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Hispanic American Historical Review 81.1 (2001) 179-181



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Book Review

Mexico in the 1940s:
Modernity, Politics, and Corruption


Mexico in the 1940 s: Modernity, Politics, and Corruption. By STEPHEN R. NIBLO. Wilmington, Del: Scholarly Resources, 1999. Photographs. Illustrations. Tables. Bibliography. Index. xxv, 408 pp. Cloth, $55.00.

With Mexico in the 1940s, Stephen Niblo has written an excellent companion volume to his 1995 War, Diplomacy, and Development: The United States and Mexico, 1938-1954. Both books should be read by anyone interested in modern Mexico. The new book covers what one might call Mexico's long 1940s, from the Cárdenas administration's right turn in 1938 through the end of the Alemán presidency in 1952; thus, the two volumes share periodization. The two books also use similar sources: Niblo supplements the untrustworthy, sometimes inaccessible, and frequently insufficient documentation available from Mexico's central government with diplomatic records from Britain and the United States. The two books approach these sources in the same way. Niblo eschews close readings--there's no postcolonialist discourse analysis here--preferring to take documents more or less [End Page 179] at their word. Niblo has written a straightforward, "top-down" history of Mexican politics in this era, but readers should not mistake his clarity for lack of sophistication. Though he sometimes falters, on the whole Niblo makes a subtle argument here while also usefully summarizing what happened in Mexico in this complicated and understudied era.

The broad definition of "politics" employed in Mexico in the 1940s is entirely appropriate for a place and time with such an expansive state sector. Some of the strongest passages in the book are those dealing with organized labor, economic policy, and popular culture. (However, the first chapter entitled "Mosaic of an Era," which sketches demographic and cultural aspects of daily life, seems irrelevant to the argument developed in subsequent chapters.) Niblo suggests that the two most important aspects of Mexico's political development in this era were the growth of mass media and the institutionalization of corruption, and his book is most intriguing when it takes up those topics.

In chapter 6, "The Battle for Mexican Media," Niblo links World War II-era Allied and German propaganda efforts within Mexico to improvements in Mexican media technology and to a learning process on the part of the Mexican state. The state learned by observing successful and failed foreign propaganda campaigns that "indirect efforts" on behalf of existing media outlets worked far better than "crude, boring and obvious" newspapers or radio shows produced directly by the state (p. 355). This helps explain, in turn, how today's media empires arose through state support in the 1940s and how "pinnacle players in the media game" (p. 354) came to provide such firm support for the state. This chapter's diplomatic history of Mexican media has obvious affinities with Seth Fein's work on the history of Mexican film, but Niblo is trying to take on all the relevant media at once--not just film, but also print journalism, radio, and the nascent television industry--at the crucial and confusing moment "when channels of mass communication were being allocated for the foreseeable future" (p. 314). Niblo implies the possibility of a more nuanced version of the theory of cultural imperialism, one which recognizes that audiences do not learn from mass media "automatically what owners desired" even if "the central reality" of the situation in this decade was "influence flowing from the Great Powers toward countries such as Mexico" (p. 355). Proving this will require further evidence from earlier and later periods in Mexican media history--perhaps the World War II era was a special case?--but Niblo's argument provides an exciting starting point for new research.

Similarly, the chapter titled "The Politics of Corruption" breaks new ground in the study of postrevolutionary Mexico simply by recognizing the rise of kleptocracy as a key political development, and by setting up a taxonomy of corruptions, dividing "Direct Looting" (p. 257), "Kickbacks" (p. 263), "Hidden Deals" (p. 266), "Payments for...

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