Beyond the Border: American Broadcasting, National Identity, and Mexico's “Border Blasters” in the 1930s

Recent scholarship on interwar-era American radio has explored the connections between the rise of a national network-controlled commercial broadcasting system and the shaping of national identity among an American audience. Informed by Benedict Anderson’s notion of an “imagined community,” this work explores the shared symbols and values that radio conveyed as it helped foster a common sense of identity among an otherwise anonymous audience. This paper seeks to build on that scholarship, but in a way that looks beyond national borders. It will consider the relationship between national identity and listener engagement with radio broadcasts that stood outside the mainstream of the US national broadcasting system that emerged by the 1930s. In particular, it will focus on the so-called English language “border blasters,” which were established just south of the Mexican border in an intentional effort to evade US radio regulators while still broadcasting to a US-based audience. How did these broadcasts that crossed international borders engage manifestations of national identity among its listeners? Who listened to these broadcasts and why were they either drawn to or repelled by them? What is the significance to processes of national identity formation when a distinctly American form of broadcasting illicitly crosses an international border to reach its targeted audience, garnering both popularity and condemnation within the United States? My answers to those questions, I suspect, will demonstrate the importance of keeping the values and ideals of technology’s users at the forefront of any historical analysis of technology. Engagement with the “border blasting” stations will likely underscore how the values, ideas, and prejudices a listener brought to radio shaped how that listener understood, interpreted, and reacted to this international programming they encountered during the 1930s in often unexpected and unintended ways.