Thirteenth International Conference on The Image

Abstract

This paper discusses the role of the Mexican picture press during the years of the early PRI regime (1946-1952). Despite the efforts to build a strong propaganda department like the ones of Brazil and Argentina, Mexico depended heavily on the collaboration of the press. This paper thus explores the different attempts to create a Mexican propaganda department, and how they ultimately fell short of their real objectives. For this reason, I propose that instead of defining the relationship between the Mexican State and the press as a submissive one, where government spin doctors were in charge, we should instead consider it as symbiotic, where both parties advanced their own interests (in the case of the State, propaganda, and in the case of the magazines, a secure income). The paper thus argues that the Mexican picture press cemented the early PRI’s hegemony by promoting president Alemán’s modernization program and covering up its corruption scandals. Finally, I discuss why the picture press became popular during the 1930s and 1940s in the US, Europe, and Mexico, and explain how the Mexican editors’ conservative ideology (Catholicism, anticommunism, and antilabor) went hand in hand with the PRI regime.