USA

In my dissertation I show how the hegemonic power of the post revolutionary state in Mexico utilized the figure of legendary Pancho Villa in literature and cinematography to create a national myth that represents a consensus in a mestizo patriarchal Christian society. I examine how the use and abuse of the image of Villa in post - revolutionary literary works and films caused this figure to acquire mythical characteristics and dimensions, and to become a key element in the construction of national identity and masculinity in Mexico. I argue that the figure of Villa is a confirmation of a traditional rather than a revolutionary proposal in gender terms. Equally important, I demonstrate how the literature and film of the Mexican revolution constitute instrumental devices for the formation of masculinity and the strengthening of a homosocial culture in the Mexico’s vi post - revolutionary stage, a process that would later determine the structure of the Mexican state.

USA

This dissertation explores the experience of indigenous activists as they attempt to use the Internet and Internet-enabled alliances with global civil society to negotiate their conflicts with state and local governments in the southern state of Oaxaca, Mexico. Drawing on communication and globalizations studies,as well as anthropological literature, this case study sheds light on indigenous conceptualizations of and experience with identity politics, integration into what have been described as “new social movements,”and the shifting state powers that have come with the acceleration of economic and political globalization.

USA

The present dissertation is concerned with a set of art and literary practices from the Latin American avant - garde conversant with the technologies, the techniques of display, and the social and symbolic dynamics that vector into and out of advertising. Drawing on a set of paradigmatic avant - garde works from Mexico and Brazil, it posits sense perception and sensory experience as contested grounds within which viewing and reading postures can be steered towards critical consciousness even as they are subjected to coercion and control. These works, by Mexican muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros, Brazilian concrete poets Augusto de Campos, Haroldo de Campos, and Décio Pignatari (collectively known as the Noigandres poets), and Mexican poet and writer Octavio Paz, function and signify under the two - pronged conviction that mass media (film, photography, newspapers, radio, television) and mass culture (mostly advertising and forms of advertising: billboards, logos, slogans, etc.) reconfigure conditions of reading and spectatorship in modern urban environments, and insist that it is the task of the writer and artist to intervene the dynamics under which this reconfiguration takes place.

USA

This dissertation explores the interplay of early radio technology and twentieth century state power in Mexico. It argues that wireless technology was crucial to government attempts at incorporating frontiers, foreign policy, the outcome of the Mexican Revolution, and the formation of the single party state that ruled from 1929 to 2000. Examining radio development in Mexico is especially useful because political leaders first incorporated the technology immediately preceding a fractious revolution turned civil war. The subsequent dissolution and reconsolidation of the political order shows how wireless technology affected new attempts at state building during the first half of the twentieth century. Initially used as a tool of centralization, trade, and military domination, the Revolution proved that in the hands of insurrectionists and foreigners, radio could also be a tool of de centralization. The Revolution intensified the tendency of leaders to focus on the medium’s military potential as warring factions incorporated wireless devices to advance their causes.

USA

Powerful semiotic signs like the Great Wall of China and the Berlin Wall served significant communicative functions. The modern culture of nation state wall building continues despite the fact that the security fences are obsolete. Wall advocates argue that security fences deter undocumented immigrants from trying to cross the border illegally. The walls also function to stop terrorism or other criminal threats. This paper applies semiotic and hermeneutic methods to examine and compare the communication functions of South African apartheid with the U.S. Mexico border wall. Structuration Theory (ST),and issociation and Dimensional Accrual (DAD) are applied to discuss the consequences to communication from such barriers.

USA

The rapid increase in the use of social media during the “war on drugs” in Mexico, especially in the first decades of the 21st century, has stimulated a growing research agenda in academia. To date, this scholarship has focused primarily on investigating the opportunities social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube offer to civilians as organizing mechanisms, to fill the informational vacuum left by the tightly self-censured mainstream media outlets, and as a tool for survival. Yet, in Mexico, the use of these platforms has taken a darker, more sinister turn. Research exploring the use of social media platforms has largely ignored the fact that these communication outlets also provide major opportunities for criminal organizations to engage in public relations strategies, ease their recruitment tactics, send threatening messages to government authorities, civilians, and to warn off potential rivals.

Australia

#YoSoy132 erupted unexpectedly during Mexico’s 2012 presidential elections in the face of the imminent return of the ex- hegemonic Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) to power. Faced with this threat to Mexico’s weakly consolidated democracy and with the candidate’s neoliberal reforms package, this volatile student movement temporarily united sections of a deeply divided student body. Given the entrenched class antagonisms that divide public and private universities in Mexico, surprisingly little critical attention has been paid to the forging of these political solidarities. Instead the literature has emphasised the aesthetic self-consciousness and innovative use of new communication technologies as mechanisms for contesting power and alternatives for participation. Such accounts sideline socio economic and historical factors in favour of cultural and communicative analyses of the movement’s politics, overlooking factors that mediate access and influence. This thesis grounds the ongoing significance of #YoSoy132 within a history of democratising struggles in Mexico. Drawing on 21 semi-structured interviews, I explore participant reflections two years on, at the movement’s epicentre: Mexico City. Investigating the play of competing democratic imaginaries within the movement, I argue that a new political style enabled #YoSoy132 to temporarily transcend class-based divisions and to generate an inclusive and voluntaristic association, which was both energising and self-limiting.

Gran Bretaña

The process of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) diffusion today is one of the major determinants of a country’s economic growth and development. A greater understanding of the factors driving this is therefore critical in developing countries. Whilst the literature presents a range of potential factors that explain the difference in diffusion rates across countries, it is the relative level of economic development in one country compared with another that is cited most frequently. This would suggest that the diffusion of the telegraph and the telephone in Argentina should have been decidedly faster than in Mexico, given the former’s significant inherent economic advantage throughout the period. This was not found to be the case. Instead, Argentina underperformed while Mexico outperformed, giving rise to an interesting historical episode which I dub the ‘Double Paradox’.

Gran Bretaña

The use of the internet and related information and communication technologies (ICT) in public administration (known as ‘e-government’) has gained notable space within processes of public sector reform. Arguably, ICT provide an attractive strategy to reorganize internal government tasks, routines and processes, and to make them more efficient, responsive as well as accountable to citizens. Yet, the linkages between public values and e-government programmes remain understudied or taken for granted. My research focuses on this particular aspect of public sector reforms and organising. It engages with the debates towards modernisation of central government services while contributing to discussions of the relation between technologically induced programmes and public values over time. Using critical discourse analysis, I trace the discourses on public values and technology within a longitudinal case of a technology-enabled platform to facilitate foreign trade regulations in Mexico—the Mexican Single Window for Foreign Trade. In my empirical analysis, I examine a combination of key government texts and extensive data from fieldwork to address two related questions: what public values are presented, enacted or marginalized during the trajectory of the case, and how these values are enacted and operationalised into technology over time.

Gran Bretaña

Since the eighties, the political face of Mexico has been changing gradually. There has been a shift from the hegemony of the official Institutional Revolutionary Party to a more egalitarian distribution of power, in which the other two main parties (Natio nal Action Party and Democratic Revolution Party) have gained salience at national, state and local levels (Camp 1999, Eisenstadt 2003, Hiskey 2003, Hiskey and Bowler 2005, Elizondo 2006 and Escalante 2006). Nonetheless, it is still not clear the impact of this reconfiguration on news organizations: in their studies on Mexican journalism, Lawson (2002) and Hughes (2003 and 2006) perceived a general trend towards modernization. By taking certain news outlets located in the most important cities (mainly in Mexico City, Guadalajara and Monterrey), they considered that, indeed, Mexican media are undergoing progressive change. However, looking at other places like Morelia -makes evident that the situation in the rest of the country is different. Therefore, this research will argue that, despite the arrival of diverse political parties to the national, state and local administrations, the relationship between reporters and high rank political authorities remains the same. That is, the exchange of favours – economic most of the times – still determines the way news organizations and politicians interact.