Advertising Modern Mexico: Beer, Race, and Economic Development in Mid-20th-Century Mexico

This paper examines the shift in beer advertising from naturalist and indigenista visions of the national consumer in the 1920s to a vision of the modern consumer in the 1930s and 1940s that was professional, urban, middle-class, and white. Scholars have explored how Mexican officials, intellectuals and artists used culture and education in the 1920s and 1930s to promote a vision of the Mexican nation rooted in its indigenous past and connected, I argue, to its project of economic nationalism and social justice. Few have broached how those visions shifted just a few years later, as Mexico embarked upon its experiment with state-protected stabilizing development. Beer advertising allows us to trace that shift, and to analyze how it facilitated an economic project that, while nominally nationalist, ultimately left many Mexicans behind. Indeed, beer advertising allows us to explore the cultural foundations for material inequality amid the rise of protected industrialism in Mexico.

 This project of protected, stabilizing development challenged the system of hemispheric capitalism by threatening trade ties and the free movement of capital and goods. But the visions that accompanied that project explicitly sought to ameliorate global concerns about rising difference by portraying a version of Mexican racial identity that assuaged US concerns about the ‘other’, in turn softening U.S. opposition to rising protectionism. In uniting the intersecting economic and cultural facets of state-protected development, this paper explores how racialized visions of the nation shaped material difference as Mexico sought to expand its sovereignty within and as part of the tightening bonds of hemispheric capitalism.