Sistema Regional de Información
en línea para Revistas Científicas de América Latina,
el Caribe, España y Portugal

This article analyzes some of the strategies utilized by colonial authorities to circumvent the freedom of the press in New Spain, despite the fact that it had been mandated for the entire Hispanic world by the Cortes of Cádiz. By analyzing events at the Cortes of Cádiz and the Viceroyalty of New Spain’s state of war, it examines the process by which the freedom of the press took on a constitutional character. Due to their inability to prevent the appearance of a critical press, whether of an insurgent or independent nature, the colonial authorities published written responses as a method of mitigating the effects of the dissemination of the political ideas of their adversaries. In the end, this article shows how the decision to respond to political writings fomented a new way of doing politics through the press that had no precedents in New Spain.

This article examines the evolution of the term “democracy” in Mexico between the early and mid-19th Century. At the beginning of the century, democracy was associated with the French Revolution; it was a synonym for demagogy and instability. In the constitutional debates of 1823-24, democracy was a seldom used term. Nevertheless, the word was frequently used at the Constituent Congress of 1856-57, as it had begun to be used as a synonym for representative elections and republican government. This article analyzes the evolution of the use of this term in the texts of Mariano Otero in 1840, the failed Constituent Congress of 1842 and a variety of publications from the 1850s. Finally, it analyzes the various uses that were given to the term at the Constituent Congress of 1856-57. From that moment on, democracy would be associated with the official discourse of the Mexican state, alongside liberalism and federalism.

-

Situated in the intersection between satirical visual representations and the regulatory framework on the freedom of the press between 1868 and 1883, this article reflects on the dynamic relationship between journalism and politics, studying the political cartoons published during this period, as well as laws and various legal provisions – regulations, constitutional reforms, decrees, circulars, etc. The tensions between the press and government authorities are duly studied herein with the goal of showing the complexity of the issue, the diversity of actors that intervened in this process, the many difficulties it presents and the varied perspectives from which it can be addressed, thus overcoming the traditional dichotomous vision of repressive government/independent press. Extraordinary powers, the suspension of guarantees, press laws, the reform of Article 7 of the Constitution, censorship strategies (both legal and extralegal) and mechanisms of repression (both formal and informal, some of them marked by the use of physical violence) are examined in order to understand debates and developments in the defense of and attack on the freedom of the press as part of the search to regulate and delimit the margins of expression. The roles played by the executive, legislative and judicial branches in these dynamics are also studied and analyzed in this article. The appendices include a chronological account of the laws and legal provisions in place at each time, as well as of the reform of Article 7 of the Constitution; this information has never before been systematized, yet it is essential to understanding the legal context for the freedom of the press.

-

-

María Ignacia Rodríguez de Velasco, known simply as La Güera Rodríguez, has fascinated Mexicans both during her life and posthumously. This article compares the “real” woman with her later historical, literary and artistic representations. It follows her life story (which is interesting, but not extraordinary for a woman of her class and times), her disappearance from Mexican literature during the second half of the 19th Century and her resurrection and transformation into an iconic figure in the 20th and 21st centuries. In this long road to fame, her image got further and further from the flesh-and-blood woman who lived from 1778 to 1850. There are so many myths surrounding her that it’s difficult to separate the woman from the legend. This analysis of the construction of these legends illuminates Mexican culture during many periods, because the different versions of La Güera that have been developed at different times reflect the ideology of each author and the context of their times. It also reminds us that history is living and that there is a great gulf between historic events and their memory.

In 1943, the first specialized nutrition research center in Mexico was founded: The National Nutritional Institute (Instituto Nacional de Nutriología, INN), which lasted for slightly over ten years. The goal of this article is to provide a panoramic view of its creation and offer information that could explain its decline. Under the leadership of Francisco de Paula Miranda, its first director, the inn kept abreast of domestic and international scientific trends. One of these trends was the broad-based international movement known as “social nutrition,” which sought to study the “problem of nutrition” and its socioeconomic causes. In line with this current, the institute used a variety of methodologies to understand and improve the nutrition of Mexicans in order to improve their quality of life. The institute’s short lifespan (1943-1956) can be understood as part of larger processes, in particular the end of a period in which international organizations such as the Rockefeller Foundation financed projects in Latin America, as well as changing trends in nutritional research and the creation of other institutions that were better adapted to the new conditions of the postwar period. This article brings together documentation from domestic and international sources, allowing us to see the complex networks of the mobilization of knowledge that were woven between different scientific and medical programs, in particular those focusing on the study of marginalized populations, a question that is relatively unexplored in the historiography.

The 1857 theatrical productions of Uncle Tom’s Cabin in Mexico City must be understood as part of the cultural phenomenon of “Tom Mania” that swept the Atlantic world in the 1850s. Nevertheless, both historians and literary critics have ignored the impact of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s famous novel in Mexico, as well as its importance in Latin America as a whole. One consequence of this has been a lack of attention paid to how the Spanish imperial project, which included slavery, influenced the development of a Hispano-Mexican intellectual field regarding issues such as slavery, race and abolitionism. This article sheds light on these connections through a transnational perspective on the circulation of Uncle Tom’s Cabin in Mexico City. The first part traces how it and other important contemporary texts that dealt with the issue of slavery –Victor Hugo’s Bug-Jargal and Gustave de Beaumont’s Marie, or Slavery in the United States– conquered the bookstores, periodicals and literary salons of the capital. The second part focuses on the 1857 theatrical productions of the novel, arguing that aspects of these productions underscored the apparent acceptance and familiarity with minstrel tropes in the cultural arena, showing how these anti-slavery plays nevertheless reinforced practices that stigmatized blackness.

This paper focuses on the 1921 parliamentary debate regarding a federal law supporting the expropriation of landed estates throughout the country by local governments, splitting them into family-size farms and selling them to needy peasant families as freeholdings (homesteads). This paper explains what brought about the quashing of the ideal of small freehold estates, embedded in Article 27 of the Mexican constitution, replacing it essentially with the communal or shared model (ejido). The major argument is that what led to the abandonment of the freehold agrarian option was the agro-statutory division of power anchored in Article 27, which entrusted the responsibility for the communal ejido reform to the central government, and the responsibility for the homestead reform to the federated states. The political center did not accept this arrangement, fearing the loss of its leadership in the management of Mexican agrarianism. This led to the rescinding of what most thinkers of the revolution defined as the right way of rehabilitating the Mexican pueblo, turning it into the spearhead of Mexican economic prosperity and modernization.