This article looks at civil society in 1950s Mexico. To do so, it examines the popular responses to the murder of a local taxi driver, Juan Cereceres. It argues that both newspapers and civil-society organizations took the murder seriously, interrogated government findings, attempted to discover the real culprits, and sought a degree of justice. In all, the story asks historians to reassess both the extent and the force of civil society under the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI).

This essay analyzes citizenship in Latin America, providing both comparative context and a schema for the phenomenon in Mexico. It identifies a region-wide “century of citizenship” that ran from the rise of liberal regimes in the 1850s to the eclipse of populist government in the 1960s, using concepts from historical sociology to discuss the common outlines of citizenship and the extent to which they apply or fail to apply to Mexican history. Key among those outlines are the prevalence of the ideas and practices of citizenship, both inside and outside of the state’s formal structures, and the spaces and places where those ideas and practices are developed and perpetuated. It concludes with the exploratory typology of the “four B s,” the processes through which historical actors build, form boundaries, bicker over, and break citizenship.

El artículo caracteriza las balmoreadas –fiestas efectuadas en domicilios privados de la ciudad de México entre 1925 y 1931– como espacios de sociabilidad bohemia. Estas fiestas tenían un fin moralizante: exhibir los efectos nocivos de la ambición económica que movía a muchas personas en la sociedad urbana posrevolucionaria. Al mismo tiempo, sin embargo, las veladas servían como espacios privados de diversión, esparcimiento y aceptación de la diversidad sexual, que desafiaban las convenciones del género y la sexualidad en espacios públicos. El artículo se centra en los significados de expresión de esta diversidad sexual que han sido escasamente analizados en la literatura historiográfica anterior.

This article examines debates about the bodies and souls of women prostitutes in Mexico City that confronted the revolutionary Mexican government with the Catholic Church in the 1920s. We analyze the philanthropic activities of women’s organizations such as the Damas Católicas through the Ejército de Defensa de la Mujer and the ways in which they engaged in political roles at a time of fierce political struggle between the Catholic Church and the Mexican government. For both the government and Catholic women, it was deemed necessary to isolate and seclude the prostitutes’ bodies to cure them of venereal diseases and rehabilite them morally. While the government interned them at Hospital Morelos, Catholic women established a private assistance network, as well as so-called casas de regeneración , where former prostitutes had to work to sustain themselves while repenting for their sins and receiving the sacraments. By exploring the tension-filled interaction about women prostitutes between the Mexican government and the Catholic Church, we seek to contribute to the understanding of sexuality and prostitution in Mexico City in the 1920s.

La Glorieta de Insurgentes –una importante plaza y estación de metro de la ciudad de México– es punto de sociabilidad para diferentes sujetos marginados, entre ellos grupos de personas LGBT+. En este ensayo analizo la relación entre la producción social de este lugar, las sociabilidades que ahí surgieron y el proceso de gentrificación actual en la zona que buscan expulsar a estas poblaciones. La discusión se centra en las formas en que la aparición pública –quién puede y quién no puede ser visto en el espacio público– se conducen como un proceso de place making , entendido como un proceso abierto, participativo y de disputa en la producción y mantenimiento de espacios públicos. El artículo analiza algunas de las disputas alrededor de esta glorieta, mostrando cómo las trasgresiones al orden de género, clase e identidad sexual pueden ser marginadas, negociadas o segregadas a ciertos espacios donde se toleran o incluso se aprovechan comercialmente.

Alongside all the other functions of movie theaters over the past century, in Mexico City men have used them as sexual spaces. A few cinemas like the Cine Teresa became notorious as sites in which men could find male sex partners. Yet even there, behaviors of and narratives by men who had sex with men mirrored those by men who had sex with women. This article focuses on the history of masculine sexuality in Mexico City movie houses from 1920 to 2010. The presence of women in these houses, either as workers, on the screen, or in men’s memories, along with the presence of men who went there to watch heterosexual sex on the movie screen, suggests that moviegoing in Mexico City can be analyzed through the lens of gender history as much as through that of the history of sexuality. Despite major social, cultural and technological changes over the twentieth century, examining movie audiences in terms of the histories of sexuality and gender reveals a startling amount of continuity in movie theaters as spaces of male sexuality.

This article examines how some Catholic women, through their participation in an Acción Católica campaign, protested what they believed was the immoral nature of an expanding consumer culture: the movies, magazines, fashions, and comic books that inundated Mexico—particularly Mexico City—in the 1950s. Through this campaign, these women sought to construct an ideal form of Catholic womanhood that was both modern and moral—one that embraced modesty and sexual purity as a way for Mexico to modernize and progress. While the campaign had its roots in papal directives and was part of transnational discourses about morality, the Mexican women who participated saw their actions, nevertheless, in nationalistic terms. A modern Mexico, they argued, needed to have a strong moral base in order to be economically and politically successful; thus the morality they espoused centered on constraining women’s sexual expression.

Este ensayo analiza las experiencias de exilio de Adolfo Salazar y Miguel de Molina, dos hombres homosexuales que se vieron forzados a abandonar España para escapar de la violencia de la Guerra Civil (1936–39) y de la intolerancia del franquismo y buscar refugio en la ciudad de México con el fin de rehacer sus vidas y carreras profesionales, cada uno tomando caminos diferentes. El objetivo de este artículo es brindar un primer acercamiento a una dimensión de la vida de algunos refugiados españoles que hasta ahora ha sido escasamente estudiada, a saber: su identidad sexual. El artículo muestra que, como exiliados, la identidad sexual fue un elemento central a la hora de construir o reconstruir redes de sociabilidad en la sociedad receptora, un factor determinante para el éxito o fracaso de sus experiencias profesionales individuales.

In October 1931, Governor Bartolomé García Correa and Socialist Party activists violently closed Carlos R. Menéndez’s Diario de Yucatán for being reactionary. Defenders of the Diario denounced the governor for illegally silencing the voice of what today we would understand to be civil society. After a seventeen-month struggle in the courts, the national press, and in Mexico City’s bureaucracy, Menéndez prevailed. This article closely examines the conflict, using regional and national archives and abundant contemporary press coverage, paying careful attention to discursive expression of socioethnic inequalities. It reveals significant limits on the regional independent press and the concept of civil society during the formative period in postrevolutionary Mexico known as the Maximato (the 1928–35 era dominated by Plutarco Elías Calles as hyperexecutive or Jefe Máximo). During the Maximato, the postrevolutionary state employed authoritarian measures to centralize power. The Maximato state, however, could not govern without acknowledging both the Constitution of 1917’s classical liberal civil rights, such as freedom of the press and guarantees of associational life, and the revolutionary political legacy of popular action against “reaction.” In the Yucatecan case, the muzzling of the regional independent press was not simply top-down illiberalism. Yucatecan socialists believed it would help create a more egalitarian and inclusive socio-political order to supplant civil society. The Diario ’s exclusivist definition of civil society and the national press’s personal attacks on García Correa reflected widespread beliefs that people of indigenous and African descent were incapable of taking part in civic life. While Menéndez eventually prevailed in the courts, it was due more to his economic and cultural capital and prominent Mexico City allies than to legal protections for press freedom or civil-society resistance. The case helps us to understand how the latter two varied so significantly over place and time in postrevolutionary Mexico, and why Tocquevillian notions of civil society require careful qualification when applied to poor, overwhelmingly indigenous regions of Mexico.

Los esfuerzos bélicos en Norteamérica en la costa del Pacífico durante la Segunda Guerra Mundial reavivaron el flujo turístico hacia la ciudad de Tijuana. Pero el protagonismo que habían mantenido los negocios turísticos, desde la llamada “era de las prohibiciones”, respecto a la organización del espacio se vio mermado ante las demandas de la creciente población mexicana entre las décadas de 1940 y 1950. El propósito de este artículo es describir cómo en esta nueva concentración urbana las facultades ciudadanas empezaron a manifestarse mediante la participación colectiva en acciones y discursos que pugnaron siempre por mantener la cohesión social a través del mejoramiento social, material y moral de la ciudad.

This article examines the political activism of conservative civil society in postrevolutionary Mexico through the lens of American service clubs. It focuses on the case of the Rotary Club of Monterrey, which gathered the city's industrial elites and some of the most vocal opponents of the Mexican state, particularly the presidency of Lázaro Cárdenas (1934–40). Monterrey is significant because of its economic and political clout; by the 1930s, it was the powerhouse of heavy industry and in the 1940s a key center of support for the Partido Acción Nacional. After Monterrey Rotarians dissolved their club in 1936, following a disagreement with Rotary International's policy against political involvement, they regrouped and established throughout Mexico the only service club that blended pro-business goals with right-wing hispanidad ideology: the Club Sembradores de Amistad. This story illustrates how conservative civil society in Mexico adopted seemingly contradictory transnational influences (Catholic Hispanist thought and American service clubs) to challenge the postrevolutionary state in a less confrontational way.

El donativo fue una institución fundamental en la organización imperial de la monarquía hispánica, tanto en el Mediterráneo como en las Indias. La Corona, sin haber creado un sistema directo de representatividad política en América, puso en práctica una metodología de recaudación alternativa a las asambleas representativas y centrada en los donativos voluntarios. Así, inauguró en el Nuevo Mundo un proceso extraordinario para la recaudación de recursos necesarios en la gestión imperial de sus intereses. En la primera mitad del siglo xvii un gobernador de Filipinas y un presidente de la Audiencia guatemalteca pidieron donativos voluntarios a los titulares de oficios sujetos a sus respectivas jurisdicciones, reforzando así el régimen fiscal del donativo en las Américas. Donation systems were fundamental in the imperial organization of the Spanish monarchy, both in the Mediterranean and the Indies. The Crown, without creating a direct system of political representation in America, implemented fundraising systems emphasizing voluntary donations as an alternative to representative assemblies. Thus commenced an extraordinary process in the New World of fundraising the resources necessary to manage its imperial interests. During the first half of the seventeenth century, a governor in the Philippines and a presiding governor of the Guatemalan Audience each requested voluntary donations from acting officials under their respective jurisdictions. This reinforced the donation-based funding system in the Americas.

Durante la primera mitad del siglo xix , las necesidades presupuestales del erario mexicano obligaron al gobierno a recurrir al endeudamiento y al arrendamiento de algunas de las casas de moneda más importantes del país. Este artículo examina las condiciones políticas y económicas que hicieron posible el relevo del capital británico por el estadounidense—en estricto sentido, californiano—como arrendatario de la Casa de Moneda de México en 1857. Asimismo, explora el desarrollo empresarial de Juan Temple para explicar la coyuntura política que hizo posible su llegada, y la de sus descendientes, a la administración de la ceca de la capital mexicana. During the first half of the nineteenth century, the budgetary needs of the Mexican treasury forced the government to resort to borrowing and leasing some of the most important mints in the country. This article examines the political and economic conditions that allowed for the replacement of British capital by United States capital—specifically, Californian—as the lessee of the Mexican National Mint in 1857. It also explores the development of Juan Temple’s entrepreneurship to explain the political circumstances that facilitated his admission, and that of his descendants, into the administration of the National Mint in Mexico City.

Between 1844 and 1896, two archetypal figures on horseback known as rancheros and chinacos were disseminated through print publications. As war with the United States loomed in 1844, a relatively obscure Mexican writer depicted the ranchero as a “true national type” in a popular magazine. Eighteen years later another archetype on horseback, the chinaco, appeared in newspaper propaganda designed to provoke resistance against an imminent French advance into the Mexican interior. Later writers, such as Justo Sierra and Antonio García Cubas, imbued such figures with racialized mestizo qualities and heroic martial traits, equating mestizo blood with strength and martial capabilities that could build a more advanced Mexican state. The depiction of both figures as of mixed-race origins was a popular perception that carried over into the Porfirian years. This article traces the origins of these figures in popular reading during the years in which Mexico dealt with war with the United States, a civil war, and finally the French Intervention. Through an analysis of popular reading and intellectual commentaries, supplemented by archival research, mestizaje as a foundational concept of Mexican nationhood is traced to these early depictions. Entre 1844 y 1896, las publicaciones impresas de México difundieron dos figuras arquetípicas a caballo, conocidas como rancheros y chinacos. Cuando se avecinaba la guerra con Estados Unidos, un oscuro escritor mexicano describió al ranchero como un “verdadero tipo nacional” en una revista popular. Dieciocho años más tarde, otro arquetipo a caballo, el chinaco, apareció en la propaganda periodística diseñada para incitar a la resistencia contra un inminente avance francés hacia el interior de México. Más adelante, escritores como Justo Sierra y Antonio García Cubas infundieron tales figuras con las cualidades racializadas del mestizo y los rasgos marciales heroicos, equiparando la sangre mestiza con la fuerza y las capacidades marciales necesarias para construir un Estado mexicano más avanzado. La representación de ambas figuras como mezcla de razas constituyó una percepción popular que se mantuvo durante los años del Porfiriato. El presente artículo rastrea los orígenes de estos dos arquetipos en las lecturas populares durante los años en que México libró una guerra contra Estados Unidos, una guerra civil y, finalmente, lidió con la intervención francesa. A través de un análisis de las lecturas populares y los comentarios intelectuales, complementado con una investigación de archivo, se rastrea el origen del mestizaje en cuanto concepto fundacional de la idea de nación mexicana hasta estas representaciones.

Las novelas Margarita de niebla (1927) de Jaime Torres Bodet y El réferi cuenta nueve (1943) de Diego Cañedo tienen protagonistas varones mestizos/criollos de clase alta. Éstos se encuentran en triángulos amorosos que los fuerzan a escoger entre una mujer mestiza y mexicana, por un lado, y una mujer blanca y alemana, por otro. En ambos casos, los hombres optan por la extranjera, pero se arrepienten poco después cuando ven que no son compatibles. Este ensayo categoriza ambas novelas como ficciones fundacionales fallidas. Doris Sommer acuñó el término “ficciones fundacionales” al analizar literatura que imaginaba una reconciliación nacional a través del romance y matrimonio heterosexual entre personas de sectores distintos de la sociedad. Las novelas que analizamos a continuación hacen lo opuesto, pues interpretan el romance entre hombres mexicanos de la élite y mujeres extranjeras como una afrenta a los intentos del Estado posrevolucionario por construir una nación a través del proyecto oficial de mestizaje. Tanto Torres Bodet como Cañedo pintan a los hombres que evitan el matrimonio interracial como obstáculos a la institucionalización de una comunión nacionalista. The novels Margarita de niebla (Jaime Torres Bodet 1927) and El réferi cuenta nueve (Diego Cañedo 1943) follow the lives of well-to-do mestizo/criollo Mexican males who find themselves in love triangles that force them to choose between a Mexican mestiza or a white, German woman. In both cases, the men opt for the foreigner, but they soon regret their decisions when they realize that they are incompatible with their mates. For this reason, I view these novels as failed foundational fictions. Doris Sommer coined the term “foundational fictions” while analyzing literature that imagined a national reconciliation through heterosexual romance and marriage between people from different sectors of society. These novels do the opposite because they view romances between Mexican elites and foreign Others as antithetical to the nation-building project of official mestizaje. As such, both Torres Bodet and Cañedo depict those men who eschew interracial marriage as a hindrance to the institutionalization of a nationalist communion.

This article analyzes how Latin American academics and students, in many cases exiled from their countries, interacted with pedagogical concerns during the government of Lázaro Cardenas. Using examples of Chilean, Peruvian, Argentinian, Venezuelan, and other Latin American militants, and placing a focus on socialist education, this paper discusses experiences of individuals who arrived in post-revolutionary Mexico, seeking to engage with the pedagogical changes proposed by Cardenism. Methodologically, this research makes use of autobiographies, archival sources, and secondary bibliography in order to discuss some of the traces left by these émigrés. El presente artículo analiza cómo académicos y estudiantes latinoamericanos, en muchos casos exiliados de sus países, se relacionaron con los procesos educativos impulsados por el gobierno de Lázaro Cárdenas. Recurriendo a ejemplos de chilenos, peruanos, argentinos, venezolanos y otros militantes latinoamericanos, con un énfasis especial en la educación socialista, el presente texto intenta comprender las experiencias de quienes arribaron al México pos revolucionario buscando vincularse a los cambios educativos propuestos por el Cardenismo. Metodológicamente, esta investigación recurrió a autobiografías, fuentes de archivo y bibliografía secundaria, con el objetivo de analizar las huellas dejadas por estos emigrados.