Robert M. Buffington. A Sentimental Education for the Working Man

In the first three chapters of A Sentimental Education for the Working Man: The Mexico City Penny Press, 1900–1910, Robert M. Buffington reconstructs working-class demands for effective citizenship as they appeared in Mexico City’s penny press. In the last two chapters, he extracts the penny press’s editors’ views of working-class “masculine subjectivity” in relationship to women. His evidence is drawn mainly from a close reading of three prominent examples of the penny press in the decade before the Mexican Revolution: La Guacamaya, El Diablito Rojo, and El Diablito Bromista. Buffington carefully deconstructs their mastheads, the iconographic meaning of the graphics, the allegorical meaning of the images, etc. Particularly useful are the author’s textual analysis of the penny press’s popular columns called “street talk.” Presented in the presumed vernacular of working-class Mexicans, Buffington translates and analyzes the penny press’s rendition of the satirical, often rude and vulgar, and almost always hilarious dialogue. One wonderful example is the exchange between two friends arguing over the merits of the controversial book by Francisco Bulnes, El verdadero Juárez (92–93).

Art · Art history · Literature · Meaning (existential) · Media studies · Penny · Political science · Politics · Reading (process) · Sociology · Vernacular · Working class · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Psychology