Bataclán, Bullfights, and Boxing Matches: Working-Class Masculinity and Popular Culture in Mexico City, 1917–29

“Bataclán, Bullfights, and Boxing Matches:  Working-Class Masculinity and Popular Culture in Mexico City, 1917-1929”

This paper investigates how Mexico City’s working-class men formed gender identities through popular culture during the decade following the Mexican Revolution (1910-1920).  I ask how this specific socioeconomic class maintained and redefined societal gender and sexuality beliefs in the years of turmoil following the Mexican Revolution.  

This paper argues that that negotiation between workers, their families, and the state over multiple masculinities resulted in contested meanings of manhood.  Furthermore, these negotiations took place in the context of modernity.  The period featured transnational ideas of the modern woman, a modern post-revolutionary government’s adoption of new transnational ideas about men, and new forms of mass popular entertainment such as sports.  I hope to contribute to a broader scholarship on masculinity in Latin America (Thomas Klubock, Robert Buffington, Matthew Gutmann) that is helping to move interpretations of manhood beyond machismo). 

These workers formed class and gender-based subcultures associated with modern popular entertainment practices such as going to the movies, attending bullfights, cheering at boxing matches, and drinking.  Residents of the capital hung out, flirted, and fought amidst an urban backdrop of movie houses, street theaters (where the bataclán cabaret style was one of many popular forms of entertainment), and dance halls.  These men formed intimate relationships with women, their families, and each other.