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Bandits, Indians, and Communists: Representations of Mexican politics in the early twentieth century US Press

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posted on 2024-10-30, 10:12 authored by Peter Sasvari

This thesis analyses how the early twentieth-century US press weaponized cultural and racial anti-Mexican prejudices during the period between 1910 and 1939. Based on examples from The New York Times and a selection of US-Mexican border state papers, it will demonstrate that the press used long-established tropes to argue for authoritarian elite control or foreign tutelage over Mexico. They inhabited the mental landscape of Mexico with figures like bandits, “Indians”, and dangerous radicals to prove that the country was inherently sliding toward chaos without firm control. This also enabled the papers to dismiss and depoliticize the Mexican Revolution, casting it as an outburst of innate Mexican characteristics, violence, and banditry and, therefore, a mere security issue. Furthermore, the economic and social reforms of the 1910s and 1920s were shown as a shift toward Bolshevism. In dynamics with this, opponents of the revolutionary governments were seen by the papers as defenders of stability and traditional values. This way, the papers argued for restoring the US-friendly, authoritarian status quo of the Díaz regime, which they saw as both fitting for the “backward” Mexicans and for US economic and political interests. The existing scholarship established how Mexican elites used prejudices about chaos and criminality of the lower classes to argue against democracy and how anti-communism was used in the United States to support elite control over the population. This thesis shows how portions of the US press examined here built upon both these arguments and applied these prejudices to the Mexican people. Thus, it uncovers dynamics between anti-Mexican prejudices and US political and economic interests.

History

Supervisor(s)

Deborah Toner; Andrew Johnstone

Date of award

2024-08-15

Author affiliation

School of History, Politics, and International Relations

Awarding institution

University of Leicester

Qualification level

  • Masters

Qualification name

  • Mphil

Language

en

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