USA

Between 1950 and 1970 television emerged as one of the most important forms of mass communication in Mexico. An analysis of television news scripts and film clips located at the Televisa (the nation’s largest television network) Archives in Mexico City exposed tensions and traditions in television news. The tensions reveal conflicts between: the government and media producers; modernity and the desire to create traditions and maintain those already invented; elite controllers of the media and popular viewers; a male dominated business and fema le news producers and viewers; an elite (mostly white) group of media moguls and a poor mestizo and indigenous viewers; and the United States and Mexico in the midst of the Cold War.

USA

This dissertation examines Mexico City’s material politics of print —the central actors engaged in making print, their activities and relationships, and the legal, business, and social dimensions of production — across the nineteenth century. Inside urban printshops, a socially diverse group of men ranging from manual laborers to educated editors collaborated to make the printed items that fueled political debates and partisan struggles in the new republic. By investigating how print was produced, regulated, and consumed, this dissertation argues that printers shaped some of the most pressing conflicts that marked Mexico’s first formative century: over freedom of expression, the role of religion in government, and the emergence of liberalism. Printers shaped debates not only because they issued texts that fueled elite politics but precisely because they operated at the nexus where new liberal guarantees like freedom of the press and intellectual property intersected with politics and patronage, the regulatory efforts of the emerging state, and the harsh realities of a post colonial economy.

USA

This project reconsiders the relationship between the government and media as revealed by the development of national print media organizations in Mexico before and after the revolutionary period, 1900 - 1940. Historians have long believed that Mexican journalists had accepted payments from the PRI, the party that laid the foundation for its seventy year dictatorship during this period, in exchange for positive news coverage and to cover up the government’s failings. This project challenges this assumption and demonstrates a different history of intense contestation between the state and media organizations. Instead of acquiescing to government officials, Mexican journalists founded new periodicals and used them to defy their authority throughout this time period, often at the risk of their careers and lives. Journalists remained strong activists and worked closely with politicians to pass the reforms they fought for during the revolution. It was only through the leadership of President Lázaro Cárdenas that the government was able to integrate these defiant reporters into the “Revolutionary Family.”