This panel examines the role of print media in Mexico as a key space of cultural intervention through which individuals and groups from a range of social positions across the country’s geographical, class, gender, racial, and generational plurality laid claim to the public sphere throughout the postrevolutionary twentieth century. Through the examination of a variety of press publications and ephemera, the scholars brought together here interrogate how print media served as a vehicle for the negotiation of residual and emergent perspectives in ways that reified and/or contested hegemonic discourses pertaining to popular classes, Indigenous people, women, youth, and the state. Individually these scholars, who vary across rank, types of home institutions, geographical locations and specializations, approach the topic of print culture as an accessible site of enunciation and dissemination in Mexico’s complex postrevolutionary sociocultural landscape with a focus on a specific historical and geographical points of inflection. Collectively, their common national and medium-specific frameworks provide points of continuity and convergence structuring a cohesive scholarly conversation about Mexican print culture’s sociocultural significance and impact throughout the previous century.

Amy Wright’s intervention, “Serializing Villa in the Post-Revolutionary Press: Repetition’s Role in the Creation of a Mass-Media Legend” will examine how serial narrative in the 1920s and 1930s functioned in shaping opinion around one figure who would become one of Mexico’s most important, and longest running, multimedial legends: José Doroteo Arango Arámbula, also known as Pancho Villa. The narratives she analyzes illuminate how seriality’s fragmented nature mirrored the instability of the time while offering a structured way to process it, allowing for insight into the real-time reflections and dynamic interplay between history, mythmaking, and popular imagination in post-Revolutionary Mexico.

Proceeding chronologically and shifting focus to the relationship between women and the popular press, in “A Cursi Intellectual for the Masses: Rosario Sansores in Mexico” Alejandra Vela discusses Yucatecan poet Rosario Sansores’ successful, long-running column in the Novedades newspaper from 1939 to 1972. While feminist and literary historiography often focuses on figures who defied the norms of femininity in their era, Vela proposes the term the term “cursi aesthetics” (translatable to corny or cutesy) to name how Sansores’ publications exemplified a modality of conservative femininity rooted in pre-revolutionary values. Vela’s study illustrates how post-revolutionary audiences still held "outdated" aesthetic preferences as well as how an exponents of conservative feminism both rejected milestones of contemporary feminism while also acquiring a freedom that can be read as a feminist avant-la-lettre.

Turning to visual ephemera in relation to youth culture, in “Forging a Mexican People: Collective Subjectivities in the 1968 Mexico City Prints” Pablo Zavala centers the subversive graphic arts associated with Mexico City’s 1968 student urban popular protests. For Zavala, these images forged and reflected collective subjectivities through a unique visual vocabulary consisting of symbols and satirical images to denounce oppression. In dialogue with theoretical conversations surrounding conceptualizations of “the people,” Zavala examines how the production of prints converged and diverged from the representation of the students in other realms of the media landscape including photography, film, and newspapers, highlighting competing strategies to forging a Mexican people. Furthermore, he explores how the plurality of images speaks to a thorough break that occurred between the Mexican State and civil society, on the one hand, and to a lesser extent, within civil society.

Angelica Waner also discusses cultural developments pertaining to 1968, but from an Indigenous perspective. In “Writing as Path: Print Culture for Zapotec Cultural Preservation and Revitalization” she studies the Zapotec literary magazine, Neza Cubi, meaning “new path,” founded by two young Zapotec intellectuals upon returning to their hometown of Juchitán in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, Oaxaca after living and working in Mexico City. Through interdisciplinary methods of close-reading, Indigenous Theory, and archival research, this paper highlights the importance of print culture for Indigenous cultural preservation and revitalization as it explores the editors’ goals for their publications, such as expanding their (imagined) community beyond the Juchitec Zapotec, in contradistinction the project of an earlier generation of local intellectuals in the 1930s.