Behind the ostensible calm of the Pax Porfiriana, the first decade of the twentieth century was challenging for Mexico. Governing elites worried about their increasingly powerful northern neighbour, which had assumed for itself the right to intervene in the domestic affairs of Latin American nations. At the same time, a portion of the upper classes had managed to monopolise the most lucrative opportunities, leading to resentment among less well-connected sectors of the upper and middle classes. Major strikes were taking place in the country's largest textile mills, mines and railroads, and when presidential mediation failed workers were duly repressed. Anxious with these pressures from outside and from within, little did ruling elites know that they also needed to worry about the coalescence of Mexico City's artisans, factory workers and peddlers. Robert Buffington's fascinating study proposes a close reading of a satirical penny press describing itself as ‘por el pueblo y para el pueblo’, as it contributed to the construction of a popular oppositional identity in the ten years leading up to the so-called Mexican Revolution.
A Sentimental Education for the Working Man begins by warning the reader that the fluidity of urban life in the early twentieth-century Mexico forged bonds that cut across traditionally-defined ‘classes’, leading to the creation of identities that were not class-based in any Marxist sense. On this basis, Buffington uses the term ‘working class’ to refer to the labouring classes, the popular classes and the urban poor. The book continues in two distinct parts. The first unpacks the ‘structure of feelings’ behind popular Liberalism. Chapter 1 analyses how the editors of the satirical penny press deployed graphic images and cartoons in the construction of a popular alternative to the official historical narrative disseminated by Porfirian elites. It demonstrates that they used a resonant religious imagery to resignify Liberal heroes like Father Hidalgo and Benito Juárez as working-class heroes. Readers supported this operation, contributing poems that expressed the affective bond that tied them to their newly imagined nation. Buffington finds that popular Liberalism combined with civic Catholicism to denounce the betrayal of the founding fathers’ project of an egalitarian, democratic society by the corruption and authoritarianism of the Porfirian regime.
The cult of Juárez is the focus of chapter 2. Following a scathing biography by científico intellectual and politician Francisco Bulnes, the penny press joined other opposition publications in using the controversy to undermine the government's legitimacy. What distinguished the penny press was the linguistic inclusion of its ‘street-talk’ columns, which featured conversations between two male acquaintances during their daily quests for sustenance, entertainment and women. Written in a language that imitated the way workers talked, these columns validated the vernacular of the streets as a form of public speech. Ultimately, Buffington argues that the penny press contributed to the formation of a ‘counterpublic’ that contested the exclusions that characterised the public sphere of the late Porfiriato. Chapter 3 describes attempts to inscribe the working class in national history. Most successful was the commemoration of the battle of Churubusco of the US-Mexican war where, in the words of the weekly El Diablito Bromista, ‘worker patriots’ died fighting ‘vigorously against the gringo invasion’. Yet penny press editors did not always agree on which of their readers’ activities to endorse. While some weeklies supported the government's efforts to curb ‘scandalous behaviour’ during national celebrations, La Guacamaya defended carousing as an acceptable manifestation of workers’ patriotism. In doing so it voiced workers’ demand for the right to perform their political subjectivity collectively in public. Taken together, the first three chapters trace the mutation of popular Liberalism, with its emphasis on individual rights, into a Liberal populism that pitted the labouring classes against the elitist regime.
The second part of the book turns to the alternative notions of manhood available to working men in this period. Chapter 4 further examines how the penny press dealt with the tensions between proper and improper forms of leisure available to Mexico City's male residents. More often than not, according to their representations, Porfirian modernity left workers with empty pockets, beaten-up by policemen, or worse, run over by trams. Yet the protagonists of street-talk columns faced their lot with self-awareness, flexibility and cheerfulness. Editors shifted the blame for working-class deviance to the hypocrisy of the Porfirian bourgeoisie, who were unwilling or incapable of creating opportunities for social mobility. Chapter 5 enters the realm of the intimate, mapping the penny press's engagement with traditional masculinities built around Mexico's ubiquitous donjuanismo and its aggressive assertions of masculine honour. In contrast, the romances callejeros poems by Canuto Godines depicted women as more resilient and more sensible than men, demanding their partners take them out drinking and celebrating as they would their male friends. Editors and contributors juxtaposed the image of a good man who knows how to love and respect women with the tenorios de barrio, whom they cast either as dull scoundrels or amusing fools. These chapters portray early twentieth-century working men as more modern, in the sense of more capable of adapting to rapidly changing circumstances, than their elite counterparts.
A Sentimental Education for the Working Man will be of interest to scholars of Mexico, popular culture and gender relations. It is a beautifully written book, theoretically sophisticated yet unburdened by jargon. Few authors transport their readers to the streets of early twentieth-century Mexico City as effectively as Buffington does. Yet while he leaves no doubt that male factory workers, artisans and peddlers had a shared experience of life in the capital, his characterisation of them as ‘the working class’ erases the sometimes-conflicting interests that resulted from their differing social relations of production. The satirical penny press’s reflection of their collective identity, built around drinking together during national holidays, and their being in and out of work, jail, or love, might have contributed to the emergence of a ‘populist configuration’, as Buffington claims. But whether this pueblo ever developed the capacity to change its lot or shape national events is left unexplored. After all, casual labourers in Mexico City are still as excluded today, and probably as poor, as they were in 1910. This is not the focus of the book and it does not subtract from its merits, but it leaves hanging the question of the role of Buffington's subject in the social and political history of twentieth-century Mexico. Similarly, while the book reveals the existence of a ‘modern’ masculinity based on companionship, Mexican women have reason to question the extent to which Mexican men internalised this alternative set of attitudes. They may have just enjoyed a good laugh.
