Mass Media and Consumer Culture in 20th-Century Mexico

In 20th-century Mexico, as in many other places, consumer culture and mass media have shaped everyday experiences, helped give meaning to ordinary lives, and opened up spaces in which political ideologies could be created and contested. Cultural forms such as dance, song, cuisine, clothing, and sports have been deployed to distinguish regions from one another, while at the same time, print media, radio, television, recorded music, film, and other cultural forms have connected Mexicans across regional and international borders (and across lines of gender, class, ethnicity, language, religion, political affiliation, and more) from the 1880s to the present day. Consumer culture—meaning the distribution, sale, and use of mass-produced goods such as clothing, as well as agricultural commodities like sugar and coffee—linked Mexico to a wider world in the historical era in which Mexico joined in the global process of rapid-fire modernization. The study of mass media and consumer culture in Mexico has been, at its best, highly interdisciplinary: historians and art historians, literary critics and cinema studies specialists, sociologists, and ethnographers have worked with journalists, folklorists, ethnomusicologists, and others in developing a sophisticated scholarly literature. This literature has its roots in two interrelated schools of scholarship: one that interpreted the products of culture industries as well as the creativity of ordinary people in a search for clues to Mexican national identity, and another that interpreted both locally made and imported mass media to understand how they shaped and supported the political, social, and economic status quo, both locally and globally. Since the 1980s, however, scholarly attention has broadened its focus from the images, narratives, movements, sounds, and objects produced by Mexican and foreign culture industries, and recent scholarship has looked to processes of creation, distribution, criticism, and consumption as well. Identities—whether regional, national, local, ideological, sexual, or political—are no longer understood as stable categories, but rather as a highly contested set of ideas, stories, and pictures that have changed radically over time. Much scholarship on mass media and consumer culture now begins with the understanding that culture industries have provided the tools with which discourses of identity could be shaped and reshaped, and that audiences and consumers have sometimes picked up those tools and turned them to their own purposes. And they have moved beyond taking the nation as a central category of analysis to ask how Mexican consumers and culture industries have participated in international and transnational processes of modernization.