Stephen Allen offers an engaging take on the importance of boxing in twentieth-century Mexico. As boxing became a commercialized international spectacle, Mexican boxers established a presence among the sport's global elite while becoming an intrinsic part of their nation's popular culture.
As Allen argues, boxing promoted a masculine vision of national identity, which in turn served the cultural agenda of the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). While state efforts at cultural politics were typically expressed through public education and endless propaganda, popular diversions contributed something as well. Thus, boxing conveyed the image of the ideal male citizen: healthy, disciplined, moral, sober, patriotic, and imbued with both “hard” masculine traits (for example, a virile and violent warrior ethos) and “soft” ones, such as humor, charisma, intellect, cleverness, and style. By appealing to people across social divides, boxing reinforced collective notions of what it meant to be Mexican. In his introduction, Allen addresses how citizens took something with origins in the Anglo world and adapted it to the national interest. Although not native to the country, boxing (or at least watching it on TV) effectively became an authentic national pastime.
The greatest strength of this book is the set of five biographical sketches of prominent boxers. The first featured was Rodolfo Casanova, the paragon of the 1930s “Golden Age.” Possessing innate talent and plenty of charisma, Casanova elevated his country's stature in the world of boxing, but ultimately he fell into poverty and alcoholism. Nevertheless, he remained a folk hero for the masses. Next was Raúl “Ratón” Macías, who shined in the 1950s because of both his boxing skill and his rags-to-riches story. Escaping the mean streets of Tepito, he became a symbol of the pious, healthy, and refined modern man, an antidote to the excesses of Casanova.
The final three had their heyday in the “second Golden Age” during the 1970s, when the nation's boxers became fixtures in the big-money world of televised international boxing. Vicente Saldívar, the “all-powerful mathematician,” shared the virtue of self-care with Macías, but he failed to connect on an emotional level with the Mexican public, who saw him as self-centered and aloof. Rubén Olivares symbolized the “emotional revolution” of the 1970s, in which men became increasingly encouraged to express feelings, sexual desire, and intellectualism. Olivares displayed hyper-masculine swagger (and, yet again, a love of drink), while some of his contemporaries were more cerebral. Finally, José “Mantequilla” Nápoles, an immigrant of Afro-Cuban descent, endeared himself to Mexican audiences, as much for his frequent displays of affection for his adoptive home (he once proclaimed himself “more Mexican than the nopales”) as for his boxing skill. Still, he, like Casanova and Olivares, fell into the trap of hedonism, defeated in the end not by a superior boxer, but by the bottle.
This is an enjoyable book to read and a sound piece of scholarship. Allen nonetheless occasionally overplays his hand. For example, in the conclusion to Chapter 4, he asserts that the lack of popular enthusiasm for Vicente Saldívar signified the absence of popular belief in PRI-era modernization (133). That is a gross overreach: Saldívar failed to connect with the public because he had a reclusive lifestyle and a cold personality. Even though the writing is refreshingly straightforward, the most consistent problem in the book is that it is littered with typos and the occasional mixed metaphor. We find Casanova “embarking on a meteoric rise” on page 47, and see Tepito as a “cesspool standing in opposition to national progress” on page 74, to cite two examples. Despite these problems, this book is a welcome addition to the historiography of Mexican popular culture and politics. Its accessibility and brevity would make it a useful addition to an undergraduate course, should the University of New Mexico Press publish it in an affordable paperback edition.
