Viva la historieta: Mexican Comics, NAFTA, and the Politics of Globalization

5. Empire at Work: Comic Books and Working-Class Counterpublics

92 5 EMPIRE AT WORK Comic Books and Working-Class Counterpublics Reading comic books is generally prohibited on the job—except, that is, when the comic book in question is part of the internal communications strategy of the employer. The Mexican auto parts enterprise Rassini, for example, distributes to its 4,550 employees Contacto Comix, thematic stories featuring fictional company workers Lupita Bujes Maquinado y Resortes and Pepe de la Muelle Disco Ybarra. Installments in the series refer the reader to company-defined values “such as leadership, team work, or annual production goals set by management ” (Ramírez Tamayo). Produced on contract with ¡Ka-boom! Estudio, the comic book characters are intended to facilitate factory workers’ identification with company directives and norms. Lupita’s and Pepe’s extended surnames identify them with the automotive commodities produced in Rassini’s factories —spark plugs (bujes), springs (resortes), shocks (muelle), discs (disco)—and the female character reflects an effort to target communication to the high percentage of female workers in several Rassini plants. Lupita, in fact, had replaced an earlier character named Pancho Socavón (“socavón” means mineshaft), who represented the company’s mining division until the early 1990s, when the mining concern was sold to a Canadian corporation. Lupita and Pepe can be viewed as popular cultural vehicles for what philosopher Michel Foucault famously called “the power of the Norm” (184), a principle of efficiency, productivity, and behavioral control applied systematically to the social body by modern institutions as diverse as prisons, schools, and factories . The fictional cartoon workers of Contacto Comix model a work ethic and Work: Comic Books and Working-Class Counterpublics 93 personal morality that seek to fit the factory worker like a standardized gear into the company’s productive machinery. Lupita and Pepe are consistently depicted peering in through windows and doors onto the private lives of Rassini employees like smiling, animated surveillance devices. It is no exaggeration to say that the comic book envisions and promotes the workplace morality preferred by company management through the same kind of panoptic visuality—Lupita and Pepe always observing and judging employees’ behavior, no matter whether at home or on the job—that Foucault diagnosed in nineteenth-century prison architecture. Looked at with this normalizing function in mind, one can see in Rassini’s comic a tool, or even weapon, deployed as an adjunct to labor politics —further evidence of how comic books circulate amid the clash of social class interests that occurs as a matter of course within the globalized capitalist system of production. What of comics that stake out a position on the other side of the class divide ? While the Rassini comic suggests a steering mechanism at the service of business interests who would manage workers’ comportment and workplace identity, there are also comics that are representative of efforts by working-class organizations or their political allies to foment critique, popular resistance, and mass opposition to dominant business. Two interesting, albeit rare, variants in this category are comics published by labor unions and comics published by working-class neighborhood organizations. In both cases, these types of graphic discourse can directly counterbalance the social messaging of official comics, such as the Fox and López Obrador texts discussed in chapter 2, and the corporate didactics of business comics, like Rassini’s workplace comic, or the monthly corporate brand comic published by the Farmacias de Similares pharmacy chain (see Las aventuras del Dr. Simi in chapter 7). Graphic narrative at the service of social critique has occupied a significant niche in Mexican comics culture for some time—if a bit faded in recent years relative to its profile in the 1970s and 1980s. Comics as social critique is most notably visible in the prolific work of internationally renowned political cartoonist Rius (Eduardo del Río) and, more recently, Rafael Barajas, alias El Fisgón (The Snoop), a political cartoonist for the daily newspaper La Jornada. In an important sense, the work of these artists, among others, partakes of a modern Mexican tradition of socially engaged graphic arts that runs through José Guadalupe Posada’s print-making in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and later the radical Taller de Gráfica Popular (TGP) of the 1930s onward. Rius, in fact, pointedly disassociates himself from the Mexican comic Work: Comic Books and Working-Class Counterpublics 94 book industry in...