A Sentimental Education for the Working Man

Robert Buffington analyzes how during the Porfiriato's final decade (1900–1910), “socialist-inspired” penny press journalists—a little-studied group who identified with the working class and whose writings circulated widely—critiqued the Porfirian state's modernizing project. The penny press elaborated an alternative popular liberal pantheon for the nation that created an awareness of gender and class, encouraged new attitudes toward work and leisure while satirizing the bourgeoisie, and displaced traditional honor-based relations between the sexes with a more companionate, modern intimacy. Historians have used the penny press but have not engaged with the complex texts accompanying the images as Buffington has, deciphering the complex argot, double entendres, puns, and word games interspersed with Mexico City's working-class caló dialect. Buffington offers a useful methodological guide by exploring iconographic conventions in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Mexico and explaining how journalists designed images and texts to convey meaning through spatial relations (pp. 42–45). Buffington richly synthesizes and engages with the historiography from the 1970s to the 2000s on working-class politics and labor history, and he draws on Pablo Piccato's important work on the public sphere, in addition to political scientist and anthropologist James C. Scott's Seeing like a State (1998) and feminist queer scholar Judith Butler's Bodies That Matter (1993).In chapter 1, Buffington analyzes how penny press journalists and readers constructed and disseminated “an alternative national history intended to undermine the legitimacy of the official story” (p. 24). They recast liberal heroes Miguel Hidalgo and Benito Juárez as working-class heroes who fought the people's oppressors, using Catholic language and imagery to publicly comment on liberalism and its policies (p. 54). In chapter 2, Buffington explores how the working-class cult around President Juárez criticized the Porfirian state's version of this liberal statesman, charged with political opportunism and authoritarianism. Buffington details this in his analysis of “street talk” columns, which attracted a diverse readership including proles as well as artists and intellectuals, a counterpublic contesting bourgeois efforts to exclude workers from the public sphere (pp. 91–96). Chapter 3 examines penny press attempts to insert workingmen into Mexican history as active players despite the bourgeois state's efforts to disenfranchise them. Workingmen were propelled into the spotlight as “the people” (el pueblo) through military service, the work of folk heroes like El Pípila and the Niños Héroes, the participation of workers' delegations in public commemorations, and the penning of patriotic poems.I found the fourth and fifth chapters to be the most interesting and provocative portion of Buffington's work. Chapter 4 analyzes working-class attitudes toward work and leisure. Buffington turns to Norbert Elias's concept of the civilizing process to analyze how Mexico City workingmen criticized bourgeois behavior as pretentious and removed from reality. Buffington deems working-class male behavior a “protest masculinity” that contested the state-advocated “hegemonic” masculinity. Through street talk stock characters, penny press journalists highlighted the elite modernizing project's aloofness from workingmen's reality and exposed the immorality of elite harassment and criminalization of working-class norms while also highlighting the upper classes' illegal actions (pp. 140–44).Chapter 5 explores the displacement of traditional, honor-based relations between the sexes by more companionate notions of love and intimacy built on criticism of machista behavior. Buffington explores how the penny press romance callejero (street romance), rooted in mid-nineteenth-century costumbrismo (working class–based Romantic-age works that constructed the national) and set in the urban underworld, allowed journalists to emphasize the need to modernize working-class men. These stories, full of salacious details, masked exploitative relations with humor but nevertheless offered sharp social critique (pp. 182–84). Other tales featured clever women who foiled their abusive, lustful mates and escaped rape, pregnancy, or abuse. Independent and free of compromisos to undeserving men, these women shop around for better partners able both to shoulder the expense of improved living conditions and a higher social status and to reform their ways, abandon donjuanismo, and treat their women with respect—and love (pp. 195–97).Buffington's conclusion is a meditation on continuities between the late Porfirian penny press and working-class immigrant men's culture as portrayed in an afternoon Spanish-language talk radio show in Los Angeles, California, that features a battle of the sexes among characters performed by radio personality Oswaldo Díaz. The show engages, like the penny press, in significant social criticism through satire and humor based in working-class culture and provokes the public to discuss ideas.Buffington's book allows the reader—from the academic specialist to the student in a Latin American or media studies survey—to appreciate how historians make sense of the complex interplay between readers, writers, and authorities in the development of working-class consciousness. Buffington's monograph is an important contribution to Porfirian cultural studies. Buffington's writing is crisp, fresh, and devoid of the difficult theoretical somersaults that characterized his earlier writing. In this approachable yet sophisticated analysis, he engages the literature on media studies, liberalism, labor history, and cultural and gender studies to produce a rich, provocative text. The book is not saddled with an unnecessary history of the penny press and its journalists; this is a book that teaches the reader to recognize the usefulness of the penny press as a register of cultural transformation during the decade leading to the revolution, when not only ideology but gender was in flux. No one doing work on the Mexican Revolution, the Porfirian state, the public sphere, or gender in twentieth-century Mexico can neglect this work

Bourgeoisie · Historiography · Honor · Legitimacy · Media studies · Political science · Politics · Public sphere · Sociology · State (computer science) · Working class · Gender Studies · Latin American and Latino Studies · Law · Politics and Society in Latin America