ABSTRACTESTRELLAS, MEDIOS Y RELATOS DE FÚTBOL EN MÉXICO (1941-2001) ByAlejandro González Landeros This doctoral dissertation explores how Mexican soccer narratives have changed throughout the 20th century under the impact of different platforms of mass media and new technologies (i.e. written press, radio, cinema and television). I have three goals in undertaking this project. First, I map and trace the history of changes of what I call “the parole of Mexican soccer” or the way Mexico talks about soccer. Second, I explore how Mexican media invested in creating a soccer star mega-system. Third, I analyze how Mexican soccer imagination changes under the impact of a media cross-fertilizations process. Up to this point, there are no studies that research how different technologies influence of language of Mexican soccer. This is a void that I propose to fill by revising the history of the relationship between soccer and mass media in Mexico throughout the 20th century. My dissertation consists of 5 chapters. The first chapter analyzes Esto, which became the sports weekly magazine most widely sold in Mexico during the 40s. In this chapter, I examine how Esto narrated soccer by addressing the following questions: 1) how did the press begin to organize and imagine Mexican soccer narratives, 2) how did Esto’s chronicles and/or interviews build a star-system that later established itself as a common practice for other mass media, and 3) what rhetoric started to be associated with soccer, or how was a soccer narrative founded in the newspapers of the 1940s. The second chapter analyzes the “Golden Age” of Mexican cinema, especially the movie Los hijos de don Venancio (1944). I review how did cinema speak about soccer in Mexico along with the star system that movies built or how they fed the celebrity discourse already institutionalized by the written press. In chapter three, I focus in Chanoc (1959-1981?), which was one of the most successful comic books in the 1960s through the 1980s. By entering the universe of soccer comic books, Mexican soccer began to be narrated through parody and picaresque. Also, the topics start to diversify. Acknowledging all these changes, I explore how Chanoc mocked the “nación mexicana futbolera” through the lens and satirized language of Televisa sport commentator Ángel Fernández, a major talking point of Chanoc’s football series. Chapter four analyzes how Tomás Mojarro talked in his UNAM radio program Paliques y cabeceos (1982-1986) about the social and economic implications that the 1986 World Cup had on its staging throughout Mexico. Tomás Mojarro provides insights into Televisas’s investments in the mega-event, and how the Mexican state aided the media corporation. The last chapter analyzes the telenovela El juego de la vida (2001) and the new “sentimental” and “feminine” language that the soap opera added to the existing (male) narratives of soccer in Mexico. I am interested in finding how this telenovela was able to imagine the impossible women of mid/high classes becoming protagonists of such an uncharted territory of Mexican masculine landscape.
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