for the expansion of the middle class, all the while imposing middle-class ideals about proper parenting and childhood.4 Nevertheless, the efforts of countless bureaucrats, school inspectors, and teachers should not be undervalued; the SEP expanded educational programs to include kindergartens, attempting to reach children at a younger age than it had previously, and made efforts to provide ageappropriate play and instruction to poor children whose circumstances did not allow them to attend kindergarten, and more than likely a few years of primary school either. By mid-century, the SEP used newspapers to call

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on owners of private enterprises to assist the government in new school construction in the capital, a sign of its inability to handle such initiatives on its own and a continued reliance on the relationship between wealthy business owners and government. Despite serious efforts to alleviate the plight of the urban poor, the rights and privileges of a protected childhood were lost on countless children who slipped through the cracks of a well-intended but overtaxed and underfunded system. Following a November 1949 international conference on pediatrics, Dr. Luis Lara Pardo wrote a lengthy article about the protection of childhood. Dr. Lara opined: “In reality, and it’s a fact that we all feel, we do not lack laws designed to defend childhood and adolescence and lead them in the right direction. . . . for example, obligatory instruction, labor laws, and the laws we have to prevent child abandonment. But they are not fulfilled. There are no schools. The laws are evaded and no one oversees their fulfillment.”5 The state and well-meaning individuals actively sought to protect children but the sheer number of children in need and the lack of economic resources among parents—especially single parents—made good intentions fall considerably short. The city’s infrastructure could not sustain the massive increase in population, to say nothing of the strain the child population put on limited school buildings, free lunches, or other safety nets designed to assist the most economically vulnerable populations. Because no one would argue that children deserved to live in substandard or dangerous conditions, it was the children’s situations that most often merited commentary in the eyes of journalists, photojournalists, and other commentators who focused on broader societal problems. Overcrowding of the urban environment was a consequence of socioeconomic policies that favored industrial development in the capital; as rural migrants flooded Mexico City in search of employment—taking jobs that were scarce or insecure—they were forced to piece together a modicum of a living, often in the informal economy. Capitalism produced social stratification and children were often the most vulnerable, especially if they had lost a parent or both or had difficult home situations. Yet, the picture of Mexican childhood in the Cold War era need not be as bleak as press reports might have it. True, those atrocities existed, but so did other happier childhoods, and not only for those children with significant material advantages. Consider the girls from the vecindades studied by Oscar Lewis. Although they worked for wages, they also commented on the dear friends they made with their female coworkers who lived in other parts of the city, and specifically on gift exchanges for birthdays and outings to the cinema. Other

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children remembered in interviews or memoirs their early work experiences and many expressed pride in their contributions to the family income. This did not diminish the exploitation many child laborers faced, but does put into perspective the idea that all child labor was or is wholly unacceptable. From this analysis, we also see the ways in which childhood experiences were gendered. Educational and propaganda materials from the state and the church mostly upheld patriarchy, sometimes explicitly and overtly, and other times with a somewhat deceptively more modern visage. Through official curriculum, children’s magazines, films, and print media, both boys and girls were exposed to ideas of gender-specific chores, jobs, and ways of interacting with one another and society. The idea of the male breadwinner coupled with female domesticity was a reality that only a portion of the population could have upheld in their adult lives, even if they had wanted to do so. Notions of gender propriety meant that boys and girls often had gender-specific experiences in their mobility throughout the city, but that too was class-specific. Boys were more visible without supervision on city streets than girls were. The Cold War era saw an increasing foreign influence in the Mexican capital. While not a new occurrence, the influx of cultural productions and consumer goods only accelerated from the earlier part of the century. Many of the earlier revolutionary aims—evident in the radical 1917 Constitution but often not implemented until the 1920s and 1930s—were initiatives to undo the damage done by Porfirio Díaz’s modernization programs of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that courted foreign investment at the expense of internal, long-term economic development, and most importantly, at the expense of the masses’ living and working conditions. The economic reforms of the 1920s and 1930s, such as land redistribution and the expropriation and nationalization of the oil industry in 1938, also represented nationalistic concerns of the newly institutionalized revolutionary government as it sought to remake Mexico. Beginning in the 1940s, those economic policies and political ideologies slowly started falling by the wayside, a process that would accelerate in the coming decades, in favor of import substitution industrialization. From one perspective, the residents in Mexico City were subject to neoimperial impositions of culture and politics through nested layers of power—from foreign, mostly US producers of mass culture and politics, to the ruling party’s use of force and adaptation of anti-communism to repress and punish dissidents. The Catholic Church, while staunchly anti-communist, provided some pushback on the cultural invasion of foreign influences and strove to maintain and adapt religious traditions in the changing world. Fearful of not only

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Protestantism, but also the inroads that the “American way of life” was making in Mexico, the church tried to adapt Mexican and Catholic traditions to modern, secular influences and behaviors. The Catholic laity, largely through the female wing of Catholic Action, increased its power over the period and chose girls to be the moral guardians of Mexico and tasked them with maintaining the nation’s traditions. The previous chapters also make it clear that it is difficult to separate analytically the influence of Catholicism from the broader cultural milieu. For Cold War Mexico, one can study religious and lay institutions and specific programs of the church, but the importance and ubiquity of the cultural forms of Catholicism are almost innumerable. Advertisements for consumer products, editorials in secular newspapers and magazines, popular films, and other cultural productions contained explicit and implicit messages of Catholicism. Perhaps this is unsurprising; the liberal reforms of the nineteenth century and anticlerical aspects of the Mexican Revolution could not have possibly removed centuries of Catholic influence on Mexican tradition and culture. Boys and girls from the middle-class and elite sectors enjoyed the advantages of the economic boom known as the Mexican “miracle”; their childhoods filled with the material trappings of what is commonly recognized as a “modern” childhood. Their parents judged their own success by the childhood their children experienced, as evidenced by their clothing, toys, leisure activities, and education. In terms of modern consumer culture, many urban dwellers had access to a bevy of time-saving household appliances, imported clothing and cosmetics, and other luxury items like televisions, high-end cameras, and projectors (to document and recreate performances of an idealized childhood). Department stores dotted city streets and those who could afford them saw shop windows and newspaper advertisements full of manufactured toys and specialty children’s clothing for purchase, another demarcation of social class and a modern childhood. Leisure activities changed over the period, and by the early 1960s, Cri-Crí was off air, the Golden Age of cinema was long gone, and television reigned supreme in those living rooms where families could afford them. Even those household with less economic resources were not immune to the draw of the new medium—residents in large complexes often paid a fee to watch programs on a neighbor’s television set if they could not afford their own. Television allowed for ever-increasing exposure to commercial products and foreign ideas. Even though the state enacted legislation to censor the popular new medium by 1960, the state in effect allowed the industry to monitor and censor itself. The government and the television industry had an agreeable arrangement that served both entities well; in fact, they were excellent partners

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in delivering to the masses the new leisure activity, and this medium benefited the ruling party. In later decades, the responsibility to use television to serve the masses in any positive way seemed like a throwback to the earliest days when some optimistic innovators like Guillermo González Camarena hoped that the medium would be used to combat literacy in the 1950s. Television tycoon Emilio Azcárraga Milmo, the son of the original media mogul Emilio Azcárraga Vidaurreta, reportedly said, “I am a soldier of the PRI” and that television “is for losers (los jodidos), people who’ve got no other way to have fun. It’s not aimed at rich people like me who have choices, and it’s not for people who read political magazines; it’s for the losers who don’t read and just wait for the entertainment to come to them.”6 Historians have written a great deal about modernity in Mexico, focusing on the period from the late nineteenth through the mid-twentieth centuries; many of these studies present historical changes within broader cultural narratives, often stressing individual agency and the ability to shape one’s identity. Moreover, it seems that, for many historians the concept largely has positive connotations. The darker side of modernity negatively affected many Mexicans, and is worthy of more historical inquiry. The power of the state, while quite real and obviously important, has received tremendous attention. Studies that stress the intersection of state power on the one hand and private industry and culture on the other provide tremendous insight into the Cold War era and, hopefully, scholars of Mexico will continue to expand our understanding of the era.7 Given the brutality with which the PRI responded to protesting students in Tlatelolco on October 2, 1968, it may seem that the ruling party’s power was absolute. Yet, it is precisely because its position was precarious—powerful to be certain but uneven and inconsistent—that government forces took such dramatic action. Generations of young people, who had been raised in the wake of the institutionalized revolution and Cold War eras, employed revolutionary rhetoric and cultural symbols of resistance to lay claim to democratic inclusion and to challenge the PRI’s dominance. The PRI needed the press and television industries to cooperate in belittling student demands before the massacre and in glossing over the atrocities committed on October 2 in its coverage of the event thereafter. While the government obtained these concessions from media outlets, it could not contain dissent and the persistence of social inequalities, despite all its rhetoric.

Notes Introduction 1 La Prensa July 18, 1966. (Some newspaper articles were found in the archivo económico in the Biblioteca Miguel Lerdo de Tejada. They are cataloged by subject matter and while the date and publication title are always clear, most do not contain page numbers as the columns are clipped from the original newspaper and affixed to a backing.) 2 La Prensa July 19, 1966. 3 Eduardo de la Vega Ávila, member of the Communist Party and prisoner in Lecumberri, went to the offices of the Communist Party (186 Mérida). He and another man were arrested. “We thought that if we insisted on our constitutional rights the police would clear out. But we were the ones that got cleared out—and taken straight to Lecumberri.” Poniatowska, Massacre in Mexico, 44. 4 Elena Poniatowska, Massacre in Mexico, translated by Helen R. Lane and Introduction by Octavio Paz (University of Missouri Press, 1991) (reprint edition), 236–38. 5 Ibid., 19. 6 Renata Keller, Mexico’s Cold War: Cuba, The United States, and the Legacy of the Mexican Revolution (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 1. 7 Keller, Mexico’s Cold War, 4–5. 8 Ibid., 9. 9 Cited in Jaime M. Pensado, Rebel Mexico: Student Unrest and Authoritarian Political Culture During the Long Sixties (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013), 40. 10 Pensado, Rebel Mexico, 184–85. 11 Elaine Carey, Plaza of Sacrifices: Gender, Power, and Terror in 1968 Mexico (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2005), 54. 12 Robert Alegre, Railroad Radicals in Cold War Mexico: Gender, Class, and Memory (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2014); Gladys McCormick, The Logic of Compromise: How the Countryside was Key to the Emergence of Authoritarianism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 2016); Tanalis Padilla, Rural Resistance in the Land of Zapata: The Jaramillista Movement and the Myth of the Pax-Priísta, 1940-1962 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008). 13 Soledad Loaeza, La restauración de la iglesia católica en la transición Mexicana (Mexico City: El Colegio de México, 2013), 55.

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14 Jean Meyer, The Cristero Rebellion: The Mexican People Between Church and State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Adrian Bantjes, As If Jesus Walked the Earth: Cardenismo, Sonora, and the Mexican Revolution (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1998); Marjorie Becker, Setting the Virgin on Fire: Lázaro Cárdenas, Michoacán Peasants and the Redemption of the Mexican Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996). 15 Loaeza, La restauración de la iglesia, 11, 45, 51; David Espinosa, Jesuit Student Groups, the Universidad Iberoamericana and Political Resistace in Mexico, 19131979 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2014); Ben Fallaw, Religion and State Formation in Postrevolutionary Mexico (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013). 16 Patrice Olsen, Artifacts of Revolution: Architecture, Society, and Politics in Mexico City, 1920-1940 (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2008), 224, 238–39. 17 Robert M. Jordan, “Flowers and iron fists: Ernesto P. Uruchurtu and the contested modernization of Mexico City, 1952-1966” (PhD diss., University of Nebraska, 2013), 22–23. 18 John Charles Chasteen, “Introduction: Why Read Santa” Santa (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), ix. 19 Paul J. Vanderwood, Juan Soldado: Rapist, Murderer, Martyr, Saint (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), 10–16, 42. While Olga Camacho was killed in Tijuana not Mexico City, parents’ fears in urban environments were similarly based on the anonymity of the city. Vanderwood examines popular religion in Tijuana as Castillo Morales was shot and killed by police, later becoming a popular saint. 20 Ann Shelby Blum, Domestic Economies: Family, Work, and Welfare in Mexico City, 1884-1943 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2010), 196, 208–10. 21 Eric Zolov, Refried Elvis: The Rise of the Mexican Counterculture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). 22 Keller, Mexico’s Cold War, 28. 23 Ponitowska, Massacre in Mexico, 147. 24 Paul Gillingham and Benjamin T. Smith (eds.) Dictablanda: Politics, Work, and Culture in Mexico, 1938-1968 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014). 25 Soledad Loeaza, “Mexico in the Fifties: Women and Church in Holy Alliance,” Women’s Studies Quarterly, vol. 33, no. 3/4 (Winter/Fall 2005): 138–60, 143. 26 Dictablanda, 2. Using the Gini coefficient, “a compound measure of national inequality in the distribution of wealth,” Gillingham and Smith show that Mexico’s level of inequality was similar to those found in sub-saharan African in the same time period. 27 Jennifer M. Morris, The Origins of UNICEF, 1946-1953 (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2015), 2, 4, 18–20. 28 Morris, The Origins of UNICEF, 7, 109.

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29 Soledad Loaeza, Clases Medidas y Política en México: la querella escolar, 1959-1963 (Mexico City: El Colegio de México, 1988); Mary Kay Vaughan, Cultural Politics in Revolution: Teachers, Peasants, and Schools in Mexico, 1930-1940 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1997); Elena Jackson Albarrán, Seen and Heard in Mexico; Susana Sosenski, Niños en Acción: El Trabajo Infantil and la Ciudad de México, 1920-1934 (Mexico: El Colegio de México, 2010); Blum, Domestic Economies; Nichole Sanders, Gender and Welfare in Mexico: The Consolidation of a Postrevolutionary State (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2011). 30 Blum, Domestic Economies, xviii. On the poor house’s origins and transformation into the Hospicio, see Silvia Arrom, Containing the Poor: The Mexico City Poor House from 1774-1881 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001). 31 Susie S. Porter, Working Women in Mexico City: Public Discourses and Material Conditions, 1879-1931 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2003), 163–64. 32 Blum, Domestic Economies, xxvi. 33 Ibid. 34 Pablo Piccato, City of Suspects: Crime in Mexico City, 1900-1931 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001), 149. 35 Sosenski, Niños en acción, 80–81; Heidi Morrison, The Global History of Childhood Reader (London: Routledge, 2012), 116–18. Ann S. Blum, “Speaking of Work and Family” Hispanic American Historical Review, labor for children under twelve was prohibited and work for those twelve to sixteen was restricted. 36 Eric Zolov, Refried Elvis, 1. 37 Mary Kay Vaughan, Portrait of a Young Painter: Pepe Zúñiga and Mexico City’s Rebel Generation (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015), 3. 38 The Global History of Childhood Reader, edited by Heidi Morrison (London: Routledge, 2012); Katherine S. Bullard, Civilizing the Child: Discourses of Race, Nation, and Child Welfare in America (Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books, 2014); Viviana Zelizer, Pricing the Priceless Child. 39 The historiography of childhood has grown tremendously since Philippe Aries’s work first appeared and convinced historians that childhood has a history. The historiography is too large to include all the major works here but a few important ones have been included. Philippe Aries, Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life (New York: Vintage Books, 1965) (originally published in French in 1960); Anna Davin, Growing Up Poor: Home, School and Street in London 18701914 (London: Rivers Oram Press, 1996); Ellen Ross, Love and Toil: Motherhood in Outcast London, 1870-1918 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); Ann Hulbert, Raising America: Experts, Parents, and a Century of Advice About Children (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003). Paula S. Fass, Children of a New World: Society, Culture, and Globalization. (New York: New York University Press, 2007); Karin Calvert, Children in the House: The Material Culture of Early Childhood, 1600-1900 (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1992); Gary Cross, Kids’ Stuff: Toys and

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41

42

43 44 45 46 47 48

49 50

Notes the Changing World of American Childhood (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997); Steven Mintz, Huck’s Raft: A History of American Childhood (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University, 2004); Karen Sánchez-Eppler, Dependent States: The Child’s Part in Nineteenth-Century American Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). Nara Milanich, Children of Fate: Childhood, Class and the State in Chile, 1850-1930 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009); Bianca Premo, Children of the Father King: Youth, Authority, & Legal Minority in Colonial Lima (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2005); Tobias Hecht, ed., Minor Omissions: Children in Latin American History and Society (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2002); Elizabeth Anne Kuznesof, “The Puzzling Contradictions of Child Labor, Unemployment, and Education in Brazil,” Journal of Family History, vol. 23, no. 3 (July 1998): 225–39. Marilyn Irvin Holt, Cold War Kids: Politics and Childhood in Postwar America, 1945-1960 (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2014); Margaret Peacock, Invisible Weapons: The Soviet and American Politics of Childhood in the Cold War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 2014); Sara Fieldston Raising the World: Child Welfare in the American Century (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015). See also Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York: Basic Books, 1988). Julio Moreno, Yankee Don’t Go Home: Mexican Nationalism, American Business Culture, and the Shaping of Modern Mexico, 1920-1950 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 12. Ageeth Sluis, Deco Body, Deco City: Female Spectacle and Modernity in Mexico City, 1900-1939 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2016), 11. Luis M. Castañeda, Spectacular Mexico: Design, Propaganda, and the 1968 Olympics (Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 2014), 90–100. Eric Zolov editor, Iconic Mexico: An Encyclopedia from Acapulco to Zócalo (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2015), 49–50. Zolov, Iconic Mexico, 48. Daniel L. Schacter, Searching for Memory: The Brain, the Mind, and the Past (New York: Basic Books, 1996), 5. Within the context of Southern Rhodesia/colonial Zimbabwe, Beverly Carolease Grier demonstrates how African boys challenged patriarchy and used their labor to escape control by their elders. “Struggles over African Childhood: Child and Adolescent Labor, 1890-1920s,” in The Global History of Childhood Reader, edited by Heidi Morrison (London: Routledge, 2012), 208–09. SEP, Memoria 1947, 21–22. Susan Rigdon, The Culture Façade: Art, Science, and Politics in the Work of Oscar Lewis (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 48–71. Rigdon provides an intellectual history of Lewis’s work and shows that in his research at the Casa Blanca

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and Panaderos he actively sought to differentiate between different sectors of the urban poor. My aim here is not to give credence to his theory but rather to discuss the controversies surrounding the book’s release in Spanish in 1964 and to make use of some of his important material collected about children’s lives in the vecindades.

Chapter 1 1 Robert E. Park and Ernest W. Burgess, The City: Suggestions for Investigation of Human Behavior in the Urban Environment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, Midway Reprint Edition, 1987), 1–2. Park views the city as an economic unit as well. The city “as organically related; a kind of psychophysical medium in and through which private and political interests find not merely a collective but a corporate expression.” Conversations with Robert E. Moore contributed to my understanding of Park’s analysis. 2 Oral histories conducted by author in Mexico City, March 2005 and in Los Angeles 2014. The individual interviews are cited throughout the chapter. 3 Mauricio Tenorio-Trillo, I Speak of the City: Mexico City at the Turn of the Twentieth Century (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press), xviii. 4 Davis, Urban Leviathan. Between 1880 and 1910, the capital regained its centrality in all realms, according to Tenorio Trillo, I Speak of the City, xviii. 5 Tenorio-Trillo, I Speak of the City, 127. 6 Pablo Piccato, City of Suspects, Ageeth Sluis, Deco Body, Deco City, Mauricio Tenorio-Trillo, I Speak of the City. 7 Luis M. Castañeda, Spectacular Mexico: Design, Propaganda, and the 1968 Olympics, (Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 2014), xxi. 8 Alexander de Humbolt, Political Essay on the Kingdom of New Spain, trans. John Black (New York: AMS Press, Inc., 1966). 9 Barbara Tennenbaun, “Streetwise History: The Paseo de la Reforma and the Porfirian State, 1876-1910,” in Rituals of Rule, Rituals of Resistance: Public Celebrations and Popular Culture in Mexico, edited by William H. Beezley, Cheryl English Martin, and William E. French. (Wilmington, Del.: Scholarly Resources, Inc., 1994), 127–50. 10 Susan Eckstein, The Poverty of the Revolution: The State and the Urban Poor in Mexico (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977). 11 Diane E. Davis, Urban Leviathan: Mexico City in the Twentieth Century (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994), 28. The rule of Porfirio Díaz, known as the Porfiriato, was a period characterized by “progress” and modernization of the country’s economy and infrastructure, an achievement that was accomplished through strict control and oppression of the masses.

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12 Hira de Gotari Rabiela and Regina Hernández Franyuti, La Cuidad de México y el Distrito Federal: Una historia compartida (México: Departamento del Distrito Federal y Instituto de Investigaciones Dr. José María Luis Mora, 1988). 13 Lázaro Cárdenas ruled the country between 1934 and 1940. Cárdenas implemented massive agrarian reform, nationalized the oil industry, and was widely regarded throughout the country as sympathetic to the needs of peasants. 14 Cited in Stephen R. Niblo, Mexico in the 1940s: Modernity, Politics, and Corruption (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, Inc., 1999), 161. 15 Celeste González de Bustamente, “Muy buenas noches”: Mexico, Television, and the Cold War (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2012), 23. 16 Niblo, Mexico in the 1940s,164. Mexico declared war on the Axis Powers one day after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. 17 Octavio Paz, The Labyrinth of Solitude (New York: Grove Press, 1985), 343. 18 Davis, Urban Leviathan, 329. 19 My discussion of “the city” refers to “Mexico City” and the Federal District. When speaking of numbers or statistical calculations, I attempt to identify the reference as the Federal District or specifically Mexico City. 20 The 1930 census does not contain data for two areas, cuartel XII of Mexico City and the delegación of Gustavo A. Madero from the Federal District. Estados Unidos Mexicanos, Secretaría de Industria y Comercio, Dirección General de Estadística. V Censo General de Población 1930. Mexico: 1933, VI Censo General de Población 1940. Mexico: 1943, VII Censo General de Población 1950. Mexico: 1953, VIII Censo General de Población 1960. Mexico: 1963, IX Censo General de Población 1970. Mexico: 1971. The chart is based on my calculations from each of the above censuses. The child population was subdivided into a variety of subcategories of age (ranging from a breakdown of months for infants to a range of a few years for older children, e.g., 4–7, 8–10, etc.) that changed over the period 1930–1970 for each delegation. 21 Robert M. Jordan, “Flowers and iron fists: Ernesto P. Uruchurtu and the contested modernization of Mexico City, 1952–1966” (PhD diss., University of Nebraska, 2013), 22–23. 22 I define children as fourteen years of age and under. 23 La Prensa, July 19, 1966. 24 Ira Rosenwaike, Population History of New York City (Syracuse, New York: Syracuse University Press, 1972), 188. 25 Marilyn Irvin Holt, Cold War Kids: Politics and Childhood in Postwar America, 1945–1960 (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2014), 17. 26 Luis Castañeda, Spectacular Mexico, 90–100. 27 Ibid., 49–51. 28 Ibid., 127–28. 29 Ibid., 169. 30 Ibid., 117, 122–23, 124.

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31 The tension between the rhetoric of modernity and reality of illiteracy is evidenced in the design of the Metro system where each stop is represented both in words and pictorially. 32 Juan Villoro “From Primodial Cave to Postmodern Velocity: The Mexico City Subway” in Technology and Culture in Twentieth Century Mexico, Araceli Tinajero and J. Brian Freeman, eds. (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2013), 255–56. 33 Castañeda, Spectacular Mexico, xvi. 34 Oscar and Ruth Lewis Papers, Box 109, “Mexico, Tepoztlan, 1943–1944; Dreams, Tests.” In Oscar Lewis’s analysis of Tepoztlán, his researchers found that young children there had knowledge of the atomic bomb, leading one researcher to question her beliefs about rural life and its supposed isolation from domestic and international political concerns. 35 Hearst Newsreel Footage, Mexico, 1938–1946, University of California at Los Angeles Film Archives, CS559, Mexone 40020000, program 1, tape 2. Cited in Julio Moreno, Yankee Don’t Go Home: Mexican Nationalism, American Business Culture, and the Shaping of Modern Mexico, 1920–1950 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 1. 36 Elena Poniatowska, Massacre in Mexico (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1991), 74–75. Originally published La Noche de Tlatelolco 1971. 37 Renata Keller, Mexico’s Cold War: Cuba, The United States, and the Legacy of the Mexican Revolution (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 29. The Oxford History of Mexico, 578–79. 38 Jaime M. Pensado, Rebel Mexico: Student Unrest and Authoritarian Political Culture During the Long Sixties. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013), 49. 39 Pensado, Rebel Mexico, 85, 101. 40 Keller, Mexico’s Cold War, 31. 41 Ibid., 33. 42 Robert F. Alegre, Railroad Radicals in Cold War Mexico: Gender, Class, and Memory in Cold War Mexico (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2013), 2–5. 43 Davis, Urban Leviathan, 12. 44 Todd Gitlin, The Sixties: Years of Hope Days of Rage (New York: Bantam Books, 1993). Gitlin argues that consumer culture significantly influenced the ideology of the generation coming of age in the 1960s in the United States. 45 Photographic evidence from Hermanos Mayo. 46 Moreno, Yankee Don’t Go Home!: Mexican Nationalism, American Business Culture, and the Shaping of Modern Mexico, 1920-1950, 1 (Chapell Hill: University of North Carolina Press). Moreno points out that the success of Sears in Mexico rested, at least in part, upon the company’s ability to adapt business practices to fit within the acceptable boundaries in Mexican culture. 47 Roderic Ai Camp, Mexican Political Biographies, 1935-2009, 4th ed. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2011), 1285.

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48 Davis, Urban Leviathan, 130–34. 49 Jordan, “Flowers and iron fists,” 52–53. 50 Oscar Lewis, Five Families: Mexican Case Studies in the Culture of Poverty (New York: Basic Books, 1959), 315. Lewis characterized the Lomas neighborhood as “the wealthiest and most aristocratic residential section of Mexico City.” Of the Castro family, he considered them to be “typical of the nouveau riche who had prospered in Mexico since the revolution.” 270. 51 Interview with Araceli March 2005, Mexico City. 52 The contrast between experienced, sometimes savvy, city-dwelling children and those hailing from the countryside is starkly portrayed in Luis Buñuel’s cinematic portrait of Mexico City life, Los olvidados. 53 While a dichotomy between rural and urban is too simplistic, very real differences existed between children’s lives in the countryside versus the capital. See for example, José Revueltas Papers, Box 98.9 Diary of Olivia Peralta entry dated December 13, 1955. 54 Ilan Stavans, Return to Centro Histórico: A Mexican Jew Looks for His Roots (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2012), 11. 55 Interview with Roberto March 2005, Mexico City. 56 Interview with Georgina March 2005, Mexico City. 57 Because the practice was technically illegal, accurate statistics for children working in the city are impossible to obtain. Regardless, anecdotal evidence attests to its prevalence. 58 Constitution of the United Mexican States 1917. (Washington, D.C.: Pan American Union Department of International Law, 1957). 59 Susana Sosenski, Niños en Acción: El Trabajo Infantil and la Ciudad de México, 1920–1934 (Mexico: El Colegio de México, 2010), 83. 60 Rosemary Thorp, Progress, Poverty and Exclusion: An Economic History of Latin America in the 20th Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press for the Inter-American Development Bank and the European Union, 1998), 172–73. 61 Blum, “Speaking of Work and Family,” 81. 62 La Prensa, July 21, 1966. 63 Ibid. 64 Salvador Flores Rivera, Relatos de mi barrio, (Mexico City: Editores Asociados, 1972), 11. 65 Lewis, Five Families, 34. 66 Interview with Roberto March 2005, Mexico City. 67 Letter from Bursley to US Secretary of State dated September 20, 1943, and original letter from eight clubwomen to the US Embassy in Mexico City dated August 23, 1943. National Archives and Records Administration, State Department Central Decimal File, 1940–44, 812.5047/1. It should be noted that the tone of the clubwomen’s letter was very much in line with US foreign policy and relations

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72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79

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toward Mexico during the Second World War. The women, referring to “slave labor,” reported: “This practice might be conconed [sic] in Japan, but not in a country closely co-operating with the U.S. for the advancement of the so called four freedoms.” See photograph of a boy working at a gasoline station in Mexico City from the Hermanos Mayo Collection. Oscar Lewis Papers, Box 128 “Interviews with Young Women in Panaderos (1960).” The girls interviewed range in ages from thirteen to eighteen years of age. The older girls provided accounts of their first paid employment. The work of Oscar Lewis was, and remains, controversial. While his work remains problematic, Lewis’s ethnographic work in Mexico City is so voluminous and filled with details of everyday life in the burgeoning metropolis that it would be foolhardy not to engage his archive. The Oscar Lewis papers at The University of Illinois archive contain a rich account of material conditions in several Mexico City housing units, often providing an inventory of household items and number of individuals per dwelling. Iona Opie and Peter Opie, Children’s Games in Street and Playground (London: Oxford University Press), V. Robert Payne (Photographs by Dick Davis) Mexico City (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World Inc., 1968), 25–28, 65, 105, and 173. For a discussion of the importance of the plaza in daily life, see Setha M. Low, On the Plaza: The Politics of Public Space and Culture (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000). Low’s study focuses on San José, Costa Rica, but she also addresses the plaza’s importance in Latin America more generally. Jordan, “Flowers and iron fists,” 83. Interview with Roberto March 2005, Mexico City. Historia Oral at the archives of the Instituto Nacional de Antropologia y Historia. Oscar Lewis Papers, Box 128 “Interviews with Young Women in Panaderos (1960).” Joe Nash, Minute Guide to Mexico City Museums (México: Editorial Minutiae Mexicana, 1966). Salvador Novo. Nueva grandeza mexicana. (México: Ediciones ERA, S.A., 1946), 34. Nash, Minute Guide to Mexico City, 3. In September 1964, López Mateos inaugurated the following: the new National Museum of Anthropology, the Anahuacalli, the Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Colonial Painting, the Museum of Natural History in Mexico City, and the National Museum of the Colonial Era in nearby Tepotzotlan, State of Mexico. Nash, Minute Guide to Mexico City, 3. See, for example, photographs in included in the INAH project Box #026 of a 1955 outing and Box #078 featuring a 1940 photograph. Additionally, several individuals commented on excursions in the oral history interviews I conducted. Jueves de Excelsior (September 12, 1957) No. 1834, p. 27. Jueves de Excelsior (26 junio 1958) No. 1875, pp. 22–23.

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83 1947 Photograph “Between the Wheels of Progress” Héctor García México sin retoque, Presentación de Elena Poniatowska. (México: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México Coordinación de Difusión Cultural Dirección de Literatura, 1987). 84 Davis, Urban Leviathan, 117. 85 For a discussion of Ford Motor Company, see Steven J. Bachelor, “Toiling for the ‘New Invaders’: Autoworkers, Transnational Corporations, and Working-Class Culture in Mexico City, 1955-1968,” in Fragments of a Golden Age, edited by Gilbert Joseph, Anne Rubenstein, and Eric Zolov (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001), 273–326. During one interview, Alejandro mentioned that his father worked for Ford as a mechanic and eventually became a supervisor until he retired. 86 INAH, #58 Letter to Antonio Garzón dated November 27, 1943. 87 Interview with Araceli conducted by author March 2005 in Mexico City. 88 Jonathan Kandell, La Capital: The Biography of Mexico City (New York: Random House, 1988), 5. 89 Interview with Alejandro March 2005, Mexico City. 90 Interview with Marta in March 2005, Mexico City. It should also be noted that class or social hierarchies also existed within specific communities, like the vecindad. In one vecindad, one mother attempted to limit her daughter’s exposure to the other girls living there. “A pesar de que se lleva bien con las demás chicas, su mama no la deja salir con ellas, pues considera que se llevan de un modo muy feo con los muchachos de las que lleguen a la vecindad, quienes les dicen groserias.” OLP Box 128 “Interviews with Young Women in ________ (1960).” 91 Interview by author May 2014. 92 Judith Adler Hellman, Mexican Lives (New York: The New Press, 1995), 189. 93 Ibid. 94 Cited in Rebecca M. Schreiber, Cold War Exiles in Mexico: U.S. Dissidents and the Culture of Critical Resistance (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 8, 64. Original source is from Crawford Kilian’s unpublished memoir. 95 Ricardo Montalban, Reflections: A Life in Two Worlds, (Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc, 1980), 43. 96 David Harvey, Paris, Capital of Modernity (New York: Routledge, 2003), 1. 97 Elena Poniatowska, La Noche de Tlatelolco: Testimonios de historia oral (México: Biblioteca Era, 1971), 1.

Chapter 2 1 Mary Kay Vaughan, Cultural Politics in Revolution: Teachers, Peasants, and Schools in Mexico, 1930-1940 (Tucson: The University of Arizona Press, 1997); Elena Jackson Albarrán, Seen and Heard in Mexico: Children and Revolutionary Cultural Nationalism (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2014); Jaime M. Pensado, Rebel

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4 5

6

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Mexico: Student Unrest and Authoritarian Political Culture During the Long Sixties (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013). Mary Kay Vaughan, Portrait of a Young Painter: Pepe Zúñiga and Mexico City’s Rebel Generation (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015), 3. Elena Jackson Albarrán has shown how the SEP used radio in the 1930s to reach children and create “a community of invisible little friends.” Seen and Heard in Mexico, 133–38. The Course of Mexican History 6th edition, 643–44. Mary Kay Vaughan, Cultural Politics in Revolution, 59; José Vasconcelos, A Mexican Ulysses: The Autobiography of José Vasconcelos, trans. W. Rex Crawford. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1963). Vasconcelos’s idea of the “Cosmic Race” glorified the mestizo race. Licia Fiol-Matta, A Queer Mother for the Nation: The State and Gabriela Mistral (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002); Patience A. Schell, “Gender, Class, and Anxiety at the Gabriela Mistral Vocational School, Revolutionary Mexico City,” in Sex in Revolution: Gender, Politics, and Power in Modern Mexico, edited by Jocelyn Olcott, Mary Kay Vaughan, and Gabriela Cano (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 112–26. Vasconcelos invited Mistral to assist in the implementation of Mexico’s education reform after the revolution. James Wilkie, The Mexican Revolution: Federal Expenditure and Social Change Since 1910, 2d ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970), 160–64. Note: These figures are for national educational expenditures and are not specific to the capital city. It is certainly noteworthy that both the new-school construction campaign and the textbook controversy occurred during the nadir (late 1940s early 1950s) and peak (early 1960s) of educational outlay as a percentage of total federal expenditures. Mary Kay Vaughan, “Cultural Approaches to Peasant Politics in the Mexican Revolution.” Hispanic American Historical Review, vol. 79, no. 3 (May 1999): 269–305; Anne Rubenstein, Bad Language Naked Ladies; Gilbert Joseph, Anne Rubenstein, Eric Zolov, eds., Fragments of a Golden Age: The Politics of Culture in Mexico since 1940 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001). Jackson Albarrán, Seen and Heard in Mexico, 133. Photo and caption from the New York Bureau of the United Press (MX 1067648), September 18, 1954. Photo courtesy of Historic Images. See Ann Shelby Blum, Domestic Economies: Family, Work, and Welfare in Mexico City, 1884–1943 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2010) and Nichole Sanders, Gender and Welfare in Mexico: The Consolidation of a Postrevolutionary State (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2011). Stephen E. Lewis, “The Nation, Education, and the ‘Indian Problem’ in Mexico, 1920-1940,” in The Eagle and the Virgin: Nation and Cultural Revolution in Mexico, 1920-1940, Mary Kay Vaughan and Stephen E. Lewis, eds. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 24.

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12 Soledad Loaeza, La restauración de la iglesia católica en la transición Mexicana (Mexico City: El Colegio de México, 2013), 57–58. 13 In addition to the representation of Mexico at international educational, social welfare, and medical conferences, SEP officials corresponded with foreigners wishing to study and observe Mexican education. 14 Victor Gallo Martínez, Política educativa en México (México: Ediciones Oasis, Biblioteca Pedagógica de Mejoramiento Profesional, 1966). 15 Schell, Patience A. Schell “Nationalizing Children Through Schools and Hygiene: Porfirian and Revolutionary Mexico City.” The Americas, vol. 60, no. 4 (April 2004), 564. Schell maintains: “An unintentional result of postrevolutionary focus on education and childrearing was the spread of childhood as a discrete developmental stage.” 16 Elena Jackson Albarrán, Seen and Heard in Mexico, 25–26; 131; 173–74. 17 Secretaría de Educación Pública, La Educación Pública en México desde el 1 de diciembre de 1934 hasta el 30 de novimebre de 1940 (México, DF: 1941), 20. Mary Kay Vaughan has demonstrated how the 1930s’ policy of the SEP took a drastic turn from the time of the SEP’s inception. 18 Ibid., 20–21. The SEP promoted the education of both sexes together because “in the social life man does not live in an exclusively male world, nor do women live in one exclusively female.” 19 See Chapter 4 for more details on Catholics’ response. Narciso Bassols would later serve as Ambassador to Great Britain (1935–37), France (1938–39), and Russia (1944–46) as well as delegate to the League of Nations (1937). Roderic Ai Camp, Mexican Political Biographies, 1935-2009, 4th ed. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2011), 89. 20 Secretaría de Educación Pública, La Educación Pública en México desde el 1 de diciembre de 1934 hasta el 30 de novimebre de 1940 (México, DF: 1941), 23. 21 Ibid., 46. 22 Ibid., 49. 23 Ibid., 64. 24 Ibid., 57. 25 Jueves de Excélsior, 6 febrero 1941, no. 971. Another image depicts a stout indigenous woman labeled Minister of Education pouring atole (=article 3) into a bowl being held by a young boy marked as “the people” (el pueblo). The caption reads: “With virile resolution the schoolboy exclaimed: Listen, Doña Education: este atole ya no cuele!” (This atole [a prehispanic, maize-based drink] won’t strain!) 26 Camp, Mexican Political Biographies, 886. 27 Soledad Loaeza, Clases Medidas y Política en México: la querella escolar, 1959-1963 (Mexico City: El Colegio de México, 1988), 118.

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28 Secretaria de Educación Pública, Memoria de la Secretaria de Educación Pública Labores desarrolladas en el período comprendido entre el dia 1o. de septiembre de 1943 al 31 de agosto de 1944 (México, DF: 1944), 14. 29 SEP Educación Pre-escolar Box 5031 (1742) Folder S/160.1 exp 2 leg 1. Letter to Los CC. Directores de Educación Federal E Inspectoras de Jardines de Niños en los estados de la Republica from RZ 23 de feb 1948. 30 Rosaura Zapata, Educación Pre-Escolar (México, DF: Alianza de Mujeres de México Estudios Pedagógicos, 1955), 17; Secretaria de Educación Pública, Memoria de la Secretaria de Educación Pública 1947-1948 (México, DF: 1948), 412. 31 La Educación Pública en México desde el 1 de diciembre de 1934 hasta el 30 de novimebre de 1940. (México, DF: 1941), 23. 32 Ibid., 36. 33 Rosaura Zapata, Teoría y Práctica del Jardín de Niños (Mexico: Imprenta Manuel Leon Sánchez, 1962), 58–59. 34 Additionally, the SEP encouraged fieldtrips of several kinds. Teachers were instructed to take kindergarteners to locales that would demonstrate how society and the economy functioned. Trips to aviation centers, post offices, railroads, among others, were particularly stressed upon. 35 Secretaria de Educación Pública, Memoria de la Secretaria de Educación Pública 1947–1948 (México, DF: 1948), 414–16. 36 Ibid., 408–09. 37 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities; Elena Jackson Albarrán, Seen and Heard in Mexico, 130–34. 38 Secretaria de Educación Pública, Memoria de la Secretaria de Educación Pública 1951–1952 (México, DF: 1952), 58–59. 39 Memoria 1947–1948, 408. 40 Ibid., 12. 41 Memoria 1943–1944, 7. 42 Ibid., 9. 43 SEP Box 5030 (1742) Folder S/142(C) (016) Letter to C. Official Mayor del Ramo from RZ, dated 21 December, 1942. 44 Memoria 1951-1952, 55. 45 Memoria 1943-1944, 9–10. 46 Memoria 1948-1949, 11. In addition to the same countries listed in the previous report, exchanges were established with Brazil, Canada, Cuba, Honduras, and Uruguay. 47 Memoria 1949-1950, 46–47. 48 Memoria 1950-1951, 55. 49 Memoria 1951-1952, 48. 50 SEP Box 4300 (469) Folder S/232 Letter from Principal Elizabeth Neterer, dated November 9, 1949.

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51 SEP Box 4300 (469) Folder S/232 Letter from Virginia Lee Forbis of Wheaton, Illinois, dated March 27, 1950. 52 Memoria 1950-1951, 55–56; Zapata Educación Pre-Escolar, 18. 53 SEP Box 5040 (1752) Folder S/167(73) Letter to C. SUBSECRETARIO DEL RAMO from Zapata after a visit to the United States to view kindergartens there, dated September 2, 1948. 54 Zapata, Teoría y Práctica del Jardín de Niños, 25. “El Jardín de Niños Mexicano, abierto a las nuevas corrientes educativas, sabe de los esfuerzos que en cuestión de material didáctico se han hecho y ha captado el espíritu de los trabajos realizados en ese sentido por Montessori y Decroly, adaptándolos a las necesidades del medio social regional nuestro a la edad y dearrollo de los niños.” 55 Memoria 1950-1951, 59 56 This may be a reference to the fact that some children were not sleeping in their own bed or cot but rather sharing sleeping spaces with parents or older siblings: a point Vaughan has addressed in Cultural Politics in Revolution. 57 Memoria 1950-1951, 59-60. All the references are gender-neutral except the question that asks: “Do you accompany her in her outings?” 58 Numerous discussions with Robert E. Moore greatly informed this point. 59 SEP Box 5046 (1758) Folder S/203(4-21). Letter to RZ from Inspectora from DF Ernestina Latoue, dated July 5, 1946. 60 Memoria 1951-1952, 44. 61 Ibid., 46. 62 Ibid., 47. 63 Memoria 1949-1950, 52. 64 Zapata, Teoría y Práctica del Jardín de Niños, 16. 65 Memoria 1951-1952, 51. 66 Ibid., 52. 67 The SEP’s instruction of mothers through the jardines is reflected in other official government publications addressed to women. For example, the PRI later addressed mother’s roles in the home in a 1957 pamphlet stating: “Husband and wife should live in an environment of affection, harmony, and frank understanding to provide a good example to your children and so to deserve the utmost respect from them.” Usted Ya Es Ciudadana (México: Partido Revolucionario Institucional, Comité Central Ejecutivo, Dirección de Acción Femenil, 1957), 15. 68 Zapata, Teoría y Práctica del Jardín de Niños, 15–16. 69 Blum, Domestic Economies; Sanders, Gender and Welfare in Mexico. 70 Memoria 1951-1952, 53. The report ended the list by noting “and many others that we could cite.” 71 SEP Box 5038 (1750) Folder S/166:201.3. “PROYECTO DE LA LABOR TECNICA SOCIAL Y ADMINISTRATIVA QUE ME PROPONGO REALIZAR EN LA

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73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82

83 84 85

86

87

88

89 90

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PRIMERA ZONA DE JARDINES DE NINOS QUE ES A MI CARGO, DURANTE EL ANO DE 1948.” Inspectora Luz Gonzalez Baz. SEP Box 4300 (469) Folder S/210(4-64) Undated letter to Rosaura Zapata and letter from Zapata to inspectors of jardines in Federal District, dated August 14, 1942. Memoria 1943-1944, 16. Jueves de Excélsior Abril 8 de 1948, p. 32. Lewis, “The Nation, Education,” 192. Jueves de Excélsior Abril 8 de 1948, pp. 30–33. Memoria 1947, 21. Memoria 1947, 22. Memoria 1948-1949, 29. Memoria 1949-1950, 39–43. Jueves de Excélsior Junio 24, 1948, p. 20. The reforms discussed in this section are national in scope. While the specific examples and data are drawn from the Federal District, ideologies and rhetoric are frequently cited from the general project as articulated by the SEP. Jueves de Excélsior Junio 24, 1948, p. 35. Jueves de Excélsior May 27, 1948, pp. 42–43. “Se necesitan 700 millones para escuelas,” Jueves de Excélsior April 15, 1948, p. 23. The article claimed that according to the census, there were 5,000 millionaires in the Federal District and invited them to contribute to the cause. “Todos los sectores sociales del pais cooperan en la construccion de escuelas,” Jueves de Excélsior Mayo 13 de 1948, p. 30. El caballito holds tremendous cultural significance and serves as a reminder of Mexico’s colonial past. Mexicans call the statue el caballito because it depicts the ruler on horseback. In her analysis of patriotic festivals in Tecamachalco, Puebla, Mary Kay Vaughan argues that the festival of the 1940s “did not simply disseminate ideology from above” but rather “engaged and mobilized people.” (216). “The fiesta became a ritually performed mobilization for modernity linked to the state.” (231). Vaughan rejects the notion that the festivals represented state imposition as well as the idea that that the state had “little impact as a cultural creator.” Instead, she focuses on it as a site for negotiation and inclusion. SEP Escuelas Particulares Box 9, Folder E/185 (E-21 “282”) (072)/15 exp 1, letter from the Sociedad de Padres de Familia de la escuela “Siete de Enero” Tacubaya, D.F., dated August 12, 1952. SEP Escuelas Particulares Box 8, unmarked folder containing nineteen photographs of children from the school Santa Cruz de las Salinas (1942–50). SEP Escuelas Particulares Box 8, unmarked folder containing sixty-three photographs of children from the school Día del Arbol (1949–50).

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91 SEP Escuelas Particulares Box 1 Folder E/202 (02) Exp 317. Brochure for “Curso de 1945 Kindergarten France-Amerique 1o. y 2o. Curso de Primaria Incorporado.” 92 SEP Escuelas Particulares Box 5, Folder II/202 (02) Exp 246. Informe sobre la Escuela Particular “Madrid” 10 de marzo de 1949 inspector Natalio Cerecedo Cortina. 93 SEP Escuelas Particulares Box 3, Folder II/202 (02) Exp 622 Legajo I. Letter from Inspectora especial (Profa. Maria de la Luz Ramirez) to the C. Direct. Gral. De Educ. Prim. En el D.F. 4 de abril 1953 regarding her inspection of the school “Moderna Americana” on Gabriela Mancera #1057 Col. Del Valle D.F. 94 SEP Escuelas Particulares Box 3, Folder II/202(02) exp 637 legajo 1. Letter to the C. Secretario de Educ. Publica from Directora Margarita de la Mora Navarro of Escuela ‘Cristiana F. De Merino’ Tripoli 112, Col. Portales. D.F. 30 de sept 1953. 95 SEP Direc. Gral. De Educ. Prim. en el D.F. E/187.2 (E-21 “312”) Expediente 1. Letter, dated August 6, 1953, to Secretario de Educación Pública from mothers of a school located in Santa María Ticomán, in the delegation of Gustavo A. Madero in the Federal District. 96 Letter to President Adolfo Lopez Mateos from the Conderacion de Pequeños Fabricantes de Calzado de le Republica, no date. AGN Adolfo Lopez Mateos Vol ALM C.632, Exp. 534.3/1681. 97 Wilkie, The Mexican Revolution, p. 161. It should be noted that while the percentages dropped during his presidency, Alemán managed to hold the pesos per capita at a steady level. 98 James Wilkie maintains “the Plan de Once Años was announced with great fanfare and gradually was not mentioned by the end of López Mateos’s term.” 99 Memoria 1941, 49. Officially, each classroom was to contain a maximum of fiftyfive students. 100 Ramón García Ruiz, El Programa Escolar y los Libros de Texto (1962), 7. 101 Obra Educativa en el Sexenio 1958-1964, pp. 71–72. 102 Ibid., p. 46. 103 García Ruiz. El Programa Escolar y los Libros de Texto, p. 8. 104 Obra Educativa en el Sexenio 1958-1964, 73. 105 “Reforma Total a la Educación” Excélsior 30 julio 1959, p. 11. 106 “16 Millones de Libros de Texto y Cuadernos Para las Primarias, Impresares y Encuardernadores Invitados por la Comisión Nacional a Elaborarlos” El Nacional (Mexico City) July 11, 1959. 107 “Reforma Total a la Educación” Excélsior 30 julio 1959, p. 11. 108 “Cómo Abaratar el Libro de Texto” Antonio Caso, Jr. El Universal (Mexico City) February 15, 1954. See a later article on the same topic: “Prometen Abaratar los Textos, Habló Ceniceros con Importantes Editores” El Universal February 15, 1957. 109 Roderic Ai Camp, Mexican Political Biographies, 1935-2009, 4th ed. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2011), 194.

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110 “Satisfacción por los Precios de los Textos” Novedades, February 15, 1957. 111 “López Mateos Cumple una Promesa de la Revolución al dar Libros Para la Niñez: El Primer Libro de Texto Gratuito le fue Entregado Ayer” El Nacional 13 Enero 1960. 112 Valentina Torres Septién, “La Unión Nacional de Padres de Familia: la lucha por la enseñanza de la religión en las escuelas particulares,” in La Ciudad y el Campo en la Historia de México: Memoria de la VII Reunión de Historiadores Mexicanos y Norteamericanos Oaxaca, OAX., 1985 (México: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1992), 927. 113 Torres Septién, 932. 114 Ibid., 933. 115 Ibid., 934. 116 Obra Educativa en el Sexenio 1958-1964, 71–72. 117 Katharine Bliss, Compromised Positions: Prostitution, Public Health, and Gender Politics in Revolutionary Mexico City (University Park: Pennsylvania University Press, 2001). Bliss makes this argument regarding the state’s intrusion into the domestic sphere in its regulation of sexuality and prostitution an earlier period. 118 Soledad Loaeza, Clases Medidas y Política en México: la querella escolar, 1959-1963 (Mexico City: El Colegio de México, 1988), 34. 119 Carlos Daniel Añorve Aguirre, La organización de la Secretaría de Educación Pública 1921-1994 (México: Universidad Pedagógica Nacional, 2000), 213. Two years later, it was elevated to the Dirección General de Educación Auditivo-Visual (48). 120 Añorve Aguirre La organización de la Secretaría de Educación Pública 1921-1994, 213. 121 These figures are based on my compilation of SEP reports. Numbers gathered and publicized by the SEP are problematic. Demographer Cecilia Rabell had pointed out to me early during my research the problems of taking SEP calculations at face value as they often exaggerated statistics to serve political ends. 122 Memoria 1943-1944, 12–13. 123 Memoria 1948-1949, 15. 124 Memoria 1949-1950, 44. 125 Memoria 1950-1951, 52. 126 Memoria 1951-1952, 66. Eight jardines de niños were created in the DF (one in Zacahuizco, three in Mexico City, one each in Colonia del Periodista, Colonia Portales, Coyoacan, and one located at 5-5-km distance of the Carretera Puebla, Colonia Federal.

Chapter 3 1

In Luis Castañeda, Spectacular Mexico, 161. For example, student protestors manipulated the government-issued commemorative Olympic postage stamp of

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Notes boxers and created an image of protestors being beaten by police with the slogan “Year of the Democratic Struggle” to communicate police brutality in the days leading up to the Olympic Games. Poniatowska, Massacre in Mexico, 95. For the Soviet case see, Choi Chatterjee, Celebrating Women: Gender, Festival Culture, and Bolshevik Ideology, 1910-1939 (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2002). A prior film was made in 1918; both are based on Federico Gamboa’s novel of the same name from 1903. Alejandro Galindo, El Cine Mexicano: un personal punto de vista (Standard practice in Latin American scholarship to leave citations in Spanis) (Mexico City: Editores Asociados Mexicanos, S.A.), 29; See also John Charles Chasteen, Santa: A Novel of Mexico City (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), ix. Carl J. Mora “Alejandro Galindo: Pioneer Mexican Cineast,“ Journal of Popular Culture, vol. 18, no. 1 (1984): 105. Celeste González de Bustamante, “Muy buenas noches”: Mexico, Television, and the Cold War (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2013). Ibid., 101. Joy Elizabeth Hayes, Radio Nation: Communication, Popular Culture and Nationalism in Mexico, 1920-1950 (Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press); González de Bustamante, “Muy buenas noches”; Andrew Paxman, “Cooling to Cinema and Warming to Television: State Mass Media Policy, 1940-1965,” in Dictablanda: Politics, Work, and Culture in Mexico, 1938-1968 edited by Paul Gillingham and Benjamin T. Smith (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014). Carlos Monsiváis, Aires de familia, 214; “And Television Appeared among the Mexicans,” in Technology and Culture in Twentieth-Century Mexico, editors Araceli Tinajero and J. Brian Freeman, (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2013), 117. Agustín Sánchez González, Cri Cri: Historia de un Señor Que una Vez Fue Grillo (México: Juan Pablos Editor, 1999), 25. Soler’s program experienced two interruptions (1940–41 and 1950–51) due to his extensive travels. It seems that for at least some of the pre-1945 period, his program was aired daily. After 1945, Cri- Crí was aired once a week until it went off the air in 1961. Elvira Desachy-Godoy, “Cri-Crí: El Mundo Creativo de Francisco Jose Gabilondo Soler” (Ph.D. diss., University of New Mexico, 1998), 31. When Soler resumed his broadcast in 1943 after a maritime voyage and stay in Buenos Aires, the program was extended to 30 minutes, before that the program duration had been 15 minutes. See Desachy-Godoy, “Cri-Crí,” 29. Sánchez González, Cri Cri: Historia de un Señor Que una Vez Fue Grillo, 13; Iconic Mexico: An Encyclopedia from Acapulco to Zócalo ed Eric Zolov (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-Clio, 2015), 183–190.

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14 Joy Elizabeth Hayes, Radio Nation: Communication, Popular Culture, and Nationalism in Mexico, 1920-1950 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2000), xix. 15 Ibid., xv. 16 Oscar Lewis Papers, University of Illinois Archive. For the U.S. case, Kozol estimates that nearly 90 percent of households had one or more television sets by 1960. Wendy Kozol, Life’s America: Family and Nation in Postwar Photojournalism (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994), 185. 17 Esther Cuatzon Mora, “En otro tiempo, cuando estabas no sé donde . . . : Francisco Gabilondo Soler Cri-Crí 1934-1961” (Masters thesis, Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla, 2004), 27–28; 31–32. 18 Cuatzon Mora, En otro tiempo, 41. 19 Desachy-Godoy, “Cri-Crí,” 32–36. 20 Miguel Lopez Azuara, “Multitudinario Homenaje al Hombre Que Hizo de la Música Bello Juguete,” Excélsior [Mexico] September 24, 1961. 21 José Emilio Pacheco, Battles in the Desert & Other Stories (New York: New Directions, 1987), 93–94. 22 García, De Lunas Garapiñadas Cri-Crí, (Mexico: Radio UNAM FONAPAS, 1982), 91. 23 Canciones Completas de Francisco Gabilondo Soler Cri-Crí, Fernando García Ramírez and Tiburcio Gabilondo Gallegos, eds. (Mexico: Ibcon, 1999), 43. 24 Hayes, Radio Nation, 33. These estimated ownership rates are for all of Mexico, not just Mexico City. 25 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991); William Beezley, Mexican National Identity: Memory, Innuendo, and Popular Culture (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2008). He demonstrates how puppet shows created an “imagined community” for a mostly illiterate Mexican populace in the nineteenth century. Mary Kay Vaughan addresses the Pepe Zúñiga’s recollections of Cri-Cri in Portrait of a Young Painter: Pepe Zúñiga and Mexico City’s Rebel Generation, 51–60; Jackson Albarran, Seen and Heard in Mexico, 129. 26 While this chapter looks at the work of Walt Disney (films, books, and comic books) as a counterpoint to Cri-Crí, a variety of foreign-produced forms of children´s entertainment could be accessed as well. Of course, the advent of television in Mexico meant that these trends became even more pronounced. Carlos Monsiváis; Aires de familia: Cultura y sociedad en América Latina (Barcelona: Editorial Anagrama, 2000), 211–14. “La television es el gran interlocutor a quien se le cede el centro del diálogo familiar.” 27 Desachy-Godoy, “Cri-Crí,” 2. 28 Ibid., 49. 29 Cri-Cri´s popularity spread throughout Latin America but also reached less likely regions, eventually China, to name one example.

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30 Story cited in Desachy-Godoy, “Cri-Crí,” 68. 31 For example, Soler undertook oceanic voyages and study during hiatuses from the radio program in 1940–41and 1950–51. Navigation and astronomy remained two of Soler’s lifelong passions. 32 While Deasachy-Godoy contends that Soler’s music put Mexico “on the world musical map,” the circulation of his music had broader implications for communicating Mexico’s social, cultural, and economic place in the world to Mexican children. (22). Soler performed his work in Havana (1948–49) and his music would eventually circulate throughout the world, including parts of South America, North America, the Caribbean, and even China. 33 José de la Colina, “Cri-Crí o la fiesta del mundo,” in Canciones Completas de Francisco Gabilondo Soler Cri-Crí, Fernando García Ramírez and Tiburcio Gabilondo Gallegos, eds. (Mexico: Ibcon, 1999), 25. 34 Sidney Mintz and Richard Price, The Birth of African-American Culture: An Anthropological Perspective (Boston: Beacon Press, 1992). 35 Beginning in 1947 the Departamento became the Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes, which was first directed by renowned Mexican composer Carlos Chávez. 36 See http://www.arts-history.mx/cronoteatro/cronologia4.html. 37 Desachy-Godoy, “Cri-Crí,” 30. 38 Her ducklings/are growing and they do not have shoes/and her husband/is a shameless and lazy duck that does not give them anything to eat/and the duck, what is she to do?/when they ask, she will answer:/Eat mosquitoes for quack-quack! 39 Excélsior Figueroa de Garcia Sancho 1964. 40 See Chapter 2 for a description of the development of a separate department of preschool education, formally incorporated into the SEP in 1942. 41 Desachy-Godoy, “Cri-Crí,” 36. 42 De la colina, “Cri-Crí o la fiesta del mundo,” 19. 43 García, De Lunas Garapiñadas Cri-Crí, 41. 44 Ibid., 66. 45 When asked about merchandising and protecting his name, Gabilondo Soler replied: “Brands of shoes or children’s clothes, candies or games . . . . I do not make them, nor do I want to make them, because I am not a businessman.” García, De Lunas Garapiñadas Cri-Crí, 15. 46 García, De Lunas Garapiñadas Cri-Crí, 16-17. 47 Sánchez González, Cri Cri: Historia de un Señor Que una Vez Fue Grillo, 54. 48 Ibid., 55. Soler’s story from the radio program printed in Sánchez González, Cri Cri, translated from Spanish by author. 49 Quoted in Desachy-Godoy, “Cri-Crí: El Mundo Creativo de Francisco Jose Gabilondo Soler”, p. 18. 50 Ibid., 18. 51 Ibid., 20, 25.

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52 De la Colina, “Cri-Crí o la fiesta del mundo,” 25. 53 Julianne Burton-Carvajal, “‘Surprise Package’: Looking Southward with Disney,” in Disney Discourse: Producing the Magic Kingdom, edited by Eric Smoodin (New York: Routledge, 1994), 133, 243 n6. 54 Lisa Cartwright and Brian Goldfarb, “Cultural Contagion: On Disney’s Health Films for Latin America” in Disney Discourse, 172; One of the earliest critics was Chilean Ariel Dorfman who originally published in 1971, Para Leer el Pato Donald. Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart, Para leer al pato Donald, 32d ed. (México, D.F.: Siglo Veintiuno Editores, 1993), 11. Dorfman stated: “If important sectors of the intelligentsia in the U.S. have been lulled into complacency with Disney, it can only be because they share his basic values and see the broad public as enjoying the same cultural privileges; but this complicity becomes positively criminal when their common ideology is imposed upon non-capitalist, underdeveloped countries, ignoring the grotesque disparity between the Disney dream of wealth and leisure, and the real needs of the Third World.” 55 “Walt Disney, Visitó Ayer al Senor Presidente A. Camacho,” Excélsior, December 19, 1942, 10; “Walt Disney, Con el Secretario de Gobernación,” El Nacional, December 16, 1942, 8; Christy Fox, “Mexico Theater Fetes Los Angeles Visitors” Los Angeles Times September 1, 1943, A5. 56 Andrew Paxman, “Cooling to Cinema and Warming to Television: State Mass Media Policy, 1940-1965,” in Dictablanda, 314. 57 The Disney archives, unfortunately, are not open to the public. I attempted to obtain statistics regarding ticket sales and distribution in Mexico but was denied access to the archives. Personal correspondence with the Walt Disney Company (Burbank, California) dated December 2004 and February 2005. 58 Steven Watts, Magic Kingdom: Walt Disney and the American Way of Life (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2001), 246. Dorfman, in his assessment of Disney comics, maintains that they are full of “Americanisms,” political ideology, and that “native peoples are often characterized as dumb, ugly, inferior and criminal.” More recently, Mexican cultural critic Carlos Monsiváis argued the influence of Hollywood and Disney influenced Latin Americans and helped shape gender norms, styles, and notions of beauty; Julianne Burton-Carvajal, 131, 242 n1, 141. BurtonCarvajal puts Disney’s productions at ninety-four percent war-related by 1943. 59 Cartwright and Goldfarb, Disney Discourse, 170. 60 Burton-Carvajal, “Surprise Package,” 142. 61 Carlos Monsiváis, “South of the Border, Down Mexico’s Way: El cine latinoamericano y hollywood,” in Aires de familia: Cultura y sociedad en América Latina (Barcelona: Editorial Anagrama, 2000), 51–78. 62 José Emilio Pacheco (1939–2014) one of Mexico’s most influential poets, essayists, novelists and short story writers (the novel is a mostly autobiographica account of his childhood during the 1940s and early 1950s).

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63 José Emilio Pacheco, Battles in the Desert and Other Stories, trans by Katherine Silver (New York: New Directions, 1987), 88. 64 José Piedra, “Pato Donald’s Gender Ducking,” in Disney Discourse: Producing the Magic Kingdom, edited by Eric Smoodin (New York: Routledge, 1997), 161–62. 65 Jueves de Excélsior 1945. 66 1942-43 International Motion Picture Almanac, 959. 67 Ibid., 961. 68 Ibid., 963. 69 Julio Moreno, Yankee Don’t Go Home: Mexican Nationalism, American Business Culture, and the Shaping of Modern Mexico, 1920-1950 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 10. 70 1943-44 International Motion Picture Almanac Terry Ramsaye, ed. (New York: Quigley Publishing Company, 1944), 917. 71 1944-45 International Motion Picture Almanac Terry Ramsaye, ed. (New York: Quigley Publishing Company, 1945), 787. The name changed to Office of InterAmerican Affairs (OIAA) in 1945. 72 Leo A. Handel, Hollywood Looks at its Audience: A report of film audience research (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1950), x–xi. 73 Ibid., 182. 74 Gerald M. Mayer, “American Motion Pictures in World Trade,” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences, The Motion Picture Industry. vol. 254 (November 1947), 34. 75 Watts, Magic Kingdom, 259. 76 Dorfman, 14–15. 77 Historietas de Walt Disney (México, DF : Novaro Editores-Impresoras, S.A.) Año VIII No. 86 (1 de Noviembre 1956); Cuentos de Walt Disney (México, DF: Novaro Editores-Impresoras, S.A.) Año XVI, No. 334, (20 de Noviembre 1964). 78 Walt Disney, El Pato Donald Automovilista. 79 Oscar Lewis, Five Families: Mexican Case Studies in the Culture of Poverty (New York: Basic Books, 1959), 296. 80 Advertisement in Excélsior, December 15, 1955. 81 Anne Rubenstein, Bad Language, Naked Ladies, and Other Threats to the Nation: A Political History of Comic Books in Mexico (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998), 91–92. 82 Piloto, a Catholic magazine for boys, published young boys’ drawings of Disney characters as well as the magazine’s own renderings of these figures. 83 Rubenstein, Bad Language, Naked Ladies, and Other Threats to the Nation, 91–92. Rubenstein demonstrates that some left-wing opposition to Disney’s educational films existed in the early 1940s and attributes it to cultural protectionism.

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84 Beatriz Reyes Nevares, The Mexican Cinema: Interviews with Thirteen Directors, trans by Elizabeth Gard and Carl J. Mora (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1976; originally published in Spanish in 1974), 97. 85 Anne Rubenstein points out that Pedro Infante’s later films “recognized that few in his audience experienced technological change and modernity as an uncomplicated source of pleasure.” Anne Rubenstein “Bodies, Cities, Cinema: Pedro Infante’s Death as Political Spectacle,” editors Gilbert Joseph, Anne Rubenstein, and Eric Zolov, Fragments of a Golden Age: The Politics of Culture in Mexico Since 1940 (Durham, NC: Duke University press, 2001), 220. 86 Sergio De la Mora, Cinemachismo: Masculinities and Sexuality in Mexican Film (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006), 77. 87 Cited in Rubenstein, Fragments of a Golden Age, 201. 88 “Mariachi music accompanies the burial,” Díaz, Delgado, and García archive of the Fototeca of the Archivo General de la Nación, Mexico City, Illustration 30 in Rubenstein, Fragments of a Golden Age, 206–07, 219–20. 89 Mauricio Tenorio-Trillo, I Speak of the City: Mexico City at the Turn of the Twentieth Century (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2012), 75. 90 Rubenstein, Fragments of a Golden Age, 216. 91 De la Mora, Cinemachismo, 79. 92 Ibid., 76, 80. 93 Cited in Rubenstein, Fragments of a Golden Age, 231 n32. 94 Rubenstein, Fragments of a Golden Age, 225. 95 Paxman, “Cooling to Cinema,” 305. The film “mixed melodrama with hummable tunes and a soothing subtext about the nobility inherent in being Mexican and poor.” 96 Andrea Noble, Mexican National Cinema (New York: Routledge, 2005), 106, 113, 192. 97 Julia Tuñón, Mujeres de luz y sombra en el cine Mexicano: la construcción de una imagen (1939-1952), (Mexico: El Colegio de México, Programa Interdisciplinario de Estudios de la Mujer e Instituto Mexicano de Cinematografía, 1998), 143, 171 98 Mora, “Alejandro Galindo,” 102–04. 99 Luis Buñuel, My Last Sigh, trans. Abigail Israel (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003). (Originally published in France Mon dernier soupir in 1982 and translated into English in 1983.) Many Spaniards, including Buñuel and the individual photographers from the Hermanos Mayo collective, took refuge in Mexico after the Civil War. Buñuel arrived in 1946 and lived there continuously more or less until 1961. 100 Buñuel, My Last Sigh, 199. 101 Rachel Kram Villarreal, “Gladiolas for the Children of Sánchez” (University of Arizona, 2008), 33. 102 Agustín Sanchez Vidal, Gabriel Figueroa Flores, Rafael Aviña, and Carlos Monsiváis, Los olvidados: una película de Luis Buñuel (Mexico: Fundación Televisa, 2004), 35.

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103 According to Tenorio-Trillo, ojitos was kidnapped for his labor, I Speak of the City, 297. 104 Jean Franco, Plotting Women: Gender and Representation in Mexico (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), 154. 105 Ernesto R. Acevedo-Muñoz, Buñuel and Mexico: The Crisis of National Cinema (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 78. 106 Agustín Sánchez Vidal, “El largo Camino hacia los Olvidados,” in Los Olvidados: Una película de Luis Buñuel (Mexico: Fundación Televisa, 2004), 49. 107 Pedro Armando, “Alfonso Mejía es la revelación infantil del presente año” El Nacional November 19, 1950. 108 Kram Villarreal, “Gladiolas for the Children of Sánchez,” 34–35. 109 Rafael Avina, Los olvidados: una película de Luis Buñue, 286. 110 Buñuel, My Last Sigh, 200–02. According to Buñuel, the wife of one prominent figure was so upset by his interpretation that she threatened to scratch his eyes out, complaining that no Mexican mother would ever treat her children so coldly. 111 Jueves de Excélsior, December 7, 1950. 112 Quoted in Reyes Nevares, The Mexican Cinema, 58. 113 Carmen Peña Ardid and Víctor Lahuerta Guillén, Buñuel 1950: Los olvidados guión y documentos (Spain: Instituto de Estudios Turolenses, 2007); Vidal, Flores, Aviña, and Monsiváis, Los olvidados. 114 Michael Strauss, “Macias Hurls Perfect No-Hitter as Monterrey Takes Series” The New York Times, August 24, 1957, 11. 115 “El niño Prodigo Angel Macías lanzó juego perfecto ‘ponchando’ a 11, y Monterrey se coronó campeón mundial infantile de beisbol,” El Universal, August 24, 1957, 16. 116 “El niño Prodigo Angel Macías lanzó juego perfecto ‘ponchando’ a 11, y Monterrey se coronó campeón mundial infantile de beisbol,” El Universal, August 24, 1957, 16. 117 “Una casa para cada uno de los campeones mundiales,” El Universal, August 26, 1957, 18. 118 “El Presidente Eisenhower Recibió Cordialmente a los prodigiosos niños beisbolistas Mexicanos,” El Universal, August 28, 1957, 23. 119 “El Presidente Eisenhower Recibió Cordialmente a los prodigiosos niños beisbolistas Mexicanos,” El Universal, August 28, 1957, 26. 120 “El Presidente Eisenhower Recibió Cordialmente a los prodigiosos niños beisbolistas Mexicanos,” El Universal, August 28, 1957, 23. 121 Raúl Garnica, “De Charla con los Pequeños Campeones y sus Familias” El Universal, August 29, 1957, 23. 122 “Recepción de Apotesosis a nuestros campeones,” El Universal, August 29, 1957, 1. 123 Luis Parra, “Gran homenaje a nuestros pequeños campeones mundiales,” El Universal, August 28, 1957, 23. 124 Rebecca M. Schreiber, Cold War Exiles in Mexico: U.S. Dissidents and the Culture of Critical Resistance (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 75.

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125 Advertisements in El Universal June 9, 1960, 21; Novedades June 10, 1960, 9. 126 “Sueña con Ganar un Campeonato para México el Pequeño Gigante” El Universal June 9, 1960, sec 3, 7. 127 Advertisement in Novedades June 11, 1960, sec 3, 7. 128 Celeste González de Bustamente “The Early Years of La Tele” 92–93 129 Monsiváis, “And Television Appeared,” 112. 130 Celeste González de Bustamente “The Early Years of La Tele” 94. Prior to the 1960 law, television regulation fell under The Ley de Vías Generales de Comunicaciones (1940). 131 Andrew Paxman, “Cooling to Cinema,” 312–13. 132 Celeste González de Bustamante, “Muy buenas noches”: Mexico, Television, and the Cold War (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2012), 3–5. 133 González de Bustamente, “Muy buenas noches” 31–32. 134 “Enrique Alonso, 79; Entertainer Known as ‘Cachirulo’” Los Angeles Times, August 31, 2004; “Muere Enrique Alonso ‘Cachirulo’” El Siglo de Torreón, August 27, 2004. 135 González de Bustamante, “Muy buenas noches” 19. 136 Advertisement Excélsior February 8, 1963, 18-A; “Los Capitalinos Podrán Ver Hoy TV en Colores,” Excélsior February 8, 1963, 14-B; Hector Ignacio Ochoa, “Los Capitalinos Vieron Ayer el Primer Programa de Televisión en Colores” Excélsior, February 9, 1963, front page and 12. 137 Eduardo Cazares, “50 años de Televisión a color en México,” Diaro Cultura: Política, Cultura, e Historia January 23, 2013. 138 José Victor Payan “Pereció el Ing. González Camarena, Inventor de la Televisión a Colores” Excélsior, April 19, 1965, front page; “Sepelio de González Camarena a las 12” Excélsior, April 20, 1965, front page and 4. 139 Providing historical context for her work on children’s culture in the 1920s and 1930s, Elena Jackson Albarrán states that “a distinctly child-oriented popular culture did not emerge until 1870, with a rise in the publication of children’s books and magazines.” Seen and Heard in Mexico, 4. It is important to remember that economically these were out of reach for the vast majority of Mexican children. It was not until the 1930s that a children’s mass culture was fully recognizable. 140 Celeste González de Bustamante “The Early Years of La Tele” 101. 141 Monsiváis, “And Television Appeared” 114; Paxman, “Cooling to Cinema,” 313. 142 Ibid., 112.

Chapter 4 1 Reception is a notoriously difficult phenomenon to demonstrate. In the case of an incredibly famous public figure or event, reception can be located in several places: celebrities feed public discussions in the form of editorials, essays, letters

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Notes to the editor, among others, which can connect a discursive or textual analysis to wider public sentiment. Future research could enlighten this aspect of the history of children’s religiosity through oral histories. For the time being, I restrict my analysis to one dominant discourse. Jeffrey M. Pilcher, Cantinflas and the Chaos of Mexican Modernity (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources Inc., 2001), xxi–xxii. Pilcher states, “In describing the lives of times of Mario Moreno and Cantinflas, this book pays special attention to the question of audience reception. It does so not in a linear fashion but rather by laying out the multiple loops of feedback between star and society through which Cantinflas came to personify the actor as a reflection of the Mexican pueblo.” See also, Joanne Hershfield, The Invention of Dolores del Río (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2000), xiii–xv. Hershfield, The Invention of Dolores del Río, 15. Ibid. Cited in Anne Rubenstein, Bad Language, Naked Ladies, and Other Threats to the Nation: A Political History of Comic Books in Mexico (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998), 82. Rubenstein analyzes the complete letter and argues that to the male letter writer, “The asexuality of women and children, and their distance from the capitalist marketplace—their fragile ‘purity’—guarantees the stability of the family, the nation, and the whole moral universe.” 83. Sergio de la Mora, Cinemachismo: Masculinities and Sexuality in Mexican Film (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006), 27. Ibid., 33. Patience Schell points out that before the Cristero War (1926–29), the revolutionary government and Catholic Church at times promoted overlapping agendas. Patience Schell, Church and State Education in Revolutionary Mexico City (Tucson: The University of Arizona Press, 2003). Peter Lester Reich, Mexico’s Hidden Revolution: The Catholic Church in Law and Politics Since 1929 (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1995), 3. Schell, Church and State Education, 140–41. Knight maintains that the socialist education project was undoubtedly a failure if we are to judge it based on the efficacy of its proposed agendas. Mary Kay Vaughan, Cultural Politics in Revolution: Teachers, Peasants, and Schools in Mexico, 1930-1940 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1997), 7. Vaughan argues that the 1930s was characterized by negotiation between the peasantry and the state. David Espinosa, Jesuit Student Groups, the Universidad Iberoamericana, and Political Resistance in Mexico, 1913-1979 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2014), 61. Ben Fallaw, Religion and State Formation in Postrevolutionary Mexico (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013), 28–29.

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14 Roberto Blancarte, “Intransigence, Anticommunism, and Reconciliation: Church/ State Relations in Transition,” in Paul Gillingham and Benjamin T. Smith (eds.), Dictablanda: Politics, Work, and Culture in Mexico, 1938-1968 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), 73. 15 Blancarte, Dictablanda, 75. 16 Soledad Loaeza, “Mexico in the Fifties: Women and Church in Holy Alliance,” Women’s Studies Quarterly, vol 33, no. 3/4 (2015): 157. 17 Schell, Church and State Education, 96. 18 The scholarship can be divided roughly into: church–state relations, religiosity or spirituality, and the differences between the mandates of the official church hierarchy and popular devotion. 19 See Marjorie Becker, Setting the Virgin on Fire: Lázaro Cárdenas, Michoacán Peasants and the Redemption of the Mexican Revolution (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1995); Adrian A. Bantjes, As If Jesus Walked the Earth: Cardenismo, Sonora, and the Mexican Revolution (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 1996); Jean Meyer, The Cristero Rebellion (London: Cambridge University Press, 1976). 20 Edward Wright-Rios, Revolutions in Mexican Catholicism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009). Paul Vanderood, Juan Soldado: Rapist, Murderer, Martyr, Saint (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004). 21 Adrian Bantjes, “Religion and the Mexican Revolution: Toward a New Historiography,” in Religious Culture in Modern Mexico Martin Austin Nesvig. (Lantham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Press, Inc., 2007), 223–54. For a look at a cooperative relationship between evangelicals and Catholics, see Peter S. Cahn, All Religions are Good in Tzintzuntzan: Evangelicals in Catholic Mexico (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003). 22 Kristina Boylan, “Gendering the Faith and Altering the Nation: Mexican Catholic Women’s Activism, 1917-1940” in Sex in Revolution, 216. In fact, the importance of women in positions of power in the church can be traced back much further chronologically as the work on the colonial and early national period of Silvia Arrom attests. Silvia Arrom, Containting the Poor, The Mexico City Poor House, 1774-1876 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001). 23 Soledad Loaeza, La restauración de la iglesia católica en la transición Mexicana (Mexico City: El Colegio de México, 2013), 57–58. 24 Loaeza, “Mexico in the Fifties,” 139. 25 Ibid., 146. 26 Rubenstein, Bad Language, 79–80. 27 Loaeza, “Mexico in the Fifties,” 148. 28 Ibid., 143–48.

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29 Oscar and Ruth Lewis Papers, Box 109, “Mexico, Tepoztlan, 1943–1944; Dreams, Tests.” 30 Jonathan Kandell, La Capital: The Biography of Mexico City (New York: Random House, 1988), 5. 31 Oscar Lewis, Five Families: Mexican Case Studies in the Culture of Poverty (New York: Basic Books, 1959), 67. 32 Oscar Lewis Papers, Box 128 “Interviews with Young Women in Panaderos (1960).” 33 Catholic doctrine indicated that from the age of seven, children were obligated to attend mass. 34 S. J. Roberto Guerra, Mi Primera Comunion, (Mexico: Buena Prensa, A.C., 1960). 35 Lewis, Five Families (1959), 109. 36 Arzobispado, Luis Maria Martínez, Folletos, devocionales, Noviembre, 1954, Jornadas Preparatorias al Congreso Mariano Catequisto-Vocacional del Arzobispado de Mexico. 37 Lewis, Five Families (1959), 107. 38 Arzobispado, Luis Ma Mtz, Caja 7 correspondencia de Luis Maria Martinez con párrocos, 1944, Diario del Sr. Cura Carlos Garcia 39 AC-Ibero, AC, Comision Central de la Infancia, diciembre, 1955, Proyecto del Reglamento de la Comision Central de la Infancia de la ACM 40 Rubenstein, Bad Language, 8. For the US case, see Bradford W. Wright, Comic Book Nation: The Transformation of Youth Culture in America (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003). 41 Legion de Decencia, “Otra Llamada a los Padres de Familia,” Apreciaciones [Mexico] 12/junio 1943. 42 UFCM, “De Nuestros Concursos,” Piloto Agosto 1944: 7. 43 AC-Ibero, AC, Comision Central de la Infancia, noviembre, 1958, ACM-Comision Central de la Infancia-Anexo C. #1 Campaña de Navidad. 44 Legion de Decencia, Arzobispado, Luis Ma Mtz, Exp letra K L / “Carpeta 80 y 81 Instituciones”, Letter to Archbishop 45 Legion de Decencia, “Otra llamada a los Padres de Familia.” 46 UFCM, “El Apostolado en el Hogar,” Piloto Julio 1944: 4. 47 As Loaeza states, “The religiously charged notion of femininity that prevailed in the fifties attributed to women moral superiority while it justified a basic inequality and gender-based discrimination.” “Mexico in the Fifties,” 156. 48 Pequeña, February 1942. 49 Legion de Decencia, “Letter to Archbishop.” 50 Sarah A. Buck, “The Meaning of the Women’s Vote in Mexico: 1917-1953,” in The Women’s Revolution in Mexico, 1910-1953, 73. 51 Pequeña, May 1959. 52 Pequeña, September 1960. UFCM, Piloto Octubre 1941: 3.

Notes 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64

65 66

67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77

209

Pequeña, February 1942. Pequeña, March 1943. Pequeña, March 1968. Pequeña, February 1946. Pequeña, July 1959. Monsiváis, Foreword to Sex in Revolution, 1. Pequeña May 1962. Linda B. Hall, Mary, Mother and Warrior: The Virgin in Spain and the Americas (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2004). Pequeña, March 1944. Pequeña, August 1960. Pequeña, May 1946. For a discussion of “social Catholicism” and the impact of global Catholicism in the middle of the twentieth century, see José Orozco, Receive Our Memories: The Letters of Luz Moreno, 1950-1952 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 27, 115, 135. On the interconnectedness of Catholicism and global politics, Orozco writes “Luz understood that the lives of all Mexicans were shaped by transnational phenomena and modern technologies that, whether they liked it or not, placed them in the ring with everyone else” (115). Pequeña, January 1941. Pequeña, February 1946. In an entreaty to boys to pray for peace, one author reminded boys: “Not all children in the world are happy like you. . . . The war, frightfully cruel, leaves many children orphans, and others, without home, hungry and sick.” UFCM, “Roguemos por la Paz,” Piloto Mayo 1943: 10. Vijay Prasha, The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World (New York: The New Press, 2007), pp. 6–7. Pequeña, August 1942. While there is no explicit reference, this article probably refers to Our Gang movies. Pequeña, March 1943. UFCM, Piloto Abril 1944: 6–8. Pequeña, June 1943. Pequeña, July 1947. UFCM, Piloto “Desde Wuhu” Agosto 1941: 8–9. Ibid. Arzobispado, “Diario del Sr. Cura Carlos Garcia,” 1944. While much of Diego Rivera’s public murals celebrated Mexico’s indigenous populations and vilified Spanish conquistadors, scholars have pointed out that programs aimed to uplift the indigenous populations often carried with them inherently racist ideologies. See, for example, Patience Schell “Nationalizing

210

78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86

87 88 89 90 91

92 93

94 95 96

97

Notes Children Through Schools and Hygiene: Porfirian and Revolutionary Mexico City,” The Americas, vol. 60, no. 4 (April 2004): 559–87. Pequeña, January 1944. Pequeña, January 1945. Pequeña, November 1964. Pequeña, March 1963. Pequeña, August 1963. Blancarte, Dictablanda, 78–82. Pequeña, July 1947. UFCM, Piloto Febrero 1942. Pequeña, May 1959. See Sandra Aguilar-Rodríguez, “Cooking Technologies and Electrical Appliances in 1940s and 1950s Mexico” in Technology and Culture in Twentieth-Century Mexico, edited by Araceli Tinajero and J. Brain Freeman (Tuscabosa AL: University of Albama Press, 2013), 43–54. Pequeña, October 1968. UFCM, Piloto Marzo 1941: 4. Pequeña, October 1945. Pequeña, October 1962. Pequeña, September 1964. It seems that this comment reflects an acknowledgment of mestizaje while expunging the historical presence of African descendant populations in Mexico. Blancarte, Dictablanda, 82–86, For examples of analyses of national identity within a transnational or global context, see Eric Zolov “Showcasing the ‘Land of Tomorrow’: Mexico and the 1968 Olympics,” The Americas, vol. 61, no. 2 (October 2004): 159–88; Joanne Hershfield, Imagining la Chica Moderna: Women, Nation, and Visual Culture in Mexico, 19171936, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008); and The Modern Girl Around the World Research Group, Alys Eve Weinbaum, Lynn M. Thomas, Priti Ramamurthy, Uta G. Poiger, and Madeleine Yue Dong, eds., The Modern Girl Around the World: Consumption, Modernity, and Globalization (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008). Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Friction: An Enthography of Global Connection (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 1–10. James Ferguson, Out of the Shadows: Africa in the Neoliberal Order (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 16–20. Gilbert Joseph, Anne Rubenstein, and Eric Zolov, eds. Fragments of a Golden Age: The Politics of Culture in Mexico Since 1940 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001), 10. Laura Briggs, Gladys McCormick, and J. T. Way, “Transnationalism: A Category of Analysis,” American Quarterly, vol. 60, no. 3 (September 2008): 625–48. See also,

Notes

211

C. A. Bayly, Sven Beckert, Matthew Connelly, Isabel Hofmeyr, Wendy Kozol, and Patricia Seed, “AHR Conversation on Transnational History,” American Historical Review, vol. 111, no. 5 (December 2006): 1441–64. Despite legitimate criticism of the possible abuse of the term transnationalism, its usefulness outweighs its limitations. In tracing the history of the term transnationalism, Laura Briggs, Gladys McCormick, and J.T. Way demonstrate how it has been employed to both buoy and criticize neoliberal economic policies, particularly in the global south. Its strengths, they argue, outweigh its connection to transnational global capital and its association with cultural imperialism. I find Briggs’s contention that the family is an inherently transnational institution to be particularly useful to this discussion. If the family is transnational in nature, then it is equally plausible that the concept of girlhood (and childhood, for that matter) is likewise affected by and constructed within this space of transnationality. 98 Gregory D. Black, The Catholic Crusade Against the Movies, 1940-1975 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).

Chapter 5 1 Instituto Nacional de Estadística y Geografía México, Estadísticas históricas de México 2009 (Mexico: Instituto Nacional de Estadística y Geografía México, 2010), Cuadro 17.2 (3a. parte). Accesssed December 10, 2014, http://www.inegi.org.mx/ prod_serv/contenidos/espanol/bvinegi/productos/integracion/pais/historicas10/ EHM2009.pdf. 2 Jueves de Excélsior, October 18, 1951. 3 Anne Rubenstein, “Mass Media and Popular Culture in the Postrevolutionary Era,” in The Oxford History of Mexico, edited by Michael C. Meyer and William Beezley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 640. 4 Renata Keller, Mexico’s Cold War: Cuba, The United States, and the Legacy of the Mexican Revolution (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 22. Other publications include La Prensa, which is described as “the government’s favorite vent for its propaganda, fears, threats, and wrath” and the semi-independent Siempre! 5 Soledad Loaeza, Clases Medidas y Política en México: la querella escolar, 1959-1963 (Mexico City: El Colegio de México, 1988), 17. 6 Stephen R. Niblo, Mexico in the 1940s: Modernity, Politics, and Corruption (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, Inc., 1999), 347–49. According to Niblo, the daily paper occasionally featured articles by G. F. Eliot and Walter Lippman. 7 John Mraz, Nacho López: Mexican Photographer (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 1.

212

Notes

8 Carlos Monsiváis, Aires de familia: cultura y sociedad en América Latina (Barcelona: Anagrama, 2000); Gilbert M. Joseph, Anne Rubenstein, and Eric Zolov, eds., Fragments of a Golden Age: The Politics of Culture in Mexico Since 1940 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001); Mary Kay Vaughan, Portrait of a Young Painter: Pepe Zúñiga and Mexico City’s Rebel Generation (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015); Elena Jackson Albarrán, Seen and Heard in Mexico: Children and Revolutionary Cultural Nationalism (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2014). 9 García, Díaz, and López are certainly not the only important photographers in Mexico at this time. Of great significance is the collective of photographers known as the Hermanos Mayo, five men who worked together in their adopted country of Mexico after fleeing the Spanish Civil War. See Mraz, Looking for Mexico: Modern Visual Culture and National Identity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009), 176–84. 10 Jacob A. Riis, How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York (New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1971), v–vii. Riis called the tenements of New York “the child of our own wrong,” 2. Katherine S. Bullard, Civilizing the Child: Discourses of Race, Nation, and Child Welfare in America (Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books, 2014), 48, 51. 11 Elizabeth Partridge, ed., Dorothea Lange: A Visual Life (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1994). Lange’s photograph Migrant Mother, Nipomo, California (1936) is perhaps the most widely circulated image from the Great Depression. While Lange’s career spanned several decades, she is best remembered for her work under the Farm Security Administration. 12 Gisele Freund, Photography and Society (Boston: D.R. Godine, 1980), 4–5. 13 Wendy Kozol, Life’s America: Family and Nation in Postwar Photojournalism (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994), vii–viii, 181. Kozol concludes that the narrative ideal of domesticity “presented a vision of private life that met the needs and served the interests of dominant political and economic sectors” 184; Paula S. Fass, “Making and Remaking an Event: The Leopold and Loeb Case in American Culture,” in Children of a New World: Society, Culture, and Globalization (New York: New York University Press, 2007), 106–40. 14 Gutierre Aceves, “Imagenes de la inocencia eternal,” in Artes de México: el arte ritual de la muerte niña (México, DF: Artes de México, 1998), 28–32. 15 Alberto Ruy Sánchez Lacy, “Resurrection in Art” (translated by Kurt Hollander), in Artes de México: el arte ritual de la muerte niña (México, DF: Artes de México, 1998), 82. “‘Child-death’ is an expression that does not refer directly to the death of children, but rather to a Mexican cultural phenomenon, the ritual in which recently deceased children are no longer considered children but rather angelitos (cherubs, or little angels), and such their death is celebrated rather than mourned.”

Notes

213

16 Alberto del Castillo Troncoso, “La invención de un concepto moderno de niñez en México en el cambio del siglo XIX al XX,” in María Eugenia Sánchez Calleja and Delia Salazar Anaya, eds., Los Niños: su imagen en la historia (Mexico: Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, 2006), 110–15. 17 Mraz, Nacho López. Mraz cites several photoessays of López that covered street children. See pages 88–93, 99–101, 150–53. 18 Mauricio Tenorio-Trillo, I Speak of the City: Mexico City at the Turn of the Twentieth Century (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2012), 168; 182–87. 19 Jane Livingston, M. Alvarez Bravo (Washington, D.C.: The Corcoran Gallery of Art, 1978), xi–xii. 20 Livingston, M. Alvarez Bravo, xxi, xxxiii. 21 Héctor García: México sin retoque. Presentación de Elena Poniatowska (México: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México Coordinación de Difusión Cultural Dirección de Literatura, 1987), 88. Niño entre el vientre de concreto; Dionicio Morales, Héctor García: Fotógrafo de la calle (México: Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes, 2000), 39. 22 Deborah Cohen, Braceros: Migrant Citizens and Transnational Subjects in Postwar United States and Mexico (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2013). The Bracero Program (1943–64) was an arrangement between the US and Mexican governments to send documented migrant workers to the United States to fill the demand for labor, particularly in agricultural jobs. 23 Mraz, Looking for Mexico, 185–87, 170. 24 Video interview with Héctor García, unspecified date 2001, Accessed January 18, 2014, http://www.zonezero.com/exposiciones/fotografos/hgarcia/video6eng.html. 25 Video interview with Héctor García. 26 Héctor García: México sin retoque, 90–92. 27 Mraz, Looking for Mexico, 173–76; Mraz, Nacho López, 115. 28 DDG 77/1 “Conciertos infantiles, 1940.” 29 DDG 85/25 “Niños de las escuelas visitan la exposición de la radio, July 13, 1944.” See Chapter 3, Figure 3.1. 30 DDG 87/2 “Escuelas y niños, 1938-1946.” 31 López lecture at the Museo de Arte Moderno in 1976, cited in Mraz, Nacho López, 24. 32 Mraz, Looking for Mexico, 171, Mraz, Nacho López, 9–10. 33 Mraz, Nacho López, 12–13. 34 Interview with López by Luis Suárez, cited in Mraz, Nacho López, 88. 35 Cited in Mraz, Nacho López, 91, 218 n53 36 Mraz, Nacho López, 88–90. 37 Cited in Mraz, Nacho López, 147–49; “El drama de los niños desvalidos,” Luis Suárez, photos Nacho López, Mañana, January 7, 1956, 19–23.

214

Notes

38 See Fondo Enrique Díaz, Archivo General de la Nación, México (AGN) 87/2 “Niños” (1946). 39 “Seis Años Cumple,” Excélsior January 4, 1963, B-9. 40 See Fondo Enrique Díaz, Archivo General de la Nación, México (AGN) 87/2 “Niños” (1946). 41 “Su Primer Comunión,” Excélsior January 3, 1963, B-1. 42 Oscar and Ruth Lewis Papers, 1944–76, The University of Illinois Archives at Urbana-Champaign, Box 128. 43 Nichole Sanders, Gender and Welfare in Mexico: The Consolidation of a Postrevolutionary State (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2011), 116. 44 Jocelyn Olcott, Revolutionary Women in Postrevolutionary Mexico (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), 236–37. 45 See front cover of Jueves de Excélsior, December 22, 1955. Another example can be found on the front cover from Jueves de Excélsior, December 2, 1948, titled “Contrasts of Winter,” representing the same idea of children going without basic material goods in contrast to the extravagant wealth of an adult passerby. 46 “Repartiendo atole” Jueves de Excélsior, February 1, 1940. 47 Anne Rubenstein, Bad Language, Naked Ladies and Other Threats to the Nation: A Political History of Comic Books in Mexico (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998), 78–87. 48 Ignacio Vado, “Soldados Contra la Inmoralidad” Jueves de Excélsior, January 10, 1952, 9. 49 Jueves de Excélsior, May 18, 1947. 50 “La Crisis de Nuestro Tiempo” Jueves de Excélsior, October 23, 1958, 2. 51 Susana Sosenski, “Santa Claus contra los Reyes Magos: influencias transnacionales en el consumo infantil en México,” Cuicuilco no. 60 (May to August, 2014), 262. Posadas refers to the nine days of religious observation leading up to Christmas when they find shelter. 52 “Carta a los Reyes Magos,” Mañana, January 3, 1956, no. 645, front cover; Sosenski also reproduces several cartoons in her article on Santa Claus. 53 Susana Sosenski, “Santa Claus contra los Reyes Magos,” 263–68. 54 Advertisement for Centro Commercial Blanco, Excélsior, January 4, 1963, A-16. 55 Advertisement for Bonos del Ahorro Nacional, Excélsior, January 4, 1963, A-14. 56 Advertisement for El Puerto de Liverpool, Excélsior, January 4, 1963, A-17. 57 Alejandro Sandoval A., “Rebeca Iturbide dice: Salvemos la Niñez” Jueves de Excélsior, May 27, 1954, 17. 58 Jueves de Excélsior, August 14, 1952. 59 “Crece la Delincuencia Infantil,” Jueves de Excélsior, January 13, 1955, 5. 60 Elena Azaola, La Institución Correcional en México: Una Mirada Extraviada (México, DF: siglo veintiuno editores, 1990), 78–82.

Notes

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61 Cited in Mraz, Looking for Mexico, 167. 62 “Salvemos a los Niños-esclavos,” Presente, January 6, 1949, cited in Mraz, Looking for Mexico, 167–68. 63 Mraz, Nacho López, 84. 64 “Pobres Chiquillos desamparados!” Jueves de Excélsior, October 10, 1946, 16–17. 65 In addition to written articles in print media, photographic evidence from photojournalists depicts children working in various occupations. The Hermanos Mayo Collection at the Archivo General de la Nación contains numerous examples. For an image of a Boy Working At A Gas Station, see HMCR 21.820, “Niños Trabajando en Gasolineras” (1966). See Figure 1.1 in Chapter 1. 66 DDG, “Niños” 87/2. 67 Jueves de Excélsior, 6 febrero 1941, no. 971; Jueves de Excélsior, n.d.; Another image depicts a stout indigenous woman labeled Minister of Education pouring atole (=article 3) into a bowl that is held by a young boy marked as “the people” (el pueblo). The caption reads: “With virile resolution the schoolboy exclaimed: Listen, Doña Education: this atole won’t do anymore!” 68 Jueves de Excélsior, March 24, 1949, front cover. 69 Cartoon by Freyre, Excélsior, January 5, 1963, A-6. 70 “Regalos a Hijos de Cubanos Asilados Aquí,” Excélsior, January 7, 1963, A-5. 71 Jueves de Excélsior, June 26, 1958, 22–23. 72 Ibid. 73 Jueves de Excélsior, September 12, 1957, 27. See Figure 1.2 in Chapter 1. 74 Jueves de Excélsior, September 4, 1941. 75 Jueves de Excélsior, September 11, 1941. 76 Rachel Kram Villarreal, “Gladiolas for the Children of Sánchez: Ernesto P. Uruchurtu’s Mexico City, 1950-1968” (PhD diss., University of Arizona, 2008), 180. 77 “Margaret Mead on The Children of Sánchez,” in Oscar Lewis, The Children of Sánchez: Autobiography of a Mexican Family (New York: Vintage Books, 2011), xiii. 78 Kram, “Gladiolas for the Children of Sánchez,” 183. 79 Ibid., 182. Kram cites original correspondence between Lewis and Dr. Vera Rubin from November 12, 1965, in which Lewis summarized the five charges against him and the book. See OLP, Box 59. Kram points out that, ironically, the FBI monitored Lewis for 27 years, beginning in 1943 after the anthropologist had crossed the border with information on a Communist Party meeting. 80 Lewis, The Children of Sánchez, xix. The Fondo de Cultura Económica eventually reacquired the Spanish-language rights. 81 Lewis, The Children of Sánchez, 24. 82 Ibid., 144 83 Ibid., 146. 84 Kram, “Gladiolas for the Children of Sánchez,” 183.

216

Notes

85 Cited in Rigdon, xv, letter from Luis Buñuel to Oscar Lewis dated February 6, 1966 in OLP, personal correspondence. 86 Letter from Castro to Lewis, March 1968, cited in the foreword by Susan Rigdon, Oscar Lewis, The Children of Sánchez, xv. 87 “Como Logran Mejores Fotos de sus Niños,” Excélsior, April 16, 1965, 3-B.

Conclusion 1 Emilio Uribe Romo, “Protección a la Mujer y al niño: Transcendental Promoción de Reforma Legislative” El Nacional December 7, 1964. 2 Robert M. Jordan, “Flowers and iron fists: Ernesto P. Uruchurtu and the contested modernization of Mexico City, 1952-1966” (PhD diss., University of Nebraska, 2013), 77. 3 Maria Luisa Rodriguez Sala “Instituciones de Protección a la Infancia en el Distrito Federal” (Masters Thesis, Political and Social Science, Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico, 1957), 34. 4 Nichole Sanders, Gender and Welfare in Mexico, 4. 5 Luis Lara Pardo, “Protección a la Infancia” November 8, 1949 Excélsior. 6 Monsiváis, “And Television Appeared” 117. Monsiváis cites two sources relating to this quote, nevertheless he concedes that “it is unclear if the source is verbatim or it it just has been used and misquoted by Mexican intellectuals.” 7 Prostitutes in Oaxaca City reinvented themselves and their economic value through photographic registries, modern girls in the capital city used fashion and make-up to demonstrate their participation in modernity, and young people enjoyed relajo (fun) and launched a countercultural movement by about the mid-twentieth century. See, for example, Mark Overmyer-Velasquez, Visions of the Emerald City; Joanne Hershfield, Imaging la Chica Moderna; Ageeth Sluis, Deco Body; Jaime Pensado, Rebel Mexico, Eric Zolov, Refried Elvis. With the exception of Pensado, most of these authors portray modernity, or at the least the individual’s ability to negotiate it, in a positive light. José Orozco’s Receive our Memories is a notable exception, though his work deals with a small town in Jalisco.

Bibliography Archival sources Archivo Histórico de la Secretaría de Educación Pública (SEP) Dirección General de Educación Preescolar Dirección General de Educación Primaria del Distrito Federal (including Escuelas Particulares) Archivo General de la Nación (AGN) Fondos Presidenciales Fototeca - Colección Hermanos Mayo Colección Díaz, Delgado, y García Archivo Histórico de la Secretaría de Salubridad y Asistencia Archivo Histórico del Arzobispado Fondo Luis Maria Martínez Archivo Histórico de la Acción Católica-Universidad Iberoamericana (AC) Unidad Femenina Católica Mexicana (UFMC) Comisión Central de la Infancia Instituto Nacional de Antropologia y Historia (INAH) Testimonios Familiares Oscar and Ruth Lewis Papers, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (OLP) José Revueltas Papers, University of Texas at Austin Biblioteca Miguel Lerdo de Tejada

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Index

“Absolute Security For The Children” 169 Acapulco 34, 40, 98 Acción Católica Mexicana (ACM) (Mexican Catholic Action) 19, 102, 122–5, 127–9 centralization of children’s activities by 129 Acción Femenina (Women’s Action) 130 Acevedo Millán, Leticia 1, 28 Acevedo-Muñoz, Ernesto 109 Aceves, Gutierre 150 Acosta Becerra, Manuel 116 African missions 141 agency, of children 10, 15, 16, 25, 151, 172 Alameda Park 32, 39 Alberto Lanz school 71 Alegre, Robert 5, 32 Alemán, Miguel 5, 26, 27, 50, 74, 85, 113, 123, 154, 196n. 97 Alonso, Enrique 114 Álvarez Bravo, Lola 151, 165 Álvarez Bravo, Manuel 151–3, 155–6 Alvaro Obregón (delegation) 27, 28, 51 “Amelia B. de Casas Alemán” 67 Anderson, Benedict 199n. 25 Ángel Mendoza, Miguel 153 anti-communism 8, 120, 123–6, 140–4, 166, 178 see also communism Apreciaciones 102, 126 Argentina 63, 98 Argüelles, Carlos 156 Aries, Philippe 183n. 39 Arrom, Silvia 207n. 22 Asociación Católica de la Juventud Mexicana (ACJM) (Catholic Association of Young Mexican Men) 129 Asociación de Niños de Acción Católica (ANAC) (Association of Boys of Catholic Action) 129

Azcapotzalco 27 Ávila Camacho, Manuel 5, 26, 54, 58, 121, 123, 124 Azcárraga Milmo, Emilio 180 Azcárraga Vidaurreta, Emilio 87, 113 Aztec Stadium 30 Bachelor, Steven J 190n. 85 Bambi (film) 98 Banco de México 70 Bantjes, Adrian 125, 207n. 21 Bassols, Narciso 56, 123, 192n. 19 Batista, Fulgencio 5 Battles in the Desert (Pacheco) 88, 98 Bayly, C. A. 210n. 97 Beckert, Sven 210n. 97 Beezley, William 199n. 25 Before Family Planning (García) 154 Bertha Dominguez school 74 Between Progress and Development (García) 152 Between the Wheels of Progress (García) 154 blackness, construction of 137 Blum, Ann 10, 36 Boylan, Kristina 125 Boy urinating (Álvarez) 152 Bozo 115 bracero program 213n. 22 Brazil 8, 193n. 46 Briggs, Laura 210n. 97 Brígida Alfaro school 66 Bullard, Katherine 149, 212n. 10 Buñuel, Luis 18, 85, 107–8, 110, 112, 153, 163, 171, 188n. 52, 203n. 98, 204n. 109 Burgess, Ernest W. 23, 185n. 1 Bursley, Herbert S. 37, 38, 188n. 67 Burton-Carvajal, Julianne 201n. 58 Butler, Hugo 85, 112 Buxton, Dorothy 9

236

Index

Cahn, Peter S. 207n. 21 Calles, Plutarco Elías 52 Calvert, Karin 183n. 39 Camacho, Olga 7, 182n. 19 Camp, Roderic Ai 192n. 19 Canada 193n. 46 capitalinos movement 34 Cárdenas, Lázaro 4, 30, 51, 52, 56, 58, 122, 123, 186n. 13 Carolease Grier, Beverly 184n. 48 Cartwright, Lisa 96, 201n. 54 Casa Amiga de la Obrera (Friend of the Working Woman House) 10 Casas Alemán, Fernando 71 Castañeda, Luis 25, 198n. 1 Castillo Morales, Juan 7, 182n. 19 Castro, Fidel 4, 171 catechism classes 127–8 Catholicism 3, 6, 15, 17, 19, 35, 49, 52, 54, 56, 58, 62, 69, 75, 78, 83, 89, 90, 102, 105, 112, 151, 159, 161–3, 178–9, 192n. 19, 202n. 81, 206n. 7, 207n. 21, 208n. 33, 209n. 64 and global politics and gender in Mexican national identity 119–144 Catholic lay organizations 19 see also ACJM; ACM; ANAC; UFCM Celuloide 153 Ceniceros Andonegui, José A. 42, 76–7, 162, 168 Cerecedo Cortina, Natalio 72 Cervantes, Elizabeth Curtiss 37 Chapultepec Park 39, 168, 176 Chasteen, John Charles 198n. 4 Chatterjee, Choi 198n. 3 Chávez, Carlos 113, 200n. 35 child-death, ritual of 150, 212n. 15 childhood documentation, through print media and photography 145–9 child poverty and idealized childhood and 157–71 Mexican photographers and 151–7 power of representation in historical perspective 149–51 children’s health and well-being 9–14 child-to-child world 39 Chile 12, 63 China 200n. 29, 32 Christian charity, doctrine of 140

church and state, relationship between 5–6 Cinelandia 102 Cinemundial 102 Cine Mundial 153 citizenship, social 144 Clemente Orozco, José 84 Cobo, Roberto 110 collective presence, of children 2, 23, 28, 48, 52, 61, 62 Colonia Churubusco Country Club 168 Comisión Central de la Infancia (Central Commission on Childhood) 129 Comisión Nacional de los Libros de Texto Gratuitos (National Commission of Free Textbooks) 76 Comite Coordinador de la Campaña Pro Construcción de Escuelas (The Coordinating Committee for the Campaign for School Construction) 70–71 Comité Federal Pro Construcción de Escuelas (Federal Committee for School Construction) 70 communism 8, 112, 123 specter of 140, 166, 171 see also anti-communism Conesa, Maria 114 Connelly, Matthew 210n. 97 consumerism 12, 13, 15, 20, 33, 95, 106, 112, 162, 163 Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs (CIAA) (US) 99–100 Corpus Christi 139 Cosío Villegas, Daniel 8, 109 counterculture youth movement 7, 11 Coyoacán 27, 28, 35 Cri-Crí, el Grillito Cantor (Gabilondo Soler, Francisco) 88 Cri-Crí and childhood culture creation 87–95, 199n. 26, 200n. 29 Cristero Rebellion 122 Cristeros (Soldiers of Christ) 125 Cristina F. De Merino school 73 Cross, Gary 183n. 39 Cuajimalpa 27 Cuba 99, 193n. 46 Cuban revolution 5, 166–7

Index Cuentos Musicales del Grillito Cantor (Gabilondo Soler, Francisco) 88 cultural nationalism 10, 55, 84–5 cultural protectionism 202n. 82 “culture of poverty” 21, 169 Dancigers, Óscar 110, 112 danger and modernity, in children’s lives 42–6 Davin, Anna 183n. 39 Davis, Diane 32 “deco body” 24 de la Mora, Sergio 103, 122 del Castillo Troncoso, Alberto 150 de Llano, Rodrigo 147 del Razo, Alberto 156 del Río, Eduardo 171 del Valle, Sofia 122 democratic childhood 168 Departamento de Beneficencia Pública (Department of Public Welfare) 161 Desachy-Godoy, Elvira 198n.n 11–12, 200n. 32 Dia de la Raza (Day of the Race) 141, 142 Día del Arbol school 72 Díaz, Enrique 20, 148, 154, 158, 211n. 9 Díaz, Porfirio 10, 26, 58 Díaz, Señora 10 Díaz Ordaz, Gustavo 33 Dirección Federal de Seguridad 5 Dirección General de Educación Preescolar (General Directorate of Preschool Education) 59 Disney, Walt 18, 85, 93–4, 199n. 26 in Mexico 95–103 Disney archives 201n. 57 domesticity 3–5, 7, 10, 12, 36, 52, 59, 60, 84, 85, 98, 106, 108, 119, 123, 124, 126, 131–3, 150, 154, 165, 178, 197n117, 212n. 13 Domingo, Plácido 89 Donald Duck Prize Driver 101 Dorfman, Ariel 201nn. 54, 58 Driscoll, Bobby 110 Editorial Novaro 101 education, history of background of 55–8

237

kindergarteners as political subjects and 58–67 parents–SEP conflict, over textbooks 75–9 school scarcity in Federal District and 68–75 SEP’s role in 49–55 education ministers (1921–70) 81 Eisenhower, Dwight 112 El caballito 195n. 86 El drama de los niños desvalidos (The drama of the destitute children) (López) 157 Eliot, G. F. 211n. 6 “El jicote aguamielero” (Gabilondo Soler) 90 El Nacional (newspaper) 147 El Pato Donald Automovilista 101 “El Pípila” 67 El Puerto de Liverpool 163 El Salvador 63 El Universal (newspaper) 112, 147 Emmanuel Arturo Acha Martínez, Jesús 89 En familia con Chabelo (At Home with Chabelo) 115 E. Pestalozzi school 66 Epstein, Jason 169 Esparza Lepe, Daniel 31 Estefanía Castañeda school 66 Excélsior (newspaper) 92, 114, 147, 153, 175 Fact, A Secret, A Danger!, A 123 Fass, Paula S. 150, 183n. 39, 212n. 13 Faz, César 111 Federal District 26–9, 52, 55, 58, 60–2, 66, 67, 68–75, 76, 79, 195nn. 82, 85 modernity symbols and discontent signs and 29–33 Ferguson, James 143 Férnandez, Vicente 89 Fieldston, Sara 12 Figueroa, Gabriel 110, 153 “Filósofos de la noticia (Philosophers of the news)” (López) 157 Fiol-Matta, Licia 191n. 5 Fitzgerald, Edward 112 Fitzpatrick, James A. 97 Flores Rivera, Salvador “Chava” 36

238

Index

Fondo de Cultura Económica 169, 170 Forbis, Virginia Lee 63 Foucault, Michel 15 France-Amerique school 72 Francisco I. Madero (delegation) 26 Franco, Jean 108 Fray Pedro de Gante school 66 Freund, Gisele 149 friction, metaphor of 143, 144 Gabilondo Soler, Francisco 18, 85, 87–95, 198nn. 11–12, 200nn. 31–2, 45, 48 Galindo, Alejandro 106, 107, 190n. 85, 198n. 4 Gamboa, Federico 7, 198n. 4 García, Carlos 128 García, Héctor 20, 42, 148, 152–4, 211n. 9 Garcia Sancho, Maria Figueroa de 92–3 General Directorate of Preschool Education 66 Germany 99 Gertrudis G. Sánchez colonia 145 Gillingham, Paul 182n. 26 girls childhood as period of innocence and 135 domesticity of 132–3 as good Christians 134–5 obligations to Mexico’s future 132 being thankful to parents 136 Girl watching birds (Álvarez) 152 Gitlin, Todd 187n. 44 Goldfarb, Brian 96, 201n. 54 González, Nicho 115 González Camarena, Guillermo 113, 115, 116, 180 González de Bustamante, Celeste 113 Gordillo, José 93 Guatemala 63 Gustavo A. Madero (delegation) 27, 28, 43, 73 Gutiérrez, Eduardo 36 Guzmán, Juan 151 happiness, child’s right to 62–3, 64–8 “Happiness Brigades” 62, 65 Harvey, David 47 Haskins, Harold 111 “Héctor Pérez Martínez” 67

Hellman, Judith Adler 45 Henrey, Bobby 110 Henson, Jim 89 Hermanos Mayo 20, 165, 203n. 98, 211–12n. 9, 214n. 65 Herminio, El Tío 115 Hershfield, Joanne 121, 206n. 1, 210n. 93, 216n. 7 Hipódromo de las Américas 71 historical context and historiography 4–9, 183n. 39 history, of Mexico City 26 Hofmeyr, Isabel 210n. 97 Honduras 8, 193n. 46 Hospicio de Niños (Children’s Hospice) 9 How the Other Half Lives (Riis) 149 Hoy 147 Huerta Luna, Enrique 71 Hulbert, Ann 183n. 39 human collectivity 57 immorality and child poverty, connection between 161 Infante, Pedro 89, 103–5, 203n. 84 Institute for the Improvement of the Child’s Situation in the Home 66 Instituto Mexicano de Seguridad Social (Mexican Institute of Social Security) 176 Instituto Politecnica Nacional (IPN) (Polytechnic Institute) 8 I Speak of the City (Tenorio-Trillo) 151 Iturbide, Rebeca 163 Ixtacalco 27, 70 Ixtapalapa 27, 28 Iztacalco 28 Jackson Albarrán, Elena 10, 55, 191n. 3 Japan 189n. 67 Jasso, Omar 115 Jebb, Eglantyne 9 Jiménez, Agustín 151 Johnson, Lyndon B. 112 Joseph, Gilbert 143, 190n. 85 Jueves de Excélsior (magazine) 57, 69, 70, 99, 145, 147, 149, 160, 161, 192n. 25, 214n. 45 juvenile delinquency 10 concerns about 163–4

Index Kandell, Jonathan 43 Keller, Renata 4 Kilian, Crawford 46 kindergarten-age children 53, 57 kindergarten movement 16–17 kindergartens (jardines de niños) 16–18, 50, 55, 58, 61, 63, 65–8, 82, 87, 92, 93, 197n. 126 Kozol, Wendy 150, 199n. 16, 210n. 97, 212n. 13 Kram Villarreal, Rachel 215n. 79 Labyrinth of Solitude (Paz) 109 La Magdalena Contreras 27 La Negrita Catacumbé (The Little Black Girl Catacumbé) 137 Lange, Dorothea 149, 212n. 11 La Prensa (newspaper) 1, 181n. 1, 211n. 4 Lardo Pardo, Luis 177 La vida y los amores de Pedro Infante (The Life and Loves of Pedro Infante) 104 Lazarfeld, Paul 100 Legion of Decency, The 125, 130, 132, 161 leisure and children’s communities 39–42 León, Nuevo 111 Lewis, Oscar 20, 101, 126, 148, 159, 169–72, 177, 184n. 50, 187n. 34, 188n. 50, 189n. 69, 215n. 79 Lewis, Stephen E. 69 Ley de Trabajo 72 Life magazine 126, 150 Lippman, Walter 211n. 6 Liverpool 115, 163 Loaeza, Soledad 6, 8, 124, 125, 208n. 47 Lomas de Chapultepec 33, 72 Lomas neighborhood 188n. 50 lo mexicano (the essence of being Mexican) 90 López, Nacho 20, 148, 150, 151, 154–7, 164, 211n. 9, 212n. 17 López, Xavier 115 López Bocanegra, Ignacio see López, Nacho López Mateos, Adolfo 5, 29, 41, 51, 54, 75, 76, 77, 85, 189n. 79 López Moctezuma, Juan 103 Loreto y Peña Pobre 71

239

Los gorrones (The Freeloaders) (Álvarez) 165 Los hijos de Sánchez (The Children of Sánchez) (Lewis) 20, 148, 169–71 Los olvidados (The Forgotten Ones) (film) 7, 18, 85, 103, 107, 109, 110, 112, 153, 155, 163 “Los otros niños” (The other children) (del Razo 156 Los pequeños gigantes (The Tiny Giants) (film) 19, 85, 103, 110, 113 los Reyes Magos (The Three Kings), phenomenon of 130, 162–4, 167 Low, Seth M. 189n. 71 Luis Andreu, José 138 Luis Guzmán, Martín 77 Lupe, Señorita 54 Luz Ramirez, Maria de la 72 McCarthy, Joseph 112 McCormick, Gladys 5, 210n. 97 Macías, Angel 111, 112 Madrid school 72 Mañana (magazine) 147, 154, 156, 157, 162 Manuel Cervantes Imaz school 66 Manuel M. Ponce school 66 Maria Martínez, Luis 69, 127 Marín, Lupe 109, 110 Martin del Campo, Rafael Pérez 1 Mathieu, Mirielle 89 Matiana M. de Aveleyra school 66 Mattelart, Armand 201n. 54 Mayer, Gerald 100 Mayer, Louis B. 97 Mead, Margaret 169 Mejía, Alfonso 109 Mexican Constitution Article 123 35 “Mexican Miracle” 9, 32, 47, 148, 153, 172, 179 Mexican Revolution 26 Mexico City Poor House 9 Mexico City see individual entries Mikoyan, Anastas I. 85 Milanich, Nara 12 Milpa Alta 27, 70 Mintz, Steven 184n. 39 Mi Primera Comunion (My First Communion) 127

240

Index

mobility 3, 16, 24–6, 40, 43, 48, 113, 178 labor and class stratification and 34–9 Modern America school 73 modern childhood 4, 11, 12, 14, 17, 20, 21, 36, 45, 96, 128, 146–7, 158, 168–9, 172, 176, 179 modernity 12–14, 106, 115, 216n. 7 and danger, in children’s lives 42–6 and nationalism and consumerism 95 potential dangers of 152, 154 and prostitute analogy 122 symbols, and discontent signs 29–33 Modotti, Tina 151 Monsiváis, Carlos 86, 89, 116–17, 199n. 26, 201n. 58, 216n. 6 Monterrey 111 Moore, Robert 185n. 1, 194n. 58 moral authority 67, 125, 133 Moreno, Genaro 115 Moreno, Julio 12, 187n. 46 Moreno, Mario 71 Morris, Jennifer 9 Morrison, Heidi 184n. 48 Mother of the Shoeshine Boy and the Shoeshine Boy, The (Álvarez) 152 Mraz, John 150, 154, 156, 212nn. 9, 17 Múgica, Francisco 123 national anthem 52, 53, 88, 97 National Anthropology Museum 29, 176 national identity, modernity, and politics 131–44 nationalism 10, 11, 18, 19, 33, 49, 53, 55, 61, 84, 85, 90, 95, 105, 112, 119, 124, 127, 139, 143, 178 Negro y Blanco (magazine) 99 Neterer, Elizabeth 63 New York City 28 Niño entre el vientre de concreto (Boy within a Womb of Concrete) (García) 152 “Niños de las escuelas visitan la exposición de la radio (School children visit the radio exposition)” (Díaz) 154 Niños Trabajando en Gasolineras (Boys Working in Gas Stations) 165 Nixon, Richard 112 Noble, Andrea 106 Noche de Reyes (Night of Kings) (López) 156

Nonalco-Tlatelolco complex 13 North American Newspaper Alliance 147 Nosotros los pobres (We the Poor) (film) 7, 18, 85, 103–5 Novedades (magazine) 147 Novo, Salvador 113, 153 Novo Report 115 Oaxaca City 216n. 7 Obra de Santa Infancia (Sacred Childhood Society) 138 O’Farrill, Rómulo 113 Ofreón theater 113 Orfila Reynal, Arnaldo 170 Organización Mundial de Educacion Preescolar (OMEP) (World Organization of Preschool Education) Organization of American States 5 Orozco, Gabriel 145, 152, 172 Orozco, José 209n. 64 Ortiz, Rosario 138 Overmyer-Velasquez, Mark 216n. 7 Pacheco, José Emilio 88, 98 Padilla, Ezequiel 97 Padilla, Tanalis 5 Pagliai, Bruno 71 Palacio del Hierro 163 pan-Americanism 97, 100 Pan Bimbo 13 Pani, Mario 13, 29 Paraíso infantil (A Child’s Paradise) 115 parental anxieties, about changing cultural mores 121–2 Park, Robert E. 23, 185n. 1 Parque de la Lama 62 Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) (Institutional Revolutionary Party) 4, 6, 33, 45–6, 54, 146, 148, 160, 171, 175, 180, 194n. 67 Partridge, Elizabeth 212n. 11 Paxman, Andrew 114 Paz, Octavio 109 Peacock, Margaret 12 Pensado, Jaime 5, 32, 47, 216n. 7 Pepe el toro (Pepe the Bull) 104

Index Pequeña magazine 19, 119–21, 124, 126, 128, 131 national identity, modernity, and politics in 131–44 Peralta, Olivia 34 Pérez, Encarnación 32 Peru 62 Piedra, José 99 Pilcher, Jeffrey M. 206n. 1 Piloto magazine 19, 128, 131, 133, 137, 139, 141, 202n. 81 Plan de Once Años (The Eleven-Year Plan) 76 plaza, in daily life 189n. 71 political indoctrination and education, relationship between 75 “Ponciano G. Padilla” 67 Poniatowska, Elena 47–8, 181n. 3 poor children and animals, comparison between 163 popular culture and entertainment (1934–63) 83–6 children and families as subjects on silver screen and 103–10 Cri-Crí and childhood culture creation and 87–95 heroes and ambassadors during Cold War and 111–17 Walt Disney in Mexico and 95–103 popular discourses, on girlhood 121 Porfiriato 10, 26, 55, 124, 150, 164, 185n. 11 posadas 214n. 51 Premo, Bianca 12 Productora e Importadora de Papel, S.A. (PIPSA) (Paper Producer and Importer, Inc.) 147 Protestantism 124 Public thirst (Álvarez) 152 quality of life, for children 167–8 Rabell, Cecilia 197n. 121 racialized lyrics 91–2 Rámirez Vázquez, Pedro 29 Reader’s Digest 126 reception, phenomenon of 205–6n. 1 revistas infantiles (children’s magazines) 129 Revueltas, José 34, 153

241

Ricardo Castro school 66 Ricardo y Linda 115 Rigdon, Susan 184n. 50 Riis, Jacob 149, 212n. 10 Rio Consulado 168 Rivera, Diego 84, 109, 110, 209n. 77 Robinson Crusoe (film) 112 Rockefeller, Nelson 96 Rodriguez, Ismael 105 Ross, Ellen 183n. 39 Rubenstein, Anne 102, 121, 143, 190n. 85, 202n. 82, 203n. 84, 206n. 4 Rubin, Vera 215n. 79 Ruiz Cortines, Adolfo 32, 78, 114, 167 Ruiz Cortines, María Dolores Izaguirre 114 Sáenz, Aarón 71 Said, Edward 139 Salazar, Othón 32 Saludos Amigos (Hello Friends) (film) 18, 97–8 Sanborns 163 Sánchez, Manuel 37, 54 Sánchez-Eppler, Karen 184n. 39 Sánchez González, Agustín 200n. 48 Sánchez Pontón, Luis 57, 165 Santa (Gamboa) 7 Santa Claus, phenomenon of 90, 130, 162, 163 Santa Cruz de las Salinas school 72 Save the Children 9 Schell, Patience A. 55, 124, 191n. 5, 192n. 15, 206n. 7, 209n. 77 scientific socialism 57 Scott, James 15 Sears Roebuck 33, 102, 115, 163 Secciones Preparatorias (Prepatory Sections) 129 Secretaría de Educación Pública (SEP) (Ministry of Public Education) 3, 16–18, 61–8, 72–80, 192nn. 13, 17–18, 193n. 34, 194n. 67, 195n. 82, 197n. 121, 200n. 40 conflict with parents, over textbooks 75–9 on history of children’s education 49–55 responding to Cri-Crí’s success 92

242

Index

Secretaría de la Asistencia Pública (SAP) (Ministry of Public Assistance) 58 Secretaría de Salubridad y Asistencia (Ministry of Health and Welfare) 159 Seed, Patricia 210n. 97 sex education, in public schools 122–3 sexuality 6–8, 98, 105, 106, 122, 135, 142, 170, 176, 197n. 117 absence of 109 of girls 7 Siempre! (magazine) 147, 153, 171, 211n. 4 Siete de Enero school 71 Silva Herzog, Jesús 8 Siqueiros, David 84, 109 slave labor 37, 164, 189n. 67 Sluis, Ageeth 13, 24, 216n. 7 Smith, Benjamin T. 182n. 26 social Catholicism 209n. 64 social dissolution law (1941) 5 social inequality 5, 8, 13, 90, 147, 148, 155, 171, 176, 180 socialization 11, 39, 50, 53, 59, 68, 80, 86, 89, 116, 120 Social Product (García) 154 Sociedad Mexicana de Geografía y Estadística (SMGE) (Mexican Society of Geography and Statistics) 169–70 Society of Mothers 70 “Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz” 67 Sosenski, Susana 36, 162, 163, 214n. 51 Spain 142 Stavans, Ilan 35 Suárez, Luis 157 Tacubaya 46, 70, 71 Tarahumara indigenous group 141 Teatro Fantástico (Fantastic Theater) 114, 163 “technologies of power” 15 television, advent of 113–17 Tello, Manuel 111 Tenorio-Trillo, Mauricio 24, 104, 151 Tepoztlán 126, 187n. 34 theaters, as mischievous behavior sites for children 40 Three Caballeros, The (The Three Gentlemen) (film) 18, 97–9

Tin Tan 89 Tlahuac 27 Tlalpam(n) 27, 164 Tlatelolco 35 Tlatelolco massacre 4, 8, 11, 47–8, 116, 148, 153, 173, 180 Torres Bodet, Jaime 29, 54, 75–8, 85 Torres Septién, Valentina 78 transnationality 9, 12, 17, 23, 33, 47, 48, 52, 54, 64, 79, 80, 91, 95, 96, 116, 120, 130, 138, 143, 144, 162, 209n. 64, 210n. 93, 210–11n. 97 Tribunal para Menores (Juvenile Court) 7, 10, 36, 198, 164 Tsing, Anna 143 Tuñón, Julia 1–6 Una familia de tantas (A family among many) (film) 7, 18, 85, 103, 106 “Una vez fuimos humanos (We were humans once)” (López) 157 Unidad Femenina Católica Mexicana (UFCM) Union of Mexican Catholic Women) 19, 128–30, 138, 141, 142 Union Nacional de Padres de Familia (UNPF) (National Union of Parents) 78, 123 Unión Nacional de Productores de Azúcar, S.A. 70 United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) 9 United States 11, 12, 27, 62, 85, 95–8, 112, 124, 147, 149 Universal Declaration of the Rights of Man 78 Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México 156 urban poverty 105, 148 Uruchurtu, Ernesto P. 29, 33, 39, 114, 167 Uruguay 193n. 46 Ustedes los ricos (You the Rich) 104 Vanderwood, Paul J. 125, 182n. 19 Vasconcelos, José 29, 51, 191n. 5 Vaughan, Mary Kay 86, 191n. 5, 192n. 17, 194n. 56, 195n. 87, 199n. 25, 206n. 11 vecindad 20, 38, 40, 45, 85, 104, 126, 127, 169, 170, 177, 185n. 50, 190n. 90

Index Vega Ávila, Eduardo de la Vidal, Gual 71

181n. 3

Watts, Steve 100 Way, J. T. 210n. 97 Weapons of the Weak (Scott) 15 Whitney, John Jay 99 Wizard of Oz, The (film) 103 World Day of the Missions 141 Wright, Bradford W. 208n. 40 Wright-Rios, Edward 125 Wyman, Lance 30

243

XEW radio station 87 Xochimilco 27, 41 Yáñez, Agustín 116 “Yo también he sido niño bueno (I too have been a good child)” (López) 156 Zacatecas 35 Zapata, Rosaura 54, 59, 64, 66–8, 93 Zelizer, Viviana 11 Zolov, Eric 11, 143, 190n. 85, 210n. 93, 216n. 7