Mass Media and Urban Publics, 1950–1958

Rapid urbanization, the expansion of a middle class, and rising literacy rates transformed Mexico’s public sphere at midcentury. New infrastructure, such as the national highway system, facilitated travel for both mail and people. The mechanization of agriculture and employment opportunities in cities propelled rural-to-urban migration, which fundamentally altered the country’s population distribution. While most Mexicans lived in rural areas in 1940, the country was predominantly urban by 1970.³ Over these three decades, literacy rates rose from 42 percent to over 76 percent due to sustained state investment in education.⁴ Finally, the growth of a middle class created an emergent market for mass media and consumer products.

Available reading material proliferated alongside literacy. Corner newsstands sold cheap comic books, sensationalist crime blotters, and sports tabloids—the three best-selling genres. The federal government made news publications more affordable through its 1935 creation of the Productora e Importadora de Papel S.A. (PIPSA), a paper monopoly that stabilized the domestic newsprint market. PIPSA initially purchased and sold paper, but soon broadened its operations to warehouse and manufacture newsprint. The availability of newspapers increased throughout the country, and major cities boasted well-established and respected periodicals, including Monterrey’s El Norte, Guadalajara’s El Occidental, and Mérida’s Diario de Yucatán. While readership remained low in rural areas, investors recognized the market potential of burgeoning cities, and in the late 1940s, José García Valseca built his media empire by expanding the El Sol newspaper chain into new cities, such as Tampico and Fresnillo, ultimately accruing thirty-seven regional newspapers.⁵

Most print publications were privately owned by a handful of media magnates, who earned their revenue through advertisements rather than subscriptions. The threat of financial ruin generally kept mainstream media loyal, as the government could easily withhold subsidized newsprint and advertising. Public officials also provisioned reporters with regular payments—the notorious embute—to ensure complacent coverage.⁶ Pablo Piccato demonstrates that critical viewpoints could nonetheless emerge in the most commercially successful news publications. He shows that from the 1920s through the 1960s, crime tabloids (nota roja) regularly explored questions of police impunity, government injustice, and urban degradation. Nota roja encouraged active engagement from readers, many of whom had a precarious economic foothold amid rapid urbanization. New publics emerged as readers wrote to newspapers with their own theories or tips regarding ongoing criminal investigations.⁷

Cultural production was heavily centralized in the capital city, where the federal government furnished spaces for debate through its investment in the arts and education. The state-sponsored publishing house, the Fondo de Cultura Ecónomica (FCE), translated major works into Spanish and republished Mexican classics, distributing books at affordable prices.⁸ The state also invested in public education, including preparatory schools and escuelas normales (rural teacher training colleges). To accommodate the demands of a growing population, the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) underwent a significant expansion, and the new 1800-acre campus opened in the south of Mexico City in 1957. Other universities also grew during this period, including the Universidad Veracruzana in Xalapa.

The 1950s witnessed the arrival of new publications, associations, and centers, which fostered critical debate and the development of anti-authoritarian sensibilities. At the UNAM, the Dirección de Difusión Cultural (DDC) sponsored new books, art exhibitions, performances, and student fellowships. The Casa del Lago, the DDC’s cultural center, was founded in 1959 and became a prestigious space for intellectual engagement that was free and open to the public. Other institutions, such as the Centro Mexicano de Escritores, similarly cultivated young writers by awarding them fellowships. During this period, new publications and associations also increased the spaces for critical engagement. México en la Cultura, the weekly cultural supplement of Novedades, began publication in 1949 and brought international art into the homes of Mexico City readers. In 1954, prominent intellectuals, including Pablo González Casanova and Leopoldo Zea, formed the Círculo de Estudios Mexicanos, which convened leftist political debate through conferences and a journal, the Cuadernos del Círculo de Estudios Mexicanos.

The political weekly, Siempre!, exemplifies both the possibilities and limits of criticism in Mexico City. In 1953, publisher José Pagés Llergo founded the pluralistic magazine, which featured opinions from both leftists and conservatives, denunciations of corruption, and calls for democratic reforms, including clean elections and effective land redistribution. Photo essays, cartoons, and cover art also delivered visual criticism. For example, affecting images of poverty by photographers Héctor García and the Hermanos Mayo highlighted the failures of the Mexican Revolution.⁹ At the same time, the magazine undergirded central aspects of Mexican politics, including presidentialism.¹⁰ Pagés Llergo, along with Siempre! reporters, enjoyed close ties with public officials and regularly received monthly stipends and sometimes even housing from political elites who sought their loyalty. Critically, the Mexico City public sphere opened with explicit government permission and support.

Outside of the capital, regional journalists voiced more direct criticism, while also facing potentially greater risks for doing so. Local and regional newspapers often suffered attacks by governing officials, and at times, journalists were even killed. A forthcoming study by Benjamin T. Smith shows that small, local publications developed strong ties with civic movements and used complaints from ordinary readers as the basis for exposés on corruption. Newspapers like El Chapulín of Oaxaca City and El Norte of Chihuahua City featured large sections for letters, where readers contributed their own analyses of wrongdoing. Both periodicals denounced official impunity and corruption, which catalyzed popular protests, forced accountability, and, in one case, led to the resignation of the governor.¹¹

The biggest change on the horizon was the expansion of mass-media technologies. Between 1950 and 1960, the number of radio sets doubled from 2 to 3 million, and radio stations increased from 195 to 369.¹² Mexico was also at the forefront of the international adoption of television and aired its first televised broadcast on September 1, 1950. From the outset, television was a commercial venture dominated by three media magnates: Romulo O’Farrill Silva, Emilio Azcárraga, and Guillermo González Camarena. In 1955, they formed Telesistema Mexicano, which operated as an effective monopoly in the industry. Radio was similarly concentrated among a few commercial owners, with Azcárraga’s Radio Programas de México (RPM) network controlling the greatest share of stations.

The government exerted more direct control over broadcasting content than it did print media. Telesistema Mexicano relied upon the state to assign and renew its broadcasting concessions, which were limited by the available number of frequencies. The 1960 Ley Federal de Radio y Televisión also granted the government the right to regulate the industry and monitor content. Newscasts typically defended the political status quo and demonstrated a strong intolerance toward leftist movements.¹³ This stance not only reflected the anti-communism shared by the PRI and television magnates, but also the outsized influence of U.S. companies. Mexican broadcasters relied upon U.S. producers and companies for technological support, broadcasting content, and equipment. Mexican broadcasters also pulled much of their international coverage from U.S. wire feeds, primarily the Associated Press and United Press International.¹⁴ Thus, Mexican international news was generally refracted through the vision of Cold War threats.

Yet, mass media should not be understood as uniformly depoliticizing consumers. Mary Kay Vaughan has argued that viewing and listening practices forged communities around shared sensorial and affective experiences that transcended local and sometimes national divides.¹⁵ The rapid expansion of movie theaters and government-enforced price controls on tickets made movie-going accessible across the social spectrum, and film attendance soared during this period.¹⁶ Radio, like movies, provided a shared cultural language through the airing of “música típica” and radionovelas.¹⁷ In the late 1950s, radio also became a tool of rural education. State institutions, such as the Instituto Nacional Indígena (INI), sent shortwave radios to indigenous communities in an effort to expand Spanish literacy.¹⁸ In cities, television viewership was a social experience because sets were initially quite expensive, and most urban dwellers watched television in public spaces, such as storefronts, bars, and restaurants.¹⁹ Mass media thus nurtured new behaviors and attitudes among consumers.

Ideological Battles of the Cold War, 1958–1968

The 1959 Cuban Revolution deepened political polarization, and protracted ideological battles were waged in the public sphere. The long 1960s witnessed an effervescent university culture, the creation of new civic organizations, mounting public protests, and expanding fora for debate alongside greater urban repression. Railroad, telegraph, and sugar workers mounted massive strikes with demands for independent unions, eliciting serious concern from governing officials. The largest of these protests, the 1958–1959 railroad workers’ movement, ended in March 1959 after the military arrested 10,000 strikers, some of whom would remain imprisoned for over a decade.

University campuses served as breeding grounds for the New Left, which was broadly united by a shared language of anti-authoritarianism and anti-imperialism. While some students advocated armed revolt, many more pressed for moderate democratic reforms alongside a cultural revolution. Students rejected the paternalism of the PRI’s corporatist organizations, and they demanded bottom-up governance of their universities and organizations. Democratization was also reflected in the makeup of student movements, as women increasingly participated in campus organizing and challenged traditional, patriarchal values.²⁰

Students tried to wrest knowledge production away from mainstream media, which smeared them as rebels and communists. They embraced direct action through mítines relámpagos (lightning meetings) and information brigades. Print ephemera exploded across campuses, with student manifestos, bulletins, academic journals, and newspapers voicing demands and announcing protests. University radio stations, independent student organizations, and cineclubs offered new spaces to debate ideas and consume countercultural art. Meanwhile, film journals, like Nuevo Cine, and art movements, like Poesía en Voz Alta, sought to decenter cultural production and democratize artistic consumption.²¹

New organizations also arose from within the ranks of the political elite. In 1961, academics, leftist party leaders, and former PRI officials formed a pressure group, the Movimiento de Liberación Nacional (MLN), to support the Cuban Revolution, oppose U.S. imperialism, and call for a return to economic nationalism. The organization drew support from tens of thousands, and its unofficial figurehead was former president Lázaro Cárdenas (1934–1940), whose enduring popularity undergirded the movement’s legitimacy. Two years later, some of the same leaders founded the Central Campesina Independiente (CCI), which mobilized landless peasants around demands for agrarian reform. Neither organization called for an overthrow of the PRI, but rather for a renewed commitment to its revolutionary principles.²²

Leftist publications both responded to and nurtured restless Mexico City publics. The weekly magazine, Política, was the most radical of these news outlets. Created by Manuel Marcué Pardiñas in 1960, Política brought together Old and New Left writers, and many of its earliest collaborators hailed from the MLN’s leadership, including Alonso Aguilar Monteverde, Elí de Gortari, and Ignacio García Tellez. Política distinguished itself from other news outlets by directly criticizing the president and reporting on state repression, including the assassination of peasant labor leader Rubén Jaramillo and his family in May 1962. While Política found a loyal readership among students, the magazine was perpetually in economic crisis, as PIPSA frequently withheld subsidized newsprint in retaliation for negative coverage. Política reportedly offset these pressures with financial support from Cuba and the Soviet Union, and speeches by Fidel Castro frequently appeared in the magazine. To stem criticism, Mexican government at times resorted to intimidation and violence against Política reporters.²³

A more mainstream newspaper, El Día, also appeared in 1962 with the support of left-leaning priísta and journalist Enrique Ramírez Ramírez. El Día counterbalanced the government’s anti-communism with consistent support for peasant and labor movements. The opinion pages became an essential site for debates about poverty and development and featured prominent writers, including Francisco Martínez de la Vega and Fernando Benítez. In the mid-1960s, reporter Manuel Buendía also began contributing his column, “Para Control de Usted,” where he gradually broke with the genre’s conventions to write in more accessible prose directed at the reader.²⁴ Other outlets, including Siempre!’s cultural supplement La Cultura en México and the investigative weekly magazine Sucesos Para Todos, also articulated strident criticisms of the Mexican Revolution.

Critical perspectives on politics were also represented in the literature, academic writing, and cartoons of the period. Carlos Fuentes, Rosario Castellanos, José Emilio Pacheco, and Sergio Pitol were among the most important writers to satirize cultural nationalism and bring to light issues of poverty and urban crisis. Works by prominent academics, including Pablo González Casanova and U.S. anthropologist Oscar Lewis, argued that the revolution had failed to resolve landlessness and poverty, inspiring debates in roundtables and the press. Cartoons by Rius (Eduardo del Río) and Naranjo in Política, Siempre!, and Sucesos Para Todos satirized political corruption and abuses of power, and Rius’s wildly popular Supermachos comic books explored similar themes for a wider audience. In conservative broadsheets like Excélsior, cartoons by Abel Quezada represented one of the few spaces for permissible criticism.

Whereas these publications spoke to a primarily educated, middle-class and elite readership, new research shows that independent newspapers outside of Mexico City increasingly addressed rural peasants and the urban poor. For example, the biweekly Chihuahua City newspaper, Acción, published scandalous pieces on violent abuses by landowners, rural police, and the military. Founder and folk singer Judith Reyes used testimonies from peasants, rather than the political elite, as the basis for her articles. Elsewhere, local dailies, such as El Monitor de Parral and Acapulco’s La Verdad, similarly allied with grassroots civic movements in the 1960s.²⁵

The left was not alone in its attempts to bridge the divide between civil society and politics. Right-wing civic groups and new periodicals expressed anti-communist sentiment and supported conservative interests. In the early 1960s, Catholic movements vociferously protested a “socialist” state initiative to print and distribute free school textbooks.²⁶ Conservative publications, like Monterrey’s El Norte, became a mouthpiece for such concerns. Right-wing student organizations, such as the Movimiento Universitario Renovadora Orientación (MURO) in Guadalajara, formed to defend universities against communism, and student confrontations on campus often led to violent clashes. In 1965, media magnates José García Valseca and Gabriel Alarcón also furnished new conservatives outlets with the arrival of El Sol de México and El Heraldo de México.

By the 1960s, television sets had become more accessible, and credit made ownership possible even for those living in shanty towns and tenements.²⁷ Those who did not own their own set would pay a small fee to watch a soccer match or their favorite telenovela at a neighbor’s house. Nearly four million people watched television every month, with most viewers concentrated in cities.²⁸ The improved access was a direct result of Mexico’s preparations to host the 1968 summer Olympics, which would be televised live. The National Network of Telecommunications and the National Microwave Network, completed in 1968, made transmission possible to all parts of the country.²⁹

As the first global South country to host the summer Olympics, Mexico sought to project an image of modernity. Yet in 1966, student protests erupted in Puebla, Hermosillo, and Morelia, challenging the government’s claims of democracy. Meanwhile, Mayan henequen workers struck in Mérida with demands for fair wages and denunciations of abuses by landowners and local officials. Many of these protests were met with police or military repression. The most visible opposition emerged in the summer of 1968 in Mexico City, when a broad-based student movement organized to demand the dissolution of the riot police and the release of political prisoners, among other things. Ten days before the Olympic opening ceremonies, plainclothes security forces shot on students gathered for a rally in the Plaza de Tres Culturas. The episode, which came to be known as the Tlatelolco Massacre, ended the movement and resulted in hundreds of student deaths.

With few exceptions, mainstream media remained silent regarding the massacre or merely echoed official statements that underrepresented the causalities and blamed the students for instigating the violence.³⁰ Intellectuals and left-leaning reporters, meanwhile, were profoundly influenced by the attacks. In 1971, Elena Poniatowska published the oral testimonies of students, movement leaders, and observers in her chronicle La noche de Tlatelolco, which became the most popular account of the Tlatelolco Massacre.³¹ Academic scholarship also suggested profound disillusionment with the one-party regime, and a growing revisionist historiography argued that the Mexican Revolution had produced an authoritarian system.³²

The Uneven Democratic Opening, 1968–1976

Upon assuming the presidency, Luis Echeverría (1970–1976) attempted to appease a discontented, urban middle class by declaring a “democratic opening” and gradually releasing political prisoners. He increased university funding and created new academic centers and public offices, which provided jobs for former student leaders. To undergird his promises of press freedom, Echeverría furnished visible spaces of pluralism, which included La Revista Mexicana de Cultura, a new cultural supplement of the PRI’s newspaper El Nacional.³³ Echeverría also allowed greater criticism in Excélsior, one of Mexico City’s two largest dailies.

Excélsior soon became the most prominent broadsheet to deliver critical news commentary. The country’s foremost intellectuals, including Daniel Cosío Villegas and Gastón García Cantú, regularly contributed to the opinion pages, where they decried state violence and corruption, and the front pages gradually began to question foreign and economic policies.³⁴ Excélsior director Julio Scherer García also created a monthly cultural supplement, Plural, which became a forum for debates about democracy under the directorship of poet Octavio Paz.

Mexico City’s public sphere further benefited from the influx of Southern Cone exiles fleeing military dictatorships. In the early 1970s, thousands of Chileans, Uruguayans, and Argentine writers and intellectuals arrived in Mexico’s capital and joined university faculty, newspaper editorial teams, and cultural centers.³⁵ In addition to welcoming refugees, Mexico City hosted several international conferences, including the United Nations’ (UN) 1975 International Women’s Year Conference. These events placed Mexico at the center of several international political debates and formed part of Echeverría’s efforts to position himself as a leader of a growing global South movement, which aimed to rectify global power imbalances.³⁶

The opening of the public sphere was geographically uneven. Spaces for critique grew in cities like Mexico City and Monterrey, while the federal government waged a dirty war in the countryside. To extirpate radical leftism, the military and state security forces initiated a scorched-earth campaign in the state of Guerrero, kidnapping, torturing, and sometimes killing suspected dissidents throughout the 1970s. Security forces targeted guerrilla cells led by rural school teachers and radicalized student movement participants.³⁷ Most newspapers avoided the taboo topic of counter-insurgency, but the leftist Mexico City publication Por Qué? issued more radical and confrontational coverage. After the 1968 massacre, the bimonthly newspaper contested official denials with gruesome photographs of the victims. Por Qué? also published investigative reportage on guerrilla groups, corruption, repression, and electoral fraud. Editors and journalists frequently encountered repression, and in 1974, newspaper was forced to close.³⁸

In 1973, television corporations merged to form a single national monopoly, Televisa, which soon owned over 90 percent of all broadcasting stations.³⁹ Young people, intellectuals, and artists sought to consume and produce art outside of the mainstream media. Music magazines, such as Piedra Rodante, provided an outlet for countercultural consumption. Informal music venues, known as “peñas,” also offered gathering places to listen to Chilean nueva canción, Cuban nueva trova, and Latin American protest songs. Artists also formed new organizations, such as Frente Para la Libre Expresión de la Cultura, to call for greater cultural freedom.⁴⁰

The government did make efforts to expand opportunities for young artists. Echeverría created myriad institutions to fund, produce, and distribute new films. The Banco Nacional Cinematográfico sponsored cinema projects and held contests for student filmmakers, which encouraged new talent.⁴¹ High-quality films, such as Paul Leduc’s Reed: Insurgent Mexico (1973) and Felipe Cazals’ Canoa (1976) delivered pointed social commentary.⁴² Opportunities to publish also increased through workshops and prizes supported by the Instituto Nacional de Bella Artes. High and low theater also boomed, making performances accessible to a wide audience.

The public sphere diversified as new movements demanded autonomy from corporative institutions. The Tendencia Democrática and the Coordinadora Nacional de Trabajadores de la Educación fought to democratize the electricians’ and teachers’ unions, respectively. Urban popular movements also arose to demand basic services and greater access to affordable housing. Meanwhile, in Juchitán, Oaxaca grassroots mobilization challenged the PRI’s stranglehold over local politics. The Coalición Obrera Campesina Estudiantil del Istmo (COCEI) formed in 1973 to advocate the needs of local Zapotec peasants and organized protest caravans to the capital.⁴³

By the conclusion of his term, Echeverría had grown tired of criticism. On July 8, 1976, he surreptitiously orchestrated a coup within Excélsior’s cooperative, which removed director Scherer García and his editorial team. Over two hundred journalists and printers resigned in solidarity, and foreign correspondents denounced the action as evidence of state censorship.⁴⁴ Domestically, reporters publicized the intervention through roundtables and pamphlets and raised support for a new venture.⁴⁵ In November 1976, Scherer García opened a highly critical weekly newsmagazine, Proceso, which became a platform for attacking the outgoing president.

The Diversification of the Public Sphere since the Late 20th Century

Upon taking office in December 1976, López Portillo took concrete steps to pacify the leftist opposition. He made Jesús Reyes Heroles, who formed part of the progressive reform-mind PRI, his secretary of the interior. Together, they crafted a series of laws collectively referred to as the “Political Reform,” which Congress passed in December 1977.⁴⁶ This legislative bundle legalized leftist opposition parties, granted amnesty to guerrillas, and amended Article 6 of the Constitution to guaranteed the “right to information.” Without a mechanism to ensure transparency, the amendment changed little in practice, but its passage launched public discussions about the social role of the press.⁴⁷

Mexico City publications became increasingly confrontational and did not shy away from political scandals. This was especially the case with new investigative outlets such as Proceso and unomásuno, both of which were created by former Excélsior journalists. In some instances, Proceso exposés led to the resignation of high-level figures, including the Petróleos Mexicanos director Jorge Díaz Serrano.⁴⁸ The daily unomásuno regularly reported on labor issues and social protests and gave extensive cultural coverage to burgeoning artistic movements. In the mid-1980s, El Financiero also become known for its combative exposés on drug trafficking and corruption. New literary and intellectual magazines, including Nexos and Letras Libres, further expanded spaces for debate.

The rise of prominent investigative newspapers was not limited to Mexico City. Since 1977, the Baja California newspaper ABC pursued scandalous exposés on gubernatorial corruption and nepotism. Two years later, Baja California governor Roberto de la Madrid shuttered ABC, leading the director Jesús Blancornelas and his collaborator to found a weekly muckraking newspaper, Zeta, which gained a loyal Tijuana readership.⁴⁹ Other regional investigative newspapers included Guadalajara’s Siglo XXI and Hermosillo’s El Imparcial.

Radio programs also diversified in the late 1970s, as local governments and the INI created indigenous-language radio programs. The first of these was “La Voz de la Montaña,” which aired in Guerrero beginning in 1979. Like the radioescuelas of the late 1950s and early 1960s, these programs were oriented toward economic development and Spanish-language acquisition in poor, rural communities. By 1989, indigenous communities assumed greater control over the production and direction of these programs.⁵⁰

Opposition parties enjoyed increased success at the polls. The Political Reform allowed the COCEI to compete in local elections, and in 1980 the party won in Juchitán on a joint ticket with the Partido Comunista Mexicano. In the early 1980s, the conservative Partido Acción Nacional (PAN) also began winning municipal elections in states along the U.S.-Mexico border. With the support of powerful business groups, the conservative party swept the 1983 midterm elections in Chihuahua, winning the state’s seven most important mayoralties. Two years later, the PAN won five out of the ten federal congressional seats in play. In 1986, the PAN was expected to win the gubernatorial election, and when the PRI declared victory, civic groups took to the streets in protest of electoral fraud. Mexico City newspapers and the Diario de Juárez reported instances of vote buying and ballot box stuffing.⁵¹ Baja California Norte was also a key site of electoral challenges. In 1986, Ernesto Ruffo was elected mayor in Ensenada, and in 1989 he won the governorship of Baja California Norte, becoming the first politician of the opposition to do so.

Left-leaning Mexico City news outlets also developed an increasingly symbiotic relationship with social movements. After the 1985 earthquake devastated Mexico City, independent radio programs and the periodicals gave extensive coverage and support to neighborhood organizations that demanded housing reconstruction and a greater voice in local political decision-making. La Jornada and Proceso both became popular venues for the publication of chronicles, which brought ordinary voices into the pages of the press. La Jornada also supported a new student movement, spearheaded by the Consejo Estudiantil Universitario (CEU), which protested austerity measures in 1986–1987. During the 1988 presidential elections, newspapers covered the broad-based support for center-left candidate, Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, and the widespread protests that erupted after the PRI declared itself the victor.⁵² Finally, the rise of the internet contributed to the decentralization of news production and dissemination. The Zapatistas were the first political movement to use the internet to gain support for their cause. During their 1994 uprising, leaders demonstrated media savvy by publicizing their manifesto online and inviting international reporters to Chiapas.

Over the course of the 1950s through the 1980s, the provisioning of information became more decentralized and robust, and the public sphere democratized in terms of the diverse issues discussed and voices represented. By the late 1980s, President Carlos Salinas de Gortari (1988–1994) closed PIPSA, which he described as a vestige of press censorship. In 1993, the liberal newspaper Reforma opened and adopted a sympathetic stance toward the conservative opposition.⁵³ Yet, this progression did not mean that the risks of journalism decreased. In 1984, Manuel Buendía, arguably the country’s most famous columnist, was killed in broad daylight as he left his office for the day, and in 1988, Héctor Félix Miranda (co-editor of Zeta) was assassinated. The dangers for journalists dramatically increased with the militarization of the war on drugs in 2006. Mexico has since become one of the most dangerous places to be a journalist, and activists and members of opposition parties similarly face intimidation and threats of violence.⁵⁴ In addition to using violence, cartels try to influence public opinion through narcomantas, YouTube videos, and social media.⁵⁵ Reporters who work in high-risk areas have also turned to social media to inform the public and avoid scrutiny, whether from government officials or organized crime.⁵⁶ These recent developments cast a shadow over the general trend of a liberalized and diversified public sphere in the late-20th century.

Discussion of the Literature

In the wake of the Tlatelolco Massacre, many scholars and writers emphasized the impediments to a rational, open, and democratic space for debate. They highlighted the PRI’s repression, its notorious cooptation of independent movements and journalists, and the ways in which mass media generated apathy.⁵⁷ Literature in political science and communications similarly framed the public sphere as only opening in the late 1980s, when the PRI lost its stranglehold over media and elections.⁵⁸ Some of the first historical studies of mid-century publics focused on how mass media shaped identities and reinforced cultural nationalism, and the edited volume, Fragments of the Golden Age, represented a foundational work in this field. Scholars Anne Rubenstein and Celeste González de Bustamante also examined the ways in which mass media reinforced PRI hegemony in their respective works on comic books and television.⁵⁹ Eric Zolov, meanwhile, focused on the consumption of rock music to trace growing countercultural and anti-authoritarian attitudes among Mexican youth.

Meanwhile, studies of political and social movements since 1940 have suggested that the public sphere developed much earlier than was previously imagined. For example, Elisa Servín, Tanalís Padilla, and Jaime Pensado brought to light the political resistance and state violence that prevailed during the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, undermining the notion of a “pax priísta,” or a period of relative peace and acquiescence.⁶⁰ Recent studies of this period made use of intelligence archives, declassified in 2002, to reveal greater state repression than scholars previously imagined. The edited volume, Dictablanda, for example, emphasized the role that violence, alongside negotiation, played in consolidating political rule during this period.⁶¹ Meanwhile, Jacinto Rodríguez Munguía revealed generalized corruption of the press through payoffs and collusion.⁶² Though these practices were already common knowledge, Rodríguez’s study documented how extensive they truly were.⁶³ Finally, Soledad Loaeza and Louise E. Walker uncovered the oppositional attitudes of the conservative middle classes since the 1960s.⁶⁴

Recent works have explicitly explored the relationship between mid-century urbanization and the public sphere.⁶⁵ Pablo Piccato, for example, examines the creation of the Mexican publics through a media genre traditionally associated with escapism—crime news.⁶⁶ While Habermas saw mass media as removing political discussion from the public sphere, Piccato argues that nota roja became a democratic site for debates over justice and truth and cultivated critical publics of readers. In her biography of the painter, José Zúñiga, Mary Kay Vaughan examines how Mexico City art and cultural forged new anti-authoritarian subjectivities.⁶⁷ Both works see media and culture as central to the formation of critical publics.

Finally, forthcoming studies are examining other previously neglected aspects of the public sphere. Benjamin T. Smith’s forthcoming book offers new research on readers and journalists outside of Mexico City. He examines small, independent press operations in Oaxaca City and Chihuahua and demonstrates that these publications became key interlocutors between the state and local civic and peasants’ movements.⁶⁸ Derek Bentley’s dissertation, meanwhile, explores conservative movements since the 1970s, and focuses on the public sphere created through the print worlds and protests of Catholic civic organization, business groups, and the PAN.⁶⁹ Finally, Vanessa Freije examines how political scandals reshaped ideas of corruption and democracy and forged new publics since the 1960s.⁷⁰