A Sentimental Education for the Working Man: The Mexico City Penny Press, 1900 – 1910 by Robert M Buffington (review)

Robert M. Buffington, Professor of Women and Gender Studies at the University of Colorado, Boulder, has written extensively on Mexican history. Buffington published a monograph: Criminal and Citizen in Modern Mexico (University of Nebraska Press, 2000), as well as several articles, and edited a volume with Pablo Piccato entitled True Stories of Crime in Modern Mexico (University of New Mexico Press, 2009). As such, he is an acknowledged authority on Mexican history. The author utilizes twenty-seven Mexico City penny press newspapers to illustrate how the editors of these papers produced a sentimental education for working-class men that was "less patronizing, less coercive, more realistic, and more comprehensive than anything produced by the authorities" (5).

The first two chapters explore efforts by the penny press to construct popular alternatives to official stories and discuss how editors attempted to forge bonds of affection between popular figures like Miguel Hidalgo and Benito Juárez and the working class. In essence, penny press editors plucked liberal icons from official histories, reinterpreted them as working-class heroes, and used them to criticize Porfirio Díaz's regime. Mexican Independence leader Hidalgo's courage in the face of betrayals by his countrymen who colluded with imperialist Spaniards resonated with penny press criticisms that an unholy alliance between Díaz and foreigners impoverished Mexico. Similarly, penny press canonization of Juárez, the hero of the War of the Reform and the French Intervention, proved an excellent way to subvert official patriotic discourse because Juárez and Díaz had a tumultuous relationship. Penny press editors skillfully employed Juárez to make sarcastic references to Díaz. When Francisco Bulnes, a friend and favorite of Díaz, issued a blistering anti-Juárez polemic, the penny press savaged him as a traitor to the country. Editors assumed Bulnes spoke for Díaz and deplored Don Porfirio's seeming attempt to denigrate their Juárez, a martyr and a working-class hero. Ultimately, the penny press helped forge a new national identity in which working-class men were "the true patriots whose hard work and steadfast devotion would one day realize the nation's destiny and redeem the noble sacrifice of its immortal champions" (97). In disseminating this vision, the penny press argued that the working-class were "the people."

From the reinterpretation of Hidalgo and Juárez, Buffington moves to analysis of penny press efforts to write working-class men into the national narrative as active participants. Editors argued that the "humble but heroic contributions" of the working-class to nation-building "warranted their inclusion, not as passive beneficiaries but as full-fledged rights-bearing citizens" (101). Penny press editors emphasized the heroism of the Niños Héroes, the six military cadets defending Chapultepec Castle during the Mexican-American War who chose suicide over surrender. They also praised the small Mexican force that fought a larger U.S. force to a standstill, before being defeated, at the battle of Churubusco during the war. Buffington asserts that penny press editors were not so much embracing a "popular liberalism" as a "liberal populism" that "served as both precedent and model for the shifting political logics that would characterize the 1910 Revolution" (135).

The remaining chapters study working-class men as gendered subjects and "reconstruct penny press efforts to constitute working-class men as men" (139). In contrast to middle-class ideas about civic virtue, well-behaved male citizens, and character, penny press editors mocked these ideas and contended working-class men were the embodiment of the people. Chapter Four examines Pitacio and Chema, two protagonists of a street talk column and analyzes three representative stories. While Buffington should be commended for translating and deciphering the often difficult to comprehend slang, this chapter might have been strengthened by the inclusion of a few more stories. Chapter Five considers the figure of Don Juan Tenorio...