The Mexican Press And Civil Society 1940 1976

Mexico today is one of the most dangerous places in the world to report the news, and Mexicans have taken to the street to defend freedom of expression. As Benjamin T. Smith demonstrates in this history of the press and civil society, the cycle of violent repression and protest over journalism is nothing new. He traces it back to the growth in newspaper production and reading publics between 1940 and 1976, when a national thirst for tabloids, crime sheets, and magazines reached far beyond the middle class. As Mexicans began to view local and national events through the prism of journalism, everyday politics changed radically. Even while lauding the liberty of the press, the state developed an arsenal of methods to control what was printed, including sophisticated spin and misdirection techniques, covert financial payments, and campaigns of threats, imprisonment, beatings, and even murder. The press was also pressured by media monopolists tacking between government demands and public expectations to maximize profits, and by coalitions of ordinary citizens demanding that local newspapers publicize stories of corruption, incompetence, and state violence. Since the Cold War, both in Mexico City and in the provinces, a robust radical journalism has posed challenges to government forces.

"Mexico today is one of the most dangerous places in the world to report the news, and Mexicans have taken to the street to defend freedom of expression. As Benjamin T. Smith demonstrates in this history of the press and civil society, the cycle of violent repression and protest over journalism is nothing new. He traces it back to the growth in newspaper production and reading publics between 1940 and 1976, when a national thirst for tabloids, crime sheets, and magazines reached far beyond the middle class. As Mexicans began to view local and national events through the prism of journalism, everyday politics changed radically. Even while lauding the liberty of the press, the state developed an arsenal of methods to control what was printed, including sophisticated spin and misdirection techniques, covert financial payments, and campaigns of threats, imprisonment, beatings, and even murder. The press was also pressured by media monopolists tacking between government demands and public expectations to maximize profits, and by coalitions of ordinary citizens demanding that local newspapers publicize stories of corruption, incompetence, and state violence. Since the Cold War, both in Mexico City and in the provinces, a robust radical journalism has posed challenges to government forces."--Provided by publisher.

Since the 2000 elections toppled the PRI, over 150 Mexican journalists have been murdered. Failed assassinations and threats have silenced thousands more. Such high levels of violence and corruption question one of the fundamental assumptions of modern societies, that democracy and press freedom are inextricably intertwined. In this collection historians, media experts, political scientists, cartoonists, and journalists reconsider censorship, state-press relations, news coverage, and readership to retell the history of Mexico’s press.

A myth-busting, 100-year history of the Mexican drug trade that reveals how an industry founded by farmers and village healers became dominated by cartels and kingpins. The Mexican drug trade has inspired prejudiced narratives of a war between north and south, white and brown; between noble cops and vicious kingpins, corrupt politicians and powerful cartels. In this first comprehensive history of the trade, historian Benjamin T. Smith tells the real story of how and why this one-peaceful industry turned violent. He uncovers its origins and explains how this illicit business essentially built modern Mexico, affecting everything from agriculture to medicine to economics—and the country’s all-important relationship with the United States. Drawing on unprecedented archival research; leaked DEA, Mexican law enforcement, and cartel documents; and dozens of harrowing interviews, Smith tells a thrilling story brimming with vivid characters—from Ignacia “La Nacha” Jasso, “queen pin” of Ciudad Juárez, to Dr. Leopoldo Salazar Viniegra, the crusading physician who argued that marijuana was harmless and tried to decriminalize morphine, to Harry Anslinger, the Machiavellian founder of the American Federal Bureau of Narcotics, who drummed up racist drug panics to increase his budget. Smith also profiles everyday agricultural workers, whose stories reveal both the economic benefits and the human cost of the trade. The Dope contains many surprising conclusions about drug use and the failure of drug enforcement, all backed by new research and data. Smith explains the complicated dynamics that drive the current drug war violence, probes the U.S.-backed policies that have inflamed the carnage, and explores corruption on both sides of the border. A dark morality tale about the American hunger for intoxication and the necessities of human survival, The Dope is essential for understanding the violence in the drug war and how decades-old myths shape Mexico in the American imagination today.

A history of Mexican comic books, their readers, their producers, their critics, and their complex relations with the government and the Church that discusses cultural nationalism, popular taste, and social change.

In 2015, the Mexican state counted how many of its citizens identified as Afro-Mexican for the first time since independence. Finding Afro-Mexico reveals the transnational interdisciplinary histories that led to this celebrated reformulation of Mexican national identity. It traces the Mexican, African American, and Cuban writers, poets, anthropologists, artists, composers, historians, and archaeologists who integrated Mexican history, culture, and society into the African Diaspora after the Revolution of 1910. Theodore W. Cohen persuasively shows how these intellectuals rejected the nineteenth-century racial paradigms that heralded black disappearance when they made blackness visible first in Mexican culture and then in post-revolutionary society. Drawing from more than twenty different archives across the Americas, this cultural and intellectual history of black visibility, invisibility, and community-formation questions the racial, cultural, and political dimensions of Mexican history and Afro-diasporic thought.

Dr Tainter describes nearly two dozen cases of collapse and reviews more than 2000 years of explanations. He then develops a new and far-reaching theory.

The Roots of Conservatism is the first attempt to ask why over the past two centuries so many Mexican peasants have opted to ally with conservative groups rather than their radical counterparts. Blending socioeconomic history, cultural analysis, and political narrative, Smith's study begins with the late Bourbon period and moves through the early republic, the mid-nineteenth-century Reforma, the Porfiriato, and the Revolution, when the Mixtecs rejected Zapatista offers of land distribution, ending with the armed religious uprising known as the "last Cristiada," a desperate Cold War bid to rid the region of impious "communist" governance. In recounting this long tradition of regional conservatism, Smith emphasizes the influence of religious belief, church ritual, and lay-clerical relations both on social relations and on political affiliation. He posits that many Mexican peasants embraced provincial conservatism, a variant of elite or metropolitan conservatism, which not only comprised ideas on property, hierarchy, and the state, but also the overwhelming import of the church to maintaining this system.

From 1942 to 1950, nearly twenty thousand Poles found refuge from the horrors of war-torn Europe in camps within Britain’s African colonies, including Uganda, Tanganyika, Kenya and Northern and Southern Rhodesia. On the Edges of Whiteness tells their improbable story, tracing the manifold, complex relationships that developed among refugees, their British administrators, and their African neighbors. While intervening in key historical debates across academic disciplines, this book also gives an accessible and memorable account of survival and dramatic cultural dislocation against the backdrop of global conflict.