Elite and Popular Consumption Practices in Mexico

November 15, 2010 - 4:00 pm

The Double Life of Golf: Business Practices and Symbolic Weapons in Mexico
Hugo Cerón Anaya, Moravain College and Lehigh University
This paper analyzes how and why affluent individuals do business on the golf course, highlighting the way in which class notions impact business practices in Mexico. This work demonstrates how golf reinforces social hierarchies within the business world.

Mexican Telenovelas in the 1970s
Melixa Abad-Izquierdo, SUNY-Stony Brook University
The 1970s were a pivotal moment for the internationalization of Mexican telenovelas. The genre thrived due to the lessons learned in the 1960s, from the phenomenon of Simplemente Maria, and the creation of the entertainment monopoly Televisa.  One of the most fascinating aspects of telenovelas in the 1970s was that its greatest successes were stories that disconnected viewers from the political realities of Mexico.  In the midst of the political tension of the early 1970s, Televisa’s position was exclusively of  an entertainment network. The telenovela cliché of a young woman who fights against all odds and whose love triumphs in the end came into its own during this decade, as the success of Los Ricos Tambien Lloranexemplifies.

Mexican Nationalism, Popular Culture, and Migration: The Case of Pachucos in Mexico City
Romeo Guzmán, Columbia University
This paper seeks to bring together transnational popular culture and Mexican nationalism by focusing on a debate concerning pachuco identity in Mexico City in the early 1940s. Pachucos were Mexican-American youth living in the southwest United States and along the border. This paper uses responses to popular culture to tease out ideas about Mexican national identity, migration, and the border of the nation.

Moderator:
Araceli Tinajero, The Graduate Center and The City College of New York, CUNY

Hugo Cerón Anaya is lecturer in the departments of Sociology and Anthropology at Moravian College and Lehigh University. His research focuses on the fields of globalization, economic elites, and sports. He is working on a manuscript entitled Globalization and Golf in Mexico. His work has appeared in edited books in Spanish and Portuguese, as well as in academic journals in English. The current issue of the Journal of Sports and Social Issuesincludes a paper based on his doctoral research: “An Approach to the History of Golf: Business Practices, Technologies of the Self, and Symbolic Capital.”

Melixa Abad-Izquierdo a Ph. D. candidate in the History Department at SUNY-Stony Brook University.  Her essay “A Melodramatic Miracle: The Cultural and Political Economy of the Mexican Telenovela, 1950-1980” will be published in  Soap Operas and Telenovelas in the Digital Age: Global Industries, Hybrid Content, and New Audiences.” Edited by Diana I. Rios and Mari Castaneda, this publication is currently in press with Peter Lang Publishing.

Romeo Guzmánis a Ph.D. candidate in the History Department at Columbia University. He is currently working to found an intellectual and cultural space for bi-national thought at the Casa del Ahuizote, a documentary center that will house archival material pertaining to the Flores Magón brothers, based in Mexico City’s Historical Center.

Araceli Tinajero is a Mexican scholar and the author of Orientalismo en el modernismo hispanoamericano, El lector de tabaquería, El Lector: A History of the Cigar Factory Reader. She is presently co-editing Technology and Culture in Twentieth Century Mexico. Her Kokoro, el Japón en mi corazón is forthcoming.