Bad Language, Naked Ladies, and Other Threats to the Nation: A Political History of Comic Books in Mexico (review)

Bad Language, Naked Ladies, and Other Threats to the Nation: A Political History of Comic Books in Mexico. By Anne Rubenstein. Durham: Duke University Press, 1998. 210 pp. Cloth, $49.95. Paper, $17.95.

Among the enormous wealth of popular cultural productions in Mexico none occupies a more glorious place than the comic book. For many humble consumers of culture, comic books may be all that they read on any sustained level and may, in fact, be the key to any level of literacy they have. Comic books in Mexico have often served as a forum for biting social satire and the revision of social roles that--until at least twenty years ago--continued to remain rigidly defined in that country. Comic books have also provided political education, or even basic civic information, especially in the series prepared by Rius. Like other forms of popular culture, comic books have often been the bearers of information about changing social and political patterns, while others, with the virtual abolition of censorship that has occurred in post-modern, post-PRI hegemony Mexico, have indulged in the scatological, the erotic, and the pornographic. Finally, major artists like Rius have attracted important critical attention to the comic book, with the result that there is now an important bibliography of research on the Mexican comic book from numerous scholarly perspectives.

Rubenstein's book is a superb contribution to this bibliography. Making use essentially of a historical and cultural studies approach, she surveys the emergence of the comic book in Mexico, the controversies surrounding its social function and its morality, and the sorts of audiences it had or were imagined to have. Rubenstein is particularly interested in the issue of cultural conservatism, the ideology by which governmental agencies and sectors of societies (such as the church) that had access to those agencies attempted to exercise control over cultural production. In the years following the Mexican revolution, it soon became very apparent that the groups and individuals who assumed control of the state were interested in making use of culture to further their own understanding of how to go about creating a modern Mexico. It is widely recognized that such an interest in the possibilities of utilizing culture in the furtherance of a revolutionary agenda is responsible for some of the best work to have come out of Mexico in the twentieth century. The standard icon in this regard is the muralist tradition. However, it is probable that Mexican filmmaking would not have had the enormous development it saw in the first third of this century had it not been for government interest and support, and certainly the theater owes much to governmental programs, as do other forms of traditionally elite cultural production.

However, it has eventually become both possible and necessary to question the sort of cultural hegemony this official support came to constitute, both in terms of what it meant for what did get produced via subsidy and in terms of what either did not get produced or what was produced outside the scope of such subsidies. Of course, there existed, from the beginning, cultural manifestations that were either alternative or opposed to official culture (which is one way in which the contemporáneos group can be approached), but the retardation of a distinctly urban novel (with the exception of the potboilers of the irksome Luis Spota) can be attributed in part to the enormous official emphasis on the rural and the provincial, the folkloric and the indigenista. In a certain sense, the Mexican comic book filled the gap of the thinness of a record of urban cultural fiction. The comic book is narrative fiction, and, although there were other interests (some of Rius's best work is in series like Los supermachos and Los agachados, which tended to echo...