Serial Mexico

Amy E. Wright

Description

No book until now has tied in two centuries of Mexican serial narratives—tales of glory, of fame, and of epic characters, grounded in oral folklore—with their subsequent retelling in comics, radio, and television soap operas. Wright’s multidisciplinary Serial Mexico delves into this storytelling tradition: examining the nostalgic tales reimagined in novelas, radionovelas, telenovelas and onwards, and examining the foundational figures who have been woven into society.
 
This panorama shows the Mexican experience of storytelling from the country’s early days until now, showcasing protagonists that mock authority, make light of hierarchy, and embrace the hybridity and mestizaje of Mexico. These tales reflect on and respond to crucial cultural concerns such as family, patriarchy, gender roles, racial mixing, urbanization, modernization, and political idealism. Serial Mexico thus examines how serialized storytelling’s melodrama and sensationalism reveals key political and cultural messaging.
 
In a detailed yet accessible style, Wright describes how these stories have continued to morph with current times’ concerns and social media. Will tropes and traditions carry on in new and reimagined serial storytelling forms? Only time will tell. Stay tuned for the next episode.
Introduction

1. Nation as Family in Mexico’s First Novel: Lizardi’s Periquillo (1816) as Pamphlets
2. Back to the Future: Mexico as Serial Hero in Riva Palacio’s Historical Novels (1868–1872)
3. Family Education through Mexico’s First Comic: Don Catarino y su apreciable familia (1920s–1960s)
4. Mexican Radionovelas’ Serial “Stay Tuned”: Announcing . . . ¡Chucho el Roto! (ca. 1965–1975)
5. History’s Eternal Return in Televisa’s Telenovelas: Martín Garatuza (1986) and El extraño retorno de Diana Salazar (1988–1989)

Continuará • To Be Continued

Sujets

• justice
• Media Studies
• Social Science
• Sociologie, société et politique
• Mexican literature
• Mexican Revolution

Informations

• Publié par: Vanderbilt University Press
• Date de parution: 15 juin 2023
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780826505637
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 27 Mo

Extrait

Serial Mexico
CRITICAL MEXICAN STUDIES
Series editor: Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado
Critical Mexican Studies is the first English-language, humanities-based, theoretically focused academic series devoted to the study of Mexico. The series is a space for innovative works in the humanities that focus on theoretical analysis, transdisciplinary interventions, and original conceptual framing.
Other titles in the series:
The Restless Dead: Necrowriting and Disappropriation , by Cristina Rivera Garza
History and Modern Media: A Personal Journey , by John Mraz
Toxic Loves, Impossible Futures: Feminist Living as Resistance , by Irmgard Emmelhainz
Drug Cartels Do Not Exist: Narcotrafficking in US and Mexican Culture , by Oswaldo Zavala
Unlawful Violence: Mexican Law and Cultural Production , by Rebecca Janzen
The Mexican Transpacific: Nikkei Writing, Visual Arts, and Performance , by Ignacio López-Calvo
Monstrous Politics: Geography, Rights, and the Urban Revolution in Mexico City , by Ben Gerlofs
Robo Sacer: Necroliberalism and Cyborg Resistance in Mexican and Chicanx Dystopias by David Dalton
Mexico, Interrupted: Labor, Idleness, and the Economic Imaginary of Independence by Sergio Gutiérrez Negrón
Serial Mexico
Storytelling across Media, from Nationhood to Now
Amy E. Wright
Vanderbilt University Press
Nashville, Tennessee
© 2023 by Vanderbilt University Press
Nashville, Tennessee 37235
All rights reserved
First printing 2023
This book is printed on acid-free paper.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Wright, Amy E., 1974– author.
Title: Serial Mexico : storytelling across media, from nationhood to now / Amy E. Wright, Vanderbilt University Press.
Description: Nashville : Vanderbilt University Press, 2023. | Series: Critical Mexican studies; 10 | Includes bibliographical references.
Identifiers: LCCN 2023002346 (print) | LCCN 2023002347 (ebook) | ISBN 9780826505613 (paperback) | ISBN 9780826505620 (hardback) | ISBN 9780826505637 (epub) | ISBN 9780826505644 (adobe pdf)
Subjects: LCSH: Serialized fiction—Mexico—History and criticism. | Storytelling in mass media. | Narration (Rhetoric) | Digital storytelling.
Classification: LCC PQ7207.S46 W75 2023 (print) | LCC PQ7207.S46 (ebook) | DDC 863--dc23/eng/20230317
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023002346
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023002347
For my son, Rahm, who reminds me every day that I am an author.
Contents
Acknowledgments
INTRODUCTION
1. Nation as Family in Mexico’s First Novel: Lizardi’s Periquillo (1816) as Pamphlets
2. Back to the Future: Mexico as Serial Hero in Riva Palacio’s Historical Novels (1868–1872)
3. Family Education through Mexico’s First Comic: Don Catarino y su apreciable familia (1920s–1960s)
4. Mexican Radionovelas ’ Serial “Stay Tuned”: Announcing . . . ¡Chucho el Roto! (ca. 1965–1975)
5. History’s Eternal Return in Televisa’s Telenovelas : Martín Garatuza (1986) and El extraño retorno de Diana Salazar (1988–1989)
CONTINUARÁ . To Be Continued
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments
I want to acknowledge the vast number of individuals who helped me along this exhilarating journey. (Please forgive any unintentional omissions.) First and foremost I thank my entire family and the many students, friends, and colleagues who have offered their great enthusiasm and encouragement for this project.
I am deeply grateful to those I met during my early years at university and who molded and shaped my thinking during that time. At the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, I remember the guidance of Marcia Collins (Spanish), Jonathan Hartlyn (political science/Latin American studies), and John Chasteen (history/Latin American studies). The support I received from the John Motley Morehead Foundation, under the aegis of Chuck Lovelace and Megan Mazzocchi, was essential. Gabriel Evens and his family were instrumental in my development. From my time at Brown University I thank Wadda Ríos-Font and Geoffrey Ribbans (QEPD), who guided my early navigation of the labyrinth of nineteenth-century popular literature. From the days of my first job at NC State University I appreciate the excellent leadership of Dr. Ruth Gross, and a deep friendship with Shelley Garrigan, with whom I have now enjoyed some twenty years of conversation on matters both personal and professional. I also met Billy Acree, now a colleague in Saint Louis, then finishing his PhD at my alma mater. From my earliest trips to Mexico, I have lifelong friends—Cynthia Viveros, Adriana Alcántara, Maira Vaca, Mauricio Dussange, Gabriela Pérez, and Marimar Patrón Vázquez—who first welcomed me into their homes and families. And from the same period dates a friendship with Brenda Campos, who twenty years later in New York City would usher me into the world of entertainment-education, and the groundbreaking work of storytelling pioneers such as Ev Rogers, Arvind Singhal, and Miguel Sabido.
Since arriving in Saint Louis, I am especially grateful to my long-term friend and mentor Christopher Conway for his enduring interest in my work, his intellectual generosity, and the many talks we have shared without which this book would hardly be possible. I gratefully acknowledge the early support of Saint Louis University (SLU) and my then-department chair Kathleen Llewellyn in graciously providing the sabbatical that allowed for the bulk of this project’s archival labor. My thanks go out as well as to SLU’s College of Arts and Sciences (CAS), under Dean Donna Lavoie’s leadership, for the Mellon and Stolle Awards, and to David Borgmeyer and the Office of the Vice President for Research, for the Beaumont Award and for support of my NEH application. I am deeply appreciative for our SLU graduate students (in particular former graduate research assistants Mariela López and Angela Blash) and colleagues (Ellen Crowell, Pascale Perraudin, Ana Montero and others who participated in our CAS research groups). Colleagues from nearby Washington University—in particular Ignacio Sánchez-Prado, Colin Burnett, Elena Dalla Torre, and again, Billy Acree—have been exceptionally supportive over the years.
I am wholly indebted to Mexico City researchers and librarians at the Hemeroteca UNAM (Fernando Lizárraga and Alfredo Bramlett Ruiz), the Fondo Reservado UNAM (Rosario Páez and Alberto Octavio Partida Gómez), the Biblioteca Miguel Lerdo de Tejada (Jorge Corona García Pina), the Museo del Estanquillo (Ana Laura Peña Aguilar), the Fonoteca Nacional (Pável Granados), the Protele Foundation (Nadia Elizabeth Rosas Pineda and Edgar Gerardo Hernández Alonso), the Academia San Carlos (Elizabeth Fuentes Rojas), the Biblioteca Nacional (Colección Personal Monsiváis), and to scholars Virginia Medina Ávila, Maricruz Castro Ricalde, and Juan Manuel Aurrecoechea, among many others, for sharing their deep knowledge and personal attention during my time in Mexico. In Austin, Texas, I thank the scholar Charles Ramírez-Berg as well as expert librarians Adrian N. Johnson and Dylan J. Joy, for their skillful stewardship of the resources of the Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection (UT-Austin); in Harlingen, Texas, my thanks go out to Rogelio Agrasánchez and Xóchitl Fernández of the Agrasánchez Film Archive. Alejandra Monroy of Mérida provided key help with translation during a time when I was far too busy to take care of that single-handedly. (Indeed, nearly all of the Spanish-to-English quotes in this book are the result of that collaboration.) I am very pleased to have participated in the excellent CONACYT working group led by Yanna Hadatty Mora and Viviane Mahieux, which brought together a top-notch group of scholars to collaborate on Culture and Press in Mexico (1880–1940). I am also extremely grateful for the many fortuitous life connections that allowed me to consult with Juan Pablo O’Farrill Márquez, Surya MacGrégor, C’Cañak Weingartshofer, Sergio Villegas, and Gabriela Rodríguez on various materials that I have used in this book.
A huge thank you goes out to the National Endowment for the Humanities. I am honored and humbled by that award for this project. I offer profuse thanks to Efraín Navarro in Mexico City and my editors Gianna Mosser and Joell Smith-Borne of Vanderbilt University Press—as well as my stellar copyeditor, Peg Duthie—for their extraordinary assistance and considerate attention.
Last but not least, I thank my dear parents, Gerald and Jean Wright, for the unconditional love and support they have offered me throughout life. I thank Kunal Rehani for cheering me on through the last lap of the book preparation marathon. And I thank my sweet son, Rahm, for bringing immense delight into each of my days: proof of some of the finest joys to be found in repetition.
Introduction
This is a book about one of the most enduring and fundamental exercises in human communication—storytelling. Narrative plays a core role in the ways that we define ourselves, individually and communally: we use and share stories to structure and transform our realities. Storytelling about our world offers patterning and predictability to existence, prompting certain questions: What happens next? What’s in this story for me? Once these questions are raised, we are hooked, and we keep following the stories to find answers. That level of engagement is not reached through just any story, however. The most compelling tales include transformative elements of “what is” and “what could be.”
If storytelling has the power to shape our individual and collective identities over time, serialization is storytelling on steroids. Serialization, or the sharing of a story as a sequence of installments, is a vital feature of narrative that traditionally has been overlooked. Yet today, across the globe, serialization is more prominent and participatory than ever, proliferating through blogs, podcasts, and on-dem