SHAPING MÉXICO LINDO: RADIO, MUSIC, AND GENDER
IN GREATER MEXICO, 1923-1946
By
Sonia Robles

A DISSERTATION

Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
History
2012

ABSTRACT
SHAPING MÉXICO LINDO: RADIO, GENDER AND MUSIC
IN GREATER MEXICO, 1923-1946
By
Sonia Robles
This dissertation studies the early history of radio in Mexico by analyzing the complex
ways in which border stations, Mexico City national networks and the Mexican government
interacted and competed over the Mexican audience in the United States between 1923 and 1946.
Following the Mexican Revolution (1910-1920), the government implemented an
extensive reconstruction project which sought to unify Mexico and transform its people through
cultural and educational reform. Radio, along with rhetoric, art and educational policy were
enlisted by the government to inculcate literacy, nationalism, notions of citizenship, sobriety,
hygiene and hard work. My research shows that as early as 1923 commercial and official
stations in Mexico targeted the Mexican population in the rural areas of the nation and in the
United States through powerful transmitters. To station owners, the airwaves were intended to
project the true national folklore of Mexico, display the best manifestations of Mexican culture
through music, and, through advertisements and songs, create consumers.
The study of radio in Great Mexico proves that the U.S.-Mexico border region had not
accounted for a border since the 1920s due to the absence of legislation banning these
transmissions and the power of radio to send signals across great distances. This dissertation
argues that the interests of the Mexican government concerning its radio industry went beyond
the national boundaries of Mexico. Situating radio within the industrialization, urbanization and
mass communications technological innovations of the twentieth century redefines the role of

mass media and industry growth and development within Mexico. What is more, by mid-century
the results were unforeseen: the government’s plan failed to materialize and singers and artists
migrating back and forth between Mexico and the United States along the circuit provided by
radio realized they had to leave Mexico in order to become true cultural ambassadors.

Copyright by
SONIA ROBLES
2012

Dedication
To my parents: J. Ascención Robles Flores, whose stories of life in Mexico City during the
1940s inspired me to take this journey and tell a story and to my mother, Connie Robles, whose
enthusiasm for life will always keep me looking up.

v

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This dissertation would not have been possible without the financial support of Michigan
State University. A University Enrichment Fellowship allowed me to focus solely on course
work and dissertation research for two years, which eased my transition from undergraduate to
graduate school. In the in-between years, I benefitted from a Tinker Foundation grant which
provided preliminary research trip to Mexico City. Most recently, a Dissertation Completion
Fellowship from the Graduate School allowed me to focus on completing this dissertation in a
timely manner.
Staff members at various archives and libraries in Mexico and the United States were
invaluable tools in this process. In the United States, archivist Michael Stone at U.C.L.A. shared
some valuable insight into the history of “Mexican” Los Angeles with me. Colin Gunkel and
Josie Martin, other graduate students at U.C.L.A., also offer valuable help and conversation. In
Mexico City, the archivists at the various places I visited including the Archivo General de la
Nacion, Archivo de Secretaria de Relaciones Exteriores, the Fideicomiso Archivo Francisco
Torreblaca and the Hemeroteca Nacional. Many thanks to Roberto at the Archivo Histoico de la
Secretaria de Educacion Publica for help and great conversation.
I am grateful for the support I have received from my dissertation committee over the
years. I’d like to begin by thanking my advisor, Dr. Javier Pescador, for his belief in this project,
his honesty and respect for me as a scholar. I’ve learned just as much from watching him teach
as I have from our conversations and mostly, I’ve been encouraged knowing he believed that in
this dissertation I was creating something that was important.

vi

Dr. Dennis Valdés, whom I quote often in class, has also been influential in the formation
of this process and most importantly, in my arrival at Michigan State. I have always been
challenged by his pursuit of knowledge, and I admire his life-long dedication to both writing and
exploring the plight of Mexicans in the United States. Dr. Erica Windler, who challenged me to
think about gender in Latin America, has been a supportive in this process from the beginning.
As a T.A. for her class, I learned the challenged of teaching Gender and I admire her approach
and dedication to this field of study. Lastly, Dr. Ben Smith has been extremely valuable in
shaping my graduate school experience. Not only was he always available and eager to talk
about Mexican current events, culture, and history, but his knowledge motivated me to seek
reliable sources and to look beyond the “obvious.”
A number of graduate student colleagues from Michigan State have offered their
assistance during this process including Heath Bowen, Andrea Vicente, Lindsey Gish, Micalee
Sullivan, Jamie McLean Dalyrymple, and Ahimsa Bodhrain. Outside of Michigan State I’d like
to extend my gratitude to Susanne Eineigel and David Carletta, friends and colleagues who
opened up their home to me during the darkest of times and offered shelter, food, support
encouragement, good conversation and much, much more. There is no doubt in my mind that
this dissertation would have been completed had it not been for them. I remain eternally
grateful!
My family in Mexico and the United States has cheered me on since my first day of
graduate school. In Mexico City, I was fortunate to have the support of my aunt, Maria Elena
Robles Valenzuela, and my cousins, Jovita and Jorge. Not only did they fill my days with
stories, laughter and good food, but living with them and talking about what I was doing each
day helped me put the entire dissertation project, and academia in general, in perspective. The
vii

greatest of thanks to other members of my family including my brother and sister and in Mexico
my uncles Pablo and Raúl, my aunt Gloria, my cousins Alejandra, Ulises, Omar, Israel, Gilberto,
Gerardo, Ernesto, Pilar and their families. The encouragement of personal friends and loved
ones such as Sarah Postma, Kate Jones, Brook Albanis, Tamar Lawrence-Samuel, Ernesto
Medina, Carlos Zavala, Kelly McGlynn, Jason Fenton and Chris Flecknoe motivated me to not
lose sight of the end result. And, finally, to my parents, Chon and Connie Robles, for their
unending support and love over this difficult and at times, unnerving journey, los quiero mucho!

viii

TABLE OF CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION................................................................................................................................... 1
CHAPTER I: THE BIRTH OF “LA NUEVA MARAVILLA”: RADIO ARRIVES IN
MEXICO ................................................................................................................................................. 23
CHAPTER II: FROM “LA HORA DEL HOGAR” TO “LA HORA NACIONAL”: NATIONBUILDING AND OFFICIAL RADIO BROADCASTING IN MEXICO ............................... 59
CHAPTER III: CREATING LISTENERS THOUGH THE AIR: MEXICAN BORDER
RADIO ENTREPRENEURS AND THEIR OVERSEAS AUDIENCE, 1930-1950 .............. 91
CHAPTER IV: CRAFTING AN AUDIENCE: MUSIC, MASS MEDIA AND RADIO IN
“MÉXICO DE AFUERA” ......................................................................................................... 124
CHAPTER V: FROM MICHOACÁN TO THE MILLION DOLLAR: MEN, WOMEN
AND MUSIC IN THE TRANSNATIONAL RADIO INDUSTRY ...................................... 166
CHAPTER VI: CULTURAL AMBASSADORS OF THE AIR: THE INTERNATIONAL
CAREERS OF RADIO SINGERS ................................................................................................. 201
EPILOGUE: THE END OF AN ERA: CENSORSHIP, TELEVISION AND SINGLENETWORK CHAINS ....................................................................................................................... 243
BIBLIOGRAPHY .............................................................................................................................. 259

ix

Introduction

Radio was a force aimed to unify and shape Mexican communities in post-revolutionary
Mexico. It was an excellent educator, training listeners how to love, laugh, sing, forget, dream,
cry, and, by the middle of the twentieth century, become first-rate consumers. Radio
transmissions crossed geographic terrain with ease and thus had an advantage over other cultural
forms like theater or film connecting communities in Mexico to the U.S. Southwest. In the
United States, radio gave Mexican audiences the opportunity to feel connected to other members
of the Patria, or Motherland, wherever they were located; in Mexico, it taught and reminded the
population that the nation was growing, modernizing and that the future was promising.
The arrival of radio to Mexico in 1923 coincided with important national events; most
notably the post-revolutionary cultural project of the Mexican government which claimed art,
music, folklore and other objects as part of the official discourse. “Revolutionary educational
policy sought to inculcate literacy, nationalism, notions of citizenship, sobriety, hygiene, and
hard work,” writes Alan Knight, “Art, rhetoric, and (by the 1930s) radio were enlisted for the
same purpose.”

1

In the post-revolutionary decades, the government used various forms of

media- film, radio, and later, television- to instill principles of nationalism and bring the people
of Mexico together under the ideology of the ruling political party. Broadcasting was eagerly
embraced by the state because it simplified existing forms of communication and for its potential
to reach the most dispersed pueblos in the interior of Mexico. Political leaders were fortunate

1

Alan Knight, “Popular Culture and the Revolutionary State in Mexico, 1910-1940,” The
Hispanic American Historical Review 74: 3 (Aug, 1994): 395-96.

258

that radio was part of a new mass media technology that came to maturity at the exact moment
that the government and commercial interests were looking for an efficient means of reaching the
Mexican people.

2

A number of events influenced the growth of the radio industry during the first half of the
twentieth century including: the post-revolutionary national project, the global economic crisis,
the forced and volunteer deportation of Mexicans in the United States during the 1930s, World
War II, and the rise of consumerism in both Mexico and the United States. Between 1923 and
1945, moreover, the Mexican radio industry grew exponentially as indicated by archival records
from the Secretaría de Comunicaciones y Obras Públicas (Ministry of Communications and
Public Works), or SCOP, the government body responsible for mass communications. SCOP
offices did not begin to keep track of commercial radio until the 1930, when 31 stations were in
operation in Mexico. A decade later, the country was home to 126 stations, 34 in Mexico City
3

and 92 scattered in urban centers throughout the nation. By the 1940s the radio was no longer a
“luxury” item in a Mexican household, as it had been in the 1920s; it was as indispensable as a
gas stove or a sewing machine. In 1943, an estimated two million radio receivers were in
operation in Mexico, giving way to over 14 million listeners “who look for kind distractions in
4

the transmissions.”

This dissertation is a history of radio in Greater Mexico between 1923, when commercial
2

Elizabeth Joy Hayes, Radio Nation: Communication, Popular Culture, and Nationalism in
Mexico, 1920-1950 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2000), xi.
3
4

Boletín Radiofónico, October 1963, p. 83.
Radiolandia, April 16, 1943.
2

stations arrived in Mexico, to 1946, at the end of the administration of Manuel Ávila Camacho,
when the radio industry was centralized, censored and part of the nation’s growing industries.

5

This dissertation situates the transnational capabilities of radio within an era of Mexican history
of rapid population, urban, industrial and economic growth. I analyze government records,
official bulletins, correspondence between listeners and radio stations, newspapers, popular
periodicals, music and personal archives in order to explain how, from the moment they went on
the air, Mexican commercial and official radio stations were international businesses interested
in sustaining a dialogue with Mexicans abroad. Since 1923, for instance, two of the first
privately-owned radio stations in Mexico City, CYL and CYB, boasted that their transmissions
were powerful enough to be heard in the U.S. Southwest, Central America, and Cuba.

6

Literature Review
The twenty-first century is known as an era of permeable borders and transnational
identities, a time dictated by the interests of multinational corporations where the internet enjoys
unmatched and unforeseen power. What the study of radio in Greater Mexico during the first
half of the twentieth century uncovers is that some geographic areas have not accounted for a
border in decades. Thanks to the power of radio to send signals across a large territorial span,
the region has disregarded the political boundaries since the 1920s, when the first radio stations
appeared in central and northern Mexico. This dissertation disentangles the phenomenon of
5

Within Chicana/o History, the term “Greater Mexico” applies to the predominantly Mexican or
Mexican-American parts of the United States from the U.S.-Mexico border to Chicago. See,
José Eduardo Limón, American Encounters: Greater Mexico, the United States and the Erotics
of Culture (New York: Beacon Press, 1999) and Americo Paredes, “With His Pistol in His
Hand”: A Border Ballad and Its Hero (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1970). Generally, this
area is studied vis-à-vis the United States; here, it is understood as one region.
6

El Universal, September 18, 1923.
3

transnational broadcasting by Mexican radio stations by drawing on literature from four bodies
of work: Mexican History, Mass Media Studies, Chicana/o History and Gender Studies.
In Mexico, the post-revolutionary era was imbued with meanings of redemption and lofty
aspirations, such as attaining social equality and offering education to all citizens. Over the last
two decades, scholars have noted that many of the goals meant to take place after the overthrow
of the Porfirio Díaz (1876-1910) regime failed to materialize; what occurred instead, they
contend, was the consolidation of a political party and a turn towards an authoritarian system of
rule, among other things.

7

For years, much of the work of the post-revolutionary government project saw the
overwhelming power of the government as omnipresent and omnipotent. In recent decades,
historians began to realize that this period included, not a cultural program that was passed down
from the government to the people, but one in which a significant amount of negotiation took
place between these two forces. In fact, scholars identified multiple sites of struggle on the local,
8

regional and national level. Regarding mass media, in particular, some have challenged the

7

The literature on the post-revolutionary era is extensive, ranging from studies on Cardenismo
(the administration of President Lázaro Cárdenas from 1934-1940) to gender, protest, religion
and social issues the nation confronted following the war. For the consolidation of the political
party, see Héctor Aguilar Camín and Lorenzo Meyer, In the Shadow of the Mexican Revolution:
Contemporary Mexican History, 1910-1989 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1993).

8

Post-revisionist scholarship, which emerged in the 1990s, is a vast field. For a brief overview
see, Gilbert M. Joseph and Daniel Nugent, Everyday forms of State Formation: Revolution and
the Negotiation of Rule in Modern Mexico (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997); William H.
Beezley, Cheryl English Martin and William E. French, eds. Rituals of Rule, Rituals of
Resistance: Public Celebrations and Popular Culture in Mexico (Wilmington: Scholarly
Resources, 1994); Jeffrey W. Rubin, Decentering the Regime: Ethnicity, Radicalism, and
Democracy in Juchitán, Mexico (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997); Alan Knight,
“Cardenismo: Juggernaut or Jalopy?” Journal of Latin American Studies Vol. 26, No. 1 (Feb.,
1994), pp. 73-107; Mary Kay Vaughan, Cultural Politics in Revolution: Teachers, Peasants,
4

9

belief that it was an obedient servant of the political party. This dissertation contends that while
invigorating nationalism may have been one of the aims of mass media policy as expressed by
the close link between private businessmen and the government, by no means was it the only
one. Instead, radio entrepreneurs and businessmen, who were interested in the monetary rewards
of the enterprise, worked with the law to ensure their stations would prosper.
Mexican mass media legislation favored the interests of Mexican entrepreneurs over the
U.S. border radio investors who disregarded the restrictions set in place by the Federal
Communications Commission (FCC). They attained concessions through prestanombres,
(nominal owners or trustees) by the Mexican Ministry of Communications and offered Englishlanguage programming that was entertaining and highly profitable, yet many times unlawful. In
turn, Mexican commercial stations earned generous profits advertising in Spanish and English
for businesses from New York City, to Chicago, to Houston and Texas.
In Mexico, scholars have pursued the links between nationalism and cultural policy with
greater success. Seminal works by Ricardo Pérez Montfort, for instance, play an important part
highlighting the centrality and cultural importance of radio, within the context of the formation

and Schools in Mexico, 1930-1940 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1997).
9

Recently, Historian Andrew Paxman has challenged the notion that nationalism was the
principle aim of mass media policy. Paxman claims that while nationalism played a central role,
policy was also driven by two other principles: the desire to contain the masses and the need to
unite the people of Mexico under the same political party. Additionally, he attributes two
financial aspects, the actions of private business men and industrial economics, as vital to the
trajectory of mass media policy in the post-revolutionary era. See, Andrew Paxman, “Cooling to
Cinema and Warming to Television: State Mass Media Policy, 1940-1960,” paper presented at
the conference “Authoritarianism & Resistance in Mexico, 1940-1955,” Michigan State
University, East Lansing, 1-2 March 2009, 17.

5

10

of national music and folklore in Mexican society following the revolution.

Mexican cultural

policy is also explored in works such as Red, White and Green, by Michael Miller, which
attempts to bring together modernization and culture in Mexico by studying the way art, cinema,
ballet and music were taken up by the Mexican government to promote unity during the Manuel
Ávila Camacho administration (1940-1946).

11

The formation of the nation state included radio,

however, and existing monographs of the cultural history of Mexico tend to disregard this
important aspect of the nation-wide cultural project.
Within mass communications, the seminal English-language work on radio in Mexico is,
Radio Nation: Communication, Popular Culture, and Nationalism in Mexico, 1920-1950, by
media scholar Elizabeth Joy Hayes. Her monograph explores the effective way the government
regulated radio programming by keeping politics and religion out of broadcasting and the ways
in which radio served as an effective medium to transmit messages from the cities to the
hinterlands of the nation.

12

While Hayes convincingly illustrates the importance of radio to the

national project, she leaves many unanswered questions regarding the relationship between mass
media and the government beyond Mexico’s political borders, such as: how did political leaders
use radio to reach a public outside of Mexico? Or, how was mass media integrated into the post-

10

Ricardo Pérez Montfort, Estampas De Nacionalismo Popular Mexicano: Ensayos Sobre
Cultura Popular Y Nacionalismo. (México, D.F: CIESAS, 1994.) and Expresiones Populares y
Estereotipos Culturales en México. Siglos XIX y XX. Diez Ensayos (México, DF: Casa Chata,
2007).
11

Michael Nelson Miller, Red, White and Green: The Maturing of Mexicanidad, 1940-1946 (El
Paso: University of Texas at El Paso, Texas Western Press, 1998).
12

Elizabeth Joy Hayes, Radio Nation: Communication, Popular Culture, and Nationalism in
Mexico, 1920-1950 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2000).
6

revolutionary national economy? Taking into account that alongside petroleum, automobile and
aeronautical production radio was considered an important part of the national economy for its
production value, the number of people it employed, and that entrepreneurs along the U.S.Mexico border were benefitting from using radio communications to meet the consumer
demands of Mexican immigrants in the United States, it is important to explore these questions
further. By 1944, for example, Mexico was home to 911 radio stations and, according to the
Ministry of Communications and Public Works, an estimated fifteen million pesos had been
invested in their establishment.

13

Other studies within mass communications have focused on the “Golden Age,” (1920s1950s) of radio,

14

or have invoked theory, in particular that of Benedict Anderson, to

demonstrate that nations are in fact communities that are socially constructed and imagined by
the people who perceive themselves as part of that group. Anderson’s work, on the influence of
print technology on nationalism, challenged scholars to think of ways that communication
transfers to millions of people across great distances with the help of the mass media.

15

In

response, cultural critics within Latin America have noted the centralizing and nation-building

13

Radiolandia, September 22, 1944.

14

Michele Hilmes, Radio Voices: American Broadcasting, 1922-1952 (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 1997); Susan J. Douglas, Listening In: Radio and the American Imagination
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998); Michele Hilmes and Jason Loviglio, (eds.)
The Radio Reader: Essays in the Cultural History of Radio (New York: Routledge, 2002); and
Jason Loviglio, Radio’s Intimate Public: Network Broadcasting and Mass-Mediated Democracy
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005).
15

Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of
Nationalism (New York: Verso Books, 1991).
7

role of the media and nationalism more broadly.

16

However, to date, most examples within the

mass communications field that touch upon radio stations in Mexico heard in the United States,
center around the “Border Radio” phenomenon, popularized by Gene Fowler and Bill Crawford
in a book by the same title.

17

“Border Radio,” is a blanket term used to describe powerful and influential U.S. radio
stations set up in Northern Mexico between the 1930s and the 1960s. These stations disregarded
the restrictions set in place by the FCC, attained permission and licensing from the Mexican
government, and established single-station networks whose extraordinary power allowed their
programs to be heard all over the United States.
The border radio interpretation maintains that Mexico granted U.S. entrepreneurs
permission to establish high-frequency radio stations on the Mexican side of the border in order
to circumvent U.S. laws prohibiting them from using the stations for non-sanctioned activities
such as selling medical treatments or offering horoscope readings over the air. The Mexican
government welcomed the opportunity “to tweak American broadcasting establishment and the
Yankee imperialists who had established hegemony over the North American airwaves,” as

16

See, Néstor Garcia-Canclini, Transforming Modernity: Popular culture in Mexico (Austin:
University of Texas Press, 1993); Jesús Martín Barbero, Communication, culture and hegemony:
From the media to mediations. (London: Sage Publications, 1993); Ricardo Pérez Montfort,
Estampas De Nacionalismo Popular Mexicano: Ensayos Sobre Cultura Popular Y Nacionalismo
(México, DF: CIESAS, 1994).
17

Gene Fowler and Bill Crawford, Border Radio: Quacks, yodelers, pitchmen, psychics, and
other amazing broadcasters of the American airwaves (Austin: Texas Monthly Press, 1987).
8

argued by Jim Fowler and Bill Crawford.

18

However true this may have been, this narrative

disregards the concessions the Mexican government gave to Mexican entrepreneurs who wanted
to use the stations to “be heard among the population in Southern California, where millions of
Mexicans exist,” as requested by a Mexican entrepreneur in the 1930s.

19

As border blasters

emerged and gained influence over the U.S. airwaves in the middle of the twentieth century, the
Mexican government relished making a stand in the international field of mass communications
by allowing its own entrepreneurs to build stations for international use. In turn, dozens of
Mexican businessmen capitalized on the government’s project and crafted a consumer-based
international commercial radio industry.
Historians of Mexico have explored the many angles of state formation following the
Mexican Revolution. Those who focus on the cultural project explain its wide range of
20

manifestations across Mexico.

This dissertation explores the complex relationship between

nationalism and media in Mexico and proposes that it is a more complex picture, as
transmissions from central and northern Mexico crossed political borders to nurture and cultivate
18

Ibid, 205.

19

Archivo General de la Nación (AGN), Fondo Secretaría de Comunicaciones y Obras Públicas
(SCOP), Expediente 22/131.6 (722)/23.2.
20

For some examples of nationalism within the context of Mexican post-revolutionary cultural
project see, Claudio Lomnitz-Adler, Exists from the Labyrith: Culture and Ideology in the
Mexican National Space (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992); Julio Moreno, Yankee
Don’t Go Home!: Mexican Nationalism, American Business Culture, and the Shaping of Modern
Mexico, 1920-1950 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2007); Eric Zolov,
Refried Elvis:The Rise of Mexican Counterculture (Berkeley: The University of California
Press, 1999). Radio, in particular, is explored in the essay by Elizabeth Joy Hayes, “National
Imaginings on the Air: Radio in Mexico, 1920-1950,” in Mary Kay Vaughan and Steven E.
Lewis. Eds. The Eagle and the Virgin: National and Cultural Revolution in Mexico, 1920-1940
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2006.)
9

a particular brand of Mexican nationalism outside of the nation’s borders.
For instance, the Northeast and Northwest regions of Mexico followed their own path of
development, different to the ones taken by commercial radio stations in Mexico City. When the
commercial radio industry expanded in the 1930s in the Northeastern states of Coahuila,
Tamaulipas, Sonora, Chihuahua and Nuevo León, conflicts arose between station owners in
Mexico City and those in the rest of the country. The story of entrepreneurs in border radio
contradicts the official histories of Mexico which favor the centralizing power of the government
where Mexico City is the center of all political, economic and cultural activity. Mexican
historians such as Fátima Fernandez Christlieb, who studied radio pioneers across several states
in northern Mexico, argue that the history of other post-revolutionary institutions and cultural
manifestations like mass media reveals other centralities outside of the capital.

21

In addition, this dissertation attempts to reconfigure the study of Mexican cultural history,
22

which has either tended to focus attention on U.S.-Mexico relations,
in the year 1940, following the Cárdenas administration.

or placed a dividing line

23

In Mexico, the body of work examining the birth and role of the radio industry explores a
21

Fátima Fernández Christlieb, La radio mexicana: centro y regiones (México, DF: J. Pablos
Editor, 1991), 29-30.

22

See, Gilbert M. Joseph, Catherine LeGrand, and Ricardo D. Salvatore, (eds.) Close
Encounters of Empire: Writing the Cultural History of U.S.-Latin American Relations (Durham:
Duke University Press, 1998) and Helen Delpar, The Enormous Vogue of Things Mexican:
Cultural Relations between the United States and Mexico, 1910-1935 (Tuscaloosa: University of
Alabama Press, 1992).
23

Gilbert M. Joseph, Anne Rubenstein, and Eric Zolov, (eds.), Fragments of a Golden Age: The
Politics of Culture in Mexico Since 1940 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001).
10

number of topics ranging from the history of the founders and pioneers, to the way radio
followed the official discourse of the post-revolutionary state.

24

International transmissions,

these scholars maintain, were created primarily to sustain commercial links with the United
States. For the most part, Mexican scholarship has not taken into account the estimated one
million Mexicans who had migrated to the United States by 1930. They tuned in to Mexican
radio stations regularly and wrote letters to Mexico City indicating their enjoyment of the
programs, criticizing the music being played or asking for the government to send musical
groups north. This dissertation compliments Mexican scholarship on the early history of radio,
but expands the picture by demonstrating that there were other focal points, such as the Northeast
and Northwest, which played an influential role in the development of the national radio
industry.
Chicana/o scholarship has provided ample evidence of the strategies employed by the
Mexican community living in the United States to sustain close ties with each other and their
heritage nation during the first half of the twentieth century. The establishment of Mutual Aid
Organizations, Consulate offices, holiday parades, “Patriotic Committees,” and other grass roots
organizations which celebrated national holidays, for example, have been explored by a number
24

This scholarship is extensive. For a general overview, see Jorge Mejía Prieto, Historia De La
Radio Y La Televisión En México (Colección México vivo; México: O. Colmenares, 1972);
Fernando Mejía Barquera, La Industria De La Radio y La Televisión y La Política Del Estado
Mexicano (México, DF: Fundación Manuel Buendía, 1989); Gabriel Sosa Plata, Las mil y una
radios: una historia, un análisis actual de la radiodifusión Mexicana (México; New York:
McGraw-Hill, 1997); Ángel Miquel, Disolvencias: literatura, cine y radio en México (19001950) (México, DF: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2005); Fátima Fernández Christlieb, La
Radio Mexicana: Centro y Regiones (México, DF: J. Pablos Editor, 1991); Juan Leyva, Política
educativa y comunicación social: la radio en México, 1940-1946 (México, DF: Universidad
Nacional Autónoma de México, 1992); Pavel Granados, XEW: 70 Anos en el aire (México, DF:
Editorial Clío, 2000).
11

of scholars. Specifically, these studies mention the importance of music, radio and other forms
of entertainment in the formation and sustainment of the U.S. born Mexican and Chicana/o
communities of the United States.

25

More recently, scholars who study the history of media

among the Mexican and Chicana/o population in the United States have used the term “Spanishlanguage media” to describe films, radio programs, and theater that was displayed in the United
States to a Mexican and Chicana/o audience in the better part of the twentieth century.

26

As singers, actors, composers and performers in the United States, Mexican immigrants
and U.S. born Mexicans also contributed to the field of the mass communications industries, in
particular radio. Roberto Avant-Mier recently claimed that the “border blasters” of the 1930s
were “the first mass medium that was truly multicultural,” since they featured music of poor and
working class whites, African Americans and Latinos. But in fact, as this dissertation
illuminates, other forms of media were diverse, such as English-language radio stations in the
U.S. Southwest where Mexican immigrants and U.S. born Mexicans sung in “block
programming” on a regular basis since the late 1920s. Through these Spanish-language time

25

See, Vicki L. Ruíz, From Out of the Shadows: Mexican Women in Twentieth-Century
America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998); George Sánchez, Becoming Mexican
American: Ethnicity, Culture and Identity in Chicano Los Angeles, 1900-1945 (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1993); Lisbeth Haas, Conquests and Historical Identities in California,
1769-1936 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); Matt Garcia, A World of Its Own:
Race, Labor, and Citrus in the Making of Greater Los Angeles, 1900-1970 (Chapel Hill: The
University of North Carolina Press, 2001); Anthony F. Macias, Mexican American Mojo:
Popular Music, Dance and Urban Culture in Los Angeles, 1935-1968 (Durham: Duke
University Press, 2008).
26

See Colin Gunckel, “’A Theater Worthy of Our Race’: The Exhibition and Reception of
Spanish Language Film in Los Angeles, 1911-1942,” (PhD Dissertation, University of California
Los Angeles, 2009) and Dolores Inés Casillas, “ “Sounds of Belonging: A Cultural History of
Spanish-Language Radio in the United States, 1922-2004,” (PhD Dissertation, University of
Michigan, 2006).
12

slots, Mexican entrepreneurs, broadcasters, radio singers, and musicians altered the face of U.S.
commercial radio by offering Mexican music to an immigrant population and helping local
businesses prosper by advertising their products over the air.

27

For the most part, the work within Chicano, Mexican-American and Latino Studies tends
to focus on the geographic region within the boundaries of the United States. In addition, the
literature within Chicano studies fails to consider the efforts that the Mexican government,
funneled by its Ministries, Institutions and Consulate Offices, made to reach the immigrant
population living in the United States through mass media, including radio broadcasting. Radio
transmissions accelerated the link Mexican immigrants in the United States had with Mexico.
By calling to attention the influence that radio stations along the U.S.-Mexico border had in
helping sustain an overseas audience of listeners and showing how the Mexican Consulate
worked alongside commercial radio, this dissertation challenges the understanding of the
Southwest borderlands and speaks to a range of issues of great significance to the Chicana/o
community and identity formation, including language, music and gender roles.
Lastly, this dissertation draws from studies of Women and Gender in Latin America. To
28

date, the literature that explores the intersection of gender and mass media is limited.

In spite

of this oversight, however, the medium offers invaluable insight into changing gender relations
in the twentieth century. Because radio blurs “boundaries of public and private separating the
27

Roberto Avant-Mier, “Heard it on the X: Border Radio as Public Discourse and the Latino
Legacy in Popular Music” in Michael C.Keith, ed., Radio Cultures: the Sound Medium in
American Life (New York: Peter Lang, 2008), 50.
28

For a history of women, gender and radio in the United States, see, Donna Halper, “Speaking
for themselves: How Radio Brought Women into the Public Sphere” in Radio Cultures: the
Sound Medium in American Life Michael C.Keith, ed. (New York: Peter Lang, 2008).
13

voice from the seen body,” as historian Christine Ehrick argues, “[it] is a technology with
profound gender implications, one in which we can hear the challenges, reaffirmations and
contradictions of the gendered soundscape in the first half of the twentieth century.”

29

Over the course of radio’s development, women in Mexico were caught in a contradiction
that pulled them in two directions: between the modern, post-revolutionary project that created
new spaces and opened up new opportunities for them, and the undeniable fact that they were
working for an anti-feminist industry and often stopped working when they got married or had
children. Radio, which was not a static object but a force that molded people’s behaviors,
attitudes and ideas, had conflicting effects on gender relations.
Early on, the radio industry welcomed the participation of people from all ages. In radio,
men, women and children found an array of new possibilities as workers, singers, artistic
directors, actors, composers, etc. Moreover, radio broadcasting appeared when movements
fighting for equal rights and gender relations were beginning in nations across Latin America. In
Mexico, it emerged when the new political order, the post-revolutionary government, promised
to bring profound social changes in class and gender relations. During this time, politicians,
intellectuals and artists were optimistic about the future and attempted to construct a new society
based on shared revolutionary values.
At the same time, radio reinforced gender norms and behaviors in Mexico. Given its
direct connection to the state, Mexican radio broadcasting carried patriarchal overtones. At
times, the message of the government, via radio airwaves, became the paternal voice of
29

Christine Ehrick, “Savage Dissonance: Gender, Voice, and Women’s Radio Speech in
Argentina, 1930-1945” in David Suisman and Susan Strasser, eds., Sound in the Age of
Mechanical Reproduction (Pennsylvania: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009).
14

inclusion, calling for every Mexican to “Hacer labor pro-Patria” roughly translated as “engage
in patriotic work” in his or her daily life. For those who lived in the United States, this included
returning to the homeland and investing in the nation’s future.
Moreover, many of the myths concerning Mexican national identity, the models outlining
the behavior of men and women or the importance of familial unity were born in the studios of
commercial stations in Mexico during the 1920s, and advanced with the full consent of the
government in the subsequent decades. In particular, the radio industry appropriated and
replicated the model of the Gran Familia Mexicana (Great Mexican Family), crafted by the
government. Recently, historian Ann Blum has explored the meaning and usage of the “Great
Mexican Family” metaphor. The symbol is understood to signify an agreement in which
disparate revolutionary leaders were co-opted by the Partido Institucional Revolucionario
(Revolutionary Institutionalized Party), or PRI, and placed into the pantheon of heroes in the
1920s. “The family metaphor,” according to Blum “naturalized gender relations premised on
biological reproduction and then projected them onto the nation at large. The family ideal –
productive and protective fathers, nurturing mothers, and healthy children- offered the
30

paternalistic state powerful justifications for its authority over its fractious constituents.”

The activity of the most influential commercial station in Mexico, XEW, offers the best
illustration of this phenomenon. According to Mexican scholar Jorge Mejia Prieto, before XEW,
impresarios had one of three objectives for new stations: to be used for technical experiments, for
the diffusion of culture and education, and, to a lesser extent, for profit. Mejia Prieto concludes
that during the early 1930s, with the exception of Emilio Azcárraga Vidaurreta, who was the first
30

Ann S. Blum, Domestic Economies: Family, Work, and Welfare in Mexico City, 1884-1943
(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2010), xxvi-xxvii.
15

man to think of radio as a business in Mexico, radio station owners either lacked the capital or
the vision to fulfill this role. Additionally, he argues, when Azcárraga inaugurated the station on
September 18, 1930, his objective was not cultural, scientific or artistic but simply economic; to
“unify the ‘great Mexican family,’ create an extraordinary labor source and establish a colossal
factory of idols.”

31

In order to not fall out of favor with the government, radio stations across

Mexico appropriated the family model put forth by the state and used it for their own profit.
During the decades following the Mexican Revolution, women negotiated social spaces
characterized by contradictions. Mexican scholars, Julia Tuñón and Carmen Ramos Escandón,
for instance, argue that after the Revolution there was a stark contradiction in the messages
women received from the government, private media, and that which they were seeing on a daily
32

basis in the urban centers of Mexico.

At work, in the factories and shops, for instance, many

created their own space-based conceptions of female virtues.

33

Within radio, which was a

professional industry by 1930, women were given the opportunity to perform and sing in public;
but simultaneously, they were also used by the conservative government as symbols of dignity,
abnegation, moral strength, and nationalist purity.
This dissertation illustrates the way commercial stations transmitted “gendered
programming,” which replicated the gendered stereotypes of Mexican men (strong and virile)
31

Mejía Prieto, Historia de la radio y la televisión en México, 38.

32

Carmen Ramos Escandón, Presencia y transparencia. La mujer en la historia de México
(México, DF: El Colegio de México, 1987) and Julia Tuñón, Mujeres en México: una historia
olvidada (México, DF: Planeta, 1987).
33

Susie S. Porter, Working women in Mexico City: public discourses and material conditions,
1879-1931 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2003), xix.
16

and women (soft and virtuous). What is more, because radio was a site where gender was
negotiated, renegotiated and contested, it demonstrates how Mexican women, who used the
exposure given to them by radio, toured the United States and effectively created spaces where
they exerted their place and value within society.
Chapter Outline
Each chapter of the dissertation is organized thematically around the various factors,
circumstances, methods and by-products of the creation of an international radio audience
between 1923 and 1946. In the first decades of the twentieth century, a distinction arose between
legitimate and “popular” forms of entertainment in many countries in the Western Hemisphere.
At that time, the members of the cultural elite defined “popular” forms of entertainment as those
that were frequented by large masses and that lacked artistic value.

34

In Mexico, cultural authority and transmission had been in the hands of the upper classes
since the sixteenth century. This sector of society believed that it was important to maintain a
high sense of morality and culture in the entertainment industries. However, after the arrival of
new technology in the twentieth century, the arbiters of culture became people who had not
previously been involved in intellectual or cultural production, such as businessmen, radio
station owners, operators and artistic directors. In Mexico, as people began to purchase their
own radio sets for personal use in the 1920s, “popular” forms of entertainment became the most
frequented. Chapter one explains the circumstances in which radio broadcasting arrived in
Mexico and the way artistic and literary groups appropriated the medium as well as the drastic
changes that radio created for the urban population of Mexico. The importance that early radio
34

For more on this see, Lawrence W. Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural
Hierarchy in America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990).
17

broadcasting stations placed on music and culture, in fact, allowed the industry to develop with a
transnational vision and take messages across the border into the United States.
During the 1920s, when Mexico was following broad policies of economic
reconstruction, free enterprise, and capitalistic development, along with dealing with the internal
crisis brought about by the Cristero Rebellion (1926-1929), President Plutarco Elías Calles relied
on radio as a mouthpiece for his policies both at home and abroad. Radio stations in Mexico
City transmitted the government’s official message through music, conferences and cultural
programs. Through state-sponsored radio stations affiliated with new institutions like the
Secretaria de Educacion Publica, or SEP, the Ministry of Public Education, the radio industry
was able to take the message of the government across international borders. Chapter two
explains the way this was carried out by SEP station XFX, which was one of the first stations to
monitor its international transmissions and successfully send messages into the United States.
More than any government-sponsored station, XFX set an example to other stations by diffusing
culture to all social classes in Mexico and, more importantly, communicating with Mexican
immigrants and U.S. born Mexicans abroad.
The development of the radio industry was influenced by a range of people in the private
sector including engineers, inventors, wealthy entrepreneurs and businessmen. This was the
generation who came of age during the Mexican revolution (1910-1920) whose lives were
transformed by the arrival of modern equipment and technology emerging in the early to midtwentieth century such as the telegraph, automobiles, airplanes, and, of course, radio. Generally,
these businessmen were not part of the intellectual or ruling classes in Mexico; instead, they
invested in the nascent industry purely out of curiosity or commercial and financial reasons.
These men, and some women, were part of a growing entrepreneurial class emerging in Mexico
18

at this time. One, which, some argue, had little or no political ties. In the North, they used mass
communications legislation to create consumers across the border which furthered the
“Americanization” of Mexican immigrants and, at the same time, spurred the growth of Mexican
small businesses in the United States.
Chapter three explains how, between 1930 and 1950, Mexican trans-border entrepreneurs
building radio stations along the US-Mexico border influenced the formation of an overseas
radio audience in two ways. First, they followed the principles and goals of the government’s
post-revolutionary project by using the law to their advantage. Since the growth of the nation
followed a capitalist path, stations were able to woo local and international businesses to
advertise their products over their stations. Second, they were culturally attentive to the needs of
their listeners. Not only did they see the potential of the overseas market but they regularly made
reference to this audience in their programming through auditions and contests.
One of the reasons why radio was an effective tool in nation formation is that it is a
medium allowing a mass-mediated message to be experienced by listeners in different locations.
The common space where these messages were received has no set territory, allowing
transmissions from Mexico City to be easily heard in Los Angeles and San Antonio, the two
cities with the largest concentration of Mexican immigrants during the first half of the twentieth
century. Chapter four studies the Mexican immigrant and U.S. born Mexican communities in
these two cities and explains the way they sustained the tradition of listening to Mexican music
in their daily lives.
Within the span of two decades, for Mexican immigrants and U.S. born Mexicans in the
United States, Mexican music served both as a link to become reacquainted with their past and a

19

bridge that exposed them to new music styles. As Chapter four suggests, some of them, such as
the bolero and the canción ranchera, were favored over classical music and corridos in radio
station programming for three reasons. First, they focused on the struggles and experiences of
the individual, instead of the community. Second, the lyrics of rancheras and boleros lacked a
specific geographic setting, other than the countryside and the urban center, respectively. Thus,
Mexican listeners from Monterrey to San Francisco were able to listen to a song and share the
same experience. And lastly, for the most part, these songs did not glorify the nation’s history
and Revolutionary past. Commercial radio stations and record companies in the United States
capitalized on these features and, thus, made these types of musical genres influential in the
creation of the overseas radio audience.
Music was a powerful cultural force stitching together ideas of México Lindo (Beautiful
Mexico) for immigrants and their U.S. born progeny. On the U.S. side of the border, as Mexican
communities defined themselves as “México de Afuera” (Mexico outside of Mexico), they used
the radio, their consulate offices and local Spanish-language newspapers to stay connected with
Mexico. This chapter proposes that the Mexican immigrant community in Los Angeles and San
Antonio helped sustain the Mexican overseas radio audience because it pursued capitalist
interests. Consulates facilitated cultural activities, newspapers advertised for local Mexican
businesses, and radio stations promoted Spanish-language and Mexican records for the
population to purchase.
Chapter five studies some of the careers of men and women in the radio industry during
the 1930s and 1940s. In particular, it looks at music and gender, and they way radio created new
spaces for men and women while simultaneously reinforcing existing norms and behaviors.
Music serves as a useful avenue for this study because it unified people of different ages, classes,
20

locations and backgrounds along with shaping Mexican masculinity and affecting the role of
women in society. For example, it allowed men to express sentiments that domesticated
machismo and tenderized their hearts and allowed fearless singers like Lucha Reyes to be a
national icon; however, through the misogynistic lyrics of Agustín Lara’s boleros, it also
relegated the importance of women in Mexico.
The theater- and later, radio- stage was a revolving door of singers, artists, musicals,
theatrical companies and music. It was also the principal platform where Mexicans in the United
States witnessed accurate and up-to-date displays of Mexican drama, art and music. In Mexico,
the theater was the cocoon of popular culture and folklore. As Carlos Monsiváis noted, between
1910 and 1950 what was considered “‘popular’ is drawn from the theater, cabarets and parties,
35

the passion of serenades and by the ‘other life’ promoted by cinema and radio.”

Since the

Colonial Era, theater in Mexico relied on the direct participation of actors and audience, which
included all classes of society. The theater was also a thriving industry in the U.S. Southwest
before the arrival of commercial radio. In the mid nineteenth century, when 1.2 million square
miles of Mexico’s territory was relinquished to the United States after the Mexican-American
War, some cultural aspects of the Mexican population living in those areas were unchanged;
theater, in particular, was one of them.
Chapter six explains how, thanks to the circuits established by the theater industry,
Mexican singers and actresses were able to leave Mexico and tour the United States with ease.
In the 1930s and 1940s, when the government considered the tours and exposés of artists
35

Carlos Monsiváis,“Yo soy humilde cancionero (de la música popular en México)” in Aurelio
Tello, ed., La música en México Panorama del siglo XX (México, DF: Fondo de Cultura
Económica, Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y Las Artes, 2010), 197.
21

“cultural” acts, Mexican immigrants benefitted from their closeness to the recording studio. With
the proper uniform and a musical selection that included rancheras, radio assisted in the
formation of not just an international radio audience, but also of true “transnational” artists and
singers. For instance, in the late 1940s, influential duets, such as Los Alegres de Terán,
performed in border cities like Reynosa, appealing to Bracero workers in the U.S. Southwest
who had been hired in significant numbers after the Second World War. Thus, as the chapter
argues, the post-revolutionary government’s cultural project to use Mexican singers to solidify
the bonds between the two nations was fragmented; by mid-century, it was Mexican immigrants
and U.S. born Mexicans in the United States, like Pedro J. González and Lydia Mendoza, who
truly fulfilled the government’s cultural mission on their own terms.
Finally, the dissertation explains the state in which the radio industry found itself in by
the 1940s as a result of censorship, international legislation and agreements and national chain
networks. The trajectory of Mexico’s radio history took a drastic turn in 1941 with the creation
of Radio Programas de México (Mexican Radio Programs) or RPM, the country’s first national
network based in Mexico City. Network programming consolidated all the artistic, commercial
and cultural activities of the country. In return, the influence of border stations slowly began to
wane, as, in order to succeed, they had to connect with Mexico City either through the telephone
during a live broadcast or wait for a recorded program to arrive through the mail. Moreover,
networks led to the decline in trans-border broadcasting because their strong frequency power
allowed them to fulfill the objective of reaching the audience in the United States. As a result,
the symbiotic relationship between the government and the private sector continued.

22

Chapter I
The Birth of “La Nueva Maravilla”: Radio arrives in Mexico

“La palpitación del minuto ahora sí es cierto que se recoge, como el agua en el cuenco de las
manos.”
“It is certain that the palpitation of the moment can be gathered, like water in the palm of your
hands.”
-Lic. Alejandro Quijano, 1923

On September 27, 1921, at the Teatro Ideal in downtown Mexico City, an eleven-yearold girl, María de los Angeles Gómez, sang during one of the country’s first live radio
broadcasts. Two technicians: her father, Adolfo Enrique Gómez Fernández, a military doctor,
and her uncle, Pedro Gómez Fernández, a dentist, assembled transmission equipment that had
been donated by the owner of the theater for the program. “You may ask yourself what a doctor
and a dentist were doing with electronic equipment,” María recalled, “The answer is simple.
During those days men were in love with science and technology.”

1

Not yet a teenager, Gómez had never performed before a live audience or sung into a
microphone; at the time, the nation’s capital was still familiarizing itself with electricity. “Do
not begin to think that I was a great singer,” she admitted, “my father had me studying music
and, since I was his only daughter, he included me in that memorable transmission.” The
program, in which acclaimed singer José Mojica interpreted Vorrei, by Paolo Posti, also included

1

María de los Angeles Gómez Camacho quoted in José Felipe Gálvez Cancino, “Los Felices del
Alba, (la primera década de la radiodifusión mexicana),” (Tesis de licenciatura, Facultad de
Ciencias Políticas y Sociales, UNAM, 1975), 235-41.
23

Tango Negro, sung by Gómez. This was “one of the couplets that Maria Tubau would sing, a
famous singer during that time, which I, at the age of eleven, profoundly admired.” Over the
course of the next five months, on Saturday and Sunday evenings from 8:00 to 9:00 p.m. the
“station of Dr. Gómez,” as it was known throughout the city, broadcast musical concerts until it
went off the air when the family relocated to Saltillo, Coahuila.

2

On that same night in late September, another notable event in the history of radio in
Mexico took place. While the tenor José Mojica enthralled the theater audience with his majestic
voice, one kilometer east of the Teatro Ideal, the Mexican government publically inaugurated its
radio equipment which consisted of two machines: a transmitter, used to send information, and a
receiver, used to listen to aural messages. In that program, in which the government partnered
with the newspaper Excelsior, technicians, journalists and government bureaucrats took turns
passing around a set of headphones to hear news bulletins and greetings received in the
Legislative Palace from a second radio “station” in the Chapultepec Castle, 6.5 kilometers south
of downtown Mexico City.

3

The unveiling of the government’s radio machinery was a transformational event for the
urban population. Months earlier, engineers working for President Alvaro Obregón had installed
the equipment and through its public inauguration, the administration proved that it was capable
of applying modern methods of communication in everyday activities. Furthermore, the live
transmission at the Teatro Ideal and the public ceremony were significant moments in the
trajectory of mass media development in Mexico and the relationship between the government
2

Ibid, 235-41.

3

Excelsior. 28 de septiembre 1921. “Dos estaciones de telefonía inalámbrica. Ayer fueron
inauguradas en la Exposición Internacional establecida en el Gran Palacio Legislativo.” P. 1, 3.
24

and the Mexican people. Not only were they visible signs that modernity had arrived to the
nation’s capital, but in a scientific sense, the broadcasts were proof that Mexico was capable of
using technology to do something unthinkable at the time: carry messages from one location of
the city to another without the use of a telegraph or a telephone wire. For the remainder of the
decade, the capital city’s population enthusiastically embraced the new and powerful tool that
altered their cultural practices, leisure activities, and the spatial order of their city.
This chapter explains the environment in which radio arrived to Mexico, its initial
growth, its link with art and culture, and the way the industry evolved from the 1920s to the early
1940s. The close relationship radio had with culture, music and the collaboration between the
government and the private sector facilitated the creation of an overseas audience. Two features
found in the early history of radio: songs and international transmission, distinguished the
Mexican radio industry from other businesses and industries in post-revolutionary Mexico.
Early History of Radio in Mexico
The discovery of electromagnetic waves in 1887 by the German physicist, Henry Hertz,
made the invention of radio possible. At the time, industrial growth was taking Europe towards a
new era regarding communications and transportation. Within this context of industrial and
technological expansion, Guglielmo Marconi created the first radio in 1895. However,
development costs prohibited the industry from growing until the early twentieth century when
communications grew exponentially, shrinking distances between markers and time between
order and delivery.
Following the First World War countries in the Western Hemisphere adopted strict
guidelines regarding the use and development of mass communications. In Mexico, the
25

infrastructure needed for the growth of railroads, telegraph lines, and roads was built in the late
nineteenth century. Under the direction of President Porfirio Díaz (1876-1910), the government
stimulated economic growth according to broad capitalist principles. This included importing
radio equipment from Europe, but keeping it within the control of the government and the
military. During the Mexican Revolution, troops relied on telegraph operators to exchange
information through radiotelefonía and radiotelegrafía; the former sending Morse Code signals
through telegraph lines and the latter transmitting voices or words through what we recognize
today as the telephone. In the years of fighting, telegraph workers labored alongside the army or
in military camps, providing generals with dispatches containing vital information and, at times,
joining the rank and file officers.

4

In the early twentieth century, mass communications methods were constantly evolving
and the radio apparatuses that emerged after 1921 surpassed the technology of the day and
brought together two pre-existing instruments: the telegraph and the telephone. As a result,
amateur radio stations sprung up throughout Mexico. In Monterrey, for example, one the first
radio transmissions on record took place on October 9, 1921 by an electrical engineer named
Constantino de Tárnava Jr. who built and operated a private radio station in his home that he
5

called “TND,” or Tárnava Norte Dame.

6

4

The use of radio during the Mexican Revolution is a topic yet to be explored. For a brief
overview see, Friedrich Katz, La guerra secreta en México (México, DF: Ediciones Era, 1981)
and Roberto Ornelas Herrera, “Radio y Cotidianidad en México (1900-1930)” in Aurelio de los
Reyes, ed., Historia de la vida cotidiana en México. Tomo V. Volumen 1. Siglo XX. Campo y
Ciudad. (México, DF: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2005).
5

Jorge Mejía Prieto, Historia de la radio y la televisión en México (México, DF: Colección
México Vivo, 1972), 14-15.
26

In the official records and the press, the two forms of communication: radiotelefonía and
radiotelegrafía, were called Telefonía sin hilos (wireless telephony) or at times, T.S.H. This
acronym was useful in the appropriation and fusion of technology with art by artistic and literary
7

circles in Mexico during the 1920s, most notably by the Estridentistas. Of interest is that the
use of the word, “radio” was not used during the ‘20s, ‘30s or even ‘40s. Instead, radiotelegraphy, radio-telephony, radio-communication and, more commonly, radio-difusión were the
most frequent ways to describe what we call today as radio: the act of transmitting aural
messages destined to be received, or “picked up” by a receiver.
Radio and the Avant-Garde
“Estridentismo and radio are bosom brothers. They belong to the vanguard!” wrote the
8

editor of El Universal Ilustrado Arqueles Vela in 1923. Outside of his job in the magazine,
Vela, along with Manuel Maples Arce, was a founding member of the Estridentistas. In the
1920s avant-garde groups like the Estridentistas took the cultural project of the government to
heart and combined it with international futurist ideals. For example, in late December of 1921,
three months after the government showcased their radio equipment, next to posters announcing
upcoming bull fights, operas and plays, the walls of Mexico City’s downtown streets were

6

Some sources claim that De Tárnava attended Norte Dame University during the 1910s and
acquired the skills and equipment from the United States before arriving in Mexico to construct
his station.
7

For example, during the inaugural transmission of X.E.W. on September 18, 1930, the avantgarde poet Manuel Maples Arce read an abstract and futuristic poem titled, “T.S.H.”
8

El Universal Ilustrado 5 de abril de 1923. “El estridentismo es hermano de leche de la
Radiofonía. ¡Son cosas de vanguardia!” p. 11.
27

plastered with a manifesto titled, “Actual Número 1.” The author of this document was Manuel
Maples Arce, the same man who would open CYL’s inaugural program with a poem about radio
two years later. In the document, Maples Arce made a call to Mexican intellectuals “to make up
an artistic society that draws on the need to testify to the dizzy transformation of the world.”

9

In Mexico City, Estridentista poets like Arce set in motion a new artistic and cultural era
that was linked to the arrival of modernity and machinery, such as cameras, sewing machines
and radios. Their cultural production, according to art historian Tatiana Flores “called for an
embrace of modernity by celebrating the city and technology.”

10

Still, their attitudes and

approach concerning the effects of technological progress upon Mexican society is lost in the
historical documents concerning mass media.

11

Even so, it requires examination as radio was an

integral part of the post-revolutionary government’s cultural program. Additionally, it relates to
the artistic revitalization of Mexico after the Revolution which called to renew Mexican arts and
literature.
Estridentistas were part of a new generation of artists in Mexico who fought to impose a
new literary form that was different from the Spanish and European trends that Mexican

9

Julio Mario Schneider, Estridentismo: La Vanguardia Literaria en México. (México, D.F.:
Coordinación de Humanidades, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1999), xxxix.
10

Tatiana Flores, “Strategic Modernists: Women Artists in Post-Revolutionary Mexico”
Woman’s Art Journal (Fall/Winter 2008): 12.
11

The majority of the studies on this group focus on art and literature. The most recent from
Tatiana Flores: “Estridentismo in Mexico City: Dialogues Between Mexican Avant-Garde Art
and Literature, 1921-1924” (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 2003). Additionally, Julio Mario
Schneider offers the most comprehensive history of the group in, El estridentismo o una
literature de la estrategia (Mexico City: Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes, 1997).
28

intellectuals had emulated during the previous decades. In the 1920s vanguard poets and artists
in Mexico also formed a movement called Contemporaneos, who were polar opposites of the
Estridentistas as they hung on to the traditions of the past instead of embracing modern life and
its new advancements.

12

Despite their distinctive viewpoints, these two groups led the country’s

literary production in the first half of the twentieth century. Estridentistas, for instance,
pretended to be cosmopolitan and were aware of global issues and universal concerns. Their
desire was to become one with the rhythms of the city; street cars, trains, elevators, illuminated
signs, throngs of people in the city streets and car horns all became part of their identity, part of
urban life. In their work, they incorporated bright lights, airplanes, and sounds. Particularly
through poems and literature the avant-garde artists demonstrated their particular interest in
radio.
For instance, Estridentistas called upon the weekly cultural magazine, El Universal
Ilustrado, created by Félix F. Palavicini, founder of the newspaper, El Universal, as a platform in
which to popularize their ideas. In fact, the newspaper’s support of the Estridentistas and their
beliefs in new technology was so sincere that on April 5, 1923 they dedicated their entire number
to radio. “Radio announces to the world a new life,” said the special number “next to it the other
13

inventions: the telephone, phonograph and telegraph, fade and become pale.”

The publication

avoided technical jargon, scientific phrases and descriptions and focused on the positive ways
radio was changing everyday life in Mexico. In addition, the pages of the special issue dedicated

12

Ángel Miquel, Disolvencias: Literatura, cine y radio en México (1900-1950). (México, D.F.:
Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2005), 180.
13

El Universal Ilustrado 5 de abril 1923.
29

to radio reflect how these innovative poets and visual artists interpreted the fusion of art and
technology. In fact, the idea of mixing radio with Estridentista interpretations was remarkable
given that at the time of its publication, Mexico City’s flagship stations, CYL and CYB, were
about the have their inaugural broadcasts.
Aside from literature, the visual arts were integral to the development of Estridentismo
14

and, as Flores argues, art becomes a useful paradigm to read modernist visual production.

Outside of art, however, other publications, such as magazines and newspapers, are also helpful
tools in the study of modernity and cultural production. Antena, for instance, was a magazine
dedicated entirely to radio, art and culture in Mexico during the 1920s. Appearing on the city’s
newsstands for the first time in July of 1924 the goal of the publication was not to provide
technical or scientific information but “since the first mission of radio is to entertain, from this
point of view we can talk about everything that relates to this admirable and innovative
discovery.”

15

Aside from printing Estridentista poems and propaganda, the magazine also

published theater reviews and criticized those stations in Mexico which were not broadcasting
cultural concerts.
At the time that Estridentistas were fusing art with technology and culture, the entire
country was moving towards a form of post-revolutionary nationalism. This era is regarded as a
time of renewal within Mexican art as it led to the rise of the mural movement, graphic arts,
photography and art education. Outside of Vela and Maples Arce, other poets, singers and visual

14

Tatiana Flores, “Strategic Modernists: Women Artists in Post-Revolutionary Mexico”
Woman’s Art Journal (Fall/Winter 2008): 13.
15

Antena-I julio 1924.
30

artists who came of age after the Mexican Revolution played a significant role in the cultural
production of the nation after the 1920s. The goal of many of these artists was to explore the
purpose of art in post-revolutionary society. Some even espoused the cultural project of the
Revolution and brought significant changes in the relationship between the state and the
16

population.

Was radio art or science? The combination of having an avant-garde group such as the
Estridentistas adopt the new technological apparatus and the groups close relationship with the
editors of El Universal Ilustrado, allowed radio to be presented to the public as complicated
science with artistic potential. In the pages of the press from 1923 to 1925, for example, when
listeners were constructing their home receivers and listening with headphones, radio appeared
as a scientific invention. For instance, in an article from El Universal Ilustrado in 1925 titled,
“Misterios de la radiofonia” radio was presented as a scientific mystery next to electricity and
the human body.

17

After all, engineers such as Constantino de Tárnava were the ones

responsible for bringing the invention to Mexico. However, avant-garde groups like the
Estridentistas were taking apart the complications of the apparatus, adding their own cultural and
modern approach and decreasing the machinery’s obscurities.
An overlap between Estridentismo and radio is apparent. For instance, Maples Arce’s
strategy of mass dissemination, by placing his manifesto on the city’s public walls, was not
unlike one of the principle features of radio which was to transcend space. Both radio and
16

On the relationship between the cultural project of the post-revolutionary government and
society see Mary Kay Vaughan and Stephen E. Lewis, eds. The Eagle and the Virgin: Nation
and Cultural Revolution in Mexico, 1920-1940. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005).
17

El Universal Ilustrado. 8 de enero 1925. “Misterios de la radiofonía” p. 4.
31

Estridentismo contested the use of public space and challenged people to fuse culture with
technology. Yet to what extent the avant-garde movement influenced the direction radio in
Mexico is less clear. On one hand, by 1927 this new generation of poets was accompanied by a
new generation of musicians, who, by the end of the decade, were using radio as a tool of
musical culture. After all, music was an artistic manifestation and an integral feature of radio
broadcasting since 1921. On the other hand, however, as Julio Schneider notes “Estridentismo,
was essentially a poetic movement.”

18

Regardless of its proximity to radio specifically the

innovative impulse it created bled into the renewal of other art forms in Mexico during the 1920s
such as paint, sculpture, engraving, photography, and music.
Reaching “El Otro Lado” (The Other Side)
Beginning in 1922, President Plutarco Elías Calles put forth a mission to use governmentowned radio stations for overseas transmissions. “One of our project’s greatest aspirations,” he
wrote, “is for every Mexican to occupy the place that corresponds him and that he deserves…365
days of the year represent 365 different [radio] programs.”

19

The following year, government-

operated Mexican radio stations began to use short and long wave radio transmissions to
broadcast concerts and conferences to listeners overseas. Initially, radio broadcasting from
Mexico City to the United States was made possible through short wave radio waves and
powerful transmitters. When the radio spectrum was designed in the 1920s it consisted of short,
long and medium wavelengths. In the early years, stations used long wavelengths and their
18

Julio Mario Schneider, Estridentismo: La Vanguardia Literaria en México. (México, D.F.:
Coordinación de Humanidades, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1999), xl.
19

Fideicomiso Archivo de Plutarco Elías Calles y Fernando Torreblanca (Hereafter FAPEC),
Fondo Plutarco Elías Calles, Expediente 18, Inv. 63.
32

transmissions were heard only within close distances. In order to send messages across greater
distances, radio transmitters relied on short wavelengths which were possible and common in the
early 1930s as there was minimal interference from other stations.
In the second half of the 1920s, short wave broadcasting was an innovative wireless
communication method that connected Mexico with audiences across the globe. For example,
station XEIDG, operated by a federal High School in the state of Veracruz, claimed to have
20

received 150 reports from different cities around the globe and the interior of Mexico.

Other

stations reported similar stories, such as privately funded station, XEB, El Buen Tono, the first
commercial station to implement short wave transmissions in Mexico, which allegedly received
listener reports from the North Pole.

21

During the late ‘20s and early ‘30s audiences across

North America did not have difficulty “tuning in” to short wave broadcasts as they were fewer in
number compared to long wave transmissions, used powerful transmitters. Additionally,
international legislation was not impeding any station from using the same wavelength as
another. At times, as in the case of Mexican state-sponsored broadcasts overseas, they were also
advertised and promoted weeks beforehand through the Spanish-language press or by Mexican
Consulate officials.
In particular, Calles viewed mass media as a way to lure those who had migrated to the
United States back to Mexico and hoped they were not planning on settling in the U.S.
permanently. He longed for Mexican immigrants to “take advantage of their temporary stay in

20

Archivo General de la Nación, Fondo Secretaría de Comunicaciones y Obras Públicas
(Hereafter AGN, SCOP), Expediente 22/131.6 (726.1)/26.
21

Mejía Prieto, Historia de la radio y la televisión en México, 34.
33

that nation, acquire capital and knowledge, so that they return to the Motherland full of energy
and skills to work for its progress and happiness.”

22

Notwithstanding Calles’ pronunciation for

the return of Mexicans from the United States, XFX’s messages and programming for
communities abroad show no indication of supporting, proclaiming or endorsing such a mission.
Mexican politicians also called upon radio to keep the spiritual conscience of Mexicans
free from the foreign influence of the United States. To be sure, since the beginning of the
twentieth century the Mexican population who lived in the northern states of Coahuila and
Sonora, which border the U.S. states of Arizona, New Mexico and Texas, were frequently
exposed to the growing culture of consumerism in the United States. The Mexican government,
which had entrusted their ministries to use radio and musical transmissions to counteract the
influence of the U.S. media upon Mexican citizens, initiated broadcasts for their defense. On
some occasions, these orders were taken to heart by citizens in Northern Mexico. On February
8, 1930, for instance, the principal of the “Escuela Tipo,” a Federal School in the border city of
Nogales, Sonora, requested a radio receiver and a cinema (viewer) from the Ministry’s
headquarters in Mexico City. He reasoned that due to the proximity of the city to the United
States “all of the radio concerts that are heard in Nogales are from that country and they
transform themselves into avenues of an unnoticed spiritual conquest.” This conquest held
negative and “definite results;” therefore, “a good receiver in which to listen to the concerts and
23

conferences transmitted by the Mexican stations,” would supply a competitive fix.
22

Archivo General de la Nación, Ramo Presidentes, Fondo Obregón-Calles (Hereafter AGN,
OC), Expediente 429-S-14.
23

Archivo Histórico de la Secretaria de Educación Pública (Hereafter AHSEP), Expediente
4.18.
34

When they were launched in the early 1920s, commercial stations CYL and CYB, for
instance, intended for their transmissions to reach other countries. In September of 1923 CYL
increased its power to 500 watts and was proud that its broadcasts would reach the U.S.
Southwest, Central America and Cuba.

24

At the time, only another station in all of Mexico had

the same power, CYB. On Friday April 11, 1924 CYL transmitted an important message abroad
from Presidential candidate Plutarco Elias Calles; marking the first time a political figure took to
the microphone in Mexico.

25

The broadcast, in fact, was intended to reach the United States, as

Calles’ speech was translated into English.
The 1920s: Setting Limits to Radio Communications in Mexico
The 1920s was an important decade for the urban and rural population of Mexico. At the
time “people were interested in the scientific advancements of the day and in having fun, they
wanted to forget about the armed conflict,” as Jorge Mejía Prieto explains.

26

In the urban

centers of the country during the evenings or weekends, people of all backgrounds and ages
attended the theater, a vaudeville show, or, before 1929, viewed a silent film. The theater,
especially the Teatro de Revista or music revue, combined music with satire and was an essential
source of entertainment for the urban population and in the live radio programs of the time, the
singers behind the microphones were said to “give themselves to the art out of pure love for

24
25
26

El Universal 18 de septiembre 1923.
El Demócrata 12 de abril 1924.
Mejía Prieto, Historia de la radio y la televisión en México, 24.
35

27

it.”

The 1920s were critical because radio concessions in Mexico, which had previous been
solely in the hands of the government and the military, became available to the private sector for
the first time. Small business owners and investors, who were allowed to own and operate radio
stations after 1923, were thrilled by the possibility of reaching the large sector of illiterate and
28

dispersed people in Mexico through the use of radio transmissions.

Amateurs continued to

own and operate stations in their own homes while the commercial sector grew exponentially.
During the first decade of the radio industry, Mexico was embarking upon a modern era
in which progress meant importing the model of industrial capitalism of the United States. In
fact, Mexican scholars who study the history of radio highlight that in the early 1920s Mexico
lacked a defined purpose for radio. Possible ideas included entertainment, education, using the
airwaves for weather alerts and forecasts or using the equipment to converse with prisoners in
jail. The one thing all parties were in agreement over was that radio was an attractive business
venture for entrepreneurs wanting to sell imported radio receivers from the United States and the
29

equipment needed to construct amateur radio stations at home.

The model they adopted,

additionally, resembled the one adopted in the United States, not Great Britain or other
industrialized nations.

27

El Universal, August 16, 1924.

28

Fernando Curiel, La telaraña magnética y otros estudios radiofónicos (México, DF:
Ediciones Coyoacán S.A. de C.V., 1996), 297.
29

Mejía Prieto, Historia de la radio y la televisión en México, and Cristina Romo, Ondas,
canales y mensajes: un perfil de la radio en México (Guadalajara, Jalisco, México: ITESO,
1991), 13.
36

The political climate in Mexico was still tumultuous in the late 1920s and early 1930s
and for private cultural industries it was a sink or swim environment. In the first years following
the Revolution, private cultural industries had a difficult time keep their doors open, or, in the
case of radio, their on-air programs. In Mexico City, a radio station affiliated with El Mundo a
30

newspaper with political leanings, appeared and left within a couple of months.

In other instances, these early experiments with radio stations were fruitful, as in the case
of Raúl Azcarraga and his small shop “La Casa del Radio” (The House of Radio). In 1921
Azcárraga saw the arrival of radio broadcasting in Mexico as an opportunity to make money and
opened a shop in downtown Mexico City. This store/garage specialized in selling wires,
antennas and light bulbs, necessary instruments to properly assembly a radio receiver. In the
spring of 1923, Azcárraga asked the local newspaper, El Universal, to partner with him and
launch a commercial radio station in the capital city. He agreed to provide the equipment, an
RCA transmitter he had imported from the United States, if the newspaper company would
handle the details and content of the broadcasts. El Universal responded by designating its
weekly cultural magazine, El Universal Ilustrado, to join forces with the entrepreneur. The
result was the birth of one of the first commercial radio stations in Mexico City: CYL, or El
31

Universal Ilustrado-La Casa del Radio.

Partnering with newspapers was an excellent idea, and other industries in the country
noticed the benefits of making a partnership with radio. Another commercial station in the early
30

Ángel, Miquel, “Dos efímeras empresas de los años veinte: el periódico El Mundo y su
estación de radio.” In Miradas recurrentes I. La ciudad de México en los siglos XIX y XX, edited
by María del Carmen Collado, 457-469. (México, DF: Instituto Mora, 2004), 457-467.
31

Mejía Prieto, Historia de la radio y la televisión en México, 26.
37

history of radio funded by a businessman, a foreign tobacco manufacturer, was CYB- El Buen
Tono. Centrally located in downtown Mexico City, CYB boasts of being the first commercial
station to go on the air in Mexico City on the night of September 15, 1923.

32

From the outset,

CYB-El Buen Tono was placed in high regard by the public for transmitting quality radio
concerts intended to reach the entire North American continent.

33

“When in Mexico the nueva

maravilla (new marvel) began,” noted El Universal, “it was ‘El Buen Tono’ the first house which
had a powerful transmitting station.”

34

By broadcasting musical programs that included

symphonies and orchestra bands, guitar and piano recitals, and later ranchera music and boleros,
privately funded commercial stations like CYB and CYL established themselves as reputable
cultural industries in Mexico.
The music played over the two most prominent privately-owned radio stations, CYB El
Buen Tono, and CYL El Universal Ilustrado, consisted of foreign and national pieces. Evening
programs would play “a recorded American fox-trot” followed by “a piano solo of Mexican
music.” On November 30, 1923, for example, CYB broadcast a program in which Eduardo
Gómez sang the Spanish song “Mi Querida” (My loved one) which he successfully “interpreted
with deep emotion.”

35

At the time, concerts were advertised days in advance by the press and

performed by small musical groups, such as the Jazz band “Lone Star,” which was on loan to

32
33
34
35

CYB later became XEB, which is still in operation today.
El Universal Ilustrado. 24 de mayo de 1923.
El Universal Ilustrado junio 1924.
El Demócrata, November 30, 1923, p. 5.
38

CYB from the owners of the Cine Majestic for their radio transmissions. Other times, stations
played xylophones, tangos and marimbas, sounds which the majority of the North American
audience was not accustomed to hearing over the air. Concerts, in particular, were appealing to
both national and international audiences. By featuring Orchestas Típicas, who used brass
instruments such as the trumpet, Mexican radio stations exposed different genres of music to
radio listeners who had limited knowledge of the sounds of Latin American music. For example,
after one concert a listener from the United States remarked “The music sounded as though some
of the instruments were different than the ones used by most orchestras.”

36

In the 1920s music served as a “magic claw,” and public plazas throughout Mexico were
filled to the brim with the people anxiously waiting to hear a live musical concert or a radio
37

transmission.

By extending the opportunity to own and operate radio stations in Mexico to

amateurs, businessmen and state and local governments, the government led the way for the
creation of a new social phenomenon, radio “performances” or “concerts.” These elaborate
programs did not resemble the broadcasts of amateur recreational stations in Mexico City, which
invited professional or novice singers to stand in front of a microphone and sing several pieces.
In contrast, the new radio concerts included dance, recitals, and music and were modeled after a
performance in a theater, a vaudeville play, or a movie house in Mexico during the 1920s.
The collaboration between the private sector and the government during the early years
of the radio industry is most noticeable in the creation of a national mass communications policy.
In the early 1920s, the novelty of radio sparked an unprecedented interest by people who were
36
37

AHSEP, Expediente A-4/235.3(73).
El Universal Ilustrado, January 13, 1938, p. 44-45.
39

avidly building amateur or personal stations in their homes and places of work.
The Mexican government leaned on the enthusiasm and talent of individuals in the
private sector as it made its decision regarding the expansion and policies of radio. In 1922 and
1923, a number of groups approached the government with ideas about the path Mexico needed
to take regarding mass communications. Men were anxious to participate in the creation of a
Mexican radio policy and groups such as ““Compañia Radio-México, S.A.,” for example, noted
that the lives of people of rural Mexico, in particular, would benefit thanks to radio broadcasting.
“If we pay attention to the development of culture among the pueblo mexicano (people of
Mexico),” they wrote, “we will find that the installation of wire-less radiotelephony will be of
invaluable worth, since inhabitants of distant places will be able to rejoice in shows such as
operas, operettas, concerts, conferences, etc., which at the moment are completely unknown.”

38

Another group, the “Liga Central Mexicana de Radio,” or “Central Mexican Radio
League,” believed the airwaves would project the true national folklore of Mexico and display
the best manifestations of Mexican culture. The group, which was formed by ambitious men
from a wide array of backgrounds and socioeconomic positions, constructed amateur radio sets
and frequently “picked up” radio signals from Mexico and North America. The League met
regularly in downtown Mexico City to discuss radio’s significance and future in Mexican society
39

and believed that it was important to instruct the general public about the topic.

Concerning

the law, they were the first to determine a schedule for radio transmissions and presented a

38
39

FAPEC, Fondo Plutarco Elías Calles, Expediente. 18 Inv. 63.
Mejía Prieto, Historia de la radio y la televisión en México, 26.
40

program with their ideas to President Álvaro Obregón on May 9, 1923.

40

The interest of these

and other businessmen and entrepreneurs generated positive results for both parties. The
government asked the Liga to draft a proposal for the nation’s mass communications legislation
and during August of 1923 a radio division was aggregated to the Dirección General de
Telégrafos, the Telegraph Department. From that point forward, the government committed to
adopt legislation concerning radio operations.

41

In 1923, President Alvaro Obregón declared that all communication through radio,
whether official, private, or public, fell under the surveillance of the Secretaría de
Comunicaciones y Obras Públicas (Ministry of Communications and Public Works), or
42

SCOP.

The Ministry relied on the Telegraph Department to handle the technical side of new

and existing radio stations, such as assigning the frequencies and determining which wavelengths
a station could operate on, as well as being responsible for the paperwork, laws and permits
needed to construct new stations. A handful of Ministries operated official radio stations in the
1920s and 1930s including the Ministry of Industry, Commerce and Labor, the Ministry of War
and Navy, the Ministry of Foreign Relations and the Ministry of Public Education, which was
the most prominent.
While formal legislation was being drafted, the Minister of Communications and Public

40

AGN, OC, Expediente 711-R-27.

41

Fernando Mejía Barquera. La Industria De La Radio Y La Televisión Y La Política Del Estado
Mexicano (México, DF: Fundación Manuel Buendía, 1989), 29.
42

AGN, OC, Minuta, 18 de enero de 1923. Acuerdo Presidencial: Código Telegráfico y
Telégrafos Nacionales Reglamento General. Capitulo II. Articulo 26.
41

Works signed a contract with the President concerning the parameters of operating privately
owned radio stations. The arrangement, signed in 1923, included three stipulations: radio
stations had to be under the direction of Mexican born or naturalized owners and operators;
SCOP would be vigilant of their construction and transmissions; and, lastly, station owners were
obligated to pay an annual tax of $200 pesos. Concerning the programming of new stations, El
Universal noted that they had to include “nothing against the laws of the country, public order or
good morals.”

43

The first national legislation concerning radio communications was created with the
signing of the Ley de Comunicaciones Eléctricas (Electric Communications Law) on April 26,
1926. The law gave the government the power to assume control of all radio activity in the case
of war or in national emergencies. It indicated that the nation’s air space, where the terrestrial
waves used for radio transmissions pass through, was government property. The Federal
government, who authorized the Ministry of Communication and Public Works to grant permits,
was also responsible for the social function of radio and intervened in strict censorship over the
airwaves. This law gave SCOP the ability to designate the stations that would be used for
cultural, commercial, experimental or official use. Concerning the latter, the law indicated that
the government could operate official stations to transmit whatever messages it desired. The
public, on the other hand, could obtain concessions and exploit the natural resources of the
nation, the airwaves.

44

Six years later, when commercial radio was on the rise and commercial

stations were springing up throughout the nation, the Ley de Vías Generales de Comunicación
43
44

El Universal, June 9, 1923.
Diario Oficial, 26 de abril de 1926. “Ley de Comunicaciones Eléctricas.”
42

45

clearly defined the technical aspects of mass communications.

With the direct involvement of the private sector, the growth of the radio industry
followed the principles of capitalism; in contrast to the post-revolutionary cultural project, as
other Ministries and Departments were doing. In the creation of the national radio industry, the
government implemented a capitalist plan for the development of a nationwide industry and thus
effectively sponsored its own model of free enterprise. According to Fernando Mejía Barquera,
in the communications sector the Mexican government promoted a brand of democracy where
“diversity” was found, not in the content of the material being transmitted over the air, but in the
number of companies allowed to exist. One way that the government sustained its ability to use
the air waves as avenues for propaganda, moreover, was by willingly allowing the private sector
to establish its own radio stations that operated as small private companies. In the end, this
partnership gave way to a symbiotic relationship between business members and political
leaders.

46

Along with being included in the post-revolutionary economic plan, radio was part of
another trend taking place between 1923 and 1947, a shift in the awareness of private and public
space. In the 1940s, writes Enrique Florescano, the proliferation of literature in Mexico was
“interrupted by the radio, cinema and television which produced a pueblo trapped by sounds,
pictures and words.”

47

Once radio was introduced to the people of Mexico, the awareness and

45

Cristina Romo, Ondas, canales y mensajes: un perfil de la radio en México (Guadalajara,
Jalisco, México: ITESO, 1991), 77.
46
47

Ibid., 13-14.
Enrique Florescano, ed. El Patrimonio Cultural De México. Sección de obras de historia
43

management of space was transformed.
Before 1921, the only way to bring music inside the home was through phonographs,
victrolas or records. Radio surpassed these forms of home entertainment and offered not only
classical music and conferences to Mexican families, but, in the 1930s and 1940s, also popular
and folkloric music, radio-dramas, national and international news and annual government
celebrations and rituals. Radio had the ability to trespass public and private barriers because it is
“a phenomenon of unprecedented penetration, it surrounds public and private spaces, enters
living rooms in homes, in the same way that it wanders through the shop windows of the central
48

avenues, it penetrates the dining room, the bedrooms, the parks, the corners.”

Upon its arrival,

radio took messages and music from public places to private ones, and vice versa. Broadcasts
had the ability to travel from radio studios to the kitchen, living room or bedroom, more intimate
secret places and, in the public realm, they traveled from studios to street corners, central
meeting places, dance halls and auditoriums. When it was first introduced to Mexican homes in
the 1920s “the radio was placed in the center of the living room, like a magic box that had the
49

power to gather the family with truly stellar auditions.”

Thanks to radio, for example, new activities for the urban population emerged in Mexico
City, some of which were sponsored by private organizations like the Central Mexican Radio
League. The society was influential in the advancement of radio in Mexico during the 1920s by
(México, DF: Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes, 1993), 295.
48

Roberto Ornelas Herrera, “Radio y Cotidianidad en México (1900-1930)” in Aurelio de los
Reyes, ed., Historia de la vida cotidiana en México. Tomo V. Volumen 1. Siglo XX. Campo y
Ciudad. (México, DF: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2005), 154.
49

Mejía Prieto. Historia de la radio y la televisión en México, 49.
44

exposing the medium to Mexico City’s public through fairs, expositions and festivals. From
June 16 to the 23, 1923, the “Gran Feria de Radio” (Great Radio Fair) took place at the Great
Mining Palace located in downtown Mexico City. The event was organized by members of the
League and the National Engineering School and was presided over by President Obregón and
the Minister of Communications and Public Works. The advertisements for the event promised
visitors live musical concerts which were to be “picked up” from stations in the United States
and from other parts of Mexico, along with dances, and live conferences about the latest
advancements in radio technology to date. In the central patio and corridors of the Palace they
organized carnivals, contests and on Sunday, June 18, the newspaper promised that those in
attendance “could follow, round by round, the boxing match held in the El Toreo plaza the
50

Argentine champion [Jim] Firpo fight the American [Jim] Hibbard.”

Speakers were placed in the ballroom of the Ministry of the National School of
Engineers, adjacent to the Palace, and for the first time those in attendance could dance to music
coming from the airwaves. Additionally, a cantina, tea room, restaurant and soft-drink and ice
cream carts were available for those who desired refreshments. Because using electricity was
still a new phenomenon for city residents in the early 1920s, the League was careful in ensuring
that radio, a new apparatus that could be turned on quite easily, would be explained in simple
terms so that it could get the attention of a large number of people. In order to do so, the League
gave amateurs and audience members in general, the opportunity to watch a short film about the

50

El Universal, June 15, 1923, p. 8.
45

construction of home radio receivers.

51

In this unprecedented social and scientific event, radio invaded the public space: the
ballroom, the halls of the Palace, the corridors of the Ministry; in general, two buildings
previously relegated for other activities. The hundreds of people who gathered for the inaugural
ceremony despite the summer rain “surrendered themselves to the wholesome amusement of
listening to concerts, conferences and talks from other locations.”

52

Thus, to the urban

population, radio transformed the awareness and meaning of space and their association with
buildings normally used for government services. Moreover, through the event, the League was
also interested in reaching a national and international market, including the thousands of
Mexican immigrants in the United States. With the proceeds from the fair they planned to
construct an experimental radio station of their own, with high frequency power and “who’s
greatest purpose will consist in spreading, in this country and outside of it, Mexican culture in all
53

its manifestations.”

The 1930s: Radio becomes a Professional Industry
Since the 1920s, the government had an influential position in the national radio industry,
not just as a producer but also as a legislator and regulator. Through laws created in 1931 and
1932 strict control was placed on the content of broadcasts.
51
52
53
54

54

Stipulations included declaring

Excélsior, May 9, 1923, p. 1.
El Universal, June 17, 1923, p. 1.
El Universal Ilustrado, June 24, 1923, p. 2.
Diario Oficial, 31 de agosto de 1931, “Ley sobre Vías Generales de Comunicación y Medios
46

that stations could not be located on the U.S. side of the border, requiring all stations to broadcast
in Spanish, mandating owners to transmit all government messages free of charge, and most
importantly, abstaining from religion and “prohibiting Mexicans from engaging in political
discourse over the airwaves.”

55

In fact, these two areas, politics and religion, which had been

kept out of Mexican radio broadcasting since the 1920s, were notable features which remained
outside of radio broadcasting for the majority of the twentieth century.
As the decade progressed, the law concerning the musical programming of radio stations
became more explicit. In the mid-1930s the government ensured that commercial stations
followed their cultural project by instilling legislation that regulated the percentage of Mexican
music each station was required to play on a daily basis. The proportion of time devoted to this
genre, in fact, fluctuated during the 1930s and 1940s. For instance, in the early ‘30s XFX
devoted ¼ of their twelve day schedule to Mexican music. By 1936, Article 24 of the
Reglamento de las estaciones radioeléctricas comerciales, culturales y de aficionados (Bylaws
for Commercial, Cultural and Amateur Radio electric Stations), stated that “every program must
56

contain at least 25% traditional Mexican music.”

Six years later, when the legislation was

revised under the administration of Manuel Avila Camacho, the law did not amend the
percentage of Mexican music each station had to play, but instead included a decree concerning

de Transporte,” and Diario Oficial, 8 de Julio 1933, “Ley de Impuestos a las estaciones
radiodifusoras.”
55

Elizabeth Joy Hayes, Radio Nation: Communication, Popular Culture and Nationalism in
Mexico, 1920-1950 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2000). 39.

56

Diario Oficial, 30 de diciembre 1936. “Reglamento de las estaciones radioeléctricas
comerciales, culturales y de aficionados.”
47

57

playing records over the air.

The ‘30s were also important for the professional development of the industry. By the
end of the decade Mexico was carving its place in the international mass communications sector
and after 1930 new commercial radio stations were springing up throughout Mexico such as
XEW, “La voz de América Latina desde México,” “The voice of Latin America from Mexico,”
which inaugurated its legendary programming on September 18, 1930 from the Teatro Olimpia
in downtown Mexico City. XEW is regarded as one of Mexico’s foremost radio stations.
Mexican scholar Jorge Mejia Prieto writes that the success of the station was the result of the
vision of its founder, Emilio Azcárraga, who focused solely on the commercial aspect of radio
and by selling radio advertisements, filled an important void within Mexican industry and
commerce.

58

The competition between commercial and government-owned stations became

noticeable after XEW was on the air.
The inauguration of XEW, in particular, contributed both to the legitimacy of the industry
and to the rural-to-urban migration taking place in the nation during the twentieth century. After
1930, “musicians and singers from every region in Mexico began to arrive in the DF [federal
59

district].”

Some, like Los Gavilanes del Sur, left the tranquility of their village in Guerrero,

picked up their guitars and “came to the city, to get drunk on lights, noise and the longings of

57

Diario Oficial, 20 de mayo 1942. “Reglamento de las estaciones radiodifusoras comerciales
culturales, de experimentación científica y de aficionados.”
58

Mejia Prieto, Historia De La Radio Y La Televisión En México, 39.

59

Yolanda Moreno Rivas, Historia de la música popular Mexicana (México, DF: Editorial
Océano, 2008), 71.
48

success.”

60

Acclaimed singer, Pedro Vargas, for instance, left his home in San Miguel de

Allende, Guanajuato after finishing grade school at the age of thirteen because he did not want to
be a campesino like his father. “I had a fervent desire to be somebody in life. That was my
obsession,” he recalled. Years later, Vargas became one of the most popular singers in Mexico,
having had a personal relationship with every President in Mexico since the 1920s and travelling
the globe, singing over the radio and recording boleros, rancheras and other Mexican popular
61

music.

In order not to fall out of favor with the government, new stations followed the main
principles of the state’s reconstruction project and focused on diffusing culture, education and
patriotism. Following a directive of the Mexican government, for instance, in 1931 Carlos G.
Blake, the Minister of Communications, ordered for all radio stations to play only national
62

music.

The Ministry of Communications and Public Works considered music, “art which speaks
deeply about the soul of the pueblo,” and during the ‘30s the government enacted a number of
laws to ensure that stations displayed their loyalty to the post-revolutionary government by

60

El Universal Ilustrado, February 18, 1937.

61

José Ramón Garmabella, Pedro Vargas: Una vez nada más (México, DF: Ediciones de
Comunicación, 1985), 28.
62

AGN, SCOP, Expediente 22/131.6 (725.1)/149. Letter from C. Carlos G. Blake to Narciso
Bassols, C. Secretario de Educación 13 enero 1931.
49

playing Mexican music.

63

The first way to ensure that this took place was by demanding all

radio stations to “utilize only the services of artists, employees and Mexican laborers;” a law
64

enacted in January of 1931.

In 1933 the government demanded that radio stations not transmit

musical or literary compositions that did not have the previous authorization of the Sociedad de
Autores y Compositores Mexicanos (Society of Mexican Composers and Authors), a group that
was responsible for the royalties of individual musical numbers.

65

After new sound technology was implemented within commercial mass entertainment,
theaters were transformed from places for live theatrical performances to spaces where one could
visit to take part in the screening of a film, a comedy sketch or a live radio program. These
programs borrowed the essential aspects of Teatro de Revista: live audiences, recognizable
characters, satire, parody, drama and music. However, live radio programs could not rely on
audience interaction like the popular theater, as on many occasions audience members had to
remain silent since they were transmitted to the near and distant public through the ether.
During the 1930s and 1940s, the radio studios of stations XEW, XEB, or XEQ, among
others, were spaces where the urban population visited to witness a live musical performance by
their favorite singer, actor or composer. Men and women from different social backgrounds
could walk the streets of Mexico City, enter a radio studio, and come face to face with the people
behind the voices they heard daily through their home receivers. One option was to visit XEW’s
63

AHSEP, Expediente A-4/235.3(73).

64

Diario Oficial, 30 de diciembre 1936. “Reglamento de las estaciones radioeléctricas
comerciales, culturales y de aficionados.”
65

Diario Oficial, 8 de julio 1933. “Ley de impuestos a las Estaciones Radiodifusoras.”
50

legendary studio on Avenida Ayuntamiento, several blocks from Avenida San Juan de Letrán.

66

In accordance with its motto, “The Voice of Latin America from Mexico,” by 1935, XEW was a
successful and celebrated radio station in the Americas. Additionally, the station was conscious
of the influence that their location in Mexico City had on the population living in the adjacent
area.
Live radio programs also created new opportunities for the public. As soon as they
stepped inside the studios, radio listeners became audience members. This experience was new,
exhilarating and unforgettable. For some, it was disheartening to see that the voice of the
“invisible artist” actually belonged to an ordinary person. Yet to others, young women
especially, seeing a famous male artist in person or listening to his voice over the air sparked
unprecedented and sometimes hysterical behavior. This occurred, for instance, when the
composer-poet, Agustín Lara, took the stage in the capital city throughout the 1930s.
“Minutes before 10 p.m., there is not one romantic young woman…restless and
adventurous young man, or a single lady…who does not tune in their radio to the hour of
Agustín Lara,” wrote a radio critic. At 10 p.m. every Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday evenings
during the 1930s, Mexico City radio station XEW transmitted “La Hora Íntima de Agustín
Lara,” (The Intimate Hour of Agustín Lara), a live radio program in which the composer sat
before his piano for several hours. Drawing from his vast repertoire of romantic and evocative
songs, he dedicated special numbers to audience members and radio listeners, who “faint when
66

Avenida San Juan de Letrán (today Eje Lázaro Cárdenas) was the principle thoroughfare for
cultural and artistic activity in Mexico City during the 1930s and 1940s. Until 1937 when the
Ministry of Communications and Public Works ordered radio stations to leave the city center, all
radio activity was concentrated along the avenues surrounding the Centro Historico, the historic
downtown district.
51

they hear the hollow voice of Agustín when he exclaims, ‘This song of mine, like a bouquet of
roses, I place before the diminutive feet of the beautiful Josefina Garza of Monterrey!’”

67

A live

program such as Lara’s, as one commentator observed, also served an important social function
in Mexico. They were a “Good thing for fathers and jealous husbands, because with ‘La Hora
Íntima de Agustín Lara’ transmitting at the most important time in the night, they avoid the cost
68

of going to the cinema or other distractions that are possibly more dangerous.”

At first, live radio programs were successful because they combined already known
artistic talent, theater actors, with a space for the discovery of new values and stars. The public
did not have to purchase tickets, as with the theater; instead they had to wait in line before
programs for free passes. Commercial radio stations, during the 1930s and 1940s, thrived thanks
to live radio programs. These stations, in fact, effectively created two listening audiences: one at
home and the other in the studio.
As a new space for the entertainment of the masses, the studio was pivotal during the
professional development of the radio industry. Through a studio, stations imparted wholesome
entertainment, culture and commercial propaganda. In the ‘30s and ‘40s, whenever a station
built or remodeled their studio, the pages of the local press included a number of photographs of
state of the art auditoriums with elaborate curtains, a shiny grand piano and a microphone in the
center of an empty stage.
Studios were focal points which brought the public together and exposed them to new

67
68

El Universal Ilustrado, February 22, 1934.
El Universal Ilustrado, June 15, 1932.
52

talent. For instance, in January of 1931, in an advertisement for commercial station, XEB El
Buen Tono, Professor Rosendo Arnaiz, the man responsible for the transmission, “RadioGimnasia,” a program which broadcast via remote control from an athletic club three times a
week, argued “we have the absolute conviction that there isn’t a radio operator or engineer, that
has not passed through the experimental laboratories of our station. A large number of the great
artists that we have today were known because of our microphones, which allowed them to be
known, both among our public and the public overseas.” Prof. Arnaiz credited the place where
this took place; “today our studio is available to the public, and in it night after night more than
500 people who are lovers of good music gather.”

69

Building state-of-the art and impressive studios was one of the many phases of radio’s
progress in Mexico. In 1934, in order to commemorate its 11 anniversary celebration, XEB
inaugurated a new studio. In a public address, Bernardo de San Cristóbal, the general manager,
noted that he was proud of the special moment and believed the new studio was “a medium, to
take to your homes, with greater purity, our sponsored programs, as well as a kind and cozy
70

corner for the Mexican artists who will visit it.”

As studios were modernized, live radio

programs continued to evolve and in the second half of the 1930s, studios and theaters were
fused into one. The most salient example is the Teatro Alameda, constructed in 1936 by media
mogul Emilio Azcárrraga as a space for the convergence of film, radio, theater and, eventually,
television. “A city inside of a movie house,” were the words used to describe this building that

69

Archivo General de la Nación (AGN), Ramo Gobernación, Fondo Propiedad Artística y
Literaria (PAL), Caja 523, Expediente 7280.
70

VEA, November 9, 1934.
53

was centrally located by the Alameda Park in Mexico City.

71

The 1940s:
In the early 1940s composers were writing songs on a weekly basis, live radio programs
were in style, and contests, most notably the “Hora de aficionados” (Amateur Hour), captured
the attention and imagination of the public. The era of creative, unmonitored transmissions,
however, was short lived. In the following decade the nation’s economy, cultural programs, and
internal politics were in flux when the country transitioned from the government of Cárdenas to
that of Manuel Ávila Camacho (1940-1946). Under Camacho, Mexico experienced a Warinduced economic boom and the nation’s ties with the United States, in particular, grew stronger.
Radio programming was affected by these new trends; particularly through censorship imposed
by the government who, through SCOP, had a systematic monitoring system and kept watch over
the content of radio station programming.

72

Placing restrictions on transmissions, in fact, was

one of the most effective ways official stations were able to compete for audiences with
commercial border stations.
In the 1940s radio continued to be exhibited in the public sphere. Radio took center stage
in 1943 during the Feria del Libro y Exposición Nacional de Periodismo and again during

71

Archivo General de la Nación (AGN), Ramo Presidentes, Fondo Lázaro Cárdenas del Rio
(LCR), Expediente 415.13/7.
72

For an excellent evaluation of how radio in Mexico steered away from political or religious
news and information during the post-revolutionary era see Elizabeth Joy Hayes, Radio Nation:
Communication, Popular Culture and Nationalism in Mexico, 1920-1950 (Tucson: University
of Arizona Press, 2000).
54

73

October of 1944 at the Ferias del Libro, del Radio y de la Cinematografía.

In June of 1944,

when the organizers of the Fair began to plan the event, they asserted that “radio will have its
own pavilion, with its theater-studios, in which first class programs will emerge from; exposition
halls, where you will be able to admire the technical progress, the perfections reached in radio
technology.” The event planners wanted to ensure radio would have an “independent
personality” outside of other cultural and commercial manifestations being displayed in the fair.
In part, this was because “in this country radio is the book and the newspaper of millions of
people.” The fair displayed the three most important forms of media in Mexico at the time:
cinema, radio and books, and, as in previous years, took place thanks to the collaboration of the
government and the business sector.
Arturo Garcia Formeti, spokesman for the event, noted that the radio exhibit, in
particular, was anticipated to be grand. A theater-studio was being constructed in the Monumento
a la Revolución (Mexican Revolutionary Monument), where live radio transmissions would take
place fifteen hours a day. In addition, the Mexican Symphony, National Opera and various
theaters had promised to make appearances and play live music over the radio. In fact, the
October 15 broadcast of La Hora Nacional, a weekly concurrent national radio broadcast, was
dedicated to the fair.

74

Thus, the objective continued to be to use radio to project nationalism

and reach audiences in the United States through powerful broadcasting signals.
The government, through the Secretaría de Comunicaciones y Obras Públicas (Ministry
of Communications and Public Works), or SCOP, desired to display radio’s advancements to the
73
74

Radiolandia, April 20 and 22, 1943, May 7, 11 and 21, 1943 and ¡Oiga!, June 24, 1944.
Radiolandia, September 15, 1944.
55

public and cooperated with the Cámara Nacional de la Industria de la Radiodifusión, the
successor of the Liga Central Mexicana de Radio, to carry this out. This independent
organization was responsible for the organization of the industry and is credited to its rapid
professionalization in the 1930s when they offered free information on legal, commercial, and
technical issues to commercial radio station owners.

75

By the following decade, Mexican film stars made special appearances in live radio
programs. Audiences filled the studios in order to see their favorite movie star. The weekly
program sponsored by Cerveza Monterrey and broadcast through XEW, on Tuesdays at 9:45
p.m. in 1944, for instance, was lauded for its high artistic quality and because film stars such as
76

María Felix, Pedro Armendáriz and Sara García made guest appearances.

Studios only continued to get more sophisticated as the years progressed. In 1942, the
new studio under construction for XEW had a seating capacity for over 4,000 people and was
said to be “identical” to the Columbia Broadcasting Systems (CBS) studio in Radio City, New
York.

77

The station spent over half a million pesos constructing this studio, in fact, and during

the inauguration in the summer of 1942, the Mexican National Anthem was played along with
one of Agustín Lara’s boleros, “Cada Noche un Amor” (Each Night a New Lover).

78

Scholars argue that the mechanical reproduction of cultural forms such as music during
75
76
77
78

Radiolandia, September 3, 1943.
¡Oiga!, April 1, 1944.
Radiolandia, June 20, 1942.
Radiolandia, June 22, 1942.
56

79

the twentieth century reconfigured the understanding of space and time.

In Mexico, as the

radio industry grew and professionalized during the 1930s and 1940s and permanently changed
the use and perception of private and public sphere. Within the span of two decades, the urban
masses of Mexico transitioned from attending the Teatro de Revista (Musical Revue), to staying
at home and listening to popular and suggestive programs hosted by musicians and composers,
such as “La Hora Íntima de Agustín Lara” (The Intimate Hour of Agustín Lara). In fact,
through live radio programs, which were in vogue after the mid-1930s, the daily routines of radio
audiences in the United States and Mexico were transformed. Conducting a radio program
before a live studio audience exhilarated listeners who could “hear even the breathing of the
speakers” and marveled at “the applause of the visible audience.”

80

Conclusion
The United States witnessed the arrival of radio broadcasting several months before
Mexico had its first transmissions. In the nation’s largest cities, radio stations played Mexican
81

and other Spanish-language music beginning in 1921.

Mexican radio stations had been

“picked up” by listeners since then; allowing many to choose between musical radio
transmissions heard in the United States coming from Mexican stations, and Spanish-language
79

This is an extensive debate. See, Walter Benjamin, Michael William Jennings, Brigid
Doherty, Thomas Y. Levin, and E. F. N. Jephcott, The work of art in the age of its technological
reproducibility, and other writings on media (Cambridge, Mass: Belknap Press of Harvard
University Press, 2008).
80

AHSEP, Expediente A-4/235.3(73).

81

For more on this topic see Dolores Inés Casillas, “Sounds of Belonging: A Cultural History
of Spanish-Language Radio in the United States, 1922-2004,” (PhD Dissertation, University of
Michigan, 2006).
57

broadcasts emitted over English-language radio stations. But the English-speaking audience was
not the population the government was interested in reaching. In order to reach them, the
government used one of its own institutions, the Secretaría de Educacion Pública, and its station
XFX, to do so.

58

Chapter II
From “La Hora del Hogar” to “La Hora Nacional”:
Nation-Building and Official Radio Broadcasting in Mexico

“No ya desde el Bravo hasta el Suchiate, sino de un polo a otro, a través de toda la Tierra,
podemos escuchar la voz de nuestros semejantes como antes podíamos recibir su
correspondencia o como más tarde pudimos telegrafiarles o hablarles por teléfono.”
“Not only from the Rio Grande to the Suchiate River, but from one pole to the other, throughout
the world, we can hear the voice of those that are like us, in the way we would receive their
letters, or later send them telegraphs or speak to them over the telephone.”
-Salvador Novo, Ensayos

Life for the urban and rural population of Mexico in the 1920s was in a state of transition.
“The people were interested in the scientific advancements of the day and in having fun, they
1

wanted to forget about the armed conflict,” explains Jorge Mejía Prieto. During the evenings or
weekends in the country’s cities people of all backgrounds and ages attended the theater, a
vaudeville show, or, before 1929, viewed a silent film. The theater, especially the Teatro de
Revista, or music revue, combined music with satire and was an essential source of entertainment
for the urban population. During the 1920s “some preferred the piano at home…others,
generally less demanding and certainly less cultured, preferred- and could pay- the spaces that
Teatro de Revista opened for the public enjoyment of music, for the affirmation and

1

Jorge Mejía Prieto. Historia De La Radio Y La Televisión En México. (Colección México vivo;
México: O. Colmenares, 1972), 24.
59

confirmation of the identity of the masses.”

2

When radio arrived, high quality entertainment could be enjoyed in the comfort of one’s
home. “We are in a splendid era,” noted Ruben Campos in 1928, “in which the Ministry [of
3

Public Education] and two other newspaper companies offer free music to the world.” Campos
was referring to official station CZE, and to CYB and CYL, the first three radio stations in
operation in Mexico City which offered nightly concerts and conferences on a frequent basis in
the 1920s.
Aside from bringing music inside the home, radio receivers connected listeners with the
cultural activity of their city. Using electricity was still a new phenomenon for city residents in
the early 1920s and radio, an apparatus that could be turned on quite easily, simplified life. For
those who did not have the means to purchase a radio, they could walk the city streets and listen
to live broadcasts, as it was reported that small businesses would place radio receivers in front of
open windows for the passersby to hear.

4

The Mexico City press played a vital role in the history of radio by instructing the
population how to listen to the new apparatus. Shortly after it was introduced, radio was taken
on by artistic and literary groups in Mexico; to some, it was even considered an art form. For
instance, radio was an important part of the work of an avant-garde artistic movement in Mexico
2

El País de las Tandas Teatro de Revista 1900-1940. (México D.F.: Consejo Nacional para la
Cultura y las Artes, Dirección General de Culturas Populares e Indígenas, 1984), 93.

3

Rubén M. Campos, El folklore y la música Mexicana. Investigación acerca de la cultura
musical en México (1525-1925) (México, DF: Talleres Gráficos de la Nación, 1928), 154.
4

Archivo Histórico de la Secretaria de Educación Pública (hereafter AHSEP) 4.18 9475/4. #25.
NECESIDAD DE ADQUIRIR LA ESTACION.
60

called Estridentismo, which drew from European futurism and called for an embrace of
modernity by celebrating the city and new technology during the mid 1920s. This group of
intellectuals and artists took the attributes of the changing city, -elevators, automobiles,
telephones, the telegraph and radio-, used them to write poetry and to familiarize a wider public
with emerging art and cultural forms. In the 1920s, the Mexico City press legitimized radio’s
culture role in Mexico and the enthusiastic support the apparatus received from newspapers like
El Universal Ilustrado and avant-garde groups like the Estridentistas helped underscore its
importance within Mexican society.
At the same time, radio emerged as an integral part of the post-revolutionary cultural
project spearheaded by the Mexican government. Under the banner of nationalism, after the
Mexican Revolution (1910-1920) a vast reconstruction project was implemented in the country
that focused on education, public health, agrarianism, and anticlericalism. This chapter explains
the birth of XFX, the station operated by the Ministry of Public Education, their mission to target
and reach Mexican listeners in the United States and the way they used gender-based
programming to advance the ideals of the Mexican government. Lastly, the chapter describes
how, by the 1940s, this station was engulfed with another government agency, the DAPP (the
Autonomous Press and Publicity Department) and continued to use radio programming to
transmit Mexican culture, values and music both at home and overseas.
The Ministry of Public Education and XFX
Following the Revolution, new institutions created by the central government appeared in
Mexico. In the eyes of political leaders, rebuilding the country after the decade-long conflict
meant creating organizations that would legitimize the state and help advance the nationwide

61

cultural and educational program. One of these was the Secretaría de Educación Pública
(Ministry of Public Education), or SEP, established in June of 1921 by President Álvaro
Obregón. The man behind the Ministry’s early projects was José Vasconcelos, who headed the
department from 1921-1924. Vasconcelos was the first government official to defend the
traditions of the people and worked to situate folkloric art, music and dance in their proper place
within the post-revolutionary society.
In 1923, the SEP responded to the call of the government to impart education to the
masses and made a commitment to adopt radio, construct rural schools and develop
technological training. As Public Education Minister, Vasconcelos eagerly supported the SEP’s
efforts to acquire the technology necessary to build a modern radio station, envisioning its role as
a tool for the “civil and cultural neo-evangelization” of the illiterate and dispersed population of
5

Mexico. New institutions like the SEP were instructed to use radio communications for a
number of purposes including making contact with Mexico’s rural population, teaching the urban
working class technical skills, indoctrinating all citizens with ideas of nationalism, and, above
all, carrying out work that was pro-Patria, or “for the betterment of the motherland.”

6

In 1924, Obregón’s successor, Plutarco Elías Calles, authorized the SEP to purchase a
radio transmitter from the United States. Officially inaugurated on November 30, 1924, the

5

Fernando Curiel, La telaraña magnética y otros estudios radiofónicos (México, DF: Ediciones
Coyoacán S.A. de C.V.), 306.
6

Elizabeth Joy Hayes, Radio Nation: Communication, Popular Culture, and Nationalism in
Mexico, 1920-1950 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2000), xiii.
62

7

station was assigned CZE (later XFX) as its call letters. XFX was at the center of the urban
transformation brought about by radio in Mexico City after 1923. At the time, radio stations
required large antennas which became problematic for the radio stations inaugurated in
downtown Mexico City, an area with limited vertical space. In order to accommodate the towers
the Ministry had to place them inside of the copulas of the Templo de Encarnacion and Templo
de Sana Catalina de Sena, churches close to the Ministry’s main building downtown.

8

Taking into account that the majority of the Mexican population was illiterate, the
government recognized that reaching them through print media was not the most efficient way to
impart its political and cultural projects. Under the direction of the state, many official radio
stations during the ‘20s, ‘30s and ‘40s made use of public spaces, such as schools, to impart their
wisdom and ideals to the general population. In urban centers, the SEP noted that their station
“has the advantage of being assisted by a number of businesses who put speakers where the
public can hear them from the street.” XFX was proud that those who did not have the means to
purchase a radio receiver could be a part of a “circle of listeners,” a group of citizens who
congregated in their homes or in public places to hear the radio.

9

In 1926, faithful listeners of the station, like J.R. Padilla noted “I have made a special
effort to listen them in my living space, placing a Loud speaker in a place where the public can

7

In compliance with the National Radio Congress taking place in Washington, D.C. in 1927, in
September 1928 the station was assigned the signals, XFX. By 1936 the station broadcast as
XEXM, long wave and XEXA short wave.
8
9

El Universal 21 de junio 1924.
AHSEP, Expediente 4.18 9475/4.
63

listen, noting that the transmissions are heard with positive delight and interest, especially by the
popular classes, which are, undoubtedly, the ones who benefit the most from these programs.”

10

Padilla was a considerate listener who brought music and conferences to his neighbors in Mexico
City. Like him, countless others were enthusiastic about the visible changes taking place in
Mexico, thanks to radio; as a result, they purchased radio sets, records and attended
performances where they could hear and see the production of a live radio program.
XFX’s programming intended to reach all social classes in Mexico and advanced ideas
over the proper behavior of men, women and children. Initially, XFX was on the air only several
hours a day and their broadcasts included hour-long conferences on hygiene, history, geography,
and horticulture. By the mid 1920s the station increased their broadcasting hours from 10 a.m. to
8 p.m. and incorporated news and information bulletins by the Ministry of Public Health, talks
on Philately and other hobbies, and artistic concerts sponsored by the Ministry of War and the
Navy or the National Conservatory of Music and Declamation.
In the first decade after the Revolution, the station was successful as a purveyor of
education and Mexican cultural nationalism, giving it national and international prestige. The
station’s goal was sending messages, conferences, and information from the Ministry’s main
office building, located in downtown Mexico City, to listeners in the city, the surrounding states,
and abroad, to be the most powerful station in Mexico and a “magnificent means of Mexican
propaganda, making known through the entire orbit our industrial developments, our true

10

Boletín de la Secretaría de Educación Pública. Tomo V, número 10. Octubre 1926. p. 175.
64

intellectual state and our general status.”

11

One of the station’s noteworthy social functions was their collaboration with the Ministry
of Public Health, who used XFX to broadcast conferences and lectures ranging from nutrition, to
diseases, to proper sanitation. In particular, their efforts in spreading the government’s antialcohol campaign, which relied on film and radio transmissions throughout rural Mexico,
generated favorable outcomes. One listener, C. Alfonso Ramírez, drafted a letter to the station
on September 29, 1927 admitting that “Before I was acquainted with a radio apparatus, I would
dedicate my spare time to immoderate partying, which many times affected my health.”

12

The

testimony of Mr. Ramírez, who had changed his daily drinking habits thanks to the lectures, is
proof of the way the Ministry assisted the government in their plans to eradicate drunkenness in
13

Mexico.

XFX Overseas Missions
Beyond focusing on improving the health and wellbeing of the nation’s people, XFX’s
mission included broadcasting internationally and reaching people “on the other side” of the
U.S.-Mexico border. The official mission statement of the station included “taking cultural
11
12

El Demócrata, September 27, 1924.
Ibid.

13

On the Mexican government’s temperance campaigns see Gretchen Pierce, “Sobering the
Revolution: Mexico’s Anti-Alcohol Campaigns and the Process of State-Building, 1910-1940”
(PhD Dissertation, University of Arizona, 2008) and “Parades, Epistles, and Prohibitive
Legislation: Mexico’s National Anti-Alcohol Campaign and the Process of State Building, 19341940” Social History of Alcohol and Drugs 23:2 (Spring 2009). A unique approach on Mexico’s
relationship with alcohol see, Tim Mitchell, Intoxicated Identities: Alcohol’s Power in Mexican
History and Culture (New York: Routledge, 2004).
65

messages to the most remote corners of our country, and past its borders to take the live voice of
our speakers and announcers…to the cultured Canadian, North American and Central American
14

cities.”

The station’s radio department, the Obra de Extension Educativa por Radio

(Educational and Extension Labor of Radio) was responsible for carefully observing radio
transmissions heard by listeners overseas.
From the moment it went on the air in 1924, the station monitored its “labor abroad,”
responded to letters from listeners and kept annual records of the number of handwritten and
telephone testimonies sent to the Ministry’s office in Mexico City. In the late 1920s, during her
tenure as station manager and director, Maria Luisa Ross corresponded with audiences across the
globe, ensuring that both foreigners and Mexicans alike knew about the work being carried out in
Mexico through the SEP’s radio department. Letters received from abroad by XFX provide a
unique opportunity to examine the reception and popularity of their programming in the United
States and the Americas.
The majority of correspondence came from audiences overseas, especially from the
United States. In 1925 the office of radio education reported that in the previous twelve months
they had received over 26,000 pieces of correspondence from listeners in the Western
15

Hemisphere and calculated that the range of the station exceeded 12,000 kilometers.
14% of the station’s listening audience was located overseas.

14

Boletín de la SEP, Tomo IV, no. 2 (1925): 63.

15
16

AHSEP, Caja 4, Expediente 41.8. 9475/15.
Ibid.
66

16

By 1929,

In the radio office’s December

1927 report, Ross noted that “Especially in the United States, listening to our music and
conferences has awakened an interest to know us better. The radio department frequently
receives requests for pamphlets, magazines, photographs, in general, all kinds of publications
17

that can illustrate our way of life, our customs and the evolution of our national spirit.”

Numberless listeners, ranging from Radio Club Members, Mexican citizens, European
immigrants, housewives, and teenagers living in the United States and parts of Canada frequently
“picked up” radio broadcasts from Mexico City between 1924 and 1931. Some responded by
drafting letters to verify their reception of a radio broadcast, complain about the sound quality in
the music being played, offer ideas for better programming, request that the operator play a
special musical number for them, or comment on the artistic talent displayed over the radio.
Letters to Mexico City even arrived from countries in Europe, like a report from Jean Maurier of
Replattes, Switzerland, who wrote to XFX in 1926 stating he had been able to listen to the
18

station with great clarity and admitted he hoped to tune in on a regular basis.

Both English and Spanish-speaking listeners frequently commented on the music played
over XFX’s transmissions. Music allowed the station to establish lines of communication both
Mexican immigrants and a curious Anglo audience. The high quality of music broadcast over
the air, in fact, set the station apart from other official short-wave operations. For instance, on
March 13, 1931, Margaret Williams sent a letter from her home in Brooklyn, New York to XFX
offices in Mexico City. “Dear Señor,” she wrote, “if I could only reach out my hands and grasp
yours, and express my heartfelt thanks for the great pleasure I experienced tonight, listening to
17
18

Boletín de la SEP, Tomo VI, no. 12 (1927): 308.
El Universal, February 16, 1926.
67

the program you sent out!” The night before, Williams had used a short-wave receiver to listen
to a concert given by Mexico’s National Symphonic Orchestra. “It is easy to tell that you people
sing from love of music, not for fame or money,” she continued, “After months of listening to
jazz and so called ‘crooners’ it was a never to be forgotten treat to listen to your lovely Spanish
and Mexican string music and choral singing.”

19

As a powerful agent of culture, music had been used since the nineteenth century by
government leaders to promote ideas of nationalism. In the 1920s and 1930s, the government
resurrected the practice and turned to music to help diffuse the cultural politics of the postrevolutionary state. During the 1920s, the canción mexicana, for instance, was “a fundamental
component of the feelings and imaginary nationalisms that inhabited the official cultural
discourse.”

20

Mexican composers had looked to the popular and rural classes for musical inspiration
since before the Revolution. Afterwards, as some scholars argue, the government co-opted
popular forms of expression and that which was considered “popular” became “Mexican.”

21

In

turn, during the 1920s, a large number of composers, piano players and musicians who had been
trained in Europe in the early twentieth century responded to the call of the government, were
inspired to work in Mexico, and used the available resources to make national art and music.
Under the direction of José Vasconcelos and the SEP, folklorists and composers like Manuel M.
19

AHSEP, Expediente A-4/235.3(73), Folio 267-268.

20

Ricardo Pérez Montfort, Expresiones Populares y Estereotipos Culturales en México. Siglos
XIX y XX. Diez Ensayos (México, DF: CIESAS y Casa Chata, 2007), 97-98.
21

Ibid.
68

Ponce embarked upon collecting musical traditions of Mexican countryside in order to
disseminate it to Mexican children. The canción mexicana emerged within this context as a
portable and succinct expression of cultural nationalism. The canción mexicana, which is
synonymous with the canción popular, in a similar way to murals and poetry, reflected the
people of Mexico in an accurate and commanding way.

22

Many of the achievements of the Educational and Extension Labor of Radio office at the
time were the result of the work of its director, Maria Luisa Ross. Journalist, author, and lifelong advocate for women’s rights, Ross’ background and concern with the lack of education and
culture in Mexico’s schools and manifested her through innovative projects and years of
service.

23

In particular, Ross was behind a struggle taking place in the late 1920s and early

1930s between commercial and official stations over audience members. For instance, the
station was “official,” meaning it was forbidden from selling air time to private businesses for
advertising. However, during the ‘20s it operated with a high degree of autonomy, in part
because it was owned by the government and also because the station was launched years prior
to the signing of the 1926 mass media law, the first legislation defining the role of commercial
22

For a general overview of the history of Mexican music see, Juan S. Garrido, Historia De La
Música Popular En México, 1896-1973 (México, DF: Editorial Extemporáneos, 1974.); Ricardo
Pérez Montfort, Estampas de nacionalismo popular mexicano: ensayos sobre cultura popular y
nacionalismo (México, DF: CIESAS, 1994) and Expresiones Populares y Estereotipos
Culturales en México. Siglos XIX y XX. Diez Ensayos (México, DF: CIESAS y Casa Chata,
2007); Claes af Geijerstam, Popular music in Mexico (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico
Press, 1976); Yolanda Moreno Rivas, Historia de la música popular mexicana (México, DF:
Editorial Océano, 2008).
23

Rosalía Velázquez Estrada, “La Radiodifusión Mexicana Durante los Gobiernos de Álvaro
Obregón y Plutarco E. Calles,” (Tesis de licenciatura, Facultad de Filosofía y Letras, UNAM,
1980),170-171.
69

and official stations in Mexico.
Since its birth, the station focused on the acquisition of radio receivers to be distributed to
rural schools and teachers throughout Mexico. In 1928, Ross proposed a campaign to exchange
air time for radio-receivers with local businesses.

24

Consequently, between 1928 and 1932, in

between programs and during commercial breaks, XFX aired commercial advertisements for
local businesses such as, “El Palacio de Hierro,” “Al Puerto de Veracruz,” and “Casa
Armida,” high-end clothing and department stores in Mexico, along with “The University
Society” and “AGFA Fábricas,” a school organization and a fabric store, respectively.
Collaborating with private businesses assisted the progress of the station. In 1929 the office
reported that “Colgate, Palmolive & Peet, Inc.” had donated more than $5,000.00 pesos in
25

powerful radio apparatuses to the station.

The project was also successful in helping the

station acquire a large number of receivers for the Ministry’s rural education program.
Radio and Nationalism Abroad
The audience XFX was also concerned with reaching were Mexican immigrants in the
United States. One method used to engage this Mexican market in the United States was
organizing special transmissions for them in the form of classical and chamber music concerts.
Following a directive of the Mexican government, in 1931 Carlos G. Blake, the Minister of
Communications, directed XFX to play only national music; meaning that instead of concerts
featuring international composers interspersed with national ones, the station privileged music

24
25

AHSEP, Expediente 4.18 9474/15.
Ibid.
70

written and performed by Mexican composers and singers.

26

Thus, during Mexican holidays,

like the Independence Day celebration in September, XFX used the radio airwaves to transmit
nationalistic music and, of course, the national anthem. The celebration of Mexican
Independence begins on the evening of September 15. Known as “El Grito,” it is customary for
the President to give a speech and reproduce the battle cry for Independence by Father Miguel
Hidalgo on September 15, 1810. Mexican immigrant J. Piña Pastor, who listened to the
September 15, 1929 broadcast from his home in Brownsville, Texas, wrote a letter to XFX
declaring: “In agreement with the request you made in your transmission of the ‘Grito’ ceremony
some moments ago, I would like to express that I heard it with pure perfection. The ringing of
the Cathedral bells was a bit weak but everything else very clear.”

27

Correspondence sent to the radio office in Mexico City also reveals that the broadcasts
nurtured feelings of patriotism, especially within an elite group of Mexican immigrants. At
times, programs to the U.S.-Mexican audience were carried out in conjunction with commercial
stations, such as the broadcast of November 20, 1931, when XFX partnered with commercial
stations XEW, and XET of Monterrey and transmitted the Presidential address and a concert
throughout Mexico and parts of the United States. That night, under the direction of acclaimed
composer Carlos Chávez, the Mexican National Symphony gave a concert at the Arbeu Theater
in downtown Mexico City. The concert, and the radio broadcasts that accompanied it, were a
success. “A true work of art,” wrote A.C. Laurel from Laredo, Texas, “it gives great pleasure

26

Archivo General de la Nación, Ramo: Secretaría de Comunicaciones y Obras Públicas
(Hereafter AGN SCOP), Expediente 22/131.6 (725.1)/149.
27

AHSEP, Expediente 4.18 9474/15.
71

and satisfaction to us Mexicans living outside of the homeland that our country can count on
such a great orchestra as the National Symphonic Orchestra. I can assure you without fear of
being mistaken, that neither the Philharmonic of New York nor the Philadelphia Symphony can
supersede it and I have listened to them perform the same numbers.”

28

During their temporary or permanent stay in the United States, cultured Mexican
immigrants could tune in to live concerts from Mexico City and praise the advancements of the
post-revolutionary government’s cultural project. A listener in Brownsville, Texas, for instance,
reiterated the fact that Mexican citizens, even when they lived abroad, were aware of the cultural
missions of the government and were taking advantage of the opportunity to hear the broadcasts
with their friends and family members. In his letter, thanking Carlos Chávez and the singer
Hortensia Valladares for their great artistic work, Mr. Robles continued, “I do not want to end
this letter without also sending warm and enthusiastic congratulations to Mr. Narciso Bassols,
Secretary of Public Education, for the support and enthusiasm he displays in favor of national
art, making possible concerts like the one from last night, since their diffusion will make us
worthy of good judgment and appreciation abroad, since a people who have artistic
manifestations like the one heard last night, are forced to be admired and respected.”

29

Thanks

to the station’s ability to reach the United States, the music broadcast over the air not only gave
the station international prestige but it also united and lifted the spirits of Mexican citizens
abroad. However, the station was mandated by the government to serve other institutions and
broadcast their bulletins, the speeches of the President and important announcements.

28
29

AHSEP, Expediente A-4/235.3(73).
Ibid.
72

Radio: A Microphone for the Government
In 1930, as XFX grew in importance, new commercial radio stations also appeared in
Mexico City, declaring that spreading the government’s cultural propaganda was their first
priority and, consequently, posing an even more serious threat to the future of the official station.
In the Ministry’s quarterly bulletin Ross noted that “one of the greatest difficulties we have
encountered…have been the excessively low rates which commercial radio stations charge for
advertisements.”

30

The station juggled between broadcasting news bulletins from various

government Ministries and continuing its educational work, leaving Ross and other managers in
a difficult position.
By the mid ‘30s, the government used radio alongside its own cultural project to form a
“musical nationalism” designed to incorporate all citizens into a shared national culture.

31

XFX

used music as their principle weapon in their struggle against commercial stations. Since the
early 1920s, the station had been noted for its high quality musical performances, and during the
next decade they were an important source for classical music in Mexico. When the
internationally renowned Mexican mezzo soprano Fanny Anitua returned to Mexico from her
tour in Italy in 1927, for instance, she donated three records of Mexican songs to the Ministry of
Public Education which were used in the music lessons of the National Conservatory and for the

30

Boletín de la SEP, Tomo VII, no. 5 (1928): 176.

31

Hayes, Radio Nation: Communication, Popular Culture, and Nationalism in Mexico, 19201950, 245, 255.
73

activity of the radio office.

32

Live radio concerts were other ways the station competed with the commercial sector. In
1930, XFX’s programming sought to counteract the jazz music being played over commercial
stations by offering nationalistic and artistic programs that featured classical and Mexican
folkloric music.

33

However, the majority of the music that was broadcast over XFX was

classical and chamber music, not the popular music being sung in the villages or rural Mexico.
While this style of programming had an audience at home and abroad, the generational gap
between the urban populations was growing and the majority of commercial stations in Mexico
had abandoned classical music by the early ‘30s. In fact, commercial radio broadcasting, more
in line with the evolution of popular music, new rhythms and recent developments, had a better
understanding of the changes in the market.
Music may not have been the best strategy to reach the majority of the population, but
through its powerful short wave transmitter, XFX played a key role broadcasting national rituals
of the post-revolutionary government. Assisted by engineers and technicians, in 1928 the
Ministry of Public Education installed a series of speakers on government buildings throughout
Mexico City, such as the National Cathedral’s main towers, at the exit of the National Palace,
and in the chambers of Congress.

34

The purpose was threefold: to offer those who did not own

radio receivers the opportunity to hear important events, such as the inaugural speeches of
32

Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Instituto de Investigaciones Sobre la Universidad
y la Educación (IISUE), Fondo D.A., Caja 16, Expediente 395, 33 Fs. Fo. 7147-7179.
33
34

Boletín de la SEP, Tomo IX, no. 5 (1930): 105-106.
Excélsior, September 1, 1928.
74

Presidents, to be a part of the daily political life of the nation, and to turn radio-listening into a
civic-patriotic activity taking place in public and symbolically relevant social spaces.
The speakers were used the following year during the government’s commemoration of
Mexican Independence Day. Nation-wide public holidays, in fact, created opportunities for the
State to reach both a local and an international audience. Audiences across Mexico and in the
United States took interest in this Independence Day transmission. According to the official
report, the 1929 broadcast “took all of the listeners located in different parts of the country or in
foreign soil, a temporary glimpse of the joy of the people, which culminated at the moment when
the President rung the historic bell and announced the independence of Mexico.”

35

For Mexican political leaders, the radio was a modern and efficient way to communicate
with the nation’s dispersed people who had crossed the northern border and were located in the
United States. Some, like President Calles, considered XFX the best station in Mexico City in
the 1920s and lauded its priority in spreading cultural propaganda within Mexico and abroad.
The station’s transmissions, he proclaimed, “are heard in North and Central America as well as
Cuba, even having received some correspondence from South America.”

36

Concerts and songs were the primary means by which government stations diffused
patriotic sentiments and, after 1930, Presidents took up the microphone to give speeches aimed at
unifying the nation. Keeping sight of the overseas population, for example, in the 1930s

35

Boletín de la SEP, Tomo VIII, no. 8 (1929): 131.

36

Presidentes Ante la Nación: Informes, Manifiestos y Documentos de 1821-1966. Tomo III
“El Gral. Plutarco Elías Calles, al abrir las sesiones ordinarias el Congreso, el 1º de septiembre
de 1925,” p. 703.
75

President Pascual Ortiz Rubio used the radio on a regular basis. On February 25, 1931 from his
residence in the Chapultepec Castle Ortiz Rubio addressed the nation and outlined the main
points of his cabinet’s plan. “The Government of the Republic hopes to compel all Mexicans,”
he said, “those residing within and outside of the country, to cooperate in their labor, with their
efforts, with their honorable attitude and even while sacrificing their passions, to the wellbeing
37

and development of our Patria.”
Radio and the Family

To many Mexican families, the technological advancements of the early twentieth
38

century -electricity, telegraph, radio- created a “revolution in the home.”

The arrival of radio

in Mexico brought alterations to the city’s landscape and created changes in familial gender
dynamics by bringing music and entertainment inside of the house, the space designated for the
administration of the wife and mother. As with all new innovations, after radio arrived in the
home the public was anxious to see how their life would change.
The majority of Mexico City’s population embraced the apparatus; however, some were
afraid and others skeptical and cynical about its effects on family life. In 1923, journalist L.G.
Varela wrote an article about the novelty of radio in Mexico. He noted “it is no longer the
tavern, nor the friend, nor the cantina, which keeps a man from his home. Neither the love of his
woman or his children has been able to do what the station El Buen Tono has. From his work,

37

El Universal, February 25, 1931.

38

José Felipe Gálvez Cancino, “Los Felices del Alba, (la primera década de la radiodifusión
mexicana),” (Tesis de licenciatura, Facultad de Ciencias Políticas y Sociales, UNAM, 1975), 33.
76

39

the man runs home on the nights in which El Buen Tono transmits concerts.”

Varela remarked

that since the advent of radio, men no longer needed to make excuses for not wanting to go home
or put their responsibilities to the side, but instead could go home and listen to the good quality
of commercial station’s CYB’s transmissions.
A look at transmissions by XFX’s radio office reveals that its mission mirrored the
attitudes of the state, especially concerning the role of men and women in society. Established in
1924, the radio department was separated into four sectors: educational, cultural, artistic and
informative. The largest division was the one headed by the cultural office which was
responsible for broadcasting concerts offered by the National Conservatory, remote control
conferences from the National University, which relied on telephone lines and a radio
40

transmitter, and classical and popular musical programs.

Through educational broadcasting, however, the SEP created a pattern whereby radio
stations targeted individual members of the family, giving them suggestions as to what their
place within post-revolutionary society would be. Through programs about child rearing and
psychology, the organization of the home, etiquette, health and hygiene, and proper dinner
conversation for instance, women were able to learn important post-revolutionary principles.
Mothers, in fact, were in charge of teaching, children were to be obedient to their parents, and all
members of the family were important citizens of a growing nation. XFX’s transmissions not
only directly mirrored the intentions of the government but also served as an outline for
commercial stations in the following decades. By the mid-twentieth century, commercial
39
40

El Demócrata, November 30, 1923, p. 12.
AGN, SCOP, Expediente 22/131.6 (725.1)/149.
77

stations like XEW transmitted programs like, Marimbas and Maracas, “at the time that the
‘muchachas’ would accompany the ‘señoras’ to the San Juan market for the groceries.”

41

Reasserting patriarchal authority in the household while projecting the family hierarchies
was in the best interest of the nationalist agenda and values. In the late 1920s and early 1930s,
XFX’s programming the station specifically targeted women as important audience members and
it offered “gender-based radio programming,” where state-sponsored attitudes concerning proper
behavior and roles in society were promoted through special lectures and broadcasts.
During the post-revolutionary decades, the school and the home were the principal
agencies for the socialization of the Mexican people. The home, according to policymakers, was
the basic social unit; the arena where the ideological formation took place. Through the Ministry
of Public Education it had been possible for the government to administer control of schools and
education. However, the home was a much more impenetrable terrain. In turn, one of the
strategies used to ensure women were being indoctrinated with official government ideas was to
educate the women of the urban and rural areas through radio programming.
Reaching women, who spent the majority of their time at home, was a principal objective
of XFX during the 1920s and early 1930s. The Ministry believed it was necessary for women to
be integrated into society because, along with teachers, she was responsible for educating the
new generation of Mexican children. Additionally, the government aspired to spread its cultural
project to all people of Mexico, and radio, in the hands of XFX, was a way to reach the Mexican
female population scattered throughout the nation and in the U.S. Southwest. As Alan Knight
41

In this context, muchachas refers to maids or servants and Señoras to their employers, the
women of the household in which they worked.
78

notes, “radio was considered especially important not only because listeners did not need to be
literate but also because it was accessible to rural women.”

42

During its first decade on the air, XFX also produced family based radio programming;
transmissions where the proper roles of men, women and children were advanced in the form of
special programs and lectures. Since 1924, for example, XFX had targeted children by
broadcasting stories in the early morning hours before they went to school.

43

These hours

remained set apart for children’s broadcasting during the following decades, aiding mothers as
they made breakfast and began their daily chores.
When XFX reorganized its programming in 1930 it separated its radio audience into four
groups: children, housewives and urban and rural workers. The radio office created special
programs for each sector with the firm belief that extending a cultural education was the number
one priority. Their programming included musical transmissions which were under the cultural
section of the programming, but which were of high importance in the socialization of many
Mexicans. Next to education, according to the SEP, it was important for radio stations to offer
quality artistic talent that would infuse a regard for culture and art. However, merging patriarchal
hierarchies with the new nationalist identity, in fact, constituted a priority in XFX’s social
44

mission.

In fact, there was a strong link between domestic life and radio. Advertisements for

radio during the early 1920s, for instance, showed how a woman could perform household
42

Alan Knight, “Popular Culture and the Revolutionary State in Mexico, 1910-1940,” The
Hispanic American Historical Review 74: 3 (Aug, 1994): 395.
43
44

VEA, November 23, 1934.
AHSEP, Caja 4, Expediente 9475/9.
79

chores such as ironing or sewing while listening to the radio with a headphone at the same time.
Radio was a functional tool to individual members of the family. Mexican women, for
example, could share the privilege of a life out of doors without ever having to leave their home.
In the ‘20s, commercial radio stations conducted remote control broadcasting from theaters and
some even broadcast live concerts in music halls and auditoriums. With live music at home,
women were no longer pressed for time or money to attend the theater. At home, they could be
entertained all day as radio stations would broadcast concerts from cabarets or theaters in the late
evenings, with dramas or conferences in the afternoons, mixed with a potpourri of musical
selections throughout the day.
One of the projects born under XFX specifically targeting the Mexican female audience
was a broadcast titled “La Hora del Hogar” (The Hour of the Home). The first of its kind seen
in Mexico, this show offered women advice on how to manage their home, learn about domestic
hygiene, daily food prices, fashion and even some world news. To the station, the goal of
broadcasting specifically to women went beyond education; it consisted in “contributing in a
45

useful manner, to moralization and good customs, to perfecting family life.”

This genre of

programming began in 1927 and continued through to the next decade. Immediately, women
became avid listeners of programming that was intended to suit their needs. During a report
made by the Ministry in 1929, for example, housewives accounted for owning the most radio
receivers.

45
46

46

According to historian Ageeth Sluis, in fact, this sector benefitted most from the

El Universal, March 6, 1927, p. 10.
AGN, SCOP, Expediente 22/131.6 (725.1)149.
80

educational programming of XFX.

47

The tradition of using radio to advance proper female behavior established by XFX set
new trends for commercial radio stations in the following decades. Specifically, through the
Radionovela, a day-time radio drama, stations promoted the proper female behavior to a wide
audience across Mexico. For instance, one of the most popular Radionovelas in Mexico City
was Anita de Montemar which began to air in the spring of 1941. The drama, whose success
helped launch a new era in live radio transmissions, featured the day to day activities and
challenges of an honorable Mexican woman. To Mexican female audiences, radio magazine
Radiolandia noted, “Anita de Montemar should be an example of a courageous, unselfish, noble,
48

Christian woman.”

La Hora Nacional
The inauguration of XEFO “Radio Nacional” (National Radio), the official station
operated by the Partido Nacional Revolucionario, (National Revolutionary Party), or PNR, in
1931, brought a decline in the use of XFX’s microphones by government leaders or in national
rituals. Initially, the station collaborated with the weekly magazine El Universal Ilustrado to
broadcast concerts every Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday nights at 8:00 p.m.

49

As the 1930s

progressed, and the power of the central government was consolidated, political leaders turned to

47

Ageeth Sluis, “Revolution and the Rhetoric of Representation: Gender Construction in
Mexican Radio and Cinema, 1920-1940,” (Master’s Thesis, University of Wyoming, 1997), 41.
48
49

Radiolandia, June 20, 1942.
El Universal Ilustrado, December 31, 1936.
81

this station to help them indoctrinate the people of Mexico on the ideologies of the PNR and
used the station as a tool in the incorporation of the proletariat as new citizens of Mexico. As
Propaganda and Culture Secretary for the PNR Manuel Jasso noted “by installing its radio station
the PNR is offering the most effective technique of diffusion to date which is a service to its
revolutionary ideology.”

50

In the coming decades, the party’s platform coincided with the

function of the radio station: to extend culture through art, music and literature, to instill
solidarity within the people of Mexico, to reach a domestic and international audience and, most
importantly, to have daily and continuous contact with the public.
On December 31, 1936 the laws of all the Federal Ministries and Departments were
revised and the Departamento Autónomo de Publicidad y Propaganda (Autonomous Press and
Publicity Department) or DAPP, was created. This new office consolidated all pre-existing
communications offices and the control of XFX transitioned from the authority of SCOP, to the
Department of the Interior. The department, which was designed to offer a unified offering of
government news and publicity both at home and abroad, propelled official radio to export
Mexican culture and arts, specifically through the weekly broadcast of La Hora Nacional, a onehour weekly program featuring music, drama, history, and government reports created in 1937
which is still transmitted in Mexico today. By law, every commercial station was mandated to
form a special network every Sunday evening whose goal for the entire nation and an overseas
listening audience was to be attuned to the message of the state. Journalist Ramón Beteta noted
that from the outset the broadcast served two purposes: to entrench relations between Mexicans
at home “and so that those who are located abroad will not forget their country.” Thanks to La
50

Manuel Jasso, Secretario de Propaganda y Cultura del Partido quoted in, Jorge Mejia Prieto,
Historia de la radio y la televisión en México, 55-56.
82

Hora Nacional, “Without a doubt! Our compatriots will cry with excitement knowing we have
reached out to them and, despite their distance from the Motherland, love them.”

51

By the late 1930s, it seemed that the government was losing its battle with commercial
stations for the Mexican immigrant market in the United States because of class and musical
differences within the audience. Then, during the administration of President Lázaro Cárdenas,
changes were made to the structure of the cabinet, directly affecting mass communications and
radio in particular. The government had been behind the establishment of national radio
regulations since the 1920s and, after the establishment of the DAPP in 1936, was able to impose
a form of programming that served its interests. Over the next decades, through official radio
broadcasts like La Hora Nacional, they used radio to present a concerted effort of government
news and policy both in Mexico and overseas.
Aside from transmitting music, high-quality programs, information and conferences, the
DAPP was created with the intention that one government body would coordinate all
government propaganda and publicity. At the time, the nation lacked this resource and the
DAPP pledged to organize all government information so that its doctrine could be made known
to the public. Following the move, the SEP did not cease their broadcasting activities at home or
abroad; instead, their office was absorbed by the DAPP which amplified the range of their
52

transmissions in 1937 when it acquired a new and even more powerful station.

Intended to

broadcast to the world the social and economic developments of Mexico, this official station was
51

Ramón Beteta, quoted in Renfro Cole Norris, “A History of La Hora Nacional: Government
Broadcasting via Privately Owned Radio Stations in Mexico” (PhD Dissertation, University of
Michigan, 1963), 191-192.
52

AGN, SCOP, Expediente 22/131.6-(725.1)/149.
83

designed to reach foreign countries in fulfillment of the statutes established by the Regional
53

Radio Congress of Havana, Cuba in 1938.

The transmissions of the new DAPP station, whose call letters were XEKA short wave
and XEDP long wave, were very similar to those of XFX before the merge: daily news bulletins,
agricultural instruction, public health information, statistics and information for the betterment of
the general public, useful data from the Treasury Department, and most importantly, music and
concerts. Live radio programs sponsored by the DAPP included popular music, chamber and
assembly hall concerts, artistic concerts, and a selection of recorded music played over
commercial stations. Weekly radio concerts had been part of official radio programming since
the early 1930s when the Ministry of Foreign Relations began to transmit a concert every Sunday
night through the government’s central short wave station in the Chapultepec Castle.

54

After 1937, the DAPP appropriated the idea and modified the structure of the programs
so that their objective included showcasing both Mexico’s national and foreign policy which was
carried out through La Hora Nacional. The goal was to use music to take national and
international listeners to the highest artistic and intellectual talent Mexico had to offer. “The
radio concerts of DAPP,” said the press “will reach the interior of the country as well as the most
remote places of the world.” The government imparted greater importance to the broadcasts by
demanding that all commercial stations in the nation transmit or re-transmit the programs.

53
54

55

La Prensa, January 31, 1938, p. 5.
AGN, SCOP, Expediente 22/131.6 (725.1)/62.

55

To date, not much has been written about “La Hora Nacional.” For a good overview see,
Renfro Cole Norris, “A History of La Hora Nacional: Government Broadcasting via Privately
84

Listening to the programs was, as a newspaper announcement indicated, “The civic duty of every
good Mexican,” and programs were intended to strengthen this responsibility.
Keeping in line with the mission of XFX, the new station used music and speeches to
contact Mexican immigrants living in the United States in order to promote their unity and offer
them some feeling about being Mexican. For instance, in the inaugural broadcast on July 25,
1937, director Agustín Arroyo Ch. made an appeal to Mexicans abroad to remember their
homeland. He noted,
It is our duty to make of Mexico an institution-universally strong and morally indestructible.
May these words reach also our countrymen abroad with the request that they rededicate
themselves to their Motherland: that their souls be strengthened by the memory of it; and that
regardless of the place where they are now, that they join with our teachers, soldiers, workers,
and all these men who are striving toward the conquest of a better future for the land that saw
56
them at birth.
As it grew, the station continued to include themes which the immigrant population could
relate to. In the summer of 1938 the DAPP organized a series of conferences and concerts
dedicated to Mexican immigrants in the United States. Titled, “The expropriation of the goods
of the petroleum companies that operated in Mexico,” the lectures were intended to inform
listeners in the United States about the petroleum nationalization of Mexico under Cárdenas.

57

The office hoped that the intended audience, which included the English-speaking public and
Mexican residents in the United States, in addition to the Mexican and foreign audience all over
the world, could learn about the social and economic developments of Mexico during one of the
Owned Radio Stations in Mexico,” (PhD Dissertation, University of Michigan, 1963).
56

Agustin Arroyo, quoted in Renfro Cole Norris, “A History of La Hora Nacional: Government
Broadcasting via Privately Owned Radio Stations in Mexico,” 44.
57

La Prensa, June 30, 1938, p. 5.
85

most significant moments for post-revolutionary nationalism.
In 1939, the DAPP offices closed and the program was transferred to the Ministry of
Interior, Gobernación. La Hora Nacional, in turn, became part of an office called Radio
Gobernación. The programming’s objective continued to be the same, transmitting useful
information about the economic and cultural activities of the nation. What changed was that
instead of creating a new government station to distribute the program to the rest of the nation,
President Manuel Ávila Camacho asked media mogul Emilio Azcárraga, head of XEW, to
produce the program. Thus, the weekly government-sponsored program became under
commercial supervision, a classic example of the “cordial relationship” between private and
58

public mass media sector during the twentieth century, as Elizabeth Hayes notes.

Radio Gobernación was responsible for the production of La Hora Nacional until 1959.
The program continued to appeal to the international audiences and oftentimes dedicated a
program to another country, a branch of government or a group of people, or a current nationwide project or event, such as the census or vaccination campaigns. On September of 1941, for
instance, the program was dedicated especially to México de Afuera (Mexico outside of Mexico).
That night, the broadcast featured the first performance by the Mexican National Marine Band
over the radio.

59

The long-term success of La Hora Nacional in promoting national unity is debated. In
1938, concerning the effectiveness of the DAPP, Emilio Azcárraga said, “The pueblo…will not
58

Hayes, Radio Nation,78-79.

59

Archivo General de la Nación, Ramo Presidentes, Fondo Manuel Ávila Camacho (Hereafter
AGN, MAC), Expediente 162/2.
86

60

become educated through radio, because they regard radio only as entertainment.”

Yet, by

1945, over 60 stations throughout Mexico linked with the XEDP and the station became one of
the most trusted mouthpieces of the government. Some argue, however, that due to the
combination of official bulletins and classical and orchestra music, the transmissions appealed
only to the upper classes with government ties. Many listeners throughout Mexico would either
shut off their receivers or turn them to another station that was not following the command of the
government. Yet, artistically, the programming was superior then most commercial stations at
the time because its government sponsorship allowed the directors to acquire noteworthy artistic
directors and special musical guests including acclaimed director Miguel Lerdo de Tejada,
composer Alfonso Esparza Oteo, and singers Pedro Vargas, Chela Campos and Lucha Reyes.
As the Cárdenas era came to an end by 1940, the direction of Mexico shifted to the
leadership of his successor, Manuel Ávila Camacho. The Camacho administration is noted for
its turn to the “right,” or towards a more conservative program; however, in general, the 1940s
was also an era when Mexico pursued a path of industrialization. The nation benefitted from an
economic boom brought about after joining the Allied forces in the Second World War, which
resulted in vast economic prosperity. Mass communications, a useful tool during war, was used
to rally the nation and remained under strict control of the government. Thus, during the 1940s,
the radio industry answered more directly to the demands of the government.
Patriotism was growing across the country during this time, a trend that desired to turn
everything that was art, culture and ideas into clearly “Mexican” objects. While the growing
film industry glorified Mexico’s rural countryside and the patria chica, radio was called upon to
60

La Prensa, May 1, 1938, p. 8.
87

diffuse the songs that accompanied, and sometimes preceded, the pictures on the screen. At the
same time, the industry was forced to edit the content of their programming and music. The
rapid turn to adopt a moral high ground in the national radio industry was so severe, for instance,
that in 1942 the Ministry of Communications and Public Works prohibited XEW from
transmitting a program that included the blowing of kisses over the air in one of their live radio
programs in order to “follow behavior, rectitude and morality norms.”

61

Ensuring that radio stations follow proper morals was not just a government concern.
Individuals and families throughout Mexico were in tune with the changes taking places within
mass media and, at times, took on the role of inspectors. Some, like Narciso Bassols, voiced
their opinions on the way the government was using its power within the radio industry. In early
December of 1942, the government had shut down the live broadcast of a meeting organized by
the Sindicato Industrial de Trabajadores Mineros, Metalúrgicos y Similares over official station
XEFO. Bassols, who held an office in the station, disputed the actions to President Camacho.
“Recently, you expressed that your government will respect, on a broad scale, freedom of
expression,” he wrote, “We cannot believe that the President of the Republic is in agreement that
62

a rally in protest of the high cost of living, is a rally against the government.”

Another sector of the listening audience did, in fact, see eye to eye with the need to adopt
rigorous guidelines over the airwaves. In the fall of 1942, Mexico City residents Juan Villegas
and María Paz de Ramírez sent a letter to Camacho concerning a radio broadcast they had heard
the night of August 23 over XEW. The drama told the story of a Mexican woman who took
61
62

Radiolandia, June 20, 1942, p. 11.
AGN, MAC, Expediente 710.1/101.86.
88

revenge on her alcoholic husband by having an affair with another man. When she confessed
what had transpired, he did not believe her. Angry, she ran to her in-laws for help, who advised
her to deny the incident, return home and ask forgiveness from her husband. After he forgave
her for “lying,” the drama ended. Through the airwaves, Villegas and Paz de Ramírez wrote, the
drama had entered their homes “abusing the respect we had placed on XEW.” In addition,
because the play regarded the “morality of Mexican society in general” they demanded that the
President intervene and punish the station for the loose morals promoted in the broadcast.

63

Other radio listeners across Mexico shared the opinion that radio programming needed to
set a good, and morally upright, example to Mexican families. In an article for the magazine
Radiolandia, Eduardo Correa Jr. commented that “as the best friend of the home…the radio
needs to be a model of decency and neatness.”

64

The desire to intervene on this matter was so

great that in 1943 a “Mexican League of Decency” was established in Mexico City which
dedicated itself to printing a weekly magazine in which they gave reviews on entertainment like
the cinema and live shows like radio and theater productions throughout the city. The League
took on the task of evaluating whether or not these events “tend to the decency and neatness of
language” and considered themselves responsible for correcting “many of the vices that exist
today” in the industry.

65

Conclusion

63
64
65

AGN, MAC, Caja 555, Expediente 512.32/43.
Radiolandia, August 10, 1942.
Radiolandia, June 25, 1943.
89

During the post-revolutionary era, the Mexican government benefitted from the
international reach of new technology. Radio broadcasting, in particular, played an influential
role and was adopted as a viable tool used to implement the cultural project. Since the mid
1920s, XFX helped the government form a “national space” by broadcasting government rituals,
conferences, music, etc. across great distances. More importantly, the station also brought
together culture, art and music and set a blueprint for Mexican commercial radio programming
by seeking the foreign audience and relying on gender-specific transmissions. With advanced
communications methods like radio, the government also took the project across Mexico and into
the United States where Mexican immigrants were making their homes during the first half of
the twentieth century.
But by the mid-1930s, the weakness in the official radio system was evident. The official
sector could not compete with commercial radio, because, even though government-owned
stations accounted for 15% of all total stations in 1937, they did not operate as a network, their
programming was not uniform and their coverage did not reach a wide segment of the population
as commercial stations did. Consequently, as Renfro Cole Norris explains, “when the federal
government wished to reach the general public on a national scale, it turned to the stations with
the larger audience- the commercial stations.”

66

Official radio stations in Mexico City aimed for

an audience of listeners in the United States and used government legislation, censorship and
gender-specific programming to fight for this audience; in northern Mexico, entrepreneurs
established stations along the border during the 1930s and 1940s to carry out the same objective.

66

Renfro Cole Norris, “A History of La Hora Nacional,” 26-27.
90

Chapter III
Creating Listeners though the Air: Mexican Border Radio Entrepreneurs and their
Overseas Audience, 1930-1950

“Today, through the radio my voice can reach all the people in the United States from the
Embassy office. One hundred years ago communication between the North American and the
Mexican capital took more than one month. Today the two countries are literally face to face.”
1

-U.S. Ambassador to Mexico, Dwight W. Morrow, 1930.

During the first half of the twentieth century, radio stations in Mexico relied on a faithful
listening audience across the United States. In the 1930s and 1940s, devout listeners from
California, Arizona, Texas, New York and New Jersey stayed awake late at night or rose in the
early morning when signals could be easily intercepted and tuned in to Mexican radio stations.
In San Antonio, this audience included Mexican immigrants like Mr. Martinez who was
determined to hear Mexican music and “used to get up about three o’clock in the morning and
make some coffee, smoke cigarettes and listen to…the radio.”

2

By the 1930s, Mexican stations along the U.S.-Mexico border, like XEP of Ciudad
Juárez, Chihuahua, had established “a permanent spiritual connection with the Mexicans who
either live or are traveling through the U.S. South” and worked with the Mexican government to
carry out their marketing plans, which included reaching the Mexican immigrant and U.S. born

1

La Prensa, September 27, 1930, p. 3, 10.

2

Chris Strachwitz, and James Nicolopulos, Lydia Mendoza: A Family Autobiography (Houston:
Arte Público Press, 1993), 76-78.
91

3

population in the United States. Archival records from the Secretaría de Comunicaciones y
Obras Públicas (the Ministry of Communications and Public Works), or SCOP, the government
institution responsible for mass communications operations, reveal the intent and motivation
entrepreneurs had in building radio stations along the Mexican border with the United States.
Correspondence between SCOP offices and XEXP of Matamoros, Tamaulipas, for example,
indicates the need some stations had to be “heard primarily allende el Bravo [on the other side of
the Rio Grande], as there is a great number of Mexicans who are anxious to hear the voice of
their Patria [Motherland], but because of the distance and interference from the American
4

stations, cannot find it.”

This chapter describes the establishment of radio stations in the Mexican states of
Chihuahua, Tamaulipas, Nuevo León and the Baja California territories by border radio
entrepreneurs during the 1930s and 1940s. First, it shows how mass media legislation helped
their stations by protecting them from foreign influence and allowing them to advertise in both
Spanish and English and, second, it explains how owners prospered because their stations grew
at the same time that the Northwestern and Northeastern regions of Mexico were being
integrated into the national economy. In the 1930s and 1940s border radio station owners were
successful entrepreneurs by creating business plans and strategies that catered to the Mexican
population living in the United States.
The Mexican radio industry expanded in the late 1920s and early 1930s thanks to the
3

Radiolandia, April 22, 1943.

4

Archivo General de la Nación, Fondo: Secretaría de Comunicaciones y Obras Públicas
(hereafter AGN, SCOP) Expediente 22/131.6 (721.1)/14.
92

influence of a number of people in the private sector including engineers, inventors, wealthy
entrepreneurs and businessmen. These men were members of the generation who came of age
during the Mexican Revolution (1910-1920) and whose lives were transformed by the arrival of
electricity, modern equipment and technology such as the telegraph, telephone, automobiles,
airplanes and, of course, radio. They were also part of a growing entrepreneurial class in
5

Mexico, one which, some argue, had an apolitical stance. In radio broadcasting, these
businessmen were not part of the intellectual class of Mexico; instead, they took interest in the
new industry out of curiosity or because of the financial profits that could be made through radio.
These men were entrepreneurs like Fernando Parra Briseño, who requested in 1935 that
SCOP assign him one of the unoccupied frequency channels in Mexico so that he could build a
radio station in Tijuana to “be heard among the population in Southern California, where
6

millions of Mexicans exist.” By the 1940s this group of entrepreneurs also included women
like Rosa de Múzquiz, who desired to build a 750 watt commercial radio station in the city of
Matamoros, Tamaulipas during the 1930s. Múzquiz pleaded with the government in Mexico
City that her station be “declared ‘Regional Station,’ since it intends to cover the banks of the

5

There were some businessmen, who did not have direct political affiliation, and triumphed in
the privately funded cultural industries. This is a trend that goes back to the mid-1920s and
1930, when, as radio was being introduced in Mexico, a number of radio stations appeared
alongside newspapers like El Heraldo de México, El Universal and Excélsior. See, Ángel
Miquel, “Dos efímeras empresas de los años veinte: el periódico El Mundo y su estación de
radio.” in María del Carmen Collado, ed., Miradas recurrentes I. La ciudad de México en los
siglos XIX y XX. (México, DF: Instituto Mora, 2004), 468.
6

AGN, SCOP, Expediente 22/131.6(722)/23.2.
93

Río Bravo covering approximately 100 kilometers, with day and night services.”

7

As they

established their stations, Briseño and other entrepreneurs invested in radio by purchasing
equipment from the United States, transporting it to Mexico and selling “air time” to businesses
in the United States, many of which were owned by Mexican immigrants or U.S. born Mexicans.
In the following decades, radio broadcasting development was dictated by the close
relationship between Mexican entrepreneurs, transnational capital and the Mexican state’s efforts
to regulate communications and promote economic development. Both the government and
border radio entrepreneurs took into consideration the impact that the estimated one million
citizens who migrated to the United States during the first three decades of the twentieth century
8

had upon the nation’s economic, political and cultural climate. Mexican entrepreneurs,
however, stand at the center of this process, dictating the path radio needed to proceed, securing
foreign finance and technology to flow into Mexico and ensuring that the government did not
underwrite their authority.

9

Radio Broadcasting to the United States
Radio broadcasts from Mexico to the United States after the late 1920s were
7

AGN, SCOP, Expediente 22/131.6 (721.1)/12.

8

The literature on the migration of Mexicans to the United States is extensive. For a look at the
Chicano Studies perspective on the factors contributing to this exodus see, Douglas Monroy,
Rebirth: Mexican Los Angeles from the Great Migration to the Great Depression (Berkeley and
Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999); David G. Gutiérrez, Walls and Mirrors:
Mexican Americans, Mexican Immigrants and the Politics of Ethnicity (Berkeley and Los
Angeles: University of California Press, 1995).
9

John Sinclair, “Dependent development and broadcasting: ‘the Mexican formula,’” Media,
Culture and Society Vol. 8 (1986): 99.
94

separated into three categories: trans-border programming, transnational broadcasts and
international broadcasts. Trans-border programming was the practice of carrying out
radio broadcasts especially for Mexican audiences by radio stations along or close to the
U.S.-Mexico border, whereas transnational broadcasts were those originating in Mexico
from high-powered or short-wave radio stations, thus having enough power to be heard in
the United States. Transnational broadcasts were commonplace until the 1940s when
international legislation limited the act of sending signals across international borders by
the use of high-powered stations. International broadcasts, finally, were less frequent and
usually accompanied an important public or political event, such as “Pan-American
Day,” on April 14, 1931 when Mexico celebrated the establishment of the Pan-American
Union and coordinated with the governments of the United States and other countries in
the Caribbean to re-transmit a program with a special radio messages by the Mexican
10

President, Pascual Ortiz Rubio.

By the mid 1930s, radio transmissions from Mexico to the United States also came from
so called “border blasters,” a term popularized by Gene Fowler and Bill Crawford.

11

“Border

Radio,” is a blanket term used to describe powerful and influential U.S. radio stations set up in
Northern Mexico between the 1930s and the 1950s. These stations disregarded the restrictions
set in place by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), attained permission and
licensing from the Mexican government, and established single-station networks whose

10

Excélsior, April 15, 1931.

11

Gene Fowler and Bill Crawford, Border Radio: Quacks, yodelers, pitchmen, psychics, and
other amazing broadcasters of the American airwaves (Austin: Texas Monthly Press, 1987).
95

extraordinary power allowed their programs to be heard all over the United States.

12

Border Entrepreneurs and the Law
Among the long list of changes to the political and social structure of Mexico, the
Mexican Revolution also produced a stable entrepreneurial class. In the radio industry, men like
Carlos Kennedy, who was “fanatic for everything related to radio,” combined their enthusiasm
with basic capitalist principles and believed that private enterprise was the best way to achieve
economic success.

13

Along the U.S.-Mexico border, this progress came about thanks to laws

created by the Mexican government allowing radio station owners to fulfill the needs of Mexican
audiences in the United States. An analysis of mass media legislation during the 1930 reveals a
look at the way border radio entrepreneurs worked with the government to advance their own
marketing structures, which included the needs and interests of Mexicans living abroad.
Legislation passed in 1926, 1931, 1933 and 1936, in particular, gave entrepreneurs the chance to
build stations, and assisted in the expansion of commercial radio during the first half of the
twentieth century.
In 1926, before the first mass media law was established in Mexico, the President
Alvaro Obregón, and the Minister of Communications and Public Works, signed a
contract establishing the parameters of radio broadcasting. In this agreement, it was
12

For more on the topic of “Border Radio” see, Gene Fowler and Bill Crawford, Border Radio,
José Luis Ortiz Garza, Una radio entre dos reinos: la increíble historia de la radiodifusora
mexicana más potente del mundo de los años 30 (Mexico: DF: Javier Vergara, 1997); Roberto
Avant-Mier, “Heard it on the X: border radio as public discourse and the Latino legacy in
popular music” in Michael C. Keith, ed., Radio Cultures: the Sound Medium in American Life
(New York: Peter Lang, 2008), 47-64.
13

AGN, SCOP, Expediente 22/131.6(722)/5
96

mentioned that in order to acquire a permit for a new or existing station the applicant
needed to prove to be Mexican born or a naturalized citizen, noting that “without this
requirement a permit will not be granted.”

14

Thus, the intent of the government was to

build a national industry run by Mexican citizens, using Mexican equipment and without
foreign influence.
In Mexico City, where a large portion of the radio stations were located, this
stipulation was less problematic; however, along the U.S.-Mexico border foreigners, at
time, were stuck in frustrating and disadvantageous positions. For instance, in 1932,
Norm Baker, a United States entrepreneur from Iowa, invested a quarter of a million
dollars building a 150,000 watt radio station in the border town of Nuevo Laredo,
Mexico. The following year, on August 14, 1933, Baker wrote a letter to the Minister of
Communications and Public Works in Mexico City requesting permission to take a
telephone wire from his station, XENT, across the U.S.-Mexico border and transmit radio
programs from a studio in Laredo, Texas, less than two miles away.
“Remote control” broadcasts, as this form of transmissions were called, had been
taking place in Mexico since 1923 but in accordance with a 1931 law, remote control
transmissions could not take place in foreign soil. Nevertheless, Baker argued that he
should be allowed to take the cable across the border because his station would provide
for the Mexican government a valuable line of communication that would ultimately
promote tourism to Mexico. Additionally, Baker confessed that there were already
stations in the border cities of Villa Acuña and Piedras Negras that were operating by
14

Ibid.
97

remote control from studios in the United States. There was even “a small station” in
Nuevo Laredo, he admitted, that had been operating from a hotel in Laredo, Texas.

15

Baker’s insistence, both to broadcast in the United States and his fervent desire to
cooperate with the Mexican government, placed him within a small group of U.S.
businessmen in Mexico during the twentieth century. Since 1931, when his own radio
station in Muscatine, Iowa was banned by the FCC, Baker was determined to defy the
U.S. government and build the most powerful and popular commercial station in North
America. On several occasions he requested to increase the power of his station to
750,000 watts in order to surpass all existing stations in the continent. Yet unlike other
“border blasters,” he extended his services to Mexico by offering free air time to the
Ministries of Education and Foreign Relations and even considered himself a close friend
of Mexican President Plutarco Elías Calles, whom he had met in 1926.
Nevertheless, the law passed by the Mexican government and Baker’s narrow
vision of “border radio,” one that considered using transmissions only to contact Englishlanguage listeners, prevented him from carrying out his plan. To him, stations located
along the U.S.-Mexico border would be effective only if they offered ten to fifteen
minute English or Spanish-language programs, not translated transmissions. Baker,
however, failed to consider the one million Mexicans who migrated to the United States
during the first three decades of the twentieth century, most of whom had eager ears for
national Mexican music. His myopia thus failed to take into account the cultural and
transnational dimension of radio broadcasting.
15

AGN, SCOP, Expediente 22/131.6 (721.1)/17.
98

By 1931, the government signed the Ley de Vías Generales de Comunicación, a
mass media legislation clearly defining the parameters of all mass communications
operations in Mexico. Even though radio stations in Nuevo Laredo or Tijuana were far
away from the capital city, SCOP ensured stations were monitored once a year by
government assessors. In their reports, SCOP inspectors wrote information concerning
the daily programming and extra-curricular activity of radio stations. For instance, in
October 1931 the assessor of station XER of Villa Acuna, Coahuila wrote: “I have
carefully observed the services of said station…all of their English announcements are
first read in Spanish, and in all of their concerts they play national music.”

16

This

effective monitoring can be interpreted either as a success in the power of the state to
control its Ministries or in the concern it had over the information that was coming in and
out of the country through the ether.
Commercial radio was not a profitable business until the late 1930s thanks to advertising,
which allowed border radio entrepreneurs the ability to reach the Spanish-speaking foreign
audience by selling air time to U.S. advertising companies. In a law passed in 1933, the
government made room for bilingual advertising agencies in all commercial radio operations.
Article 26 of the legislation deemed that transmissions had to be in Spanish. According to the
decree “the official language is Spanish, all commercial oral transmissions need to use it…When
this type of transmissions desire to be made in a language other than Spanish, authorization is
needed from the Ministry.” However, the law noted that if the broadcasts were “solely
commercial announcements” they were allowed to be translated, only if the English message
16

AGN, SCOP, Expediente 525/16 Datos sobre la estación de Villa Acuna, Coah. Octubre
1931. Sin nombre.
99

followed the Spanish one.

17

Three years later, when the regulation was amended, it stated that

stations could only advertise in foreign languages for 50% of their total daily air time.

18

The consumers across the United States border were distinctly Mexican, and
Mexican entrepreneurs in border stations patronized businesses in the United States
headed by fellow Mexican citizens or second-generation U.S. born Mexicans. Station
XEAW of Reynosa, Tamaulipas, for instance, broadcast a program under the direction of
Arnaldo Ramirez, a McAllen native who formed an ad agency in the beginning of World
War II with his boss at a local furniture store. Once a day during the 1930s, Ramirez
crossed the Texas border to host his program in the Reynosa studios. The program
gained wide popularity and was on air for four hours a day in the late 1930s; allowing the
owners of XEAW to amass large profit by leasing blocks of air time.

19

Advertising for businesses in the United States allowed commercial radio stations
to make considerable profits. At times, they also led to competition between station
owners and protests by the local community along the border. In 1935, for instance,
Leopoldo Allende, a radio announcer from Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, set out to launch a
new station in the city that would play records and broadcast live radio programs from
local cabarets. The Spanish-language press in San Antonio, Texas, which covered news
and events along the border, noted that it was not necessary for Ciudad Juárez to have a
17

Diario Oficial, 8 de Julio 1933. “Ley de Impuestos a las estaciones radiodifusoras.”

18

Diario Oficial, 30 de diciembre 1936. “Reglamento de las estaciones radioeléctricas
comerciales, culturales y de aficionados.”
19

Gene Fowler and Bill Crawford, Border Radio, 219.
100

third radio station and criticized radio owners and businessmen, claiming that “they are
concerned with getting ahead whichever way possible as long as they are making money
through advertising.”

20

In response, residents of the border city made plans to address

the Ministry of Communications and Public Works headquarters in Mexico City, asking
that they assign the same frequency to all local stations so that they would have to take
turns in their transmissions, as opposed to taking up all the room on the radio spectrum.
Many times, U.S. born Mexican business owners took advantage of being able to
broadcast in both English and Spanish by paying only for Spanish-language air time. In
1944 in a trimester report for XEFV of Ciudad Juárez, for example, only one of the
twelve South Texas businesses including Franklin’s Tienda de Ropa, Las Norteñas
Abarrotes, Teatro Colon, Myrtle Auto Wrecking, Co., Bustamante Garage, La Prisiense,
Jesús Herrera Garage, Bob’s Shop for Man, Academia Munoz, Layva’s Garage, Fruteria
Helguera and Clark’s Tienda de Ropa, paid for Spanish and English-language
advertisements. The other stations averaged between ten to fifteen minutes of air time
per day.

21

By the late 1930s, as commercial radio was becoming more profitable, stations
across the Northeast and Northwest were required to list all of the advertisements from
foreign businesses in their quarterly reports. Advertisements were crucial to the success
of stations and allowed some of them to broadcast almost 24 hours a day. By 1943, for
example, one station boasted that for four consecutive years it had been transmitting
20
21

La Prensa, January 18, 1935, p. 5.
AGN, SCOP, Expediente 22/131.6 (721.4)/1.
101

sixteen hours a day with paid advertisements.

22

SCOP files in Mexico City,

furthermore, contain evidence indicating business ads from cities across the United
States. For instance, Rosario Beach station XERB received advertising monies from
Mercury Insurance Company of San Antonio, Everlasting Baby Shoes Co. of Topeka,
Camera Man and American Schools of Chicago, Nacor State Life Building of
Indianapolis, and The American Paultry Journal of New York City, among others.

23

The

laws passed favored Mexican entrepreneurs like Carlos de la Sierra, owner of a Tijuana
station who noted that “the only way to exist as a commercial station is through Los
Angeles, Cal. With more than one million inhabitants this city is practically the focal
point of all business in the western region of the United States…in order for a station to
survive, it is essential that it obtain advertisements from that city.”

24

Hence, in the 1930s, while Baker and other U.S. entrepreneurs set their sights on
using high-powered radio stations in Mexico to circumvent U.S. law, Mexican border
radio owners prospered by working with the Mexican mass media legislation which
demanded that they play Mexican national music, coveted by their audience of Mexican
immigrants in the United States and also by allowing them to sell advertisements to U.S.
businesses. The laws passed during the 1930s, then, allowed border stations to not only
to sell music and advertising, but also to create consumers.

22
23
24

Radiolandia, March 20, 1943, p. 9.
AGN, SCOP, Expediente 22/131.6(722)/8.
AGN, SCOP, Expediente 22/131.6(722)/22.
102

Building Northern Mexico
With the law on their side, Mexican radio entrepreneurs set about building stations along
the border during the 1930s and 1940s. The most profound growth of the northern border was
the direct result of the attention given to the area by post-revolutionary administrations, in
particular by President Lázaro Cárdenas (1934-1940). The border, a unique place of exchange,
distribution, adjacency and confluence, expanded during this time and created a distinct cultural
space. By transmitting live or recorded music along with commercials for Mexican ethnic
businesses from California to Chicago, border radio stations provided entertainment based on
norteño music, nationalist culture and immigrant experiences. In the 1930s and 1940s these
Mexican stations, in fact, introduced the U.S. born Mexican generation to Tejana singers like
Lydia Mendoza and Mexican immigrant composers and radio announcers like Pedro J. González.
Simultaneously, the border also put a strain on the operations of border radio stations and
improvisation became common in radio station programming during the 1930s and 1940s. At
the time, limited distribution of U.S. labels in Latin America led some station managers to cross
the border, purchase Spanish-language records by Vocalion, Blue Bird, RCA or other labels,
return to their studios in Mexico, and play them on the air. Oftentimes, during a live broadcast,
radio announcers of stations like XENT of Villa Acuña, Coahuila, would ask “Lydia Mendoza,
which song are you going to sing?” and then proceed to play a record by the legendary Mexican
folk singer.

25

The growth of border radio stations like XENT also coincided with the integration of the
Northwest and the Northeast into the national economy, a second process in the trajectory of
25

Chris Strachwitz and James Nicolopulos, Lydia Mendoza, 129-131.
103

radio development in Mexico that aided the marketing plans of border radio entrepreneurs.
During the Mexican Revolution, industrial, economic and agricultural labor prospered in the U.S.
Southwest, propelling migration from central and northern Mexico. The Southwest was an
attractive region to Mexican agricultural workers who were lured to cross the border by higher
wages, greater opportunities to prosper and, in some instances, to escape the havoc brought on by
violence and bloodshed of the political and religious events affecting the nation.
In the United States, the infrastructure, economy and population of states like California,
Arizona and Texas expanded rapidly during the 1920s thanks to cheap labor and an unlimited
supply of workers. But by the end of the decade, the world-wide economic crisis directed the
federal government to restrict the entry of groups of foreigners, which included Mexicans. In
turn, many who were either prohibited from crossing the border or failed to do so remained in the
region, separating the two nations and immediately straining the limited natural resources-mostly
water-and social services.
In Northern Mexico, economic growth was stimulated by agricultural, mining and
railroad construction which transformed unpopulated territories into important
commercial sites by the mid-nineteenth century. However, Northern Mexico has distinct
regional characteristics and cannot be conceived as one area, given that in the West, the
region was desolate and home to only a handful of urban centers by the 1920s, while in
the Central North and the Northeast, cities in the states of Chihuahua, Tamaulipas and
Nuevo León were established in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

26

26

See, Thomas Benjamin and William McNellie, eds., Other Mexicos: Essays on Regional
Mexican History, 1876-1911 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1984) and Andrew
Grant Wood, ed. On the Border: Society and Culture Between the United States and Mexico
104

The rate of development in this area was slow, however, and by the midnineteenth century there was a stark visible difference between the U.S. Southwest and
northern Mexico: the former was integrated into the national economy as an up and
coming region and the latter scarcely connected to the rest of the nation. This, scholars
argue, forced the local population to adopt the ways of life, commerce and consumption
27

practices of the United States.

Attempts by the Mexican government to spur growth along the border directly
affected the growth of the radio industry, mostly clearly seen in the convergence between
the government’s cultural educational programs and radio. Radio broadcasting, next to
aviation and the telephone, were symbols of the potential in Mexico’s technological and
educational fields. In 1931, the ruling political party in Mexico, the Partido Nacional
Revolucionario (National Revolutionary Party), or PNR, implemented a program
including agrarian reform, nationalism programs, anticlericalism and socialist education.
With the help of radio, the project to jumpstart the educational system yielded favorable
results. This was, according to Alan Knight, an “education that would impart scientific
knowledge, practical skills, class consciousness, and international solidarity.”

28

During the first three decades of the twentieth century, in the United States the

(Landham: Roman and Littlefield, 2003).
27

Eliseo Mendoza Berrueto, “Historia de los programas federales para el desarrollo económico
de la frontera norte” in Ojeda, Mario, ed., Administración del desarrollo de la frontera norte
(México, DF: El Colegio de México, 1982), 39-84.
28

Alan Knight, “Popular Culture and the Revolutionary State in Mexico, 1910-1940,” The
Hispanic American Historical Review 74: 3 (Aug, 1994): 419.
105

combining forces of repatriation and migration resulted in an increase in the number of
inhabitants along the U.S.-Mexico border. The arrival of families to the area put a strain
on existing resources ranging from public services to schools. According to statistics for
the 1935 school year, for example, more than 2,000 children, from six to twelve years of
age, were unable to enroll in public schools in the state of Chihuahua.
Schools were important for the post-revolutionary cultural project because
primary education was a cornerstone of the government’s political and cultural mission.
In response, the government, through the Ministry of Public Education, or SEP,
sponsored a number of education projects in the northern states. As in previous decades,
they used education to advance nationalism and hoped that through proper schooling,
parents would avoid migrating to the United States and hold fast to their national heritage
and culture. The collaboration between the State and the SEP led teachers like the
regional director of Chihuahua to request for the SEP to construct “four new modern
schools in order to lift the regional and cultural prestige of this region, which only had
cantinas and cabarets to show tourists until a short while ago.”

29

To the government, building schools in the northern territories served two
purposes: educate the population and deter families from crossing the border and enroll
their children in schools in the United States. Political leaders, who stood behind the
SEP’s projects, joined the cause in building schools to stop emigration into the United
States. In his annual address to Congress on September 1, 1931, President Pascual Ortiz
Rubio declared that “six new secondary schools were created, one in the southern
29

La Prensa, August 5, 1935, p. 2.
106

territory of Baja California and the others in the principal cities in the north of the
country. With this measure we hope to decrease the emigration of young men and
women who previously had to end their studies or continue them in nearby populations,
30

in the United States.”

During the 1920s, radio corresponded with the post-revolutionary government’s
project because it signified that technological modernity had arrived in Mexico. Radio,
additionally, also converged with education because it came from science, and scientific
thought was a fundamental part of socialist education. Knight notes “Socialist educationwhose very objective was the inculcation of a rational and exact concept of the universe
and social life- involved talks expounding, for example, the ‘scientific explanation of
miracles’ or the scientific basis of natural phenomena.”

31

And while radio stations did

not directly contribute to the construction of new schools, they disseminated important
information about education and were influential in the development of the region.
Radio along the Northeastern Border
Following the Revolution, the government sponsored an irrigation system which
facilitated agricultural development in the areas below the Rio Grande. Consequently,
from the late 1930s through the 1960s the states of Tamaulipas, Nuevo León and
Coahuila reaped the benefits of a so-called “cotton boom.” Water, a principal factor in
determining the location of economic activities, was an integral component of this
30

Presidentes Ante la Nación: Informes, Manifiestos y Documentos de 1821-1966. Tomo III.
“El. Ing. Pascual Ortiz Rubio, al abrir las sesiones ordinarias el Congreso, el 1º de septiembre de
1931,” p. 1077.
31

Alan Knight, “Popular Culture and the Revolutionary State in Mexico, 1910-1940,” 419.
107

expansion. Under Cárdenas, the government offered ejido land that was enmontada
(thickly covered), and turned over to be cultivated for cotton and other crops.
Large scale redistribution affected the states of Coahuila, Sonora and the Baja
California territory and in 1935, over 181,000 people worked in communal agriculture
throughout northern Mexico. Two years later, the Cárdenas administration distributed
32

almost 25,000 hectares of land to peasant families.

Government investment in the area

led directly to migration from the interior of the country to the state of Tamaulipas where
men worked as day laborers, seasonal agricultural workers, or to tried to land a contract
as Braceros in the pre and post-World War II era.

33

A substantial number of commercial stations appeared during the ‘30s and ‘40s along the
Northeastern half of the U.S.-Mexico border. Since the nineteenth century, Northeast Mexico
included markets oriented towards consumers in the United States in large cities in the states of
Chihuahua and Nuevo León, such as Ciudad Juárez and Monterrey. In the 1930s, after the onset
of new communications technology such as commercial radio, tourists, technicians, and
entertainers settled in the towns along the Rio Grande and brought permanent changes to the
local economies. The quick rate at which mass communication technology grew in cities like
Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, for instance, allowed the state to be the driving force behind
commercial activity and a regional nucleus in the radio industry by the 1940s.

32

David E. Lorey, The U.S.-Mexican Border in the Twentieth Century: A History of Economic
and Social Transformation (Wilmington, Delaware: Scholarly Resources, 1999), 80-81.
33

Francisco Ramos Aguirre, Los Alegres de Terán Vida y Canciones (México, DF: Consejo
Nacional Para la Cultura y las Artes, 2003), 67.
108

The arrival of stations in the Northeast was also on par with the advent of
commercial radio stations nation-wide. In 1931, the same year that Mexico City’s
legendary station, XEW, “La Voz de América Latina desde México,” (The Voice of Latin
America from Mexico) was founded, two stations, XET of Monterrey and XEJ of Ciudad
Juárez, also went on the air for the first time. These two states, Nuevo León and
Chihuahua, were also home to pioneers in Mexican radio broadcasting.
Chihuahua was home to one of the first stations to extend its transmissions across
the Mexican border with the United States. After their inaugural transmission the night
of December 14, 1923, station XICE, owned and operated by the state government
broadcast concerts, instructive lectures, conferences and bilingual news.

34

The station

was permitted to air the broadcasts in Spanish and in English because at the time the
Mexican government had not enacted mass media legislation concerning the parameters
and use of commercial radio.
Unknowingly, the state of Chihuahua spearheaded a practice that would continue
until the end of the century. In fact, oftentimes employers sought bilingual broadcasters
when they realized these men and women had an easier time pronouncing Englishlanguage ads over the air during commercial breaks. Jesus Soltero Lozoya, an announcer
known as El Gallito Madrugador (The Early Rooster), for instance, worked in station
XELO of Chihuahua during the 1940s and confessed he had gotten his job because he
was bilingual. Lozoya learned to speak English in the early 1920s when he moved to Los
Angeles with his family to work in the agricultural fields. By 1927 his family returned to
34

El Universal, December 13, 1923.
109

Chihuahua, but he continued to be influenced by U.S. culture, especially sports. After his
dream of becoming a professional baseball player in the United States was shattered by
an injury, he approached the owner of XELO and asked for a job as a sports broadcaster
in the station. The owner willingly accepted the proposition and the career of El Gallito
Madrugador, one of Chihuahua’s legendary sports announcers, was born.
Dozens of other bilingual broadcasters like Lozoya contributed to the prosperity
of border stations in the first half of the twentieth century. Not only did they have an
easier time pronouncing names, calling plays or reading commercials, but they
established a relationship with Mexicans who had lived in the United States since the
early decades of the twentieth century by incorporating slangs and popular culture
references their audiences could relate to. Lozoya was proud that XELO was “the
teacher of the air for thousands of compatriots living in the United States” who
maintained unified thanks to Spanish language transmissions and Mexican music aside
from offering a regional multi-lingual programming.

35

Since the early 1920s, the radio

industry counted on other regional nuclei other than Mexico City such as the North and
the South, each of which had a peculiar relation with the political center (i.e. Mexico
City). Thus, depending on their location, as Fernández Christlieb contends, radio
businessmen and broadcasters used strategic language in their programming.

36

Radio entrepreneurs along the border coveted Mexican audiences on both sides of
35

Marcos Aldana Aguirre, El gallito madrugador: la vida de Jesús Soltero Lozoya (México:
Ciudad Juárez, 2001), 95.

36

Fátima Fernández Christlieb, La Radio Mexicana: Centro Y Regiones (México, DF: J. Pablos
Editor, 1991), 13, 19.
110

the U.S.-Mexico border. On some occasions, stations in Mexico fought with Englishlanguage stations in the United States over the Spanish-speaking Mexican audience. In
the 1930s, station XEJ of Ciudad Juárez, battled with two stations in El Paso over control
of the airwaves spanning across the two neighboring cities. In the fall of 1930 the
stations on the U.S. side of the border claimed they had lost a large number of their
Spanish and English-language audience due to the “Mexican characteristics” of XEJ’s
programs. This allegation, which was followed by a threat, led the manager of the
Ciudad Juárez station to plead with the Minister of SCOP in Mexico City to intervene on
his behalf so that he could continue to broadcast to the Mexican population in Texas.

37

In the following decades, similar series of events took place in other locations across the
region where the political border, or the Rio Grande, stood between a U.S. and a Mexican
city.
Tamaulipas was another Northeastern state where commercial stations flourished
in noteworthy numbers. As in Chihuahua, impresarios in Tamaulipas launched stations
with the intention of having markets in Mexico and across the U.S.-Mexico border.
Radio stations, at times, had established a relationship with Mexican immigrant
communities in the United States. During the 1940s, for example, business owners in
Pearsall, Texas, an agricultural community one hundred miles north of Nuevo Laredo in
the South Texas Valley, sponsored a live radio program on Friday nights over station
XEDF of Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas. “The Radio Hour of Pearsall, Texas,” as it was
called, featured performances by piano and guitar players, notable singers, Ranchera trios

37

AGN, SCOP, Expediente 525/21.
111

and touring groups from Mexico City like Los Tres Vaqueros (The Three Cowboys), who
offered a live concert during the inaugural show in the spring of 1939.

38

Music is the one of the principal features of radio programming, and, after
advertising, was one of the strategies used by border radio entrepreneurs to lure an
audience. Nationalism, by means of popular and traditional music and songs, became an
important feature of all radio broadcasting during the ‘30s and the northern stations did
their part in guaranteeing that Mexican citizens, no matter their location, would not be
39

without Mexican music.

The boleros and canciones rancheras of the 1930s were

implemented in the programming because they appealed to first-generation Mexican
immigrants who were familiar with these sounds and relished the opportunity to tune in
their radios and hear familiar songs from their childhood or past.

40

Implementing music generated favorable results and Mexicans in both countries
displayed enthusiasm for music. For example, in September of 1935, station XEFE
hosted a singing contest which was included in the Independence Day festivities of the
city. In the stipulations for the event, the station noted that the prize money, $50 in cash,
was to be given to the contestant who sang the best traditional Mexican song, and that
contestants could be from either of the two “Laredos”: Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas or

38
39
40

La Prensa, December 4, 1939, p. 5.
AGN, SCOP, Expediente 22/131.6 (721.1)/15.
La Prensa, January 8, 1940, p. 8
112

Laredo, Texas.

41

Being one of the first stations to build its towers on the banks of the Rio Grande,
XEFE was a respected and truly transnational station. In the following decade, the
station continued to be noted for its transmission of popular and folkloric music and
proudly announced that their listening audience was in both Tamaulipas and South Texas.
In 1943 it transmitted a special “patriotic” musical program featuring local artists titled
“México de la Frontera” (Mexico of the Border).

42

By the following year, station owner

and manager, Rafael Tijerina Carranza boasted of having this national and international
43

audience “practically controlled.”

During the cotton boom hundreds of people from central Mexico migrated to the cities of
Reynosa and Matamoros, in particular. Among the newly arrived were repatriated Mexican
citizens from the United States and young adults, mostly men, who saw the growth of the cities
and the convergence of people in new locations as a possibility to begin a new life or a career,
whichever came first. In particular, the emergence of a substantial number of commercial radio
stations in the Northeast and Northwest during the 1930s drew young men and women from rural
areas with dreams of bright careers or becoming big stars. Within this group were a number of
musicians who played the guitar or accordion for the exhausted laborers in the cantinas at night.
Eugenio Ábrego, one of the members of Los Alegres de Terán, and forerunner of norteña music

41
42
43

La Prensa, September 11, 1935, p. 5.
Radiolandia, March 20,1943 p. 9.
Radiolandia, September 22, 1944.
113

moved to the border city of Reynosa, Tamaulipas at the age of seventeen. He wanted to test his
luck as an accordion player at the Salon Chapultepec before landing a job at a local radio station.
Ábrego, who had grown up listening to radio, attending weekly dances and watching the train
pass by, realized that radio was one of the avenues for becoming a star.

44

Musical groups responded to the economic boom of the region by moving closer
to the cities along the border and relied on radio to diffuse their music and familiarize the
public with their sound. The trajectory followed by musical groups from Northeast
Mexico, like Los Alegres de Terán, for instance, highlights the interplay between the
results of government projects, commercial radio stations and international radio
listeners. The duet, Los Alegres de Terán, pioneers in the norteño genre, was comprised
of Eugenio Ábrego and Tomás Ortiz, both from the state of Tamaulipas. Their career
began in the 1940s when the guitar and accordion player moved to Reynosa to sing and
perform in cabarets and radio stations. Their music, facilitated by radio stations along the
border, brought social unity and gave life to the migratory patterns of Mexicans in
Northeastern Mexico for decades.

45

Radio station entrepreneurs in Northeast Mexico,

then, employed a wide range of broadcasters who used their background to appeal to
Mexican audiences in Mexico and the United States. Additionally, with the help of
music, these stations were able to reach listeners eager to hear Mexican music.
In other parts of Mexico, teenagers left the rural pueblos and headed to the cities along
44

Francisco Ramos Aguirre, Los Alegres de Terán Vida y Canciones (México, DF: Consejo
Nacional Para la Cultura y las Artes, 2003).
45

Ibid, 67.
114

the U.S.-Mexico border. In particular, the emergence of a substantial number of commercial
radio stations in the Northeast and Northwest during the 1930s drew young men and women
from rural areas with dreams of bright careers or becoming big stars. Eugenio Ábrego, one of
the members of Los Alegres de Terán, and forerunner of norteña music moved to the border city
of Reynosa, Tamaulipas at the age of seventeen. He wanted to test his luck as an accordion
player at the Salon Chapultepec before landing a job at a local radio station. Ábrego, who had
grown up listening to radio, attending weekly dances and watching the train pass by, realized that
radio was one of the avenues for becoming a star.

46

Radio in Northwest Mexico
In the Northwest, Mexican entrepreneurs also targeted fellow compatriots on the U.S.
side of the border, especially in Southern California, and built stations to cater to their consumer
interests. The integration of the Baja California peninsula into the national economy took place
decades later than in the Northeast. What is today Baja California Norte was not an official state
of Mexico until January of 1952.

47

Since the late nineteenth century the region was home to a

strong itinerant market that included ranchers, investors, miners and railroad workers. In the
1930s when the commercial radio industry was booming, the government authorized individuals

46

Ibid.

47

The State in the southern half of the peninsula, Baja California Sur, was not incorporated into
the Mexican Republic until 1974. See, David E. Lorey, The U.S.-Mexican Border in the
Twentieth Century: A History of Economic and Social Transformation (Wilmington, Delaware:
Scholarly Resources, 1999), 120.
115

to own and establish stations in that territory.

48

In the spring of 1935, while stations in Ciudad Juárez and Reynosa were busy
broadcasting concerts and special programs sponsored by the Mexican business
community in Texas, in the western half of the border, President Lázaro Cárdenas
announced the colonization of the Baja California territory. The factors that led to the
development of this area included reduced demographic density, relative distance from
the production centers of the nation, a lack of paths of communication with the interior of
the country and insufficient local production of consumer needs; in general, an overall
lack in development. In 1939, four years after introducing the colonization plan,
Cárdenas signed a decree establishing Zonas Libres (Free Zones) in the northern and
southern territories. The objective for creating these “Free Zones” was to stimulate much
needed industrialization, instill social and economic growth in the region and integrate
the economy of the Northwest with that of the rest of the nation.

49

The attention placed on strengthening the border was a small part of Cárdenas’s
national economic and political program, which focused on land reform and eventually
led to the expropriation of millions of hectares and the creation of ejidos. The
government considered the development and fortification of the northern frontier a
critical step in thwarting U.S. expansionism from traveling south into Mexico.

48

Rachel St. John, Line in the Sand: A History of the Western U.S.-Mexico Border (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2011), 4.
49

Mario Ojeda, ed., Administración del desarrollo de la frontera norte (México, DF: El Colegio
de México, 1982), vii, 47-48.
116

Since the mid-1920s, when alcohol distribution centers and recreational
establishments were founded during Prohibition (1920-1933), a strong U.S. presence had
been visible. The Great Depression brought a slump in the clientele of these businesses
and the Mexican government, in turn, was hopeful that the local economy would be
fortified and that the businesses which proliferated with the backing of U.S. dollars
would disappear.
Despite the plans of the government, attempts to spur large-scale economic
growth along the border were in vain. In fact, there was uneven and incomplete
development in the area until the 1960s when the Mexican government established the
Border Industrialization Program (BIP) in order to stimulate the manufacturing sector and
provide employment for workers. At that time, considerable industrialization began with
50

the arrival of maquilas or maquiladoras to the region.

However, the investment in the

urbanization and industrial growth of the border attracted a handful of entrepreneurs who,
as in the Northeast, launched radio stations with the intention of accessing the Mexican
population in the United States. In the 1930s, as they catered to the Mexican market
overseas, Northwest border radio stations also took entertainment, news and valuable
information to the Mexican people living in the Baja California territory at a time when
newspapers or even paved roads, were scarce.
In the Baja California peninsula, U.S. entrepreneurs were not able to build
powerful stations to reach the United States as they had done along the Rio Grande
Valley; in part, this was due to the difference in terrain of Texas and the Great Plains in
50

David E. Lorey, The U.S.-Mexican Border in the Twentieth Century.
117

the East, and the Rocky Mountain states in the West. Overall, Mexican-owned border
stations prospered in this area as a result of two features unique to radio stations in the
Northwest: their closeness to the cultural and artistic production of Southern California
and the interest given to the development of the region by U.S. entrepreneurs during
Prohibition who converted Baja into a “playground” for the Hollywood elite.
Radio stations in Baja California had one advantage over stations along the Rio
Grande during the ‘30s and ‘40s, their proximity to the bright lights and glamour of
Hollywood. In the 1920s, the restrictions created during Prohibition made Mexico and
the Caribbean attractive locations for U.S. pleasure seekers and entrepreneurs who
established night-clubs, restaurants and lavish resorts and lured visitors from the entire
state of California. In the Mexican northern border, U.S. businessmen financed
gambling, prostitution, horse racing, boxing, and other illicit activities. A large part of
this activity was concentrated in the Agua Caliente Hotel and Casino which was located
outside of the Tijuana city limits and offered horse racing, golf, drinking, gambling and
bathing in a modern spa.

51

The opening and closing of the Agua Caliente Hotel and Casino, in fact, reflects
the close relationship between the government’s plans for industrializing the region and
the establishment of the commercial radio industry in the Northwest. The operator at the
time, Ricardo Vázquez de Lara, remarked that he desired for the station to be heard in
states in the Pacific Northwest such as Washington, Oregon and even Canada. “Places

51

For more on the Agua Caliente resort see, Paul J. Vanderwood, Satan's Playground: Mobsters
and Movie Stars at America's Greatest Gaming Resort (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010).
118

that yield a greater number of tourists.” As early as 1931, the owners of the Casino
realized the advantages that a radio station would offer them to advertise the services of
the resort and constructed a new station, XEBC. During the 1930s, the station served an
important role for the casino and was used to announce sweepstake winners, horse race
results and at times even interviews from Hollywood actors. Even after temporary
closure in the ‘30s, it was deemed necessary for the station to remain open because its
mission was in line with the economic recuperation plan by Cárdenas for Baja California.
According to Congressman Ramón V. Santoyo, “the operation of XEBC is considered an
essential means of propaganda for the success of this new work plan.” In effect, the
government allowed the station to broadcast commercial propaganda, conferences and
speeches in English with the stipulation that “the transmission is made in Spanish first, in
a complete and accurate manner, and immediately after in a foreign language.”

52

In the late 1920s and early 1930s, as places like the Agua Caliente were gaining
popularity, Mexican entrepreneurs saw the benefits of building stations catering to the
late night entertainment industries. Some, such as XEAE, which began broadcasting in
1932 with the slogan, “The Voice of the Californias,” changed their programming in
order to respond to the needs of their international audience. On July 16, 1933, owner
and manager Adolfo Labastida Jr. sent a telegram to the Ministry of Communications and
Public Works office in Mexico City requesting permission to broadcast from local night
clubs through the use of a portable short wave transmitter. “The commercial
establishments of Tijuana are composed primarily of cabarets or attraction centers for

52

AGN, SCOP, Expediente 22/131.6 (722)/15.
119

foreign tourists and they play music all day, with very good Mexican orchestras,”
Labastida declared, “they wish to transmit their concerts through our station with
interjections from commercial advertisements.”

53

The station, which was authorized to use the apparatus several months later,
thrived thanks to the remote control transmissions from cabarets and night clubs in the
area. These broadcasts were made possible when commercial and official radio stations
made arrangements with the telephone company to broadcast live radio programs from
dance halls, cabarets, government chambers, and public plazas. Labastida was an
ambitious businessman, and aside from pursuing the idea of broadcasting live in night
clubs he also copied the broadcasting model in the United States of dedicating special
songs and numbers to radio listeners. He noted that the practice was “very common in
the radio stations of the United States and much liked among the radio listeners of this
region which we intend to please.”

54

The studios of stations in urban centers like Tijuana and Ensenada were stopovers
for actors and performers before crossing the border to act in a movie, make a record or
fulfill a contract in a noteworthy theater. On other occasions, border radio stations were
places where local aspiring artists visited while they were trying to initiate their singing
or acting career. For example, in the early 1930s when he was attending the Instituto
Técnico Industrial de Tijuana, a vocational school established in the former Agua
Caliente Hotel and Casino compound outside of Tijuana, singer and composer Fernando
53
54

AGN, SCOP, Expediente 22/131.6 (722)/16.
Ibid.
120

“Freddy” Quiñones escaped the premises after hours to go sing at the local cabaret,“El
Tecolote.” Quiñones, whose dream was to work and record in Los Angeles, realized that
singing over the radio would take him one step closer to Hollywood. “I would escape at
night to go sing during an amateur contest transmitted over radio station XEAC,” he
recalled. Later in his life, the singer used the experience he gained at the radio station
when he was the lead singer in Mercedes Gallegos’ Latino orchestra in San Francisco.

55

One hundred miles east of Tijuana, the city of Mexicali was also home to a
handful of radio stations in the early 1930s. The first commercial radio station in the city,
XEAO, was initiated in 1932 by Luis Castro López, an engineer who designed the
transmitter using recycled World War I radio parts he purchased in Calexico and Los
Angeles. López, a native of Los Mochis, Sinaloa, had studied in Los Angeles before
arriving in Mexicali in 1930 to work as a technician dedicated to making radios.
XEAO’s listeners came from cities across Southern California like Coachella, Indio,
Brawley and some across the border in Yuma, Arizona. López nicknamed the station
“La Voz de Mexicali al servicio del agricultor” (The Voice of Mexicali at the service of
the farmer), because the majority of listeners were agricultural workers who played a
direct role in the prosperity of the station. “Farmers really enjoyed this,” he recalled,
“they would come and bring me money…so that I could pay the electricity bill, the rent
and buy records.” López noted that the station served a social function to the farm
worker community because at times people would come and ask for a special program or

55

Victor Alejandro Espinoza Valle, La Vida Misma: Fernando Freddy Quiñones, un trovador
fronterizo (Guadalajara, Jalisco: Centro Universitario de Ciencias Sociales y Humanidades,
Universidad de Guadalajara, 2008), 29.
121

to broadcast a fundraiser for a community member in need.

56

The close proximity to Southern California, along with the direct investment made in
mass communications by U.S. businessmen, gave the first generation of Mexican border radio
entrepreneurs the opportunity to continue taking music and special programs across the airwaves
and into the homes of the Mexican immigrant and U.S. born Mexican communities across the
U.S. Southwest. The infrastructure development and overall attention given to Northwestern
Mexico by U.S. interests during Prohibition gave Mexican entrepreneurs easier access to
Mexican markets in Southern California, who were their target audience and an integral
component in the future of their businesses.
Conclusion
In the post-revolutionary decades, the people living in the region from Baja California to
Tamaulipas had to survive and learn how to gain a livelihood in a world that was quickly
becoming urban and industrial. Instead of strictly following the mandates of the government, the
border region followed the imperatives of the capitalist market. Mexican radio entrepreneurs in
the northern border with the United States, who were part of this population, were involved in
the creation of a consumer market in the United States. Advertisement records most accurately
show how these radio entrepreneurs saw the border: as non-existent. Thanks to the power of
radio to send signals across the border, border radio station owners relied on the overseas
audiences, not simply of Anglo consumers, but of Mexican immigrants and their children for
their stations to prosper. They drafted their own business plans and came up with strategies to
56

Manuel Ortiz Marín and Miguel Antonio Meza Estrada, Testimonios de la radio en Mexicali
(Mexicali, BC: Universidad Autónoma de Baja California, 1994), 8,11.
122

ensure that Mexicans in the United States would never be left without the voice of the
government, which came through the commercial airwaves. In turn, they need to be considered
as important components in the post-revolutionary growth of the nation.

123

Chapter IV
Crafting an Audience: Music, Mass Media and Radio in “México de Afuera”
“En efecto, los mexicanos que han cruzado las fronteras, con sólo respirar el ambiente
de su patria, con sólo la convivencia natural dentro de la historia nuestra, quedan exentos de
contaminaciones extrañas.”
“In effect, the Mexicans who have crossed the border, simply by breathing the air of their
motherland, by the natural socializing with our history, become exempt from foreign
contaminations.”
-La Prensa, 1934

During the 1930s, from his home in Santa Catalina Island, California, José Guerrero
tuned in to La Hora Nacional (The National Hour) from Mexico City station XEDP. Broadcast
live on Sundays from 8:00 to 10:00 p.m., the government-sponsored program featured
noteworthy speeches by dignitaries and heads of state, official news bulletins and musical
numbers performed by local and internationally renowned bands and orchestras. In 1937,
Guerrero, who was also a composer, corresponded with Mexican President Lázaro Cárdenas
about the possibility of airing one of his music pieces in the program. “Let me know the date the
1

band will play my march,” he wrote, “to see if "I can tune in to la Hora Nacional.”

Radio listeners like Guerrero, who were part of the México Lindo generation, or recent
arrivals to the U.S., occasionally tuned in to live radio programs from stations across the U.S.Mexico border or Mexico City during the 1930s and 1940s.

2

Radio listening provided a

1

Archivo General de la Nación, Ramo Presidentes, Fondo Lázaro Cárdenas del Rio (Hereafter
AGN, LCR), Caja 102, Expediente 135.2/146.
2

For the México Lindo generation, see Francisco Arturo Rosales, ¡Pobre Raza!: Violence,
124

simultaneous experience for Mexicans in Mexico and in the United States. Music, through radio
airwaves, brought social unity to their communities and gave life to their migration patterns.
Through music, they could sustain the use of Spanish at home or they could connect with their
past; being nostalgic when they heard “songs from the days gone by.”

3

This chapter focuses on the practice of radio listening by the Mexican population in the
two cities with the largest concentration of Mexicans in the first half of the twentieth century:
Los Angeles, California and San Antonio, Texas. Specifically, it explains how these
communities sustained the practice of radio listening and honoring and remembering Mexico
through music thanks to the Spanish-language press, the Mexican Consulate and local Englishlanguage radio stations, which broadcast segments of airtime in Spanish. With the help of grassroots organizations, Mexican government representatives and local newspapers, the U.S.
Mexican population, by the 1940s, were more than just a radio listening community. The
advertising power generated by the press also encouraged the population to be consumers. Thus,
inconsequently, radio unleashed the buying power and potential of the Mexican population in the
United States.
Background
Post World War I immigration legislation in the United States limited the flow of
European immigrants into the country and led to a shortage of labor in the U.S. South and
Justice and Mobilization among México Lindo Immigrants, 1900-1939 (Austin: University of
Texas Press, 1991).
3

La Prensa, January 8, 1940, p. 8. For the way Mexican communities in the U.S. Southwest
listened to both Mexican radio stations and English-language radio for pleasure and to maintain
the use of their Spanish language see, Maggie Rivas-Rodríguez and Emilio Zamora, Beyond the
Latino World War II Hero: The Social and Political Legacy of a Generation (Austin: University
of Texas Press, 2010).
125

Midwest. In the 1920s, restrictions on Asian labor were also significant, as Japanese and
Filipinos, in particular, worked in agriculture in the West. In turn, the agriculture and business
sectors recruited Mexican workers and their families in states like California, Texas and Illinois
to work in the fields, railroads, steel or in another of the nation’s growing industries.
Leaving their native land for the United States was possible for many Mexican workers
who had fallen into economic hardship in the wake of the Mexican Revolution (1910-1920), a
decade of fighting resulting in a substantial population loss, homelessness and devastation of
land. Yet the Revolution was not the only culprit for migration and hardship. Between 1926 and
1930, Mexico was affected by the Cristero War, a time when members of the Catholic Church
were persecuted by the government throughout the country. This event also resulted in massive
migration northward as thousands of families escaped the oppression and moved to the United
4

States. By 1930, more than one million Mexicans had migrated to the United States as a result
5

of violence in Mexico and labor shortages in the U.S. South and Midwest.

The 1930s, furthermore, was a tumultuous decade for Mexican immigrants in the United
States. The economic instability created by the Great Depression led to the exodus of thousands

5

For more on the Chicano Studies perspective on the factors contributing to the exodus of
Mexicans to the United States see, Douglas Monroy, Rebirth: Mexican Los Angeles from the
Great Migration to the Great Depression (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California
Press, 1999); David G. Gutiérrez, Walls and Mirrors: Mexican Americans, Mexican Immigrants
and the Politics of Ethnicity (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995).
126

6

of Mexicans, U.S. and Mexican citizens alike, back to Mexico. Many returned to Mexico
voluntarily, while some were forced to leave the United States by federal government
immigration raids. In Southern California, for instance, during a five month period in 1931,
approximately one-third of the Mexican population of Los Angeles voluntary and involuntarily
left the city.

7

The Mexican Communities of San Antonio and Los Angeles
In Texas, San Antonio was home to a large Mexican population dating back to the
nineteenth century. By 1850, Mexicans accounted for 46% of the city’s population. The greatest
advantage that San Antonio had, which other cities of Mexican heritage at the time did not, was
the proximity by rail to the central and eastern United States and the direct connection to central
Mexico. Thus, in the late nineteenth century, city residents could maintain contact with urban
centers in northern Mexico such as Monterrey, an important mining city which achieved regional
dominance as a trading center for most of northeastern Mexico, as well as growing U.S. cities
like Chicago and St. Louis. San Antonio’s modern transportation system sustained the interests
of a thriving community of Mexican immigrants, many of whom were entrepreneurs, wealthy
businessmen or, during the Revolution, political exiles who longed to return to Mexico once the

6

On colonization of Mexico’s border and repatriation efforts: José Angel Hernández’s
forthcoming book, “Lost Mexico: Militarization, Migration & Mexican American Colonization
in the Nineteenth Century.”
7

Francisco E. Balderrama and Raymond Rodríguez, Decade of Betrayal: Mexican Repatriation
in the 1930s Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2006), 136.
127

conflict was over.

8

In the early twentieth century, San Antonio was vital to the formation of an international
radio market. A number of record companies built studios in the city and it was there that the
first full-time Spanish-language radio station was founded in 1946. Station KCOR, owned and
operated by Raoul Cortéz, a Mexican entrepreneur, filled an important social and cultural gap
9

within the Mexican community in the state of Texas.

Cities in the U.S. Southwest like San Antonio were mandatory stops for performers
traveling overseas; there, singers like Pedro Vargas, Agustín Lara and Toña la Negra could count
on the favorable treatment by the Mexican and U.S. born Mexican audience. Since the late
nineteenth century, the combination of the theater circuits, which paved the way for the tours of
radio performers, and the railroad line, which connected the interior of Mexico to the United
States, had allowed the city to be home to a vital Mexican presence manifested in art, music and
food. Understandably, during their tour in Los Angeles and San Antonio, Las Hermanas Águila
noted that they felt a sense of joy “hugging the Mexicans that live over there.”

10

In California, Los Angeles had a Mexican population of close to 5,000 people in 1900.

8

For more on the history of Mexicans in San Antonio see: Richard A. Garcia, Rise of the
Mexican American middle class: San Antonio, 1929-1941 (College Station: Texas A&M
University Press, 1991); Daniel D. Arreola, “The Mexican American Cultural Capital”
Geographical Review 77:1, (Jan, 1987): 21.
9

In 1947, Cortéz requested permission to have his station re-transmit La Hora Nacional each
Sunday from Mexico City. For more on the legacy of the Cortéz family see the website created
by his nephew http://www.sintv.org/sintv/biography3.html
10

Radiolandia, March 20, 1943.
128

Persuaded by jobs in industry and agriculture, Mexicans migrated there at a rapid rate during the
first three decades of the twentieth century. By 1930, approximately 150,000 persons of
Mexican birth or heritage had settled into the city’s expanding neighborhoods, converting the
sprawling Southern California city into the largest Mexican community outside of Mexico
City.

11

At the time, small businesses in East Los Angeles included a “number of dental and

medical services, department and grocery stores, and restaurants, while nickelodeons, dance
halls, burlesque houses, brothels, saloons and other ‘bawdy entertainments’ provided a range of
entertainment to the heterogeneous population of laborers residing downtown.”

12

Mexican immigrants of the city and the surrounding valley were exposed to the latest
musical, cultural and artistic productions of Mexico. Mexican groups, in fact, traveled there
before highways and railroads made the trip from Mexico City to Los Angeles possible.
Celebrated singer Pedro Vargas recalled that in 1928, when he embarked upon his first
international tour to the United States with the Orquesta del Maestro Miguel Lerdo de Tejada,
the group took the train from Mexico City to Tijuana and from there “crossed the border by foot
13

and boarded a train from San Diego to Los Angeles.”

In addition, Los Angeles helped sustain

11

For more on the history of Mexicans in California see, Albert Camarillo, Chicanos in a
Changing Society: From Mexican Pueblos to American Barrios in Santa Barbara and Southern
California, 1848-1930 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979); Ricardo Romo, East Los
Angeles: History of a Barrio (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1983); Matt Garcia, A World of
its Own: Race, Labor and Citrus in the making of Greater Los Angeles, 1900-1970 (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 2001); William Deverell, Whitewashed Adobe: The Rise of
Los Angeles and the Remaking of its Mexican Past (Berkeley: University of California Press,
2005).
12

Douglas Monroy, Rebirth: Mexican Los Angeles from the Great Migration to the Great
Depression (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999), 19.

13

José Ramón Garmabella, Pedro Vargas: Una vez nada más (México, DF: Ediciones de
129

the Mexican post-revolutionary art movement of the 1920s and 1930s by offering a place for
Mexican painters and artists to present their work. Along with a group of artists including Maria
Bonilla and Luís Martínez, for example, in 1926 Dr. Atl (Gerardo Murillo) exhibited his artwork
in the city, noting that the California city had the potential to be converted into a “first class
artistic center.”

14

Moreover, Los Angeles was important in sustaining an overseas radio market because,
inherently, it attracted a large number of people drawn to Hollywood to work in the film, radio,
and theater industries. Mexican elite and middle class members, who labored alongside their
Anglo counterparts and had control over Spanish-language entertainment of the city, aimed at
using mass media to reinforce a Mexican national identity.

15

Theaters in East Los Angeles were

converted from English to Spanish-language venues in the early 1920s when large movie palaces
were created near Hollywood. And as the Mexican population tripled during that decade, the
city became a manpower pool for Hispanic theater. From the late 1910s to the 1930s, as Nicolás
Kanellos notes, Los Angeles supported five major Spanish language theaters with approximately
fifteen others hosting performances on an irregular basis.

16

As Mexican communities consolidated and grew in number during the 1930s in

Comunicación, 1985), 55.
14

El Universal Ilustrado, January 7, 1926.

15

Colin Gunckel, “The war of the accents: Spanish language Hollywood films in Mexican Los
Angeles” Film History Volume 20 (2008): 325.
16

Nicolás Kanellos, A History of Hispanic Theater in the United States: Origins to 1940
(Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990), 21.
130

Los Angeles, San Antonio and other cities in the U.S., generational differences emerged
between Mexican immigrants and their offspring, U.S born Mexicans. The first,
sometimes called “Mexican nationals,” often saw their status in the U.S. as temporary.
Some members of this group displayed their loyalty to their country of birth by retaining
their Mexican citizenship and made plans to return to Mexico in the future. While they
assimilated to life in the United States, many held on to their religious, familial and
cultural traditions along with a vast repertoire of canciones and corridos they had learned
in their childhood.
The second group, U.S. born Mexicans, was the first generation of Mexican
children born in the United States. This generation had a different understanding of their
past, history and also had a different relationship with the mass media than their parents,
as they came of age at the same time that film and radio emerged as important mediums.
U.S. born Mexicans were influenced by movies and the recording industry and also tuned
in to radio for music, news, and dramas, both in Spanish and English. Growing in
number and influence during the late 1920s through the middle of the twentieth century,
second-generation Mexicans were a disparate group including Pachucos and Pochos.
A Pocho was a Mexican man or woman born outside of Mexico who had
migrated to the U.S. at an early age and had been partially, yet not completely, integrated
into mainstream U.S. society. Pochos found an identity deeply rooted along the U.S.Mexico border. In many ways, their sense of nationalism was defined as being “in
between.” The complexity of the Pocho is a fascinating topic of interest to both Mexican
and U.S. born scholars, since the word is also a derogatory term referring to a Mexican in
the United States who has denounced his native cultural traits or is unable to speak
131

Spanish, for instance. Pachuco, on the other hand, is a term given to Mexican-American
youth living in the U.S. Southwest and along the U.S.-Mexico border. This group used
cultural expressions, such as music, to resist national and international marginalization.

17

During the first half of the twentieth century both Pachuchos and Pochos introduced a
new way of talking, dressing and acting in the United States with deep symbolic
connotations; in many ways, however, their essential characteristics are reduced to dress
and vocabulary.

18

Mexican Music
Since the nineteenth century, music played an important role in Mexican communities
and homes. It was not uncommon for families to congregate around a piano, harmonica or other
musical instrument during evenings or special occasions. On some occasions, Mexican
immigrants sent letters to political leaders and musical groups in Mexico requesting that they
send Mexican orchestras, bands and artists to pay them a visit. Music was also part of the oral
tradition of the Mexican community. A number of Mexican female singers, such as Maria
Padilla and Lydia Mendoza, recalled that Mexican folkloric songs and ballads were passed down
from their parents to them at home. In fact, Padilla admitted that at times her father would pay
17

Anthony Macías, Mexican American Mojo: Popular Music, Dance, and Urban Culture in Los
Angeles, 1935-1968 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008), 1.

18

Pachuchos came to the attention of the general public during the Zoot Suit riots in Southern
California. On the riots see Eduardo Obregón Pagán, Murder at the Sleepy Lagoon: Zoot Suits,
Race, and Riot in Wartime L.A. (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2006);
Margarita Aragón, Brown Youth, black fashion and a white riot (London: University of London,
2007); Laura L. Cummings, Pachucas and Pachucos in Tucson: Situated Border Lives (Tucson:
University of Arizona Press, 2009). For a view on la pachuca see Catherine S. Ramírez, The
Woman in the Zoot Suit: Gender, Nationalism and the Cultural Politics of Memory (Durham:
Duke University Press, 2009).
132

her and her sisters a peso or two to sing a couple of songs when they had company over or during
special events.

19

Despite living in a foreign country, Mexican immigrants maintained strong ties to the
musical culture of Mexico. In cities throughout the United States they listened to radio
transmissions from Mexican radio stations in the Northeast and Northwest border, and in the
1930s programs from Mexico City. In 1935, for example, Mexican agricultural workers from
the Yakima Valley in the state of Washington sent a letter to the Mexican Ministry of Foreign
Relations requesting that XECR, the radio station operated by the Ministry of Foreign Relations,
re-transmit their Sunday evening concerts through their local station. The Ministry of
Communications and Public Works granted them permission to do so, considering it an honor to
have Mexican music diffused through English-language radio stations.

20

In the United States, radio exposed Mexican immigrants to new music genres and songs.
Growing up in Southern California during the 1930s, for instance, Hank Cervantes recalled after
his family had “acquired a thumbnail-shaped radio…we began hearing songs like
“Guadalajara,” “Estrellita,” “Siete Leguas,” “Cielito Lindo,” “Adiós, Mariquita Linda,” popular
hits in Mexico at the time.

19

21

“Mexican stations,” as Maggie Rivas-Rodríguez suggests,

Interview with Maria Padilla, March 15, 2009, conducted by the author.

20

Archivo General de la Nación, Fondo Secretaría de Comunicaciones y Obras Públicas
(Hereafter AGN, SCOP), Expediente 22/131.6(725.1)/62.

21

Maggie Rivas-Rodríguez, “’Embracing the ether’ The use of radio by the Latino World War II
Generation” in Maggie Rivas-Rodríguez and Emilio Zamora, eds., Beyond the Latino World War
II Hero: The Social and Political Legacy of a Generation (Austin: University of Texas Press,
2010). Regarded as the “Father of Mexican Music,” Manuel M. Ponce’s song “Estrellita”
133

introduced the U.S. born Mexican generation to singers like Lydia Mendoza and countless other
22

Mexican and U.S. born Mexican stars.

Mexican music, especially if it was played by orchestras and bands, reiterated patriotic
feelings for Mexican immigrants. To many members of the community national identity was
manifested when, in song, you remembered and honored Mexico. Throughout the twentieth
century, the Mexican community in the United States was overjoyed when artists, performers
and musicians visited their cities. The Mexican Police Band, led by Miguel Lerdo de Tejada,
toured the United States during the 1930s and stopped in major cities throughout the U.S.
Southwest and Northeast. After their visit to San Antonio, Mexican citizen, Josefa C. Valdez,
communicated with President Cárdenas about their audition. In her letter, she personally
thanked him for sending the Band to San Antonio. It had been the music, Valdez noted, that
23

allowed her to feel closer to Mexico, the country that she longed to return to.

Arranging the auditions of Mexican bands and orchestras, in fact, were important duties
for certain members. On February 24, 1928, Pedro S. Espinosa, secretary of the Mexican
Chamber of Commerce of Los Angeles, penned a letter to President Lázaro Cárdenas requesting
for the Mexican government to send its Police Band to Los Angeles. “It is our wish that our
Motherland be represented in these acts which depart themselves from commercialism to achieve

(Little Star), was a popular hit world-wide translated into English, French and Italian by 1933.
The song, according to a critic, “has been so deeply planted in the Mexican soul, that wherever it
is sung, surely there is a heart of ours there, or in that instant the name of Mexico vibrates,” El
Universal Ilustrado, March 16, 1933, p. 31, 47.
22
23

Ibid.
AGN, LCR, Expediente 135.2/146.
134

patriotic traits, since the high prestige of our Motherland is involved,” he wrote. The Chamber
noted that in previous years the exposition of Mexican products had drawn more than 40,000
people per day, and having the band play would not only honor the government of Cárdenas, but
would be a sign of the culture and progress of Mexico to foreigners and Mexicans alike.
Requests such as these display the high quality entertainment sought for the event, as well as
their allegiance to the government in power.
Thus, in the 1930s and 1940s, Mexican immigrants and farm workers in the Texas or
California valley, many of whom were from rural Mexico, were overjoyed to hear songs from
their upbringing. This music, which told stories of longing to return to Mexico and glorified the
land of their birth, also became part of their daily life. In the stores of downtown Los Angeles or
San Antonio, Mexican sheet music and Spanish-language records were readily available to the
Mexican communities; their distribution, in fact, was made possible by local businesses and the
press. Thanks to the sponsorship of small businesses, a Mexican man or woman walking the
city’s streets also had the opportunity to hear popular music. While conducting field research for
her Master’s Degree at the University of Southern California during the early 1930s, Nellie
Foster observed that “In the United States men stand in front of music stores where phonograph
records of corridos are heard over a loud speaker; they congregate in barber shops, pool rooms,
and other masculine gathering places, and in Los Angeles listen to the wandering musicians in
Olvera Street.”

24

Listening to music and consuming music are not one in the same; and, as their Anglo

24

Nellie Foster, “The Corrido: A Mexican Culture Trait Persisting in Southern California,”
(Master’s Thesis, University of Southern California, 1939), 22.
135

counterparts, the Mexican immigrant population in the United States was influenced by the
growing consumer culture of the early twentieth century. In urban centers many embraced mass
consumption practices on a daily basis, at times even settling down and purchasing homes.
Owning property in cities like Los Angeles, in fact, allowed Mexican immigrants to become,
“more integrated in the American consumer economy,” as George J. Sánchez notes.

25

To many

of those in the second generation, the ethic of consumerism, explains historian Vicki Ruiz
“became inextricably linked to making it in America.”

26

Throughout the United States, mass media- newspapers, magazines, and advertisementspersuaded men and women to purchase radio sets long before Spanish-language radio stations
appeared in Texas or California. In his 1928 study on women and industry, Paul Taylor
observed:
Another interesting case was that of a mother and daughter who both worked
because they wished to have a better home. In this case it was not a desire for a
different dwelling and neighborhood, but for improvement of the place in which
they already lived. They were very anxious to get some new furniture and a
radio. They seemed to think that a radio was the most desirable thing in the
world. The mother was anxious to have these things so that her daughter would
continue to be happy at home- so that she might bring her friends home to
27
dance.

25

George J. Sánchez, Becoming Mexican American: Ethnicity, Culture, and Identity in Chicano
Los Angeles, 1900-1945 (New York; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 205.

26

Vicki L. Ruiz, From out of the Shadows: Mexican Women in Twentieth-Century America
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 54; Roland Marchand, Advertising the American
Dream: Making Way for Modernity, 1920-1940 (Berkeley, University of California Press,
1985).

27

Paul S. Taylor, “Women in Industry,” field notes for Mexican Labor in the United States,
Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, Box 1 P. 3.
136

Using the radio for entertainment or personal enjoyment made owning one a valuable item. In
the U.S. Southwest, the majority of Mexican immigrants reaped the benefits of urban and
cosmopolitan lives before their counterparts in northern Mexico. The relative high price of radio
receivers did not inhibit some families from purchasing their own set, as was the case for many
families in Mexico during the 1920s.
Radios and Radio Listening by Mexican Immigrants and U.S. Born Mexicans
By the mid-1930s radios were becoming common household items in Mexican
communities across the United States. Radio transmission in Spanish, over “block
programming” in English-language stations, served an important cultural function within the
community and helped created a unified listening audience. “Block programming,” was initiated
during the 1930s by Mexican businessmen and was a segment of air time purchased by a
Mexican entrepreneur who was responsible for the Spanish-language advertisements and
programming of the time under contract. Given the revenue that could be gained through
advertising, “block programming” became popular not just in Texas, but in radio stations
throughout the nation.
Mexican-led radio programs were broadcast over U.S. stations at dawn or in the evenings
and weekends. As Nellie Foster observed in California during the early 1930s, “Radio programs
for the Spanish-speaking working class are scheduled for the early morning hours, when the
pocho or Chicano can listen while his wife is preparing breakfast and putting up his lunch. This
takes a couple of hours in those homes where tacos are still prepared in the old Mexican way.”

28

Radio stations like WOAI of San Antonio, for instance, invited notable Mexican singers like
28

Nellie Foster, “The Corrido: A Mexican Culture Trait Persisting in Southern California,” 22.
137

Chucho Monge to give live auditions on the air. In 1937, when Monge visted the station’s
Spanish-language hour, “the radio listeners of the Mexican colony,” noted the press, “thoroughly
enjoyed his compositions and interpretations.”

29

In the late ‘20s and early ‘30s, classical music was the most common style of music
played during Spanish-language radio slots. But by mid 1930s, the musical content of Mexicanled radio programs shifted from purely classical music to featuring a combination of corridos
and musica ranchera, music more aptly tied to the migratory trends of Mexican immigrants
during the first half of the twentieth century. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, corridos had a
particular appeal to the population because of their direct relation to the Mexican Revolution.
This was a time when people from different regions of the country interacted and the population
was exposed to a wide range of musical styles. Thus, because the corrido related stories about
heroes and battles of the Revolution, it became the poetry of the people, of a community that was
separated geographically from their native land.

30

The radio industry, which grew on par with cinema, was important to the Mexican
communities of the United States, many of which relied on Spanish-language “block
programming” on a daily basis. By 1930, the Mexican immigrant population in San Antonio and
Los Angeles, in particular, was urban and more cosmopolitan than most of Mexico, with the
exception of Mexico City. Not only were Mexicans in the United States introduced modern
29

La Prensa, March 22, 1937.

30

On corridos see, Vicente T. Mendoza, El Corrido Mexicano (México, DF: Fondo de Cultura
Económica, 1992); Rubén M. Campos, El folklore y la música Mexicana. Investigación acerca
de la cultura musical en México (1525-1925) (México, DF: Talleres Gráficos de la Nación,
1928.) For a Chicana/feminist perspective see Maria Herrera Sobek, The Mexican Corrido: A
Feminist Analysis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990).
138

technologies into their homes, such as telephones, radios, and phonographs, but they were also
first rate consumers who oftentimes took radios and records on their return trips to Mexico, as
Mexican anthropologist Manuel Gamio observed.

31

Group listening was a common practice in many Mexican communities across the
United States. During the 1920s, in the Mexican community of La Habra, California, for
example, “A particular special broadcast would bring a living room full of people.” And
despite the fact that radio was contested by the popularity of the cinema in the 1930s, “as
32

the years went by, the radio became a favorite form of family entertainment.”

However, group listening was not the only way Mexican immigrants heard the
voice of the Patria. In the late 1920s and 1930s, those whose socioeconomic status
allowed them to purchase a short wave radio receiver frequently tuned in to transmission
from Mexico City. This group of elite and cultured Mexican immigrants was familiar
with Mexican composers such as Manuel M. Ponce and Silvestre Revueltas and included
radio listeners like Bernardo Toro, who tuned in to a concert over station XFX from
Mexico City on November 20, 1931, from his home in New Orleans, Louisiana.
Enthusiastic about his listening experience, Toro wrote to XFX: “a group of friends,
gathered at the modern and well-known Mexican restaurant ‘Chapultepec’ on St. Carlos
avenue of this city, had the indescribable pleasure of listening through the radio the very
important concert transmitted by the symphonic orchestra under the direction of
31

Manuel Gamio, Mexican Immigration to the United States: A Study of Human Migration and
Adjustment (New York: Dover Publications, 1971), 229.
32

Gilbert G. González, Labor and Community: Mexican Citrus Worker Villages in a Southern
California County, 1900-1950 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994), 71, 92.
139

33

Chávez.”

In their correspondence to XFX, some members of the upper classes, moreover,
expressed their opinion about the way Mexico was being represented abroad through the
mass media, in particular through radio. Some of the letters received during the late
1920s and early 1930s indicate that Mexicans were more concerned with the way the
nation was being perceived abroad than the quality or content of some governmentsponsored radio concerts. For example, on the night of April 14, 1931, Mexico and the
United States celebrated the establishment of the Pan-American Union by transmitting a
special radio program. That night, Manuel Alonso, a Mexican citizen living in Texas
believed he would have the opportunity to hear the Mexican Police Band play the
National Anthem, but, after listening to an Orquesta Típica (an orchestra composed
primarily of stringed instruments) play the music of the anthem with the accompaniment
of a women’s chorus, he wrote the following message,
Undoubtedly, the orchestra is artistically qualified to perform in banquets, fairs,
bullfights, regional dances, etc. However, when you are faced with an
extraordinary opportunity to show the American people that there are good
musical bands in Mexico, it would have been best to play the anthem without
voices and by a military band, that way; Mexico’s true worth would have been
displayed. Now, after showing to all of the American people the type of music
obfuscated by the voices, now these people must be thinking that in Mexico we
lack musicians and that marimbas, mandolins, and guitars are part of the musical
34
accompaniment for our most important holidays.
Apparently, Mr. Alonso was concerned with Mexico’s reputation and believed that

33

Archivo Histórico de la Secretaria de Educación Pública (Hereafter AHSEP), Expediente A4/235.3(73).

34

AHSEP, Caja 8, Exp. A-4/253.3 (73), Fo. 291.
140

military bands, more than female voices, gave more accurate representations of Mexican music.
His letter also reveals the concern and, to an extent, embarrassment over the fact that women,
and non-traditional, folkloric musical instruments, like marimbas, were used under the category
of “Mexican national music.”
Spanish-language broadcasts over English-language radio stations depended on local
newspapers to divulge information concerning their air time, as to who would be participating,
etc. In Los Angeles and San Antonio during the ‘30s and ‘40s radio listeners frequently called
radio stations requesting and dedicating special songs and musical numbers for friends and loved
ones. Soon after their first audition, for example, the singer Maria Padilla recalled that members
of the local Mexican community called KMTR asking that Las Hermanas Padilla appear on the
program more frequently. Had it not been for the public’s desire to hear the young girls over
their radio receivers, their careers might have been short lived. Within a year, she and her sister
recorded albums with major record labels such as Blue Bird, Columbia and Vocallion, and
within two years they took up artistic tours throughout California, Mexico and South America.
35

Decades later, Maria rightfully admitted, “We were an instant hit.”

Sustaining a radio audience in the United States was made possible thanks to Spanishlanguage newspapers and U.S. commercial radio stations. English-language station owners were
aware that the Spanish-speaking population of their cities used the radio to tune in to
transmissions from Mexico. Mexican radio stars gave performances on English-language
stations in San Antonio, like WOAI, which boasted of being the station that transmitted the

35

La Opinión, January 28, 1939.
141

oldest Mexican radio program in Texas, hosted by Prof. Eduardo Martínez.

36

As these events

became more frequent during the ‘30s, they included Mexican and local radio singers and artists
such as the acclaimed radio group, “Los Caballeros,” who appeared during a benefit concert
given by Mexican radio station XEW’s stars Emilio Tuero and Rafael Romero in October
37

1935.

La Prensa and La Opinión
Across the U.S. Southwest, Spanish-language newspapers were avenues that taught
people how to listen to the radio as well as tools that closed the gap in the distance between
Mexico and the United States. In particular, Ignacio E. Lozano’s newspapers, La Prensa of San
Antonio, Texas, established in 1913, and La Opinión, of Los Angeles, established in 1926, were
the two largest Spanish-language newspapers in circulation in the U.S. Southwest during the first
half of the twentieth century. Since its establishment in the early years of the Mexican
Revolution, for instance, daily issues of La Prensa had circulated throughout the state of Texas.
Local businesses and companies took advantage of this long-standing publication and placed ads
for their services. The newspaper served both the English-language business owners and the
Mexican government. For example, when English-language radio stations like KRGV began to
broadcast Mexican programs from cities as distant as Weslaco, 250 miles from San Antonio,
they advertised their programming in La Prensa. In the 1930s, some of their transmissions
featured diplomats and government representatives such as the Consul of McAllen, Dr. Bernardo
Chávez V. and the Mexican Consul of Texas, Santiago Suárez, who sent a warm greeting to the
36
37

La Prensa, April 22, 1937, p. 4.
La Prensa, October 20, 1935, p. 3.
142

Mexican residents of the Texas valley during a special radio program when they commemorated
the anniversary of the Mexican Revolution on November 20, 1936.

38

In Los Angeles, as

Francine Medeiros notes, Lozano began La Opinión “as a newspaper in political exile whose
objective was to effect change in the homeland so that thousands of compatriots could return and
others would not be forced to emigrate.”

39

For decades, Lozano’s newspapers put forth a consistent view concerning the importance
of the Mexican Revolution to the Mexican community abroad; however, his political stance
towards Mexico and the actions of post-revolutionary leaders shifted between the 1920s and the
1940s. Over time a greater attention was place on nurturing the interests of the Mexican
immigrant communities in the United States. For instance, on the night of September 16, 1930,
in honor of the fourth anniversary of La Opinión, Lozano gave a speech over Los Angeles radio
station KMTR while his wife and other Mexican singers, such as the acclaimed composer Guty
40

Cárdenas, sang special Mexican musical numbers.

The speech given by Lozano, as well as

other speeches on Mexican holidays, reinforced the longing for the Patria (Motherland) felt by
Mexicans living in the United States and stressed the importance of imparting nationalistic
values and lessons to the children of immigrants. More importantly, they also reiterated that
although they were distant, their efforts were no less important or valuable for exalting the
Mexican nation. Editorials, articles and reviews published in both of these circulars reveal the

38

La Prensa, April 2, 1936, p. 5; La Prensa, November 20, 1936, p. 4.

39

Francine Medeiros “La Opinión, A Mexican Exile Newspaper: A Content Analysis of its First
Years, 1926-1929” Aztlán 11.1 (Spring 1980): 78.
40

La Prensa, September 19, 1930, p. 1, 5.
143

importance of Spanish-language press to the configuration of the Spanish-speaking Mexican
radio audience.
Newspapers and magazines published throughout the United States, as Nicolás Kanellos
argues “protected the language, culture and rights of an ethnic minority within a larger culture
that was in the best times unconcerned with the Hispanic ethnic enclaves and in the worst of
times openly hostile.”

41

A publication such as La Prensa, wrote a Mexican Consulate Official

in 1925, “is the largest circulated newspaper within the Mexican colonia of San Antonio in the
42

United States.”

Newspapers not only offered local and national information, advertisements

and entertainment news, but they also printed articles and editorials on the current state of
Mexican government affairs. Thus; they served the dual role of orienting Mexican immigrants in
a foreign land and sustaining their cultural heritage.
Correspondence from readers confirms these attitudes. Personal letters sent to the offices
of the papers demonstrate the importance Lozano’s publications had in fostering a sense of
community and patriotism, not only in the U.S. Southwest but also in Mexico. Oftentimes, La
Prensa published anecdotes from letters sent to Lozano around February 14, the day the
newspaper commemorated its anniversary. One note, written by Pedro S. Rodríguez in 1935,
noted that “this newspaper, which in the United States is a spokesman for Mexican public
opinion, and the sure indicator that guides our people which are scattered throughout this great
41

Nicolás Kanellos, “A Brief History of Hispanic Periodicals in the United States” in Nicolas
Kanellos and Helvetia Martell, eds., Hispanic Periodicals in the United States, Origins to 1960:
A Brief History and Comprehensive Bibliography (Houston: Arte Publico Press, 2000), 5.
42

Archivo General de la Nación, Ramo: Obregón-Calles (Hereafter AGN, OC), Expediente
818-J-16.
144

nation. LA PRENSA, which is the paper that I eagerly read every day, has become an
indispensable need for me, as well as a friend and inseparable companion.”

43

Letters continued in the following years. During their 25 anniversary, best wishes were
sent to Lozano from readers in cities around the United States such as Chicago, New York, Los
Angeles and New Orleans. Readers applauded Lozano for carrying out positive cultural and
patriotic work through his paper. One in particular, Hilario E. Vázquez of St. David, Arizona,
had subscribed to the newspaper for more than twenty years. He noted, “There are many reasons
why LA PRENSA has prospered, but to me, the most salient is that it has defended the rights of
our Motherland and increased our name abroad…I am 77 years old. I arrived in the United
States in 1885 and I am a Mexican citizen.” Correspondence from the commemoration also
arrived in San Antonio from Mexico, such as the letter written by Eulalio Velásquez of
Querétaro who wrote, “It is my wish that LA PRENSA reach a long life, being at all times, as it
has been until today, an unsurpassable spokesman for the children of Mexico who, because of
the inevitable decree of destiny, live allende el Río Grande (on the other side of the Rio Grande),
remembering every hour, every instant, with pure affection, their beloved land.”

44

Ignacio E. Lozano was an important figure within the Mexican population of the U.S.
Southwest who took on multiple roles as newspaper editor, entrepreneur, cultural advocate, and
by the 1940s, “defender of Mexico.” He was behind the establishment of a series of grass roots
movements and organizations in Texas and California. In 1934, for instance, he helped found
“Permanent Patriotic Committees” in cities throughout the country in order to promote holidays
43
44

La Prensa, February 20, 1935, p. 8.
La Prensa, February 13,1938, p. 8.
145

and events that were held in suitable locations. This initiative came in the aftermath of an
incident in Brawley, California, when, after canceling their local celebration, one member of the
community shouted the midnight cry of “Viva Mexico” during Mexican Independence Day at his
place of work, the local liquor store.

45

In San Antonio, one of Lozano’s greatest achievements was founding the “Beneficiencia
Mexicana,” a Mexican welfare society that sponsored the construction of a medical office, the
46

“Clínica Mexicana de San Antonio.”

The clinic was founded in the early 1930s with the help

of local businessmen and generous community members. Every year during Día de la Raza
celebrations on October 12 , they organized a benefit concert featuring invited singers, actors,
and government representatives from Mexico, such as Juán Arvizu, Toña la Negra, María
Conesa, and Las Hermanas Águila, along with local artists and musicians. Acclaimed singer
Juán Arvizu, who had participated in one of these fundraisers during the early 1930s, applauded
Lozano for his labor and believed “that all Mexican artists should cooperate with Mr. Lozano, in
order that the institution mentioned, continues forward and prospers, to the benefit of the
47

multitude of compatriots who lack the resources to request medical attention.”

Lozano

maintained, and rightly so, that offering Mexicans with limited resources the opportunity to
receive medical attention at a low cost would benefit the San Antonio’s Mexican population.
Along with a number of first-generation Mexican immigrants, Lozano believed that it

45
46
47

La Prensa, September 18, 1934, p. 3.
La Prensa, October 14, 1934, pp. 1, 3, 8.
La Prensa, November 13, 1934, p. 8.
146

was important to prolong the cultural traditions of his childhood such as celebrating national
holidays and honoring the homeland through festivals, outdoor events and cultural activities. An
editorial written on September 11, 1930, in La Prensa, for instance, included what he called “the
doctrine of order and patriotism.” In it, Lozano stressed the need for Mexican citizens not to
forget their nationality and to be aware of the laws in their state of residence so as to not tarnish
the reputation of the Mexican community.

48

One reader noted that, “If we know the history of

our Mexico, if our children have learned to love the country of their parents, it is because 25
years ago, in my house and my brothers’ house, we have read LA PRENSA…Who has doubted
49

that with LA PRENSA, we have learned to love Mexico more?”

As the community increased in size, newspapers made use of the creativity of their
readers and their affection for Mexican music. In 1937, for example, La Prensa and La Opinión
held a contest for the lyrics to a “México de Afuera Hymn.” The editors envisioned this song to
be a pseudo national anthem that could be intonated during special occasions and would unite the
Mexican community. According to the stipulations, “The verses…need to speak of the longings
and feelings of Mexicans who live outside of the Motherland and carry out labor mexicanista
abroad.”

50

The paper exhorted those living in the U.S. who had deep roots in Mexico and

labored to perpetuate their loyalty to their offspring. In contests such as this, Lozano’s papers
emphasized that it did not matter where you were located, just as long as you celebrated,
remembered, and perpetuated the patriotic feelings abroad.
48
49
50

La Prensa, September 11, 1930, p. 3.
La Prensa, February 13, 1938, p. 1-2.
La Prensa, October 18, 1937, p. 3.
147

While Lozano was an important cultural advocate who consistently honored Mexico’s
glorious past and promising future, his political stance towards the country of his birth fluctuated
during the post-revolutionary years. In fact, his loudest admonitions came during the Cristero
War. During the 1920s, the content of the articles published in La Prensa, wrote A. Martinez,
“deviates the judgment of the Mexican residents.” Martinez, who had previous experience in the
newspaper industry, was living in Detroit, Michigan and desired to start up a newspaper in order
to counteract the misinformation being published by Lozano’s San Antonio newspaper.

51

Given its history and growing Mexican population, San Antonio was at the center of
attacks by Mexican immigrants who opposed Lozano. “The city of San Antonio is the meeting
point of all the enemies of the government and peace in Mexico,” wrote Jorge Kathain in 1925.
Kathain, who wanted to uphold Mexico’s good character in the city, asked the Mexican
government for $2,000 to cover the start up costs of a Spanish-language newspaper.

52

The

government, which could not fund the project, responded instead by using other forms of media
such as the radio to counteract the misinformation being circulated in the city.
Mexican immigrants found other ways to combat Lozano and show their support to the
government. In the mid-1920s, many who had escaped during the Revolution and continued to
look to Mexico in the years following the conflict, rose up in support of the claims made by
former political leader Adolfo de la Huerta, who was speaking against the Calles regime. In
1924, the Vice-consul of Mexico stationed in St. Louis, Missouri, Rómulo Vargas, for example,
wrote to President Calles informing him that La Prensa had published an article about a banquet
51
52

AGN, OC, Expediente 121-R-S-6.
AGN, OC, Expediente 805-K-7.
148

attended by 150 San Antonio Mexican-American businessmen in which Huerta spoke
“falsehoods and intentional machinations” against the Mexican government. “I don’t see,” De la
Huerta had said, “why instead of imitating the constructive administration of the United States of
53

America, [Mexico] follows the politics of Soviet Russia.”

Lozano’s ideology towards Mexico and the Mexican community in the United States was
made clear during the 1930s, a difficult era when deportation campaigns by the U.S. government
forced thousands to return to Mexico. Lozano was not in favor of repatriation because he
believed that the Mexicans who lived in the U.S. for an extended period of time became
accustomed to a higher living standard and noted that once they returned to Mexico many felt
uncomfortable. Instead, he campaigned for the Mexican government to invest in ensuring that
Mexicans in the U.S. felt that their government cared if they maintained their nationality or that
they be allowed to vote.
Each time a new sexenio (six-year presidential term) or transfer of power took place in
Mexico, Lozano published his opinions concerning the state of the Mexican government and his
thoughts on its future. During the transfer of power in Mexico from Emilio Portes Gil to Pascual
Ortiz Rubio in 1930, he explicitly expressed his opinion on the direction Mexico was taking in
the pages of his newspapers. “The country wants something more serious, more tangible, more
consistent than simple promises” he wrote, “they want the assurance that the Mexican
54

Revolution will truly enter a new period under the upcoming administration.”

The promises

made by the new leader were in vain and by 1933 Lozano’s view on the government was even
53
54

AGN, OC, Expediente 101-R2-H-8.
La Prensa, January 14, 1930.
149

more disparaging. On Saturday, July 29, for instance, he wrote “tendentious attacks” against the
Mexican government; in particular, he criticized the use of government funds to pay for a
railroad trip taken by Calles from the Northern Mexican border to Mexico City. Calles, who was
no longer President by 1933, influenced the administration of Abelardo L. Rodriguez, exercising
“privileges without justification” as Lozano wrote.

55

Mexican Consul of Dallas, Raul

Domínguez, wrote to Calles to inform him of the article, also penned a letter to Lozano
condemning the actions of the paper for not concerning themselves with the wellbeing of the
Mexican community of San Antonio. Domínguez pleaded with Lozano to work with the
Consulate and engage in Labor Pro-Patria, as the nation was undergoing a vast reconstruction
project.

56

At heart, Lozano viewed himself and the Mexican community in the United States as part
of “the Mexican nation,” and thus believed that newspapers in Mexico should publish more
information concerning the problems which Mexicans who lived in the United States faced. His
reasoning was that by 1934, the sheer number of Mexicans in the United States exceeded that of
some states in Mexico. The Mexican government was making a mistake by not focusing on their
needs, he noted, leaving some members of the community with a sense of “abandonment.”
When Mexicans in Mexico were aware of the issues that Mexican immigrants confronted on a
daily basis, Lozano maintained, a greater concern for the federal government would be raised

55

La Prensa, July 29, 1933.

56

Fideicomiso Archivo de Plutarco Elías Calles y Fernando Torreblanca (FAPEC), Expediente
14. Inventario 570. Legajo 1/16.
150

concerning the future and importance of Mexico’s reconstruction.

57

In 1934, after Lázaro Cárdenas became President of Mexico, Lozano’s vision for his
newspapers shifted and he adopted a more positive outlook concerning the relationship between
the Motherland and its population in the United States. During Cárdenas’s term in office,
Lozano was an avid advocate of the rights of the Mexican population in the U.S. In turn, the
Mexican press rightfully depicted him as “defender and Patriarch of México de Afuera.” In an
interview for the Mexican magazine Hoy, where he was questioned about the allegiance of the
Mexican population in the U.S. towards Mexico, Lozano responded “I continue to believe that
the Mexicans of the U.S. South maintain a love for the Motherland…the Mexicans maintain, for
generations, their nationality…They don’t lose the hope that they will someday return to the
Motherland.”

58

Until Cárdenas’s administration, the Mexican government’s policy towards Mexicans in
the U.S. had been inconsistent. Cárdenas labored to have an open dialogue between the needs
and desires of Mexican expatriates and their home country and received support from many
former soldiers and leaders of the Mexican Revolution to carry this out. One man in particular,
Jesús M. González, demonstrated that patriotism to Mexico was alive among the Mexican
community living in the United States. González wrote to the President in January 1938 from
his home in Los Angeles to tell him about the patriotic duties he had been carrying out since his
days as a young soldier fighting against Porfirio Díaz and later in the Constitutionalist Army
during the Mexican Revolution. He noted that he had taken a stand against fascism, the actions
57
58

La Prensa, August 4, 1934.
La Prensa, January 28, 1940, p. 1-2.
151

of former President Plutarco Elías Calles, and he had written a pamphlet about repatriation and
colonization, “these two important Mexican problems.” Additionally, he had joined the “Comité
Nacional Revolucionario y Fraternidad Amigos del Campesino” and would soon take up a radio
program with funding from the organization.

59

As the Cárdenas sexenio progressed, Lozano continued to support his projects. In 1936,
La Prensa printed a special message given by Cárdenas to México de Afuera in which he urged
Mexicans to keep their nationality at all costs and to be assured that their “present government
cares for them.”

60

Mexicans living in the United States believed it was important to keep not

just their nationality, but also the characteristics of their race, as they were unlike the Anglo
Americans. The coverage of the speech by the Spanish-language press indicates that many
interpreted this address as a personal conversation between them and the President. Hearing the
head of state reassure their place within the Mexican community was comforting, especially
since previous administrations had been ambivalent, if not silent, about their policy towards the
Mexican community living abroad.
In fact, Cárdenas’ views on repatriation and his overall attitude on the need to encourage
Mexicans abroad, as opposed to ignoring or discounting them, gave him favor among the
Mexican-American population in the United States during the late ‘30s. On Memorial Day in
1938, for example, he used the Partido Nacional Revolucionario (National Revolutionary Party),
or PNR’s radio station, XEFO, and gave a speech in English to the Mexican community of San
Antonio, Texas. This broadcast, which originated in Mexico City, was re-transmitted for those
59
60

AGN, LCR, Expediente 512.3/16.
La Prensa, January 23, 1936, p. 3
152

who did not have the opportunity to hear it by Mexican stations in Monterrey and Tamaulipas.

61

Despite the fact that its primary purpose was to extend cordial greetings to the other country, La
Prensa indicated that this speech, along with the one of the previous year, had strong political
significance. Radio was utilized by Mexican government leaders to send a greeting to the
Mexican population in the United States. By and large, transmissions such as these served as
reminders that their government was aware of their current situation and was concerned with
their return migration.
Spanish-language newspapers also played a large role in preserving and sustaining
Mexican music, patriotism and to a lesser extent, the Spanish broadcasts of English-language
radio stations. During their Spanish-language “block programming,” radio stations also hosted
live radio programs from theaters across the U.S. Southwest during the ‘30s. In 1934, for
example, San Antonio’s Teatro Nacional began a daily broadcast called, La Hora Anáhuac.
This program was transmitted over station KABC and was sponsored by “Dávila Glass Works”
whose manager, José Dávila Jr., was in support of the use of radio to diffuse Mexican culture and
art.

62

La Hora Anáhuac aired for more than a decade and was a popular radio program that

attracted high quality Mexican singers. In 1935 when Mexican artists Ana María Fernández,
Pedro Vargas and Raulito gave a performance in the Municipal Auditorium in San Antonio, for
instance, they visited KABC and gave a special audition dedicated to the Mexican community of

61
62

La Prensa, May 29, 1938, p. 1.
La Prensa, May 10, 1936, p. 5.
153

the city.

63

Until the 1950s, Spanish-language broadcasts over English-language radio helped

preserve Mexican music within the older generation of Mexican immigrants in the United States.
Through the Spanish-language press, the Mexican community learned everything there
was to know about local English-language and Mexican radio stations: their broadcasting hours,
what music they would play, if a Mexican singer or artist was going to appear live on the
program, or if a special Consulate member or head of state was going to give a speech during a
holiday or special event. In 1938, when the “Casa Mexicana de Musica Tomas Acuña” of San
Antonio, Texas advertised the latest model of Philco Radios, for instance, their ad read: “Listen
to the programs from Mexico City with a PHILCO Radio!”

64

Lozano’s newspapers assisted the

formation of a consumer culture of Mexican products by Mexican immigrants and their children
in the United States. Following the Second World War, for example, Mexican immigrants and
U.S. born Mexicans living in the United States were avid patrons of mariachi records and
movies. Jesús Jáuregui notes that in the 1940s “Our paisanos were regular consumers of the
representations of Lucha Reyes, Tito Guizar and Jorge Negrete.”

65

Lozano’s close circle of friends and business partners included Mexican entrepreneurs
and radio station owners in Northern Mexico. In fact, the bond he had with the Mexican radio
scene was apparent during the 1930s when the programming and activities of Mexican radio
stations were announced in the pages of La Prensa or in La Opinión. His newspapers partnered
63
64

La Prensa, September 29, 1935, p. 6.
La Prensa, August 31, 1936.

65

Jesús Jáuregui, El mariachi: símbolo musical de México (México, DF: Instituto Nacional de
Antropología e Historia, 2007), 378.
154

with Mexican radio stations in their efforts to reach Mexican citizens and “transport them back to
Mexico” through music.
Radio stations located in Monterrey, Nuevo León, such as XET, advertised their
programming in La Prensa. Nicknamed El Pregonero del Norte (The proclaimer/announcer of
the north), XET boasted that they were the favorite among Mexican residents in the United
States. The station’s advertisements read: “Are you Mexican? Do you like Mexican music? The
most listened station. The news of greatest concern. The most entertaining programs are
diffused daily in northern Mexico by XET.”

66

From 1937 to 1938, La Prensa sponsored a radio

program over the station once a week. The “Radio program of ‘La Prensa,’” featured Mexican
singers and bands, orchestras, duets and trios which sang traditional and popular music. The
advertisements for the program read, “XET the favorite station among Mexican residents of the
United States…You could ‘Transport yourself to your homeland’ by “listening to XET.”

67

La Prensa frequently announced live concerts aired from radio stations in the
Northeastern states of Chihuahua and Tamaulipas. XEMU of Piedras Negras, Coahuila, for
example, featured a concert twice a month in which the students of an acclaimed piano
instructor, Esperanza Delgado, debuted.

68

In 1940, to commemorate their third anniversary,

XEMU, along with the Club Recreativo “Piedras Negras,” hosted a grand ball in honor of the
people who supported the station living in the state of Coahuila and Texas. Months earlier, the

66
67
68

La Prensa, July 4, 1937, p. 2; La Prensa, September 23, 1937.
La Prensa, July 4, 1937, p. 2.
La Prensa, December 17, 1939, p. 4.
155

station had organized a concurso de simpatía (beauty pageant) among its listeners and the
winner, Miss Azalia Acuña of San Antonio, Texas, was selected as the queen of the festivity.

69

Interestingly enough, all but one of the members of the “royal party,” Otilia Domínguez, who
was from Hondo, Coahuila, was from cities in southern Texas.
The Spanish-language press helped Mexican citizens stay tuned to Mexican programming
and assisted Mexican radio station owners in fulfilling their goal of broadcasting into the United
States. At times, these papers also saved new commercial radio stations from going under. On
August 2, 1935, for instance, Carlos M. Kennedy, the owner and operator of station XEAN of
Ensenada, wrote to the Ministry of Communications and Public Works in Mexico City
requesting to increase the power of his station so that he could have enough advertisements from
the United States and the surrounding Northwestern states like Sonora and Chihuahua. He noted
that only local businesses were using his station, since it was not beneficial for foreign
companies due to the short reach of his station. In addition, the station did not broadcast live
music, since it could not afford to pay the artists wages and used phonographic records during its
programming instead.

70

Three months later, Kennedy wrote to the Minister of Communications

and Public Works again noting that he had read in La Opinión, of Los Angeles, that a
commercial radio station in Hermosillo, Sonora had been authorized to transmit with 1000 watts
and was assigned the same frequency as his station, XEAN. Kennedy wrote that listeners had
informed him that during the tests that XEBA had done, they had been unable to hear his station.
The Buying Power of the Mexican Community
69
70

La Prensa, March 24, 1940, p. 5.
AGN, SCOP, Expediente 22/131.6(722)/5.
156

As the second-generation came of age during the ‘30s and ‘40s and participated in
the Second World War, some retained the practices of their parents of listening to
Mexican radio stations. Men serving in the U.S. Army or Navy, for instance, would
listen to Mexican radio stations in the middle of the night while stationed in places as far
North as Dutch Harbor, Alaska. This generation, which navigated two cultures and
languages “used radio to live within that reality.”

71

Second-generation Mexican women, either as Pachucas or Pochas, had an
ambiguous relationship with mass media. In the form of Hollywood movies, dime novels
and romance magazines mass media entered their daily lives and led many of them to
fantasize and covet the lifestyles promoted in these publications. Thus, as Vicki Ruiz
notes, during the 1930s the media became an “agent of Americanization” influencing the
way these women navigated between the U.S. mainstream society and Mexican cultural
values.

72

Radio, which was an important tool and resource, oftentimes influenced the
acculturation of Mexican women. Aside from motivating people to purchase a home
radio receiver, the growing consumer culture of the first half of the twentieth century also

71

Maggie Rivas-Rodríguez, “’Embracing the ether’ The use of radio by the Latino World War
II Generation” in Maggie Rivas-Rodríguez and Emilio Zamora, eds., Beyond the Latino World
War II Hero: The Social and Political Legacy of a Generation (Austin: University of Texas
Press, 2010), 22.

72

Vicki L. Ruiz, “Star Struck’: Acculturation, Adolescence and the Mexican American Woman,
1920-1950’” in Elliot West and Paula Petrik, eds., Small Worlds: Children and Adolescents in
America (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1992), 2.
157

caused rifts between young women and their mothers.

73

Women were in the center of

familial conflicts within Mexican homes in the United States. In Southern California,
first-generation parents became concerned with the effects cinema had on their young
daughters as they began to frequent the cinema more and more in the 1930s and 1940s.
In response, many parents desired to exercise control over the lives of their daughters,
especially when they wanted to be in public un-chaperoned.

74

Young women battled

against men like Zeferino Ramirez, for instance, who would not let his daughters attend
an English-language or Mexican theater, as he considered what took place in those
establishments as “immoral.” Instead, he wanted his five children to attain the best
education possible and not be artists but industrial workers. A muleteer from Zacatecas,
Mexico, Zeferino believed his daughters “need to learn to work in order to sustain
themselves as if they didn’t have any money and were never going to get married.”

75

As consumers, Mexican immigrant women in the United States also maintained
close ties with Mexican music through the mass media. In particular, Americanization
campaigns took into consideration the role of mass media in the assimilation of Mexican

73

Vicki L. Ruiz, “Star Struck’: Acculturation, Adolescence and the Mexican American Woman,
1920-1950’” in Elliot West and Paula Petrik, eds., Small Worlds: Children and Adolescents in
America (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1992), 2.
74

Vicki L. Ruiz has written on this topic see, From Out of the Shadows: Mexican Women in
Twentieth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998) and“Star Struck’:
Acculturation, Adolescence and the Mexican American Woman, 1920-1950’” in Elliot West and
Paula Petrik, eds., Small Worlds: Children and Adolescents in America (Lawrence: University
of Kansas Press, 1992), 61-80.
75

Manuel Gamio, Notes gathered for his book, Mexican Immigration to the United States
Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, Reel 1.
158

immigrants and worked hard at changing the cultural practices of Mexican immigrants.
To begin with, one of the challenges reformers faced was getting Mexican women out of
the house. In their opinion, it was important for women to leave and attend Englishlanguage classes, as language was the gateway to an “American way of life.” Yet when
women stopped attending the classes for a number of reasons, reformers blamed the
patriarchal Mexican culture and the traditional and antiquarian ways of Mexican men.
One factor which was overlooked as a cause for the drop in attendance, which could have
contributed to the resistance in “assimilation,” was that at home women had radios,
records and music.
Mexican women might have been isolated from English-language culture, but
they were entertained nonetheless. In the late 1920s, Maria Dolores de Aguilar, of San
Antonio, Texas, for instance, would “only go to the theater when Mexican vaudeville
shows are in town,” which traveled throughout the U.S. Southwest and northern Mexico
occasionally. Admitting that she enjoyed “Mexican music,” the most, Aguilar noted that
at home “in my phonograph I always have Mexican songs.”

76

Regardless of their gender

or class status, the Mexican immigrant generation faithfully listened to Mexican radio
stations during the 1940s and through the 1950s when their children were being
influenced by rhythm and blues and rock ‘n’ roll.
The Mexican Consulate
The physical movement of people, whether by necessity or not, is accompanied by the
76

Manuel Gamio, Notes gathered for his book, Mexican Immigration to the United States
Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, Reel 1.
159

movement of their customs, traditions, foods, and other cultural manifestations like their music.
Mexican communities also made use of the Mexican Consulate which made it possible for
Mexican immigrants to listen to Mexican bands and singers or to tune in to Mexican radio
programming. In their posts as diplomatic agents, Consuls were linked to the larger events
taking place within the post-revolutionary Mexican national theater. Moreover, the cultural
activities sponsored by the Consulate require further investigation, as they reflected the
government’s policy towards its former residents. Correspondence between the Mexican
immigrant population, Consulate offices and the Ministry of Foreign Relations proves not only
that the overseas population was attune to radio; but, that they took interest in the content of the
messages that official and commercial stations were projecting.
Since the nineteenth century, Mexican Consulate offices in the United States had served
as institutions entrusted to defend the rights of Mexicans abroad and preserve their cultural
integrity. In Los Angeles, for instance, during the first half of the twentieth century, Mexican
Consulates gave aid to repatriated Mexicans, helped organize agricultural unions for better
wages and working conditions, and assisted the establishment of the Comité de Beneficiencia
Mexicana (The Mexican Welfare Society) which gave aid, shelter, medical care and assistance to
those in need.
In Mexican communities throughout the nation, Consulates also served a cultural
function and were also behind the establishment of a range of activities and events including the
sponsorship of baseball clubs, church organizations, and mutual aid societies which promoted the
construction of México de Afuera (Mexico Outside of Mexico). During the world-wide
economic crisis of the late 1920s and early 1930s, in particular, Consular activities reflected the
interests, needs, and aspirations of not just Mexican immigrants, but U.S. born Mexicans as
160

well.

77

In the United States, Mexican Consulate offices spearheaded a number of educational
efforts such as building schools, libraries, and focusing on teaching the Spanish language and
Mexican History. Some argue that these were failed projects in the attempt to control the
78

process of the acculturation of Mexicans in the United States.

Yet in doing so, they fostered

cultural activities which Mexican immigrants in the U.S. had consistently looked to Mexico for,
such as concerts and music. With the help of mass communications, they made the postrevolutionary government’s cultural project advance within the Mexican communities of the
United States. Both Mexican and English-language radio stations, in fact, were included in the
activities used to strengthen a sense of national identity among those living beyond the
geographical borders of Mexico.
In particular, a number of first generation Mexican immigrants in the United States
longed to perpetuate the traditions of their upbringing and extend the true meaning of Patria
(Motherland), to their children. After all, oftentimes some of them were called Pochos. Music,
77

Douglas Monroy, Rebirth: Mexican Los Angeles from the Great Migration to the Great
Depression (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999), 7-66. For more
on this topic see, Francisco E. Balderrama, In Defense of La Raza: The Mexican Consulate and
the Mexican Community, 1929-1936 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1982); George J.
Sánchez, Becoming Mexican American: Ethnicity, Culture, and Identity in Chicano Los Angeles,
1900-1945 (New York; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 108-125. For an analysis on the
work of the consulate in the late nineteenth century through the Mexican Revolution see, Juan
Gómez-Quinones, “Piedras Contra la Luna, México en Aztlán y Aztlán en México: ChicanoMexican Relations and the Mexican Consulates, 1900-1920” in James W. Wilkie, Michael C.
Meyer, and Edna Monzón de Wilkie eds., Contemporary Mexico: Papers of the Fourth
International Congress of Mexican History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976).
78

George J. Sánchez, Becoming Mexican American: Ethnicity, Culture, and Identity in Chicano
Los Angeles, 1900-1945 (New York; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 109.
161

in effect, was an avenue to make this connection and Mexican communities leaned on grassroots organizations to honor and remember the homeland through music. Organizations
affiliated with the Consulate, in particular, dominated the public life of the Mexican community
during the 1920s. In the 1920s, for example, it was custom practice for local groups, such as the
“Union Mutualista” (Mutual Aid Society), to sponsor Veladas Musicales, evening gatherings in
which a variety of songs were sung by members of the community.
The support of the Consulate was displayed when Mexican bands toured cities in Texas
and California, which often took place during a Mexican holiday. As extensions of the
government, the Consulates were there to ensure that the principles and ideals of the Mexican
Revolution were making headway in the United States. This was evident in patriotic festivals in
the United States organized by the Consulate offices. At times, Consulate workers in Northern
Mexico crossed the border into the United States to attend important holidays or patriotic
festivals organized by the Mexican immigrant community in Texas or California. After attending
a Mexican Police Band concert on December 5, 1935, in Laredo, Texas, for instance, Daniel X.
Duarte, migration delegate of Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas, wrote the following report: “This is
the best way for those who are away to remember with enthusiasm the Motherland and to see
that the Revolution has not disregarded any sector as it has progressed forward.”

79

In some instances, these were memorable gatherings. In May of 1925, for instance,
Arturo M. Elias, who worked for the Mexican Consulate in Houston, Texas, reported that when
the Mexican Police Band, led by acclaimed musical composer Miguel Lerdo de Tejada, played
during a local congress the performance drew a crowd of more than 10,000 people. Elias noted
79

AGN, LCR, Expediente 135.2/146.
162

that after the concert hundreds of Mexicans walked in unison from the auditorium to the Houston
Post offices, where the band performed several numbers that were broadcast over the radio.
During their two week tour in Texas, the group gave concerts in prestigious hotels and theaters in
San Antonio and Laredo.

80

Emerging forms of technology aided the community’s gatherings. In some instances,
Mutual Aid Societies and Consulate offices relied on radio to demonstrate their commitment to
Mexico; as in November 1925 during the III Congress of the Representatives for the Blue Cross
Brigades and the Honorific Commissions of Texas and Oklahoma. On that occasion, a radio
transmitter was placed in the auditorium so that the speeches and Mexican music would be heard
in the surrounding area.

81

Mexican Consulate Officials were attentive to the efforts of the government in having the
Mexican community hear music and state-sponsored bulletins. In December of 1926, the
Mexican Consulate office in Tucson wrote to the radio department and informed them that in
order to take full advantage of the Mexican propaganda that the Ministry of Public Education
delivered through XFX in the state of Arizona, the station needed to broadcast between 480 and
500 meters. This frequency change, in their opinion, would allow Arizonians to listen to XFX
without any interference from local stations in the United States. The Ministry realized that
changing its frequency to serve the needs of one state would mean that other areas would not be
able to listen to their station, and responded by transmitting special musical concerts dedicated to

80

Archivo General de la Nación (AGN), Ramo Gobernación, Fondo Dirección General de
Gobierno (DGG), Expediente 205-H-22.
81

AGN, OC, Expediente 429-S-14.
163

specific regions of the United States. In addition, the radio office asked Consul Officials to
indicate the days that local stations were off the air in order to dedicate a special concert of “proMexico propaganda.”

82

In fact, during the 1930s, Consulate Officials tuned in and collaborated with Mexican
radio stations on a frequent basis. On December 4, 1930, for example, in partnership with
commercial station XEW, XFX sponsored a concert given by Mexico City High School students.
This broadcast was dedicated to Mexican teachers and students living on the border between
Mexico and the United States and the Mexican communities of the U.S. Southwest. Weeks prior
to the event, Consulate offices in California, Arizona, and Texas informed their communities of
this special broadcast, whose goal was in line with the mission of the SEP: using music to
connect Mexican students and their families in both locations.

83

Because Spanish-language radio stations did not exist in the United States during the
1930s, at times the Consulate members crossed the U.S. border into Mexico to make a live
appearance in a Mexican commercial radio station. Such was the case for the Consul of Laredo,
Texas who traveled to Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas on November, 1937 when station XENT
transmitted a series of music concerts dedicated to President Lázaro Cárdenas and the Mexican
Army. The transmission was conducted in an effort to bridge the relationship between Mexican
soldiers and workers and was rebroadcast over local stations in the surrounding area. In addition
to the music selection, which included bands, orchestras and the appearance of popular singing
duet “Las Hermanitas Herrera,” the Consul of Laredo gave a speech in English and Spanish
82
83

Boletín de la SEP, Tomo VI, no. 1 (1927): 153.
AHSEP Exp. A-4/253.3 (73).
164

during this concert.

84

Conclusion
The 1930s proved to be a crucial time in the configuration of Spanish-language radio
broadcasting in the United States and, more importantly, in the formation of a community of
listeners, a network of radioescuchas who relied on Mexican songs, cultural programs and live
performances to create a sense of community based on a multilayered set of messages advanced
by the Mexican consulates, the Spanish-language music industry, the cultural policies of
commercial radio stations and Spanish-language newspapers in the United States.
The presence of grass-roots organizations like Mutual Aid societies, Spanish-language
newspapers and “block programming” over local radio stations underpinned the unity of the
Mexican immigrant and Mexican-American population and aided the development of the social
activities of Mexican communities in Los Angeles and San Antonio. Moreover, an unintended
consequence of radio broadcasting was the revelation of the buying power of Mexican
immigrants and U.S. born Mexicans.

84

La Prensa, November 2, 1937, p. 5.
165

Chapter V
From Michoacán to the Million Dollar: Men, Women and Music
in the Transnational Radio Industry

The artistic careers of Maria and Margarita Padilla, the members of the Mexican singing
duet, Las Hermanas Padilla, began on a summer afternoon in 1936 at a park in Pico Rivera,
California. One day, as Maria recalled, “they set up stands [in the park] and we were walking
around barefoot by a small lake there…then, they announced over a microphone that there was
going to be a singing contest and my brother asked, ‘Why don’t you enter?’” Terrified, Maria
said the suggestion immediately brought tears to her eyes. However, since she was familiar with
the corridos and Mexican songs that her two older sisters, Margarita and Rita, frequently sung at
home, she agreed to participate and sang the ballad “El Caballo Bayo” alongside Margarita.
1

Hours later, the teenaged sisters went home with the first place prize.

The events that transpired that Sunday afternoon were common among Mexican
communities throughout the United States. Since the nineteenth century, families from
California to Texas spent evenings and weekends outdoors at picnics, celebrations and festivals
featuring food vendors, artistic contests, popular dances, and athletic competitions. At nights, in
the local or tent theater, they attended film screenings, live musical performances or local variety
acts where comedy sketches were frequently displayed. What made that particular day
memorable for the Padilla family was that Ramón B. Arnáiz, a radio announcer and president of

1

Interview with Maria Padilla, March 15, 2009, conducted by the author.
166

the local chapter of the “Beneficiencia Mexicana,” a Mexican welfare society, was walking
around in the crowd at the exact moment that Maria and Margarita were singing. Taking note of
the girls’ innate talent, Arnáiz approached their father to ask if his daughters could perform in the
Spanish-language radio program he hosted over local English-language radio station KMTR.
Mr. Padilla hesitated, realizing that having his daughters pursue career as “artists” might tarnish
the reputation of the Catholic family, but he agreed nonetheless. Weeks later, Maria and
Margarita debuted in KMTR singing the Mexican ballads and songs they had learned from their
mother at home. Within a year, she and her sister recorded albums with major record labels such
as Blue Bird, Columbia and Vocallion; shortly after, the two Mexican-born singers took up
artistic tours throughout California, Mexico and South America.

2

Las Hermanas Padilla’s success story is a microcosm of what took place to dozens of
aspiring singers, actors, and performers within Mexican communities of the United States during
the twentieth century. Maria and Margarita quickly rose to stardom because of the importance of
Mexican music to the Mexican immigrant and U.S. born Mexican population, the persistence and
vision of entrepreneurs such as Mr. Arnáiz, and thanks to mass media instruments like radio that
diffused their music. This chapter analyzes some of the careers of men and women in the radio
industry including composers, interpreters and actresses. The radio industry, which became
professionalized in the 1930s, created new spaces and opportunities for men and women. In
radio, men could assert their masculinity as broadcasters or through singing, performing and
moving the audience with patriotic songs while women were at a crossroads about the perception
2

A similar situation took place in Texas with the guitarist and singer Lydia Mendoza who was
“discovered” by Manuel J. Cortéz, a pioneer of Mexican-American radio broadcasting in the
1930s. For more on this see, Chris Strachwitz, and James Nicolopulos, Lydia Mendoza: A
Family Autobiography (Houston: Arte Público Press, 1993), 76-78.
167

by the upright Catholic society if their work was considered “decent” or “indecent.” On one
hand, they had to fight against the negative stereotypes associated with artists, such as loose
morality and extravagant lifestyles, and on the other, there were new spaces open for them
thanks to radio which they could pursue. Thus, radio created new spaces offering men and
women the opportunity to step outside of pre-determined gender roles.
The Mexican Radio Industry in the 1930s
The professionalization of the radio industry during the 1930s was possible thanks to a
number of skilled workers including commentators, artistic directors, composers, actors, singers,
telephone operators, technicians and engineers. Some of these positions, such as artistic
directors, emerged as the industry expanded; others, such as telephone operators, were preexisting jobs for which workers generally did not have to make any adjustments when they
transitioned into working for the radio. Before commercial radio appeared in the ‘30s, workers
in this sector were admired for their valor and passion for the radio. In August 1924, for
instance, station CYL, El Universal Ilustrado-La Casa del Radio received a number of
compliments by the press for their live radio programs, which at the time included symphonic
concerts, piano recitals and orchestras. The editor noted that even though the executors and
singers were all amateurs, they “give themselves to the art out of pure love for it.”

3

In the 1930s and 1940s, radio was a growing industry offering a range of new job
opportunities for men and women. During the professionalization of the industry, numberless
aspiring singers and actors traveled to Mexico City to seek fortune and fame in a radio station.
Once in the capital, those who were fortunate enough to sign a contract with a radio station
3

El Universal, August 16, 1924.
168

became part of a new and promising industry. In the 1920s, women in Mexico were entering the
workforce in greater numbers and were influenced by modernity and the technological
developments of the times, such as the typewriter at their place of work or the radio at home.
Had it not been for the rapid growth of radio in the following decade, the singers, musicians and
broadcasters with whom the public was well acquainted would not have existed. Instead of the
singer known as La Torcasita, wrote the editor of Radiolandia, “we would have a more or less
useful stenographer, which, as such, would not earn more than two or three pesos a day.”

4

The radio project extended outside of the capital city and by the 1930s, radio stations in
the provinces were flourishing. Commercial stations in the states of Sonora, Chihuahua,
Tamaulipas, Nuevo León and Veracruz recruited a large number of singers and artists and sent
them to Mexico City if they wanted to test their luck making records or gain a contract with a
large commercial station. By 1930, radio was part of daily life for a large percentage of
Mexico’s rural population, like José Sánchez, who was operating an experimental station in his
village of Mineral del Monte, Hidalgo. In 1934, Sánchez wrote a letter to the Minister of
Communications and Public Works in Mexico City requesting that he be allowed to change the
frequency of his station in order to satisfy the curiosity that radio had brought to his town. “The
concerts have been accepted by society and the general public of this city,” he wrote. The
broadcasts, however, had awakened great enthusiasm within a “great number of youth and young
women (señoritas) who are fans of singing and music, who ask me to continue to lend them my
5

station and have more transmissions.”

4
5

Radiolandia, March 10, 1943.
Archivo General de la Nación, Fondo Secretaría de Comunicaciones y Obras Públicas
169

In some instances, the careers of some singers began in stations in the provinces. For
example, the artistic careers of Paz and Esperanza Águila, or Las Hermanas Águila, began in
their home state of Jalisco. In 1934, the sisters befriended a man who worked for station XED of
Guadalajara. “One day he invited us to play football,” Esperanza recalled, “but first we had to
accompany him to his [radio] program. His duty was to play the piano for one hour. It was easy
for him to ask us to sing so we did.” Even though the sisters had never sung into a microphone
or appeared in a radio station before, they enjoyed the experience. Their friend, on the other
hand, received a warning from the station’s owner. “Two days later he was reprimanded. They
accused him of playing records instead of appearing in his program. When it became clear that
6

we weren’t ‘records’ they invited us to sing again,” she said. Within a month, Las Hermanas
Águila traveled to Mexico City where they became very successful artists singing for various
commercial radio stations, recording albums with major labels and touring North and South
America.
The Performance Industries and Women
In Mexico, women had been drawn to the life of the theater and pursued careers as
singers, dancers and performers since the nineteenth century. This path went “against the
conventional prejudices and lies of the female world, which directly aim to keep her as a
‘servant’, and ‘dependent’ upon others.” Early pioneers were women like Celia Padilla, who had
thrown “herself into the theater, to gain a defined personality and ‘independence.’” Mexican

(Hereafter AGN, SCOP), Expediente 22/131.6 (724.6)/1
6

Bertha Zacatecas, Vidas en el aire. Pioneros de la radio en México (México, DF: Editorial
Diana, 1996), 33-34.
170

women working in the theater, like Padilla, established the path for vaudeville actors and radio
singers years later.

7

For women, the radio industry opened up new possibilities. Working in radio physically
placed them in a new and unique position, the stage or studio. In Mexico’s provinces and across
the border into the United States, women toured with Teatro de Revista companies, singing and
acting in radio studios, night clubs and theaters during the 1930s and 1940s. Because
transmissions were heard all over the nation and in cities like San Antonio and Los Angeles,
their voices had the capacity to reach private places: homes, bedrooms, living rooms, cabarets,
night clubs and other unknown spaces where “decent” women were not physically allowed to
enter.
In fact, the advent of mass media of press and radio during the early twentieth century
represented a permanent intrusion into the domestic space which broke down the distinctions
between public and private spheres. As scholars have pointed out, the new mass means of
communications like radio, in particular, were able to reach an audience of women on a daily
basis; allowing governments, businesses and commercial stations access to an entirely new
8

audience. In Mexico, women responded either by staying at home glued to their receivers as
they listened to the voice of the crooner “make love” to them through soft romantic music or, by
9

finding ways to travel to the cities and begin a career in the budding industry. In most cases,

7

El Universal Ilustrado, December 17, 1925.

8

Victoria De Grazia, How fascism ruled women: Italy, 1922-1945 (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1993).
9

Elizabeth Joy Hayes, Radio Nation: Communication, Popular Culture, and Nationalism in
171

the women who arrived in Mexico City from the surrounding states to work in a radio station had
little or no experience behind a microphone. Such was the story of the singer, “Guadalupe la
Chinaca,” who moved to the capital because she was escaping familial obligations in her native
state of Oaxaca.

10

As middle-class women entered the labor force in Mexico during the 1930s and 1940s as
teachers, secretaries, and office clerks, a segment of them got into radio and took jobs as singers,
actresses, operators and programmers. Working in radio had advantages that the theater and
cinema lacked, like the privacy of singing in a studio. Yet, in the radio industry, women had to
overcome the same barriers which other working women in Mexico had to endure; namely, the
beliefs around traditional sex and gender roles in society that confined them to the home and
made public life disreputable. There was an indisputable level of control by the government,
which put an end to programs with “immoral” content. In the 1940s, censorship was
commonplace in the entertainment and mass media sector. In radio programs like Radionovelas
-the antecedents to the Mexican soap opera- “we were not allowed to use certain words like
divorce, cancer, and others,” noted Rita Rey a radio actress at the time. In order to not receive
reproach by the government, radio stations managers told actors and actresses they had to keep
certain morals and, at times, “controlled our personal lives,” as Emma Telmo, one of the most
11

celebrated radio actresses in Mexico City during the 1940s, admitted.

Mexico, 1920-1950 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2000), 23.
10

Bertha Zacatecas, Vidas en el aire, 46.

11

Bertha Zacatecas, Vidas en el aire, 189. For more on the morality campaigns of this era see,
Anne Rubenstein, Bad Language, Naked Ladies and Other Threats to the Nation: A Political
172

Radio offered women employment and an opportunity to leave their home. Many of
them began their careers in radio when the industry was still forming and salaries were not given
to all employees. In the mid-1930s, when she was only thirteen years old, for example, Raquel
Moreno began singing and acting in one of Mexico City’s commercial radio stations for several
years without pay. As the radio industry grew and the opportunities to go abroad opened up, the
performer landed a contract to travel to the United States. There she took a job singing Mexican
and Latin American folkloric songs for the CBS short wave radio station in New York City.
Given her previous position as a non-paid employee, it was understandable that in the mid-1940s
her foremost goal included to “live, travel, have fun and above all make money.”

12

Some began their careers very young, like the radio actress and singer, Manolita Arriola,
who was discovered in 1931 at the age of twelve by the artistic director of XEW while attending
a live radio program with her mother. At the time, the station transmitted from a studio above
the Cine Olimpia in downtown Mexico City. “You had to climb a lot of stairs,” Arriola recalled,
“I was sitting taking a break when Pedro de Lille walked by and asked me if I sang. They
needed a girl for a radio program. He gave me an audition and I passed.”

13

For women with a background in theater, radio opened up new career opportunities. By
the 1930s, it became possible for singers to alternate between working in the radio and the
theater. The rise to fame of Maria Antonieta Peregrino, otherwise known as Toña la Negra
(Toña the dark skinned woman), is another example of this case. Toña, who had brilliant success
History of Comic Books in Mexico (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998).
12
13

¡Oiga!, May 13, 1944.
Ibid., 33-34.
173

in both the radio and the theater industry, began her artistic career in 1932 during a contest of
jarocho music, or music from the state of Veracruz, the home of the singer. According to the
story, Agustín Lara attended this competition and, after hearing the performance of Peregrino,
advised her to accompany him to Mexico City where she could develop her talent as a singer.
14

Once in the capital, she debuted in the Teatro Esperanza Iris and on radio station XEW.

Toña was admired so much by the public that the following year she was on tour with
burlesque plays written and composed by Lara. Shortly after her first tour, El Universal
Ilustrado interviewed the emerging star and asked her about her future plans. She answered
“learn much, since, I don’t want to only dedicate myself to sones and tropical songs, I want to be
a singer to the fullest.”

15

Because the ambition of many women at the time was to be a vedette,

a soloist combination of singer, dancer and actress, it was possible for a singer to have ambitions
to be successful in both theater and radio.
One of the multiple ways a radio star was born in Mexico during the 1930s, according to
the nation’s leading newspapers, was to have an “artistic godfather.” For women, these tended to
be older men who were composers and sometimes artistic directors and took them to the radio
studio for auditions. An example was Rosa del Rio, who tried out for the prestigious commercial
station XEQ thanks to an interview which her “artistic godfather,” the composer Manuel

14

El País de las Tandas. Teatro de Revista 1900-1940. (México DF: Consejo Nacional para la
Cultura y las Artes, Dirección General de Culturas Populares e Indígenas, 1984), 130.
15

El Universal Ilustrado, February 23, 1933, p. 16.
174

Rentería, arranged for her.

16

After 1930, when commercial radio stations began to thrive throughout the nation, a large
number of women were drawn to radio, seeking employment as singers, actresses, interpreters or
even telephone operators. Yet, the unfamiliarity that the general public had with the new
industry led some, particularly well-to-do conservative families, to associate radio singers and
actors with burlesque and vaudeville actors, or even cabaret dancers. In turn, before standing in
front of the microphones for the first time, let alone touring abroad, aspiring radio singers faced
opposition from their families over their line of work.
The first barrier Mexican women pursuing a career in radio had to overcome was the
concept that women could not sing in public. Often, families held conservative beliefs about
women singing outdoors, especially the generation of parents whose children came of age after
the Mexican Revolution. Tejano music star Lydia Mendoza, for instance, remembers that her
mother frequently sang at home when she was a small child. “If she were to have had the
chance, she would have made a big career for herself as a great singer because she had an
exceptionally pretty voice,” recalled Mendoza, “But her family would never have allowed her to
sing in public, only at home.”

17

Those who chose to sing and act in radio stations, then,

challenged the expectations about female behavior in public that was set in place by some
Mexican families.
Another way a family interfered with the careers of women in radio was by questioning

16
17

Radiolandia, April 15, 1942.
Chris Strachwitz and James Nicolopulos, Lydia Mendoza, 11.
175

the respectability of their jobs as radio singers. In the summer of 1936, before they became Las
Hermanas Padilla, Maria and Margarita were young girls attending a festival at a park in
Southern California. Instead of approaching them directly, Maria noted that the radio announcer,
Ramón Arnaiz, asked their father if she and her sister could appear on his Spanish-language
radio program in Los Angeles. Initially, Mr. Padilla was apprehensive about his daughters
becoming “artists,” and the negative connotation this had for a strong Catholic family who had
fled Mexico during the Cristero Rebellion, a time when the Mexican government turned against
the Catholic Church. Yet, to the delight of his daughters, he eventually gave in to the idea.

18

In Mexico City, parents of talented female singers responded in a similar way to the idea
of having a daughter become an “artist.” Radio actress Amparo Montes recalled that, after her
first audition for station XEQ in 1941, she received offers to sing in various cabarets throughout
Mexico City. “As if my dad would let me sing in a place like that,” Montes noted, “During those
times even singing over the radio was a tremendous thing for parents.”

19

Mr. Montes’ or Mr. Padilla’s concerns for their daughters were not unwarranted. During
the first half of the twentieth century having a single daughter work in the theater was not an
honorable career to many “decent” Mexican families. Working for a radio station could be a
more respectable career than the theater, but not completely free of scrutiny. To the older
generation, working in radio took women to “dishonorable” places. In Mexico, the oppressive
climate of the 1940s, which was strengthened by Catholicism, viewed women who worked in the
entertainment business as “lost women.” Women in radio were grouped together with ballerinas,
18
19

Interview with Maria Padilla, March 15, 2009, conducted by the author.
Bertha Zacatecas, Vidas en el aire, 165.
176

cabaret singers and rumberas, those who “embody femininity with a negative sign.”

20

Additionally, an obstacle women faced was the concept that after marriage and children,
working in radio was no longer needed. Since many women in Mexico began singing in radio in
their teens or early ‘20s most were single when they began their careers. But years later after
they made a name for themselves, women who worked in radio had to ascribe to the expectations
placed on other women, such as leaving or suspending work to have children in order to protect
the marriage and continue to adhere to the duties of the house. This was valued more
importantly than a job. Those who returned to work after childbirth or divorce confronted the
criticism of the public and, at times, even their family.
This was true in Mexico and within the Mexican immigrant community of the United
States. Lydia Mendoza recalled that after she was married and had her first daughter, her friends
and family told her husband, “that I was married now, and that I had to dedicate myself to him
and to my home, to my little girl.” Lydia, desiring to continue to sing and tour the United States,
wrestled against ideas that “going around singing wasn’t the proper life for a respectable married
woman.” Concerning her husband, she said “They put it into his head like that, that he shouldn’t
permit contracts and the he shouldn’t allow me to perform in public.”

21

In the 1930s, as the

level of professionalization increased in radio with the surge in commercial radio stations,
women were sought specifically for different tasks: singers, actresses, secretaries, and, most
importantly, interpreters.
20

Elsa Muniz, “Del micrófono al aire, trayectorias de quimeras: Lupita García (1930-1950)” in
Lucia Melgar-Palacios, ed., Persistencia y Cambio: acercamientos a la historia de las mujeres
en México (México, DF: El Colegio de México, 2008), 245.
21

Chris Strachwitz, and James Nicolopulos, Lydia Mendoza, 101.
177

Interpreters
Within the Mexican commercial radio industry, one of the most coveted positions for
women was that of an interpreter. In the 1930s and 1940s, while radio composers like Mario
Talavera and Agustín Lara wrote boleros, station managers and artistic directors sought male and
female voices that truly carried the emotions of their songs. Being a radio singer and an
interpreter were not one in the same, as the latter implied that among dozens of prospects, one
person was the only suitable voice of a composer. Therefore, given his contentious and romantic
lyrics that made him a popular figure in Mexico’s music scene, it was not surprising that
throughout the nation women of all ages dreamed of being one of Agustín Lara’s interpreters.
Since the early ‘30s, Lara had worked with a handful of male and female interpreters. If
this position became open, auditions were held in the studios of radio stations in Mexico City. In
1942 during one of these try-outs, hundreds of women lined up in front of XEW’s station on
Ayuntamiento Street. In the crowd was Alma Graciela, a 15 year-old girl who had left school
because she “listened over ‘W’ that Lara was looking for an interpreter.” Once her parents found
out she had gone to the audition they reproached her and advised her to pursue another career.
Unwilling to let go of her teenage dream, Graciela insisted on being part of the industry; a year
later she was singing before the microphones of XEB, earning a meager salary.

22

Graciela was successful as a radio singer, but not lucky enough to have been chosen as
the coveted interpreter of Agustín Lara. Those who were, like Aurora Muñoz, usually had prior
experience as singers and entertainers. Muñoz was a Mexican singer who had spent more than a
decade in the United States where she had landed a record contract for “Decca” and had
22

Radiolandia, April 16, 1943, p. 6.
178

experience in the theater, radio, and even cinema. In 1944, then, when Lara invited her to
interpret some of his latest compositions in Mexico City, she accepted. “Imagine, I was so
happy,” she said, “I was always a great admirer of Agustín Lara’s music and I never thought I
would get to be one of his interpreters.”

23

Women’s appearances in public places of entertainment as spectators created a reaction
by the public. Between 1920 and 1940, movie houses in Mexico were places where morality
was in question, the threat of violence was at hand, and at the same time, young men could
display their masculine behavior. Female moviegoers in the urban centers who frequented this
new space did not find much support at the movie theaters for a variety of embodied identities.
For them, going to the movies meant affiliating themselves with a single vision of femininity:
the modern girl, also known as the flapper, the chica moderna and the pelona.

24

Broadcasters and Commentators
For men, the new space etched out by the commercial radio industry became a place for
them to define their masculinity. During the amateur radio era of the early 1920s, men viewed
their engagement in radio as feminine activities that were permissible for men, such as chatting
and eavesdropping.

23

25

In Mexico, the Liga Central Mexicana de Radio, whose membership

¡Oiga!, June 17, 1944.

24

For more on the Chica moderna see, Joanne Hershfield, Imagining la chica moderna: women,
nation, and visual culture in Mexico, 1917-1936 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008).
25

Susan J. Douglas, Listening In: Radio and the American imagination, from Amos ‘n’ Andy
and Edward R. Murrow to Wolfman Jack and Howard Stern (New York City: Times Books,
1999), 50.
179

exceeded more than 300 people in 1923, was a place for these gendered actions to be exercised.
Working for the radio as a broadcaster was legitimized in several ways, but the government
fused the cultural project with professionalism through the examination conducted by the
Ministry of Communications and Public Works, SCOP. Male broadcasters joined radio from a
number of places. Some had multiple jobs, like “baritone-boxer” Manuel Flores, who split his
time between working as an announcer for XEB and the ring.

26

But generally, they took their

jobs with professionalism and seriousness. As the industry grew and men continued to be the
engineers, artistic directors and general managers it maintained this gendered division of labor.
When women took jobs as broadcasters they exerted their sense of importance within
society. Radio broadcasters were the first to play a vital role in commercial radio because they
targeted specific sectors of society, like women, as audience members. The anonymity of radio
gave radio reporters like Margarita de Silva an opportunity to comment on current events. In
1943, Radiolandia reported it had recently added to its staff de Silva, a prestigious commentator
in Mexico City who “with her efforts and critical capabilities converted commentating into a
profession.”

27

In the 1920s, when women first approached the microphone as broadcasters they were
respected. Government-sponsored station XFX, in particular, selected a number of women to be
part of their gender-specific programming which targeted the middle-class urban population
during the late 1920s and 1930s. These commentators were professionals –doctors, nurses, and
teachers-who were serving a specific purpose for the station, which was to transmit education
26
27

VEA, November 23, 1934.
Radiolandia, January 30, 1943, p. 7.
180

through the air. For instance, one of XFX’s broadcasters, Professor E.Q. del Pozo, was said to
“awaken brains, the one who opens hearts to a life of love and sentimientos, the one who shapes
the habits and who molds characters for good and for bad.”

28

By the following decade, as commercial radio stations implemented live radio programs
and a higher caliber of music, radio programming began to be more complex, and the number of
male and female commentators increased. Educational programs for women quickly became
aural “advice” columns where women answered correspondence from listeners and gave timely
suggestions. Carmen Madrigal, for example, was a woman whose daily program, “Woman to
Woman Club,” transmitted over station XEFO, was said to have a vast number of female
29

“members” in the late 1930s.

Another program led by “Carmina,” who also had an advice

column on the pages of Vea magazine, had a following of over 17,000 women. Faithful listeners
could request official membership cards from the radio station and communicate with the host
and broadcasters as well. One such audience member, Emilia Raudón de Aldana, wrote to
Carmina on July 7, 1934, “I have been listening to the talks that you, successfully, address to
30

housewives, to modest women who suffer the daily struggles of their environment.”

Mexican gender codes gave men more freedom than women and as commentators like
Carmina were acquiring faithful listeners, they were also being criticized in the pages of the
newspaper. For instance, regarding the usefulness of Carmina’s program, Raul Pérez observed
28

Archivo Histórico de la Secretaria de Educación Pública (Hereafter AHSEP), Expediente A4/235.3(73).

29
30

Radio Directorio de México, 1937.
Mujeres y deportes, July 14, 1934, p. 11.
181

“the only thing that I am in agreement in and which I thank her, is that her advice to married
women is always that they need to be sweet and affectionate to their poor husbands. Thanks
Carmina!”

31

Evidently, insulting the voice or presence of women in radio was separate from

agreeing with the message of the programs that gave housewives advice.
Composers
In the 1930s, during the heyday of the bolero, Mexican radio composers were considered
passionate and overly romantic. They “always talk about love” noted singer Esperanza Águila.
“I have not come across one optimistic song, they are always passionate wailings,” she
expressed.

32

Female composers displayed similar qualities. In her music, composer and lyricist

María Grever, was said to display “her soul, the sentimental romantic soul of the true Hispanic
American woman, who feels when she doesn’t cry and doesn’t cry when she feels.”

33

In order to be successful in the growing competitive industry, composers had to
constantly produce new music. By 1942, Agustín Lara, for example, was a prolific composer
who drew from the vast coffin of feelings and emotions. Labeled “the singer of vices,” the style
of music Lara was composing, its cursilería “revolved around sexuality.”

34

Lara’s rapid rise to

fame, according to others, was due to “his morose and sexually stimulating lyrics, which cannot

31
32
33
34

Ibid.
Radiolandia, March 20, 1943.
La Prensa, March 26, 1939.
El Universal Ilustrado, June 15, 1932.
182

bring anything cultural or edifying to the people.”

35

In fact, some believed that Lara knew that in order to be popular he had to appeal strictly
to the female population. Lara made money conquering hearts and smiles. “This was his
greatest victory,” wrote a critic in 1932, “that to succeed and gain popularity quickly, all he had
to do was convert himself into the singer of women, and since he already knew the souls of many
downtrodden and tormented women, he put in verse the vulgar details of the great human sorrow
and began to be a poet more than a musician.” The Mexican female audience and the composer,
“understood each other and his songs became the complaint of the delusional and the sinful
vibrant desire of the innocent virgins,” he wrote.

36

Along with their male counterparts, women also became successful radio composers
during the 1930s and 1940s. “The weaker sex has given to composing,” noted one critic,
“women have abandoned their domestic duties to dedicate themselves to compasses and
semitones.” Some even achieved international recognition, such as the composer Julia Elena
whose song “Espejismo” (Mirage) was recorded in New York City by Afro-Cuban singer
Miguel Valdes. In the mid-1940s, Elena had been offered a record contract with Southern Music
Company and toured the United States.

37

Another noteworthy Mexican female composer of the

early twentieth century was Consuelo Velázquez, whose 1941 bolero “Bésame Mucho” (Kiss me

35
36
37

La Prensa, July 4, 1937, p. 2.
El Universal Ilustrado, June 9, 1932.
Radiolandia, August 1, 1946.
183

a lot) received global attention.

38

During that time Velázquez traveled back and forth between

Mexico and the United States making special auditions and recording some of her other
numbers.
Radio transformed Mexican music into a product that was not only worthy of export but
also profitable for composers. Within the group of composers who worked overseas, one of the
most notable people to attain international recognition was María Grever, who benefitted from
the exposure that both Mexican and U.S. radio stations gave her music. Grever, who considered
herself Mexican, lived most of her life in New York City, teaching and composing during the
1930s and 1940s. In 1938, her song “Ti Pi Tin,” in fact, was awarded the most popular song of
the year by the American Society of Authors and Composers. As in Mexico, the composers in
the United States leaned on records and radio to diffuse their music. Spanish-language
newspaper, La Prensa, noted that not only was Grever “glorifying even more the name of
Mexico, of the Motherland” but her song was selling a large number of records and was popular
39

in the radio show, “Hit Parade,” broadcast by NBC radio.

At times, composers were blamed for producing song lyrics which aroused people’s
feelings and made them behave in certain ways. In the spring of 1937, for instance, Ernesto
Cortázar, who wrote the lyrics to “Tu ya no soplas” (You don’t cut it anymore) was caught in a
bind when this song reportedly caused suicides and duels between lovers. The song was
compared to Agustín Lara’s cursi music, which moved the people of Mexico to do unthinkable
38

The song, which is translated into “Kiss me much” was one of Jimmy Dorsey’s top hits in the
late 1940s. It was also popularized by Placido Domingo during the 1980s and has received other
notable attention over the years.
39

La Prensa, April 2, 1938; La Prensa, July 18, 1938.
184

things and, as X. Campos Ponce eluded, was even closely linked to the lower classes.

40

According to the critics, the song had been so degrading to women that certain radio
stations in northern Mexico banned them from their programming due to the controversy of the
lyrics.

41

As in other arenas in society, women were caught in a paradox when it came to their

role within mass media, either as singers or as subjects of popular songs. For example, while
boleros helped preserve women as objects of desire, in public theaters and movie houses singers
like Lucha Reyes performed a mélange of ranchera songs and modern ballads with titles such as,
“La tequilera” (The Tequila Drinker) and “Yo me muero donde quiera” (I will die where I feel
like it).
Music and the Voice
Mexican music was recognizable over airwaves across the globe. Since the 1910s
composers took their work and exposed the world to Mexican music in orchestra halls and
auditoriums in Europe and North America. The composer Manuel M. Ponce’s song,
“Estrellita,” was played in auditoriums in the United States while Alfonso Esparza Oteo’s
music,“Un Viejo Amor,” was translated into four languages. Juventino Rosas was another
musician whose waltz, “Sobre las olas,” is one of the most famous Latin American pieces in the
world. Archival data proves that this was, in fact, a recognizable number. From his home in
Cincinnati, Ohio, Rudolph Kuré wrote a letter to Mexican radio station XFX on March 1, 1931
confirming that he had used his short wave receiver to tune in to a program where “A Spanish

40
41

La Prensa, July 4, 1937, p. 2.
La Prensa, July 3, 1937, p. 4.
185

tenor sang the beautiful Mexican waltz entitled ‘over the waves.”

42

At this time, the distribution of other forms of Mexican art spilled over to U.S.
mainstream society. Since the late 1920s the Anglo-American audience was exposed to Mexican
paintings, music, theater and to a lesser extent, cinema. Writing from his post as foreign
correspondent in New York City during 1930, Mexican journalist Luis Sepúlveda noted that
“today the Canción Mexicana is a staple in North American life. At all hours radio stations,
43

bands, orchestras and concert halls play the songs of Mexico.”

The canción mexicana coincided with the massive rural to urban migration process taking
place in Mexico during the first three decades of the twentieth century. This music was “the
genuine product of the pueblo, born in the modest dwelling places of the poor. It is simple,
painful like the life of a laborer, filled with hope like the dawn.” Because of its close connection
with the rural and uneducated classes, in effect, Mexican popular music was scorned by the
upper class members of society. Only a portion of the middle class and a few “fifis” (dandies)
were said to be sympathizers of this style.

44

During the 1930s, new distinguishable urban sounds appeared in Mexico; in particular, a
style of music labeled cursi (genteel or tacky) emerged in the cities. While the canción
mexicana had an ability to interpret the feelings of the people, this genre of music, which was

42
43

AHSEP, Expediente A-4/235.3(73).
El Universal Ilustrado, July 31, 1930.

44

Juan S. Garrido, Historia De La Música Popular En México, 1896-1973, México, DF:
Editorial Extemporáneos, 1974. 23, 189.
186

more “romantic,” separated itself from Mexican popular music by abandoning the adoration of
Mexico’s past and focusing on individual feelings, or sentimientos, through song lyrics. This
shift away from nationalism and a collective identity to the ego also took place within the larger
entertainment industry; specifically, in the Teatro de Revista (Musical Revue). At this time,
songs, theater and film became sentimental, “Revista moves towards intimacy, music abandons
collective causes and installs itself completely in the heart.”

45

Since the early twentieth century, Mexican composers such as Miguel Lerdo de Tejada
had incorporated romantic themes in music, yet the major difference between this and earlier
trends was the introduction of Cuban themes and melodies, most importantly the bolero.
Imported from Cuba in the late nineteenth century, the bolero circulated the Yucatán Peninsula
and the state of Veracruz before arriving in Mexico City and was popularized by the arrival of
Agustín Lara to the stages and studios of the nation’s capital in 1928. Lara presented the bolero
“in a very personal way,” through song lyrics that gave reference to deep expressions of love,
loss, regret and passion.

46

Aside from being more individualistic and less patriotic, compared with the canción
mexicana, the bolero also was important to the overseas Mexican audience because its lyrics
lacked a specific setting and were spoken directly to the roles of men and women in society.
Generally, boleros were straightforward and included feelings of loss, regret and desire. Songs
followed the model of Mexican popular music, but the lyrics were more directly, stating “Let me

45

El País de las Tandas. Teatro de Revista 1900-1940 (México DF: Consejo Nacional para la
Cultura y las Artes, Dirección General de Culturas Populares e Indígenas, 1984), 112.
46

Juan S. Garrido, Historia De La Música Popular En México, 1896-1973, 65.
187

seduce her,” as opposed to, “Seduce her, sir.”

47

Because they adopted this different method and

their music spoke of emotions that men and women were not supposed to feel, at first, this genre,
and its producers, was not included within the canon of “popular” music by the fathers of
Mexican music such as Manuel M. Ponce. In fact, in the late 1930s, Ponce considered the lyrics
of boleros to come from “degenerates” since the rhythms and words followed those themes.
Additionally, they were escape valves for many housewives, he noted.

48

For much of the 1930s and 1940s the emotions expressed in boleros did not respond to
the expression of the pueblo, like traditional Mexican popular music, but instead came from the
personal experiences of the composers. In general, composers who were labeled cursi and wrote
boleros were true to a “sentimental spirit” and took refuge in personal feelings, as opposed to
interpreting an authentic popular sentiment, which those who labored towards producing national
music did. Lara, in particular, because he did not choose to sing about Mexican landscapes and
the spirit of the people, was labeled as cursi and anti-nationalist. Common themes in his songs
were love, jealousy, and resentment because “In his good songs Lara responds to a deep
sentimental spirit. His success emanates from that, because our pueblo es todo sentimiento (the
Mexican people are all feelings).”

49

Yet his popularity was unforeseen and by the early 1930s

became a national symbol of romanticism and disillusion. Lara’s song lyrics, according to Mary
Kay Vaughan and Marco Velázquez, also spoke to the modern urban Mexican woman and
“helped to shape her, to liberate her body from the corset and confessional.” And while Lara
47
48
49

El Universal Ilustrado, July 7, 1932, p. 30, 41.
La Prensa, March 15, 1936, p. 3, 8.
El Universal Ilustrado, June 15, 1932.
188

challenged women to think about their own sensuality and made pleasure a socially tolerable
subject, his music nonetheless followed the ancient misogynistic tradition.

50

Mexican immigrants blended musical genres and accepted both older styles and emerging
ones like the bolero. The Mexican community in the United States was not involved when
debates between cursi (genteel) music and national patriotic music were circulating in the press
during the 1940s. Yet the popularity of boleros did not decrease in the urban centers, or in the
United States, where Mexican immigrants took a particular liking to Lara and welcomed him
during a tour in the spring of 1932.

51

However, one style of music was favored by Mexican

immigrants and U.S. born Mexico over the others: the ranchera.
When it arrived in the urban centers of Mexico, “The Ranchera became an artificial
product, viewed as “country style” by the city people.”

52

In addition, there was purity in the

countryside that the urban centers did not share. “Music belongs to the countryside,” wrote
Francisco Davalos, “from the city are the songs of the scoundrel: in them there is mention of jail,
of vices, of the mother who kneels before her son while begging for forgiveness.”

53

50

Mary Kay Vaughan and Marco Velázquez, “Mestizaje and Musical Nationalism in Mexico,”
in The eagle and the virgin: nation and Cultural Revolution in Mexico, 1920-1940 edited by
Mary Kay Vaughan and Stephen E. Lewis, 243-255 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006),
109.
51

Archivo Histórico Diplomático Genaro Estrada (AHGE), Secretaría de Relaciones Exteriores
(SRE), Expediente IV-376-48.
52

Claes af Geijerstam, Popular music in Mexico (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico
Press, 1976) 68-69.
53

El Universal Ilustrado, March 12, 1925.
189

Ranchera music moved people. In keeping with the “sentimental mythology” of
Mexican literature and music, men cried and wailed and women like the legendary Lucha Reyes,
moved audiences to tears. Despite the fact that many of the songs mention loss of love, betrayal
and loneliness, Carlos Monsiváis argued that their distress came from work because, in reality,
most of the time their personal relationships were going well. This genre prevailed, in essence,
because it validated passionate feelings and because the possibility of pain was more appealing
54

than thoughts of happiness.

Additionally, the ranchera served a social function by providing emotional escapes for
the rural masses that were moving into the urban centers during the 1940s and 1950s, including
Mexican immigrants who were settling in the U.S. Southwest. Displaced from their homeland,
to them, ranchera “expressed the longing for a mythical countryside devoid of exploitation,
want, conflict, and sin, populated by kindhearted hacienda owners, gallant macho lovers, fully
clothed virgins, and happy peons,” situations, people, and scenes they were familiar with.

55

Boleros and rancheras, in fact, helped normalize pre-established gender codes. Yet, as
Mary Kay Vaughan and Mario Velázquez note, “Both conquered Mexico through the new mass
media, creating languages of popular culture that had little to do with the central government but

54

Carlos Monsiváis, “Yo soy humilde cancionero (de la música popular en México)” in Aurelio
Tello, ed., La música en México Panorama del siglo XX (México, DF: Fondo de Cultura
Económica, Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y Las Artes, 2010), 234.
55

Mary Kay Vaughan and Marco Velázquez, “Mestizaje and Musical Nationalism in Mexico,”
110.
190

much to do with the centralization of the recording, radio, and film industries.”

56

By

broadcasting musical programs, which at first included symphonies and orchestra bands, guitar
and piano recitals and later individual ranchera and corrido singers, privately funded
commercial radio stations established themselves as reputable and popular avenues of cultural
production by the 1930s.
Women’s Voices and Nationalism
Women were hired also because of the impact made from their voice. Some believed that
“In order to succeed in the radio, the actor needs, then, a special education, a special feeling,
which is completely concentrated in the voice.”

57

To the budding radio industry of the early

1930s, it generally did not matter if an artist knew how to handle herself or himself on the stage,
it was just important that he or she possess a great voice. For example, when she arrived in the
theater during the early 1930s, Toña la Negra did not know any theory concerning stage blocking
or body positioning on stage. What she did own, however, was a “warm, delicious, well-toned
voice which caresses the ear when she interprets Agustín Lara or when she sings the melancholic
Cuban songs.” Another artist, Rita Montaner, on the other hand, was considered a theater actress
from head to toe. “In Toña the song is the most important, in Rita it is one of her features,” said
one review. These two women could not be compared, as one danced, spoke and sang with a
peculiar style [Montaner] while the other [Toña] sang “deliciously.”

56
57
58

Ibid. 108.
Radiolandia, May 21, 1942.
El Universal Ilustrado, March 23, 1933, p. 29.
191

58

Some women’s voices over the radio became powerful forces to be reckoned with. Lydia
Mendoza, for instance, was a powerful female singer given that she included the female
perspective and sexual themes in her songs, a feature that departed from the widely held
stereotypes concerning the “traditional” working-class notions of women’s “virginity” and
“chastity.”

59

Lucha Reyes was another Mexican singer who used the canción ranchera and sang “from
the depths of her throat in a style never before heard in Mexico.” Reyes was influential in
promoting the Mujer Mexicana Bravía, the female counterpart to the aggressive, lively and
upfront male ranchera singer. In her performances, which included songs featuring overt sexual
innuendos, role playing, alcohol consumption, and intense passion, she challenged ideas
concerning Mexican women in a rapidly changing society, as well as the role of female
singers.

60

Additionally, in certain places female voices even disrupted the order of society, as
historian Christine Ehrick recently noted. In Latin America “while some heard the possibility of
greater gender equality, for others a woman’s voice on the radio was the sound of all that was
negative or threatening about modernity: disorder, immorality, and the breakdown of the

59

Yolanda Broyles-González, “Ranchera Music(s) and the Legendary Lydia Mendoza:
Performing Social Location and Relations” in Norma E. Cantú and Olga Nájera-Ramírez, eds.,
Chicana Traditions: Continuity and Change (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press,
2002), 183.
60

Mary Kay Vaughan and Marco Velázquez, “Mestizaje and Musical Nationalism in Mexico,”
112.
192

traditional family.”

61

For a woman becoming a Mexican singer, performing and touring the

country, then, required permission or compromises. Both in the United States and in Mexico,
women were subject to the same sexual, racial and class discriminations. Mostly, they were
familiar with the inferiority complex that every woman in a patriarchal society must endure in
which sex roles are established by birth and women’s potential, as opposed to men, did not even
exist.
As interpreters, women were successful because music was full of sentimientos and they
were the carriers and interpreters of patriotic and carnal feelings. To sing was to “interpret songs
with all the feelings, with the beauty and the sweet romanticism that the authors have inserted in
them.” But, in particular, a female singer, “puts all of the sentimental and evocative soul of a
woman” in her music.

62

The musical group, Las Soldaderas, for instance, interpreted Mexican

popular music such as corridos, sones and huapangos and “know how to set fire to the red flame
of nationalism in the ánimo (spirit) of the public.”

63

The commentary on the musical performance of the duet Las Hermanas Águila,
illustrates how women could help promote nationalism. During the Fiesta de la Raza in San
Antonio in October of 1934, Las Hermanas Águila gave a concert as part of a fundraiser for the
Beneficiencia Mexicana. The last name of the sisters, which is “Eagle” in English according to

61

Christine Ehrick, “Savage Dissonance: Gender, Voice, and Women’s Radio Speech in
Argentina, 1930-1945” in David Suisman and Susan Strasser, eds., Sound in the Age of
Mechanical Reproduction (Pennsylvania: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), 70.
62
63

Radiolandia, April 14, 1944.
El Universal Ilustrado, March 11, 1937, p. 6.
193

the report “is symbolic. Because they are ‘eagles’ in the way they ascend to the native sky, to
that sky where you can hear the most beautiful melodies, and the one that all of us who have a
plated heart for that which is ours and open for anything that is Mexican feel transported to so
that we can receive a message from our absent Mother.”

64

In Mexico, there was a belief that women were not fit to sing certain genres of songs, one
of which was the Afro-Caribbean rhythms. Marga Llergo, who was contracted by the cigar
company, “El Águila,” and toured Mexico during the 1930s, became a celebrated “tropical
singer” during the following decade. Llergo began singing boleros and then transitioned to Afro
music because she was trained by a composer of that genre. When asked if this created any
conflicts within her personal life, she answered, “at first my family was opposed because they
believed this was a style that an unmarried woman could interpret, but realizing that I wasn’t
going to change my mind they conceded.”

65

Together, both the clothing and nationalistic music

were unwritten, but important, prerequisites which contributed to the standardization of the
overseas experience of dozens of men and women who left Mexico and toured the United States.
Proper Images of Mexico
In their pursuit as singers, men and women incorporated two things: the proper attire and
a repertoire that mirrored the vision of the state. Given that most men and women performers
would perform live, either on the radio or during a concert or festival, it was important to be
dressed in clothing that displayed and represented Mexico, if they were to go abroad. During the

64
65

La Prensa, October 14, 1934, p. 1, 3, 8.
¡Oiga!, June 24, 1944.
194

twentieth century, one costume stood out among the rest: the China Poblana and the Charro.
Dancing the Jarabe Tapatío, the Charro and the China Poblana were the central figures in the
quintessential image of Mexico.
Created in the late 1920s, this emblem had the essential features for projecting folklore: a
man and a woman wearing costumes dancing to regional music. The dance the couple was
engaged in, the Jarabe Tapatío, was part of the traditional fiestas populares, or popular festivals,
originating in the state of Jalisco. This dance became an official symbol of Mexico in the early
1920s when, to commemorate the centennial of the Mexican independence, painter Adolfo Best
Maugard and musician Manuel Castro Padilla organized for 300 couples to dance the Jarabe
before President Álvaro Obregón and Minister of Public Educacion, José Vasconcelos.

66

The

Jarabe, however, was not the distinguishing feature of the image, it was the costumes of the
Charro and China. The Charro wore a wide-brim hat, boots, and country-western attire while
the China was dressed in a long full skirt, embroidered top with ribbons and braids in her hair.
This stereotype was created in the years following the Mexican Revolution, when the
government was preoccupied with guarding and redefining economic, political and cultural
national interests. At the time, a group of intellectuals and artists began to search for “lo
mexicano” and agreed that the country needed to have its cultural representation in “popular”
artistic manifestations. The strategy was to extract features of Mexico’s countryside, bring them
to Mexico City and re-configure them as “national” symbols.
The China’s origin dates back to the early nineteenth century when she first appeared as
66

Frances Toor, “El jarabe antiguo y moderno,” in Mexican Folkways, Vol VI, Number 1,
Mexico, D.F.. 1930.
195

the “typical Mexican woman” in Mexican literature. She was a mestiza woman, which novelists,
chroniclers and poets described as “proud, seductive, sometimes flirty, attractive, small-footed, a
good dancer of jarabes, and always ‘very Mexican.’” After the turn of the century, post cards
featuring Chinas from different regions of Mexico were distributed among foreign audiences
and, by the 1930s, the national consensus was that the costume of the China represented
“Mexican women par excellence.”

67

Poets and composers continued to give the China homage

during the first and even second half of the twentieth century, always singling out her costume as
the feature that set her apart as “very Mexican.”
The Charro emerged as a Mexican national symbol during the 1920s when folklorists,
musicians and authors were commissioned by the government to travel the countryside and
extract data for manuscripts about Mexican traditions and culture. According to Ricardo Pérez
Montfort, intellectuals, artists and foreign observers were responsible for creating and diffusing
regional characters like the Charro or the Norteño or Jarocho, etc. The work of three authors in
particular, Rubén M. Campos, Higinio Vázquez de Santa Ana and Fernando Ramírez de Aguilar,
(alias Jacobo Dalevuelta), contributed to the consolidation of a national stereotype centered
around the Charro. In 1931, Dalevuelta wrote, “I propose the Charro as a national symbol, as a
68

Mexican popular symbol, to be seen inside and outside of our patrio solar.”

With the help of

leaflets, books and magazines by the men and women in charge of Post-Revolutionary education,
along with a group of artists, journalists and intellectuals, these stereotypes gained consensus in

67

Ricardo Pérez Montfort, Expresiones Populares y Estereotipos Culturales en México. Siglos
XIX y XX. Diez Ensayos (Mexico, DF: Casa Chata, 2007), 127, 142-43.
68

Jacobo Dalevuelta, El charro-símbolo (México, DF: Ediciones Particular, 1932), 15.
196

the aristocratic, as well as the popular, press, the theaters, radio, and the emerging film industry
of the 20s and 30s.

69

Mexican mass media, including commercial radio, synthesized regional and national
stereotypes like the Charro and China Poblana into products that could be exported and help
define true Mexican folklore. In turn, throughout Mexico, singers and performers began to dress
as Charros and Chinas. For example, in the fall of 1935 the folkloric group, “Los Chinacos,” led
by the composer and singer Pedro Galindo, traveled to Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua for a
“nationalistic fair.” Before their departure, Galindo expressed that the governor of Chihuahua
had given them a set of three Charro costumes in black, white, chocolate brown, and “since the
fair is very ‘nationalistic’ a three-piece suit that is red, white and green,” the colors of the
Mexican flag.

70

As images, the China poblana and the Charro became powerful national symbols and
equally important export items. As one observer noted in 1925, “The success of the revistas here
and abroad is in their aesthetic element, in the colorful costumes of our Chinas and our
71

Charros.”

When singing duets like “Laura y Ray” traveled to the United States a decade later,

they also dressed as Charros and Chinas. With the help of their attire, the duet was considered
“ambassadors of our song, who have made, thanks to their effort, that the Charro costume and
the polychrome of the China Poblana is known and liked in New York, and in Los Angeles, in

69
70
71

Ricardo Pérez Montfort, Expresiones Populares y Estereotipos Culturales en México, 59.
El Universal Ilustrado, September 12, 1935.
El Universal Ilustrado, December 17, 1925, pp. 32-33, 58.
197

Atlanta and Detroit.”

72

In fact, clothing separated Mexican singers and performers from other Latin American
performers when they toured abroad. During her visit to Cuba during the 1940s, singer
“Rosalinda” recalled that on her Saint’s Day, the President of Cuba’s commercial radio station
RHC, Amado Trinidad Velasco, hosted a party in her honor at the Montmarte Cabaret and asked
73

her to come dressed as a China Poblana.

Clothing became synonymous with being a Mexican

woman artist in the United States as well. According to a journalist, the night that Matilde
Sánchez, nicknamed“La Torcasita” (The Pigeon), was discovered in a cabaret in Los Angeles,
she “was wrapped in the aura of a regional Mexican costume.” The dark skinned, brown hair and
brown eyed young woman came to be a representative of folkloric Mexican music who sang
74

ranchera songs in Los Angeles during the early 1940s.

U.S. born singers and Mexican musical groups followed the example of their Mexican
compatriots. This was especially true in orchestras, who appeared in the U.S. Southwest in the
1930s. In 1936, for instance, when the Orquesta Típica de El Paso was about to embark on a
tour, the newspaper noted that “they all dress in the typical Mexican charro garb, covered by
75

beautiful sarapes from Saltillo.”

Low-brow entertainers like the sketch comedy group, Netty

and Jesús Rodríguez, also dressed as Charro and China. As La Prensa noted “the singers have
72
73
74
75

Radiolandia, August 28, 1945.
Radiolandia, April 7, 1944, p. 7.
Radiolandia, February 20, 1943.
La Prensa, February 5, 1937.
198

always been well liked, as much for the quality in the art they cultivate as with the wardrobe that
they use in their attractive and diverse performances.”

76

As images, the Charro and China also appeared in the radio industry, as singers and
performers wore their costumes when they toured and sang in live radio programs in the United
States. During the 1930s, for instance, the government sponsored Orquesta Típica de Miguel
Lerdo de Tejada traveled to the United States to give performances in New York City and
Washington D.C., stopping in San Antonio on their way to the Northeast. The company, which
consisted of one hundred musicians, singers and dancers, performed before more than 3,000
spectators in San Antonio in the spring of 1936. The Spanish-language press, who advertised the
performance noted, “Just the ensemble, as a show, is worth seeing, because all the members that
are part of the Orquesta Típica come, this time, dressed with authentic Charro costumes and the
singers and dancers with astounding China Poblana costumes.” This “combined with the
instruments and to the combination of lights made in the Auditorium, produced one of the most
pleasing impressions upon the public.” From the moment the curtain rose, “there was only
musica popular, and the songs, were especially huapangos and rancheras, which delighted the
great mass gathered in the vast locale which displayed their enthusiasm with constant clapping
77

and exclamations.”

Film also celebrated the presence of the singing Charro accompanied by his band of
mariachis as principal features of “Mexicanness.” This was why, in 1942, after the singing trio
“Los Rancheros” signed a radio contract overseas, Mexico City entertainment magazine
76
77

La Prensa, December 13, 1936, p. 6.
La Prensa, November 22, 1935, p. 5; La Prensa, November 24, 1935, p. 6, 8.
199

78

interpreted this triumph as “more evidence that ‘ranchera’ music is a symbol of Mexico.”

After 1941, Trios became popular because they were “ductile” and could perform in a number of
settings including serenades, outdoor festivals or mañanitas, a custom where one is serenaded
with the traditional Birthday song.

79

Conclusion
The growth of the radio industry made use of the participation of women from Mexico
and Mexican immigrants in the United States. When women took up jobs in commercial radio
they maintained their sense of honor and respectability because the transmissions took place in
an enclosed space, not in the public. When men joined the radio industry they asserted their
masculinity as broadcasters or through singing, performing and moving the audience. The new
spaces created by the radio industry, then, offered men and women the opportunity to step
outside of pre-determined gender roles.

78

Radiolandia, May 21, 1942.

79

Jesús Jáuregui, El mariachi: símbolo musical de México (México, DF: Instituto Nacional de
Antropología e Historia, 2007), 137.
200

Chapter VI
Cultural Ambassadors of the Air:
The International Careers of Radio Singers

“Gracias a Esperanza Iris, el mundo supo que si teníamos terribles ‘Panchos Villa’, siniestra
personalidad que llegó a ser una alegoría mexicana en el extranjero, teníamos también mujeres
hermosas, inteligentes y artistas.”
“Thanks to Esperanza Iris, the world knew that if we had dreadful ‘Pancho Villas,’ sinister
personality who became an allegory of Mexico overseas, we also had beautiful, intelligent
female artists.”
-José Joaquín Gamboa, 1925

“Without a doubt,” wrote a newspaper critic in 1945, “Mexican artists understand that it
is necessary to leave the Motherland in order to truly accomplish success.” During the 1930s
and 1940s, for Mexican singers and performers, making guest appearances on U.S. radio stations
like NBC or CBS in New York City, performing before U.S. born Mexican crowds in Los
Angeles or San Antonio, or recording with the “RCA Victor” or “Bluebird” label in the United
States guaranteed their success upon a return trip to Mexico. In fact, touring the United States
was considered the “best passport in the overnight transformation of a shining star.”

1

With this in mind and tired of “diffusing her beautiful and exquisite voice only through
the radio air waves,” in the spring of 1935, Mexican singer Toña la Negra recruited a group of
actors, singers, dancers, artists, musicians and comedians to form a theater company and tour the

1

La Prensa, August 23, 1936, p. 2-3.
201

United States. After crossing the border, the ensemble made a stop in San Antonio, Texas where
they drew spectators from the entire state and towns along the border. Toña was a familiar voice
in the city; for months, Mexican immigrants tuned in their radios to “hear her many nights
through Mexican radio stations.” Following her sold-out performance, the company traveled to
cities throughout the U.S. Southwest, enthralling her audiences with Mexican boleros composed
by Agustín Lara and appearing before English-language radio stations in their Spanish-language
“block programming.”

2

This chapter follows the path of Mexican singers and performers like Toña from Mexico
to the United States by highlighting the factors that aided their tours: the theater, radio and record
contracts. In the 1930s and 1940s, Mexican singers and performers faced an indisputable fact:
the economic potential of the U.S. Mexican communities was not only impossible to ignore but
had actually become one of the most important defining elements of a successful career as both a
“cultural ambassador” and an “international artist” in the music world. The artistic trajectories
of Lydia Mendoza, Pedro J. Gonzalez, Toña la Negra and Lucha Reyes, for instance, all crucial
performers in the international radio markets that stretched from Mexico City to New York City,
and from South Texas to California in the West Coast, exemplify this process. While embracing
the nationalistic aspirations of portraying a positive image of Mexico abroad, a permanent
feature of the Mexican revolutionary government’s policy in the United States, Mexican artists
also adopted as their own an extremely utilitarian vision of the Mexican markets in the U.S. as
sources of significant revenue, international prestige and the ultimate stage to achieve artistic
recognition and stardom status. Thus, by the 1940s the audience of border radio stations could

2

La Prensa, March 3, 1935, p. 3 and La Prensa, March 11, 1935, p. 8.
202

“hear the voice of Mexico” and, as a community, “applauded and admired all of the artists who
have crossed the border.”

3

Background: The Links between Theater and Radio
Following the Mexican Revolution, the reconstruction project of the government focused
on transforming society through broad programs and missions carried out, including cultural and
agricultural reform. In particular, the nation’s leaders diligently worked at making an imprint on
the international cultural scene by sending singers and performers north to the United States.
The first musical ensemble on record to cross Mexico’s northern border on tour was a military
4

band led by José Encarnación Payén, who traveled to an exposition in New Orleans in 1885. In
the early twentieth century, the government sponsored the overseas trips of a number of theater
actresses and concert singers; including Esperanza Iris, Mexico’s foremost “cultural
ambassador” and Fanny Anitua, a mezzo-soprano who was regarded as “Mexico’s spiritual
ambassador” during her tour of Europe in 1923.

5

The formation of an overseas Mexican audience during the first half of the twentieth
century would not have been possible without the theater. The radio broadcasting that emerged

3

Radiolandia, April 22, 1943.

4

Rubén M. Campos, El folklore y la música Mexicana. Investigación acerca de la cultura
musical en México (1525-1925) (México, DF: Talleres Gráficos de la Nación, 1928), 202.
5

El Universal Ilustrado, June 7, 1923. Through the Ministry of Public Education, the
government funded the tours of artists in the 1920s. In late March 1922, for example, Isabel
Zenteno sent a letter to President Alvaro Obregón hoping that her life as an artist would be
funded by the government. See, Archivo General de la Nación (AGN), Ramo Gobernación,
Fondo Dirección General de Gobierno (DGG), Expediente 805-Z-13.
203

in the 1930s and 1940s benefitted from previous networks of entrepreneurs, venues and
audiences -established mostly in Texas and California- by Spanish-language popular theater,
which regularly featured caravans and troupes of Mexican performers. Since the early
nineteenth century, Mexican professional theater troupes visited inland cities in northern Mexico,
in what is today Arizona and in port cities of California. By the turn of the century, “Laredo-San
Antonio-El Paso in Texas became the heart of an itinerary for troupes coming up from interior
6

Mexico to tour along the border.” In the following decades, these locations were on the touring
schedule of Mexican acclaimed stage actors such as Virginia Fábregas and Manuel Soto. In fact,
the actress and her company, which was regarded as a “legitimate” representation of Mexican
theater overseas, frequently visited the U.S. Southwest during the 1930s.

7

The origins of theater in Mexico date back to the Colonial Era when Spaniards brought
troupes to the New World after colonization. In the following centuries, elaborate buildings
modeled after European theaters were constructed in major cities throughout the empire. During
Mexico’s rule by Porfirio Díaz (1876-1910), the interest for European theater and music was
sustained, as the leader desired to emulate all aspects of foreign art and culture. Spanish theater
was the most revered style of drama in Mexico. In the weekly performances of the Teatro
Principal, during the 19 and early twentieth century, Spanish entertainment by Spanish
8

impresarios featured Spanish actors, singers, composers and dancers. Until the turn of the
6

Nicolás Kanellos, “An Overview of Hispanic Theater in the United States” in Nicolás
Kannelos, ed., Hispanic Theater in the United States (Houston: Arte Publico Press, 1984), 7-8.
7

El Universal Ilustrado, September 5, 1929.

8

El País de las Tandas. Teatro de Revista 1900-1940 (México DF: Consejo Nacional para la
Cultura y las Artes, Dirección General de Culturas Populares e Indígenas, 1984),18.
204

twentieth century, Spanish-language theater in Mexico, and also in the United States, followed a
Spanish model with the predominant form being Zarzuela or Spanish operetta. Aside from this
form of “legitimate” theater, other outdoor entertainment included Teatro de Revista and carpa;
the former, a short one-act burlesque containing music and comedy pieces and the latter, a tent
theater.
In the United States, theaters disseminated Mexican music to the Mexican communities. In cities
across the Southwest, Spanish-language theater had been one of the principle forms of cultural
9

entertainment since the 1890s. When Spanish-language professional theater flourished in the
first decades of the following century, these cities became important focal points that attracted
artists and audiences from the surrounding regions, including northern Mexico. The Mexican
upper class and elite members of the communities believed that one of the best ways to preserve
true Mexican culture in the changing twentieth century world, in fact, was through legitimate
theater. Attending the theater was an important social activity and before the arrival of sound to
the cinema, theaters helped preserve the Spanish language, Mexican music and, during the 1920s
and 1930s, promoted new musical genres.
During the Mexican Revolution, the theater industry suffered the expected losses that
come about during an internal war: threats from political figures, actors and playwrights leaving

9

The Chicana and Chicano scholars who have written about the social life of Mexican families
throughout the United States highlight the significant role of theater during the first half of the
twentieth century include Lisbeth Haas, Nicolás Kanellos, and Elizabeth Ramírez. See, Lisbeth
Haas, Conquest and Historical Identities in California, 1769-1936 (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1996); Nicolás Kanellos, A History of Hispanic Theater in the United States:
Origins to 1940 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990); Elizabeth C. Ramírez, Footlights
across the border: a history of Spanish-language professional theatre on the Texas stage (New
York: Peter Lang, 1990).
205

the stage for the battlefield, and near or complete bankruptcy due to the lack of funds. Despite
these setbacks, the industry maintained a close relationship with the general population. By
1920, no rupture had been made in the attitudes and interests of the population to theater; instead,
the people were drawn to it even more. The events of the Revolution actually inspired
playwrights and authors. In the 1940s, film director and screenwriter Juan Bustillo Oro, for
example, incorporated the experiences he had encountered during the conflict into movies such
as “México de Mis Recuerdos” (Mexico of my Memories).
By 1920, politics and theater united on the stage for the first time. These two themes had
not been features of theater before the Mexican Revolution, inhibiting those who did not read
books, magazines or newspapers -the majority of Mexico’s population- from knowing the day to
day political events of the country. However, once it became acceptable to mock government
leaders and authority figures, theater received a large impulse. Until the rise to power of
Plutarco Elías Calles in 1924, in fact, a large number of political debates were in the hands of the
10

press and the city’s Teatro de Revista companies.

Thanks to playwrights like José F. Elizondo, whose book, La vida en broma, was
standard reading during the 1920s, theater moved away from its Spanish roots and acquired
Mexican themes. Zarzuela was quickly replaced by the Teatro de Revista as the essential source
of entertainment for the urban population. While “some preferred the piano at home” during the
1920s, “others, generally less demanding and certainly less cultured, preferred- and could paythe spaces that Teatro de Revista opened for the public enjoyment of music, for the affirmation

10

El País de las Tandas. Teatro de Revista 1900-1940, 35-37, 41.
206

and confirmation of the identity of the masses.”

11

There are four reasons why Revista was such a widespread form in entertainment in
Mexico during the first half of the twentieth century. First, it was a popular show because the
public did not attend simply to enjoy the performance as spectators, but intervened directly and
indirectly in the event. In the capital city’s main theaters, “the plays succeeded or failed simply
by the reaction of the public, not because of art or publicity.” And second, the topics and themes
of the plays always touched upon real events; at times they were controversial and were written
by journalists and playwrights who spent hours on the streets, cafes and cantinas.
In fact, the 1920s and 1930s was the “Bohemian” era of Teatro de Revista. After their
performances, the cast, crew, audience, intellectuals and journalists gathered in the city’s cafes,
restaurants, cabarets or bars until the early morning hours. This was a time when actors, like
Roberto Soto, made a living critiquing the customs and habits of the Mexican people. When
Soto took the stage, “the public would turn up in the auditorium of the Principal to laugh at their
own vices and defects.”

12

The third reason why Revista shows attracted the urban masses of Mexico was because
the stages were filled with popular archetypes who reflected the people and the issues of living
day-to-day in the city. Musical theater was an exclusively urban show “in which the provincial
references served only to reaffirm the new character, the project, of a society that longed to be
modern, cosmopolitan, and up to date.” And lastly, Revista was frequented on a regular basis
11
12

Ibid., 93.
El Universal Ilustrado, March 5, 1931.
207

because the stage was a space for new ideas concerning behavior and fashion. This was not an
imposed fashion from the upper classes but one that was necessary and desired; one that elevated
Mexico to the likeness of Paris or New York.

13

Despite its stronghold in society, musical theater did not maintain its place as the number
one source of entertainment in the 1930s, and Revista began to decline in the middle of the
decade. This downfall was the result of the co-option and use of the medium by the services of
the government, especially during the presidency of Lázaro Cárdenas (1934-1940).
Subsequently, this form of entertainment lost its appeal because the new generation of political
leaders did not attend the theater, and political debates took place in other locations. After
Revista’s decline, carpas continued to be frequently visited by the urban population due to the
low cost of ticket prices. Admission to most carpas cost between 15 and 30 cents and lasted for
about twenty minutes. Despite the short length of their performances, they continued to capture
the interests of the general population.
Radio intersected the theatrical traditions of Mexico by serving as a launching place for
new artists during the 1930s. “In Mexico there has traditionally existed a narrow relationship
between song and stage,” notes Yolanda Moreno Rivas, and because music was the major
cornerstone of Teatro de Revista, theater assisted the process of professional development for
radio.

14

This exchange was mutual. In the 1920s, when a large portion of the radio

13

Guillermo Bonfil Batalla in, El País de las Tandas Teatro de Revista 1900-1940 (México DF:
Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes, Dirección General de Culturas Populares e
Indígenas, 1984), 9-10.
14

Yolanda Moreno Rivas, Historia de la música popular Mexicana (México, DF: Editorial
Océano, 2008), 56.
208

transmissions in Mexico were symphonic and orchestra concerts, radio stations in Mexico City
looked to the Teatro de Revista for their cancioneras (singers) and tiples cómicas (comical
sopranos) and contracted them to sing on stages and in radio studios. Chelo Tovar, for example,
began her career as an actress with a traveling theater company in 1931 and performed in the
Teatro Regis of Monterrey, Nuevo León. Years later, she landed a job for XEW in Mexico City,
15

contracted as an “exclusive artist” for a brand of medicinal products named Productos Picot.

Revista’s demise coincided with the rise in commercial radio; in particular, the arrival of
XEW, “La Voz de América Latina desde México” (The Voice of Latin America from Mexico) in
mid-September of 1930. Live radio programs along with national cinema, which was becoming
a profitable industry at the same time, began to be avidly visited by the urban popular masses.
These were suitable substitutions for Revista because both mediums catered to the general
population and reflected the ills of society. In response to the increase in radio-listeners and
movie-goers, musical theater adopted more romantic themes and was transformed into Teatro de
Variedades, a genre of theater which was similar to Revista in that it was a play centered on a
script and contained many musical selections.
The competition between theater and radio, however, was futile. In many of the urban
centers of Mexico during the 1930s, the theater industry suffered, and musical theater, which
projected the popular base of an emerging national culture during the 1920s, was replaced by the
cinema, radio, and eventually television. After this time, theaters became “spaces where you
submissively receive the eco of radio hits, a stopover for those who are preparing their ascension

15

La Prensa, October 13, 1937, p. 5.
209

to the technological limelight.”

16

Yet, despite the decline of Revista, radio maintained the most

salient part of popular forms of entertainment, the ability to serve as a mirror and reflect society
in its programming. The radio industry, which was relying on live radio programs after the mid1930s, transformed into a place for the display of new artists or new melodies eagerly waiting to
be consumed by the public.
Touring Abroad
After 1930, a musical exchange took place between nations in North and South America
and the Caribbean. Bands and orchestras from Cuba and Venezuela, for example, toured Mexico
for a season while Mexican orchestras, singers and performers traveled to Spanish-speaking
countries in the region. Overseas, the performances of the singers and actors emphasized themes
of internationalism and true “Mexicannes” or Mexicanidad.
Cultural exchanges between Mexico and the U.S. date back to the nineteenth century,
after Mexico lost less than half of its territory to the United States in the years following the
Mexican-American War and the people living in that territory became U.S. citizens almost
overnight. At the turn of the century, as urban centers were modernizing during the Porfiriato
(1876-1910), the nation avidly pursued a cosmopolitan way of life. The subsequent presence of
jazz bands, musical influences like foxtrots, U.S. films and other forms of entertainment arriving
in Mexico during the 1920s, led many to see the presence of U.S. culture as intrusive and
detrimental to Mexican values. Some, however, argued that the exchange between the two
countries was not just coming from the United States and traveling to Mexico, but was mutual, as
“The two Americas interpenetrate minute by minute, and hour by hour.” Those who adopted this
16

El País de las Tandas. Teatro de Revista 1900-1940,111.
210

perspective, the Mexican government included, pinpointed that Mexico was proud that while the
United States exported the items of its “practical” civilization, such as tractors and films, the
nations of Latin America shared “bananas, coffee, parrots and songs” with their northern
neighbor.

17

Music and cultural artifacts, in particular, were items avidly embraced by the Mexican
government for trade and export. Mexican songs were diplomatic instruments and disseminated
to two groups in the United States: U.S. born Mexican and Mexican immigrant communities and
English-speaking Anglo audiences. Since the early 1920s, the latter was exposed to multiple
representations of Mexico in the form of Broadway musicals, murals, art exhibits and vaudeville
plays. As a Mexican observer in Texas noted, “Night after night through the air one can hear
concerts and drama pieces based on music and customs of our current time or previous eras.”

18

Mexico continued to use music as one of its most popular exports in the following decades.
Before World War II concluded Mexican music was being sung by “soldiers of the United
Nations, the citizens of Europe, America, etc., who project to the four winds Mexican songs.”
The nation, in fact, believed it was “at the head of the countries who export popular music” and
19

desired to continue this trend after the war concluded.

Spreading positive images of Mexico in the United States was necessary because the
English-language press was spreading negative images of its southern neighbor. The Mexican

17
18
19

El Universal Ilustrado, July 31, 1930.
La Prensa, February 16, 1930.
¡Oiga!, September 2, 1944.
211

government could not depend on Mexican actors to do their part in showcasing the best attributes
of Mexico, as not everyone who took the stages was extending the government’s project.
Overseas, a number of Mexican actors and singers followed personal desires and disregarded
how their actions might tarnish Mexico’s image. “Many people of the United States have a
peculiar idea of Mexicans,” wrote a U.S. radio listener from New Jersey to Mexican radio station
XFX., “Speak of Mexicans or Mexico and immediately people think of Indians or bandits.”

20

Other than the press, theaters in the United States distributed Mexican art and cultural forms. In
the theater, as Helen Delpar notes, “many of these portrayals were superficial and perpetuated
traditional stereotypes.”

21

In fact, some critics argued that accomplished performers like dancer and actress Lupe
Vélez were responsible for disgracing the name of Mexico in the United States. Mexican
women, in particular, were usually suitable carriers of patriotic feelings. In the United States,
Mexican music and artists were accepted through songs over the radio, art exhibits, cinema and
theater under a racialized and gendered understanding. In 1932, Vélez starred in a drama titled
“Hot-Cha” which played in New York City at the Ziegfeld Theater for several months. The play
was set in “Old Mexico” and featured a bull fighter, who was accompanied by Mexican
“señoritas,” one of which was played by the actress. Mexican theater critic Rafael Fuentes Jr.,
who traveled to New York City especially to review her performance, was not impressed with
the plot which he believed denigrated Mexicans. Fuentes criticized Vélez for taking part in this
20

Archivo Histórico de la Secretaría de Educación Pública (Hereafter AHSEP), Expediente A4/235.3(73).

21

Helen Delpar, The Enormous Vogue of Things Mexican: Cultural Relations between the
United States and Mexico, 1910-1935 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1992), 165.
212

performance and noted, “Lupe joins the farce,” like other Mexican actors in the United States,
22

“They love ‘their Mexico’ very much but they don’t pass up an opportunity to ridicule it.”

In

the 1930s and 1940s, Vélez and several other stars like Dolores del Río became what José Limón
has called “ethnic intellectuals,” who “though rooted in their native communities, nevertheless
engage the world and bring that experience back to bear on their communities of origin and their
struggles.”

23

The image of Mexico was also misrepresented in other sectors of the entertainment
industry, most notably film. In the screen, during the first three decades of the twentieth century,
the villain of the movie, according to a critic “was always personified by a Mexican with a big
mustache, wide sombrero, and gun to his belt.”

24

Understandably, when Mexican actors

traveled to Hollywood in the 1920s they came face to face with this negative stereotype. Ramon
Navarro, one of the Mexican actors who “triumphed in Los Angeles” in the early 1920s,
confronted several misconceptions concerning his ethnic background. The actor noted that in
Hollywood there was a lack of understanding and careful study of Mexican issues. He expressed
that the perception was that “in Mexico Mexicans are dirty, shiftless, vagrant Indians clothed in
feathers.” The lack of familiarity with culture south of the border was another reason why actors
like Navarro were consistently confused for being Spanish instead of Mexican. One interviewer,
after making this clarification for her Los Angeles readers, noted “So, then, we need to discard

22

El Universal Ilustrado, June 9, 1932, p. 26.

23

José E. Limón, ‘José Limón, the Devil and the Dance’ in Juan Flores and Renato Rosaldo,
eds., A Companion to Latina/o Studies (Malden, Mass: Blackwell, 2007), 99.
24

La Prensa, February 16, 1930, p. 3.
213

the idea we have that in Mexico everyone is a ‘greaser’ dressed in chaps with large sombrero,
25

like those we see in the movies.”

In Mexico, the public was aware that in the United States there was a misunderstanding
of the “true” nature of Mexican culture. In turn, a group of intellectuals and artists believed it
was urgent to expose the factual and pure manifestations of Mexican art, culture and music to
U.S. audiences, who were being shown a distorted view of the nation through the press, cinema
and the theater. “They ignore us and they confuse us,” noted painter and film director, Adolfo
Best Maugard, in 1925. After visiting the United States, Maugard believed that Mexico urgently
needed “propaganda supported not with what we lack, but with what we have: our tradition and
our art. The civilization of the future is being generated in America, the one that the United
States will impose upon the world, and Mexico needs to compliment this force with the grace of
26

its spirit.”

Mexican immigrants living in the United States shared these sentiments.

“Something more eloquent and effective is needed to counteract the anti-Mexican propaganda,”
wrote Rosa García Peña in 1931, “Now that there is peace in Mexico we need to make ourselves
known, because our spiritual culture is superior to that of our ill-intentioned neighbors.”

27

Turning to radio to counteract the negative image being circulated in the United States
concerning Mexico proved to be the most cost-effective plan for the government. “Its use,”
critics believed, “will dispel the many doubts that still exist abroad concerning the true

25
26
27

El Universal Ilustrado, May 3, 1923.
El Universal Ilustrado, April 23, 1925.
AHSEP, Expediente A-4/235.3(73).
214

personality of the Mexican people.” Additionally, radio broadcasting had already proven to be
beneficial during overseas tours, such as the one conducted by the Orquesta Típica when they
traveled to South America in 1940. During that journey, the group made a stop in Chile where
they offered radio programs in which “Mexican vernacular music reached to all places: jails,
28

social clubs, worker’s meetings, public plazas, schools, universities, sanatoriums, etc.”

The Mexican government also counted on U.S. citizens who wanted to change the
negative image of Mexico abroad. By calling on the radio, some of them formulated elaborate
plans on how to influence the perception of Mexico. Men like Paul Moyle, for instance, had
observed “a definite lack of understanding on the part of many citizens of the United States
towards the Republic of Mexico and its people.” In response, Moyle, General Manager of radio
station WTSB in Lumberton, North Carolina, organized a plan in which he intended to “record a
series of programs of fifteen minutes in duration, featuring native Mexican talent, music, drama,
history, points of interest, etc.” Turning to radio continued during the administration of Lázaro
Cárdenas when, in 1938, he set out to build a powerful official radio station in which to diffuse
“throughout the world the economic and social work Mexico is undertaking, as well as its music,
its songs and its vernacular poetry.”

29

The Government Impulse
Mass media was a suitable instrument in diffusing positive images of Mexico, yet another

28

Archivo General de la Nación, Ramo Presidentes, Fondo Lázaro Cárdenas del Rio (Hereafter
AGN, LCR), Expediente 570/31.
29

Archivo General de la Nación, Ramo Presidentes, Fondo Manuel Ávila Camacho (Hereafter
AGN, MAC), Caja 445, Expediente 512.32/14.
215

strong force influencing men and women to take trips abroad was the government’s command to
spread Mexican folklore and extend the post-revolutionary cultural project beyond the nation’s
borders. In the 1920s, Mexico’s leaders sought to develop a national sense of identity which led
to the implementation of nation-wide economic, political and cultural reconstruction programs.
“For several years Mexico has concerned itself with its propaganda abroad,” noted an observer in
30

1925, “this is a very practical action that will yield excellent results.”

Radio, it was believed,

was a suitable way to transform the psyche of the Mexican people at home and overseas. The
territorial span covered by radio broadcasts and the endless possibility of transmissions
persuaded the government to look to the industry for reasons beyond implementing educational
policy, but as an agent that spread Mexican culture and folklore in the United States and by
sustaining an audience of radio listeners. In turn, government ministries like the Secretaría de
Relaciones Exteriores (Ministry of Foreign Relations), collaborated with Consulate offices in
cities through the United States to ensure true Mexican folklore was disseminated abroad and
used radio to help carry out this task.
Mexican orchestras and classical music composers and performers were the first to
present Mexican musical styles to English-speaking audiences in cities across the country such
as New York and Los Angeles. Musical groups were well equipped and included different
genres in their repertoire so as to entertain all audiences in the U.S. In 1919, when Miguel Lerdo
de Tejada and his Orquesta Típica de Policía toured the United States, he recruited Los
Hermanos Gómez, a group of brothers whose expertise was playing the marimba. The group,
which later went on to perform in U.S. and Mexican radio stations had the capability of

30

El Universal Ilustrado, November 5, 1925.
216

interpreting any song, from the most “fundamental and folkloric canción mexicana, to the
31

strongest concert pieces.”

On many occasions the tours of trios, orchestras and classical music performers were
sponsored by the government. At times, politicians even offered to pay the costs of an
international trip. In 1925, for instance, when he served as governor of the state of Tamaulipas,
Mexican President Emilio Portes Gil extended economic and moral support to the musical
ensemble by the name of Los Trovadores Tamaultipecos. With the financial help of Portes Gil,
the group traveled to New York City where they performed in Broadway and other theaters in
32

the area before returning to Mexico in 1928.

This practice, which began earlier in the century, continued through the following
decades. At times, performers asked government officials for financial assistance. In March of
1932, for example, Agustín Lara and his theater troupe found themselves in San Antonio with a
small amount of money. Lara made his way to the offices of the Mexican consul, Eduardo
Hernández Cházaro, to request financial assistance. Since his company was “on a cultural tour
haciendo labor pro-Patria” (conducting work for the Motherland) the government did not
hesitate to intervene.

33

In other instances, singers leaned on the support of government before embarking on their
31

El Universal Ilustrado, January 16, 1936.

32

El Universal Ilustrado, December 26, 1929; Juan S. Garrido, Historia De La Música Popular
En México, 1896-1973 (México, DF: Editorial Extemporáneos, 1974), 63.
33

Archivo Histórico Diplomático Genaro Estrada (AHGE), Secretaría de Relaciones Exteriores
(SRE), Expediente IV-376-48.
217

overseas trip. In the spring of 1940, Lara asked President Cárdenas for the finances to pay for a
34

trip to the United States.

That same year, actress and singer Lupe Rivas Cacho communicated

with Cárdenas that she had “contracted noteworthy artistic talents to make a tour in the United
States.” “Kindly let me know the date,” wrote Rivas Cacho, “as I count on your generous
help.”

35

The Mexican government invested in the overseas trips of performers and took interest in
seeing who was complying with the post-revolutionary government’s cultural project. In part,
this was because the state viewed international singers as “Good Will Ambassadors.” This was
the case with Miguel Lerdo de Tejada’s orchestra who, in 1935, during a tour in the United
36

States, were noted to have “skillfully fulfilled their mission.”

Others, like composer and

director Carlos Chávez, were also considered faithful government servants. In 1936, Chávez
traveled to New York City and signed a contract with CBS to direct six concerts of the New
York Philharmonic in Carnegie Hall.

37

Eight years later, when he returned to the United States

on tour with his orchestra, Chávez was praised for traveling and interpreting the Mexican
national ideology abroad.

38

Thus, in the 1930s and 1940s, Mexican singers and performers traveling abroad were led

34
35
36
37
38

AGN, LCR, Expediente 111/1646.
AGN, LCR, Expediente 415.1/12.
AGN, LCR, Caja 102, Expediente 135.2/146.
El Universal Ilustrado, January 21, 1937.
AGN, MAC, Caja 964, Expediente 568.3/22.
218

by two forces: their desire to be successful and the need for the government to spread positive
images of the nation throughout the United States. By traveling out of the country and making
money, Mexican musicians and singers successfully capitalized on the nationalistic project of the
government; meanwhile, the media categorized their performances as “patriotic.” Newspaper
articles noted that artists toured in order to exalt the name of Mexico, when in reality there were
riches to be gained from these trips. For example, when the singing duet of Los Hermanos
Gómez decided to tour the United States, Mexico City’s leading newspapers noted that “they
went out into the world in search of glory, money and art;” at the same time, in their
performances “they have exalted the name of their birthplace and of Mexico in all of the places
they have performed.”

39

Mexican-American singers and artists were astute and realized that thanks to the
exposure they were receiving from radio and the local Spanish-language newspaper, they could
embark on tours in Northern Mexico and the U.S. Southwest. In 1935, for example, Roberto and
José Cavazos who formed the duet, “Los Hermanos Cavazos,” traveled from their hometown of
McAllen, Texas to San Antonio to promote their fox-trot titled, “Llegaste” (You Came).
According to La Prensa, the group was scheduled to appear in local radio stations and prior to
their arrival in San Antonio, they had promoted their song in station KRGB of Weslaco, Texas
and in Mexican radio station XEAW of Reynosa, Tamaulipas.

40

By the mid-1930s, second-

generation Mexican entrepreneurs took advantage of this feature and turned to U.S. commercial
stations to showcase their talents and advertise for local businesses. Small business owners at
39
40

El Universal Ilustrado, January 16, 1936.
La Prensa, August 11, 1935, p. 5.
219

local English-language radio stations were traveling to the Mexican colonias and neighborhoods
to recruit singers for their Spanish-language programs, as in the case of Mr. Ramón Arnáiz, who
discovered Las Hermanas Padilla at a park in Los Angeles. The aim was to make Mexican
immigrants and their children first rate consumers like their Anglo counterparts.
Taking an international tour was a high point in the life of a singer. After working many
years for commercial station XEW in Mexico City, Luis Roldán attained a contract and went on
an extensive tour throughout central Mexico, north to the states of Tamaulipas and Coahuila,
crossed the U.S. border into Laredo, Texas, then to San Antonio, Texas, Los Angeles and finally
New York.

41

Mexican radio singers and actors like Rolán, who toured the U.S. Southwest

during holidays or for local fundraisers and benefits, did more than earn a decent salary or help
extend the government’s cultural project overseas, they also helped jumpstart and sustain the
careers of U.S. born Mexican and Chicana/o artists and musicians.
In effect, Mexican singers paved the way for U.S. born Mexican artists and performers to
prosper in two ways. First, since Mexicans continuously exposed Mexican immigrants and U.S.
born Mexican artists to new forms of music, they were able to bring together older and newer
genres and serve the diverse crowds gathered at the auditoriums and theaters in the United States.
Thus, when they presented themselves before sold-out crowds in California or New York, they
became both international and transnational performers. Second, thanks to the proximity they
had with the recording industry, Mexican immigrants became recording artists sooner, allowing
them to expose their name and music earlier than their counterparts in Mexico who, at least until
the 1940s, had to cross the border to make a record.
41

El Universal Ilustrado, March 17, 1938.
220

For the most part, the Mexican press was concerned more with the places the singers
traveled- Havana, New York City or San Francisco- than the actual audiences who they were
performing before- mostly Mexican and U.S. born Mexican immigrants. In effect, Mexican
“international” performers were born not in shows at renowned auditoriums, but singing before
their fellow countrymen in local theaters. During the first half of the twentieth century, Los
Angeles, California was a recruitment center for Mexican theater troupes and radio singers.
When he was forming his touring company, “Los Pachucos Review,” in the spring of 1944, it
was there that Mexican impresario, Joaquin Gonzalez, first heard Aurora Muñoz sing. By the
time Gonzalez hired her, Muñoz had six years of experience singing and acting on stages and
night clubs in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and New York City. In fact, her career began during
an amateur radio contest at a “Latino Theater” in Los Angeles in 1938. Yet, despite having the
artistic tours under her belt, touring Mexico was not the same as performing before Anglo and
U.S. born Mexican crowds in the United States. “You have no idea how afraid I was to come to
my homeland,” she confessed. Muñoz was fearful of the Mexican audience’s response to her,
but her reluctance ceased when she received a personal invitation from the acclaimed singer and
composer, Agustín Lara, to be one of his infamous “interpreters.”

42

Shortly after arriving in

Mexico City later that year, she received a number of film and theater offers and was instantly
43

declared the “New Radio Figure” by Mexico City magazine Radiolandia.
Clothing, Patriotism and The Canción Ranchera

In the 1940s Mexican singers who took up the circuit from Mexico City to Monterrey, El
42
43

¡Oiga!, June 17, 1944.
Radiolandia, May 19, 1944; Radiolandia, May 26, 1944.
221

Paso, San Antonio, New York or Los Angeles, captivated their crowd by singing rancheras such
as “Pelea de Gallos” (The Cock Fight) and “Arriba el Norte” (Long Live the North), two songs
which radio singer “Alejandra” admitted were frequently requested by her audiences during her
44

1946 trip.

Mexican immigrants had an affinity for this music at the time; ranchera, in fact,

had a longer lasting presence in the United States than in Mexico and was the preferable “export”
genre of music.
While the bolero made its way into the urban centers of Mexico during the 1930s, the
canción ranchera also became a new song genre. Derivative of the canción mexicana, historians
have noted that it existed in the nineteenth century, but began to be called ranchera (literally, “of
the ranch”) during the 1920s when, in the midst of post-revolutionary national assertions, songs,
in order to be truly Mexican “had to invoke the rural world.”

45

This scenery was familiar to

Mexican immigrants, many of whom had migrated from rural Mexico to the North or into the
United States. The emergence of songs such as “Allá en el Rancho Grande,” during the 1930s,
introduced a new trend of Mexican music which coincided with the growing national film
industry. Thus, standardized forms of popular music like the ranchera were designed to attract
audiences on a national and international level. This was useful for this genre because it became
integrated with the Mariachi, the interpreter of the canción ranchera who traveled the world and
became a national symbol of Mexico during the 1940s.
By mid-century, the canción ranchera was the most popular musical style among
Mexicans in the United States. Ranchera music was particularly appealing because it
44
45

Radiolandia, September 21, 1946.
Ricardo Pérez Montfort, Expresiones Populares y Estereotipos Culturales en México, 105.
222

“negotiated the transition to urban life” for countless migrants leaving their rural
upbringing and heading North to the United States in search of prosperity.

46

Thus, when

singers Pedro J. González, Maria Padilla or the troubadour Freddy Quiñones sang this
music, their popularity increased. They were also in vogue because they focused on the
individual and his or her life experiences, trials and dreams.
The state turned to one specific representation of Mexico, the ranchera and the Mariachi,
as the best Mexican export. In part, this was to rectify the misuse of certain Mexican songs. The
government and the intellectual elite did not see eye to eye on this issue. Rejecting the idea that
there was little value in sending artists and singers as “cultural ambassadors” to the United
States, one critic asked “Why send a Mexican singer to represent Mexico, with Mexican music,
47

over there where they sing La Cucaracha like the ‘blues?’”

But by 1930, Mariachis were

effective, some argued, because they sing “as though they were crying; these popular singers and
are so sincere and are so possessed, that it appears as though they are making art, because art is
48

all sincerity and expression.”

Through the radio and the cinema, Mariachis effectively

“popularized the soul of the Mexican people overseas” which is why, by the mid-1940s, Mexico
invested more attention on these spokesmen of Mexican culture. In addition, because they were
singing rancheras, songs that told stories and individualized experiences of being Mexican, they

46

Mary Kay Vaughan and Marco Velázquez, “Mestizaje and Musical Nationalism in Mexico” in
Mary Kay Vaughan and Stephen E. Lewis, eds., The eagle and the virgin: nation and cultural
revolution in Mexico, 1920-1940 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 111.
47
48

El Universal Ilustrado, October 1, 1936.
El Universal Ilustrado, November 21, 1929.
223

were able to connect with audiences no matter where they performed.

49

For Mexican immigrants in the United States, listening to this music was also a way to
re-affirm their patriotism. Freddy Quiñones, a Mexican troubadour for example, recalled he “felt
more Mexican than ever,” after witnessing Tito Guizar sing the classic ranchera, “Allá en el
Rancho Grande” at the Memorial Opera House in San Francisco in the 1940s. Guizar, who was
considered “ambassador of Mexican and Latin American music in the entire world,” inspired
Quiñones to give himself wholeheartedly to his singing career in the United States.

50

By the 1940s, there was a clear distinction between the music being produced and
consumed in Mexico City and the music being exported abroad. At home, Mexicans enjoyed
more boleros than their immigrant compatriots in the United Status, who had a stronger liking
for ranchera music. Published record sales confirm these statements. For example, according to
XEW, between 1939 and 1942, the songs requested the most by the public had been boleros.

51

Between March and December of 1942, 63 out of 100 compositions were boleros and out of the
top ten “Peerless” record sales between March and December of 1945 more than 50% were
52

boleros.

This was not the case in the United States. Record companies published their number49

Radiolandia, February 18, 1944.

50

Victor Alejandro Espinoza Valle, La Vida Misma: Fernando Freddy Quiñones, un trovador
fronterizo. (Guadalajara, Jalisco: Centro Universitario de Ciencias Sociales y Humanidades,
Universidad de Guadalajara, 2008), 52.
51
52

Radiolandia, January 10, 1943.
Radiolandia, May 4, 1945; Radiolandia, August 14, 1945; Radiolandia, November 16, 1945.
224

one hits and recordings and in August of 1944 PHAM noted that not only was Mexican music
very popular in the CBS radio programs of New York City, but that the “Victor” records
recorded in Mexico in highest demand in the United States were “Así se quiere en Jalisco” (This
is how you love in Jalisco) and “Yo soy puro mexicano” (I am a pure-blooded Mexican), both
canciones rancheras recorded by Jorge Negrete.

53

Since the late 1920s, the Mexican and U.S.

born Mexican community had a liking for music that was not classical and overly romantic. In
urban centers like Los Angeles and San Antonio, for instance, “Corridos are sung in Mexican
theaters and over the radio on programs for the ‘pueblo.’”

54

The canción ranchera was popular among the Mexican populations of the United States
for a number of reasons. First, for those who migrated away from Mexico to the United States it
served the important function of “underpinning the dynamic of nostalgia and memories of the
countryside.” Far away from their native land, ranchera music gave the people yearnings to
return to that which they had lost.
Second, this style of music was popular among the immigrant population as it was “the
55

first genre created fundamentally for commercial exploitation.”

For example, after arriving in

the cities, ranchera became urban, and its byproduct, the bolero ranchero, was popularized by
the voices of singers like Lucha Reyes and Jorge Negrete who exposed this genre of music to the
public through films, radio and live performances during the late 1930s and early 1940s. The two

53
54

Radiolandia, August 11, 1944.
Nellie Foster, “The Corrido: A Mexican Culture Trait Persisting in Southern California,” 22.

55

Yolanda Moreno Rivas, Historia de la música popular mexicana (México, DF: Editorial
Océano, 2008), 198.
225

genres, the bolero and the canción ranchera, gave record companies the ability to single out the
consumer and appeal to him or her on an individual basis. In particular, record companies
become successful because they did not follow the nation-building model of the state, which
aimed to make the country identify with certain common features, including history, music and
traditions; instead, they saw the radio listener in his simplest human state, as a consumer.
The third reason ranchera flourished is that, as the U.S. born Mexican community came
to define itself by mid-century, they began to demand and produce this style of music on a more
frequent basis. The Mexican and U.S. born Mexican community wanted composers to “sing this
56

life of ours here, with all of its sufferings and triumphs.”

By the 1940s, some Mexican

broadcasters like Pedro J. González were not concerned with exposing their music to the larger
Anglo world, but instead, served a small audience of fellow compatriots. González promoted
issues affecting the U.S. born Mexican population in his daily radio broadcasts and composed
songs such as “El Lavaplatos” (The dishwasher), which U.S. born Mexicans and their parents
could directly relate to. In addition, the style of music that was played over the radio into the
United States, mainly corridos and the canción ranchera, were big hits among the Mexican
immigrant population. A radio listener from California noted that “ranchera songs would make
us forget even for a moment the hardship and worries of work.”

57

The Importance of Records
One aspect assisting the careers of Mexican artists and singers were records; a
56

La Prensa, May 28, 1934, p. 4.

57

Box 1 Folder 9. Pedro J. Gonzalez Papers, 60, Chicano Studies Research Center, UCLA,
University of California, Los Angeles.
226

record contract in the United States, in fact, was an important feature for molding an
international performer. During the first half of the twentieth century, the U.S. recording
industry came to be a major player in the diffusion of Mexican music to Mexican
immigrant communities and U.S. born Mexicans, to the formation of an overseas
audience and to the establishment of the careers of Mexican singers and artists. Mexican
began making records in the late 1920s; thus, prior to that time, most of the music played
over Mexican radio stations that was not live came from records imported from the
United States, Argentina, Cuba or France. After 1930, radio transmissions began to
include live and recorded Mexican music on a more frequent basis. And by the following
decade, the two most prominent musical genres, boleros and the canción ranchera,
competed for air time. From the outset, the national and international audience, which
took great “pleasure in hearing Mexican stations,” also purchased records.

58

Even though U.S. record companies had a foothold in Mexico since the 1930s,
singers were forced to travel to the United States to produce a record because Mexico did
not have the advanced technological capabilities for its own record production until the
years following the Second World War.

59

In the late 1920s, a number of singers and

groups like the Trovadores Tamaultipecos, El Charro Gil y sus Caporales and Pepe
Guizar had crossed the U.S.-Mexico border solely because they had a contract with
record companies like “Columbia” or “Decca.”
58
59
60

60

Receiving a record deal was beneficial

AHSEP, Expediente A-4/235.3(73).
AHGE, SRE, Expediente IV-245-11.
El Universal Ilustrado, July 13, 1939; La Prensa, February 15, 1937; Radiolandia, May 4,
227

for singers because if they signed a contract in the United States they were likely to tour
California, Texas, perhaps even New York, depending on where the records were
produced. Other groups in Mexico, like Los Alegres de Terán, also used the record
industry as a springboard for their careers in Northern Mexico and the United States. The
duet gained exposure after their records, produced in San Antonio by Falcon records,
were distributed on a large scale during the early 1940s. The popularity of this group, in
61

fact, corresponded with the growth of the commercial radio and record industries.

Records were material proof that artists had “made it” in the United States. In
1930, singer, composer, and actor Guty Cárdenas landed multiple recording and acting
contracts in New York City and Los Angeles, securing his stay in the United States for an
entire year. Records were also ways to earn money. “I spent many years in poverty,”
noted composer Lorenzo Barcela, “but now thanks to phonographic records and the
cinema, I have earned a lot of money.”

62

In addition, records popularized the music of

Mexican groups in the United States before they arrived in Mexico. Los Trovadores
Tamaultipecos, for example, recorded corridos, huapangos, sones and even boleros for
Columbia Records in 1929. These records, critics argued, were demonstrations of their

1945.
61

Francisco Ramos Aguirre, Los Alegres de Terán Vida y Canciones (Mexico, DF: Consejo
Nacional Para la Cultura y las Artes, 2003), 33.

62

La Prensa, October 9, 1937.
228

art, inspiration and genuine effort and were distributed in the United States.

63

Record companies began recording Spanish-language music in the United States
during the 1920s. Companies dispatched units throughout the nation to acquire music for
the nascent Spanish-language recording industry, known at the time as “Ethnic” music.
Record companies had been aware of the U.S. immigrant audience since the early 1920s
when companies like Columbia Records made Spanish-language records featuring
classical and concert singers like Esperanza Iris, Pilar Arcos, and Maria Conesa. The
distribution of these records among the Mexican immigrant population is difficult to
measure. Chris Strachwitz argues that the audience for these records was small, given
that they were expensive and therefore only appealed to the upper classes.

64

Evidence

dating back to the 1920s, however, suggests that Spanish-language songs were diffused
through records and the radio in public places such as businesses, theaters and even street
corners. Therefore, even though an individual family might not be able to purchase a
record by Maria Conesa, for example, there were opportunities to listen to her songs in
public places like Olvera Street in East Los Angeles nonetheless.
As the Spanish-language industry was established, at times company
representatives also set up recording facilities in local hotels, like in Texas, where
Mexican musicians performed their repertory, including accordion instruments that had

63
64

El Universal Ilustrado, September 12, 1929.
Chris Strachwitz, and James Nicolopulos, Lydia Mendoza: A Family Autobiography, ix.
229

65

been part of a cantina musical tradition.

Another strategy used by the recording

industry was to hire men who would listen to stations from Mexico and then bring singers
across the border to record albums. While singing for radio station XEP in the state of
Chihuahua, for example, Adelina Garcia’s voice was heard by the record company,
Columbia, in the United States, who hired her to travel overseas and record for them.

66

Mexican composers and singers took advantage of the rapid rise in record
manufacturing in the United States during the 1930s, and whenever possible, recorded
songs shortly after they were written. For example, before traveling back to Mexico,
Maria Alma recorded her first song, “Noche de mar,” in Los Angeles weeks after it was
written.

67

Record contracts also aided the exposure Mexican singers received over U.S.

English-language radio stations. Singer and composer Tito Guizar who, “without saying
anything, packed his guitar and his personal items and went to New York” in 1929 was
helped both by the growing record and radio industry of the city at the time. Upon
arrival, Tito signed a seven year contract with CBS and by the mid-1930s his voice was
known throughout the United States and Mexico. Guizar even hosted his own show
called “Tito y su guitarra” (Tito and his guitar).

68

When Mexican singers had a touring or recording contract in the United States,
65

Jorge Reina Schement and Ricardo Flores, “The Origins of Spanish-Language Radio: The
Case of San Antonio, Texas,” Journalism History 4, No. 2 (1977): 56-58, 61.
66
67
68

Radiolandia, September 18, 1945.
Radiolandia, August 4, 1944, p. 11.
La Prensa, August 21, 1938, p. 2.
230

they would sometimes extend their trip and appear in radio stations along the MexicoU.S. artistic circuit. For example, in 1937 when Pepe Guizar was traveling to San
Antonio to record for “Decca” he made a stop in Monterrey, Mexico to sing over station
XET and then in San Antonio where he appeared at the local radio station KABC’s
Spanish-language radio program, “La Hora Anáhuac.”

69

The expeditions of Mexican singers in the United States also benefitted the
careers of U.S. born Mexican singers and Mexican immigrants living abroad. In effect,
the journeys paved the way for the establishment of a generation of U.S. born Mexican
singers who, during the ‘30s and ‘40s, began their careers singing in radio programs
hosted by Mexican entrepreneurs and musicians. This group benefitted from the tours of
Mexican singers in two ways. First, the continuous exposure of new music genres from
Mexico allowed U.S. born Mexican singers and performers to combine newer and older
forms of music; thus, they were able to entertain the diverse audiences gathered in the
theaters and public auditoriums of Los Angeles and San Antonio. Second, because of
their physical location in the United States, U.S. born Mexican singers had easier access
to the record industry. More records meant greater exposure and consequently, their
voice and music became available to the general public before that of Mexican singers.
On the stages and in studios of San Antonio, New York and Los Angeles, then, U.S. born
Mexican singers and performers lived out the post-revolutionary government and
commercial radio’s goal to reach the Mexican population in the United States, cultivate a
faithful audience, and instill notions of patriotism among them.

69

La Prensa, February 15, 1937, p. 2.
231

A handful of Mexican performers who had settled in the U.S. and worked hard at
sustaining their careers during the late 1920s and 1930s were successful. However, the
fate that U.S. born Mexicans encountered during the Great Depression when voluntary
and forced repatriation dislocated thousands, also affected Mexican artists and singers.
At that time, in many of the cities across the United States, the cultural and artistic
production of the people was put on hold. As a result, Mexican artists living in the
United States were left with three choices: return to Mexico, move to New York City and
work in Vaudeville Theater or take meager jobs working for churches, charity
organizations or the English-language commercial radio industry. The economic and
political events of the 1930s may have caused a setback in the careers of Mexican singers
and performers, yet for U.S. born Mexicans, a new time opened up for them to grow,
perfect their talent, record music, and get their name out.
Despite the economic climate in the nation, the cultural production of the
Mexican community in the U.S. was thriving, especially that relating to music. In Texas,
the career of Lydia Mendoza, for instance, flourished during this time. In San Antonio
and Los Angeles, U.S. born Mexican men and women produced records, organized
festivals and concerts, or complimented holiday events by singing patriotic songs. San
Antonio, in fact, had been the place where a number of Mexican singers and artists began
their careers. Before traveling to her native Mexico, it was on the stages of the Teatro
Zaragoza that Maria Alma began her career. Alma, who was both a composer and
singer, had recorded for Victor and signed a contract to sing for XEW upon her arrival in

232

Mexico City in the early 1940s.

70

Since San Antonio was home to a number of auditoriums and theaters, Mexican
immigrants had ample opportunity to develop their careers. Thus, it was possible for
different musical genres to come together under the same roof. For example, the comic
sketch couple, Netty and Jesús Rodríguez, who were experts at performing, variedades or
“ensembles of popular variety acts,” traveled throughout Texas, Arizona, New Mexico
and California. In December of 1936, Netty and Jesús joined the acclaimed Miguel
Lerdo de Tejada orchestra, along with composer Agustín Lara, singer Margarita Cueto
71

and other Mexican artists on their tour of South Texas.

The convergence between the

musical genres demonstrates the fusion of musical and artistic styles: Netty and Jesús’
numbers appealed to the working-classes while Lerdo de Tejada’s orchestra was known
as a culturally elitist group. The duets performances also resonated with the population
because they embodied archetypal characters mentioned in the corridos of the
Revolution, such as the Adelita and the faithful soldier who gives his life for the rebel
cause.

72

Records homogenized Mexican music and they appealed to the consumer in new
ways. In Mexico, they made live radio and live music extinct because artists sang songs

70
71

Radiolandia, August 25, 1942, p. 3.
La Prensa, December 13, 1936, p. 6.

72

Carlos Monsiváis, “Yo soy humilde cancionero (De la música popular en México)” in
Aurelio Tello, ed., La música en México Panorama del siglo XX (México, DF: Fondo de Cultura
Económica, Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y Las Artes, 2010), 208.
233

until they were “perfect,” recorded them, and radio stations distributed them throughout
the country, and then they were played simultaneously through chain transmissions by
the late 1940s. Records expedited the process for an artist to sign a long-term contract
and popularized Mexican music on a larger scale. After witnessing the performances of
Tito Guizar in San Francisco during the mid-1940s, singer Freddy Quiñones
acknowledged that Guizar had “paved the way for those of us who are interpreters of the
Mexican and Latin American folklore, allowing our songs, which contain the timeless
musical feeling of Mexico, to be heard in the entire world.”

73

Record contracts gave artists the first steps towards stardom and preserved
Mexican traditional and folkloric music. With the help of Felipe Valdéz Leal and Nicho
Acosto, for example, Pedro J. Gonzalez and “Los Madrugadores” recorded with Victor
and Columbia records in the late 1920s.

74

In San Antonio, singer Esperanza Espino was

contracted with RCA records while she appeared with Netty and Jesús Rodríguez’s
theater company in San Antonio’s Teatro Nacional in 1938. Espino was an “exclusive
artists” whose records, according to the paper, “were in high demand.”

75

Countless other

groups, such as Las Hermanitas Vazquez and Las Hermanitas Vidaurri also had contracts

73

Victor Alejandro Espinoza Valle, La Vida Misma: Fernando Freddy Quiñones, un trovador
fronterizo (Guadalajara, Jalisco: Centro Universitario de Ciencias Sociales y Humanidades,
Universidad de Guadalajara, 2008), 52.
74

Box 3 Folder 16. CONFEDERACION DE VETERANOS REVOLUCIONARIOS DE LA
DIVISION DEL NORTE. San Ysidro, California. Enero 21 de 1978. Sr. M. Claudio Estrada.
San Felipe 143 Mexico, D.F. Pedro J. Gonzalez Papers, 60, Chicano Studies Research Center,
UCLA, University of California, Los Angeles.
75

La Prensa, March 20,1938, p. 5.
234

with record labels. When Juanita V. de Montalvo and Amelia Vázquez traveled to San
Antonio from Laredo, Texas in 1938, for example, they did so to record with RCA
Victor.

76

Las Hermanitas Vidaurri, in addition, who often toured with Jesús and Netty

Rodríguez in theaters and radio stations along with the U.S. border, had recorded with the
Blue Bird record label.

77

Fulfilling the Post-Revolutionary Cultural Mandate
In the mid-‘30s some members of the Mexican immigrant community in the United
States self-identified as México de Afuera (Mexico Outside of Mexico) and walked around with
nostalgia for the Motherland, for the land of their upbringing. These feelings were expressed
through declamation, poems, and of course, music. One important aspect of this music was
suffering, pain, and articulating the tribulations of living in the United States. In order to convey
these sentiments, the community had to produce their own male and female artists and
composers. In particular, the compositions of Pedro J. González appealed to the U.S. born
Mexican community because he wrote about Mexican issues, real life events at home, and mixed
this was with popular music genres like the ranchera. Gonzalez was also influential because he
saw himself as a spokesman for the plight Mexican immigrants encountered in the United States.
As he had been “the (first) Mexican radio announcer who spoke clearly and courageously with
Reason and Justice for our humble Latino race, true owner of our Latin American Continent.”

76
77
78

78

La Prensa, April 7, 1938, p. 8.
La Prensa, October 10, 1939, p. 1-2.
[Box 1 Folder 9] 3. Pedro J. Gonzalez Papers, 60, Chicano Studies Research Center, UCLA,
235

As the years went on, Mexican artists who chose to stay in the United States and cater to the
immigrant and second-generation audience found that mixing older and new music genres was a
sure way to be successful. Netty Rodríguez’s performances, for example, were filled with
enthusiasm and patriotism. According to the press “She is the folkloric artist of ‘México de
Afuera’ because she knows how to interpret the feelings of the Mexicans here and in her songs
and her dialogues she has incorporated our unique elements.”

79

Similarly, on the stages of cities throughout the United States, interpreters of the canción
ranchera, like Lydia Mendoza, became closely identified with the actual songs they sung. To the
public, they were idolized for their ability to articulate the feelings and expressions through
poetic imagery that centered in the rural countryside. According to Yolanda Broyles-González
one of the reasons that interpreters like Mendoza enjoyed such rich careers was in their ability to
“articulate the sensibilities and experiences of the people.”

80

Mexican immigrants who chose to

remain abroad had the ability to connect with the different Mexican generations because many
learned the skills to incorporate corridos with the canción ranchera and boleros in their
performances.
At times, Mexican composers and radio announcers also found prosperous careers in the
United States by appealing strictly to the Mexican and U.S. born Mexican audience.
Comfortable with their social position in the United States, the Mexican population demanded

University of California, Los Angeles.
79

La Prensa, July 23, 1939, p. 2-3.

80

Yolanda Broyles-González, “Ranchera Music(s) and the Legendary Lydia Mendoza:
Performing Social Location and Relations,” 183.
236

that their artists blend the traditions of Mexican music and, at the same time, incorporate local
features that would legitimize the community outside of the Patria. Cástulo Ortiz, for instance,
was a composer and poet who had migrated to Texas from Northern Mexico during the Mexican
Revolution. After spending fifteen years in the United States, Ortiz had not written a song
specifically for México de Afuera (Mexico Outside of Mexico) but focused instead on classical
pieces which the press, along with the greater immigrant community, considered a waste of his
talent. In fact, La Prensa exhorted him to, “return his inspiration to the place where surely he
placed his heart and his mind a long time ago: to our cotton pickers, our factory and sawmill
workers, our street vendors, our women…to our hopes and our longings as humans who,
consciously or unconsciously, need to give a new color to the American civilization by
connecting the two dominant cultures and races of the continent.”

81

Yet Mexican composers who launched careers in the United States prospered for a
number of reasons. First, they wrote about issues with which Mexican nationals could identify
and second, they wrote music that vividly expressed the hardships of living in the United States
as immigrants and second-class citizens. No other composer followed this model better than
Pedro J. González, whose popularity, in the eyes of some, rivaled that of Mexican singers and
film stars Pedro Infante and Jorge Negrete. His compositions covered a range of themes such as:
unrequited love, religious pleas, political changes and tragedies affecting the local population.
González was a Mexican radio announcer, musician and composer who had been a
81

La Prensa, May 28, 1934, p. 4.

82

Box 10 A. “a las ocho me mataré.” Por Joaquin Aguilar Robles. Tijuana, Baja California,
Enero de 1969. Pedro J. Gonzalez Papers, 60, Chicano Studies Research Center, UCLA,
University of California, Los Angeles.
237

82

telegraph operator during the Mexican Revolution and migrated to Southern California in the
early 1920s. There, he took a variety of jobs before landing a position in the L.A. radio station
KMPC in 1926. Shortly after, Gonzalez helped create “Los Madrugadores” (The Early Risers),
a name referring to a recording group, as well as his program, which aired daily from four to six
in the morning over station KELW in Burbank, California for several years.
The first way Gonzalez connected with his compatriots in the United States was by
writing about Mexico’s history and people. For example, the lyrics of his song “Himno
Vasconcelista,” which was an homage to Mexican politician and Public Education Minister, José
Vasconcelos, read: “I am a vasconcelista who comes here// To remember the Motherland where
I was born// And now that we are gathered together we find ourselves// In a hospitable land for
Mexicans// United we will show with great pleasure// That we will continue to honor the
Motherland which witnessed our birth.”

83

In Los Angeles, Gonzalez and Los Madrugadores also sang nostalgic and humorous
tunes which his audience could relate to, many times because they had been features of Hispanic
Theater productions. His personal archive contains lists of his most faithful listeners; men and
women from Northern California to Baja California who tuned in to this Mexican radio
announcer on a frequent basis and whom the composer kept in contact with after he retired from
radio. Correspondence between him and Mexican and U.S. audience indicates the success he
had in advocating for the concerns of the Mexican people and in furthering working-class music
for the enjoyment of the day. Letters from fans such as Matias Michel, a Mexican farm laborer
83

Box 3 Folder 9 Song lyrics 1929-34 HIMNO VASCONCELOS por Pedro J. Gonzalez.
Pedro J. Gonzalez Papers, 60, Chicano Studies Research Center, UCLA, University of
California, Los Angeles.
238

who had listened to the radio program during the ‘30s and ‘40s, read: “It is great to remember
those times when ‘Los Madrugadores’ not only delighted us with your songs but also reminded
us what time we had to wake up and prepare our lunches for work. The truth is, those days are
gone but your name alone brings us Mexicans great memories of what life was all about for the
84

Latino population at the time.”

The one feature allowing Mexican performers who stayed in the United States the ability
to succeed over their counterparts was the first-hand knowledge of the local population, their
habits, their trials, and their longings. Many achieved stardom because their careers began in the
locations where Mexican singers would not perform on their overseas tours. For example, when
she began her career as a singer, Lydia Mendoza sang at the Plaza del Zacate in San Antonio.
“There were a lot of groups in the Plaza, but they were all men,” recalled Mendoza. “We were
women; we were the only women singers: my mother, my sister and I. We were also the only
group that was a family… No groups from Mexico came to play in the Plaza, either; it was just
the Trios from around San Antonio and South Texas; strictly local groups. Of women, nobody!
Just us, we were the only family and the only women there.”

85

Mendoza noted that when

Mexican groups, such as Los Trovadores Tamaultipecos or Las Hermanas Águila, visited the
United States they sang in theaters. Mexican artists spent the majority of their time in Mexico
City and then left to other countries like Cuba or the United States.
Pedro J. González was admired by many and regarded as an important hero and leader in

84

Box 1 Folder 9. Pedro J. Gonzalez Papers, 60, Chicano Studies Research Center, UCLA,
University of California, Los Angeles.
85

Chris Strachwitz, and James Nicolopulos, Lydia Mendoza, 58-59.
239

California’s Mexican community. In fact, because he had been regarded as a menace and served
a prison sentence for a crime he did not commit, in the eyes of Mexican immigrants and their
families, he was a hero who suffered on behalf of countless others. In the 1930s, as Stephen
Loza writes “the authorities in Los Angeles perceived him as a threat because of his
outspokenness during his radio broadcasts.”

86

In 1934, Gonzalez was wrongfully accused of

rape and sent to San Quentin to serve a sentence for a crime of which he was later acquitted.
After being released from prison, González was deported to Mexico and took up a job for radio
station XEAN of Tijuana. The shame and suffering from his wrongful sentence gave him an
outlook on the treatment of Mexicans in the mid-1930s in California. Years later, he wrote “they
couldn’t look favorably on the discovery of the (first) Mexican radio announcer who spoke
clearly and courageously with Reason and Justice for our humble Latino race, true owner of our
87

Latin American Continent.”

In contrast, not all Mexican performers who traveled abroad demonstrated understanding
of the environment in which they were traveling to. During the fall of 1943, for instance, the
Cuarteto Metropolitano left Mexico for a tour in Texas. Yet what they did not realize, which
one of Mexico’s leading newspapers was quick to note, was that “it was time of the harvest and
88

the people were in the cotton fields.”

Consequently, their tour was a failure and they were

forced to return to Mexico.
86

Steven Loza, Barrio Rhythm: Mexican American music in Los Angeles (Urbana and Chicago:
University of Illinois Press, 1993), 35.
87

Box 1 Folder 9. Pedro J. Gonzalez Papers, 60, Chicano Studies Research Center, UCLA,
University of California, Los Angeles.
88

Radiolandia, September 3, 1943.
240

Conclusion
In the 1930s and 1940s, as U.S. born Mexican singers traveled throughout the country
they made use of the radio to familiarize the public with their music. Some profitted from record
contracts with major labels. Others were succeeding simply because musicians were singing
about the struggles and features of life of Mexicans in the United States, and responded to local
circumstances. As the years progressed, U.S. born Mexican music, as its own genre, drastically
advanced. Both men and women, like Pedro J. Gonzalez, Maria Padilla, Lydia Mendoza and
Netty Rodríguez, benefitted from knowing their audience and the local circumstances.
Furthermore, this style of music and radio they made reaffirms what Américo Paredes has stated
concerning the folklore and music created in the United States by Mexicans: “These songs
should have resonance in all U.S. born Mexicans, for they are part of the history of all Mexicans
in the United States. They record an important aspect of the Mexican-American’s long struggle
to preserve his identity and affirm his rights as a human being.”

89

Through radio programming, live performances and music recording the historical
significance of Mexican markets for the music industry reached a completely different status by
the early 1940s. From being stops considered merely for an extra income in the 1910s and
1920s, these markets had become by the dawn of World War II the arenas where stardom,
international status and hyper-Mexican nationalism could be achieved, displayed and celebrated.
Mexican artists performed and recorded in the United States on regular basis, not only to satisfy
the insatiable appetite in Mexican communities for ethnic music, but also to consolidate their
artistic trajectories as international stars, high representatives of Mexican culture and
89

Américo Paredes, A Texas-Mexican Cancionero: Folksongs of the Lower Border (Austin:
University of Texas Press, 1991), xviii.
241

ambassadors of the Mexican revolutionary government abroad.
The cultural mandate given to all Mexican citizens after the revolution was fulfilled in the
United States by U.S. born Mexican and Mexican immigrants like Lydia Mendoza and Pedro J.
González. In the stages and studios across the United States, they connected with the local
population through music that exalted Mexico and included songs on the Mexican experience in
the United States. Thus, as record companies and commercial radio stations appealed to
Mexican consumers to buy music or tune in to more programs produced, not in Mexico, but in
the United States the post-revolutionary project overseas failed.

242

Epilogue
The End of an Era: Censorship, Television and Single-Network Chains

La televisión pronto llegará /Yo te cantaré y tú me verás…vísteme bien mujer, vísteme bien/ Ya
no hace falta tener buena voz/ Sólo hay que andar figurín.
The television soon will come/ I will sing before you and you will see me…dress me well dear,
dress me well/There is no need to have a good voice /You only have to look nice.
-Lyrics for “La Televisión,” 1947

In Mexico, during the first half of the twentieth century, radio brought together
transnational culture, nationalism and consumerism. Additionally, along with spurring
national and international commercial relations, it fulfilled many functions to the postrevolutionary state, including diffusing art, knowledge, music and culture. To the
government, radio transmissions were efficient avenues to convey the message of the
national reconstruction project, both within the country and across the border into the
United States.
In the 1930s, commercial and official stations responded to the goals of the
revolutionary elite which, among other things, included agrarian reform, secular
education and the consolidation of a new political party, the Partido Nacional
Revolucionario (National Revolutionary Party), or PNR. As the nation’s economy and
industry grew, along the U.S.-Mexico border a group of entrepreneurs built radio stations
and created a listening audience of Mexican nationals and immigrants. These stations
were considered “business cards in order to know Mexico ‘from the inside’” and grew

243

drastically during the late 30’s and early ‘40s.

1

In the United States, Mexican immigrants used Mexican music, mass media and
entertainment prior to the advent of the national reconstruction project of the government.
By 1940 the radio industry was completely transformed as a result of censorship, chain
broadcasting and international legislation. In fact, a competition ensued between the
government and commercial radio stations along the border over the Mexican immigrant
and U.S. born Mexican audience. In that decade, Mexico embarked upon a period of
World War II related richness which brought a number of changes to the nation’s
industry, politics and entertainment. Mass media, in particular, underwent stricter
restrictions under the administration of Manuel Ávila Camacho (1940-1946), who was
concerned with the perceived effects of mass media content upon education, health,
family values, public morality and national culture. Using mass media to invigorate
nationalism and build patriotism did not lead to positive effects for the government on the
other side of the border. Consequently, the industry saw a decline in trans-border
programming, a rise in record playing and an overall standardization of programs, as they
were recorded in Mexico City and shipped to the provinces for retransmission. The
Mexican people continued to tune in to radio on a daily basis before, and after, the arrival
of television at mid-century but the industry was not the same as it had been in the
previous eras.
Censorship
Government control of the radio industry intensified in the mid-1930s under the Cárdenas
1

Radiolandia, March 20, 1943, p. 9.
244

administration, which ushered in a nation-wide project of broad agrarian and labor reform. Part
of his radical program included an overhaul of the nation’s economic system which, naturally,
touched upon the role of mass communications in Mexico. Cárdenas realized the importance of
maintaining a firm control over the media and strongly believed that the propaganda power, as
well as the revenue-generating power, of radio should be kept under strict control of the
government. In turn, he moved to enforce the existing Mexican broadcasting legislation
2

beginning in 1934, when all commercial stations were ordered to transmit news bulletins. Two
years later, amendments to the law indicated that ten out of every sixty minutes of air time had to
3

contain government propaganda. Tighter control was exercised again in 1937 with the creation
of La Hora Nacional which mandated for commercial stations from the Yucatan peninsula, to
central Mexico, to the northern border in cities like Tijuana and Ciudad Juárez, to play the
weekly broadcast.
Prohibiting commercial stations from broadcasting any political information, in the 1930s
the government merged politics with radio programming by inaugurating an “official” radio
station, XEFO. In the late ‘30s and 1940s the station became an organ of the PNR, which
transmitted classical music in their daily programming in an effort to bring “high culture” to the
audience. Despite efforts to modernize the station by constructing a new studio for the station in
1935, the state’s efforts to create a “National Radio” were not generating positive results. As one
critic whose penname was El Caballero Pálido (The Pale Horse) noted in 1935:
2

Archivo General de la Nación, Fondo Secretaría de Comunicaciones y Obras Públicas
(Hereafter AGN, SCOP), Expediente 22/131.6 (725.1)/155.
3

Diario Oficial, 30 de diciembre 1936. “Reglamento de las estaciones radioeléctricas
comerciales, culturales y de aficionados.”
245

Radio experts want to know, how much fun do the working and laboring masses have
listening to operas, rhapsodies, sonatas, etc, all the time? And the Huapangos, corridos, sones,
and Revolution episodes, and all of that music and popular literature, which is of real importance
to the people, when will that be transmitted? In the year 2000? For the hundreds of peasants that
hear [XE]FO every day it is 100 times more interesting, musically, Tata Nacho than Beethoven.

4

In the 1930s, the duty of the federal government, who dispensed licenses for new
stations, was to both protect and patrol the social function of radio in Mexico. In the following
decades the State’s role in the radio industry became twofold: it took on the role of both overseer
and broadcaster. Through a number of inspectors, the Ministry of Communications and Public
Works monitored the broadcasts of all commercial and official stations. For instance, on
September 30, 1931, the Communications Minister received a report on the activity of station
XEN, owned and operated by Cerveceria Modelo in Mexico City. The inspector, whose reports
were signed only with his initials, noted that in accordance with the law stating that stations
could broadcast informational conferences to the general public, XEN was broadcasting a
program called “Hora Impulsora de las Actividades Nacionales” (The Propelling Hour of
National Activities). In the program, prominent Mexican businessmen were commenting on the
recent 1% government tax increase and its effects in the nation. However, according to the
inspector, since September 27 the speakers had become highly critical of the government’s
actions. Calling them “scientific stupidities,” the orators attacked the current administration and
leadership noting that “it was time that they leave the Cadillac and return to the earth from which
they came; that it is time for them to visit the factories and take note, so that they understand the

4

El Universal Ilustrado, November 14, 1935, p. 10.
246

5

work that it takes to make one peso.” While discontent was common within labor force during
this time, the 1926 law stated that any direct attack on the government would not be tolerated.
Punishment to XEN, who had blatantly violated the law, came in the form of a fine.
Restrictions on broadcasting extended outside of Mexico City’s radio stations. The
Ministry of Communications placed inspectors in the North, who worked diligently ensuring that
stations did not diverge from their intended path. In their reports, SCOP inspectors noted all
information concerning the daily programming and extra-curricular activity of radio stations.
For instance, in October 1931, the assessor of station XER of Villa Acuña, Coahuila wrote, “I
have carefully observed the services of said station…all of their English announcements are first
read in Spanish, and in all of their concerts they play national music.”

6

When they noted suspicious or unlawful behavior, inspectors included the subversive acts
in their statements. Such was the case of the account sent by Francisco Aguilar, an inspector of
the first zone, to the Communications Minister on September 21, 1933 about stations XEAE and
XEFD, both of Tijuana, whom he accused of transmitting propaganda from psychologists who
sold horoscopes, gave advice, and answered questions on the air from radio listeners. In
addition, XEAE and XEFD were also dedicating songs and musical selections to friends and
loved ones, at times giving personal messages and saying the recipients’ full names over the air.
Aguilar noted that this activity was in direct violation of Article 78 of the 1926 Electric
Communications Law which stated that “the hidden or open transmission of personal, political,

5
6

AGN, SCOP, Expediente 525/20.
AGN, SCOP, Expediente 525/16.
247

7

or religious affairs are prohibited.”

At times, their job responsibilities included monitoring the broadcasts of stations in the
United States, especially if they were located along the border. In the fall of 1940, Gustavo
Pérez Aldama, who was stationed in the border state of Coahuila, reported that for months he had
observed subversive radio transmissions from San Antonio, Texas which spoke about rebel
groups in Mexico who were plotting to organize an attack against the government. This matter,
which was brought to the attention of both the Minister of Communications and Foreign
Relations, demonstrates the interest the Mexican government had in ensuring that messages
against Mexico, or her government, were not diffused through the airwaves.

8

Following Cárdenas, Manuel Ávila Camacho used the influence of his brother, who was
Minister of Communications and Public Works at the time, to imposed strict censorship
guidelines over the content of radio transmissions. The control over mass media was so
extensive during the Camacho administration that record companies found themselves
apologizing for the content of their productions. In particular, the themes and lyrics of boleros
caused generational conflicts and public debates. The growing conservative population of the
1940s considered many of the lyrics offensive to God and salacious and frequently protested. In
response to heated accusations in June of 1945, for instance, record company Promotora
Hispano-Americana de Mexico (PHAM) printed a public apology for the lyrics in one of Agustín
Lara’s boleros, “Palabras de Mujer” (The Words of Women). In a written statement Lara noted

7

Ibid.

8

Archivo General de la Nación (AGN), Ramo Gobernación, Investigaciones Políticas y Sociales
(IPS), Caja 442.
248

that he wanted to make public “1: That God is witness of my Catholic faith and He knows that I
did not have any desire to offend him in my song and 2: The world is a witness of my respect for
ladies, before whom I bow with all reverence.”

9

Chain Broadcasting
In the mid-1940s, the Mexican government’s cultural program was replaced by an
accelerated pursuit of capitalism and a cosmopolitan way of life, as advances in technology,
mass communications and transportation opened the world up to the people of Mexico. At this
time, for instance, Mexican radio listeners tuned in to the musical night life of the United States
easily. Over station XEW they heard concerts by New York City’s National Symphonic
Orchestra in Carnegie Hall or tuned in to NBC’s nightly programs featuring “Latin American”
music, a blend of Afro-Cuban, Mexican and Argentine popular songs and tangos. In addition,
after Mexico joined the allied powers during the Second World War, Mexican stations
transmitted war propaganda, programs and news briefs, many times directly from the British
Broadcasting Corporation, the BBC.
As these forces transformed Mexican society, the interests of national networks, or “chain
programming,” as it was called in Mexico, began to overshadow the work of commercial stations
along the U.S-Mexico border. In fact, commercial advertisements and networks, both introduced
in 1941, were fundamental in the direction that the radio industry took during the remainder of
the twentieth century. Together, the consolidation of a national broadcasting system in Mexico
City, along with regional and international broadcasting agreements, led to the drop in transborder broadcasting from commercial stations by the mid 1940s.
9

Radiolandia, June 22, 1945.
249

The efforts by border stations to sustain a Mexican overseas audience were frustrated
after the arrival of networks for a number of reasons. Chain programming connected radio
stations in different locations in Mexico and offered similar programming, either through the
telephone or through recorded programs made in Mexico City, and distributed to these regional
stations through the mail. This process began in 1941 with the creation of Radio Programas de
México (Mexican Radio Programs) or RPM, the country’s first national network based in Mexico
City. Despite Emilio Azcárraga’s statement that the purpose of the network was to “intensify the
artistic exchange between Mexico and its neighboring countries,” the reality was that through
RPM the links between capitalists in Mexico and the United States only grew stronger.

10

A large portion of Mexico’s media history during the twentieth century centers on Emilio
Azcárraga Vidauretta, a media mogul and visionary who is credited for establishing Mexico’s
most influential commercial radio station, XEW. He was also the founding father of the largest
media conglomerate in the nation, Televisa, as well as a financial backer of the RPM project.
Azcárraga emulated the U.S. model of radio, dreaming that the stations under his control would
one day be as influential as the NBC or CBS networks in the United States.

11

In addition, he

held an international vision for the Mexican radio industry. In 1930, when XEW first went on
the air, it was intended to be “the driving force of Mexican culture and art beyond the nation’s
borders.” In the following decades, XEW exceeded this goal and was admired and coveted both

10

¡Oiga!, June 3, 1944.

11

Jorge Mejía Prieto, Historia de la radio y la televisión en México (México, DF: Colección
México Vivo, 1972), 38.
250

for its technical advancements and for its commercial power.
professionalized, so too did the artistic life of the nation.

12

In fact, as the station

13

Azcárraga may have been the financial overseers of RPM, but the network was the
brainchild of Clemente Serna Martínez, a radio engineer from the state of Monterrey who formed
the organization in 1941 with twelve radio stations. Serna Martínez, who sold advertisements for
a radio station in Nuevo León, recalled that when he traveled South to Mexico City, during the
1930s, businessmen in the capital did not believe that their announcements would be aired over
stations in the North. He recalled that after thinking of possible solutions, “in two paragraphs I
drafted a plan to establish an organization that would give advertisers nation-wide reach.”

14

At

the time, diffusing advertisements through a national network filled an important void within
Mexican industry and commerce. Within one year, RPM included more than 100 stations,
changing the future of advertising in Mexico forever.
For the radio stations along the U.S.-Mexico border, however, the appearance of RPM
was threatening; it was a new way for the political center, Mexico City, to exert its control over
states in the North. “The radio stations in the provinces wanted nothing to do with us,” Serna
Martínez admitted.

12
13

15

In addition, RPM adopted a similar mission of commercial stations along

Radiolandia, September 22, 1944.
¡Oiga!, September 23, 1944.

14

Bertha Zacatecas, Vidas en el aire. Pioneros de la radio en México (México, DF: Editorial
Diana, 1996), 203.
15

Ibid., 204.
251

the U.S.-Mexico border: using the airwaves to create Mexican consumers in the United States.
RPM, in fact, wanted to make radio in Mexico the “message of progress which is sent across the
borders and continents daily.”

16

Radio Programas de México was not the only network to appear in Mexico City in the
1940s, or to have ambitions to reach audiences in the United States. In the spring of 1944,
station XEQ inaugurated its own network, La Cadena Azul, The Blue Network, which brought
together fifteen stations in nine different states and whose motto was to “take throughout our
territory and outside of our borders the expression of our feelings, through our music and our
folklore.”

17

In fact, the Mexican press reported that in the United States, XEQ was “one of the

most listened to Mexican radio programs.”

18

During the remainder of the decade and into the

late twentieth century, Mexican commercial networks continued to enthrall their Spanishspeaking audiences in the United States with high-quality programs.
In addition, the arrival of commercial networks prolonged the symbiotic relationship
between the government and the private mass communications sector. Since the 1920s, the
government had enjoyed a close relationship with Mexico’s “media bosses,” which included
Azcárraga and others in the newspaper and film industries. Before 1940, the state used their own
resources to diffuse nationalism, such as persuading its citizens to listen to state-sponsored radio
broadcasts like La Hora Nacional (The National Hour), a weekly concert which, by law, every

16
17
18

¡Oiga!, June 3, 1944.
¡Oiga!, April 1, 1944.
Radiolandia, May 21,1943.
252

commercial station had to retransmit every Sunday night. But, by the middle of the twentieth
century, as Stephen Niblo argues, the Mexican government learned that it was better to have an
indirect relationship with mass communications than to attempt to stand behind the project of
cultural nationalism.

19

The arrival of RPM and other networks, then, was both an economic and

political force allowing large radio stations the ability to retain political control over smaller
stations and “dictate” the growth of the industry.

20

In the late 1940s, as power shifted towards the capital city thanks to networks like RPM
and La Cadena Azul, television appeared on the horizon as the new form of entertainment and
the U.S. rose to a position as a regional leader in radio broadcasting, stations along the U.S.Mexico border offering trans-border programming were forced to give up their ability to target
the overseas audience of Mexican listeners. However, the work that Mexican commercial radio
began in the early decades of the twentieth century, the creation of an avid consumer market of
Mexican music in the United States, is a phenomenon still in existence today.
International Conferences
Aside from national networks and censorship, another factor determining the decline in
trans-border and transnational broadcasts was a series of regional and international agreements
that the Mexican government made with the United States and other countries in North America.

19

Stephen R. Niblo, Mexico in the 1940s: Modernity, Politics, and Corruption (Wilmington:
Scholarly Resources, 1999), 355.
20

Fernando Mejía Barquera, La industria de la radio y la televisión y la política del estado
mexicano (México, DF: Fundación Manuel Buendía, 1989), 130.

253

As early as 1921, individuals throughout Mexico had unrestricted access to the airwaves; on a
regular basis, many of them experimented with radio broadcasting in their homes, businesses, or
in public places. Proud of its progress in the field of mass communications, the Mexican postrevolutionary government participated and complied with intercontinental agreements. Mexican
representatives attended conferences and conventions early on, such as the International
Telecommunications Conference held in Washington, D.C. in 1929, where it was determined
that Mexico would be assigned the call letters, XE and XF for its radio stations.
In the early 1930s, as the Mexican radio industry professionalized, Azcárraga and other
media entrepreneurs realized that there was an unequal distribution of channels in the
electromagnetic spectrum in North America and that, in fact, the majority of them were being
utilized by the United States. Regardless of the law, many Mexican stations used the channels
assigned to Canada or the United States, which was not problematic until the arrival of the
“border blasters” stations in the early 1930s. After high-powered Mexican radio stations
broadcast to both English and Spanish-language audiences in Villa Acuña or Ciudad Juárez, for
example, the U.S. government took interest in Mexican radio broadcasting for the first time. In
particular, the government was committed to shutting down the stations under the direction of
FCC evaders like Dr. Brinkley, whose XER station advertised a surgical procedure where male
genitalia was replaced by goat glands as a male impotence remedy over the air.

21

In effect, the high-powered transmissions of the “border blasters” led to a number of
disagreements between the United States and Mexico over broadcast frequency allocations. In a
21

Gene Fowler and Bill Crawford, Border Radio: Quacks, Yodelers, Pitchmen, Psychics, and
Other Amazing Broadcasters of the American Airwaves (Austin: University of Texas Press,
2002), 203.
254

series of meetings over the course of the next two decades, a power struggle was manifested
between the neighboring countries. In the 1933 North and Central American Regional
Conference held in Mexico City, the United States first expressed its desire to reduce the
frequency of the border radio stations. The basis for the request was that the two nations
disagreed on the definition of the role of radio broadcasting. In Mexico, the government and the
private media sector believed that “radio transmissions are national and international services;”
noting that “especially along the border, which is a zone of cooperation, it is inevitable to use
radio to broadcast, not just in one country but in the neighboring one as well.” The United
States, on the other hand, maintained that “a broadcasting station was to serve the interests of the
population within the country and is not for an international service.” The U.S. envoy to the
Conference, Mr. Sykes, in addition, noted that “we could not consider border stations as being
needs of Mexico.”

22

The Mexican government did not surrender immediately. The representative at the
Conference, Anselmo Mena, reported that as the countries were drafting formal legislation, the
United States expressed that as a way to reduce the influence of border stations, they wanted
Mexico to ban stations from broadcasting in short wave frequencies, that is, across great
distances. In response, the Mexican delegation noted that its stations along the border were fully
complying with international law and were important to the nation for a number of reasons.
“They constituted an industry of national interests; they extended Mexican propaganda abroad,”
and most importantly, “because they are a point of contact with the Mexican people of the

22

Archivo Histórico Diplomático Genaro Estrada (AHGE), Secretaría de Relaciones Exteriores
(SRE), Expediente III-300-26.
255

23

United States.”

No formal legislation was passed in 1933 regarding the purpose of “border

blasters,” but for the first time, radio stations whose sole mission was to target the Mexican
audience abroad were placed in the spotlight.
The United States vocalized their position again four years later in Havana, Cuba at the
First Inter-American Radio Conference. There, the U.S. delegation persuaded Mexico to agree to
a reallocation of radio frequencies in North America in a provision that included, if not
prohibiting them altogether, reducing the number of stations along the border.

24

Mexico

continued to participate in conferences held in Washington D.C. and Rio de Janeiro in 1944 and
1945, respectively, stations along the border that were operated, not by U.S. outlaws, but by
Mexican entrepreneurs, were at the losing end.
Conclusion
Radio stations stitched together Mexican communities in the United States by providing a
complex and well developed set of services, from live performances to block programming and a
vital recording industry, that enhanced ideal visions of the Mexican family, the Mexican nation
and the Mexican people abroad. Between 1920 and 1950 the music-performance media business
catering to Mexicans in the United States evolved into a full fledged entertainment industry,
solely capable of propelling Mexican performers to the status of cultural ambassadors, to feature
them in the most important venues in places such as New York City, Los Angeles and San
Antonio, and to make them into international stars with generous revenue from live
performances and record sales. The unique ways in which these markets combined Mexican
23
24

Ibid.
Gene Fowler and Bill Crawford, Border Radio, 224-225.
256

nationalism, mass consumption, patriarchal values and transnational networks, to satisfy the
entertainment demands of Mexican families in the United States, illustrate the vitality and
inventiveness of entrepreneurs, broadcasters, artists and audiences in México de Afuera.

257

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258

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