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

For readers who have ever been embarrassed by their ignorance of Porfirian workers’ slang, help is finally at hand. Robert Buffington’s exploration of the penny press that targeted Mexico City’s popular classes at the end of the 19th century is a complex and ambitious work—the ambition is reflected in the title—resting on uncommonly accomplished textual analyses.

Not every cultural historian might grasp that “con paciencia y saliva” refers to the adage of the amorous elephant and the ant (191). Buffington does; he also teaches readers how to say cop, chick, and bullshit in the slang of the time (95), and he introduces “the traditional lambskin condom” (155). Duke University Press is to be congratulated on reproducing extensive Spanish-language quotations to accompany Buffington’s translations. Such raw material is educational in its own right. In Buffington’s hands, it serves the loftier purpose of tackling four questions central to any press history: 1) how are papers produced, 2) how are they read, 3) what is their instrumental role in society and politics, and 4) what do their histories reflect of a broader society? The book aims at a psychohistory of the working classes in their public and private roles, an exploration of the “structures of feeling” (35) that underpin both their citizenship and their subjectivities.

The first question Buffington addresses is the most straightforward. Even though individual biographies are difficult to come by for people working in the press, their work makes it plain that editors, writers, and cartoonists came from the working and artisan classes themselves, constituting a body of organic intellectuals who were highly literate and multi-talented. (The question of “working-class authenticity” is dismissed as a red herring.) These qualities were essential, because some papers were virtual one-man shows; yet, the economics added up, as the number of papers and their comparative longevity and circulation estimates prove. As long as paper continued to come in from the government’s San Rafael paper factory—the equivalent of the parastatal paper conglomerate PIPSA (one of assorted continuities with the PRI’s dictablanda)—the papers went out, bearing critiques of Porfirian policy, guidelines for a working-class nationalism, a militant working-class liberalism, and a working-class culture of alternative respectability and companionate gender relations.

The second question, how those messages were read, is the most complicated. How much sentimental education did readers get? Given uncertainty even about who those readers were (though Buffington suggests that in the main they were artisans, still a substantial proportion of the city’s population) this is to some extent impenetrable. Style may have been as attractive as substance: the papers continued and advanced a nononsense prose, punchy and above all idiomatic. Commentary relied heavily on satire, usually Horatian—a generalized mockery—with occasional incursions into the personal and Juvenalian, as when Francisco Bulnes criticized Juárez and was drawn disappearing headfirst down the loo (89). In Caricatura y poder político (2009), Fausta Gantús has argued that the political criticism of cartoonists from the 1880s often went over the heads of an illiterate population distanced from elite politics. It is hard to know: dead workers tell few tales.

Nevertheless, it is possible to reason backwards from the leading papers’ success. In a highly competitive market, a Darwinian logic surely applies: if working-class, new age men were not to readers’ taste, those readers would probably have found something else to read. They did not. The obvious conclusion is that readers understood largely what the as the writers intended as they crafted working-class, national heroes (Hidalgo and Juárez) and an incipiently radical working-class politics, 2) endorsed the “less savory aspects of working class culture” (138), squaring the circle of respectability and subversive authenticity, and 3) promoted more egalitarian gender relations. Theirs was a...