Rethinking Mexico City Politics through the Concept of the Public Sphere, 1940–70

In writing a chapter on the intimate history of Mexico 1968 through the biography of painter Jose Zuniga, I postulate a post-Habermasian notion of the public sphere in Mexico City as a way of reconceptualizing post-1940 Mexican politics. Most historiography limits the public sphere to the print media and sees the period between 1940 and 1968 as one in which the PRI state exercised tight press censorship and discouraged direct political discussion. But as scholars have argued, the modern public sphere also circulates through the visual and sonic media, “opening new sensory/perceptive horizons” that make the “new mass public visible to itself” while cultivating individual reflexivity and interiority. Their focus on sensory perception combined with a post-Foucauldian approach to the body and the mind as reciprocally constituted encourages me to rethink the city's public space. From the colonial period, a richly erotic popular world of pleasure thrived in the city beneath a veneer of privilege, piety and propriety. Despised as vulgar and backward by modernizing elites of the late nineteenth century, this popular culture surged forward in the Mexican Revolution to become the fertile ground for the emergence of a modern mass culture, illuminated by new movie theaters, radio stations and their programming, parks, swimming pools, sports arenas, dance and concert halls, burlesque shows, electronic billboards, and broad sidewalks for observing, performing, and talking. These blended with an archaic parade of organ grinders, guitar players, tamale vendors, and ladies of the night. They were tempered by schools, churches, clinics, museums, monuments, and traffic lights. This public space became the playground, the classroom, and the disciplining teacher for the Zuniga family.