Childhood and Modernity in Mexico City: Print Media and State ...

Childhood and Modernity in Mexico City: Print Media and State Power during the “Mexican Miracle”

Eileen Ford

The Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth, Volume 9, Number 1,Winter 2016, pp. 118-139 (Article)

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E I L E E N F O R DE I L E E N F O R D

CHILDHOOD AND MODERNITY IN MEXICO CITY: PRINT MEDIA AND STATE POWER DURING THE “MEXICAN MIRACLE”

I n October 1951, a bakery owner in Mexico City shot fourteen-year-old

Gabriel Orozco when he discovered his young employee trying to leave the

bakery with bread in his pockets. Orozco had been contributing significantly to

the family income since the tender age of ten. The Orozco family was headed by

a widowed laundress who struggled daily to feed her family of seven children.

To support the children after the death of her husband, the mother left them

alone while she worked from early in the morning until late at night. Gabriel

worked rather than attend school. At age eleven, he labored for one peso per

week at an automotive shop, a pittance when beans, rice, and lard cost 1.4, 1.5,

and 4.8 pesos per kilogram, respectively.1 Several years later, he found employ-

ment as a baker’s assistant, earning six pesos a day. Gabriel’s employment was

not unusual; many children contributed to the family economy, especially if

they had lost a parent. After the shooting, newspaper and magazine accounts

condemned not only the baker’s violence but also the larger problem of poverty

in the city. The family lived in the colonia Gertrudis G. Sánchez, which Jueves

de Excélsior described as a “proletarian neighborhood, without lights, without

drainage, without hygiene.” The weekly magazine declared:

It seems incredible that someone could be capable of killing over a few pieces of bread. And nevertheless, this somber squalid drama, is only one of thou-sands that every day develops in our beautiful city. . . . This is a call of atten-tion to the authorities, who should ensure a better distribution of wealth in our society, and to society itself that has the duty to defend its members from homelessness, as a means of self-protection.

The shooting did not prove fatal, and authorities released the bakery owner

from prison. The baker’s release, the author maintained, represented “another

Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth 119

of the greatest legal injustices: the penal code applies only to the poor. For the

rich, for the influential, they have invented numerous excuses that permit them

to enjoy a certain impunity.” The author connected social justice to the trope of

civilization, complaining that no charges were brought against the boy: “There

is no law in Mexico, nor in any other civilized country, that punishes those who

steal because of hunger.” This narrative of child labor and theft became trans-

formed into a story about child victimization and class struggle; society was to

blame for this boy’s fate.

The story of the young baker’s assistant provides a window into the impor-

tance placed on children in post-1940 Mexico City print media, which portrayed

children as innocent subjects in need of protection or as potential threats to

Mexico’s modernization project.2

Representations of childhood in Mexico during the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s

reflected societal anxieties about modernization, specifically rapid industrial-

ization, rural migration to the city, and the influx of foreign ideas and culture.

Despite the impressive economic growth the country experienced during these

post-1940 decades, the revolution and its subsequent institutionalization had

hardly succeeded in achieving social equality, as Mexico City’s elite flaunted

wealth that belonged to a few. This glaring inequality posed a challenge to the

ruling PRI, whose Cold War–era slogan of “national unity” attempted to con-

tain more radical political programs. Print media’s representations of children

used a dichotomy of poverty and modern comfort. Boys and girls appeared

either as beneficiaries of economic growth enjoying the trappings of an ideal-

ized childhood or as street urchins living and working in extreme poverty.

These journalistic depictions of children formed part of a growing number of

voices criticizing the ruling party, effectively challenging the proclaimed suc-

cesses of the revolution long before the highly visible 1968 student movement.

Of equal importance, journalists’ representations of children and childhood

through photography and related media transformed the very definition of

childhood in post-1940 Mexico. Print media coverage of both extreme poverty

and idealized middle-class childhood contributed to the ideological opening

of modern childhood as an ideal for which Mexicans, both as parents and as

citizens, should strive. The ideal of modern childhood, an ideology ascendant

in much of the world at this time, consisted of nurturing children physically

and emotionally, ensuring time for education and play, and marking child-

hood as a distinct stage before adulthood and separate from the concerns of

the adult world. The middle-class ideal of a comfortable “modern” childhood

became a widespread ideal in Mexico City thanks, in large part, to journalistic

120 CHILDHOOD AND MODERNITY IN MEXICO CITY

representations of social inequality, reinforced by the PRI’s political concerns

during the Cold War era.

During the post-1940 period, when the Mexican government controlled the

production and even the sales price of newspapers, photojournalists and jour-

nalists found that images of children provided a means to critique the failings of

the state and its economic policies and their corresponding social ramifications.

The state-owned Productora e Importadora de Papel, S.A. (PIPSA, Paper Producer

and Importer, Inc.) subsidized the newspaper industry by selling paper stock

to companies that cooperated in portraying the party in a favorable light. The

arrangement functioned well for the state. During the period 1940–1976, no

publication independent from PIPSA lasted more than a year.3 Even though

print media was largely mediated through the state, images of childhood

served to communicate problems associated with modernization.

Beginning in the 1940s, three dailies—Novedades, Excélsior, and El Universal—

dominated the Mexican newspaper industry. Excélsior (the daily from which the

weekly magazine Jueves de Excélsior originated) was founded in 1917 and sub-

sequently taken over by members of the politically and economically powerful

“Monterrey Group.” By the late 1940s, the newspaper was part of a collec-

tive headed by Rodrigo de Llano. The daily newspaper sometimes contained

articles from the North American Newspaper Alliance and often relied on the

Associated Press for news coverage. Thus, Excélsior, while viewed as more

divorced from state concerns than other newspapers, contained a large degree

of influence from the United States. Perhaps the fact that El Nacional functioned

as a “semigovernment organ” and that the reading public was aware of this fact

contributed to the idea that the other major dailies remained relatively free of

government influence. Yet, the ruling party had its hand in the production of all

major print media of the era.4

By allowing the press to critique the economic and political failings of the

PRI within a small space—the imagery of children—the Mexican state projected

a veneer of democracy. Room for dissent existed, no matter how constructed and

censored that dissent was, in the political and social environment of Mexico City.

This article engages the relatively few yet significant historical studies of

the post-1940 period, an era traditionally left to journalists, political scientists,

anthropologists, and sociologists. Most of these studies focus on popular

culture—especially when communicated through mass media—as one of the

most powerful forces in Mexican societal change in the era between 1940 and

the early 1970s; the second half of that period was commonly hailed as the

“Mexican Miracle” due to its impressive economic growth.5 In this article, I

demonstrate how interrogating representations of children and the evolving


concept of childhood provide a glimpse into Mexico City society and the politi-

cal economy of these decades. As Jaime Pensado has demonstrated, in the 1940s

and 1950s “key authorities and intellectuals [came] to view politicized students

as potential threats to national unity and economic progress.” At the same time,

young working-class protestors from the National Polytechnic Institute (IPN)

led a critique of the unevenness with which the “Mexican Miracle” arrived in

the capital and “a new generation of intellectuals [emerged] whose academic

essays, novels, and films would openly (or indirectly) question the PRI’s trajec-

tory of repression and express a critical stance toward the outcome and legacy

of the Mexican Revolution.”6 The 1956 strike of twenty-five thousand students

from the IPN signaled the beginning of massive political activism by Mexico’s

youth in the Cold War era. Seen as a real threat by the ruling party, “a concerted

campaign of provocation and violence to discredit student protestors by vari-

ous powerful individuals began to take shape.”7 As Robert Alegre has shown,

railroad workers became increasingly politicized in the post–World War II era

as the ruling party attempted to control their unions, leading to massive strikes

in 1958–1959.8 Thus, multiple voices contested the inequalities prevalent during

the economic “miracle” despite the ruling party’s attempts to suppress them.

THE POWER OF REPRESENTATION IN HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE

From the earliest days of photography, individuals have used the medium to

document, persuade, and inform the public about social conditions and prob-

lems. Two examples from the United States are illustrative. Jacob Riis, police

reporter and social reformer, used photography to document and lament the

squalid conditions that immigrants faced in New York tenements near the

end of the nineteenth century. Riis’s How the Other Half Lives (1890) enjoyed

widespread popularity.9 Similarly, photographer Dorothea Lange brought

attention to the plight of the rural and urban poor as well as the politically

oppressed in the United States. In the 1930s and 1940s, Lange photographed

migrant workers, Japanese internment camp victims, and poverty-stricken

individuals of the Great Depression era.10 While individual reception of these

works—indeed of all photography—may be difficult to gauge, their collective

impact on society and politics has been addressed in the scholarly literature.

According to Gisele Freund:

More than any other medium, photography is able to express the values of the dominant social class and to interpret events from that class’s point of view, for photography, although strictly linked with nature, has only an illusory objectivity. The lens, the so-called impartial eye, actually permits


every possible distortion of reality: the character of the image is determined by the photographer’s point of view and the demands of his patrons. The importance of photography does not rest primarily in its potential as an art form, but rather in its ability to shape our ideas, to influence our behavior, and to define our society.11

In exactly these ways, images of children affected popular discourse and

allowed for critiques of the state and dominant classes in Mexico.

The power of photojournalism and print media more generally in shaping

societal attitudes and even domestic policy has been demonstrated by several

scholars. Wendy Kozol found that Life magazine promoted “a cultural idea of

family” during a time of uncertainty and upheaval in the post–Second World

War United States. She points to the power of this cultural idea, stating “pic-

tures and stories claimed merely to reflect a shared social reality, a claim that

ignored the active role of cultural representation in constructing and shaping

knowledge.” Moreover, Kozol associates media representations of the family

with governmental concerns, where both “defined society and measured the

effects of political policy in domestic terms.” While Kozol is explicitly con-

cerned with images of the nuclear family, Paula Fass has directly linked press

coverage to ideas circulating about youth through her analysis of the Leopold

and Loeb case in Chicago beginning in the 1920s.12

For Mexico, several scholars have contributed to a relatively new discussion

of images of children. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,

Mexicans used photography to document, cope with, and ritualize the death

of very young children. Gutierre Aceves has argued that the ritual of “child-

death,” in which the bodies of dead children are dressed, celebrated, and pho-

tographed, is linked to the cult of the Virgin Mary.13 While highly personal and

distinct from images found in print media, the photographs of angelitos suggest

that many individuals employed photography to grieve and to demonstrate the

emotional value of children, especially those taken from the earthly world at a

tender age.14

A recent collection of essays demonstrates the growing attention scholars in

Mexico are dedicating to the analysis of childhood images. Alberto del Castillo

Troncoso has argued that during the Porfiriato, science and journalism shaped

the construction of childhood in Mexico City. He has maintained that “scientific

arguments, journalistic texts, and the diversity of images and representations

contributed to the diffusion of a collective imaginary that raised awareness . . .

in the capital regarding the serious problems that afflicted the child population.”

Through his analysis of images, Castillo located child participation in labor con-

flicts and an increase in “social control” of street children. He also found that


images of innocence and purity were associated with elite children. Castillo has

argued that during the Porfiriato, problems associated with children were begin-

ning to be seen as “a matter of the State.”15 I argue that images of children con-

tributed to the opening up of childhood and the production of a more democratic

category of childhood.

Images possess a certain aura; they are staged or performed as well as open

to individual interpretation. They represent a powerful means of suasion, par-

ticularly as postrevolutionary Mexico City witnessed a tremendous boom in

mass media production like radio, cinema, newspapers, and magazines. Images

are both reflections of constructed ideologies and shapers of public opinion and

social norms.16 Looking through an analytic lens of childhood provides a more

nuanced understanding of the post-1940 period in Mexican history and docu-

ments children’s historical agency in everyday life.

THE MEANINGS OF CHILD POVERTY AND IDEALIZED CHILDHOOD

In the post-1940 period, journalists and photojournalists could hardly ignore the

city’s burgeoning child population, and with good reason. By the early 1950s

if not before, the ramifications of the steady birth rate and increasingly lower

infant mortality rates began to materialize in Mexico City. The total number

of children (fourteen and under) skyrocketed, and children’s percentage of

the total population steadily climbed. The following summary of the Federal

District’s child population is striking:

Mexico City increasingly became a city of children. Urban poverty in

Mexico City was unnerving to social critics in the position to report these

calamities. Questions of homelessness and poverty among children were linked

to contemporary fears about moral corruption in the city in general. But not all

images of childhood were so bleak.

In popular magazines and newspapers, journalists, photojournalists, illus-

trators, and advertisers all offered the Mexican public several images of the

city’s children. Some photos and images depicted happy children playing,

Year Total number of children Children as percentage of population

1930 403,937 32.91940 605,569 34.51950 1,096,101 35.91960 1,996,950 41.01970 2,850,644 41.517


celebrating birthdays, and participating in religious ceremonies, such as first

communion. Children could be seen posing for society page photos outside

church after the communion ceremony or in professionally staged poses of

religiosity. Photographs of elaborate children’s birthday parties appeared fre-

quently in print media. Many of these celebrations included many children

enjoying treats like cake and soda, thus promoting age-specific activities for

youngsters.18 Some parents organized the birthday festivities around themes

complete with children’s costumes. These photographs depicted extravagance

that most children would never experience firsthand. Yet idealized images of

childhood contributed to a collective belief that childhood should be experi-

enced and celebrated.

Photographic evidence depicts children participating in leisure activities

designed especially for them. Mexican children from different socioeconomic

backgrounds participated in the culture of childhood, even if the frequency and

conditions of their experiences varied. One image portrays a little girl riding the

carousel in an open public space of Mexico City. She wears what appears to be a

party dress with white leather shoes and anklet socks, and her hair is fashioned

in ringlets and topped with a large bow. Her photograph attests to the presence

of child-centered activities and the ability of some children to participate in

these constructed forms of entertainment.19

Despite the fact that many images portrayed religiosity and innocence in

the city’s children, their experiences with the church and their attitudes toward

the institution sometimes contradicted the one-sidedness of these representa-

tions. Many children did in fact experience their first communion in the capital

with varying degrees of the idealized components. The work of anthropologist

Oscar Lewis reveals that even some of the poorest families struggled to provide

the necessary money for the clothes and party associated with the sacrament.20

During the Christmas season through January sixth, when Mexican children

received gifts in their shoes in celebration of the Catholic holiday Epiphany,

readers could expect full coverage of the toy and clothing giveaways often

sponsored by political groups or prominent individuals. In the process, child-

hood was sentimentalized and politicized. During the 1940s and 1950s, wom-

en’s participation in formal politics remained relatively insignificant; women

did not win the right to vote in national elections until 1953. But in a broader

sense, their political roles were far from absent in the political arena.21 The first

lady became an important figure in the press and, by extension, a significant

arm of the PRI.22 Moreover, when public officials distributed material prizes of

childhood to underprivileged children, they communicated that some parents

were unable to provide them on their own.


The media frequently depicted the poverty and exploitation that children

faced in this era. The idea of child poverty came through in a variety of ways:

child labor, homeless children, child victims of crime and immorality, and chil-

dren as future criminals if delinquency and neglect were not properly addressed.

Numerous covers of Jueves de Excélsior presented readers with images of poor

children, often contrasting the poor child/children with the abundance or

frivolity of the city’s wealthy residents. For example, many Christmas season

covers depicted an encounter on the street between a poor boy and a wealthy

individual. The rich, extravagantly dressed woman (inevitably with light skin-

tone) walks her dog, which is dressed in a sweater, and ignores the child who

has no such outer garment to keep him warm.23

The most heart-wrenching articles addressing child poverty were about

homeless, hungry children. In February 1940, Jueves de Excélsior printed an

article about more than two hundred children living next to a garbage dump.

During the winter, the Departamento de Beneficencia Pública (Department of

Public Welfare) had been giving out four hundred rations of a hot drink accom-

panied by a piece of bread. The author reported that the children jumped up

and down and cheered when the truck stopped to make its delivery. “Some of

them assailed the truck and greeted us with affection, giving us the thanks we

did not deserve. They are all under ten years of age and look poor. It seems

Figure 1: Fondo Enrique Díaz (AGN) 87/2 "Niños" (1946).


that the atole [a warm maize-based drink] with bread turned out to be for them

something similar to a daily gift from the Three Kings.”24 The popular press

treated poor children with empathy and emphasized their innocence. Products

of the government’s modernization projects, these children were photographed

en masse as proof of the failures of the post-1940 economy, and by implication,

the revolutionary government.

Prominent Mexican photojournalists, like the internationally acclaimed

Héctor García, recognized the detrimental effects of the population increase

and rapid industrialization that urban dwellers experienced. Many of García’s

works include children, and most contain a high level of social criticism. For

example, Between Progress and Development (1950) clearly identifies the potential

dangers that modernity poses to children, in this case a young boy wedged

between two large imposing automobiles. Boy within a Womb of Concrete (1949)

depicts a boy seeking shelter, perhaps to catch some sleep, in the most inhabit-

able looking space, crouched within a small window of concrete. In 1959, García

was awarded a prize for this photo.25

García was born in 1923 in the barrio la Candelaria de los Patos in Mexico

City. The fourth of five children, García experienced first-hand the deprivations

and malevolent side of the capital that he so often photographed later in life.

In 1937, García found himself in a correctional facility for minors in Tlalpan

(the southern part of Mexico City) and, by 1940, parentless after the death of

his mother. During World War II, García joined the ranks of Mexicans who

crossed the border to labor in the United States under the bracero program.26

Upon returning to Mexico City in 1945, García began working as an office

boy at a magazine called Celuloide. He had taken photos of social protests for

years, but his formal study of photography and filmmaking in the late 1940s

represented a turning point in his career. From there, his career took off, and he

began working for several big publications. In 1953, he founded Cine Mundial, a

popular magazine about the film industry (both inside and outside of Mexico),

with Miguel Ángel Mendoza. During the 1950s, García worked as a photogra-

pher and became very involved in the 1958 labor movement and strikes of the

railroad workers in the city. García won the National Prize for Journalism three

times during his very successful career, first in 1958 for his work in Excélsior, in

1968 in the magazine Siempre!, and again in 1979.

García’s vision of Mexico City differed drastically from the rhetoric of the

“Mexican Miracle” that contemporaries began trumpeting by the 1950s. García

himself recognized the power of photography when he profoundly yet simply

stated, “Life and history have changed since the appearance of photography.

Before, it was very difficult to have proof that everything occurred the way history


said it did. Now photography leaves no doubt.” His ideas provide insight into the

mindset of a man raised in Mexico City, as well as into the social, political, and cul-

tural implications of photojournalism. There is a definite sense that photography,

as García viewed it, had an inherent obligation to document the “truth” and that

it could be used to facilitate political and social change. García also stressed the

accessibility and democratic nature of photography: all one needed was a camera

and some film. “Photography is a tool,” he declared, “that has no other purpose

but to serve objectively without the blemish of emotions. It is the most universal

and human mean of expression that we have.”27 García adamantly believed that

by photographing suffering children, among other politically charged subjects,

he was both documenting their existence for the sake of history and putting into

motion a process by which these social concerns would be addressed.

The hardships that García endured as a child probably influenced his poli-

tics and heightened his sensitivity to the suffering of others. Nonetheless, he

believed in the objectivity of photography and its power to influence society.

For García, the relationship between his work and modernity was unmistak-

able. “Photography is the inexcusable companion of modern life, of children, of

the young, of the old.”28 In 1947, García’s Between the Wheels of Progress depicted

the perils of the city’s environs in a photograph of a little girl and a man running

to cross the street, barely escaping the rapidly oncoming automobiles. The two

human subjects in this photograph, a child and a man dressed in indigenous

garb, encapsulate the threat that modernity posed to Mexico’s people and, by

implication, its traditions. One photograph featuring a filthy, disheveled little

boy wearing rags and eating a tortilla on the streets of the city is called Social

Product (1962). In 1966 he photographed a group of about twelve children

huddled together playing on the sidewalk in Colonia Guerrero and titled it

Before Family Planning.29 If the meaning of García’s work was lost on some at

first glance, the titles left little room for ambiguity in assessing García’s politics.

The connection between immorality and child poverty displayed the very

real threat that some Mexico City residents felt that negative cultural influences

posed to their children. The Legion of Decency, the Catholic lay organization

that policed morality, worried about the suitability of movies and comic books

for children. In 1933, the organization started printing leaflets (Apreciaciones)

for distribution to parents regarding movies, and by the early 1940s attacked

comic books as well.30 For example, an article detailing the work of the Legion

of Decency featured a large photo of two children sleeping on the street.31

Declining morals, it seemed, led to the breakdown of traditional family struc-

ture and put children at risk on several levels. One editorial cartoon poked

fun at the extremes people went to in order to protect their children. In this


case, a mother equipped her two young children with blinders so that when

they walked down the city’s streets, they were unable to see the movie post-

ers depicting scantily clad women, sometimes in compromising positions.32

Conservative Catholics represented just one segment of the population con-

cerned with childhood in peril in the postrevolutionary decades.

Many artists and intellectuals included children in their subject matter. In

his collection of essays I Speak of the City, historian Mauricio Tenorio-Trillo has

documented the voices of artists, intellectuals, writers, and filmmakers inter-

ested in Mexico City in the first half of the twentieth century. Immediately after

the revolution, in the 1920s and 1930s, many featured the city in their report-

ing, “including its morally unacceptable parts.” He finds that later in the 1940s

and 1950s, individuals such as Manuel and Lola Álvarez Bravo, Nacho López,

Agustín Jiménez, and Juan Guzmán offered a glimpse into what he considers

the real city (as opposed to the idealized “Brown Atlantis”).33 For example, in

the work of Manuel Alvarez Bravo, “one senses the same fundamental alliance

with the proletariat, through a sustained attention to the existence of ordinary

people of Mexico.”34 Alvarez was born February 4, 1902, in Mexico City and

attended Catholic school in Tlalpan between 1908 and 1914, even though the

revolution often interrupted class sessions. As a child, Alvarez reportedly

witnessed the death and destruction of the revolution as he happened upon

dead bodies in Mexico City.35 Many of Alvarez’s photographs feature children,

including his famous Boy Urinating (1927), Girl Watching Birds (1931), and Public

Thirst (1934), among others. The Mother of the Shoeshine Boy and the Shoeshine Boy

(1950s) depicts the pair taking a break sitting on the sidewalk sharing a snack,

a testament to the prevalence of informal child labor on Mexico City’s streets.

Narratives of danger and the corrupting influence of the city on children found

their way onto the silver screen as well. Luis Buñuel’s 1950 film Los olvidados

(translated into English as both The Young and the Damned and The Forgotten) por-

trayed the city’s dark underbelly through the eyes of a few young, nearly all male,

protagonists. Buñuel, a Spaniard by birth, arrived in Mexico City in 1946 where

he lived for many years.36 Buñuel’s vision of the city depicted many young boys

as hardened criminals, often through a series of increasingly dramatic crimes. The

city is clearly a villain in this story; poverty and emotionally trying interpersonal

relationships abound in the burgeoning capital. The movie opened with the fol-

lowing assertion: “This film is based entirely on real life facts and all of the char-

acters are authentic.” The sequence explicitly compared Mexico City to New York,

Paris, and London, where behind the façade of wealth lurked a darker side. The

narrator asserted that “the day will come when children’s rights are respected.”

Both the comparison to these world-class cities and the declaration that the rights


of children will be respected at some future point indicate the belief that Mexico

had become or was becoming a part of the international community of modern-

ized nations. When Buñuel directed his cameras to the city’s children, even within

the context of a fictionalized account, he directed the eyes of the nation and inter-

national community to the plight of children negotiating the modern city.37

The film portrays a breakdown of the Mexican family and a generational

conflict wherein some of the younger characters repeatedly demonstrate disre-

spect toward their elders. Young Pedro, the product of rape, remains unloved

by his cold mother. Specific scenes from the movie demonstrate the very real

anxiety for peasants migrating from the country to the city in search of increas-

ingly industrialized employment. An early scene opens onto a bustling Mexico

City market with the viewer’s attention directed to a crying little peasant boy,

Ojitos (“small eyes”), dressed in traditional Mexican garb. He has either been

abandoned or lost by his father, who came looking for employment. The film

communicates that peasants are susceptible to, and likely to fall victim to, the

vices of the big city. The young peasant represents the goodness and naïveté of

the rural migrants. It is through the city’s boys that the viewer is introduced to

varying degrees of criminal behavior, from maliciousness to the lesser evil of

being victimized by unfortunate circumstances. Young boys are the perpetra-

tors of violence in this drama. Jean Franco points to the significance of all the

characters (except Julián) being fatherless. She argues:

They are fatherless at a particular historical moment—when the Mexican state is consolidating its paternal authority over its citizens. This double dimension allows Buñuel to depict an antisocial hero, Jaibo, without ideal-izing the benevolent reformist solution of the state; for Jaibo’s evil genius is far more powerful than the feeble solutions of reform school and education.38

In the end, both Pedro and Jaibo meet their deaths, Pedro at the hands of Jaibo and

Jaibo by policemen’s bullets. Significantly, Jaibo’s death is characterized by much

of the same imagery as the poor children in print media. As he lay dying, a mangy

dog appears superimposed over the image of his body. This imagery speaks to the

contemporaneous tropes of civilization, savagery, and modernity. Pedro’s body is

disposed of in a garbage dump, the literal repository of the city’s refuse. Buñuel’s

harsh narrative of delinquency and youth produced an image of Mexico City that

conflicted sharply with idealized childhood. Film scholar Ernesto Acevedo-Muñoz

gives great importance to the film as a critique of Mexico’s revolutionary rhetoric

and likens its criticism to Daniel Cosío Villegas’s famous 1947 essay declaring the

revolution dead and Octavio Paz’s Labyrinth of Solitude in its level of contestation.

He maintains that Los olvidados “serves as a revisionist approach to the superficiality


and weaknesses of the Revolution (the ‘masks,’ as Octavio Paz would call them) of

Mexican revolutionary mythology and of ‘the myth of the Revolution.’”39

According to Buñuel, Los olvidados caused controversy in the artistic and

intellectual communities, even among some involved in the film’s production.

The filmmaker maintained that “the Mexicans came round soon enough” after

the film won the prize for direction at the Cannes Film Festival.40 The general

public, it seems, remained more or less indifferent. One reporter speculated

why the artistic value had been lost on most Mexicans:

“Los olvidados” is, without question, the best picture that has been made in Mexico, harsh and painful and distressing, [it] produces a devastating effect, of a dark and miserable life that is almost not life; but the public did not like “Los olvidados.” And it is natural, we have become accustomed to the Mexican churros and the Yankee caramels, that we no longer know how to distinguish the good when it is presented.41

Another explanation is that perhaps the city’s residents did not want to see

these harsh realities portrayed on screen, either because they inflicted guilt

upon the better off or because they reflected aspects of a poorer individual’s

personal experience. Critics of the film also interpreted the vision of Buñuel as

a foreigner’s attack on Mexico’s national identity.

Buñuel’s film was not alone in its critique of Mexican modernity. Fears

about the dissolution of the family abounded. Unhealthy diversions and the

general vice of the city were a threat to the family and the nation’s children,

according to depictions in print media. In the article “The Crisis of Our Time,”

for example, one author quoted Secretary of Education Ceniceros as stating:

In this period the home no longer has the same force, the same power of authority that it did in other times; the home has weakened for various causes, principally because . . . powerful centers of diversion and entertain-ment, that lead the young, like they lead the adult, on occasion, to abandon the home, if not physically, [then] mentally or morally.42

The comparison between poor children and animals often found its way into

print media. Rebeca Iturbide, actress and mother, described them in the follow-

ing manner:

They walk [around] incessantly without shoes and with rags in place of clothing. They sleep on the ground worse off than animals, because at least they [the animals] have skin that is adequate to defend themselves from the inclemency of the weather. For these poor children, their only blanket is the newspaper that they find in the streets, covering themselves with them and


sleeping [huddled] together, almost on top of one another, to give heat to their malnourished bodies.43

Significantly, Iturbide’s description was eerily similar to the images Buñuel pro-

vided in the last scene of Los olvidados, when Jaibo was associated with a mangy

dog. While impossible to link these two renditions directly, it seems that print media

informed and was informed by other cultural expressions of childhood and youth.

The fear that these unfortunate children would turn into adolescent, and

later adult, criminals ran rampant. One political cartoon depicted a monstrous

figure labeled “Delinquency” standing in the midst of a dense cluster of build-

ings in central Mexico City, ready to wreak havoc on the modern city.44 The

press promoted the idea that childhood formed the basis for the individual’s

character and morality as an adult. Mexico City readers found warnings like

“Child Delinquency Grows” splashed across pages of print media.

Society incurs inescapable obligations with the new legal situation. In the raids of criminals carried out by the police, it is common to discover that the head of the gangs of delinquents are truly children. It is the terrible conse-quence of abandonment in which thousands of children live without govern-ment protection, without the support of the state, and without regard from that society to which we are referring. . . . It would be unfair to hope for good men from a childhood condemned to irreparable hunger and vagrancy.45

This article warned that abandoning children and “brutally persecuting” adult

criminals would not have the desired effects. State institutions devoted to chil-

dren and fears about juvenile delinquency date back to the early nineteenth

century, when a section of the Poor House was reserved especially for them.

During the Porfiriato, the first correctional school was founded in Tlalpan.

Mexico’s Juvenile Court was established in 1927. In 1938, the court reviewed

the cases of about two thousand children, and about thirteen hundred went to

the correctional schools. In 1958, the court heard the cases of 6,705 children and

sent 1,960 to correctional schools.46

Regarding child labor, one reporter noted: “Children who barely know how

to walk and nevertheless must carry out very heavy tasks, they are abundant

in all parts of the city.” The article maintained that housewives reported that

in every market in the city, children between the ages of five and fifteen were

plentiful, making a living by carrying baskets for customers.47 Because child

labor (under fourteen years of age) was illegal, reliable statistics are unavail-

able. However, several sources illuminate the plight of working children.48

Yet even images of poor children documented moments of childhood joy and

play. One photograph depicted a young girl, barefoot and sitting on the rocky


dirt, engrossed in the act of reading a children’s magazine.49 Images of children

dressed in rags with dirty faces projected, at times, child camaraderie and smil-

ing faces.50 To relegate all children living in conditions of poverty to a state of

“non-childhood” denies their ability to experience aspects of joy, leisure, play,

and mischief in their early years. Photographic evidence reveals that children

from various socioeconomic backgrounds managed to carve out a space in the

new culture of childhood.

The quality of life for children and the availability of appropriate spaces

for the city’s children became a measurement of modernity and progress. For

example, “Health and Happiness for Children of the Capital” detailed the

increasing availability of parks and recreational areas for children, praising

President Adolfo Ruiz Cortines (1952–1958) and Mayor Ernesto P. Uruchurtu

(1952–1966) in the process. The headlines declared the democratization of

childhood in the nation’s capital: “Equipment and diversions for children in all

parts [of the city]—The metropolitan modernization arrives to the proletarian

classes—88 recreation centers for the children, without distinctions of class.”

These parks were presented as a type of insurance: money well spent on the

needs of today’s children was also an investment in reducing potential future

threats (and financial drains) to society. In discussing the efforts to improve the

conditions of the city for children, the author characterized what life was like

for children who lacked these benefits:

These children lacking the resources for a better life, have been seen obli-gated to pass long hours everyday on the ground, in the stockyards, in the gutter, between rocks and quagmires and forging in their spirit a miserable conception of existence, that reduces their ambitions, drowning all desire and twisting their predilections, inducing them to envy and hatred of their fellow mankind and toward a society that does not care about them.

In describing the parks and pointing to their larger social ramifications, the

author described the new parks as spaces “where the children enjoy games and

entertainment appropriate for their age, which were reserved during all the

past eras, as a privilege for the economically powerful classes.”51 Through its

attentiveness to the needs of the city’s children, the state conceived itself as a

necessary and beneficent partner to modernity.

In addition to demonstrating the positive impact of state projects, press

coverage contributed to the notion of a more democratic childhood. The cap-

tion under a photo of the children’s park at Rio Consulado proclaims that the

expensive equipment is no longer the privilege of the few because it has been

made available to “the proletarian children by the authorities of the City of

Mexico.”52 The municipal government also granted children their own space


in Chapultepec Park, the city’s largest. The recreation center featured a puppet

theater, outdoor play equipment, library, and sandbox when it was inaugurated

in 1957 by Secretary of Education Ceniceros.53 These public spaces (and their

appearance in the press) provided visible evidence that childhood should be

experienced by children from a wide variety of backgrounds.

Parallel to these public investments, private developers used the ideal of

modern childhood to appeal to the concerns of Mexico City’s wealthy classes

for security. In advertisements for “Colonia Churubusco Country Club,” devel-

opers touted it as a living environment made desirable and necessary to certain

social sectors of society by the growth and industrial development of the city.

“We present ‘a true colonia’ to the public of Mexico,” declared the ad. The proj-

ect developers made it clear why the Colonia Churubusco Country Club was

necessary: “It has been projected as an ideal solution for multiple problems of

urbanization.” Not only was it located in “the healthiest location in the city,”

which was especially important for children, but it also included a park “with

gymnastic equipment and a children’s city that will be the delight of the chil-

dren.”54 A subsequent advertisement for the colonia featured a photograph of

the development encircled by a ring of illustrated children playing and holding

hands around the cluster of homes above the caption “ABSOLUTE SECURITY

FOR THE CHILDREN.” The developers reported that they were interested in

the security of children at play and sought to eliminate the negative effects of

Figure 2: Hermanos Mayo (AGN) 21.820 "Niños Trabajando en Gasolineras" (1966).


traffic and “pernicious companies.” In stark contrast to the bleak picture of

life outside the Colonia Churubusco, inside its confines children could expect

a “children’s city, with their houses to their proportions, their furniture, their

Ayuntamiento [local government], [and] their church, the child will become

Figure 3: Fondo Enrique Díaz (AGN) 87/2 "Niños" (1946)


accustomed to social coexistence, which creates a moral base and will have,

without the child realizing it, a constant lesson of civic-mindedness.”55

CONCLUSION

Many journalists and photographers used the topic of childhood to highlight

how the economic gains between the 1940s and the 1970s were inequitably

distributed. The Mexican state projected an image of childhood that was funda-

mentally linked with the ideology of modernity. Whereas children were most

often associated with the benefits of modernity in the eyes of the state, in reality

they became the vehicle through which Mexican society chose to articulate the

twin perils of modernity: industrialization and urbanization. While economists

and politicians heralded this era as the “Mexican Miracle,” the term begs the

question, for whom was it a miracle? Who was left out of Mexico City’s impres-

sive development? Based on an analysis of print media coverage of social

issues, it is clear that many children fell outside the boundaries of what con-

temporaries deemed an appropriate modern childhood. Yet, ideologically, the

portrayal of children on both extremes of the economic spectrum contributed to

rising expectations that a comfortable childhood ought to be open to all children

in Mexico City.

Figure 4: Fondo Enrique Díaz (AGN) 87/2 "Niños" (1946).


Moreover, photographic evidence documents the historical agency of

children growing up in the urban environment. Whether laboring, playing, or

simply participating in mundane activities, children were constantly present

in the daily life of the capital city. The attention given to children by photogra-

phers and journalists more generally highlights the importance accorded them

by society. The images and discourses surrounding childhood in the modern

era contributed to a prevailing ideology that all children should experience

childhood as a distinct stage of life and separate from the concerns of the adult

world. Yet, the ideology was unevenly realized, and it was the children them-

selves who ultimately worked within the confines of their environment to carve

out a childhood space.

NOTES The author wishes to thank Carmen Nava and the Archivo General de la Nación in Mexico

City for securing the permission to publish the photographs in this article. Valentina Tikoff, Antoinette Burton, Chris Endy, and anonymous reviewers all commented on this article in various stages, and for that I am very grateful.

1. Instituto Nacional de Estadística y Geografía México, Estadísticas históricas de México 2009 Mexico: Instituto Nacional de Estadística y Geografía México, 2010), Cuadro 17.2 (3a. parte). Accessed December 10, 2014, http://www.inegi.org.mx/prod_serv/contenidos/espa-nol/bvinegi/productos/integracion/pais/historicas10/EHM2009.pdf.

2. Jueves de Excélsior, October 18, 1951.

Figure 5: Hermanos Mayo (AGN) 11.514 "Jardin para niños-Chapultepec Park" (1957).


3. Anne Rubenstein, “Mass Media and Popular Culture in the Postrevolutionary Era,” in The Oxford History of Mexico, eds. Michael C. Meyer and William Beezley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 640.

4. Stephen R. Niblo, Mexico in the 1940s: Modernity, Politics, and Corruption (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, Inc., 1999), 347–49. According to Niblo, the daily paper occasionally featured articles from G. F. Eliot and Walter Lippman.

5. Carlos Monsiváis, Aires de familia: cultura y sociedad en América Latina (Barcelona: Anagrama, 2000); Gilbert M. Joseph, Anne Rubenstein, and Eric Zolov, eds., Fragments of a Golden Age: The Politics of Culture in Mexico Since 1940 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001); Mary Kay Vaughan, Portrait of a Young Painter: Pepe Zúñiga and Mexico City’s Rebel Generation (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015); for a look at children in an earlier period, see Elena Jackson Albarrán, Seen and Heard in Mexico: Children and Revolutionary Cultural Nationalism (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2014).

6. Jaime M. Pensado, Rebel Mexico: Student Unrest and Authoritarian Political Culture During the Long Sixties (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013), 49.

7. Pensado, Rebel Mexico, 85, 101.

8. Robert F. Alegre, Railroad Radicals in Cold War Mexico: Gender, Class, and Memory (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2013), 2–5.

9. Jacob A. Riis, How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York (New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1971), v-vii. Riis called the tenements of New York “the child of our own wrong” (p. 2).

10. Elizabeth Partridge, ed., Dorothea Lange: A Visual Life (Washington DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1994). Lange’s photograph Migrant Mother, Nipomo, California (1936) is perhaps the most widely circulated image from the Great Depression. While Lange’s career spanned several decades, she is best remembered for her work under the Farm Security Administration.

11. Gisele Freund, Photography and Society (Boston: D.R. Godine, 1980), 4–5.

12. Wendy Kozol, Life’s America: Family and Nation in Postwar Photojournalism (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994), vii-viii, 181. Kozol concludes that the narrative ideal of domestic-ity “presented a vision of private life that met the needs and served the interests of dominant political and economic sectors” (p. 184). Paula S. Fass, “Making and Remaking an Event: The Leopold and Loeb Case in American Culture,” in Children of a New World: Society, Culture, and Globalization (New York: New York University Press, 2007), 106–40.

13. Gutierre Aceves, “Imagenes de la inocencia eternal,” in Artes de México: el arte ritual de la muerte niña (México, D.F.: Artes de México, 1998), 28–32.

14. Alberto Ruy Sánchez Lacy, “Resurrection in Art,” trans. Kurt Hollander, in Artes de México: el arte ritual de la muerte niña (México, D.F.: Artes de México, 1998), 82. “‘Child-death’ is an expression that does not refer directly to the death of children, but rather to a Mexican cultural phenomenon, the ritual in which recently deceased children are no longer considered children but rather angelitos (cherubs, or little angels), and as such their death is celebrated rather than mourned.”

15. Alberto del Castillo Troncoso, “La invención de un concepto moderno de niñez en México en el cambio del siglo XIX al XX,” in Los Niños: su imagen en la historia, eds.


María Eugenia Sánchez Calleja and Delia Salazar Anaya (Mexico: Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, 2006), 110–15.

16. John Mraz, Nacho López: Mexican Photographer (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003). Mraz’s analysis of photojournalism downplays the importance of—and in some cases the frequency of—images of children in newspapers and magazines.

17. I calculated the total number of children and as percentage of the population by adding all the subcategories of age fourteen years and under in each delegation of the Federal District for each census report published between 1930 and 1970. Estados Unidos Mexicanos, Secretaría de Industria y Comercio, Dirección General de Estadística, V Censo General de Población 1930 (Mexico: 1933); VI Censo General de Población 1940 (Mexico: 1943); VII Censo General de Población 1950 (Mexico: 1953); VIII Censo General de Población 1960 (Mexico: 1963); IX Censo General de Población 1970 (Mexico: 1971).

18. See Fondo Enrique Díaz, Archivo General de la Nación, México (AGN) 87/2 “Niños” (1946).

19. Díaz, “Niños.”

20. Oscar and Ruth Lewis Papers, 1944–1976, The University of Illinois Archives at Urbana-Champaign, Box 128.

21. Jocelyn Olcott, Revolutionary Women in Postrevolutionary Mexico (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), 236–37.

22. The revolutionary party was renamed the Partido Revolucionario Institucional from its prior incarnation, the Partido Revolucionario Mexicano, in 1946.

23. See front cover of Jueves de Excélsior, December 22, 1955. Another example can be found on the front cover from Jueves de Excélsior, December 2, 1948, titled “Contrasts of Winter,” representing the same idea of children going without basic material goods in contrast to the extravagant wealth of an adult passerby.

24. “Repartiendo atole,” Jueves de Excélsior, February 1, 1940.

25. Héctor García: México sin retoque. Presentación de Elena Poniatowska (México: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México Coordinación de Difusión Cultural Dirección de Literatura, 1987), 88. Niño entre el vientre de concreto, in Dionicio Morales, Héctor García: Fotógrafo de la calle (México: Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes, 2000), 39.

26. The bracero program (1943–1964) was an arrangement between the United States and Mexican governments to send documented migrant workers to the United States to fill the demand for labor, particularly in agricultural jobs.

27. Video interview with Héctor García, unspecified date, 2001. Accessed January 18, 2014, http://www.zonezero.com/exposiciones/fotografos/hgarcia/video6eng.html.

28. Héctor García, interview.

29. Héctor García, interview.

30. Anne Rubenstein, Bad Language, Naked Ladies and Other Threats to the Nation: A Political History of Comic Books in Mexico (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998), 78–87.

31. Ignacio Vado, “Soldados Contra la Inmoralidad,” Jueves de Excélsior, January 10, 1952, 9.

32. Jueves de Excélsior, May 18, 1947.


33. Mauricio Tenorio-Trillo, I Speak of the City: Mexico City at the Turn of the Twentieth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 168.

34. Jane Livingston, M. Alvarez Bravo (Washington DC: Corcoran Gallery of Art, 1978), xi-xii.

35. Livingston, M. Alvarez Bravo, xxi, xxxiii.

36. Luis Buñuel, My Last Sigh, trans. Abigail Israel (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003). The book was originally published in France as Mon dernier soupir in 1982 and translated into English in 1983. Many Spaniards took refuge in Mexico after the Civil War, including Buñuel and the individual photographers from the Hermanos Mayo collec-tive. Buñuel arrived in 1946 and lived there continuously until 1961.

37. While the story is a fictionalized account, Buñuel spent a considerable amount of time wan-dering through the poorest neighborhoods of Mexico City, assessing the material conditions and talking with residents. See Buñuel, My Last Sigh, 199.

38. Jean Franco, Plotting Women: Gender and Representation in Mexico (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), 154.

39. Ernesto R. Acevedo-Muñoz, Buñuel and Mexico: The Crisis of National Cinema (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 78.

40. Buñuel My Last Sigh, 200–202. According to Buñuel, the wife of one prominent figure was so upset by his interpretation that she threatened to scratch his eyes out, complaining that no Mexican mother would ever treat her children so coldly.

41. Jueves de Excélsior, December 7, 1950.

42. “La Crisis de Nuestro Tiempo,” Jueves de Excélsior, October 23, 1958, 2.

43. Alejandro Sandoval A., “Rebeca Iturbide dice: Salvemos la Niñez,” Jueves de Excélsior, May 27, 1954, 17.

44. Jueves de Excélsior, August 14, 1952.

45. “Crece la Delincuencia Infantil,” Jueves de Excélsior, January 13, 1955, 5.

46. Elena Azaola, La Institución Correcional en México: Una Mirada Extraviada (México, D.F.: Siglo veintiuno editores, 1990) 78–82.

47. “Pobres Chiquillos desamparados!” Jueves de Excélsior, October 10, 1946, 16–17.

48. In addition to written articles in print media, photographic evidence from photojournalists depicts children working in various occupations. The Hermanos Mayo Collection at the Archivo General de la Nación contains numerous examples. For an image of a boy working at a gas station, see HMCR 21.820, “Niños Trabajando en Gasolineras” (1966). See figure 2.

49. See figure 3.

50. See figure 4.

51. Jueves de Excélsior, June 26, 1958, 22–23.

52. Jueves de Excélsior, June 26, 1958, 22–23.

53. Jueves de Excélsior, September 12, 1957, 27. See figure 5.

54. Jueves de Excélsior, September 4, 1941.

55. Jueves de Excélsior, September 11, 1941.

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