Comic Books Create A Divide

The post-revolution period in Mexico was an era of change for the Mexican people. Mexican society saw several changes that were the product of government reforms and growing society. The biggest change overall was that Mexican society began to transition from traditional ideals to a modernized way of life. One of the prominent changes that promoted modernization was the introduction of “mass media.” Mass media of the post-revolution period took advantage, as Anne Rubinstein says, “of demographic luck” and the vast number of newly literate Mexicans by publishing quantities of newspapers, magazines, tabloids, and comic books. These media types, especially comic books, in early and through mid-20th century Mexico provided publishers several freedoms that they used to their advantage but also brought controversy.

The controversy that arose in the post-revolution period was directly related to the freedoms that forms of mass media provided. Comic books provided a way in which, as Rubinstein says on page 7, “ anything that can be imagined can be drawn, and anything that can be drawn can be understood far more easily than anything in print. But comic books are not a global medium; they have very different niches in the cultural ecologists of every region where they are found, and they rarely translate well”. Her argument here may be understood in the manner that different parts of Mexico would interpret comic books in different ways that other regions would. She notes that, “scholars of the 1940s through the 1960s more or less agreed that no single Mexican national culture existed”.

Rather than the one she says that “ some anthropologists… saw two Mexican cultures… one urban and modern, the other rural and traditional”. Moreover, these opposites possessed different viewpoints when approaching subjects, mainly one culture opposing the other cultures views and beliefs and vice versa; reproducing a tension between modernity and tradition. What did comic book illustrations depict that could this tension rise? Controversy and debate amount modernity and tradition arose in how women were represented in the comic books themselves. “The contrast between the (invented) past and the (imagined) future was played out in stories that valorized either chicas moderators or traditional women”. Basically, the chicas modernas depicted modern women with more feminist freedoms and the traditional women being subjected to their husbands and the household. Another series called “El Viejo Nido” incorporated four sets of ideas that included: gender, kinship, location, and social class that organized the story’s plot. “The creators of the serial generated their narrative from the contradictions among these hierarchy values…” Although there were thousands and thousands of comic books released, it would be very hard to take into account all of the illustrations that created controversy.

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To write this book Rubinstein was limited with her sources. It would have been nearly impossible to navigate through the number of comic books that were published in post-revolutionary Mexico. Rubinstein was limited to the censorship commission. The censorship commission was established to appear to “govern” over popular culture; however, the commission really had no affiliation the actual Mexican government. Their intentions though were to more or less keep indecency out of popular culture. It may be understood that this commission’s goal was to eliminate the potential controversy from the start. Although controversy was inevitable, each of the two, modernist and traditionalist were rarely able to pleased at the same time. Although comic books and other forms of mass media available to post-revolutionary Mexico reproduced tension between modernity and tradition, it did help the society develop to keep up to data with the other nations of the world.

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