Radio Nation: Communication, Popular Culture, and Nationalism in Mexico, 1920-1950 (review)

Radio Nation: Communication, Popular Culture, and Nationalism in Mexico, 1920-1950. By JOY ELIZABETH HAYES. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2000 . Photographs. Illustrations. Tables. Figures. Notes. Index. xx, 154 pp. Cloth, $35 .00 .

The convergence of emerging broadcasting industries and centralizing states in the 1930 s-50s had enormous consequences for the industrializing nations of Latin America. In Mexico, Argentina, and Brazil, in particular, the rise of radio appeared to go hand in hand with a newly powerful federal bureaucracy's desire to mold the political, economic and cultural nation. Radio's significance is axiomatic and oft-mentioned, but rarely studied in depth. Hayes's account of this process in Mexico begins to reveal the complexity behind the state/radio convergence, opening up several fruitful avenues of historical inquiry.

Hayes shows that the will of the state was often greater than its skill: in Mexico; the broadcasts of the Ministry of Public Education, for example, were a failure. Targeted listeners resorted to sabotage and subterfuge in order to tune into commercial stations instead. Nonetheless, through a combination of legislation, propaganda, and what might be termed collegial pressure on major commercial broadcasters, the Mexican state, under Cárdenas in particular, succeeded in fostering a patriotic broadcasting palette. Hayes is at her best in showing how broadcasting grew under the state umbrella and simultaneously accommodated the commercial and cultural influence of U.S. broadcasting.

At times, Hayes glosses over the resulting complexity of radio. The author briefly discusses singer Agustín Lara, the biggest star of the period, but does not acknowledge that his shadowy urban melodramas do not conform to her description of a broadcast musical arena dominated by idyllic portraits of a traditional countryside. This is related to the author's unconvincing contention that both radio and nation were "antimodern," because they "actively resist the concept of modernity--the idea that human social relations are . . . increasingly abstract, individualized and future-directed" (p. xviii). This is so only if one believes that modernity undermines community of any kind. The reverse seems to be true--in destroying local, hierarchical, relatively closed communities, modernization makes possible the "virtual," imagined, expansive, relatively open communities typified by both modern nations and networks of broadcasters and listeners. In this respect, the very qualities that Hayes suggests as the "antimodern dimensions" of radio--"its capacity to collapse space and time, simulate corporeal contact, and create a virtual common space coterminous with the nation"--seem to be its most modern characteristics. For a working-class listener of the 1930 s, finally, what could be more "future directed" than buying a radio on the installment plan? Hayes admits complexities in this regard, but in the process her concept of "antimodernity" takes on contradictions that cannot be resolved.

These caveats notwithstanding, Hayes's insights into radio, state, and market give us a good schematic map of radio's central place in the creation of modern Mexico. Without doubt, this work will prove a spur to future historical research.