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118 6 MEMORIES OF UNDERDEVELOPMENT La Familia Burrón and the Politics of Modernization Gabriel Vargas’s La Familia Burrón is uniquely valued as an expression of Mexican national identity that transcends demarcation between “high culture” and popular culture. The cultural imprint of Mexico’s one-time extensive comic book industry is felt in the sentimental and nostalgic remembering of the golden era of the 1940s through 1960s, when series like La Familia Burrón, Kalimán, Fantomas: La amenaza elegante (Fantomas: The Elegant Menace), and others enjoyed mass readerships under government supports for the domestic cultural market. In one recent news article, the Mexican comic book is lamented as a thing of the past: “a species gone extinct, or like many other expressions of the heart it has become an underground voice” (Olvera and Tapia). But La Familia Burrón is exceptional because Mexican intellectuals, cultural institutions, and government in recent years have formally and explicitly identified Vargas’s longrunning comic book series with the Mexican nation’s values, and with the social experience of its postrevolutionary process of modernization. La Familia Burrón is a cultural vehicle for collective memory, what sociologist Maurice Halbwachs describes as a group’s sense of the past “reconstructed on the basis of the present” (40). The reconstruction of the nation’s past that attaches to the Burrón series holds the celebrated comic close to the post–Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) present, despite the fact that its narrative and aesthetic formulae were initiated and perfected during the long period of state-led national development later mostly superseded by neoliberalism. Presi- La Familia Burrón and the Politics of Modernization 119 dent Vicente Fox, for example, linked the historic comic book’s characters to Mexicans’ social present by employing a national “we” when awarding Gabriel Vargas the National Arts and Sciences Prize in 2003: La Familia Burrón is comprised of “popular archetypes that are just as close to us as the people we know from our daily lives” (Presidency). As with the official comic books discussed in chapter 2, this kind of public celebration and interpretation of the Burrón series is evidence of the strategic importance of “lo popular” to both those who embrace neoliberal globalization as the new model for national development and those who are critical of the free-market model. La Familia Burrón offers a case study in how an artifact of popular culture, and the representation of national popular culture configured therein, can operate simultaneously within competing narratives of the national past and present, which is to say the symbolic crux of conflict over globalization. The special place accorded to La Familia Burrón in early-twenty-firstcentury Mexican culture is, at least in part, a consequence of the series’ status as not only the longest-lived Mexican comic book still in production today but also the oldest such publication in all of Latin America. Begun in 1939, the Burr ón series was published by Editorial Panamericana until 1977, when Gabriel Vargas ceased production over a contract dispute with the publisher. Vargas subsequently began producing the comic again in 1978, in conjunction with a daily comic strip printed in the midday edition of the newspaper Excélsior (Hinds and Tatum). Vargas has also published and distributed a weekly installment of the comic book since 1978. At ninety-two years old in 2007, Vargas has been lionized as a national cultural treasure, awarded the National Journalism Prize in 1983, the José Vasconcelos Medal in 2003, the National Arts and Sciences Prize in 2003, a postage stamp specially designated by Mexico City’s Legislative Assembly in 2004, the La Catrina Award of the International Conference of Caricaturists and Comic Book Artists in 2005, and the Pedro María Anaya Prize of the State of Hidalgo in 2006. In 2002 Spanish publishing house Editorial Porrúa began reissuing the post-1978 series in bound volumes (totaling twelve as of 2007, with plans for more to come). La Familia Burrón sales have declined significantly compared to the so-called golden era of Mexican comics—according to recent Vargas family numbers, distribution approximated 500,000 copies per week in the period 1950 to 1970, declining to 140,000 by 2003 (Olvera and Tapia). Interviews with Chicago-area Spanish-language retailers suggest that distribution of the comic in the United States had been significantly curtailed if not ceased altogether by 2005. Nonetheless, weekly installments...

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