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A Sentimental Education for the Working Man
The Mexico City Penny Press, 1900â"1910
By Robert M. Buffington Duke University Press
Copyright © 2015 Duke University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-7557-9
CHAPTER 1
WORKING-CLASS HEROES
Forging the Ties That Bind
As we saw in the introduction, most early twentieth-century Mexico City workers subscribed to a shifting constellation of interrelated ideas, attitudes, and notions that historians have labeled "popular liberalism." Although derived from mainstream liberalism with its emphasis on citizenship — civic responsibilities, political rights, respect for the rule of law, respect for the dignity of the individual — popular liberalism grounded that citizenship, not in the newly emergent middle classes (often allied in Mexico as elsewhere with traditional elites), but in the historical resentments, patriotic sentiments, and productive toil of marginalized working-class men (and to a much lesser extent women). Mexico City's thriving satiric penny press for workers played a key role in establishing popular liberalism as an oppositional discourse committed to challenging the exploitation, corruption, cronyism, and authoritarian tactics of the Porfirian regime.
These are fundamental insights. Nevertheless, historians have only just begun to scratch the surface of what social theorist Raymond Williams calls the "structures of feeling"—"meanings and values as they are actively lived and felt" — that underlay popular liberalism and the emerging class consciousness of Mexico City workers. This chapter thus examines the concerted efforts of satiric penny press editors and contributors to link these structures of feeling to working-class political consciousness by constructing popular alternatives to the official story propagated by liberal elites and Porfirian ideologues. These alternatives embraced many of the same liberal icons featured in official histories but resignified them as working-class heroes and then deployed them to undermine the regime's claims to legitimacy. An essential component of this time-honored tactic of symbolic subversion was the forging of deep affective bonds between popular figures — especially independence martyr Miguel Hidalgo and liberal statesman Benito Juárez — and their working-class admirers in an effort to bind workers to a utopian vision of a liberal, democratic Mexico no longer in thrall to special interests and responsive to all its citizens, however humble their circumstances. The oppositional discourse that emerged from this process worked to split the liberal political spectrum into two distinct camps and transform popular liberalism into liberal populism, a move with revolutionary implications (see ch. 3).
This was hardly the first manifestation of working-class support for liberal heroes, especially Benito Juárez. In 1876, just four years after his death, the Gran Círculo de Obreros de México (Great Circle of Mexican Workers) staged the first of many Juárez commemorations sponsored by working-class organizations. But deepening fractures among Mexican liberals after Porfirio Díaz's 1884 reelection, exacerbated by government crackdowns on the independent press, provided an opening for an alternative liberal history that stressed the special bonds between liberal heroes and workingmen (rather than fractious political elites). The success of these late Porfirian efforts to link popular structures of feeling to working-class politics proved remarkably durable. But the waging of this symbolic "war of position" for the hearts and minds of Mexican workers was no simple thing.
The Art of War
In recent years, art historians have begun to explore the intimate links between the production of images and the construction of national histories. As Tomás Pérez Vejo explains, "images, in addition to reflecting reality, are also ... a sophisticated way of constructing reality, a powerful instrument in the production and control of collective imaginaries." Given this remarkable power to produce and control collective imaginaries, it should come as no surprise that ideologues of all stripes — penny press editors included — made frequent use of graphic images in the struggle to develop a national narrative that promoted their different conceptions of the nation-state as an "imagined and imaginary community" and their different constituencies as central to that community.
Two front-page illustrations from La Guacamaya provide a useful entry point into the intricacies of working-class politics in late Porfirian Mexico City. The first image, "En Honor de Juárez," from the cover of the July 18, 1907, issue, celebrates the anniversary of Benito Juárez's death (July 18, 1872). The second image, "¡VIVA la LIBERTAD!," from September 12, 1907, anticipates the upcoming Independence Day celebrations of September 15 and 16 (see figs. 1.1 and 1.2). The images are unsigned but in the graphic style of master printmaker and frequent contributor José Guadalupe Posada. Although close examination reveals some nice touches — the confrontation between a policeman and a newspaper boy in the second image, for example — neither illustration seems particularly inspired, at least in any conventional artistic sense. Despite these aesthetic shortcomings, the basic message is hard to miss: working-class Mexican men are true patriots; upper-class Mexican men are self-absorbed sycophants and slackers.
Although the main point is relatively straightforward; the complex web of symbolic and historical referents deployed in its service is not. Neither were its implications for working-class Mexican men. Before tackling these complications, however, we need first to examine the ways in which these graphic images and the short verses that accompany them work as texts, setting aside for a moment important questions about the historical circumstances and cultural context in which those texts were produced, circulated, and read. Only a close reading of image and text can properly convey the subtle art behind their creation and deployment: the deft manipulation of spatial conventions, the sly play with visual and linguistic signs, the meticulous fitting of graphic mortise to literary tenon. For all its fussing over picayune details and obsession with everyday tricks of the trade, a nuts-and-bolts analysis of this kind is in fact essential to our understanding of the penny press "war of position" with Porfirian bourgeois culture. This is so, because without a solid appreciation of the art of that war, we would find ourselves hard pressed to explain its subtle but powerful ideological effects. Although compelled by disciplinary training to select, sort, and synthesize, in their heart of hearts historians, like moralists, know that the devil — little, red, joking, or otherwise — resides in the details. This inquiry, then, begins there.
The image beneath the July 18 headline, "En Honor de Juárez," depicts six well-to-do men in formal attire — top hats, frock coats, starched collars — holding champagne glasses. The central figure in the group is an older man with white whiskers, walking stick, and the erect posture of a former soldier, who bears a more than passing resemblance to longtime president Porfirio Díaz. A younger man with an umbrella tucked under one arm offers up a toast to the "indispensable caudillo" as the other men look on. In the background, a campesino in traditional white cotton work clothes, serape over his shoulder, bare head bowed, sombrero in hand, back to the reader, sets a garland of flowers at the foot of Benito Juárez's tomb, with its signature marble statue of a woman — the personification of mother Mexico — cradling the hero's prone body in the pathetic style of Michelangelo's famous statue of Mary and Jesus, La Pietà.
The short poem beneath the image reads:
Mientras el pueblo patriota
sus ofrendas deposita
en la tumba del gran Juárez,
los rotos en la cantina
echándosela de lado
por el patriotismo brindan
y todo por estar bien
con el que les da ... propina.
* * *
[While the patriotic people
place their offerings
at the tomb of the great Juárez,
the rotos [sycophants] in the cantina
tossing it aside
toast to patriotism
and that all be well
with he who gives them ... gifts.]
As expected, the poem interprets the actions depicted in the illustration. This interpretation holds no big surprises. Juárez's mausoleum was a well-known pilgrimage site for his many admirers, and photographs from the period show it decked in floral ofrendas (offerings), the secular manifestation of a much older and still common religious practice associated with both the veneration of saints and respect for the family dead. The contrasting patriotic styles of the upper-class men with their European fashions and drinking habits and the campesino with his emphatically Mexican dress and demeanor are identified with sycophantic rotos (literally, "the broken ones") on one hand and the humble pueblo abnegado (self-denying people) on the other. The Spanish word propina — translated here as "gift" — is more precisely a gratuity or tip for services rendered. Set off by ellipses in the text, it reveals the venal meaning behind the toast. More subtle is the news, not apparent from the image, that the elite men are drinking in a cantina, a behavior and a site (along with the less classy pulquería) more often associated with working-class men, at least in the mind of the Porfirian bourgeoisie.
The September 12 image, "¡viva la libertad!," is divided in two equal frames. In the left-hand frame, six members of the urban popular classes — variously dressed in suits, loose jackets, overalls, bowler hats, felt fedoras, and fronted by a barefoot paperboy — celebrate the anniversary of Mexican independence with shouts, salutes, noisemakers, and flag waving. Contemporary readers would have understood these actions as popular responses to the annual Grito given by the president at 11 PM on September 15 to crowds gathered in front of the National Palace. Two policemen harass the revelers. One wields a truncheon, the other jerks a flag from the hands of the protesting paperboy. In the right-hand frame, three well-dressed men in open frock coats sleep on a row of soft, frilly beds. A portrait of Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla, the "father" of Mexican independence and the source of the original Grito, hangs on the wall above the beds. The hero's right hand holds his famous battle standard emblazoned with the image of the Virgin of Guadalupe (another allegorical figure associated with mother Mexico); his left shields his eyes from the shameful sight of the sleeping men.
The poem that serves as caption reads thus:
El pueblo entusiasmado vitorea
á aquellos que nos dieron Libertad,
y mientras tanto el gendarme arrea
al que grita y que toca ... ¡la mar!
En cambio los catrines, los patriotas (?)
se entregan á dormir la borrachera
y se olvidan de Hidalgo, cuyas gotas
de llanto caen sobre la patria tierra.
* * *
[The enthusiastic people cheer
those who gave us Liberty,
and meanwhile the policeman rounds up
those who shout and toot and [sound] ... the alarm!
In contrast, the catrines [dandies], the patriots (?)
dedicate themselves to sleeping off their drunkenness
and forget about Hidalgo, whose tears
of grief fall on the fatherland.]
As before, the poem's juxtaposition of the patriotic exuberance of ordinary men (identified as el pueblo) and the apathetic dozing of the privileged catrines clarifies the meaning of the image. Most of these clarifications are relatively straightforward: the people are celebrating Independence Day; the policemen are harassing them; the sleeping men are dandies; the dandies are sleeping off a drunk; the portrait depicts Hidalgo; Hidalgo is weeping tears of grief for the fatherland; and so on.
In this instance, however, the poet adds a more subtle touch in the form of an albur — a play on words. Especially popular among the working classes, albures could take many forms, including puns, double entendres, circumlocutions, and euphemisms. As part of the wordplay, practitioners often elided syllables, inverted letters, and truncated words to reflect popular usage and to open up different interpretive possibilities. Here, for example, the substitution of "la mar" for "la alarma" sets up a double meaning. In the original Spanish text, the phrase "toca ... ¡la mar!" (literally: "touch ... the sea!") refers to the unruly crowd and stands in for "toca ... ¡la alarma!" ("sound ... the alarm!"). At the most obvious level, the poet's use of the phrase "to sound the alarm," in reference to the celebrants graphically represented by the two bugles, works to portray the common people as alert citizens quick to respond to any threats to national sovereignty. At a more subtle level, the albur mocks officialdom's concern over disorderly public festivals and its perception of the crowds gathered in the Zócalo (Mexico City's main square) on the night of September 15 as a stormy "sea" of humanity, especially as seen from a balcony or rooftop, the preferred vantage points of the Porfirian elite.
If that weren't enough, in "¡VIVA la LIBERTAD!" the poet pushes the social critique even further than in the previous poem by advancing the notion, counterintuitive to Porfirian authorities and bourgeoisie critics, that the drunken sprees of self-absorbed elites pose a much greater threat to national well-being than the raucous but patriotic carousing of the popular classes. The absence of visible signs of alcohol consumption in the artist's depiction of the popular celebration — an absence unsubstantiated by most contemporary accounts, including those of La Guacamaya's editor and his penny press counterparts — supports the poet's idealized version of events.
The striking class differences depicted in the two illustrations are revealed as full-fledged class conflict by La Guacamaya's prominent masthead. Set within the newspaper's logo is a dramatic face-off in which a whip-wielding bourgeois cacique (boss man), dressed in frock coat, vest, and top hat, advances threateningly toward a stalwart blacksmith. The smithy, in shirtsleeves and leather apron, hammer resting on an anvil, stands fast with his chest thrust forward and feet firmly planted on the ground. In the center, slightly behind and above the two men, an angry parrot representing La Guacamaya — wings outspread, mouth open, tongue protruding — takes the blacksmith's part. The newspaper's motto, "OF THE PEOPLE AND FOR THE PEOPLE//INDEPENDENT WEEKLY DEFENDER OF THE WORKING CLASS," appears at the bottom of the masthead and leaves little room for misinterpretation.
Formal iconographic elements present in all three images further reinforce and deepen the basic message as articulated in the pictorial content and accompanying texts — an especially important supplementary effect given the uneven educational backgrounds of La Guacamaya's mostly working-class readership. Long-standing iconographic conventions in Western culture have used spatial relations within visual fields — left/right, up/down, foreground/background, big/small — as a way to represent inequalities of power and status. These formal conventions set up expectations, whether conscious or unconscious, on the part of viewers; expectations that the artist manipulates in order to reinforce, nuance, or even contradict an image's specific content. The three images from La Guacamaya do all of these things.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from A Sentimental Education for the Working Man by Robert M. Buffington. Copyright © 2015 Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press.
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