Increasing literacy rates and engagement with reading as a cultural practice in Mexico has been the focus of many postrevolutionary programs, yet studies show that few Mexicans choose to read on a regular, voluntary basis. While the image of Mexicans as nonreaders is a common theme in contemporary Mexican literature and popular culture, few studies exist on the topic. This article analyzes representations of the nonreader in Rosa Beltrán’s novel Efectos secundarios (2011) and the relationship of these portrayals to citizenship, cultural policy and management, the cultural industry, and the effects of neoliberalism in twenty-first-century Mexico. While novels such as El último lector ( Toscana 2004 ; The last reader) and advertising, such as that of the Gandhi bookstore chain, depict reading apathy as a personal failure on the part of Mexican citizens and a lack of volition to exercise what might be seen as a civic responsibility, Beltrán’s novel shows Mexican nonreaders as victims of a failed state marked by corruption, impunity, insecurity, and violence, which impede reading as a cultural practice. Because a reading public may be seen as vital for democracy, Beltrán’s novel invites critical engagement with key debates on reading and education policy, the politics of the Mexican publishing industry, and the effects of corruption and violence on the distribution of cultural goods.

Durante el porfiriato, la sociedad mexicana vivió una época de revoluciones tecnológicas que modificaron las formas de percibir el tiempo, la distancia y los sonidos. Uno de estos inventos fue el fonógrafo, creado por Thomas Alva Edison en 1877. Los usos sociales y culturales de las máquinas parlantes en el país incluyeron los más diversos rubros, desde la renta ambulante hasta la firma de contratos para trasformar el servicio de correos. Si bien los hombres tuvieron un papel protagónico en esta historia sonora, las mujeres porfirianas no fueron relegadas a un papel secundario de meras consumidoras domésticas de los aparatos. Mediante un examen de fotografías, diarios y peticiones gubernamentales, en este artículo muestro cómo, durante los días de la revolución eléctrica, las mexicanas también participaron en los procesos de grabación y comercialización de los fonogramas y los aparatos reproductores. Primero, abordo los casos de dos relevantes cantantes que lograron grabar sus voces en diferentes formatos, la soprano Ángela Peralta y la tiple Esperanza Iris. Después, documento las prácticas y las experiencias de las comerciantes que rentaron fonógrafos en las calles o los colocaron en sus negocios para atraer a clientes. El ensayo abre las puertas a una nueva historia de la relación entre las mujeres y las tecnologías acústicas en México, a la vez planteando preguntas y temas para investigaciones en otros países en América Latina.

Cultural analysts have noted similarities between Alfonso Cuarón’s Colonia Roma and José Emilio Pacheco’s Colonia Roma, depicted twenty years earlier in his best-selling novel Las batallas en el desierto (1981). But no one has examined how Pacheco’s work studies the emerging relationship between modernization and the racialization of space, which Cuarón’s film Roma later captured for a global audience. Pacheco’s depictions of a spatialized interaction between social classes in mid-twentieth-century Colonia Roma, I argue, offer an archeology of space, race, class, and modernity that attempts to counteract forces of social amnesia following a period of repression and censorship. Drawing on the critical practice of spatial studies, I look beyond the flat representation of space and study instead how a multidimensional spatialization depicted in this work reveals the legacy of Spanish colonial infrastructures of race and the emerging formulation of modernity. Indeed, Pacheco’s novel tells the story of repressed memories and unearths the infrastructures of a coloniality/modernity that continue to affect Mexico today.

Workers’ unions and political projects in postrevolutionary Chihuahua, specifically the border city of Ciudad Juárez, have remained largely unexamined by historians. Existing research in this state has mainly focused on the role of political and economic elites. In this article, I examine the rise of a radical labor wing spearheaded by the communist-leaning Cámara Sindical Obrera in the political, social, and economic milieu on the border throughout the 1930s. This wing encouraged a sense of internationalism and mass direct action. Once the Cárdenas regime ended, workers experienced significant setbacks at both the national and local levels. Scholars examining workers’ movements during the same period have identified divisions within the labor movement as the main reason behind the demise of communist unions within organized labor. I argue that the gradual co-optation of the radical wing of the labor movement, beginning in the 1940s, had more to do with the violence perpetrated against these unions by emergent statewide elites than with fractures within the movement. I demonstrate that violence, arrests, and outright murder of key leaders weakened communist unions by altering their internal mechanisms designed to remain independent. In this difficult context, organized labor responded to the challenge with different degrees of success.

Narconarratives often portray drug-trafficking culture through an “us versus them” or “friend versus enemy” Manicheism. This dichotomy erases the role of the government in the history of narcoviolence and reproduces a formulaic and a marketable “good versus evil” distinction commonly found throughout the Mexican literary field. In this article, I analyze two short stories that deconstruct this narrative, “Z” (Julián Herbert) and “Hombres armados” (Daniel Espartaco Sánchez), from the collection Narcocuentos . I approach these stories through the concept of biopolitics, emphasizing the relationship between state and (il)legal violence(s), as well as the authors’ positions in the literary field. These stories reframe the friend-versus-enemy rhetoric, offering unidentifiable perpetrators and victims instead. Moreover, they challenge the hegemonic discourse by using two figures that thrive at the boundaries between life and death: the zombie and the homo sacer . However, the anthology’s failure to attract a wide readership reveals that Herbert’s and Espartaco Sánchez’s attempts to subvert the traditional drug-trafficking “grand narrative” has not been commercially successful in challenging the deeply engrained us-versus-them Manicheism.

En este artículo se analizan algunos factores que influyen en los bajos niveles de malestar psicológico entre inmigrantes mexicanos en Estados Unidos. Para ese propósito, usamos las representaciones sociales como una perspectiva teórico-metodológica, constatando que los niveles de malestar psicológico entre este colectivo son menores que entre sus coterráneos en México. Asimismo, encontramos que los inmigrantes tienen una idea general sobre la ansiedad y depresión, asignándoles una connotación negativa. Estos aspectos, aunados a los objetivos económicos de su proyecto migratorio, son algunos de los factores que explicarían los menores niveles de autoreporte de malestar psicológico en los inmigrantes mexicanos en ese país.

Speculation about the causal relationship between the US panic of 1907 and the Mexican Revolution of 1910 has generated many hypotheses. We review the hypotheses of contemporary observers and recent historians. Our analysis begins with a timeline of events in both countries and then examines the available data for activities that are theoretically possible avenues for the international transmission of economic events, including trade and investment. Mexican wages, banking, and government debt levels are also examined for signs of stress. We conclude that the US panic and recession had little effect on revolutionary conditions in Mexico.

A body of nearly ninety criminal trials for abortion and infanticide in nineteenth-century Yucatán reveal some contradictory traits. On one hand, the testimony that licensed physicians provided to courts about the nature of the medicines that midwives and boticarios supplied to pregnant Mayan women was surprisingly respectful and supportive of these unlicensed health practitioners. The cases reveal both the ongoing practice of Mayan medicinal and botanical knowledge in obstetrical health at the close of the nineteenth century and, despite public rhetoric to the contrary, individual doctors’ tolerance of, or accommodation to, such practices. On the other hand, the local judges who tried these cases displayed much less accommodation to Mayan defendants, reflecting the pronounced Mayan and non-Mayan social and political tensions that characterized the era of the peninsula’s Caste War.

This article examines the emergence of the ban on women wrestlers from the sporting spectacle of lucha libre in Mexico City in the 1950s. Set against broader moral preoccupations about the growing popularity and visibility of lucha libre in Mexican society as a result of its broadcasting on television, luchadoras were seen as examples of transgressive femininity, which rendered attempts to make them invisible necessary. This work joins the efforts of scholars who write the history of women’s participation and exclusion from sporting activities and contributes to the growing fields of sports studies and studies of mass culture within Mexico.

This paper analyzes the roles played by the legislative, executive, and business sector in Mexico’s 2013 tax reform, drawing on original field-research findings. I examine each of these actors’ influence over the public period of congressional debate, as well as the typically invisible agenda-setting stage and the adoption of executive decrees following the legislative process. I find that Congress remains subordinated to the executive in budgetary matters and that business is more central in shaping the details of the tax bill. The tax reform achieved little, leaving the overall fiscal capacity of the Mexican State largely unchanged.

Humberto Mariles, medallista olímpico, general brigadier y destacado miembro de la élite política, cometió un homicidio en México y fue acusado de narcotráfico en Francia. Debido al impacto social que tuvieron, el análisis de estos incidentes y sus consecuencias en el declive público de Mariles, permiten asomarse a varios temas y ser abordados desde diversos enfoques. En este artículo estudio las investigaciones policiales, el juicio y la opinión pública. En mi análisis tomo en cuenta diversos aspectos como el perfil de Mariles, sus nexos con gobernantes y otros militares, facciones al interior del ejército, tensiones entre autoridades civiles y castrenses, y el sistema penal y críticas a la justicia. Asimismo, considero la importancia de ideas y valores, entre ellos el honor, que emergieron en los tribunales y en la prensa y que impactaron en el desenlace de estos incidentes.