Posing Defiance

In Mexico, the journalism industry began to take shape toward the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century. Even so, it was not until the 1930s that the first editorial offering was made available to the general public to better meet their tastes and economic means. As a result of this shift, Mexican print journalism became an active part of the country’s social life and an established source of employment. At the cutting edge of this expansion were illustrated publications, especially comic books and magazines, featuring topics ranging from general interest to specialized titles covering performance, sports, and crime.

At the time, neither the national population’s high rate of illiteracy nor their lack of education, for the most part, hindered the ability of daily and weekly publications to position themselves as vehicles for information and entertainment, as well as popularizers of mythologies that reinforced dominant ideologies