In Search Of Civilized Entertainment: Negotiating Leisure Time in Mid-Century Mexican Magazines

• In Event: Critical Times: Writing, Art and Entertainment in the Long 19th-Century

Abstract

This paper will examine the negotiation of national identities in mid-century Mexico through a close reading of the “variety” magazines that began to proliferate in the 1840s with the express purpose of educating and entertaining a broader Mexican readership. These magazines, the first of which appeared in the late 20s/early 30s (such as El Iris, or El Recreo de las Familias) were part of a transition from the polemicized periodicals of the War of Independence to a more European cultural journalism intended for the more leisurely classes. Within the images/art, advertisements and articles themselves, tensions surface in conflicting efforts to imitate European journals of origin while representing particularly Mexican realities. The exclusion and inclusion of certain types and topics of “entertainment” (and their corresponding classifications as “civilized” or “uncivilized”) within these variety magazines is particularly illustrative of the negotiations surrounding writing, art and entertainment by the mid-century point in the polemicized political culture of post-Independence Mexico.

Author

• Amy E Wright, St Louis University