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Radio Nation: Communication, Popular Culture, and Nationalism in Mexico, 1920-1950 (review)

In this sophisticated study, Joy Elizabeth Hayes analyzes the links between state power, Mexican nationalism, and the history of radio. Radio Nation compliments recent works on contemporary Mexican popular culture, exploring the tenuous relationship between modernity, power, and mexicanidad, but is concerned primarily with how technology intersects with nation formation. Hayes takes on recent debates regarding culture and “the nation” and situates Mexican popular culture as an arena of political and cultural struggle. The first two chapters map her theoretical approach. Hayes contemplates how recent revisionist approaches to Mexican history have influenced her conceptualization of radio and nation. Radio, she argues, is a medium that reflects both nation and foreign power, but it is also subject to local interpretation. Moreover, broadcast communication is a social process, not a finished product. In chapter 2, Hayes positions Mexican radio within the theoretical debates surrounding modernity: “I use the term anti-modern to describe an ambivalent perspective toward modernity as a concept of forward moving social change. More specifically, in the case of nation, I use the term to characterize modern movements of national unity and disintegration that draw directly on pre-modern ideals of allegiance and authority” (p. 14). So, how was Mexican radio used to promote the nation while embracing premodern ideals of power? At the apex of the Mexican Revolution, in the 1930s, radio became a tool to spread the ideals of the revolution from Mexico City to the far reaches of the provinces. Through the Ministry of Public Education (SEP), the state employed radio to disseminate socialist ideas to the masses in order to construct nationality and undermine clerical education in the cities and countryside. SEP programs also distributed radios to rural and urban working-class families. In an attempt to build a modern nation using premodern ideals, B O O K R E V I E W S