How to Do Things with Waves: Radio and Pan-Americanism, 1935–45

As is well-known among media historians, toward the late 1930s and amidst increasing anxieties about national cohesiveness and the coming of war, radio in the United States came to be used as a means to communicate broader and more inclusive representations of nationhood. Cued by government agencies and civic organizations, the networks now incorporated programs that were meant to embrace, and instill respect for, ethnic and religious minorities. During the war, this trend intensified and broadened in scope, but it came to a rather abrupt end as global victory was at hand.

What is less known is that this quest for unity was not limited to the national arena. Toward the late 1930s and particularly during the war years, radio output in the United States changed markedly also with respect to Latin America. Broadcasters, both large and small, engaged in a variety of strategies that invited U.S. audiences not just to acquaint themselves with the Good Neighbors to the south of the Rio Grande, but to imagine themselves as part of a wider, pan-American world and community of nations.

Radio historians in the past have focused on the role of broadcasting in the formation of a “public, shared and sociable world-in-common” (P. Scannell), and many have fruitfully employed B. Anderson’s notion of “imagined communities” to highlight the importance of radio in the formation of popular cultures within the national arena.

This papers seeks to expand on these topics by introducing an international perspective and to bridge media studies with recent theoretical and empirical work by constructivists in International Relations. More precisely, it probes into the potential and the limitations of radio as a means to instill notions of familiarity or “we-ness” (P. Scannell) on an international scale.