Araceli Tinajero, J. Brian Freeman. Technology and Culture in Twentieth-Century Mexico. Tuscaloosa: University Alabama Press, 2013. x + 363 pp. $59.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8173-1796-6.
Reviewed by David Dalton (University of North Carolina, Charlotte)
Published on H-LatAm (September, 2019)
Commissioned by Casey M. Lurtz (Johns Hopkins University)
Araceli Tinajero and J. Brian Freeman’s ambitious edited volume, Technology and Culture in Twentieth-Century Mexico, is a compelling interdisciplinary project that uses technology as a vehicle for discussing twentieth-century Mexican society. As the editors point out in their introduction, “the vast majority of contributors to this volume are in some sense outsiders within the field of technology studies. Instead, most are scholars of Mexico who have found in technology a fresh perspective” (p. 2). The central thesis of the book is that the advent of technology cannot be divorced—nor understood separately—from the historical context from which it emerges. The editors divide the book into five sections that engage the idea of technology and nation in very different ways: “Health, Food, and the Home,” “Photography, Television, and Internet,” “Radio and Music,” “Railroads, Automobiles, and the Metro,” and “Art, Literature, and Architecture.” The book posits technology as a site of great tension in twentieth-century Mexico. The state aimed to use technological advancements to modernize the population. At the same time, the nation’s artists, architects, and political leaders often had incompatible ideas about how a technologically modern Mexico should look.
Any attempt to usher in a modern nation-state depended on the penetration of the home, as shown in the first section. Claudia Agostoni’s chapter discusses numerous ways the state aimed to improve both health and hygiene; “according to some Mexican physicians, hygienists, and sanitary engineers, only through cleanliness and hygiene would it be possible to improve the health of the people and contribute toward the order and progress of the nation” (p. 25). State officials attempted to improve Mexican culture by encouraging its population to wear clean clothing, to bathe frequently, and to boil water to fight microbes. Agostoni does not mention this directly, but the resulting improvements in health and hygiene helped to grow the working class. One key means for ensuring health and hygiene was the development of kitchen technologies, particularly appliances like refrigerators and blenders.
Sandra Aguilar-Rodríguez provides a fascinating discussion about the incorporation of these technologies into the postrevolutionary state. Fueled by import-substitution industrialization (ISI), Mexican consumers gained access to these appliances in the 1940s, but it would take a decade for them to enter all households. Kitchen appliances saved women a great deal of time on the domestic duties that generally fell to them, and this allowed them to engage in activities beyond the home.
Women became the principal protagonists in endeavors to modernize the nation. Mothers were key to ensuring their children’s nutrition, hygiene, and overall health. Joanne Hirschfeld provides an interesting discussion about a wide array of domestic technologies, ranging from the sewing machine to the coffeemaker. While state officials wanted to uphold conservative divisions between men and women, private businesses proclaimed to women that recent technological advances could give them more free time. Technological developments thus came to challenge certain gender divisions that continued to plague the nation.
Technological advancements played a key role in promulgating a nationalist visual culture, as the contributors point to in the second section. John Mraz begins this section by asserting that “photography and its offspring—cinema, television, video, digital imagery, Internet—have redefined the exchange of information and our very ways of knowing the world” (p. 73). Photography revolutionized Mexican politics: revolutionary leaders like Pancho Villa cultivated their image for the camera while postrevolutionary magazines fawned over the presidency and disseminated paternalistic imageries of the indigenous people whom the state aimed to incorporate into the modern state. As this technology developed, journalism—both good and bad—became available to illiterate sectors of society who previously could not access it.
This shift became all the more emphatic with the rise of television. The book includes both a historiographical chapter by Celeste González de Bustamante that contextualizes the rise of television within the political and historical moment and Carlos Monsiváis’s classic article “And Television Appeared among the Mexicans.” Translated by Lorna Scott Fox, Monsiváis had sent the authors a Spanish verison of this chapter in 2010, just a few months before his death. González de Bustamante focuses primarily on two contradictory elements of the early Mexican television industry. On the one hand, Miguel Alemán supported a for-profit television model that required advertising and an onus on entertainment; on the other hand, however, television was a key mode through which the state proclaimed official versions of mexicanidad. As a result, while television was profit-based, the state occasionally stepped in to ban supposedly immoral spectacles, like lucha libre (Mexican professional wrestling). The mexicanidad that television professed differed greatly from that of the revolutionary period because it was more cosmopolitan.
For his part, Monsiváis speaks—somewhat hyperbolically as was his style—about the “banality” and childishness that characterized early television: lucha libre, slapstick humor, and news reporters who shamelessly supported the regime in power. Monsiváis implies that television could not ensnare future generations quite so easily as this first one, but many of his critiques of the “awe generation”—or the first generation to have access to television—seem to hold equally true today (p. 112). Naief Yeyha finishes this section with a chapter about the internet and shows how advances in cyberspace have coincided with major cultural ruptures ranging from the Zapatista uprising to the drug war.
Vivianne Mahieux begins the three-chapter section on radio and music with a discussion of the literary and cultural debates associated with bringing the radio to Mexico City. Focusing primarily on Martín Luis Guzmán, who was affiliated with the Ateneo, and Carlos Noriega Hope, who was associated with the avant-garde estridentismo movement (a vanguardian movement that enjoyed a problematic relationship with the official discourses of postrevolutionary society), she provides a fascinating discussion of the debates surrounding radio and modernity. Guzmán saw the radio as a means for paternalistically educating a new national character, while Noriega Hope took a much more playful approach that emphasized radio as a way to create community. While they differed in many ways, both ultimately contributed to an Andersonian imagined community as they broadcast to the nation at large.
The following chapters show that Noriega Hope’s less-rigid ideas of radio ultimately won out. Ricardo Pérez Montfort, for example, discusses music as a site for resistance in the 1960s and 1970s. Whether appropriating US tunes over Mexican ones, writing music that denounced the government’s actions, or simply breaking away from the musical aesthetics that the state tried to impose, music—and, by extension, radio—became a key medium for challenging the state. Antoni Castells-Talens and José Manuel Ramos Rodríguez discuss another aspect of radio through their study of the Instituto Nacional Indigenista’s (INI) indigenous-language radio. These paradoxical programs were aimed at indigenous integration from the institutional level; nevertheless, they came to provide a space for indigenous self-representation. The state aimed to teach national identity to its listeners, but indigenous individuals used these programs to promulgate discourses to their own communities in their own language. Radio thus provided a means through which indigenous people could develop their own communities.
One of the most important technological developments of the twentieth century was the improvement of transportation, the focus of the fourth section. David M. J. Wood provides a fascinating discussion about railroad and film. It was not enough for the country to build railroads that spanned the country from coast to coast. Rather, the state made films to show the majesty of the national railroads. Wood offers interesting examples of Porfirian propaganda and, later, writes about how Francisco I. Madera filmed his trips across the country to highlight his appeal throughout Mexico.
No machine revolutionized postrevolutionary transportation more than the automobile. Freeman’s chapter examines the advent—and reception—of this technology. The automobile had entered Mexico during the final years of the Porfiriato. Nevertheless, these machines were hard to use outside of urban centers due to the insufficient infrastructure. Freeman focuses on how different poets and writers imagined the role of the automobile in society. Some loved it, but others saw it as a monster. Some government officials viewed cars as a public health threat, and many foreign tourists lamented the Americanization of Mexico when they saw these vehicles speeding across city roads. Nevertheless, because automobiles clearly indicated a person’s social class and status, they were destined to expand throughout the country.
Juan Villoro rounds this section out with an essay that addresses the development of the subway system in Mexico City. While this essay at times opts for the verbose, it engages interesting questions about space and identity in the capital. The subway is the transportation system that gets working-class Mexicans around the city, and it is the only place where the city truly exists on a grid. Viewed in their totality, the chapters from this section identify and challenge issues in the area of transportation in Mexico.
The final section of the book discusses literary and cultural approximations to technology. Lynda Klich provides an essay about estridentismo by focusing primarily on Manuel Maples Arce, the movement’s leader, and Jean Charlot, a poet, muralist, and woodcarver. As this chapter examines the deep ties between the expansion of technology and the modernization of rural (read: indigenous) Mexico within estridentista thought, it shows the extent to which this supposedly marginal movement sat at the fore of postrevolutionary imaginaries regarding modernity.
Anna Indych-López furthers this line of inquiry through a masterful reading of Diego Rivera’s artwork. Unlike most of the previous literature, which has viewed the muralist’s technophilia and mestizophilia as completely separate from one another, Indych-López shows how these were two sides of the same coin. Indeed, in many cases, indigenismo and technological modernity were viewed as one and the same. One of her most fascinating observations is that, for Rivera, the representation of technology was often employed in a didactic sense. The muralist occasionally used anachronic representations of technology with the goal of showing exciting scientific realities to his viewers.
The final two chapters deal more directly with technology in Mexico in the present. Erja Vettenranta discusses the term “homo scribens,” which she develops in conversation with Naief Yehya’s “homo cyborg.” Essentially, she envisions homo scribens as a lettered figure of the digital age who engages technology either through traditional media like the novel or a person who explores with internet technology to revolutionize the nature of writing. This chapter moves away from Mexico-specific topics; the evolution of narrative through technology has been a conversation within comparative literature for quite some time. Vettenrata’s focus at times feels so geared toward breadth that it sacrifices depth, but this chapter will be useful for scholars of narrative and technology both in Mexico and throughout Latin America for years to come.
The final chapter, by Edward R. Burian, provides an interesting discussion of the ways architectural culture has reflected discourses of modernity in Mexico throughout the country’s history. The chapter focuses primarily on the architecture of the 1968 Olympic Games, which showcased the technological precision and artistic taste of modern Mexico. Nevertheless, Burian frames the chapter within a context in which “architecture in Mexico has engaged the international avante garde since the late eighteenth century and the modernist agenda of technical rationalism, functionalism, and modularization since the mid-nineteenth century” (p. 326). This particular chapter will be useful to scholars interested in architecture itself and those interested in situating Mexican architecture within a broader context.
In conclusion, Technology and Culture in Twentieth-Century Mexico is an important book that uses a broad definition of technology to theorize how technology interfaced with the country’s culture during a twentieth century that saw a great deal of change. Its highly interdisciplinary scope, coupled with the diversity of essays, means that it will be of use to Mexicanists, Latin Americanists, and scholars of technology studies for years to come.
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Citation:
David Dalton. Review of Tinajero, Araceli; Freeman, J. Brian, Technology and Culture in Twentieth-Century Mexico.
H-LatAm, H-Net Reviews.
September, 2019.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=53825
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