Guardians of Discourse: Journalism and Literature in Porfirian Mexico, Kevin M Anzzolin, 2024, University of Nebraska Press
An important distinction at the heart of historical debate about the social changes in Porfirian Mexico preceding the Revolution may have contemporary relevance.
Kevin Anzzolin points to two divergent theoretical models invoked by scholars examining the intersection of associative life, the press, the public and the state’s narrative in Latin America: those of the “lettered city” and of the “public sphere”.
On the one hand, scholars have grounded their work in Ángel Rama’s notion of a lettered city (La ciudad letrada, 1984) which emphasises how an intelligentsia wielded the written word in order to dominate the populace.
This suggests the existence of a small, stealthy and ultimately controlling cadre of intellectuals aiming to steer literature, politics, the law and even urban planning with the objective of fashioning a homogenous society.
On the other hand, they have positioned their research within the more well-known concept developed by Jürgen Habermas of a public sphere, an egalitarian social space where debate takes place through novels, coffeehouses, and in the press. This space eventually advances the emergence of rational government through the scrutiny of an informed and orderly citizenry open to enlightened debate—something we recognise today, in part, as “public opinion”.
Anzzolin is interested in determining which of these models might best apply to Latin America—more specifically, in this case, to Porfirian Mexico—and the implications of this for how we position journalism in this critical period of political change.
As he points out, it was an era in which not only journalists but a discernible cadre of public intellectuals—the “guardians of discourse”—played an outsized role in shaping politics and establishing the legitimacy of the press as a “fourth estate”.
Under Díaz, an apparently contradictory evolution took place: in order to control the press, caciques, technocrats, intellectuals and subservient attorneys sent innumerable journalists to prison on bogus charges of defamation or slander; yet all the while, the Díaz government subsidised multiple newspapers to expand literacy, mainly in an effort to aggrandise itself, thereby greatly enhancing the credentials of journalism.
Despite increasing repression and the Porfirian regime’s obsessive effort to control the narrative, those credentials were much in evidence by the time the 77-year-old Díaz ill-advisedly announced his retirement in a press interview.
The famous 1908 Creelman article in Pearson’s Magazine, an American monthly, unleashed the dogs of war—the dictator’s admission was published in Mexico’s semi-official, subsidised newspaper El Imparcial, stoking unrest and ultimately sparking his overthrow.
Anzzolin writes: “The notion of a freer press and an active public had been deemed fundamental for a nation throwing off the shackles of a dictatorship. In a speech given on January 8, 1912, opposition journalist Antonio Díaz Soto y Gama declared that the demand for a free press was one of the decisive motivations for the insurrection against Díaz.”
The strongman’s successor and Mexico’s first revolutionary president, Francisco Madero, then had to deal with a newly empowered adversary, initially appealing to the press to be his “best friends” while ultimately succumbing to its ire.
Madero instinctively understood the power of journalism in society: he had dedicated his 1908 tract La sucesión presidencial en 1910 to the “Independent Press”, which he praised for its “extraordinary self-restraint” in the “uphill battle” against authoritarianism.
During the 18 months following Madero’s accession leading up to his assassination, the neophyte president learned just how powerful journalists had become: his efforts to establish newly cordial relations soon floundered.
Their subsidies cut and their hunger for change not sated by the new president left Madero a sitting duck—he was lambasted in print with a “vitriol hitherto unseen in Mexican newsprint”. In consequence, he found the temptation to pressure his critics into silence irresistible, resorting to strategies straight from the Díaz playbook.
Madero rebuked critics of his policies, warned them against publishing inflammatory articles that stoked protest, and used subsidies to ensure there were voices within the press pack that defended his efforts to rein in their brethren.
Eventually, embattled by unfavourable public opinion, Madero’s government went further, proposing a law to prosecute not only writers of newspapers deemed slanderous but also their readers—a deranged, unprecedented and clearly unenforceable measure that would succumb to intense resistance.
In this theoretical debate, Anzzolin does not take sides: while this notion of a discrete group of intellectuals pulling the strings of public debate but also shaping the agenda such that certain state narratives were prioritised is in keeping with Rama’s model, their growing reliance on mass politics and the expansion of a reading public was also Habermasian and challenged elite efforts to limit access to the public sphere.
What stands out to the casual observer, however, is the continuity between Díaz and Madero, with the latter’s inexperienced and even naïve administration ultimately maintaining the same tactics that the former had used to keep uncooperative journalists in line.
Anzzolin writes: “It could perhaps be argued that Madero had even stymied Don Porfirio’s most ambitious unfinished project—the creation of one of modernity’s most elusive and intangible institutions, a public sphere.”
Herein lies the lesson—and it is of importance far beyond revolutionary Mexico.
As the author notes, the legitimacy and usefulness of discussing Latin American society in terms of a Habermasian public sphere has generated considerable debate because the German philosopher’s claims work best when applied to a specific historical context.
Habermas traced the development of a bourgeois public sphere—that area in social life where individuals deliberate on societal problems and in turn influence political action—from its origins in the salons of the 18th century to its ascendance through the influence of capital-driven mass media. His context was industrialising Europe, and primarily Britain, France and Germany.
Inevitably, however, these ideas have been applied to other regions, including Mexico, but as Anzzolin notes, scholarship continues to interrogate whether Habermas’s public sphere is best understood as a historical description, and thus inapplicable outside of Western Europe, or as a normative theory, thereby appropriate for interpreting Latin America history.
The normative possibilities draw attention in particular not only to the rise of a public sphere, but also its fall—a process that Habermas later dwelled upon (in modern social-democratic states) that he referred to as “refeudalisation”, by which state and society, public and private, merge again in ways that approximate conditions in the feudal state, best illustrated by the return of “representative” (i.e., state-directed) publicity.
Of course, the focus of this book demands that we ask about the extent to which that happened in Mexico under the bureaucratic state of the official party established by the Revolution, the PRI. To this day, the Mexican public sphere continues to feel limited, stunted perhaps by generations of PRI control—as if it has never really recovered from an interruption to its Habermasian metamorphosis.
The more interesting question, however, is the extent to which this process could happen in Europe, not least Britain, where the state’s instinct to control the narrative and suppress critical, independent voices was thrown into stark relief by the regime of Tony Blair, finds ample evidence in the blindly obsessive decolonial agenda of the bloated BBC, and has been resurrected by the authoritarian instincts of Keir Starmer, who resembles a positivist.
If the ideas of Habermas are normative, across space and time, can Mexico in the critical period under Porfirio Díaz examined by Anzzolin offer us clues to the fate of our own public sphere?
Is refeudalisation reducing an independent fourth estate closer to home to the mouthpiece of a new nation-building narrative with a positivist appetite to silence its detractors?
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Categories: Mexico, North America