Childhood and Modernity in Mexico City: Print Media and State Power during the “Mexican Miracle”

In post-1940 Mexico City, images and discourses of childhood proliferated in print media. While the state monitored all media, critics of the ruling party managed to communicate failures of Mexico’s post-revolutionary modernization project through discussions of children’s socioeconomic conditions and real or imagined moral corruption. Photojournalists turned their cameras to the capital’s burgeoning child population to document child poverty and, to a lesser extent, idealize childhood. In combination, these efforts worked ideologically to promote the notion that all children, at least in theory, deserved a modern, protected childhood.