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Producing the Cold War in Mexico

The Public Limits ofCovert Communications

We live of course in a world not only of commodities but also of representation,

and representations—their production, circulation, history, and interpretation-—are

the very element ofculture. In much recent theory the problem of representation

is deemed to be central, yet rarely is it put in its full political context, a context

that is primarily imperial. Instead we have on the one hand an isolated cultural

sphere believed to be freely and unconditionally available to weightless theoretical

speculation and investigation, and, on the other, a debased political sphere, where the

real struggle between interests is supposed to occur. To the professional student of

culture—the humanist, the critic, the scholar—-only one sphere is relevant, and, more

to the point, it is accepted that the two spheres are separated, whereas the two are

not only connected but ultimately the same.—Edward Said, “Secular lnterpretation, the Geographical Element and the

Methodology of Imperialism“

In 1957 Mexico City was the site of funerals for two celebrities, each responsiblefor the cultural production that marked twentieth-century Mexico: the painterDiego Rivera and the movie star Pedro Infantef It is unsurprising that one ofMexico’s leading newsreels, Noticiario clasa, would feature segments about thepassing of these two icons of postrevolutionary culture. But it is surprising thatthese images would be encountered, decades after their commercial exhibition,not in the Filmoteca of the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de México, whereone was accustomed to finding forgotten Mexican films, but buried in motion-picture vaults containing the output of the (now defunct) United States Infor-mation Agency (USIA); that records -regarding the newsreels’ production anddistribution could best be recovered not through research in Mexico City butthrough a Freedom of Information Act request to the Department of State; andthat those who produced Noticiario clasa and its successor productions gave

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them a secret name, Project Pedro, unknown not only to the fI1llllOt1S‘ whoviewed them but even to the technicians who produced them. Perhaps it is notso surprising, however, if we consider Project Pedro as part of the archive of U.S.empire an outpost of the formal system of extraterritorial control of informa-Y

tion institutionalized and globalized through Cold War.

Between East and West, Mexico and the United States

After World War ll, Good Neighbor discourse became derivative of Cold Warstrategy, and East-West relations replaced hemispheric essentialism as the inter-national framework for U.S. propaganda in the Americas. Where Latin Americahad provided a prewar laboratory for the development of the internationalistideology that globally underwrote the U.S. war effort, in the postwar period itbecame (until the Cuban revolution) a screen onto which U.S. foreign policyand Cold War culture projected extrahemispheric concerns, generated by inter-national relations in Europe and ASl21.2 The Korean War and Nsc-68 s globaliza-tion of containment changed the Cold War everywhere in every way. In theAmericas, for example, until the i95os the United States Information Sen-/ice(usis) continued to distribute materials produced for Good Neighbor objectivesduring World War ll. After Korea, USIS began to distribute more ideologicallycharged, anti-Communist materials, but ones that were derivative of foreignpolicies developed for other areas of the world rather than composed for inter-American communication? _In the 19505, Washington’s great global fear—from Cairo to Paris, Bandung to

Mexico City—was neutrality. This fear produced the idea of the Third World, asit was initially conceived in the decade’s opening years, to take hold—a world‘between East and West—before its most widely understood meanings movedfrom political to socioeconomic terms in the 1960s." A principal question posedby usiA’s 1956 “Barometer Study on Public Opinion” in Mexico elucidates-Wash-ington’s anxieties about the unwillingness of people to choose sides in the ColdWar: “At the present time do you personally think that Mexico should be on theside of the Communist powers, on the side of the anti-Communist powers or onneither side?” The aggregate response confirmed Washington’s worries: 71 per-cent of the 1,455 respondents, from across Mexico’s largest twenty-three townsand cities, answered, “Neither side.”5Washington’s secret production ofMexican newsreels drew upon both a long

history of cross-border involvement in Mexico City’s film industry and contem-porary practices of transatlantic cultural Cold War. usiA’s secret newsreel work

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in Western Europe, for example, provided an operational model for its workin the Western Hemisphere. Specifically, the agency’s “newsreel operation inFrance” was the exemplar for initial efforts in Brazil as well as Mexico. Asantifascism morphed into anticommunism and covert international informa-tion initiatives replaced public ones, Washington’s two key World War II ca-balleros, Brazil and Mexico, remained the main mass-media producers andtargets for Washington’s inter-American -propaganda. Hence, the East-West cul-tural Cold War reverberated in the Americas, where many of its discursivepatterns and international communications techniques had been first rehearsedduring the Second World War. This was part of a global sequence in the 1950s:Cold War projects in the Americas would, in turn, provide test cases for deter-mining “the possibilities and/or limitations ofsuch a [newsreel] program in theFar East or the Near East.” New U.S. foreign policies, then, would move fromEast to West, from Europe through the Americas to Asia as Washington glob-alized its early Cold War international information interventions in the KoreanWar’s wake. In Washington’s view, the medium was the message. As ProjectPedro’s Washington implementer initially thought about such work in 1954: “Itis my feeling that newsreels in themselves carry a certain credibility as a sort ofdocumentary in the entertainment field. They are presented by ‘less interested’parties than are presentations by us [USIA/ USIS ]. Consequently I consider that inthe commercial field this is perhaps the single most important vehicle for carry-ing our propaganda objectives without its being recognized as such by theviewer.”6 This early thinking about the project viewed subsidized Mexican news-reels in transnational terms that would project Washington’s mission into therest of Spanish-speaking Latin America; Mexican newsreels would provide aregion-wide system for audiovisually disseminating Washington’s Cold Warthroughout Central and South America.’ (This never happened, as ProjectPedro was produced and distributed within strictly national boundaries.)Concerns about Soviet mass-media incursions that exploited Third World

neutralism were both context and pretext for usiA's covert work to transnation-alize its film presence in the Americas. Turner Shelton, director of the agency’sMotion Picture Service, explained to its Latin American bureau in 1955 thattransnationalized newsreel production in Mexico offered a unique opportunityto wage cold war within the Americas as Washington focused its attentionelsewhere, even as intelligence about the area “reports that the Soviet Embassyin Mexico has recently aided in the establishment of a firm for the distributionof Russian films in Mexico and Central America. This is another demonstrationofwhat the opposition is up to, using Mexico as a base for operations. In our dis-

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cussion last October, we agreed on the desirability of using the newsreel devicein Brazil and Mexico. The Brazilian program is moving along very well. . . . Ithink it is highly desirable to proceed with the planning and development of thisproject for Mexico.“ Consequently, in May 1956, the USIA director TheodoreStreibert asked the agency’s general counsel to authorize plans for Project Pedro,the agency’s code name for its attempt to take control of a Mexican newsreel.To implement the project, USIA turned to an expatriate Hollywood executive,Richard K. Tompkins, who had overseen earlier agency efforts at covert produc-tion of anti-Communist film propaganda in Mexico City, the era’s world capitalof Spanish-language filmmaking. As Streibert explained: “This project involvesdealing with a ‘front man’ . . . for purchase of a half-interest in one of the twoleading newsreel companies in Mexico . . . and for performance by him ofthe production aspects of the newsreel operation, including the integration ofAgency footages into the reels.”" -

Washington’s and I-Iollywood’s complex relations with Mexican film pro-ducers between World War II and the Cold War contributed to both the notableopportunities and the limits that Project Pedro encountered in its actual opera-tion in Mexico. Cross-border commercial collaboration forged in the interestsof antifascism broke down after the war as the U.S. industry, freed from thecoercive structure of instrumental wartime dependence on Washington, soughtto contain (or co-opt) its southern competitor’s international growth. However,even as commercial relations became less harmonious, links between Holly-wood and the Mexican industry, both behind and on the screen, persisted andfacilitated Washington’s anti-Communist mission. Tompkins personified thosefilm industry connections across the antifascist/anti-Communist divide as wellas Hollywood’s commercial and political, informal and formal, connections toU.S. transnational and international relations. In the early i95os, he had oper-ated Latin America’s most important film studio, Mexico City’s Estudios Churn-busco, built during World War II by a transnational partnership between Holly-wood’s Radio Keith Orpheum (RKO), headed at the time by Tompkins’s uncle N.Peter Rathvon and Mexico’s leading mass-media magnate, Emilio AzcarragaVidaurreta.'°

Tompkins’s prior Washington-backed anti-Communist film projects in Mex-ico—production of two cartoon series and a feature film—had mobilized Mexi-can resources to reach spectators throughout the Americas. By contrast, ProjectPedro focused primarily on Mexican moviegoers. As with those earlier Cold Warprojects, the impetus for covert control of a Mexican newsreel came from USISofficials in Mexico City who sold their plan to the agency’s audiovisual planners

PRODUCING THE COLD W/\R IN MEXICO I75

in Washington. As the new program commenced, the enibassy’s top USIS oflicial,Public Affairs Officer (PAO) lack McDermott, expressed his enthusiasm to theagency‘s film chief: “I consider this an extremely important project. If it issuccessful it will reach a highly significant element in Mexico with messagescarrying our objectives. I believe that the proposed grant of approximately$68,000 is fully justified in our effort to advance U.S. objectives in Mexi_co.”“In fact, Project Pedro's first-year costs would finally approach $100,000, onceTompkins finally succeeded in obtaining control of an established national en-terprise, which was not easily accomplished.”Project Pedro was part of a wider field of national projects in Latin America--

notably in Bolivia, Chile, Ecuador, and Brazil (where Washington operatedwithin a national film culture that rivaled Mexico‘s in a nation it considered tobe of strategic importance). In each of these countries, USIA directly aidednational newsreels. These nationally distinct programs attempted to compensatelocally for what USIA neglected to do centrally in the i95os owing to the relativelyminor position Latin America held in the global formulation of U.S. foreignpolicy. As USIA film chief Shelton expressed it to the embassy’s public affairsofficer during Project Pedro's first months of production: “One of the principalreasons for establishing the Pedro project was the fact that there is a great dearthofmaterial available here on matters relating to Mexico or, for that matter, LatinAmerica in general. I think you can well understand that the newsreels of theworld (and we have access to practically all of them) cover that which is mostnews-worthy, and it is true, I believe you will agree, that Mexico and LatinAmerica, in general do not occupy a very important place in the overall news-making activities ofthe world today. This, of course, operates as a severe limitingfactor on the material with any significance to Mexico which is available to us.”Hence, from Washington’s perspective, Project Pedro's value would be prin-cipally not as an outlet for international footage but as a transnational producerof Mexican news within a Cold War frame. “I think you should use every singlemeans at your disposal,” Shelton advised USIS in Mexico City, “to persuadeTompkins to cover as many local happenings as possible which have somesignificance because this will, of course, enhance the value ofthe reel. We can, ofcourse, supply a very considerable amount of general news material composedof events that happened around the world, but I believe that the thinking so farhas been that we should stick as closely as possible to events having somerelation to Mexico and Latin America.”‘3Unlike its other American newsreel relationships, which simply received in-

ternational footage shot by U.S. companies, Project Pedro involved Washing-

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ton’s covert ownership of a national entity. The particular history of the U.S.presence within Mexican film production—~a presence that since World War llmixed commerce and propaganda, Hollywood and U.S. foreign policy—facili-tated that intervention. And that history converged with that of commercial U.S.newsreels at home and in the world in the mid-1950s. As Project Pedro began, inthe late 1950s, many of the dominant U.S. newsreels were ceasing production, asliving rooms replaced movie theaters as the site of audiovisual news consump-tion. In fact, the two major newsreels that survived into the late 1960s, Hearstand Universal, did so because of USIA contracts to produce information for theareas of the world where television had not yet achieved hegemony.“ While theyreceded nationally, U.S. newsreels also declined internationally throughout thedecade. As a usis assessment noted, “American newsreels are on their way out inMexico.” Between 1955 and 1958 the number of U.S. productions exhibited wentfrom five to two, and the remaining pair, MGM and Universal, were windingdown their operations. The embassy concluded that “for all practical purposesthe propaganda impact of American newsreels in Mexico has vanished.” Thisvacuum stimulated Washingt0n’s desire to engineer a Mexican alternative to thecommercial representation of its view of the world presented by U.S. companies,since “Mexican newsreels . . . remain the only effective film medium for reach-ing 35mm [i.e., commercial] audiences in Mexico.” As was the case across mediaand across the world, USIA moved in Mexico to work directly in an area whereit deemed the commercial presence of U.S. information inadequate to wagecold war.“

Project Pedro developed at a moment of notable national as well as internationalchange in Mexican mass communications. Not only were U.S. newsreels de-creasingly visible, but Mexican television production and reception were grow-ing rapidly. Between 1956 and 1958, the estimated number of Mexican tele-vision sets in operation more than doubled (from 170,000 to 375,000), as didthe estimated audience they served (from 1 million to 2.25 million within anational population of around 30 million)?“ USIA frequently placed materialon Mexican TV but did not directly produce any programs on a regular basis forthe tightly controlled monopoly. U.S. corporate sponsorship of Mexican newswas, however, present from the outset of TV production in 1950, when GeneralMotors began to underwrite Mexico City Channel 4’s nightly fifteen-minute

- newscast.”Despite televisi0n’s rapid development in Mexico, relative to the rest of Latin

America, it did not displace motion pictures as the dominant form of audio-

PRODUCING THE COLD WAR IN MEXICO 177

visual mass communication in the 1950s. Moviegoers encountered eight na-tionally distributed weeldies that, like the rest of Mexican 111355 media wereprivately owned by members of the political establishment (or their cronies)and depended on official patronage. Moreover, like the era’s feature films, news-reels operated within the representational parameters established by the stateparty’s culture.“ This was as much a matter of internal producer behavior asof external state intervention by the censors who worked in the Secretariade Gobernacion (Interior Ministry). Newsreels shared with feature films a closerelationship to political power not only behind the screen but on it Therethey reconfigured the dominant images as well as messages of narrative cinema,which itself was a regular topic, as newsreels spent much celluloid highlight-ing the nation s film industry, particularly the comings and goings of its movie;tars..In doing so, Mexican newsreels reproduced the celebrity culture, evi-I ent 115:1 p:1l’llI and radio as well as film, that transformed popular entertainers

In 0 °_ C1 Y 5an¢_n0n€d symbols of national identity and projected politicians,especially the president, in the glamorized language of film culture (see figures 1and a). The president’s activities—opening public works projects, attendingpolitical functions, meeting with visiting leaders from other nations—domi-nated Mexican newsreels’ political reporting. The culture of celebrity producedby Mexico’s mass media merged politics and entertainment in the nati0n’s capi-tal city.If the president was the nati0n’s political metonym Mexico City was its

geocultural synecdoche. Like so many of the feature films that they preceded onMexican movie screens in the 1950s, newsreels highlighted Mexico City as a

d ‘ - ."lo ern l"n@tl'0P0llS, the showcase of contemporary architecture, cosmopolitannlght life, P0Pnl?1I' entertainment, find, above all else, the mass-culture industriesthat pgojected the capital city’s culture nationally as lo mexicari0.‘° Mexico City

_ t . . . , .wasfl edproduction site for all of Mexicos national newsreels, and they allcond ate hthe nation with the capital C1fY.20 Project Pedro’s productions contrib-u e to t is overrepresentation of national metropolis. Mexico City simulta-neoisly served as political stage, textbook, and museum, exemplar of modernwor , consumption, and leisure. Moreover, Mexico City exercised national cul-

tur31 authority behind the $<3T¢6n, through the Federal District’s strict regulationof the content and commerce of public entertainment in the country's largestmotion-picture market and singular site of industrial film production.”

As Project Pedro completed its fourth month of production the embassy’s1= , ‘t ' ' - ‘ . .tAO i s ltop USIS official, indicated how the agency could best provision footage0 supp ement (less ostensibly political) locally produced material in order to

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i. President Adolfo Riii1.Cortines speaking at 1957 Freedom ofthe Press Day celebration.N(IiiL'fl1fl0 cliisii 810 (reproduced at the National Archives).

2. Dolores del Rio at 1957 luncheon honoring Mexican film industry. Noticiurio CICISU800 (reproduced at the National Archives).

f‘i((il)llt,|i\llL lilll. \li'Jl.I) \\//\.l( 1N t\/lliXl(lt1 l79

project the i lold War in a topical register <...ilibi'atetl tor i\/lexicaii consumption:“What then is wanted? ln general terms, items that have genuine interest, eventsthat show progress, international cooperation, or with human appeal. What aresome of these? Some footage of braceros working under good conditions tooffset the publicity which has shown only the seamy side. Mexicans preferably,or even Latin-Americans, at various cultural, commercial or scholastic pursuitsin the U.S. They may be artists, students, researchers, or important visitors.American business firms with branches in Mexico bring Mexicans to the U.S. fortraining as executives. Footage in this field is ideal to show the benefits ofAmerican capital operating abroad." Regarding direct references to the ColdWar, Jack McDermott suggested scenes showing Washington working for socialprogress more than against the Soviet Union: “Since the Agency is placing heavyemphasis on People's Capitalism, the Geophysical Year and Atoms for Peace,events related to these broad headings ought to be covered on a regular basis.”References to Moscow should respond to specific Soviet information initiatives-for example, “adverse propaganda regarding [nuclear] fallout"—or directlydramatize the Kremlin’s work to undermine the U.S.-led cause of world peace:“Coverage of a UN Security Council or General Assembly meeting on thoseoccasions when Russian delegates are shown obstructing the work of peace orarms control are good newsreel standbys?“ Prom Project Pedro’s outset, theembassy constantly demanded more international footage about Cold War con-cerns elsewhere in the world or production of special material in the UnitedStates it deemed ofinterest to Mexican spectators. For example, in one instance,usis was livid that, “despite :1 specific request by wire for coverage on the visit ofCaiitintlas [Mexican movie star Mario Moreno] to Washingtoi1[,] not one footwas received. Cantinflas is a national hero and since he made an obvious hit onhis visit, Mexico could have exploited the occasion to great advantage. It isdifficult to understand why the Agency passed up this opportunity.”Z-‘

Project Pedro unfolded within a deeply developed national film culture thatinformally as iriucli as formally imposed its own representational rules enforcedby the intricate personal and discursive interactions between oflicial Mexico andcommercial mass-culture producers and consumers. Beyond usis‘s explicit rec-ognition that waging audiovisual cold war in Mexico meant antineutralismmore than it did anti-Communism, McDermott’s request for the agency tosupply specific “message material” implicitly expressed a contradiction in Proj-ect Pedro‘s operation: Mexicanized production—whieh conformed to state reg-ulation, audience expectations, and business practices—could not produce whatWashington considered effective propaganda. Indeed. binational relations with

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Mexico presented particular challenges to Washington’s bipolar globality. Thiswas due not only to the centrality ofthe history of conflict with the United Statesto official and popular conceptions of Mexican identity but also to contempo-rary cross-border issues. Most notably the Eisenhower administrations 1954implementation ofOperation Wetback (the militarized repatriation of undocu-mented workers) was a source of public resentment, arguably more significantfor Cold War relations than, for example, Mexico’s unwillingness to endorseU.S. diplomacy in Guatemala, preceding the ciA’s overthrow of Iacobo Arbenz.“

Producing Project Pedfv

Tompkins first focused on one of the most well-regarded (if financially shaky)Mexican concerns, Espafia-Mexico-Argentina (EMA), producer of the news-oriented Noticiero mexicano and the magazine-format Cine selecciones. Prin-cipally owned by General Iuan F. Azcarate, a politically well-connected for-mer military officer and diplomat, EMA had particularly close relations to thestate. While all commercial newsreels in Mexico depended on various levels ofQffiCial patronage, the government had directly subsidized izMA’s operationssince World War II, regularly using Noticiero mexicano as a commercial out-let for official images and messages not only nationally but also in the UnitedStates, where the company had established distribution throughout the Spanish-speaking Southwest.“ An EMA product, secretly controlled by USIA., C0lJ1d beused to reach Mexicans (and Mexican Americans) within the United States(where the agency was legally prohibited from distributing its materials)‘ as wellas in Mexicu EM,i_’S equally impressive history of international distributionsouthward fit well with usiA’s secondary desire that Project Pedro replicatethe cross-border circulation of its other anti-Communist Mexican film activi-ties, notably Tompkins’s cartoons and a feature fihn—Dicen que soy comur-11st,a(i951)—made with Washington fiinds. These had effectively drawn on Mexico sinternational standing as a major film producer to export U.S. messages throughMexican movies. Likewise, usiA believed that “newsreels with Mexican attribu-tion would have value outside the country and that arrangements for distribu-tion should take into account desirable outlets in neighboring areas."2‘ ‘Tompkins’s agreement with USIA demanded that he conceal his Washington

connections from his local partners and the host state as well as the Mexicanpublic. It directed him to “negotiate, in the name ofhis controlled company, the‘Dibujos Animados, s.A.,’ and ostensibly as sole interested party,” for the right tpcontrol i2MA’s weekly productions." This presented problems, since the deals

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structure had to appear to abide by the postwar Mexican law that requiredmajority national ownership in designated industries. Owing to its prominenceas the leading producer of national culture and internationally recognized sym-bol of national achievement, the film industry was, in fact, the first of the sectorslegally declared as critical to Mexican sovereignty. Tompkins’s attempt to engagea prestanombre (a Mexican citizen to front for U.S. capital) was a widespreadpractice, but Project Pedro’s ideological (rather than strictly market) objectivesand Washington’s demands that its own control be absolute as well as covertnecessitated complicated contractual maneuvers both between Tompkins andhis Mexican associates as well as between USIA and Tompkins. usiA, not Tomp-kins, would ultimately control production: “It is clearly understood and stipu-lated that the U.S. Government shall be the owner-in-fact of the entire 531 sharesof stock thus to be acquired, and the use of such ownership and the operation ofthe Company shall be in accordance with the Governments wishes?“The agency’s plans for Project Pedro required absolute control of newsreel

content. Direct ownership of local production distinguished Project Pedro fromusIA’s other unattributed newsreel projects. Unlike its extensive Project King-fish—through which the agency assembled newsreel footage shot by U.S. com-mercial contractors into productions distributed in Asia and Africa—ProjectPedro would produce the Cold War in Mexico. The weight of two decades ofnational development of an industrial film culture gave rise to this imperialobjective and need. To produce effective messages for Mexico, ones that wouldsupposedly nudge national discourse toward the United States, demanded bothrecognition and subversion of Mexican newsreel culture. This duality under-mined the deal with EMA. Tompkins and Azcarate agreed to financial terms butparted ways over editorial authority. This was the nonnegotiable issue for usiA.In searchiof a new entree to national production and distribution, Tompkins

turned his attention to Noticiario Nacional, s.A., a company jointly ownedby Gabriel Alarcon, who controlled the mammoth Cadena de Oro networkof movie theaters, and the politico Luis Manjarrez, senator from the state ofPuebla. Underlining the always present connections between politics and pri-vately owned mass communications in midcentury Mexico, Alarcon’s fortuneshad grown through his alliance with Puebla’s dominant political boss, Maxi-mino Avila Camacho (1891-1945), who served as secretary of communicationsand public works in the presidential administration of his younger brother,Manuel (i94o—1946), during World War II.”

Less financially sound than EMA, Noticiario Nacional was desperate for newcapital. The debt-ridden Alarcon welcomed Tompkins’s overture, but the em-

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bassy paused at the additional funds required by its frontman to make the deal.”Despite the contracts cost, usis considered the company a more attractiveopportunity than EMA, because its long-running main product Noticiario clasawas “the oldest production of its kind in the Republic ofMexico-—and the onlyone locally produced which . . . maintained its ‘news’ tenor," while many of itscompetitors had shifted to feature magazine formats more suitable for lightersubject matter.“ As much as the quality of its production, USIS valued Noticiarioclasas extensive exhibition, noting that it “has among the best distributionarrangements of any Mexican newsreel." In arranging access to that nationalaudience, the new agreement between USIA and Tompkins reproduced the basicstructure of the EMA deal but involved a more complex corporate arrangementwhereby a separate Mexican company, Impulsora Anahuac, s.A., headed byTompkins (and which included Alarcon, Manjarrez, and del Villar as officers),would actually own Noticiario Nacional. Meanwhile, that companys boardwould be reconfigured in public records to include Tompkins in a seeminglysecondary position.”The covert control that Tompkins achieved over a major newsreel satisfied

Washington. usiA's Motion Picture Service's chief outlined its benefits to theagencys general counsel, who had to approve the contract: “Two features inparticular distinguish this arrangement from the prior ones in desirability: first,because, for the first time we have a written agreement signed by the indigenousprincipals that commit them to go forward with the operation; second, becausewe are dealing through a new ‘holding’ corporation, which . . . is already orga-nized (incorporated), and need only be activated. Additionally it is worthy ofnote that the newsreel now to be controlled (‘Noticiario clasa’) is considered tobe by far the best in Mexico, and it is the one [former i>Ao] Mr. Andersoninitially tried to ‘infiltrate when he first went to Mexico (the company produc-ing this reel has heretofore been too well ofi‘ financially to be interested in anyovertures)?’ Compared to earlier options, Shelton judged that “ou[r] control(through Tompkins) of the operation will be implemented and strengthened inseveral ways: As ostensible owner of 50% of the company, and as Chairman ofthe Board with statutory veto authority of such office, Mr. Tompkins will be ableto exert all practical control on both companies and their operations?”In effect, the new system involved a double prestanombre. Tompkinss com-

pany, Impulsora Anahuac, would control Noticiario Nacional, which wouldostensibly continue to operate under Alarcons leadership. At worst this ar-rangement risked revealing a link to Tompkins, who was, in any case, a well-established member of the Mexican filmmaking community, but his own links

PRODUCING THE COLD WAR IN MEXICO I8}

to USIA would remain contractually hidden. An additional advantage ofthe dealwas Cadena de Oro’s distribution of Cine mundial, produced by ProductoresUnidos, s.A. Emilio Azcarraga Milmo operated Productores Unidos, which waspart of his fathers (Emilio Azcarraga Vidaurretas) mass-media empire, whichhad long—standing links of its own to U.S. radio and motion-picture concerns, aswell as to Washington.“ Through Tompkinss arrangement, USIA would be ableto place footage with Cine mundial as well as with a biweekly regional newsreel,Actualidades del norte, that Alarcon produced for circulation in the eighty the-aters he operated in and around Monterrey, Mexicos northeastern industrialcapital.”Project Pedro commenced operation in February 1957. USIS noted that “it was

immediately apparent that Noticiario Nacional had been greatly mismanaged,”and the embassy engaged Arthur Andersen and Co. to audit its new enterprise.Surveying local operations, Noticiario Nacionals (usis-imposed) general man-ager, Cantwell Brown, determined that increased investment was necessary, sinceproduction quality would have to be immediately improved to stabilize the firmsfinances: “Upon contact with the various advertising agencies who represent thelargest volume ofpotential for the operation, it was found that the reputation ofthe Company and the popularity of the vehicle itselfwas so poor that a completelack of confidence existed.” This was a crucial problem, since Mexican newsreelspaid fees for exhibition and funded production strictly through sponsorship.Because there were no plans for funding beyond the agencys initial investment,after which Project Pedro was to function self-sufficiently, it was imperative thatit soon attract new advertisers. Brown outlined a plan for establishing a commer-cially viable operation that closely related upgrading output on the screen toincreasing managements control behind it. “Immediate improvement of thecontent and tenor of the News Reel to enhance its popularity" was the key toprofitable propaganda. This would allow for necessary “build up ofdistributionand exhibition, especially to include more first run houses in Mexico City.”However, to begin more efficient production of messages, it was immediatelynecessary to implement “proper accounting procedures and internal opera-tions,” which would require “personnel changes," including “a reduction inunion payroll” and more management control of “job specification.” Also, asproduction quality rose, Brown planned to raise fees for ads and install a com-mission system for selling spots that would “stimulate customer confidence andsecure more business.” I-Ie also recommended development of a 16 mm versionof Noticiario clasa for provincial distribution in venues unequipped for 35 mmprojection. Finally, and unrealistically, the company intended to lobby the Fed-

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eral Districts authorities to expand the permissible number of ads per reel_While in its first six months of operation Noticiario Nacional lost over 200,000pesos (US$16,ooo), the embassy considered the fact that the deficit could now bereliably reported, through its new biweekly accounting practices, as a sign ofprogress. More impressively, exhibition expanded despite its financial deficits.“During Noticiario Nacionals first six months of USIS management, it slightly

more than doubled its national presence, eventually reaching 288 screens. By theend of 1957, its production was shown weekly in 307 theaters nationally, 53 ofwhich were in Mexico City. Noticiario clasa had added a dozen theaters in thecapital, eight of which were first-run outlets that quadrupled the newsreelsscreen time among the city’s leading film venues. The company boasted that “ofthese eight 2 are of the best in the City.” In addition to the eight movie palaces itobtained through “agreement with Cadena de Oro,” Noticiario Nacional hadnegotiated “separate contracts for Palacio Chino and the Versalles,” two moreleading downtown theaters. Tompkins credited usiA’s intemational footage forNoticiario clasas expanded eidaibition. Since March, “foreign material of inter-national origin was inserted,” based not strictly on its intended ideological effectbut in anticipation of “genuine and universal interest” that had palpable publicappeal. Brown concluded that “the vehicle has been improved gradually untilnow it is of interest to theatergoers, not merely tolerated by them.” He calculatedthat it now “has a propaganda impact of 1,643,540 persons per week.”37Although USIS officials expressed satisfaction at the newsreels improved qual-

ity and expanded audience, they (correctly) doubted that it would soon pay foritself (even if Tompkins achieved all their recommendations for cutting costsand expanding revenue). The main problem was that only 38 percent ofpossibleadvertising time was currently sold, while “the weekly cost of getting out thenewsreel is some $43,000 [pesos] on top of which there was another $8,000[pesos] to be paid to the four Mexican businessmen who fronted as the opera-tion’s management. If the newsreel sold all of its advertising spots, it would takein only $49,500 [pesos, or US$3,960 ].” USIS estimated that it would be at least sixmonths until “even a break-even condition” could be achieved.” In fact, itwould never break even. This was a problem for Mexican newsreels generally,not just Project Pedros. As Noticiario Nacional reported: “Federal District de-cree insertions in the news reel are limited to four spots and one publicity item.This places a definite ‘top’ on potential income from the operation.””The states regulation of newsreel ads ensured dependence on extracommer-

cial (usually political) sources of revenue in exchange for representation. Suchcontrived “news” segments regularly provoked public incredulity and antipathy:

PRODUCING TI-IE COLD WAR IN MEXICO I35

“The definition of ‘indirect publicity’ appears to be rather flexible, incidentally,and very often the number of such items exceeds by far the official figure of one.Audiences are extremely sensitive to material of the ‘indirect’ variety, and suchitems are often met with loud whistles, the Mexican equivalent of the Bronxcheer. But more often than not the patience of the Mexican audience is strainedto the breaking point, and the public indulges in the not too diverting, butsomewhat consoling, game of trying to guess who paid for what—and did he gethis moneys worth.”“° Just as all Mexican newsreels depended on various formsof official and unofficial subsidies from Mexico City sources, so Project Pedrodepended on Washingtons secret payments to meet its costs. In its case, its extra-commercial relations produced expanded international coverage that seemedactually to enhance its reception, as long as it did not appear didactically ideo-logical (which, in fact, it rarely did).

us1A’s official mission did not include covert operations. Selling democracysecretly was publicly ruled out when the agency was formed in 1953. NeverthelessUSIA did regularly produce materials without attribution. If publicly challenged,legally it would have to admit its involvement. In fact, its objective in Mexico(and elsewhere) was to work covertly from within apparently sovereign nationalmass media. usis was aware of the risks this posed to Washingtons very interestsin sponsoring Project Pedro, the international image of the United States as abeacon of freedom in the Cold War. The embassys PAO believed that us1A couldsurvive public fallout from the disclosure that it provided unattributed newsreelmaterial to a Mexican firm, but it would have more difficulty countering revela-tions of its secret ownership of a Mexican company: “The fact that the USIS inMexico was in reality the majority stockholder in a firm engaged in the produc-tion and showing of newsreels, if it became known, would occasion seriousembarrassment to the U.S. Government. The newsreels themselves would bediscredited and since the ownership of stock in such a corporation in Mexico isillegal, the corporation itselfwould be seriously damaged. . . . It is noted that theproduction of movies is one of the so-called seven restricted industries in Mex-ico.”‘“ To avoid such disclosure, USIS assiduously operated Project Pedro as aMexico City enterprise that abided by local regulations. Regarding Tompkinssposition, Shelton pointed out, “I think the pertinent point is that as far asProject Pedro is concerned . . . Tompkins is not the majority stockholder. I-Iisownership is exactly equal to that of the other proprietary group. His control isby virtue of tacit agreement and offices held. He does not have ‘stock control’ ofthe company’s affairs. Since Mexican nationals own 50% of the stock, the corpo-rate structure is legal and the stock ownership of Tompkins (an American

186 sE"ri-1 FF.lN

national) is fully disclosed. Therefore it would be our thought that disclosure ofthe Agencys ‘control’ ofTompkins, except of course as the publicity might affectits business success, could not affect the corporation?“

In Mexico, as much as anywhere else in the world, the agency succeeded inpenetrating a locally legitimate national mode of cultural production throughimplementation of “gray propaganda,” covertly produced and distributed infor-mation that did not attribute its connection to the agency. Officially, it did notengage in the “black propaganda” (covert misinformation and psychologicalwarfare) that was the domain of the CIA (whose international subsidization ofintellectuals and mass media is better known to, if still inadequately researchedby, historians of Cold War Europe)!“ As a former USIA deputy director ex-plained in his history ofthe agency: “Unattributable material . . . is that which isprepared and disseminated in such a way as to obscure or mislead the audienceas to its origins. usiA does not engage in this kind of propaganda, leaving it tothe Central Intelligence Agency?“ In Project Pedros case, the distinction was inpractice nonexistent. In fact, in one instance, the c1A challenged usiA to provethat Project Pedro (and another plan, “Project T,” for Tompkins to produce ananti-Communist feature film) were “within the responsibility boundaries" sepa-rating the two agencies’ respective missions. In advising Ambassador Robert Hillabout how to handle the bureaucratic dispute over “the two covert film projectsof USIS in Mexico,” McDermott explained that “the U.S. Government owns nostock nor any interest in a Mexican firm. It has a contract with the American[Tompkins] to supply footage for the newsreel and retains control of the news-reels content,” but the “stock ownership aspect . . . no longer exists,” owing toProject Pedros financial restructuring in August 1958, and therefore did nottrespass on the c1A’s terrain.“

Project Pedros successful competition for national advertising was critical toits operation as a Mexican concern. Its most conspicuous national sponsors werecorporate holdovers from Noticiario Nacionals operation under Alarcon andcame from the same Puebla-based economic clique that was closely tied tonational politics and economics since Avila Camachos presidency during WorldWar II. Banco Comercial Mexicano, owned by Manuel Espinosa Yglesias, andIosé Garcia Valsecas publishing empire each sponsored short introductory seg-ments above the newsreels title. Garcia Valsecas Novedades newspaper was aclose state-party collaborator that quietly published stories planted by the PR] (aswell as a key recipient of USIA material).*‘° Mexican newsreels frequently adver-tised affiliations to particular print media. EMA’s Noticiero mexicano, for exam-

PRODUCING THE COLD WAR IN MEXICO I87

ple, publicized its alliance with the major daily El Universal. Noticiario clasasopening credits announced its alliance with Garcia Valsecas sports magazineEsto. As was generally the case, the sponsoring publication had no actual edi-torial role in a given newsreels production; it simply paid a fee for the advertisingthat the newsreel provided. Esto was Noticiario clasas second largest sponsor,and the newsreel frequently featured its exploits, as well as those of affiliatedpublications, in its “news” segments. Other major Mexican retail and manufac-turing concerns-such as Corona Beer, Cadillac shoes, and Pal nail polish-sponsored Project Pedros newsreels. Transnational U.S. companies were alsoregular advertisers, not due to Project Pedros covert connection to Washingtonbut because of their commercial interests in Mexican consumption; they adver-tised with nationally owned reels as well.” Coca-Cola was by far Project Pedroslargest source of advertising revenue. Goodyear, Kodak, and jeep were amongthe other prominent U.S. multinationals that regularly purchased Project Pedroadvertising spots in Noticiario clasa and its successor productions.“Some of the principal figures operating behind the screen showed up on

it. Noticiario clasa projected segments, for example, about the social activitiesof the Alarcon and Azcarraga clans.” One issue conspicuously brought to-gether the international and the national when it showed Emilio Azcarraga V.‘-the dominant figure in midcentury Mexican mass communication and one ofWashingtons key covert collaborators—being named Executive of the Year for1957 by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in Mexico.” Ambassador Hills ac-tivities, his appearances with President Ruiz Cortines, and his airport arriv-als in Mexico City were the only regularly conspicuous representation of theembassy.“Project Pedro did subtly intervene in national politics in a way that con-

formed to general newsreel practices of highlighting favored politicians. Acrossthe two sexenios it spanned, the last third of Adolfo Ruiz Cortiness administra-tion (1952-58) and the first half of Adolfo Lopez Mateoss (1958-64), one gov-ernment figure, greatly favored by U.S. foreign policy, remained Project Pedrosmost prominent national political figure (following the two presidents them-selves). USIS newsreels regularly featured Antonio Ortiz Mena, Ruiz Cortinessdirector of the federal governments Social Security Institute and subsequentlyLopez Mateoss treasury secretary. Ortiz Mena appeared frequently not only ateach presidents side but also officiating independently at public events andmeeting with prominent U.S. officials to discuss economic issues between thetwo neighbors. A pr0to- técnico (forerunner of the type ofpolitician that caine to

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188 SETH FEIN

dominate the Pins last two decades of presidential hegemony), Ortiz Mena’ssingular on-screen presence projected Washingtons support for a pro-U.S. poli-tician who it hoped would eventually assume the presidency.”The intensity of Us1A’s effort to control Noticiario Nacionals everyday opera-

tion matched that applied to maintaining the companys appearance as a Mexi-can concern. Iust as Noticiario Nacional presented a front for Tompkinss owndomestically registered company, Impulsora Anahuac, the expatriates firm pro-vided a Mexican front for USIA. Tompkins agreed to clear every single substantivedecision about production with the embassys USIS staff, who, in turn, regularlyinformed the agencys motion-picture chief about actual local production. Atleast two members of a Newsreel Review Board-comprised of the post’s PAO, thedeputy PAO, information officer, and films officer-—-reviewed each issue andforwarded a report to Washington. In addition, the embassy shipped a 35 mmprint of every exhibited edition to the agency for its own review (unintentionallypreserving an audiovisual record of Project Pedro ofuse to historians). USIA alsorequired Tompkins to submit a quarterly “progress report” about the enterprisesoperation that combined “narrative and statistical” assessments.”

Us1As evaluation ofNoticiario clasa scrutinized the newsreels content as muchas its finances. One such report made by Shelton, at the end of 1957, typicallyevaluated narrative structure and topical content of six consecutive entries. Theagencys motion-picture chief favorably noted the high degree of regularity inform from edition to edition, combining various quantities of sequences com-prised of footage about international events, “supplied by the [Us1A’s] newsreelpool,” with national footage, usually about events in and around Mexico City,which “included everything from boxing and beauty queens to public worksprojects.” The report further noted: “Indirectly, it can be said that the U.S. wasreferred to in at least one story in every issue. A direct reference was made in allbut one issue and in one an indirect reference was made. Peaceful uses ofatomicenergy [were] referred to in three different issues, all three of the stories con-cerned had an international connotation.” There was locally shot footage of“Ambassador R. Hill arriving in Mexico and later presenting his credentials, andDr. Milton Eisenhowers visit to Mexico.” Like numerous other such reports, thisone judged “the technical quality of the reel to be good,” praising“ its editing,narration, and overall “composition.” However, the reports final analysis ofideological impact echoed similarly qualified assessments across Project Pedrosfour years of operation: “Content-wise the reel would be classified as national incharacter except for the pool supplied material which would add an occasionaltouch of international coverage.”5“

PRODUCING THE corn WAR IN MEXICO 139

USIA dissatisfaction over the lack of locally produced political messages per-sisted throughout Project Pedros operation and continued to generate tensionsbetween Washington and Mexico City over their Mexican newsreels’ content.Two years after Project Pedro began, us1A’s exasperated Motion Picture Servicedirector regularly sent the same kind of critique to the agencys Mexico Cityproconsul" that he had since production began: “The real program value ofprojects such as the Mexican newsreel is achieved through materials shot in thelocal country in support of U.S. objectives in that country. . . . It is not the intentto completely ‘carry’ the reel through stories that we supply. It is for this reasonthat we have been so insistent that USIS work with the local producer to see thatmaterials of program value are photographed in Mexico; and that a USIS staffmember work with the producer on editing and writing the material to insurethat we get the maximum benefit from materials photographed.”55Unhappy about Project Pedros performance during its first ten months of

operations, usiA ordered both a new audit of its finances and a USIS assessmentof its “performance from a non-fiscal point of view.”5"’ McDermott supportedcontinuation ofTompkinss undertaking, even though “it will require additionalsubsidization for another year before it becomes completely self-supporting.”He blamed the financial failure on “undue optimism” and “a lack of sufficientknowledge ofnewsreel operation here.” But the PAO believed that Project Pedrosfuture “depends in large measure on Washington,” on os1A’s ability to providebetter footage, not on drastic changes in Mexico City operations.”

Based on this evaluation, USIA continued to fund Project Pedro, makingsignificant new disbursements in the first half of 1958. However, by the summer,unable to pay its bills, including its debt to Alarcon, Tompkinss ImpulsoraAnahuac went into liquidation, and Noticiario Nacional released its final issueof Noticiario clasa after two decades of production. But this was not ProjectPedros last reel. In fact, U.S. officials in Washington and Mexico City sawImpulsora Anahuacs demise as an opportunity to start a new enterprise fromscratch that would draw on the previous year and a halfs experience as itimplemented reforms to improve management and content (and to exchangeUs1A’s position as a secret owner to a potentially less embarrassing role as a secretcontractor)?‘ Despite its shortcomings, Project Pedro offered a unique angle ofaccess, otherwise unavailable to the United States in Mexico. In assessing theoverall situation of Mexican newsreel production and consumption, as Noti-ciario Nacional dissolved, USIS noted that Mexico offered few opportunities forconsistent control of any of the nationally run operations, many of which fre-quently swapped footage “with European reels—including those behind the Iron

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19O SETH FEIN

Curtain.” Even if Washington was able to displace such Eastern bloc arrange-ments, by expanding distribution of its own footage (already regularly acceptedby two privately operated concerns, including Azcarragas Cine muridial), “usiswould not, of course, be in a position to control the contents of the entire reels,just as it cannot control the entire contents of newspapers like Excélsior orNovedades or [Azcarragas] Radio Station xEw or any of the scores of news-papers, magazines and radio stations it deals with” in Mexico?"In fact, broadcast culture, not only radio but also television, provided critical

intertexts for Project Pedros reformulation. Concerned about declining au-dience for its Sunday night El mundo en imarcha radio show, in 1958 USIAcommissioned a public-opinion study of the weekly current-events programsreception. Broadcast from “Mexicos leading radio station, xEw,” in Mexico City,the show was relayed across the rest of the Azcarraga-operated national networkof forty-four stations. Its opening and closing motto—“The world marcheson!’-deliberately echoed the similar signature line of the March of Time filmseries produced by Henry Luces communications empire between the mid-i93os and mid-1950s. The pseudo-newsreel had had close relations to the GoodNeighbor policy, especially with regard to production about Mexico.“ The sur-vey compared audience attitudes toward radio news to competing forms ofcurrent-events-oriented mass media. It indicated that radio remained the mostinfluential form of Mexican mass communication about national and interna-tional events: informants placed its diffusion ahead of newspapers and its au-thoritativeness above that of newsreels, which had wide exposure but wereviewed more as entertainment than journalism. The report recognized thattelevisions daily impact would eventually supersede radios but had not yet doneso owing to the still-prohibitive cost of receivers. Nevertheless, millions ofMexicans had regular contact with "rv culture, and its presentation of currentevents suggested the same authority that radio commanded. With specific re-gard to El mundo en marcha, the study concluded that the covertly operated USISradio program, produced under contract by I. Walter Thompson of Mexico,remained a credible source of information even though some respondents com-plained that certain international events and issues went underreported com-pared to competing mass media that more critically covered the United States.“When USIS officers in Mexico City reconfigured Project Pedros finances and

form, they cited its well-regarded radio program by naming its new newsreel Elmundo en marcha. In doing so, usis signaled its newsreels link to broadcastculture as well as to Luces film series. El mundo en marcha was an audiovisualhybrid that brought television-style news production into Mexican movie the-

PRODUCING THE (‘,(')LI) WAR IN MEXICO Ik)l

LIICTS just as U.S. and Mexican corporate and state interests sought to expand rvin Mexico. Its electronic-inflected introductory soundtrack and its staccato nar-ration contributed to this effect. El mundo en marchas eventual employment ofTelesistemas ubiquitous newscaster lacobo Zabludovsky as its editorial directorand narrator made explicit the connection between small screen and big, andthe link was formal as well as personal. Before El mundo en marcha, Mexicannewsreels buried the narrators name along with that of the other technical staffin the concluding credits. Borrowing from television, El mundo en marchaestablished its identity as being intertwined with that of its celebrity journalist ateach issues start. Zabludovsky had been present at the birth of commercialMexican television in 1950 when he produced and hosted the nations firstnewscast, sponsored by General Motors.“ Too, before going to work for Tomp-kins in 1960, Telesistemas star had already performed at the Cold War nexus ofWashington and Mexican mass media. In October 1957 he hosted a prime-timeChannel 4 special (secretly authored by usiA) that used the occasion of theUnited Nations’ twelfth anniversary to concentrate attention on recent Sovietactions in Hungary.“

By the time Zabludovsky added his name and voice to El mundo en murcha,he had, then. accumulated significant social capital in print and radio as well asrv. The redeployment of that capital by Tompkins on Mexicos movie screensattracted the host states attention. The second-in-command of the InteriorMinistrys office of cinema affairs, Carment Baez, privately expressed her ad-ministrations approval of the national newscasters appointment: “We wish tocongratulate the R. K. Tompkins Company and the management of the newsreel‘El mundo en marcha' for having acquired the services of Mr. Jacobo Zablu-dovsky as Editorial Director. . . . [My office] has taken due note of this step andwill be collaborating closely with ‘El mundo en marcha,’ which will be held up tothe other newsreels as an example ofwhat a good newsreel should be and how toinform the Mexican public properly.”““ In fact, by the beginning of 1960, Elmundo en marcha was widely considered to be “the leading Mexican weeklynewsreel.” Its distribution had climbed to 358 theaters nationally.“

Changes on the screen came with changes behind it. R. K. Tompkins y Aso-ciados, s.A., openly owned and operated El mundo en marcha while retainingaccess to its predecessors wide distribution through Cadena de Oro. Alarcon,however, was no longer a partner in production. Tompkinss new company paidhim a flat exhibition fee ($9,000 for the first six months of operation) conform-ing to usual industry practice. Regarding content, Washington finally agreed inwriting to provide “message material” as requested by Mexico City, but it in-

192 SETH FEIN

sisted that Tompkins’s uncle, former 1u<o chiefN. Peter Rathvon—who had longexperience facilitating Washington’s covert production of foreign films in Eu-rope as well as the Americas—take over everyday management of his nephew'snewsreel.“ This was part of the agency’s effort to impose “closer supervision byUsis” ofProject Pedro .to implement “a planned systematic approach to coverageand use of local stories that can further program objectives.”"’7The new format’s aggregate success did not, however, resolve the ongoing

struggle between Washington and Mexico City over content. Unsatisfied withus1A’s response to its general requests for coverage about certain topics, theembassy began making “hard and specific requests for footage.” These solicita-tions ranged from coverage of activities of prominent Mexicans in the UnitedStates—such as a lecture by the historian Edmundo O’Gorman at the Universityof Indiana, the composer Carlos Chavez’s term as the Charles Eliot NortonChair in Poetics at Harvard, an Albuquerque concert by the Mexican SymphonyOrchestra, the mass-media magnate (and Project Pedro collaborator) EmilioAzcarraga’s reception of an award atColumbia University, and Mexico’s eques-trian jumping team’s competition in Washi11gton—to that of specific Cold Wargeopolitics, including resumption of nuclear testing by the Soviet Union, thecrisis over Formosa, the pullout of U.S. forces from Lebanon, and British PrimeMinister Harold Macmillan’s visit to Moscow.“Evaluating El mundo en marcha’s first three months of operation, Tompkins

defended its use ofMexican material and blamed Washington for not supplyingsufficient foreign footage: “Local coverage has been good, in fact more extensivethan competitive reels. The ‘international’ material supplied has been disap-pointing, both by reason of the material selected and because such timely mate-rial as has been provided consistently arrives to hand so late as to be unusable.”‘9Rathvon and McDermott also regularly blamed the agency for a lack of “messagematerial” to interpolate with El mundo en marcha’s local production. But Shel-ton defended his unit’s work, citing its comparative success elsewhere: “We havethis same kind of project going in numerous other countries all over the world,and in these countries the newsreel is generally considered to be one of the mosteffective of all program vehicles.”7° He advised Rathvon: “We had always ex-pected that the reel would never carry more than 1/3 international stories, andthat at least 2/ 3 of every issue would be Mexican material.” USIA had increasedits delivery of international footage to ease Project Pedro’s initial reorganiza-tion under the former Hollywood executive, but Washington expected a moreMexican-centric Cold War production for the future."

There were, in fact, obstacles to us1A’s objectives that were endemic to Project

PRODUCING THE corn wxa IN MEXICO 193

Pedro’s operation within the highly regulated Mexican film industry. For one,cost remained an issue. As the embassy’s PAO explained: “The operators, whilewilling to cover such outstanding events as the Acapulco meeting of the twopresidents [Lopez Mateos and Eisenhower], and any items we request within theFederal District, have placed limitations on coverage anywhere in Mexico unlessreimbursed for travel expenses."72 Also, changes in the Federal District’s regula-tion of newsreel advertising, which in 1959 reduced the number of twenty-second spots from five to four, challenged Project Pedro’s attempts to achieveself-sufficiency, forcing it to continue to depend on Washington subventions.Summing up these challenges, a year after starting El mundo en marcha, Rath-von reported that “due to the growing reputation of the reel we might well beable to maintain it on at least a break-even basis were it not for the arbitrary andharassing action of the government of the Federal District in regulating all thenews reels and revistas. . . . It is too early to judge our chances of breakingeven next year, but you can readily see the difficulty we would be in withoutoutside support.” El mundo en marcha’s production chief suspected that rivalprint media might have been behind the new efforts to squeeze the finances ofnewsreels. In any case, the change forced newsreels to search for more “infor-mal” funding whether from national or, in Project Pedro’s case, internationalpatrons.”Beyond the impact of its commercial regulation, the state’s official censorship

also limited Project Pedro’s editorial autonomy. For example, footage of “VicePresident Nixon’s welcome in Washington following his South American tourwas not used by CLASA because the Mexican Government film censor’s officeremoved all Nixon footage from all newsreels distributed in Mexico." This banincluded “scenes of the Vice President’s reception in Uruguay and Argentinawhich, though they showed no violence, arrived here after the Lima and Caracasreceptions. . . . The Directorate General ofCinematografia informed USIS ‘extra-officially’ that the footage had been deleted in order to avoid any unfavorablereactions among theatre audiences in Mexico,” where Nixon had made a suc-cessful official visit in 1956.“ Here was an irony of Mexican mass culture: theauthoritarian state’s control of content forced it to anticipate public opinion.Widespread recognition that the state determined what was privately exhibitedmeant that film censors expected that spectators viewed newsreels as signs ofOfficial sentiment. In this case, as in others, the Mexican state was unwilling tosanction a commercially produced presentation that seemed too pro-American.The 1>R1’s own reliance on anti-Communism in the late 1950s to suppress domes-tic opposition—for example, by imprisoning dissident labor leaders as foreign-

194 SETH 1=121r~1

directed subversives—demanded that the state perform its Cold War sovereigntythrough independence from Washington's foreign policies.”Rituals of PR1 rule also dictated specific changes. Government censors, for

example, banned El mundo en marcl1a’s experiment with diegetic sound, insteadof the usual voice-over narration. i11 its coverage of Ruiz Cortines’s 1958 Infbrme(state of the 11ation) address. us1s reported: “The live sound footage was deletedby the Government’s censorship office . . . on the grounds that theatre audiencesmight register disapproval.“ Apparently it felt the aural effect would reduce thepresident's aura.“ ln another’ case, government censors cut footage of Ambas-sador Hill’s attendance at the annual commemoration of the Nifios Heroes, thelegendary boy cadets who sacrificed their lives in defending Mexico City frominvading U.S. forces in September 1847. The scene had included importantMexican politicians seated near the ambassador and hence violated “a Presiden-tial directive forbidding closeups in newsreels of politicians, all ofwhom seem tobe vying for position in the interregnum" between Lopez Mateos’s Iuly electionand December inauguration. But this was not the only material that state cen-sors deemed beyond the pale for that week’s issue: they also banned footage ofdevastating floods, prompting 11 us1s official to comment that “‘newsreel’ ishardly the term to use in describing this kind of product in Mexico?” Hisobservation revealed also a perhaps half-conscious recognition that “U.S. pro-paganda” was hardly the term to describe Project Pedro’s output.The state’s quotidian control of content affected all Mexican newsreels, not

just Project Pedro. But it affected Project Pedro differently, since its objectivesstrove for Cold War significance according to Washingtons ideological agenda,11ot Mexico City’s. Still, the most important force limiting what Project Pedroprojected in Mexican movie theaters was not state interventions but publicreception. ln explaining why so few locally produced Project Pedro segmentsventured into Cold War politics, an unusually astute agency analyst pointed outthat “there are very definite limitations on what can be done locally and used tofurther program objectives. Not the least of these is the suspicion that Mexicanaudiences have toward local stories carried by their newsreels since almost allsuch stories are but thinly disguised paid advertisements."7" Freedom from theneed to impose such unpopular stories helped El mundo en rnarcha achieve itsfavorable reception, even as its lack of Cold War messages frustrated its Wash-ington benefactors. Hence what had made Project Pedro an increasingly popularproduct with growing national distribution—how much it combined the bestparts of other Mexican newsreels with general-interest international footage~rendered it ineffective propaganda in Washingtons eyes. While the newsreels

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1'1z<11>11c1Nr;'rt11e<;o1,n WAR IN MEXICO 195

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3. Mexican newsreels prominently projected bullfighting and other sports events thatoften generated “sponsorship fees" for “incidental product placement, usually a beeror soft drink," such as in this scene. Noticiario clasa 828 (reproduced at the NationalArchives).

Mexicanized content and form preserved its covert relationship with USIA, theyalso minimized the agency's influence on production. This communicationsconundrum frustrated a USIA assessor: “My position has never yet been clearlyoutlined as to how far USIS can control, suggest, or define our stake in this oper-ation, partly due, of course, to the shrouds imposed on our relationship.” Ofparticular concern, as his mid-1960 agency evaluation of El mundo en marchdscontent and form observed, was its seemingly pointless overproduction oftrivialsegments about social diversions (see figure 3): “lt should also be noted that outof the average reel of 699 feet, 249 feet is on sports—mostly bullfights, localboxing and soccer. Possibly this is due to something in relation to their need forplacing their advertising plugs; but to my mind it is definitely affecting the use ofyour clips sent from the United States.""’Washington never understood why so much ofwhat was shot in Mexico City

seemed apolitical. Rathvon explained that the very aspects of El mundo enmarcl1a’s content that USIA criticized, namely, its representation of popular

[96 SETH FEIN

culture and social amusements, were what provided the newsreel its publiccredibility: “The local footage has been predominant and we have won accep-tance as a Mexican reel. Although it is not always easy to find entertainingmaterial we have done an increasingly effective job. The emphasis on sports andbullfights is not simply filler. It is what the Mexican theatre-goers want andexpect.”"° Message footage had to come from New York, because it could not beadequately constituted from Mexican material. To do this better, McDermotturged Shelt0n’s Motion Picture Service “to install an Assignments Editor,” ashad other USIA mass-media branches, to oversee production and distribution offootage for specific usrs clients. Such coordination was necessary because “ma-terials shot in Mexico cannot form the bulk of the reel for program objectives.We have and shall continue to catch any item of program value in M6Xi¢0- Butthere aren’t enough of them to carry the reel week in and week out.” Theproblem regarding “program objectives”—that is, Cold War content—“is andalways has been the lack ofsufficient program material from your shop deliveredin time to be of program value.”*' This meant specially requested footage, notgeneral material distributed globally, “since this would be self-defeating in acountry like Mexico which is strongly nationalistic, and obviously suspicious ofa reel that could be suspected of too much lending from USIS.”8ZHow much Project Pedro served U.S. foreign policy would remain a baffling

question for its Washington and Mexico City patrons. Despite both its ideologi-cal shortcomings and the fact that USIA footage “is also gratefully accepted byother newsreels with no charge,” the unusual access Project Pedro providedWashington led the embassy's PAO to “reluctantly recommend,” in February1959, that Ambassador Hill support subsidizing Tompl<ins’s operation for anadditional year: “We do control this newsreel as to content and they are pleasedto carry what we want. Other newsreels use whatever of the offered footage theydesire. Such control is good for any special occasion that might arise?” As wewill see, it was in fact the broader -field ofMexican public culture reproduced byProject Pedro's competitors that limited usrs’s ability to shape Tompl<ins’s in-creasingly popular production.

Projecting Project Pedro -

As the struggles between Mexico City and Washington make clear, what ap-peared on the screen is notable for how closely it conformed to the broader fieldofMexican newsreel production. Project Pedro contended with the production-consumption matrix generated by its intertextual relationship to other Mexican

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newsreels, formal and informal state restrictions regarding content, and its an-ticipation of the expectations of national spectators. Its form and content con-verged with more than diverged from that of its competition. As it changed fromNoticiario clasa to El mundo en marcha, and as each of those products under-went revisions, Project Pedro never satisfied the aspirations of its U.S. govern-ment conceivers. Its success at entering the Mexican newsreel field as a legitimateproduct of national communication rendered it an inadequate form of anti-Communist propaganda. Here the transnational was at odds with the inter-national; the Mexicanization of U.S. resources within the local environment ofpolitical and cultural production in Mexico City diminished Project Pedro’sability to “Americanize" Mexican mass media and to propagate Washington’sforeign policy.In practice, most of Project Pedro’s effect was negative. It controlled what was

not seen more than it imposed what was. Across its entire operation, for exam-ple, segments about the Soviet Union were notably rare, compared to reportsabout the competitions stories. This conformed to the logic of Mexican foreignpolicy in the late 1950s and early 1960s that ostentatiously touted its internationalindependence from the United States to compensate for Mexico’s rightist poli-cies at home and its increasingly close economic relations with its northernneighbor. Direct references to the Soviet Union appeared only occasionally, suchas Khrushchev’s infamous anti-U.S. diatribe at the United Nations in 1961, an-nual commemorations ofMoscow’s suppression of the 1956 Budapest uprising,or images of East Germans fleeing to the West before the Berlin Wall’s con-struction.“ Regarding U.S. foreign policy, the emphasis was unsurprisingly onnonmilitary, technological achievements and the progress they promised to therest of the world. Most notable among these was the Eisenhower administra-tion’s Atoms for Peace initiative that sought to erase destructive associations ofU.S. atomic power by demonstrating the progressive ends to which Washingtonintended to direct nuclear energy globally.“ In one of Project Pedro’s few directreferences to U.S. military power, El mundo en marcha covered the Acapulcovisit of the nuclear submarine Paul Revere, which had recently seen actionin Korea.“

U.S. leadership in science was a dominant theme of agency-supplied footage.Following the Soviet Union’s successfiil October 1957 Sputnik launch, U.S. spaceexploration became a prominent Project Pedro presence, not simply as a fre-quent news topic. Noticiario clasa even reconfigured its opening sequence at theend of 1957 to associate its dissemination with satellite communication. Anima-tion depicted a rocket launched from a map ofMexico; the scene then shifted to

198 SETH Fl~llN

an aerial view of the country, and finally of Earth from outer space as thesoundtrack produced wan electronic beeps supposedly emanating from an or-biting satellite. The new title read, “NOTICIAS NACIONALES E INTERNACIONALESDEL sA'rEL1rE," and the newsreel was retitled Satélite, although satellite com-munication had no role in its distribution.”

In Sputnik’s wake, the representational practices of U.S. foreign policy cen-tered on extraterrestrial achievement (matching the new orientation of domes-tic educational and science policy) by depicting the U.S. response, its Explorersatellite, to the Soviet challenge.“ Through outer space, Project Pedro connectedMexican development to U.S.—Mexican relations. El mundo en marcha, forexample, prominently featured the opening of a space tracking station in Guay-mas, Sonora.” The segments emphasized the Sonoran installation as a nationalsite of technological advancement operated by Mexicans in the service of worldprogress. Hence the manned Mercury missions of the early 1960s became asource not only of U.S. advancement but also of Mexico’s, facilitated by tech-nological transfer from the United States. In this case, El mundo en marcharelocalized the Cold War in the provinces and in the U.S.—Mexican borderlandsas it remapped Mexico's place in global history through the nation's contribu-tion to extraterrestrial exploration as a scientific ally of the United States. In amore terrestrial cross-border moment, U.S.—Mexican relations, transnationalcapital, and Mexican popular culture converged when, in a spot sponsored byCoca-Cola of Mexico, Noticiario clasa featured the 1957 Little League WorldSeries victory of the Mexican team from Monterrey. Footage of the clinchinggame was followed by that of a White House reception where the Mexicanplayers met President Eisenhower (see figure 4).""International events appeared in usiA-supplied newsreel footage described by

locally developed narration. Often Third World flash points provided oppor-tunities to represent the United States as supportive of postcolonial nation-states. In the Suez crisis’s wake, for example, Noticiario clasa focused on RalphBunches role in directing the United Nations’ involvement in resolving theMiddle East conflict. Beyond underlining cases where U.S. foreign policy sup-ported decolonization or noninterventionism in the postcolonial world, themobilization of Bunche's visage (in Ghana as well as in Egypt and Jordan)sought to demonstrate that the United States was a meritocracy that had pro-duced one of the world's most famous diplomats, an African American leadingthe work of the United Nations." Like contemporary overt USIA productionsdistributed globally, Project Pedro also went to great lengths to project progressin U.S. race relations and the professional achievements of African Americans

‘T

4

0

l

l'l(()l)U(IIN(; ‘run-: <;oi.n WAR IN M1-;x1<,:o 199

4%

“Q65

4. Monterrey’s 1957 Little League World Series champs’ visit to the White House offereda cross-border opportunity for Project Pedro. Noticiario clasa 823 (reproduced at theNational Archives).

within the United States. In the 1960s USI/\ propaganda would “discover” theLatino presence within the United States in order to advance its leadership of theWestern Hemisphere, but in the late 1950s African Americans still stood for allpeople of color in the United States in the audiovisual competition for ThirdWorld hearts and minds.” Other international episodes that threatened U.S.prestige among nations of the so-called nonaligned world could not be entirelyerased. In early 1961, for example, Patrice Lumumba appeared as Zabludovskyflatly narrated that the “ex-Prime Minister of the Republic of the Congo hadbeen shot while trying to escape from prison.”"" More typical were seeminglyinnocuous segments about Laotian peasants struggling against Communist in-cursions from Vietnam.“While it is notable how rarely images from contemporary Cold War battle-

grounds appeared, there are instances that jar conventional teleologies. Throughthe footage distributed globally by USIA and interpolated by Project Pedrosnewsreels, we can recover liminal moments in the history of U.S. foreign policyduring the Cold War and ofthe power ofnational forces of production to shape

200 SETH FEIN

the content ofWashingtons transnationally produced propaganda. At the outsetof 1959, for example, El mundo en marclia critically compared the arrival ofousted Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista in Mexico to his initial exile theretwenty years earlier. Over images of Cubans denouncing their former leader andproudly displaying a portrait of their new one (Fidel Castro), the narrationdescribes positively the revolutions triumph.” A later segment about Castro’sApril 1959 visit to the United States includes footage of prorevolutionary streetdemonstrations punctuated by a final shot of an English-language sign thatstates “We love you Fidel.”"“ - 5More significant, and predictable, than El mundo en marcha's initially favor-

able Castro coverage is its virtual noncoverage of Cuba after U.S.-Cubaii re-lations took a decisively negative turn. The absence of anti-Castro propagandabetween April 1959 and April 1961 reveals much about Project Pedro’s localoperation. El mundo en marcha neither reproduced Mexican mass media's gener-ally favorable coverage of the revolutionary regime, including Mexico’s friendlydiplomacy with Castro’s government, nor expressed Washingtons increasinglyopen hostility to Havana. lust as the newsreel’s national operation curtailednegative reporting about Cuba, its USIA connection prevented any positive rep-resentations. But in the aftermath of the Kennedy administrations Bay of Pigsfiasco, USIS invoked Cold War politics to pressure U.S. multinationals in Mexicoto withdraw their ads from competing newsreels that favorably covered Havana.In late summer 1961, the embassy’s PAO “called in all the USA advertising com-panies and advertisers, and told them he thought it inappropriate that theyshould be the principal financial support of two Communist-owned newsreelsin Mexico; they agreed to withdraw all advertising from those Reels; in re-distributing that advertising, ‘Pedro’ received enough financing so that for thefirst time it showed a profit for several weeks in August and September.”°7Following its coverage of Castro’s first visit to the United States, El mundo enmarcha’s next, and final, mention of Cuba was unavoidable. In the immediateaftermath of the Bay of Pigs invasion, it projected Ambassador Adlai Stevensondefending the United States in the United Nations Security Council againstCuba’s accusations that it had covertly directed the counterrevolutionary in-vasion.” Kennedy’s admission of U.S. involvement, days later, unsurprisinglyreceived no play at all. Coverage of the Cuban Missile Crisis did not produce adilemma for El mundo en marcha, because by 1962 Project Pedro no longerexisted.Long considered cost ineffective, the program persistently eluded the expecta-

tions of the officials who commissioned its production. This was particularly

PRODUCING THF. corn wxrt IN MEXICO 101

perplexing for those who oversaw the program from Washington, since ProjectPedro seemed to have the most favorable conditions of all UsiA’s transnationalaudiovisual operations: “The Agency has never been at all satisfied with thefinished product—neither as to what it contains or how it handles its content.This is a real anomaly. No one questions the sincere loyalty of the Americans

associated with the Reel (T0mpkins and his wife, and his uncle, N. P. Rathvon,semi-retired, who used to own iu<o), and IMS sends it more and better footagefrom New York than any of the 50 or so other Reels in the world that we haveworking arrangements with. Somehow, at USIS level, liaison dissolves and thereis no effective control or guidance.” Motion Picture Service officials speculatedabout whether or not Project Pedro had been sabotaged by Usis officers inMexico City who possibly resented the direct connections between the Mexicannewsreel operations and Washington or the fact that the project was a legacy ofan earlier USIS regime.”While never grasping Project Pedro’s inherent contradictions, derived from

the particular context of Mexican state and culture industries, USIA did recog-

_ , ganizationally, is ideal, and was achievedover a period of several years at considerable cost and difficulty, using devious

means and f°“r C°TP°T=1t¢ Organizations. If the project is killed, these Americanowners would be unable to operate without our subsidy and would be unwillingto operate in the ‘local manner,’ as described above, and so would sell the Reel.Once sold, the loss would be irretrievable and we could not expect to re-establishour position. Our present Reel has a good local standing and is not known tohave any USA Government connection.” El mundo en marcha had even recently“received a commendation from the government’s movie control office, saying itwas an example to the other newsreels of what such a vehicle should be.” Al-

‘O‘ ense, however limited, that Project Pedroprovided."’°Despite Project Pedro’s declining costs, by the end of 1960 the embassy’s PAO,

He' paign against the Motion Picture Service’sdesire to continue subsidization of Tompkins’s newsreels.“" Throughout 1961McDermott insisted that the Motion Picture Service's director, Turner Shelton,who believed that Project Pedro was a critical counterweight to “Communist:controlled” Mexican newsreels, “go to Mexico himself and investigate thor-Ollghly why ‘Pedro’ is ineffective (if not actually counterproductive).”‘°2 At the

202 SETH FEIN

same time, McDermott successfully lobbied the Kennedy administrations newambassador to Mexico, Thomas Mann, to kill Pedro."’-‘ He explained that thenewsreel's failure was due not to USIS mismanagement but to the difficulties ofprofitably producing propaganda within a Mexican newsreel given local condi-tions, especially of state regulation. He objected to Shelton’s urgent advocacy ofProject Pedro’s continuation: “Turner makes the point that if this is killed weleave the field to the Commies. Such is not the case. There are seven newsreels inaction, two of which [including EMA’s] are controlled by the outfit which usesBloc footage. Two others would continue to use our footage, but at no cost tous. . . . He has a fetish about these classified projects and hasprobably wastedmore money than any other element in the Agency."'°“If, in the end, the local context of its production limited Project Pedro’s

impact as propaganda, foreign policy determined the timing of its terminationin September i961.“’~‘ By then, the Americas lay at the center of Washingtonsconceptualization of Cold War public diplomacy. The kind of inattention to theregion that had prompted the need to formulate transnational production ofpropaganda within Mexico was replaced by the Alliance for Progress and Wash-ington’s reassertion of the Western Hemisphere idea as central to its globalstrategy. Project Pedro, however, stands less between the Eisenhower and Ken-nedy administrations as it does more generally between the 1950s and 1960s inhow it allows us to see the transitions under way in Washington's approach tothe hemisphere, between the c1A’s overthrow of Arbenz and the Cuban revolu-tion’s overthrow of Batista; between Vice President Nixon’s vexed visit to Caracasin 1958 and President Kennedy’s triumphal tour through the same city in 1962;between the Cold War's reverberations in the Americas and the Americas as aprincipal area of Cold War confrontation; between a foreign policy that ap-proached the Third World with a conservative strategy of containment and onecharacterized by liberal rhetoric advocating social change. ""'

t All these changes can be summarized by the change in international com-munications as film gave way to television or (as McLuhan put it) as the hot gaveway to the cool medium for expression and dissemination of the U.S. message inthe Americas and in the rest of the world.“” However, while the completion ofthat transition from large screen to small was most visibly marked by Edward R.Murrow’s appointment as the Kennedy administrations director of USIA (andthe simultaneous bestowal of cabinet-level status to that post), its initiationpreceded liberalism’s return to the White House. In 1960 the Eisenhower admin-istration developed a regionwide approach to news production for the Americas

PRODUCING THE t_I()LD WAR IN MEXICO 2.0}

with its inauguration of a weekly fifteen-minute, unattributed newscast pro-duced in separate Spanish and Portuguese and broadcast throughout the Ken-nedy and Iohnson administrations.

Between Culture and Politics

In viewing Project Pedro in a transnational context, as part of the history of theUnited States within Mexico, we must not conflate the history of the researchabout the newsreels’ production with their history as culture. What happenedbehind the screen is only part of the story. lust as important for the scholar ofinternational history, for the scholar of Mexico and the United States, is whathappened on the screen and what happened around it. As Edward Said observedabout the contemporary study of imperial culture: “The problem of representa-tion is deemed to be central, yet rarely is it put in its full political context, acontext that is primarily imperial. Instead we have on the one hand an isolatedcultural sphere believed to be freely and unconditionally available to weightlesstheoretical speculation and investigation, and, on the other, a debased politicalsphere, where the real struggle between interests is supposed to occur.” Leavingaside the question of whether Said’s own work always followed the project heimagined, it is difficult to deny the value ofhis conclusion that such a division ofscholarly spheres does exist and is a false dichotomy, that the political and thecultural “are not only connected but ultimately the same."‘°" lust as the historyof these films, distributed weekly between 1957 and 1961, is part of the exogenoushistory of the United States, it is part of Mexicos endogenous history: thecontext in which their meanings were produced, that is, where their publichistory as culture (not to be confused with their secret history as instruments ofcultural diplomacy) was made. To avoid that sphere is to avoid confronting thepresence of Infante and Rivera and to ignore how the broader field of Mexicanmass culture ultimately determined not only the newsreels’ audiovisual produc-tion but also the production of their meanings, of their public consumption.Perhaps we need to posit here a notion of cultural empire without culturalimperialism; that is, echoing Ranajit Guha’s conclusions about colonialism inSouth Asia, we need to note conceptually the dissonance between imperialinstitutions and social power on the ground.""’

. Project Pedro’s history demonstrates both the limits of U.S. power in the ColdWar as well as the limits to conventional historiographic constructions of thatpower. History and historiography are, of course, always mutually constitutive.

204 sern ram

S0 too are the representational machinery of U.S. foreign policies and thosepolices themselves. If Washington ultimately waged cold war to convince na-tional societies across the globe to follow its leadership, then the production ofpropaganda cannot be viewed as a mere sideshow, a reel derivative of a more realstory or as the soft derivative of hard policies. In other words, the reel is real.And the images projected on the screen reproduced the forces of productionbehind, around, and in front of it. -This is true in the present as well as in the past. In the post—Cold War as in the

Cold War, U.S. foreign policy seeks to control the everyday representation of theworld transnationally. In the Cold War, bipolarity forced U.S. methods under-ground, as it feared charges of imperialism while managing its empire in thename of freedom, of anti-Communism and anti-imperialism. In the post—ColdWar, unipolarity allows the United States to operate openly as it imposes impe-rial infrastructure in the name of free markets and democracy. Like the UsiA’sproduction of Project Pedro in the Cold War, post~Cold War WashingtonsBroadcasting Board of Governors (BBG) has overtly imposed an Arab—languagesatellite television network for the Middle East, Al-Hurra (“the free one”), tochallenge the popularity of Al-Iazeera and other transnational networks thatchallenge U.S. foreign policy (while also revisiting earlier covert arrangements,such as Project Pedro, by purchasing access to seemingly independent MiddleEastern media, especially in Iraq). In so doing, it demonstrates the longevity,across the supposed Cold War/post—Cold War divide, of U.S. foreign policy’sdesire to engineer information internationally, even as it trumpets free marketsas the way to free ideas."“ (More recently, in Iuly 2005; the governments ofVenezuela, Uruguay, Cuba, Bolivia, and Argentina inaugurated Telesur, theirown Latin American public information TV network, also aligned with Brazilianbroadcasting, to challenge extraregional corporate news, especially CNN en Es-pafiol, with transnationalist mass communication organized to counter U.S.hegemony and foster international integration. This has provoked calls for theBBG, the usiA’s broadcasting successor, to develop new television programmingto challenge Telesur’s anticipated leftist, anti-U.S. orientation.)“‘ As MiddleEastern publics ignore Al—I-Iurra, Washington is relearning in the post~ColdWar what it learned during the Cold War: imperial designs are often frustratedby local receptions. Arjun Appadurai’s observation about methodology for thestudy of globalization holds true for investigation of Cold War as well as post—Cold War transnational culture when it demands “examination of how localityemerges in a globalizing world, of how colonial processes underwrite contem-

PRODUCING THE corn wan IN MEXICO 205

porary politics, of how history and genealogy inflect one another, and of howglobal forces take local form."‘ ‘ZKeeping such globality in mind, the so-called new international history of the

Cold War should not mean—as it too often does—the reification of established

hi5t°rl°g1'aPhi@5 by fetishizing the declassification of new documents overdeter-mined by existing master narratives. If the Cold War was indeed a global phe_nomenon, it needs to be studied everywhere in varied ways, by raising newquestions about previously understudied social as well as geocultural sites whilereading “old” sources with new eyes. Power can only be understood if its study isnot presupposed based on a myopic assertion of grand strategy as internationalhistory. Yet international history is crucial to understanding grand strategy, sincethe only way to mark power’s presence is to chart its absence, and the only way tounderstand its everyday articulation is to look beyond established actors. In otherwords, it is far from the overrepresented areas of Cold War conflict where theglobal history of the Cold War needs most to be studied-for example, in thepublic sphere of various nations—not as a sideshow (a derivative of other,supposedly discrete, military, diplomatic, or economic force fields) but as a mainattraction, not necessarily as a subset of U.S. or Soviet or Chinese history, but asLaotian, Ethiopian, or Mexican histories. Such research should foreground newframeworks for contemplating the past, rather than merely mine for new sources(to settle old scores) in already well-drilled topical veins. Of course, one of theironies of empire is that some of the best sources about life “out there" are storedwithin imperial bureaucracies. As in Project Pedro’s case, this workmight dependon (FOIA) declassification, but the demand for documents should be guided not

lenges about the very definition of CoZldtWi1cr0'SS P0 lllcal p0Sm0nf—but by Chal-_ r history itself. Accordingly, as we tellnew stories from new sources, we also need to examine old ones with new eyes,ones that see beyond both disciplinary and national borders.However, to interpret imperial remnants imaginatively means to read sources

from P°5lti°n5 beY0nd Where they have been originally produced and conven-tionally consumed. To do this, Cold War historiography must eontinlm to movenot only toward culture but also toward the world. It should, to poach fromChakrabarty, provincialize the United States.” International history must beplaced in a transnational frame, one that, in Project Pedro’s case, views thehistory of Mexico as part of the history of the United States and the history ofthe United States as part ofMexico.

2o6 SETH FEIN

Notes

A different version of this essay appeared in Diplomatic History 28, no. 5, a special issuededicated to Walter L-aFeber. I thank David Langbart, of the National Archives andRecords Administration for help in locating my sources and the State Departments FOIAteam for their declassification. I also thank my fellow members of the Little Summit-Amy Chazkel, Joanne Freeman, Christopher Hill, and Pablo Piccato—for their keencomments on an initial rendering of this work, Karen Garner for hers about a later one,and Virginie Marier for critical readings of multiple renditions.

1. Noticiario clasa, 834 and 803, Records of the United States Information Agency,National Archives Record Group 306 ( NARG 306), Motion Picture and Sound RecordingBranch (MPSRB).

2. On the role of the Americas in the development of cultural diplomacy, see FrankNinkovich, The Diplomacy ofldeas: U.S. Foreign Policy and Cultural Relations, 1938-1950(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981). ()n the Cold War in the Americas, acrosstime, see David Green, The Containment ofLatin America: A History of the Myths and theRealities ofthe Good Neighbor Policy (Chicago: Quadrangle Press, 1971); Stephen G. Rabe,Eisenhower and Latin America: The Foreign Policy ofAnticommunism (Chapel Hill: Uni-versity of North Carolina Press, 1988); and Gaddis Smith, The Last Years of the MonroeDoctrine, 1945-1993 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1994).

3. See Seth Fein, “Everyday Forms of Transnational Collaboration: U.S. Film Propa-ganda in Cold War Mexico,” in Close Encounters ofEmpire: Writing the Cultural History ofU.S.-Latin American Relations, ed. Gilbert Joseph, Catherine LeGrand, and RicardoSalvatore (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998); and Gerald K. Haines, The American-ization of Brazil: A Study of U.S. Cold War Diplomacy in the Third World, 1945-1954(Wilmington, Del.: Scholarly Resources, 1989).

4. On the political idea in its African and Asian contexts, see H. W. Brands, The Spec-ter of Neutralism: The.United States and the Emergence of the Third World, 1947-1960(New York: Columbia University Press, 1989). On its development as a social category,see Arturo Escobar, Imagining Development: The Making and Unmaking of the ThirdWorld (Princeton: Princeton University Press. 1995); Robert A. Packenham, The De-pendency Movement: Scholarship and Politics in Development Studies (Cambridge: Har-vard University Press, 1992); Packenham, Liberal America and the Third World: PoliticalDevelopment Ideas in Foreign Aid and Social Science (Princeton: Princeton UniversityPress, 1973).

5. “Barometer Study on Public Opinion: Preliminary Report,” 3, usm Office of Re-search, Country Project Files (1951-64), Box 72, NARG 306.

6. “Newsreel Coverage in Central America,” Anthony Guarco to Turner B. Shelton, 1December 1954, USIA Accession 62C185, Box 11, author’s State Department Freedom ofInformation Act case no. 200004119 (hereafter, so-rota).

7. “Newsreel Coverage in Central America," John S. Connolly to Shelton, 30 Novem-

PRODUCING THE COLD WAR IN MEXICO Z07

ber 1954 and “Mexican Newsreel Project,” Oram to Shelton, 12 April 1955, USIA Acc.62C185, Box 11, SD—FOlA.

8. “Mexican Newsreel Project,” Shelton (lMS—USIA) to Frank H. Oram (IAA—USIA),March 31, 1955, USIA Acc. 62C185, Box 11, SD—F0lA.

9. “Delegation of Limited Contractual Authority to T. B. Shelton,” Theodore C. Strei-bert to Clive L. Duval, May 11, 1956, “Mexican Cartoons: Project Pedro” folder 2, usmGeneral Counsel’s Motion Picture Rights and Permissions files (hereafter, MPRP), NARG306 (MPSRB).

10. On Tompkins and Estudios Churubusco, see Seth Fein, “Transcultured Anticom~munism: Cold War Hollywood in Postwar Mexico,” in Visible Nations: Latin AmericanCinema and Video, ed. Chon Noriega (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,2000). On World War II and Hollywood in Mexico, see Seth Fein, “Myths of CulturalImperialism and Nationalism in Golden Age Mexican Cinema,” in Fragments ofa GoldenAge: The Politics of Culture in Mexico, 1940-2000, ed. Gilbert Joseph, Anne Rubenstein,and Eric Zolov (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001); and Seth Fein, “Transnationali-zation and Cultural Collaboration: ‘Mexican’ Cinema and the Second World War,” Stud-ies in Latin American Popular Culture 17 (1998). On the postwar decline in commercialrelations between the two industries, see Seth Fein, “From Collaboration to Contain-ment: The International Political Economy of Mexican Cinema after the Second WorldWar," in Mexicos Cinema: A Century ofFilms and Filmmakers, ed. Joanne I-Iershfield andDavid Maciel (Wilmington, Del.: Scholarly Resources, 1999).

11- MCDBITIIOII £0 5l‘l€lt0n, January 30, 1957, “Mexican Cartoons: Project Pedro" folder2, MPRP, NARG 306 (mpsan).

12. See Shelton to McDermott, January 29, 1958; “Amendment No. 5 (Agreement No.IA-2428) ‘Project Pedro,’ ” April 21, 1958, usm Acc. 66A2.74, Box 84, SD-FOIA.

13. Shelton to McDermott, May 29, 1957, usm Acc. 66A274, Box 84, SD-FOIA.14. Raymond Fielding, The American Newsreel, 1911-1967 (Norman: University of

Oldahoma Press, 1972), 308-9.15. “Motion Pictures: Newsreels in Mexico,“ USIS Mexico City to USIA, July 11, 1958, 1-

2, usm Acc. 66/1274, Box 84, SD-FOIA.16. “Television Facts Summary: Latin America Area,” S-42-58,_Office of Research,

Special Reports 1953-63, Box 15, NARG 306.17. José Luis Gutiérrez Espindola, “Informacion y necesidades sociales: Los noticiarios

de Televisa," in Televisa: El quinto poder, ed. Raul Trejo Delarbre (Mexico City: ClavesLatinoamericanas, 1985), 65-66; Fernando Mejia Barquera, La industria de la radio y latelevision y Ia politica del estado mexicano, vol. 1 (1920-1960) (Mexico City: FundacionManuel Buendia, 1989), 162-95.

18. On the ideological relationship between the Mexican state and mass culture, seeRoger Bartra, Blood, Ink, and Culture: Miseries and Splendors of the Post-Mexican Condi-tion, trans. Mark Alan Henley (Durham: Duke University Press, 2oo2); Claudio L0mnitz-Adler, Deep Mexico, Silent Mexico: An Anthropology ofNationalism (Minneapolis: Uni-

208 SETH FF.|N

versity of Minnesota Press, 2001); and Carlos Monsivais, “Notas sobre la cultura mexi-cana en el siglo XX,” in Historia general de México, ed. Daniel Cosio Villegas (MexicoCity: El Colegio de México, 1988).

19. On the transition from countryside to cityscape as the dominant national repre-sentation in Mexican cinema, see Jorge Ayala Blanco, La aventura del cine mexicano en laépoca de oro y después (Mexico City: Grijalbo, 1993), 93-107.

2o. See Ricardo Pérez Montfort, “El discurso moral en los noticieros filmicos de 1940 a1960,” in Los archivos de la memoria, ed. Alicia Olivera de Bonfil (Mexico City: InstitutoNacional de Antropologia e Historia, 1999).

21. José Agustin, Tragicomedia mexicana 1: La vida en México de 1940 a 1970 (MexicoCity: Planeta, 1990), 136-40.

22. McDermott to Shelton, June 12, 1957, 1-2, us14 Acc. 664274, Box 84, SD-FOIA.23. McDermott to us14, May 16, 1957, us14 Acc. 664274, Box 84, SD—FOIA.24. This was expressed in Mexican film by the director Alejandro Galind0’s Espaldas

mojadas! (Wetbacks! ) (1953), the release ofwhich was delayed for two years at the behestof the State Department, which worked to have the film suppressed throughout LatinAmerica. See Fein, “Transcultured Anticommunism.” On Operation Wetback, see JuanRamon Garcia, Operation Wetback: The Mass Deportation of Mexican UndocumentedWorkers in 1954 (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1980); and Julian Samora, Los Mojados: TheWetback Story (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1971). On U.S.—Mexicanrelations in the 1950s, see Olga Pellicer de Brody and Esteban Mancilla, Historia de larevolucion mexicana, 1952-1960: El entendimiento con los Estados Unidos del desarrolloestahilizador, vol. 23 (Mexico City: El Colegio de México, 1978).

25. See, for example, General Juan F. Azcarate, President EMA, to Adolfo Ruiz Cortines,February 24, 1954; and September 2, 1953, expediente 523.3/14; and Carlos Gonzalez(nM4) to Ruiz Cortinés, July 25, 1957, exp. 151.3/ 1811, Rarno Ruiz Cortines, Fondo Presi-dentes, Archivo General de Ia Nacion, Mexico City.

26. “Mexican Newsreel Project," Shelton (1Ms-11514) to Frank H. Oram (144-us14),March 31, 1955. On Dicen que soy comunista, directed by Alejandro Galindo, see Fein,“Transcultured Anticommunism,” 93-100.

27. “Agreement and Terms ofGrant between the United States ofAmerica and RichardKelsey Tompkins,” June 4, 1956, 2, us14 Acc. 664274, Box 84, SD-FOIA.

28. Amendment No. 1, Agreement No. IA- 2428, October 17, 1956, 1-2, 4-6; and “Check-list for P.A.O., Project ‘Pedro’ Amendment of 10/ 17/56,” us14 Acc. 664274, Box 84, sn-11014.

29. “Motion Pictures: Newsreels in Mexico,” July 11, 1958, 3. On Alarcon’s relationshipto Avila Camacho, see AndrewWilliam Paxman, “William Jenkins, the Private Sector andthe Modern Mexican State” (M.A. thesis, University ofCalifornia, Berkeley, 2002), chaps.5 and 6; and Wil Pansters, Politics and Power in Puebla: The Political History ofa MexicanState (Amsterdam: c5014, 1990), 62-63.

30. McDermott to Shelton, January 18, 1957, us14 Acc. 664274, Box 84, SD-FOIA,31. “Report to Mr. R. K. Tompkins on Operations of Noticiario Nacional, s.4. and

PRODUCING THE co1.o w41z IN MEXICO 209

Impulsora Anahuac, s.4.," from Cantwell Brown, January 7, 1958, 1, us14 Acc. 664274,Box 84, SD-FOIA.

32. “Amendment No. 3, Agreement No. IA-2428, ‘Project Pedro,” January 31, 1957,us14 Acc. 664274, Box 84, SD-FOIA. .

33. “Project Pedro: Amendment No. 3 to Grant Agreement IA 2428( 1/31/ 57),” TurnerB. Shelton to Frank C. Tribbe, February 11, 1957, 2, "Mexican Cartoons" folder 2, MPRPfiles, NARG 306 (MPSRB).

34. José Luis Ortiz Garza, La guerra de las ondas: Un libro que desimiente la historia“oficial” de la radio mexicana (Mexico City: Planeta, 1992); josé Luis Om; Garza, Méx,-C0en guerra: La historia secreta de los negocios entre empresarios mexicanos de la comunica-cion, los nazis y E. U.A. (Mexico City: Planeta, 1989).

35. “Agreement entered into by Mr. Emilio Azcarraga M., representing ‘ProductoresUnidos,’ s.4. and Mr. Luis C. Manjarrez, representing ‘Noticiario Nacional,’ s.4. and Mr.Gabriel Alarcon Chargoy," September 24, 1956, “Mexican Cartoons; Project Pedro" folder2, MPRP files, NARG 306 (Mesna).

36. “Memorandum on Operations of Noticiario Nacional, s.4.,” Cantwell C. Brown,August 28, 1957, us14 Acc. 664274, Box 84, so-1=o14.

37. Ibid., 2; “Report to Mr. R. K. Tompkins on Operations ofNoticiario Nacional, s.4.and Impulsora Anahuac, s.4.," January 7, 1958, 5,

38. Unsigned memo to McDermott, September 2, 1957, us14 Acc. 664274, Box 84, SD-1=o14.

39. “Memorandum on Operations ofNoticiario Nacional, s.4.,” August 28, 1957, 1.40. “Motion Pictures: Newsreels in Mexico,” July 11, 1958, 2-3.41. “oca Paper ‘Principles to Assure Coordination of Gray Activities,’ " McDermott

(usis-Mexico) and Winston M. Scott (ocn Designee), November 19, 1957, 2, U515 Am664274, Box 84, SD—FOIA. »

42. Shelton to McDermott, July 22, 1958, us14 Acc. 664274, Box 84, SD-FOIA. Under-lining in original.

43. See Volker R. Berghahn, America and the Intellectual Cold Wars in Europe: ShepardStone between Philanthropy, Academy, and Diplomacy (Princeton: Princeton UniversityPress» 1°01); David Caute, The Dancer Defects: The Struggle for Cultural Supremacyduring the Cold War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004); Christopher Lasch, “TheCultural Cold War: A Short History of the Congress for Cultural Freedom," in Towards aNew Past: Dissenting Essays in American History, ed. Barton J. Bernstein (New York:Random House, 1968); Frances Stonor Saunders, The Cultural Cold War: The c14 and theWorld ofArts and Letters (New York: New Press, 1999).44. Thomas C. Sorensen, The Word War: The Story of American Propaganda (New

York: Harper and Row, 1968), 65.45. McDermott to Hill, December 10, 1958, us14 Acc. 664274, Box 84, so-F014,46. Stephen R. Niblo, Mexico in the 19405: Modernity, Politics, and Corruption (Wil-

mington, Del.: Scholarly Resources, 1999), 349.47. On this transnational presence, see Julio Moreno, Yankee Don’t Go Home! Mexican

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110 SETH I~'l>:llN

Nationalism, /lmcrican Business Culture, and the Shaping 0fM0dern Mexico, 1920-1950(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003).

48. “Report of Gross Income from Space Sales by Category," in “Report to Mr. R. K.Tompkins on Operations of Noticiario Nacional, S.A. and Impulsora Anahuac, s.A.,"January 7, 1958, 12.

49. Noticiario clasa, 834, 848, NARG 306 (mpsrtn).50. Noticiario clasa, 802 NARG 306 (MPSRB).51. Noticiario Clasa, 815, 818, 823, 838, 847, 856; El mundo en marcha, 9, 56, NARG 306

(MPSRB).52. On Ortiz Mena’s role in U.S.-Mexican relations under Lopez Mateos, see Olga

Pellicer de Brody and Mancilla, Historia de la revolucién mexicana, 1952-1960, 259-67;Agustin, Tragicomedia mexicanu, 196-200. On his proximity to the 1>1z1’s presidentialnomination in 1958, see Juan Jose Rodriguez Prats, El poder presidencial: Adolfo RuizCortines, 2nd ed. (Mexico City: Miguel Angel Porr1’1a, 1992), 236.

53. “1>A0’s Checklist for ‘Project Pedro,’ 31 January 1957,” SD-FOIA.54. “Content analysis of Not. Clasa." Shelton to Garro, December 27, 1957, “Mexican

Cartoons: Project Pedro" folder 2, MPRP, 1~1/mo 306 (MPSRB).55. Shelton to McDermott, March 23, 1959, USIA Acc. 664274, Box 84, SD—FOIA.56. Shelton to McDermott, n.d. (c. late January 1958); “Memorandum of Questions

Prepared by Frank Tribbe,” n.d (c. late January 1958), USIA Acc. 6611274, Box 84, so-1=o11\.57. McDermott to Shelton, January 24, 1958, 2, USIA Acc. 664274, Box 84, so-rota.58. “Amendment N0. 6, Agreement IA-2428, ‘Project Pedro,’" August 11, 1958, usrx

Acc. 664274, Box 84, 5D—FOIA.59. “Motion Pictures: Newsreels in Mexico,” USIS Mexico City to USIA, July 11, 1958, 3-

4, USIA Acc. 6611274, Box 84, so- FOIA. Case 200004119.60. “El Mundo en Marcha no. 302, Walter Thompson de Mexico, S.A., Depto. de Radio

y Television, 17 August 1957," usm Acc. 664274, Box 91, so-1=o1/1; “ocn Paper ‘Principles toAssure Coordination of Gray Activities,’ ” McDermott (usis-Mexico) and Winston M.Scott (OCB Designee), November 19, 1957, 3, USIA Acc. 66A274, Box 84, so-1=01A. March ofTime had a long history of collaborating with the U.S. foreign policy in Mexico; see SethFein, “Hollywood, Mexico—United States Relations, and the Golden Age of MexicanCinema" (Ph.D. diss., University of Texas, Austin, 1996), 283-90; on Luce's film opera-tion, see Raymond Fielding, The March of Time, 1935-1951 (New York: Oxford UniversityPress, 1978).

61. “A Study of Audience Opinions of the ‘El mundo en marcha' and Exposure toAdvertising Media," November 1958, International Research Associates, S.A. de C.V.,Mexico City, File Mx58o5, Box 74, USIA Office of Research, Country Project Files, 1951-64,NARG 306.

62. Claudia Fernandez and Andrew Paxman, El Tigre: Emilio Azctirraga y su imperioTelevisa (Mexico City: Grijalbo, 2000), 162, 54-58. Zabludovsky would continue to be theface ofMexican TV news for decades, hosting the Televisa m0n0poly's prime-time broad-casts into the 1990s.

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PRODUCING THE COLD WAR IN MEXICO 111

S3“/‘joca Paper ‘Principles to Assure Coordination of(}ray Activities,’ " McDermottan inston M. Scott (oca Desi nee , Nmmmt 8 J Ovember 19. 1957. 5. usiA Acc. 6611274, Box 34,

64-I Cflfment B562 to R. K. Tompkins y Asociados, s.1\. de C.V., January 6, 1961“Mexican Cartoons: Project Pedro,” folder 4, MPRP, NARG 306 (MPSRB). l

65- “Rfipvrt On Story Usage, Mexican Newsreels,” us1s—Mexico City to USIA, January6, 1960, USIA Acc. 66/1274, Box 84, SD-FO[A_

66. “Amendment No. 6, Agreement IA-2428, ‘Project Pedro,’ " August 11, 1958, 5-6; “3QSeptember 1958 Agreement between USIA and R. K. Tompkins y Asociados," SD-FOIA. Inaddition to his work in Mexico, Rathvon supervised covertly funded film production inEPTPPP» lflcllldmg ii 1956 film. secretly funded by the cm, based on George Orwell’sNmetee" E18ht}"F0W' 1 $66 Tony Shaw, British Cinema and the Cold War: The StatePropaganda, “"11 Conse"-"45 (London: I. B. Tauris, 2001), 104-14. ,

67- Daniel Garcia (ms) to Shelton, November 25, 1958, USIA Acc. 6611274, Box 54, SD-FOIA.

68. “Motion Pictures: Newsreel Guidance,” usis-Mexico, October 9, 1958, USIA Acc.“A174, Box 84, SD—FOIA. _

69. “Project Pedro: Quarterly Progress Report," R. K. Tompkins, November 14, 1953,USIA Acc. 6611274, Box 84, SD-FOIA.

70. Shelton to McDermott, March 23, 1959, us14 Acc. 6611274, Box 34, SD-FO[A_71. Shelton to Rathvon, April 20, 1959, USIA Acc. 6611274, Box 84, SD-1=()rA_72. McDermott to Shelton, April 6, 1959, us14 Acc. 6611274, Box 84, $1)-F()1A_73. Rathvon to Shelton, September 1o, 1959, USIA Acc. 6611274, Box 84, SD-FOIA,74. “Motion Pictures: CLASA Newsreel,” McDermott (usrs-Mexico City) to U514

August 14, 1958, USIA Acc. 6611274, Box 84, SD-FOIA. i75. Agustin, Tragicomedia mexicaria, 176.76. “Motion Pictures: EL MUNDO EN MARCHA Newsreel," usis-Mexico City to usiA

September 8, 1958, USIA Acc. 6611274, Box 84, SD—FOIA. i77. “Motion Pictures: 121. MUNDO EN MARC!-IA Newsreel," us1s—Mexico City to usm,

September 26, 1958, us11\ Acc. 6611274, Box 84, SD-FOIA§ El mundo en marcha 56 was theaffected issue.

78. Daniel Garcia (ms) to Shelton, November 25 1958 us11\ Acc 6611274 Box 84 57 I ~ . , , D-

FOIA.79. “Mundo en Marcha Newsreel," Robert E. Macaulay to McDermott, August 22,

1960, SD.-FOIA.80. Rathvon to Shelton, May 5, 1959, usut Acc. 6611274, Box 84, SD-FQ]A_81. McDermott to Shelton, April 6, 1959, USIA Acc. 6611274, Box 84, SD-FQr,\_82. “Report on Story Usage, Mexican Newsreels," usis-Mexico City to usm, January

6, 1960, USIA Acc. 6611274, Box 84, SD-F()IA_83. “Newsreel Contract Amendment," McDermott to Ambassador Hill, February 17,

1959, USIA Acc. 6611274, Box 84, SD-F()]A_84. E1 mundo en marcha,z1,55,153, 155,156,157, NARG 306 (MPSRB).

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212 SETH FEIN

85. Noticiario clasa, 810, 816 1111110 306 (MPSRB).86. El mundo en marcha, 109 NARG 306 (MPSRB).87. Noticiario clasa, 830 NARG 306 (MPSRB).88. Robert A. Divine, The Sputnik Challenge." Eisenhower} Response to the Soviet Satel-

lite (New York: Oxford University Press), 1993.89. El mundo en marcha, 149, 152.90. Noticiario clasa, 823.91. Noticiario clasa, 800, 802, 806.92. On the presence of race in U.S. foreign policy in this period, see Mary Dudziak,

Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image ofAmerican Democracy (Princeton: PrincetonUniversity Press, 2000); Penny M. Von Eschen, Race against Empire: Black Americans andAnticolonialism, 1937-1957 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997), chap. 7; Von Eschen,Satchmo Blows Up the World: Jazz Ambassadors Play the Cold War (Cambridge: HarvardUniversity Press, 2004).

93. El mundo en marcha, 130, NARG 306 (MPSRB).94. El mundo en marcha, 55, 56, 57, 140, 1111110 306 (MPSRB).95. El mundo en marcha, 28, NARG 306 (MPSRB).96. El mundo en marcha, 38, 1111120 306 (MPSRB).97. “Project Pedro,” Frank Tribbe to Irwin (General Counsel’s Office) October 12, 1961,

1, “Mexican Cartoons: Project Pedro” folder 2, MPRP, 1111120 306 (MPSRB).98. El mundo en marcha, 140, NARG 306 (MPSRB).99. “Project Pedro,” Frank Tribbe (General Counsel’s Office) to Irwin (ioc), July 26,

1961, 2, “Mexican Cartoons: Project Pedro,” folder 2, MPRP, NARG 306 (MPSRB), underlin-ing in original.

100. Ibid., 2-3.101. McDermott to John P. McKnight, Jr. (USIA Assistant Director, Latin America),

September 27, 1960, USIA Acc. 6611274, Box 84, SD-FOIA.102. McDermott to McKnight, July 5, 1961, us111 Acc. 66,1274, Box 84, SD-FOIA.103. McDermott to McKnight, August 4, 1961; McKnight to McDermott, August 11,

1961, USIA Acc. 6611274, Box 84, SD-FOIA.104. “Newsreel Project,” McDermott to Thomas Mann, July 18, 1961, USIA Acc. 66/1274,

Box 84, SD—l'-‘OIA.105. “Termination Settlement Agreement,” September 30, 1961; Murrow to usis-

Mexico City, September 26, 1961, USIA Acc. 6611274, Box 84, SD-FOIA.106. Stephen Rabe, The Most Dangerous Area in the World: John F. Kennedy Confronts

Communist Revolution in Latin America (Chapel Hill: University ofNorth Carolina Press,1999); Michael E. Latham. Modernization as Ideology: American Social Science and “Na-tion Building" in the Kennedy Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,2000).

107. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York:McGraw Hill, 1964).

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PRODUCING THE co1.o WAR IN MEXICO 113

108. Said, “Secular Interpretation, the Geographical Element and the Methodology ofImperialism,” in After Colonialism: Imperial Histories and Postcolonial Displacements, ed.Cyan Prakash (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 34. I

109. Ranajit Guha, Dominance without Hegemony: I-Iistory and Power in Colonial India(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997).

110. For an analysis of how Bush II foreign policy perpetuates a longer twentieth-century history of imperial designs, see Walter LaFeber, “The Bush Doctrine,” DiplomaticHistory 26, no. 4 (fall 2002). On U.S. mass communication and 9/11, see LaFeber, MichaelJordan and the New, Global Capitalism, new and expanded edition (New York: Norton,2002), chapter 7. On Al-Hurra and U.S. foreign policy, see Seth Fein, “The MediumShapes the Message," Yale Global Online, May 7, 2004, http://yaleglobal.yale.edu, On thePentagon’s use of U.S. contractors, such as the Lincoln Group, to arrange print andaudiovisual placement of Washington-made mass media, see Jeff Gerth, “Military’s In-formation War Is Vast and Often Secretive,” New York Times, December 11, 2005. GregGrandin has recently shown the instrumental links between U.S. imperialism in LatinAmerica at the end of the twentieth century and in the Middle East at the outset of thetwenty-first; See Empire's Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the Rise of theNew Imperialism (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2006).

111. See, for example, “U.S.: Nascent Telesur to Be Countered by U.S. Broadcasts,” LatinAmerican Weekly Report, July 26, 2005.

112. Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions ofGlobalization (Min-neapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998) 18; see also Seth Fan, “Culture acrossBorders in the Americas,” History Compass (2003), http://www.history-c0mpas$_eQm/Pilotl n0rtham/NthAm_CulturesArticle.htm.

113. See Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Histori-cal Dijference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000). J

2.52 ERIC z01.ov

133, Mexico City to Secretary of State, “Ioint Embassy-usrs Message,” March 14, 1962,

RG59, Box 1052, 511.121/7~761 (1960-63). This act of protest referenced an intensifyingdispute over salinity levels of the Colorado River which flowed into Mexico from theUnited States.

134. “Instituto Méxic0—Norteamericano de Morelia, Michoaczin,” Direccion Federalde Seguridad, 29 June 1962, Legajo 1, Exp. 100-14-3» H0}?! 177’ Galleri’ 1» AG“ The “Portnoted: "Students from the University of ‘San Nicolas’ have asserted they had nothing todo with this incident, though they plan a protest for tomorrow at 11 a.m. to denounce thevisit by the President of the United States of North America.”

135. Binational Centers Permanent Record [File Cards], Public Diplomacy HistoricalCollection, Washington.

136. Ibid.137. Cira interview, May 7, 2002.

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STEVEN J. BACHELOR

Miracle on Ice

Industrial Workers and the Promise

0fAmericanization in Cold War Mexico

You know what a miracle is. Not_what Bakunin said. But another w0rld’s intrusions

into this one. Most of the time we coexist peacefully, but when we do touch there’s

cataclysm. . . . Where revolutions break out spontaneous and leaderless, and the s0ul’s

talent for consensus allows the masses to work together without effort, automatic

as the body itself. And yet, sefia, if any of it should ever really happen that perfectly,

I would also have to cry miracle. An anarchist miracle. Like your friend. He is too

exactly and without flaw the thing we fight. In Mexico the privilegiado is always, to a

finite percentage, redeemed—one of the people. Unmiraculous.

—Th0mas Pynchon, The Crying ofLot 49

In November 1969, three days after Mexico’s Day of the Dead celebrations,members of the state’s secret security agency opened fire on six thousand pro-testers at Chrysler’s Toluca plant, situated along the southwestern edge of thecapital city’s industrial fringe. The violence—the first open strife at a U.S. firm inMexico since the consolidation of revolutionary rule—left a half dozen criticallywounded, two men disabled, and a popular working-class movement targetedfor elimination. One of the era’s most dramatic yet least known calls for indus-trial democracy, the conflict went unmentioned in media on both sides of theborder. Nor did attention come in the next days as Chrysler blacklisted fivehundred alleged subversives, dispatched guardias blancas (terror squads) to pa-trol the factory floor, and imposed the firm’s production manager as unionhead, a post he held for a quarter century before passing it to its present-dayoccupant, his eldest son. Then followed daily firings, routine reprisals againstinsubordinates, and two more shootings of supposed “Communists.” Thus be-gan, in workers’ telling, a “reign of terror” directed ironically against workingpeople who sought to secure union democracy and economic security-the veryideals they believed were embodied in the promise ofAmericanization.‘

ZS4 STEVEN I. BACHEl.t)R

Next to the magnitude and severity of repression seen elsewhere during LatinAmericas Cold War. the incidents at Chrysler obviously pale. Ford executives inArgentina, for instance, not only identified dissidents for state authorities dur-ing that country’s “dirty war" but also willfully apportioned space at Ford’sBuenos Aires facility to serve as a clandestine detention and torture center? Theevents at Chrysler also closely parallel the Mexican regime's familiar protocol forcrushing dissent: first ignore, then try to co-opt, and finally, if necessary, vio-lently repress. Indeed, at first glance, the violence that erupted at Chrysler seemsbut a ripple in Cold War Mexico’s otherwise conventional tale of “tranquil” and“highly cordial labor relations," a hallmark that proved the basis of Mexico’s“miraculous” postwar economic boom.’ g

Nonetheless, the insurgence at Chrysler bears great significance. More thanany sector of Latin America’s working class, autoworkers “representiedl theaspirations for change of their societies at large” during the postwar years andled the era’s largest and most important battles for economic and social justice.‘The auto industry also served as the centerpiece of Mexico’s model of importsubstitution industrialization, an economic strategy widely adopted across LatinAmerica that aimed to reduce dependence on foreign industry through thepromotion of domestic manufacturing? The industry also occupied a strategicposition in the international economic order that U.S. capitalists and state au-thorities carved out in the postwar period. In this sense, promoting automobilemanufacturing in Latin America accorded well with U.S. foreign policy, par-ticularly the Kennedy administrations Alliance for Progress, which sought tounleash the power of U.S. capitalism as a means not only of combating Commu-nism but also of remaking the region in the image of the United States.“ With the1961 inauguration of the Alliance for Progress (an “Alliance for Profits,” in onecontemporary economist’s view), U.S. foreign policy in Latin America widenedfrom a simple strategy of containing Communism to “one characterized byliberal rhetoric advocating social change” through direct U.S. investment.’ Per-fectly encapsulating this visionary zeal, in 1961 GM president Frederick Donnerannounced that “multinational corporations represent a new kind of capital-ism" that would usher in “social progress” and “elevate the Mexican nation.”

Despite charges to the contrary, Mexican autoworkers were hardly Commu-nists. Mexican presidents regularly referred to them as loyal pillars of the coun-try’s “official” (state-subsidized) union movement, celebrating them as “symbolsof the harmony and mutually beneficial relationship that exists between U.S.capital and Mexican labor.” I-Ienry Ford II called their “readily apparent suc-cess," which included among the best blue-collar wages in the country, a “crucial

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MIRACLE ON ICE 255

step in Mexico’s steady advance to modernization.“ Even Walter Reuther,an obsessive anti-Communist, deemed Mexican autoworkers his staunchestLatin American ally in his global campaign against the “red menace."“Today, as neoliberals sing the praises of Mexico’s position in a flourishing

global assembly line, the insurgent movement at Chrysler and its violent defeathave been forgotten, even erased. Chrysler executives, for example, officiallycling to a spotless, seventy-five-year record free of labor conflict, attributing theera’s multiple protests and factory occupations to “outside agitators and pro-vocateurs from other firms.”‘2 Scholars too have tended to misconstrue theinsurgence, Mexico’s largest since the 1930s. Specialists of Mexican labor haveeither dismissed the insurgence as a brief interruption in the state’s corporatistcontrol over the working class or wistfully romanticized it as an example ofvaliant but inevitably doomed resistance to the twin behemoths of Americanimperialism and Mexican authoritarianism.“ Also relying upon a corporatistanalytical framework, diplomatic historians have similarly tended to misreadworking-class politics, which they typically reduce to organized labor’s func-tional position in Latin American society. These scholars have also tended toposit a false dichotomy between nationalism and cultural imperialism, failing tocapture the transnational dimensions of global-local encounters and the com-plicated, even contradictory, meanings of Americanization in Latin America.“Thus these works render little if any of the actual political and social substance ofthe Cold War’s manifold engagements, begetting in the case of Mexico a schol-arly literature that the field's eminent authority contends is plagued by a “gen-eral abstract quality . . . a sense almost of timelessness.”‘5

Focusing on workers at the U.S. Big Three (Ford, GM, and Chrysler), this essaygoes beyond earlier analyses ofCold War Mexico. It reveals how working peoplefashioned a popular, democratic movement, born in the promise of the Ameri-can dream, which challenged the realities of state and corporate dominion overthe social forces unleashed by modernity. Foremost it shows how working peo-ple borrowed from U.S. institutions, values, and practices in ways that threat-ened both official conceptions of Mexican citizenship and key facets of U.S.imperial rule in Mexico. The essay further argues that as this insurgent move-ment grew in size and intensity and linked the exigencies of the shop floor tobroader questions of global economic justice, authorities—long accustomed topaternalist forms of rule—turned increasingly to tactics of violence and repres-sion. Thus, as happened elsewhere in Latin America between 1960 and 1980,repression in Mexico became the elite’s favored tool to crush popular efforts todemocratize industrial and urban life. In this sense, the violence of 1969 at

256 STEVEN 1. BACHELOR

Chrysler marked not only the birth of an insurgent movement that would rockMexico for the next decade. It represented also a fundamental turning pointin Mexico and the United States’ postwar political economy, an epochal shiftfrom an economic model of “cooperative capitalism” toward a neoliberal onefounded on capital mobility and labor flexibility. Although this economic re-ordering was formalized in 1994 with the North American Free Trade Agree-ment (NAFTA), its roots can be found a quarter century earlier, in the success thatstate and corporate authorities, relying on means ranging from simple redbait-ing to outright terror, had in crushing popular movements meant to democra-tize economic life. This, then, is the Cold War’s most enduring legacy in Mexico:the triumph, over widespread opposition, of an economic model based on fluidfinance capital, deterritorialized markets, and flexible modes of accumulation.

ManufacturingMiracles

At the 1962 groundbreaking for Chrysler’s Toluca complex, company presidentGaston Azcarraga, the brother of the media mogul and Mexico’s richest manEmilio Azcarraga, declared that the site would serve “not only as a workplace toearn our livings, but as a gathering place to raise our collective standards andbecome more humanitarian.“ The site would soon employ six thousand wageearners, drawn largely from the surrounding colonias populares, then absorbingnearly twenty thousand migrants a month from the countryside.” The area alsoboasted newly inaugurated Ford and GM factories, then their respective firms’most technologically sophisticated facilities in all of Latin America. The plantopenings came on the heels of the passage of the Mexican state's 1962 IntegrationDecree, which required all automakers to convert from assembly operations tofull-scale domestic manufacturing ofmotor vehicles by the end of 1964.The heart of the regime's strategy of import substitution industrialization,

automobile manufacturing promised to spark a “second” industrial revolutionin Mexico, not unlike that seen in Detroit in the 1920s. Domestic manufacturing,Mexican officials reasoned, would reduce trade deficits by replacing foreign-made goods with those produced domestically. At the time, automobile importsconstituted a hefty 10 percent of Mexico’s entire import bill, which was itselfgrowing by nearly 20 percent per annum.“ Motor-vehicle manufacturing alsopromised to jump-start Mexico’s slowing economy. Between 1949 and 1955, thecountry’s gross domestic product grew by a staggering 18 percent. Between 1955and 1959, however, that figure grew by only 7 percent.”

MIRACLE ON ICE 2S7

For the U.S. Big Three, the Latin American market represented a potentiallyenormous new market of consumers to counter lagging sales in the UnitedStates. There, first-time vehicle buyers had become almost entirely supplantedby replacement-vehicle purchasers, and for the first time in decades, automakerswere facing declining rates of profit.“ By contrast, executives predicted that inMexico the automobile market would expand by an astonishing 5 to 10 percentper year over the next two decades. As U.S. automakers concluded, the Mexicanmarket (and Latin America’s more broadly) was “essential to our global strategyof capturing market share?“Obviously, such success rested on stable industrial relations, on which auto-

makers prided themselves. Not since the unionization drives of the 1930s, whenMexican workers at the U.S. Big Three won closed shops at their respective firms,had a single labor strike afflicted the industry. Since then, automobile unions hadremained important fixtures within the state-subsidized labor movement, whoseleaders were closely allied with the ruling party and possessed a virulent strain ofanti-Communism that considered any independent or leftist ideology a “virus ofdisintegration” demanding immediate eradication. Like virtually all organizedlabor in Mexico, unions within the automobile industry remained “under thedomination of a small camarilla of trade union leaders” who ensured labordiscipline and political support for the ruling party.” Drawn almost entirelyfrom outside the workforce, these entrenched union bosses, known as charros,served as both company-paid overseers of day-to-day shop-floor relations andwell-remunerated delegates to the state-controlled, national-level labor con-federations.” Rarely did these union bosses convene government-mandatedunion assemblies or union elections. They tended to rule instead through infor-mal, paternalistic practices and their close, personal ties to corporate executivesand state officials. So successful were their efforts in stripping unionism of anyreal strength that a survey conducted at Ford in the early 1960s found that themajority of workers were unaware they even belonged to a union.“ At GM,charros at least held the occasional union assembly, typically using them totrumpet their support for the ruling party. Also, with the control over hiringpractices that Mexico’s federal labor law gave union locals, charros fared well incontracting only those who passed background checks into any suspicious politi-cal sympathies. Not surprisingly, then, in 1964, just as the auto industry preparedto launch full-scale manufacturing operations, the avowedly anti-CommunistInternational Conference of Free Unions gave Mexico a perfect rating for politi-cal and labor stability.“ Similarly, the U.S. State Department—-which, as Eric

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T258 STEVI~lN 1. BACHELOR MIRACLE ON ICE

Zolov shows in his contribution in this volume, remained greatly concernedabout Communist infiltration into local politics—maintained that Communistinfluence in Mexico's trade union movement was virtually absent?“Industrial workers, U.S. officials concluded, acquiesced to the machinations of

state-allied labor bosses. This passivity, however, had differential consequences.On the one hand, it made for extraordinary labor stability, the pride of auto-makers and Mexican authorities alike. On the other hand, it translated into whatU.S. automakers believed to be an ideologically docile workforce, easily led andmanipulated by powerful labor leaders. This, according to U.S. executives, leftMexican wage earners potentially “vulnerable to demagoguery and Communistinfluence?” To counter such vulnerabilities, automakers introduced a multitudeof company programs designed to mold wage earners in the image of an ide-alized “American” workforce. Obviously, in Mexico, where anti-Americanismresided in the bedrock of nationalist sentiment, such initiatives could evincenone ofHenry Ford’s outright jingoism and bigotry. Instead, his son Henry FordII accentuated the “social progress" that would come from “incorporating Mexi-can working-class and peasant youths into factory activities."Z" GM presidentFrederick Donner put the promise of U.S. factories even more plainly: “Mexicocan have the assurance that it will find in GM complete cooperation and reciproc-ity. Mexicans deserve a better future. Our company will provide that impulse,and Mexico will serve as a dignified example for the whole free world.”2" In asense, Donner took his predecessor Charles WiIson’s famed adage a step further:what was good for GM was now also good for the entire world. _This corporate impulse took the form of “good corporate citizenship,” a term

still used by the Big Three in Mexico. Within the workplace this included wagesfive times the average, generous welfare benefits, and scholarships for wageearners’ children. The firms also sponsored recreational activities, particularlysports leagues, which according to executives served to “showcase U.S. sports-manship and teamwork.” They also funded courses in English for their em-ployees, stressing its role as “the language of the future."’°

These corporate efforts extended as well beyond the factory walls. GM, forinstance, underwrote the nightly news on the state-owned television channeland sponsored an annual “Parade of Progress” at Chapultepec Park, duringwhich visitors were treated to festivities and the company’s latest lineup ofautomobiles.“ Ford established a manager of civic affairs to publicize its “goodcorporate citizenship” and oversee its multiple outreach projects. These in-cluded a national manual arts program for school-age children, meant to “offerroutes to find one’s vocation.” By 1970, a decade into the program, it counted

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750,000 school—age participants and took credit for “diminishing drop-out ratesand juvenile delinquencies in the areas it targeted?” By far Ford’s largest civicproject was the Escuelas I-Ienry Ford initiative, begun in 1962. This projectrepresented a commitment by the firm to partner with the Mexican governmentto “build primary schools in regions with Ford facilities and to make availablethe educational resources that will combat Mexicos deficiencies." By 1967, theprogram had sponsored more than fifty schools, including five within the Mex-ico City’s industrial periphery.”The Big Three also facilitated and encouraged contact between Mexican and

U.S. autoworkers. Not only did they uphold the United States as the epitome ofprogress; each year they sponsored trips for workers to visit Detroit, where theycould see that progress firsthand. Executives also teamed with heads of theAFI.-CIO to provide leadership grants, which brought local labor leaders to De-troit for training in union organizing. Automakers also facilitated contacts be-tween Mexican autoworkers and the United Auto Workers (UAW) and its head,Walter Reuther. Reuther was the era’s most visible “symbol and spokesman forone particularly attractive version of American life.”“ In automakers’ view, hewas the individual most responsible for bringing stability to an industry that hadhistorically been the site of heated rank-and-file activism and labor discord.Reuther reasoned that UAW strength in Mexico would serve both as a bulwarkagainst potential Communist infiltration of the labor movement and as a coun-ter to the creeping threat of “wage dumping.” Without international organizing,Reuther argued, “we will be isolated and divided, weak and defenseless in theface of the growing power of international capital to exploit us separately.”35Reuther’s gospel of the “politics ofproductivity” and the “revolutionary power

of economic abundance” closely paralleled the Kennedy administrations Al-liance for Progress. According to its charter, the Alliance aimed “to improve andstrengthen democratic institutions through the application of the principle ofself-determination by the people.”3° U.S. ambassador to Mexico Thomas Mann,who in 1967 would head the Automobile Manufacturers Association, consideredhis and the United States’ role to be to determine “how we can best help promoteeconomic and social progress in Mexico.” The “orderly evolution” of Americanbusiness was subsumed under Walt Rostow’s highly influential “modernization”theory, which teleologically posited that U.S. investments would universallypromote a “collective culture of free will” that would propel the developing worldthrough the “stages of economic growth” until it reached U.S. standards. Suchnotions were so firmly held that, during his official tour ofthe United States, onlythe second by a Mexican president, Gustavo Diaz Ordaz pronounced that Mexico

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was prepared to follow the United States’ lead, since “Mexico haldl now reachedits take-off stage.”37 As pursued by working people in Mexico, however, thissupposed takeoffwould bring contradictory and unforeseen consequences.

The American Dream ti la Mexicana

Asked whether he was ever a Communist, Clemente Zaldivar, fired from andblacklisted by GM in 1966 for being 21 “militant agitator beholden to Commu-nists," laughed. “A Communist? Me? Not at all. I don’t even know what that is."Asked whether he was anti-American or anti~Mexican, other accusations leviedagainst him, Zaldivar turned more serious. “Look,” he explained, “We werenever anti-gringo or anti-Mexicano. Yes, we wanted a more American life, but tous that was progress; that was making a better Mexico?”In his twelve years at GM, Zaldivar seemed to possess all the characteristics his

employer maintained made a “good employee”: “affable and anxious to learn,active in community afifairs, and committed to promoting security and well-being."” When not putting in overtime hours in the metal finishing department,Zaldivar played on company sports teams (even leading the soccer squad to acity championship), regularly attended English language courses, and partici-pated in the inaugural meeting of the Reuther-headed World Automobile Coun-cil. Hailing from Santa Julia, one of Mexico City’s roughest slums, but by 1966residing in a suburban home on the edge of the capital's first bedroom commu-nity, Zaldivar embodied the “modernizing” impulse promoted by U.S. andMexican authorities.In 1963, however, Zaldivar emerged as a vocal member of Grupo Democra-

tico, a faction of autoworkers who militated, in their words, to “revive sin-dicalismo in order to bring the best benefit to Mexico.”“° The group, whichauthorities labeled a “small minority being directed by Communists,” formed inthe specific context of the automobile industry’s shift to full-scale manufactur-ing.“ The 1962 Integration Decree gave automakers just twenty-nine months toconvert from assembly to manufacturing operations. This entailed rapid andunprecedented changes in work relations. Productivity skyrocketed more than100 percent, and the workforce tripled in size between 1960 and 1965.“ Withthese changes came increased injuries, daily speedups, and closer managerialscrutiny—an environment that workers said was “more suited to a burr0.”“3 Inthis setting, the industry's long-standing paternalist strategies of labor controlproved ineffective.“ Zaldivar and others found the reigning charro, Raul San-

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chez del Castillo, to be entirely unresponsive to workers’ changing concerns. By1963 they had launched a campaign to oust him from office. Posting noticesaround the plant, they denounced Sanchez del Castillo's “ineptitude and dis-regard for the rights of workers.”‘5 They also urged employees to demand andthen attend union meetings, which, when infrequently convened by Sanchez delCastillo, drew less than 30 percent of the membership.“Now is the time and ours is a movement of transcendence," democratistas

proclaimed in August 1963. GM had recently broken ground in Toluca, where inDecember 1964 it would open Latin America's largest and most technologicallyadvanced automaking facility, capable of producing twenty thousand vehicles ayear. Moreover, union elections were scheduled for that month, giving wageearners an opportunity to vote out of office their reigning charro, who sixmonths earlier had renegotiated the union contract without any input fromthe membership. Never had so much excitement surrounded a union electionwithin the auto industry. The democratistas had invited the press to observe,hoping its presence might help prevent electoral fraud. “Our working-classbrothers are counting on us to make this a victory for sindicalismo," they an-nounced."“ Once tallied, the votes revealed the democratistas to be the clearwinners. Sanchez del Castillo responded by leading his supporters (primarilyemployees from the parts warehouse and not the production facility) out of themeeting hall in protest. The next morning, they appeared before federal authori-ties, denouncing the election as having been conducted “in a completely disor-dered and arbitrary way.”“7 In a rare victory for rank-and-file workers, stateofficials, after interviewing every wage earner who cast a ballot, ruled the demo-cratistas to be the legitimate winners.Taking Americanizing discourses at their word, democratistas saw meaning-

ful participation in industrial life as the foremost promise of progress. Accord-ingly, they began articulating new demands that challenged state-controlledunionism. Assuming office in August 1963, Zaldivar announced to workers that“unions are for making demands, not supplicating. This union belongs to you;we are your representatives.” He also underscored the example of the UAW,whose “success has come through lengthy union struggle and working-classconquista/"“‘ In their first contract negotiations with GM, democratistas made ahost of new demands, all ofwhich they explained their counterparts in the U.S.had long enjoyed. For one thing, they insisted on having real contract negotia-tions, in contrast to the typical closed-door talks presided over by entrenchedcharros. And the issues they wanted to be placed on the table reached further

262 STEVEN r. BACHELOR

into managerial prerogatives than ever before. For instance, they demanded theright to decide how the transition to full-scale manufacturing would be carriedout on the shop floor. Stressing that they knew their departments better than theengineers brought in to supervise the transition to full-scale manufacturing,workers worried that company plans would make their already-burdensomeworkload ever more onerous. They also asserted the right to participate insetting production quotas, the pace of production, and the percentage of work-ers employed in different wage categories. These last demands had been inspiredby Walter Reuther himself, who not only made available to Mexican auto-workers translated copies of Detroit-area union contracts but also enlisted theirhelp in his project to analyze every contract GM had ever signed worldwide.Studying these, Mexican workers concluded that “the company is exploitingMexican labor and taking all the profits to the ‘other side.’ ""9 As one journalistwho covered the emerging movement similarly observed, GM was “not creatingnew industry but, rather, taking advantage of new labor in new places."5°

Democratistas sought to unite autoworkers across the entire industry. “Lookat the power ofthe UAW," explained one activist. “We need a single union for thewhole industry, like theirs. Only then can we expect to challenge the farce that ischarrismo.”5‘ As they had done at GM, democratistas leafleted at the city’s otherautomobile plants, inviting wage earners to join their oppositional campaign.They also began distributing their own newsletter, El Eco, which was designedto counter state-controlled media depictions. The death in Iuly 1965 of LuisQuijano, the charro at Chrysler who had been in charge since 1942, helpedtheir efforts. In his absence, employees immediately held union elections, whichbrought to power an insurgent group committed to “union democracy andsocial justice.”5Z Once in office, they reminded authorities that “we are togethermaking the step to social progress and modernization.”53

To autoworkers, modernization also meant popular participation in urbanlife, particularly as Mexico City exploded demographically and spatially in thewake of its economic miracle. In the 1960s alone, nearly two million migrantsfrom the countryside flocked to the capital, making housing one of workingpeople’s most prominent concerns.“ In 1965 autoworkers joined with hundredsof other industrial laborers to call on the government to pass legislation thatwould require employers with over one hundred employees to provide for theirworkers’ housing.” This, they maintained, was not only explicit in the LeyFederal del Trabajo but also implicit in the collective promise ofmodernization.Rhetorically, U.S. automakers pledged their support for such a plan, promising

MIRACLE on ICE 163

to help employees purchase land around the automobile factories. Still, workersobserved that “all their promises remain in their inkwells." “The company haslied to us again, so we must address these social issues ourselves,” concludeddemocratistas.“Pooling their resources, some six hundred union members at GM purchased

land in 1965 to construct a workers’ colonia-the first of its kind in Mexico.Nestled in the rolling hills ten miles north of the capital’s city center, the sitewas ideally suited to workers’ modernizing impulses. The neighborhood bor-dered Ciudad Satélite, Mexico City’s first bedroom community, constructed formiddle-class residents fleeing the irruption of rural poor into the capital. By thetime construction of the workers’ colonia began in 1965, the area boasted a PizzaHut, a Tastee Freez, a Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise, a Lions Club, and aU.S.-style supemiarket. Workers’ plans called for single, unattached homes onlarge lots, with front and back yards, two-car garages, and spacious green-belts. These dwellings stood in marked contrast to the unadorned multistoryapartment complexes the government was then building for working-class andrniddle-class residents in the capital. Further reflecting workers’ cosmopolitansensibilities, the colonia’s tree-lined streets bore names such as Calle Wash-ington, Calle California, and Avenida Norteamérica; the neighborhood as awhole was dubbed Colonia Las Americas.This project also reflected modemization’s highly gendered dimension. Shaped

by bourgeois gender ideologies, modernization implied a rigidly defined sexualdivision of labor, one in which men would fill the ranks of the industrial work-ing class and women would be consigned to the domestic sphere or jobs specifi-cally coded “female.” Exercising vast economies of scale, automobile manufac-turers offered unprecedented benefits and “family” wages, sufficient to providefor a dependent wife and children. U.S. automakers, in fact, preferred hiringsuch workers, believing them to be more responsible and loyal, and they activelypromoted a vision that equated modernity with bourgeois notions of mother-hood. These ideals, however, clashed with the realities of life in Colonia LasAméricas and other newly sprouting working-class neighborhoods in MexicoCity’s industrial periphery. As Las Americas was founded outside formal gov-ernment institutions, state authorities proved reluctant to extend municipalservices to the neighborhood. A year after moving in, residents still lackeduninterrupted running water, sanitation services, and electricity—despite mak-ing repeated demands for them. This burden obviously fell disproportionatelyon women, who attended to such concerns while their husbands did wage work

264 STEVEN J. BACHELOR _

outside the home. As one female resident recalled, “We wanted a modern com-munity, but there was nothing modern about all that trash out on the streetbaking in the sun.”57

Like their husbands in the workplace, women in the neighborhood beganmilitating for meaningful participation in controlling the social forces un-leashed by modernization. Calling themselves “Las Madres de Las Arnéricas,“the women staged a number of demonstrations, Calling on authorities to answertheir demands for improved living conditions within Mexico City’s industrialfringe. For instance, in 1967 more than three hundred women assembled onCalle Washington, carrying banners and large barrels filled with rank refuse, andmarched to the office of the mayor, who had consistently refused to meet withthe women. Forcing their way into his office, they proceeded to empty the bar-rels of garbage. State-controlled newspapers suggested the women were “surlymalcontents” who needed better supervision from their husbands.”

Las Madres de Las Americas were hardly the only ones making such demands.They were part of an expanding community movement in the 1970s headedby working-classwomen. Like their rnale counterparts in the workplace, suchwomen sought to realize what they considered to be the promise of moderniza-tion. Their demands included adequate schooling for the large number of chil-dren residing within Mexico City’s industrial fringe. As one female activistexplained, the “insufficient number of schools threatens to destroy our fami-lies?” For example, in 1973, following a brutally crushed strike at the Fordplant in Tlalnepantla, female residents demanded not only the construction ofadditional schools but also fundamental changes to Escuela Ford, the largestschool in the area. Foremost, they expressed displeasure with the school’s cur-riculum, which included teaching students that Henry Ford “was a man ofsimple pleasures who never flaunted his wealth and who believed that char-ity would not resolve the problem of misery.”‘° They also found fault withthe school’s name. Instead ofhonoring Henry Ford, parents proposed the schoolbe named Escuela Emiliano Zapata, after the famed revolutionary. In September1974, parents took their proposal to the municipal authorities, who listenedto their request but were unmoved: “Escuela Ford is the only name the schoolcan have, as Ford paid for its construction.”°‘ When, a year later, these samewomen joined in demonstration with five thousand families from Tlalnepantla,they encountered a far more severe response. Again issuing demands for ade-quate schools, housing, and municipal services, they faced a contingent ofarmed soldiers, who beat them with clubs and rifle butts. At least seven womenwere critically wounded. For working people in Mexico, such responses would

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become ever more common, prompting one participant ruefully to observe,“We don’t live; we merely survive.”"2

Deep Freeze

While healing fi'om the wounds he suffered at the hands of government authori-ties in November 1969, Vicente Herrera discovered during his hospitalizationthat Chrysler had fired him, ending his decade-long tenure with the firm. “Weare no longer in need of your services,” his dismissal papers tersely read. Her-rera’s injuries, coupled with the firm's subsequent blacklisting of him, kept himfrom finding other gainful employment.“ Sadly, Herrera’s story was not unique;although disabled by his injuries, he was otherwise simply one ofmore than fivehundred Chrysler workers fired within days of the shootings at Toluca.The issue that sparked the conflagration was the transfer of more than one

thousand wage earners from Chrysler’s Mexico City facility to its Toluca plant,about sixty miles from the city center. The transfers ended the workers’ mem-bership in their Mexico City union and relegated them to the union in Toluca,where their wages were half those previously earned. Moreover, the Tolucaplant’s union was controlled by a charro, whom wage earners accused of sellingemployment spots, personally pocketing union dues, refusing to convene unionmeetings, and openly collaborating with authorities to remove dissidents. Liketheir counterparts at GM, however, Chrysler workers’ demands extended to awide range of concerns, embracing a vision of “social justice” rooted in laborinternationalism and Mexico’s 1910 revolution.“ As wage earners explained,“The fake union is making a joke out of our real union and our Revolutionaryheritage. This is not what our Revolution was fought for.”°5

Following the November 1969 $h00Iings, workers planned their next protestfor January 21, 1970. The protest included a march by several thousand from theChrysler plant to the state governor’s office in Toluca. There officials refused tomeet with the dissidents, offering instead to respect the outcome of a new unionelection. Workers met and elected rank-and-file worker Rafael Martinez, whomthe company quickly fired and the government subsequently arrested for “steal-ing” from Chrysler.“ Meanwhile Chrysler organized its own closed-door elec-tion, in which Hugo Diaz, the company’s production chief, was declared theunion head. State labor officials immediately approved the election and rejectedworkers’ petitions for an inquiry into voter fraud.Already considered a harsh production chief, Hugo Diaz established a “re-

gime of repression and terrorism” at the two Chrysler plants.“ Cooperating

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Closely with management ( of which he remained a member), Diaz hired pisto-leros (armed guards) and guardias blancas to combat dissidence. Companysoccer teams, which in earlier years had helped foster working-class solidarity,became “converted into armed shock forces for managers” to intimidate andterrorize employees.“ Diaz even established a state police substation within theplant to facilitate the identification and removal of “militants.” Employees alsocharged that Diaz hired scabs (esquiroles) to apprise him of labor activismamong wage earners outside the plant.When, eighteen months after the first shootings at Chrysler, authorities for-

mally responded to the strife, they did so by denouncing the dissidents as“Communists” who were “threatening the fiber of the Mexican nation.” Suchclaims only served to legitimize ongoing violence being unleashed on workers.”In 1972, two more shootings occurred at Chrysler’s Toluca plant, both of whichauthorities refused to acknowledge. Workers responded by mounting more pro-tests, including numerous occupations of the headquarters of the nation’s largestlabor confederation.Autoworkers joined with laborers in other strategic mass-production indus-

tries. Over the next eight years, they launched what became the largest, mostextensive strike wave in Mexican history. Prominent groups within this insur-gence included electrical workers, who formed a dissident faction called LaTendencia Democrzitica (the Democratic Tendency), which brought togetherworkers at some 120 different workplaces, uniting more than 100,000 dissidentunionists.Scholars have tended to understand this insurgence in connection with Presi-

dent Echeverria’s apertura democnitica (democratic opening), crediting in-creased labor activism to a change in presidential labor policy." Under Echever-ria, the regime projected an ostensibly “populist” image and welcomed thecreation of “independent” unions while simultaneously repressing dissent. Forinstance, Echeverria repeatedly denounced multinational corporations as “vo-racious imperialists [who] foster national dependence” while simultaneouslydispatching the army to help employers crush opposition." Among the mostviolent of these episodes was his use of the army in 1976 to crush a nationwidestrike launched by electrical power workers. Autoworkers discerned the appar-ent political contradiction, labeling the armed men “official assassins for Mexi-can ‘progress’ ” who have “destroyed the companies’ pretensions of bringingsocial advancement."”Within the automobile industry, employers tended to respond to the mul-

tiple strikes by quickly offering wage increases in order to resume production.

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But wage increases failed to resolve the endemic class conflict, which revolvedaround issues more fundamental than remuneration. More often, these disputeswere settled through state repression and corporate recalcitrance. For GM work-ers, this was made painfully clear in 1980 when they launched what wouldbecome one of the longest strikes in Mexican history. As participants explained,“This movement is the direct result ofdifficult relations that began in 1965, whenthe company and the government assumed an intransigent attitude toward ourcivic rights.”73 As they did in 1965, autoworkers demanded the right to organize ademocratic union at <;M’s newest plant, in the northern state of Coahuila, where,once again, a corrupt union boss created a bogus union and signed a collectivecontract before a single employee had been hired. Following a protracted strug-gle, authorities succeeded in crushing the movement through intimidation andoutright fraud. The movement’s death knell came when company executives andstate officials bribed a former union leader to sign doctored documents thatacceded to management's requests. For authorities, what was at stake was up-rooting the community strength that the modernizing miracle helped beget. Bydiffusing the limited strength that Mexico City’s working class had amassed overthe previous decade, state and corporate authorities merely continued the “cre-ative destruction" that Josef Schumpeter has argued stands at the heart of indus-trial capitalism.“

Desmadre, Dismothernity

Roger Bartra has written: “We can no longer critique Mexican culture in thename ofmodernity, of a liberal-inspired modernity that raises up the banner of‘progress.’ We have to critique modernity from the standpoint I call dismoder-nity, or better yet—taking a cue from desmadre. Mexican slang for disorder-dismothernitj/.”75 Bartra’s insight applies particularly well to Mexico’s automo-bile industry, which promised “social progress” but became associated with alabor regime built on repression and human rights violations. Today the popularstruggles that marked the late 1960s and 1970s have hardly receded, despite theCold War’s end and free trade’s triumph. In fact, Ford workers in Mexico Citycontinue to militate for democratic union representation. Exercised numeroustimes since 1982, Ford’s more recent tactics to crush democratic oppositioninvolve shutting down its plants, dismissing the entire workforce, and reopeningits doors with a new workforce (sans dissidents) and significantly lower wagesand fewer benefits. For instance, 1990 saw repeated factory occupations, demon-strations calling for legitimate union elections, and even kidnappings and as-

268 srevew 1. BA(IHF.I.()R

sassinations ofactivists. Ultimately, in January 1991, state and corporate authori-ties conducted their own closed-door union elections, which human rightsobservers concluded denied “the fundamental rights of Ford workers to choosetheir union representatives.” Even the Partido Accion Nacional, a right-wingparty that rarely condemns multinational corporations, squarely blamed theongoing violence on Ford authorities.“

Just three weeks after the November 1969 shootings at Chrysler, U.S. StateDepartment officials predicted that the coming decade in Mexico would witnessan impending “clash between growing discontent and forces of resistance [that]will result in the overt use of force in support of and against the establishedpolitical system. And the United States, which is the prime inspiration for thoseMexicans who seek changeibut is also closely linked with what many considerthe status quo, may be increasingly vilified by both sides.”" Their words provedprescient. Autoworkers like Vicente Herrera and Clemente Zaldivar, who soughtto fulfill both the legacy of the Mexican revolution and the promise ofAmeri-canization, faced vilification from both a Mexican regime committed at leastrhetorically to revolutionary nationalism and corporate authorities committedto U.S. economic hegemony. Their fates highlight not only what Roger Rousehas called globalization’s “unresolved tension between ever-more reactionarystates and the largely liberatory possibilities opened up by transnational forcesand arrangements,” but also the violent means to which state and corporateauthorities went to stem the promise unleashed by Americanization."

Notes

1. Vicente Herrera, interview by the author, Estado de México, March 4, 1997; Soli-daridad (Mexico City), February 1970; El Dia (Mexico City), February 2, 1971; JusticiaSocial, August 1974; Angel Fojo de Diego, “Estudio de un conflicto industrial: El casoAutomex” (MS, Centro de Estudios Sociologicos, El Colegio de Mexico, 1973); Kevin J.Middlebrook, “The Political Economy of Mexican Organized Labor” (Ph.D. diss., Har-_vard University, 1981), 306-7. -

2. Larry Rohter, “Ford Motor Is Linked to Argentina’s ‘Dirty War,’ ” New York Times,November 27, 2002, sec. A, late edition.

3. Ian Roxborough, “Mexico,” in Latin America between the Second World War and theCold War, 1944—48, ed. Leslie Bethell and Ian Roxborough (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1992), 190.

4. James P. Brennan, “Clasismo and the Workers: The Ideological-Cultural Context of‘Sindicalismo de Liberacion’ in the Cordoban Automobile Industry, 1970—1975,” BulletinofLatin American Research 15 (1996): 293.

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5. On import substitution industrialization, see Antonio L. Aspra, “Import Substitu-tion in Mexico: Past and Present,” World Developments (January- February 1977): 111-23;René Villareal, “The Policy of Import-Substitution Industrialization, 1929—1975," in Au-thoritarianism in Mexico, ed. José Luis Reyna and Richard S. Weinert (Philadelphia: 1s1-11Press, 1977), 67-107.

6. Not for nothing was Walt Rostow, chief proponent ofmodernization theory, a keyeconomic planner of the Alliance for Progress. For a perceptive reading of the teleologyembedded in such modernizing narratives, see Maria Josefina Saldafia-Portillo, TheRevolutionary Imagination in the Americas and the Age ofDevelopment (Durham: DukeUniversity Press, 2003).

7. The phrase “Alliance for Profits" is from Clark W. Reynolds, The Mexican Economy:Twentieth-Century Structure and Growth (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970), 186.On the Alliance for Progress, see Stephen Rabe, The Most Dangerous Area in the World:IFK Confronts Communist Revolution in Latin America (Chapel Hill: University ofNorthCarolina Press, 1999), 8. Also see Michael E. Latham, Modernization as Ideology: Ameri-can Social Science and “Nation Building” in the Kennedy Era (Chapel Hill: University ofNorth Carolina Press, 2000).

8. Quoted in Victor G. Reuther, The Brothers Reuther and the Story of the UAW.’ AMemoir (Boston: I-Ioughton Mifflin, 1976), 401; and La Prensa (Mexico City), January 12,1965.

9. El Universal (Mexico City), March 18, 1958.1o. Ford International Archive (hereafter cited as 1=1A), Dearborn, Mich., International

File, Accension AR-74-18056.11. Secretaria de Trabajo y Prevision Social, Registro de Asociaciones (hereafter cited as

STPSRA), exp. 10/6298, leg. 4, July 1964. Also see Nelson Lichtenstein, TheMostDangerousMan in Detroit: Walter Reuther and the Fate ofAmerican Labor (New York: Basic Books,

1995)-12. Leopoldo Silva, interview by the author, Mexico City, October 31, 1996.13. This points up what Mary Louise Pratt has identified as the scholarly literature’s

tendency either to historicize subalterns as the “victims qua survivors” of Western im-perialism or to romanticize them as pristine beings seemingly untouched by history. Ineither depiction, she contends, subalterns are condemned to destruction. See her Irri-perial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (New York: Routledge, 1992).

14. Two important exceptions that highlight the ambiguities and contradictions of"Americanization" in Latin America are Julio Moreno, Yankee Don't Go Home: MexicanNationalism, American Business Culture, and the Shaping ofModern Mexico, 1920-1950(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003); and Michel Gobat, Confrontingthe American Dream: Nicaragua Under U.S. Imperial Rule (Durham: Duke UniversityPress, 2005).

15. Peter Smith, “Mexico since 1946,” in Cambridge History ofLatin America, ed. LeslieBethell, vol. 7 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 83. The literature in this

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vein is vast; representative works include Ruth and David Collier, Shaping the PoliticalArena (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991); and Hobart A. Spaulding, OrganizedLabor in Latin America: Historical Case Studies of Urban Workers in Dependent Societies(New York: Harper and Row, 1977). An important contribution that transcends suchanalytical dichotomies is Gilbert M. Joseph, Catherine LeGrand, and Ricardo Salvatore,eds., Close Encounters of Empire: Writing the Cultural History of U.S.—Latin AmericanRelations (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998).

16. Chrysler de México, Sobre ruedas: La historia de Chrysler en México (Mexico City;privately printed, 1993), 72; Provincia (Estado de México), January 13, 1963.

17. Luis Unikel, La dinamica del crecimiento de la Ciudad de México (Mexico City;Fundacion para Estudios de la Poblacion, 1972), 24. =

18. Douglas C. Bennett and Kenneth E. Sharpe, Transnational Corporations versus theState: ThePolitical Economy oftheMexican Auto Industry ( Princeton: Princeton UniversityPress, 1985), 100; Clark Reynolds, “Why Mexico’s ‘Stabilizing Development’ Was ActuallyDestabilizing with Some Implications for the Future,” World Development(1978): 1007.

19. Diario Oficial, August 25, 1962.20. Jerry Heasley, The Production Figure Book for U.S. Cars (Osceola, Wis.: Motor-

books International, 1977).21. Ford Motor Company, “A Study of Automotive Manufacturing in Mexico” (Mex-

ico City: privately printed, April 1960); General Motors Corporation, “General MotorsCorporation in the World Automobile Market” (Detroit: privately printed, May 1962),36; Diario Oficial, August 25, 1962.

22. Roxborough, “Mexico,” 190.23. Corrupt, state-allied union bosses were known as charros after the fondness of the

government-imposed union head Jesus Diaz de Leon for charreria (rodeo). A first-person account of “the charrazo” (the government’s substitution of independent unionheads with compliant labor bosses) is the account by the removed head of the Sindicatode Trabajadores Ferrocarrileros de la Republica Mexicana, Luis Gomez Z., Sucesos yrememhranzas (Mexico City: Editorial Secapsa, 1979). For a historical analysis, see KevinJ. Middlebrook, The Paradox of Revolution: Labor, the State, and Authoritarianism inMexico (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 107-55.

24. Richard U. Miller, “Labor Organizations in a Developing Country: The Case ofMexico” (Ph.D. diss., University ofWisconsin, Madison, 1966), 123.

25. The News (Mexico City), January 26, 1965.26. U.S. National Archives, Record Group '59» 1960-63, Box 1511, Folder 712.00 (W)/7-

761.

27. Flora Lewis, “Why There is Anti-Americanism in Mexico,” New York Times Maga-zine, July 6,1952, 10.

28. rm, International File, Accension AR-74-18056.29. El Universal (Mexico City), January 14, 1964; Novedades (Mexico City), January 15,

1965.

MIRACLE on ICE 271

30. Noticiero GM (newsletter of General Motors de México), April 1959.31. Seth Fein, “New Empire into Old; Making Mexican Newsreels the Cold War Way,”

Diplomatic History 28 (November 2004): 715n42; also see his chapter in this volume.32. Ford de Mexico, Apuntes para una historia rle la industria automotriz (Mexico City:

privately printed, 1977).33. Secretaria de Educacion P1'1blica (hereafter cited as sap), Box 54, exp. IV/161 (IV-

120/4205), April 1973.34. Lichtenstein, The Most Dangerous Man, 334.35. Ibid., 339.36. Quoted in Saldafia-Portillo, The Revolutionary Imagination in the Americas, 49.37. Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library, National Security File, Country File v.

11, 1/66-2/67, April 14, 1966; Thomas C. Mann, Oral History Interview I by Joe B. Frantz,November 4, 1968.

38. Clemente Zaldivar, interview by the author, Estado de México, July 18, 1997.39. Noti-GM (January—March 1955).40. STPSRA, exp. 10/6298, leg. 4, August 1962.41. The News (Mexico City), February 6, 1965.42. Kevin J. Middlebrook, “Union Democratization in the Mexican Automobile In-

dustry,” Latin American Research Review 24 (spring 1989): 69-93; FIA, Industrial Archive,Ford Data Book, unnumbered record from November 1965.

43. STPSRA, exp. 10/ 6298, leg. 4, December 6, 1964.44. Middlebrook, The Paradox ofRevolution, 233.45. STPSRA, exp. 10/6298, leg. 4, September 17, 1962.46. STPSRA, exp. 10/6298, leg. 4, August 21, 1963.47. STPSRA, exp. 10/6298, leg. 4, August 22, 1963.48. STPSRA, exp. 10/6298, leg. 4, November 13, 1963.49. STPSRA, exp. 10/6298, leg. 4, January 5, 1965.50. Siempre (Mexico City), February 1965.51. STPSRA, exp. 10/6298, leg. 4, July 18, 1964.52. lusticia Social, August 1971.53. STPSRA, exp. 10/5441, leg. 3, February 1968.54. Luis Unikel, La dinamica del crecimiento, 24.55. Expresiones (Tlalnepantla, Estado de México), March 4, 1965.56. s"r1>sru1, exp. 10/6298, leg. 4, February 1965.57. Irma Vargas, interview by the author, Estado de Mexico, July 20, 1997.58. Avance (Tlalnepantla, Estado de México), July 12, 1967.59. El Dia (Mexico City), August 26, 1973.60. SEP, Box 54, exp. IV/ 161 (IV-120/ 4205), April 1973.61. Ibid., September 1974.62. El Dia, July 17, 1975, August 11, 1975.63. Vicente Herrera, interview by the author, Estado de Mexico, August 25, 1997.

272 STEVEN J. I3ACHIiLOR ‘II

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64. /usticia Social (Mexico City), July 1971. I 5 T E P H E N P I T Tl65. STPSRA, exp. 10/5441, leg. 3, February 1971.66. Solidaridad (Mexico City), February 1971.67. Lider (Mexico City), December 15, 1971. Chicano Cold Warriors68. Ibid.69. El Universal (Mexico City), January 4, 1971; STPSRA, exp. 10/5441, leg. 3, January

1971.7o. Jorge Basurto, En el régimen de Echeverria: Rebelion e indepenalencia (Mexico City:

Siglo Veintiuno Editores, 1983); Ilan Bizberg, Estado y sindicalismo en México (MexicoCity: El Colegio de México, 1990). Two notable exceptions are Middlebrook, Paradox ofRevolution; and Ian Roxborough, Unions and Politics in Mexico: The Case of the Auto-mobile Industry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984).

71. El Universal, September 18, 1973.72. El Dia, November 22, 1976; Uno Mas Uno (Mexico City), December 17, 1977.73. Quoted in Valentina Cerda de Lopez, “Historia de una huelga: GM y la lucha de 106

dias” (Licenciatura thesis, Universidad Nacional Autonoma de México, 1983), 16.74. Joseph A. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (New York: Harper,

1950).75. Roger Bartra, Blood, Ink, and Culture: Miseries and Splendors of the Post-Mexican

Condition (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002), 9.76. Quoted in Dan LaBotz, Labor Suppression in Mexico Today (Boston: South End

Press, 1992), 158.77. United States National Archive, Record Group 59, 1967-69, P0l- 2 M6X-1 BOX 23371

November 24, 1969.78. Roger Rouse, “Thinking Through Transnationalism: Notes on the Cultural Politics

of Class Relations in the Contemporary United States,” Public Culture 7 (1995): 59.

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III

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II

César Chavez, Mexican American Politics,

and California Farmworkers

Few political earthquakes rocked the twentieth-century United States like theone that hit California’s San Joaquin Valley on September 16, 1965.‘ As ethnicMexican communities throughout the United States celebrated their ties toMexico in fiestas patrias, a thousand Mexican immigrants and Mexican Ameri-cans gathered to vote whether or not to strike in local agriculture. Organizers ofa group that called itself the National Farm Workers Association (NFWA) dis-tributed strike authorization cards to area residents who arrived at Our Lady ofGuadalupe church in the small town of Delano “in a holiday mood.” NFWAleaders had decorated the hall with pictures of Zapata, with the Californiasocialist Jack London’s “definition of a scab," and with the black thunderbirdand red background of the NFWA flag.’ After a local Mexican musician played anintroductory set, the meeting began with a prayer. NFWA official Gil Padilla thentook the stage to explain that Mexicans needed to decide whether to support theFilipino farmworkers who had voted the week before to walk out of local grapefields. Their key complaint was low wages, but the Filipino strikers had alsomade clear that they demanded the right to a labor union that would representthem in future disputes with California growers. Local Mexican and MexicanAmerican workers, many of them immigrants, rose to support the strike resolu-tion in the church hall. Some recalled participating in the bloody Californialabor struggles of the 1930s, while others testified about their solidarity withmore recent labor activism in Mexico. Reminding the crowd that Mexicanselsewhere had gathered that day to celebrate common national struggles, NFWApresident César Chavez urged Californians to remember Father Hidalgo’s sacri-fice in bringing down the Spanish empire, and he encouraged local workers tocommit to yet “another struggle for the freedom and dignity which povertydenies us.” The workers madly applauded Chavez’s call to strike, and withinseveral days the NFWA had gathered some twenty-seven hundred authorizationcards signed by local residents?

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