Mexico, la patria! Propaganda and Production during World War II (review)

Now that archivists in Washington, D.C. are too young to contribute research tips based on their personal experience of World War II, Monica Rankin offers a reminder from a new generation that much remains to be examined about Latin America and World War II. Rankin discovered and analyzed a distinct national melody of the Mexican revolutionary state forming in the midst of the global propaganda cacophony between 1933 and 1946. Even better, she presents new definitions and uses them as a point of departure to ask deeper questions about the foundations of the Mexican Miracle that followed World War II. The years between 1933 and 1946 were used to develop and put into place the essential shared conceptual foundations that infused many policies of the subsequent Mexican miracle period.

After a splendid introduction, the book’s last four chapters provide new, cutting edge and original knowledge. Instead of considering the entire Western Hemisphere as a whole, Rankin brilliantly demonstrates the need to look closely and exclusively at one country at a time. One wonders what scholars would find if they looked at Brazil or Peru in the same fashion. To begin, the source base of the book is excellent. Whereas other authors based their investigations only on U.S. Office of Inter-American Affairs (OIAA) records, her book solidly stands on material from Mexico’s Dirreción General de Información; Dirección General de Recursos, Materiales, y Servicios; the Ramo Presidente Avila Camacho; and the archive of the Secretaría de Relaciones Exteriores. In the United States, she consulted Nelson Rockefeller’s personal papers in addition to the OIAA.

This book discovered three distinct phases of wartime propaganda. First, between 1933 and 1941, propaganda was run by economic sectors following ideas of a world that would be increasingly economistic, following U.S. concepts. No wonder the themes of hemispheric security and the need of allied victory were at its center. Second, between 1941 and 1943 Mexico became part of a U.S.-led Allied propaganda initiative in the Americas and then government agencies reshaped themes and approach. A most original contribution is her detailed analysis of 110 Mexican propaganda examples. The achievement of national greatness and domestic priorities gained the upper hand over terms related to hemispheric and global military campaigns. Whereas earlier presidents had argued that the Mexican Revolution was a unique world event, the Avila Camacho administration now linked it with one future world inspired by democracy and freedom. Perhaps one should add how strongly Presidents Cárdenas and Avila Camacho also rejected Stalinist and Trotskyite models, even during months when the United States was Stalin’s most important ally against Hitler.

In the 1940s, the growth of print media, film and radio broadcasting created communal visual and audio experiences that provided imagined experiences of a more modern, cohesive, but also economistic, Mexico. Rather than following Allied war propaganda needs, Mexican shapers of propaganda reformulated internationalist propaganda until themes of national unity, industrial production and economic protectionism stood at its center. It was a paradox: here the rejection of top-down U.S. propaganda themes led to deeper participation in the Allied cause.

In the third phase, from 1944 to 1946, Mexican leaders used wartime economic propaganda to prepare for a planned economic takeoff expected to take place in the immediate future. Here Rankin discovers continuity from early 1930s Cardenismo which had been the first to breathe air into the newly formed figurine of the typical, future Mexican homo economicus. Production, industrialization and modernization became core symbols on Mexico’s banners, not political ideologies. The Mexican miracle that followed, once again led by industry and agribusiness, was intimately connected to pre-1945. Future chronological explanations beware.

Mexico linked wartime propaganda not simply to economic warfare measures. Rankin convincingly shows the manipulation of economic warfare symbolism until it contributed to the foundational mind-set of the economic policies...