1
Rebeldismo in the Revolutionary Family
Rock 'n' Roll's Early Impact on Mexican State and Society

When rhythm and blues crossed over to become rock 'n' roll around 1955, white youth and their parents in the United States were put on a collision course of values that set in motion important transformations in the cultural landscape of this country. When that same rhythm was imported into Mexico on the wings of transnational capital and in the suitcases of individuals traveling abroad, something similarly profound transpired. Rock 'n' roll became a discursive prism through which filtered the hopes, fears, and anxieties of a society undergoing rapid modernization. For many adults, the new youth culture attached to rock music epitomized the cosmopolitan aspirations of a middle class in ascendancy. But at the same time, the sudden challenges to patriarchal authority in the home and society suggested the darker risks of rapid development and the need for greater control over the mass media. Ultimately, what these first years of rock 'n' roll in Mexico produced was a societal consensus that neither the impact of foreign cultural trends nor the tastes of youth could be halted. But at the same time, this consensus rendered that the state has the obligation to safeguard the nation from the unwarranted excesses of modernity.

Rock 'n' Roll's Arrival

The first taste of rock 'n' roll in Mexico had little to do with youth rebellion. Imported from abroad, rock 'n' roll swept the nation in the mid-1950s, along with the cha-cha-chá and the mambo, both introduced from Cuba. Rather than catering to youth, however, rock 'n' roll was popularized by orchestral "jazz bands" performing mostly for working and middle-class adults. With the exception of the young singer and actress Gloria Ríos, rock 'n' roll was initially "made by adults ... who considered it just another

[dance] style."^[1] It had immediate appeal to a culture raised on dance. Significantly, two of the principal issues that catalyzed negative reaction by Anglo society in the United States—rock 'n' roll's "beat of sexual intercourse"^[2] and its "jungle strains"^[3] —were largely irrelevant in the Mexican context. This can be explained by the following: First, the representation of rock 'n' roll successfully marketed around the globe was overwhelmingly a white one, with its attendant associations of a modernizing aesthetic. By usurping the role of African American performers, Elvis Presley and Bill Haley, among others, had put a more palatable face on rhythm and blues, thus largely disassociating this music from its African American originators.

Second, the fear of "cultural miscegenation"^[4] that largely characterized White America's reception of rock 'n' roll was something of a nonissue to Mexicans.^[5] In fact, Mexicans identified rhythmically with the African roots of rock 'n' roll, precisely that element associated with savagery, exaggerated sexuality, and a breakdown of the moral code in the United States. Mexicans were raised on close cultural ties to the Caribbean and a passion for música tropical ,^[6] so exploring the rhythms of rock 'n' roll became at once a celebration of modernity and an addition to the lexicon of corporal expression enjoyed by all Mexicans. The important impact this new style had on dance audiences, not only in Mexico but throughout Latin America, is perhaps best conveyed in a song performed by the Cuban-born singer Celia Cruz. Set to the rhythms of a rumba cleverly fused with a back-beat, this dance song was titled simply, "Baila el rock and roll" (Come Dance the Rock and Roll):

For a society already attuned to the mambo the gyrating hips of Elvis Presley were scarcely scandalous. Rather, what would ultimately matter to Mexicans was rock 'n' roll's affronts to patriarchal values. Even the valence of singing in English came to have dual meaning: on one hand English conveyed a notion of cosmopolitanism, yet on the other it underscored the dangers of foreign cultural influence on the Mexican family.

The first Mexican recording to feature a style incorporating elements of the new rhythm was made by the orchestral leader Pablo Beltrán Ruiz, who in 1956 recorded an instrumental single on the RCA-Victor label titled simply (in English), "Mexican Rock and Roll." Within months, the jazzy rhythms and "youthful" feel of the new style caught on, and scores of orchestras, large and small, jumped on the rock 'n' roll bandwagon, contributing to what one author has described as the "de-tropicalization" of dance bands.^[8] In effect, as audiences came to expect variety even the mambo lost its novelty and "was played along with danzones [a slower dance rhythm from Cuba] and North American rhythms, becoming [just] one rhythm more."^[9] These other dance styles by no means disappeared, though their popularity among the young went into decline during the 1960s and did not recover until the advent of the cumbia (a rapid dance rhythm that originated in Colombia), which took the country by storm in the early 1970s.^[10]

Rock 'n' roll's early popularity among adults must be seen not only in the broader context of a cultural tradition of incorporating novel dance fashions to suit urban popular tastes but as a reflection of the transformation in the relationship with the United States as well. As a result of closer ties established during World War II, a discourse of economic and diplomatic cooperation had supplanted the previous rhetoric of revolutionary nationalism. Hence, the big-band sound of orchestral leaders like Glenn Miller and the new, "jazzy" rhythms of early rock 'n' roll came to symbolize the modernizing forces that were every day working to transform Mexico from a rural-based economy to an urban, industrial one.^[11] In one example, the Mexican actress Silvia Pinal promoted a hybrid invention of her own called the "can-rock," which would fuse "the old with the modern" in a new dance step: "The Can-Rock, as its name indicates, is a combination of the veteran Can-Can and the ultramodern Rock'n Roll. From the first, she has taken its [sexual] boldness and from the second, its moments of ex-

travagant craziness. The result ... is a modern dance within the reach of youth."^[12] Appealing to an older generation already seeped in the styles of mÚsica tropical, rock 'n' roll thus offered a visual and corporal language for negotiating the impact of rapid modernization and of closer ties with the United States.

But before delving more deeply into the impact of rock 'n' roll on Mexican society during the late 1950s, it is important to address the concrete questions of how this music arrived and what impact it had on local artistic production. It is a curious and telling fact, for instance, that with the rise in consumption of rock 'n' roll there was also a rise in exports of "traditional" Mexican music (such as rancheras and boleros). In other words, the musical representation of Mexico abroad continued to be characterized by a stereotypical folkloric image of the mariachi, at the same time that more and more urban Mexicans (especially youth) were rejecting that style in favor of música moderna , a wide-ranging category that included rock 'n' roll. The role of transnational culture industries was intrinsic to this process of global dissemination, though at the same time Mexico's own recording companies also came to play an important part. It is important, therefore, to describe a portrait of the recording industry's landscape in which local companies both benefited from and competed with transnational interests.

Transnational and Local Marketing Strategies

Mexico's earliest recording studios were established in 1936 not by a transnational corporation but through the investment of local capital. Discos Peerless^[13] was founded by the investors Eduardo Baptista Covarrubias and Gustavo Klinckwort Noehrenberg during a time when "foreign records had monopolized all sales and one could [only] acquire Mexican artists recorded abroad,"^[14] who were then reexported back to Mexico. The company dedicated itself to discovering and contracting Mexican talent. Meanwhile, distribution of the influential RCA-Victor label took place under the administrative direction of Emilio Azcárraga Vidaurreta, who, with his son Emilio Azcárraga Milmo, would go on to found Mexico's television and broadcasting conglomerate, Telesistema, in 1955. Emilio Azcárraga Sr. worked for RCA-Victor from the company's start in Mexico in the 1920s (when it was just Victor) until the 1940s, when he apparently turned over his duties to his nephew Rogelio; "don Emilio," as he was known, had his sights set on larger projects. In the mid-1950s RCA established its own recording facilities, a move that led Rogelio Azcárraga to separate from RCA's distribution network and form a separate recording label, Orfeón, in 1957. Rogelio, took

with him not only invaluable experience learned while working as a distributor for the RCA-Victor label but a good portion of its artistic catalog as Well.^[15] Earlier, in 1947, CBS had also established recording facilities. And around that time a second Mexican company, Musart, was founded as a result of a split between Baptista and Klinckwort, the founders of Peerless. Thus, by the mid-to-late 1950s, five major record companies—three owned by local capital (Peerless, Orfeón, Musart) and two transnationals (RCA, CBS)—dominated production and distribution in the Mexican market for music.

The move into Mexico by RCA and CBS, the two transnational companies with production facilities in place by the 1950s, was part of a broader strategy of market expansion by these companies not only in Mexico but also elsewhere in the world, and not only in the field of music but in entertainment and electronics generally. A steady increase in Department of Defense contracts subsidized development of technology in such areas as electrical wiring and magnetic tapes, while the advent of television and improvements in phonographic recordings and playback apparatuses generated an unprecedented demand for new consumer products. Such product diversity was aptly revealed on the cover of a 1957 Annual Report for the electronics firm, Audio Devices, Inc., a company with important contractual relations with both CBS and Capitol Records in the sale of magnetic recording tape.^[16] The cover of the report displays an image of a record album with a rocket blasting across the inside label; superimposed on the album is a reel of magnetic recording tape and a computer adapter wire.^[17] In another example, an advertisement for RCA reproduced in its Annual Report read: "If you sometimes fly ... Enjoy music ... Use a bank ... Worry about the weather ... Build missiles ... Or send messages ... RCA is part of your life."^[18]

International sales and investments were central to the growth strategy of these transnationals. With the promotion of import-substitution strategies in Latin America, there was an overall reduction of manufactured consumer goods exports (household and consumer appliances) from the United States to the larger industrializing economies. But it also meant that new marketing niches could be exploited by companies that directly serviced developing economies' needs in the manufacture of these same products. RCA's 1957 Annual Report , for instance, noted that "tubes and transistors were widely chosen as multipurpose tools of electronic progress particularly in Italy, France, Sweden, Denmark, Brazil, Cuba and Mexico" and pointed out that sales were ahead of the previous year.^[19] Import-substitution strategies also indirectly encouraged the location of subsidiary

plant operations (often owned via joint-capital ventures) in industrializing centers of Latin America. As a 1958 CBS Annual Report noted, "A large part of the Free World is embarked upon a program of industrialization. This is especially true of Latin America, our most convenient market.... In the future, exporters must look toward foreign manufacturing and licensing for additional income. As the larger nations develop local industries, they will need to purchase components, machinery, and heavy equipment."^[20] Thus CBS jointly operated a television picture-tube plant in Buenos Aires, while owning a minority interest in television assembly plants in Argentina and Peru, both of which produced television sets under the trademark label "CBS-Columbia."^[21] RCA proudly acknowledged its role in marketing its products around the world: "Electronics has become a major unifying influence in the modern world, linking the continents by radio and fostering the exchange of knowledge and culture through the extension of broadcasting and recording services. RCA, through its world-wide network of commercial communications and its development of television and radio systems for service in many nations, has contributed importantly to this global pattern."^[22] This global pattern of the transnationals' direct participation in the development and distribution of communications and entertainment technology—not to mention programming content—intensified throughout the 1960s.

Beginning in the mid-1950s, musical production and distribution became an increasingly significant part of overall corporate revenue. The boom in record sales generally during the 1950s can be attributed to several factors. For one, technological advances and economies of scale rendered increasingly more effective sound equipment at a lower price. Secondly, economic growth in the recovering European economies and in the modernizing Third World economies, coupled with a shift in demographics, also meant that more young people had available income to spend on leisure activities. Finally, the advent of rock 'n' roll, though initially anathema to the large record companies (with the important exception of RCA, where Elvis Presley recorded), quickly proved its earnings potential, and soon afterward it radically transformed the record industry itself. As Kenneth Shore writes, rock 'n' roll "was to become the dominant force in popular music not because of the plans of the major companies, but in spite of them."^[23] Thus in its Annual Report for 1958, for example, CBS reported that "the [Columbia Records] Division has not attempted so far to meet the large demand for rock and roll recordings,"^[24] a position that only began to change with Columbia's contracting of folk-rock and rock groups after the mid-1960s.

International sales of records nonetheless became an important component of overall corporate expansion. While, unfortunately, the corporate records that might reveal precise sales volume for specific artists are missing, by piecing together the available sources we can still glean a sense of music's increasing contribution to profits.^[25] In 1957 RCA was reporting that record sales were 18 percent higher than the year before, with broadening markets in Australia, England, Germany, Sweden, Venezuela, and South Africa contributing to the increase in profits.^[26] Likewise for CBS 1956 sales volume of records was up 50 percent from the previous year, a record high for the company: "Not only from Maine to California but from Sweden to South Africa, Brazil to Japan, record sales increased. Sales by Columbia's globe-girdling network of subsidiaries and affiliates increased 50% over the preceding year. In established markets such as Europe, record sales established new high levels."^[27] A photograph of workers unloading crates of records appeared with the following caption to underscore the importance of Third World markets: "International record boom increases volume of Columbia's foreign subsidiaries, such as this one in Mexico."^[28] In 1958 Columbia Records held its first Latin American Convention in New York City, out of which emerged a strategy to target even more aggressively the Caribbean and South American markets. By 1959 the company could report that "[f] or the first time, records from Columbia's Argentine subsidiary were sold in other South American markets," while new licensing arrangements had been established in Argentina, Uruguay and Peru.^[29] Also, for the first time in the fall of 1960 a vice-president for Latin American operations was named. With recording studios now established in Argentina and Mexico, manufacturing facilities in many other countries, and licensing arrangements throughout the hemisphere, CBS claimed 30 percent of the Latin American market.^[30]

Mexico was particularly suited for the commercialization of popular music. With its 240 radio stations Mexico ranked fourth in the world, behind the United States, China, and Brazil.^[31] In terms of production quality, according to Mariano Rivera Conde, vice president of RCA-Víctor Mexicana, Mexican radio and television "far outstrip[ped] its competition in Latin America."^[32] At the start of 1960 Variety was reporting that Mexico's outlook for the year ahead was one of optimism, "that it will be a new cycle of prosperity and advances in the commercial, technical and artistic branches" of the broadcasting industry.^[33] The strength of radio and television was offset, however, by the fact that just over a quarter of a million homes actually owned record players and sales of albums ran in the single digits, not tens of thousands, much less millions.^[34]

Though the number of integral subsidiary plant operations—those which combined recording studios and record-pressing facilities—was still limited to a select number of countries, the transnationals increasingly pushed to have their label distributed in a local market. This might even involve the pressing and distribution of one transnational's record label by another transnational, depending on the makeup of the market. In other cases, records were directly imported from a subsidiary operation in one country into another foreign market, a practice that became increasingly costly as nations began to erect protective tariff barriers to cultural products. Nevertheless, an emergent common strategy was to establish a base for subsidiary operations in one country that could reach across to a regional market.^[35] For example, production facilities in Argentina readily served the Southern Cone and Andean markets, while a Mexican-based subsidiary could serve the Caribbean and Central American markets. This approach was copied by the Mexican company, Peerless. In teaming up with the transnational recording company Polydor (which itself later entered the Mexican market directly), the two companies sought to establish a joint-venture subsidiary operation in Argentina or Uruguay, "with the object being to elaborate and distribute Mexican and European music to the countries of the extreme south of the continent."^[36]

RCA's strategic use of its Mexican subsidiaries during this period is particularly revealing. It demonstrated the coincidence of a low-wage subsidiary operation, on one hand, with the exploitation of a native product for global export on the other. Beginning in 1959, RCA began to manufacture records at its Mexico City plant for export to the United States. RCA was responding to the small yet still significant demand for what it called "international records"; that is, foreign-language hits and specific market niches, such as Mexican American communities in the Southwest. While the total volume of foreign-language music was steadily increasing, the per-unit sales of any particular record remained relatively small. This did not justify large-scale production at greater expense within the United States. However, "the smaller and more flexible Mexican factory [could] operate profitably with such low-unit sales."^[37] Targeting the Mexican American population in the United States also affected CBS, which shifted its Columbia Records' catalog accordingly.^[38] At the same time, RCA launched a major new initiative to market "the best of [Mexican] folklore music and interpreters" to markets throughout the United States, Latin America, Europe, and the Far East.^[39]

In fact, according to Variety , 1959 was a "banner year" for the Mexican

Graph 1.
Record exports from Mexico, 1955–1976. Source: Anuario del Comercio
Exterior (Mexico City: Banco Nacional de Comercio Exterior, 1955–1976); 
data unavailable for 1969.

recording industry, with sales increases of 15–25 percent, topping the previous year's peak.^[40] Led by what a government report termed "the sentimental richness of Mexican music,"^[41] record exports soared, and a story in Variety noted the industry's "assault on foreign markets"^[42] (see Graph 1). Orfeón was no onlooker to this global marketing strategy. In late 1958 the company could already boast of distribution pacts with Cuba, Puerto Rico, Colombia, Venezuela, Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Spain, France, the United States, and parts of Africa. Perhaps anticipating a protective tariff against imports, the company launched a major expansion of its Discos Mexicanos (DIMSA) facilities during 1959 with the goal of "mak[ing] its recording studios one of the most modern in Mexico."^[43] In October of that year the company announced plans for its label to be introduced into Japan and other Far Eastern markets, thus approaching its goal "to achieve worldwide distribution" by the turn of the decade.^[44] "In general," concluded the Variety report, "the Mexican industry as a whole looks forward to inauguration of

new ideas in production, exploitation and distribution of disks—not only in Mexico but in the world market."^[45]

This strategy of internationalizing Mexican artists continued throughout the 1960s and was duplicated by the other major record companies.^[46] All Mexican performers under contract with CBS Records, for instance, were now considered for an "exploitation plan" to include "globe circling tours."^[47] And in a reflection of the growing significance of the Mexican American population in the United States, in 1962 RCA also initiated another shift in tactics. No longer would distributors have to order directly from the RCA-Víctor Mexicana subsidiary. Recordings made in Mexico were now pressed directly in the United States, assuring both quicker distribution in the U.S. market and greater promotion for the artists.^[48]

If the record companies are to be credited with the promotion of Mexican music beyond the nation's borders, extending the nation's repertory of rancheras and romantic ballads to such disparate markets as Argentina, Japan, and Holland, at the same time these same companies served as vehicles for the torrent of foreign tunes into the Mexican market. Between 1956 and 1959 record imports surged to a new high, leading to talk of a government ban on imports to protect local industry.^[49] In early 1959, for example, Variety reported that a "flood of new disks bearing foreign labels and featuring internationally known singers and orchestras have appeared on the local market."^[50] Rock 'n' roll was, of course, part of that torrent, though it was by no means alone. Moreover, access to imports, including rock 'n' roll, was restricted by economics, a fact adjusted somewhat as local pressings accommodated and later displaced such demand. As Eréndira Rincón explains:

The fact is that people who had access to that music were those with money. Of course, because it was difficult to get a hold of ... everyone talked about it, and the collections were like treasuries. When someone found out about a recording of such and such and some friend lent it to him, or whatever, it was like a status boost. "I've got the original recording of whoever" and like that person became a total star for the next few days, until the rest of us got it as well.^[51]

With those words, let us now return to our story of rock 'n' roll's impact and the transformation of urban culture during the late 1950s.

Rock 'n' Roll as a Metaphor of Disorder and Progress

The transformation of rock 'n' roll from an adult musical style to one adopted for and aimed at youth was not long in coming. In an important

difference from rock 'n' roll's reception in the United States, where it was first experienced by working-class teenagers and was later appropriated by middle- and upper-class youth, in Mexico this process was essentially reversed. Rock 'n' roll began primarily as a middle- and upper-class phenomenon, not only for its associations with a modernizing aesthetic but especially because of its limited access. Most records were imported, and ownership of record and tape players was extremely limited. On the other hand, radio, jukeboxes, and films did offer an important mass cultural space that could be shared by a diverse audience. But on the whole, it seems that rock 'n' roll and its attendant youth paraphernalia largely excluded the lower classes until the late 1960s, when for other reasons this began to change.^[52]

If in the United States the central tension encoded in rock 'n' roll during the 1950s was between Anglo and African American culture, in Mexico what came to matter in the public discourse was the association of rock 'n' roll (and later rock) with desmadre . An offensive, lower-class slang word, desmadre expresses a notion of social chaos introduced by the literal "un-mothering" of a person or situation.^[53] This stands in antithesis to that other Mexican phrase, buenas costumbres, which encapsulates all that is proper and correct—"family values," as we might say in the United States. In challenging the social rules contained in buenas costumbres, the irreverent, raucous spirit of the youth culture threatened to undermine the very patriarchal values of parental authority that permeated middle-class social values. As Rincón describes it, buenas costumbres meant: "[o]f course not saying bad words; or for example if guests arrived who were older than you, you had to show them the utmost courtesy: very clean clothes, treat them with the appropriate respect, give them a kiss on the cheek if they were close to the family, help your mother prepare everything necessary to receive them, and so on. The men did not have to do any of this; men simply didn't even enter into this category of thinking."^[54] In these unwritten social rules, daughters were subordinate to sons, and sons to fathers. As a saintly figure, in her abnegation the mother acted as the moral fabric of the family unit.^[55] Through her passed the social values necessary for proper upbringing. The father, on the other hand, instilled respect for authority via a stern benevolence backed by the threat of punishment. This was of course an idealization, but there was a great deal of truth in how such values were manifest in middle-class life. Reflecting on this, Rincón continued:

My father was the ultimate authority; apparently everything worked and functioned according to what he said. But for that reason, my father had it quite well. He took charge of intervening in disputes when

he wanted to; and when he didn't want to, he didn't. He had that privilege. While in reality, the standard for everyday behavior was set by my mother. She used the name of my father almost like a "monster"; he was like a god. If you were good, your father was going to be happy, and if you were bad your father was going to hit you. Actually, my father never hit me. He was very different in that sense. He was very sensitive and wise, but still very comfortable [in his role].^[56]

These social values at the familial level reflected in microcosm the idealized patriarchal state, in which the Virgin of Guadalupe (coopted by the PRI as a patron image of national identity) played the role of the suffering mother, and the president the commanding voice of the father. The very notion of a "Revolutionary Family," a term originating in the late-1920s corporatist arrangement of societal actors, directly reflected this patriarchal structure. Respect for one's parents and elders—in a gendered, hierarchical manner—was to be inculcated in the family and generalized for society. Thus, the "un-mothering" of the social order—the literal interpretation of desmadre—connoted the failure of parents and society as a whole to instill those essential moral values (respect, suffering, discipline) embraced by buenas costumbres. In particular, however, women bore a disproportionate responsibility for this cultural outlook. They were expected to retain their "purity" (both as virgins until marriage and as suffering saints afterward), while men were expected to demonstrate their virility. Hence, when societal alarms began ringing over the breakdown of buenas costumbres, the "lax morality" of young women was a central target. Boys, too, were blamed, not for dispensing of their role as machos (that will come later, when they begin to let their hair down), but rather for turning their virile energies against the sacrosanct values of patriarchal authority itself.

Clearly a number of factors relating to the modernization process had begun to transform, if not undermine, the framework of buenas costumbres, such as the entry of women into the workforce, rural-urban migration patterns (which separated and placed new stresses on families), and the rising incidence of divorce.^[57] But perhaps no single factor was as dramatically significant as the irreverent, raucous spirit of the new youth culture, embodied in such mass cultural male icons as Marlon Brando, James Dean, and Elvis Presley. These figures not only offered new role models of confrontation in the home but immediately overshadowed the official heroes of the Revolution, whose own exaggerated masculinities had become a direct extension of the patriarchal state itself.^[58] Arguably, a postrevolutionary nationalism that openly celebrated the virile revolutionary figure had ironically laid the groundwork for a different vision of heroic masculinity: the

youthful, gallant outcast who rode a motorcycle, raced cars, or strummed his electric guitar.

Yet, at the same time, rock 'n' roll also embodied a modern lifestyle that appealed to many adults' sense of progress and prosperity, especially the desire to be viewed by the outside world as advanced. Indeed, rather than fearing rock 'n' roll's associations with savagery, many middle- and upper-class adults eagerly latched onto rock 'n' roll as a status of modernity. From 1956 to 1959 the Mexican public was galvanized by the discussion of rock 'n' roll's transformative impact on society. But there was much more at stake in this debate than simply acceptance or nonacceptance of the new youth culture. Rock 'n' roll and its attendant youth culture had opened up an important discursive space not only for boys—who readily identified with the lonely male hero battling against the odds—but also for girls, who were challenged to break free of the traditional mold of proper behavior delineated by buenas costumbres. At risk was the cultural fabric of patriarchy deemed essential to social order in the family and, by extension, the nation itself.

Mexican advertisements for films imported from the United States often adopted a marketing strategy aimed at highlighting the notion of rock 'n' roll as an agent of modernity, while downplaying its associations with disorder. Many of these advertisements, for instance, underscored the notion that rock 'n' roll was an authentically modern movement sweeping the entire planet. Mexico, these advertisements explained, was caught up in a cosmopolitan wave that demanded the participation of all its citizenry. Bill Haley's Rock around the Clock (1957), for instance, was advertised as "the first American film with the authentic and provocative rhythm that is making the entire world crazy." Evoking the image of a nation unified on its march toward the same modern endpoint, the advertisement added: "Now all of Mexico dances rock 'n' roll!" Another advertisement for the film warned, "Try not to move... And see if you can!"^[59] For adults perhaps already feeling outpaced by youth, advertisements for Haley's second film, Don't Knock the Rock (1957), offered the prospect of free dance lessons: Signed photographs of Bill Haley, "The King of 'Rock 'n Roll'," were to be given away, along with "certificates to learn how to dance 'Rock 'n Roll' courtesy of the Arthur Murray Dance Studio."^[60] Significantly, these films did not target an exclusively youth audience. Rather, rock 'n' roll was promoted as a family affair. "A film and a rhythm for all ages!" read the announcement for Rock around the Clock . This language reflected an association in the public mind of rock 'n' roll with modern values and thus appealed to an image of the Mexican family as one attuned to modern times.

The Mexican film industry wasted no time in marketing native films with a rock 'n' roll content. Some of these simply dealt with the rhythm as a new dance style with little emphasis on youth per se. In this category, for instance, were musical-variety films such as Música de siempre (1956) and Locura musical (1956), films that took advantage of the "formula of much music and little argument."^[61] These mostly showcased local performers interpreting hits from across a broad spectrum of styles, ranging from mambo to rock 'n' roll. But the industry also directly participated in the emergent debate over rock 'n' roll and the youth culture by producing a series of films throughout the 1960s that, while at times building on a long-standing genre of musical dramas and comedies, also sought to emulate the marketing success of rock 'n' roll-based dramas originating in the United States. These films largely fell into two categories: those that displayed an image of ebullient youth symbolic of the modernizing aspirations of the country itself and those that displayed an image of youth as delinquent and desmadre, disrespectful of authority and, at times quite literally, parentless. While the latter category always ended with a moral message, the image of rebellious youth that was presented had an important impact and often caused controversy.

The realization of these and other B films was regarded by critics as a distasteful collapse of the so-called Golden Age (Epoca de Oro) in Mexican cinema dating from the 1940s, and it is today regarded as a nadir in native cinematic production. Why the sudden decline of the highly regarded Mexican cinema came about is complex. According to the film historian Carl Mora, the collapse is ironically attributed at least in part to the very commercial success the industry once enjoyed. Buttressed by state subsidies and reined in by a closed actors' union, film production became increasingly reliant on the formulaic success of the "star system." Meanwhile, competition from imports (U.S. films shown in Mexico City between 1953 and 1958 averaged more than 200 per year, compared with fewer than 100 Mexican films for the same period) encouraged a crass commercialism "to make films more competitive on the international scene."^[62] Mora continues, "The basic problem was that as films became costlier and had to be produced on an assembly-line basis, there was ever-greater reliance on 'formulas'—comedias rancheras ; films based on dance fads—cha-cha [sic ], charleston, rock and roll; comedies; lacrimogenic melodramas; horror vehicles à la Hollywood; American-style westerns; and 'super-hero' adventures in which masked cowboys or wrestlers took on a variety of evildoers and monsters. Quality plummeted but production increased."^[63] What Mora misses, however, is an understanding that the new characters and

themes—such as "El Santo" and the young rebel—served popular interests, especially among the growing youth population, in ways in which the older films could not. Though today these films are largely denied the prestige accorded to the classic cinema which predates them, that should not necessarily be a measure of their popularity and influence at the time.^[64]

The films that focused on youth as a symbol of progress and modernity shared several themes. For one thing, they were all shot against the backdrop of the capital and, more specifically, the newly inaugurated (1954) National Autonomous University (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, or UNAM). This provided an opportunity to showcase the modern features of the capital and, hence, the nation's progress. Second, these films are virtually devoid of the politics of youth rebellion. In large part this is because parents are conveniently marginalized in the plots. Yet even the music itself is presented without the attendant controversy that began to surround it in real life. Rock 'n' roll was mostly treated as a new musical rhythm—now, directly associated with youth—in competition with, yet inevitably triumphing over, alternative musical styles. Members of an older generation who resist the rhythm are presented as stodgy and out of touch with the times, as in Al compás del rock'n roll (1956). Here a group working to thwart rock 'n' roll is represented as a clique of closed-minded older women called "The League of Virtue," a clear takeoff on the real-life conservative parents' organization, The Mexican League of Decency.

Third, not only do these films tend to avoid or trivialize generational conflicts, but social and class divisions are virtually ignored. As Emilio García Riera comments on the film Viva la juventud (1955), "[the students] live in a species of euphoric limbo and totally set apart from the social and political concerns of the student world."^[65] The image of Mexico these films present is narrowly defined. A close association between rock 'n' roll, youth, and material progress is emphasized, and the young are presented as gleeful students without economic hardships. In fact, the films offer a completely flattering, but totally unrealistic, portrayal of university life: students all seem to have cars and live sheltered from economic (or political, for that matter) hardship. When Mexico's urban underside is depicted, such as briefly in a scene from La locura del rock'n roll (1956), this comes at night, with its associations of darkness and danger. In fact, if anything, rock 'n' roll becomes a means of mediating generational and class conflicts. For example, in La locura del rock'n roll latent class tensions between students at the working-class Polytechnical Institute and the more prestigious UNAM are displaced by the staging of a rock 'n' roll battle of bands from the two university systems. Against the backdrop of fights breaking out in

the audience, the droll voice of an elderly narrator closes the film by explaining: "As you can see, the bonds of fraternity which unite students from the University and Polytechnical Institute are strong. Because everyone loves one another." In real life, rivalry between the two university systems was mediated in part by U.S.-style football games. But resentment and class antagonism also characterized students' political views of one another and largely kept the two systems from organizing jointly until the 1968 student movement.

In contrast to an earlier genre of cabaret films that centered on the "dark" side of urban nightlife and, for women especially, the attendant economic and moral hardships,^[66] these films suggested the possibility of rock 'n' roll as a vehicle for social mobility. Forming a rock 'n' roll band was identified with "clean" business practices and staying within the boundaries of traditional respect for one's elders; youth, after all, only want to have fun. At the same time, the more modern notion of women exerting varying degrees of independence—and the implied challenges to machismo that this presents—is also explored in these films. For example, in La locura del rock'n roll a group of women students and their boyfriends decide collectively to form a dance band. But when the women are hired as an all-female group to perform música tropical in a nightclub, the men find themselves not only jobless but without an identity as performers . Meanwhile, the women quickly discover that their largely male audience is less interested in their music than in their bodies. Still, their performances afford them an economic security independent of their boyfriends, a fact that begins to rile the men. One night the girls, discovering that the boys are penniless, invite them to eat tacos. Considered a bold affront to traditional gender roles, one of the boyfriends angrily responds: "The problem with our times is that men have to feel like fools. Men are losing their quality as men. It makes me feel ashamed!" "But that's the good thing about our age!" his girlfriend retorts, clearly proud of her newfound economic and social independence, a reflection of real-life changes in middle-class gender roles. At this, the boyfriend stands up and challenges the rest of his friends to leave: "Whoever stays has no shame," he declares, before leading the boys away. Left alone, however, the women immediately become vulnerable to being accosted by several wandering men from the street. Their shouts bring the boys back running, thus offering the opportunity to redeem their manhood (and rectify the imbalanced gendered framework) by beating up the vagrants. Yet while this reminds the women of their proper place—their vulnerability in a man's world—it does not solve the conflicting structural re-

ality of their mounting independence. Hence, the boys decide to battle the girls on their own terms, by forming a separate band—a rock 'n' roll band.

Here the boys have an important advantage. By 1956 the figure of Elvis Presley had transformed the performance style of rock 'n' roll away from a dance-orchestral emphasis toward the lone masculine interlocutor. Elvis, at least for Mexico, assured a specific role for men as interpreters of rebellion, making intrinsic the connection between musical performance and masculinity. Boys could emulate Presley's musical virility, and they did so as a means of testing and winning over girls, whose admiration for Elvis went beyond his dark, handsome features to his gutsy pride in the face of adult-laid obstacles.^[67] Rehearsing relentlessly—"And we're playing pure rock and roll, man!" one of them shouts in English—the boys try to undercut their girlfriends' status, as the big competition of the bands approaches. Learning of their boyfriends' new strategy, the girls themselves now switch to rock 'n' roll but realize that without a male singer their image is doomed to failure. At this they secretly offer a job to one of the boys, "Richard," hiring him as their lead. Come the final competition the girls will win, but because of their new lead who looks, swaggers, and even sings—in English—just like Elvis (a fact not lost on movie advertisements):

Give me rock 'n' roll
Because I like it so much
It's driving me insane.
I really don't know what I'm doing!

With this, the females in the audience are sent into a frenzy, mobbing Richard on stage after the song.^[68] "Elvis" has thus stolen the show, and, although he has won the contest for the otherwise all-female band, victory comes at the cost of reinscribing the boundaries of gendered performance: while Richard shakes and croons like a real rebel, the girls have acknowledged their subordinate role by changing into bunny suits for the performance.

The spurts of English-language dialogue and song also constituted an important aspect of these films. This reflected the explicit identification of rock 'n' roll culture with the United States, and Anglo society in particular. When one of the characters in La locura del rock'n roll asks in English, "Have you heard that rock 'n' roll? That new rhythm?" he is clearly identifying with an image of rock embodied in Elvis Presley and Bill Haley. The link between rock 'n' roll and modernity was thus grounded in the image of White performance. Secondly, English was fashionable among the upper

classes, an indication not only of one's cosmopolitanism but also of one's social achievements in an economy increasingly tied to the United States. Most children of the upper classes had the opportunity to study and travel abroad; flaunting one's English became a recognized sign of wealth and privilege. For the middle classes, learning English was not only socially prestigious but also enhanced one's job prospects; this was reflected in the scores of English-language schools that proliferated during this period.^[69] However, there was also a third interpretation, though one not invoked by this category of films. This was the association of rock 'n' roll sung in English with the breakdown of social order, exemplified in films such as Blackboard Jungle . Here English reflected not order and progress but an excessive modernity bordering on chaos.

Thus if rock 'n' roll had an implicit identification with modern values—underscored in Mexican films by the incorporation of the English language and trivialized gender conflicts—there was also an unruly underside associated with this imported rhythm. One reviewer of Bill Haley's Don't Knock the Rock , for instance, described it as "simultaneously complying with the two missions that the earlier [Haley film] fulfilled: arousing sympathy and taste for this musical rhythm ... and provoking antipathy and repulsion." "If at times [the film] is enjoyable because of its music, at other moments it seems frankly provocative. One has the impression that the propaganda of this type of music has been making not a slowly convincing and delicate conquest, but [one] of violent shocks [and] bold challenges to the public, which at times reacts in energetic protest."^[70]

A landmark film that established the association between the new youth culture and delinquency worldwide was Blackboard Jungle (1955), the first film to include a rock 'n' roll song (Bill Haley's "Rock around the Clock") as part of its sound track. Not only did inclusion of the song mark "the beginning of rock and roll's full breakthrough as a popular music form among the young," it "also laid the groundwork for a firm association of rock and roll and juvenile delinquency."^[71] The film's title was translated as Semilla de maldad (Wicked Seed), and Mexican advertisements followed the pattern set by U.S. ads for the film in concentrating on the presumed licentiousness of Margaret Hayes, who plays an unwed schoolteacher in a rough city district. The Mexican translation, however, directly tied Hayes's loose morals to the unruly social order the film depicts. The two advertisements were distinct in other ways as well. In the U.S. promotion the crucial scene when Margaret Hayes is attacked and nearly raped in the school library is a central visual of the advertisement, her expression of sheer terror highlighted by the accompanying text: "The Scream in the Classroom!" Under-

neath this movie still is another shot of Hayes, this time provocatively adjusting a stocking. In the actual film, an ambiguous flirtation is established between Glenn Ford (who is newly married) and Hayes after he rescues her from the library attack and then takes it upon himself to crack open the psychology of the gangs that terrorize the school. This flirtation is then exploited by a young student seeking to avenge Ford's "tough-love" approach in his classroom. The U.S. version of the advertisement thus reads: "She was a teacher who was indiscreet enough to wear a tight skirt! What happened then could only happen in this big-city school where tough teenagers ran wild!"^[72] The Mexican promotion also focused on Hayes's perceived sexual indiscretion but reconfigured the representations of physical danger as well as sexual flirtation. Instead of a movie still of Hayes in a short skirt, advertisements featured a drawing that depicted a voluptuous, "Latin-looking" Hayes—wearing a shoulderless blouse and a long skirt—parading in front of a school-yard fence. Several menacing and lust-driven youths reach out for her through the bars. Like the U.S. advertisement, her look is one of oblivion—or perhaps silent seduction—to the lascivious danger she has incited around her. The announcement reads: "The drama of youth led astray! The indiscreet [female] teacher provoked the students in a school where the youth let their malevolent instincts run wild. There the young [female] teachers are in danger and violence reins! You will not be able to forget what happened easily!" "For Adults Only," the advertisement warns.^[73]

This focus on the "loose morals" of Margaret Hayes, the "indiscreet teacher" in question, exploited societal fears that associated rock 'n' roll culture with a flagrant disregard for buenas costumbres. In the film, Hayes's flirtatiousness directly challenged the parameters of social behavior, both as a daughter and as a potential mother. By acting unwomanly—by being economically independent and flirting with a married man—Hayes represented the transformation of feminine values that threatened to destabilize the system: without the firm commitment of a woman to her husband and home, the "malevolent instincts" of males are unleashed and the unmothering of the social order—desmadre—will follow. But the real issue was rock 'n' roll culture, which in the film presents an image of youth defying authority and thus, by definition, patriarchy. The moment the son (student) returns the gaze of the father (teacher) he rewrites the gestures of authority that have held the system in place.

Less than a year following Blackboard Jungle , a Mexican film that tied together the themes of delinquency, licentiousness, and rock 'n' roll shocked the capital. Indeed, it was scant coincidence that the sound track for Juven -

tud desenfrenada (1956) was none other than Bill Haley's "Rock around the Clock," performed in English by Mexico's young star Gloria Ríos.^[74] In Juventud desenfrenada the issue of motherhood as an integral concept of patriarchy and social order was driven home in explicit terms. Revolving around the complex lives of various youth, ranging from lower-middle-class to upper-class backgrounds, not one of the characters has a firm foundation of parental love. Here mothers are either self-absorbed or malicious, and fathers are literally missing (replaced by a drunken or absent stepfather as a result of divorce). Lacking moral guidance from mothers too self-interested to care for their children's fates, the male characters all turn to a life of crime and drugs, the females to a life of prostitution.^[75] At one point the distortion of motherhood becomes so blatant that "Carlos" is forced to call his mother "aunt" in public, to avoid embarrassing her politically connected second husband by revealing a previous marriage. "All parents are the same," Carlos spits out at one point; "They're all fakes." What resolution the film provides comes when the same Carlos agrees to marry his girlfriend (whom he had once tried to force into prostitution) upon a doctor's certification that she is really a virgin; throughout, we had been led to believe that she was raped by her stepfather. From a priest we are told, "Only faith and love of God can save our youth."

Proclaiming the film's "basis in real events," newspaper advertisements provoked potential viewers with the questions: "Where are today's youth headed? Are parents to blame for juvenile delinquency?"^[76] This was an indirect reference to the real escalation in numbers of divorces throughout the country^[77] and an emphasis on a consumer culture that, as far as editorialists were concerned, undermined the stability of a stern authority figure in the home and led to pampering rather than discipline. Recalled today by the Mexican film historian Emilio García Riera "as one of the most repugnant pictures ever made [for its] loathsome display and vile moral hypocrisy,"^[78]Juventud desenfrenada nonetheless was significant in that it openly exploited societal fears of changes in Mexican family structure and the concomitant impact of youth culture. "In this production there was nothing made-up, everything was true," wrote a reviewer in a promotional article shortly after the film's release; the plot "was taken from the archives of the youth Tribunal."^[79] As in Blackboard Jungle , the connection between lax values and social unmothering (highlighted by rape) is clearly stated, only this time with the more explicit tie-in to rock 'n' roll. Thus in a promotional poster for the film a woman (whose skirt falls above the knees) is depicted being attacked on a couch by a young man, with the words "Rock

'n' Roll!" just underneath in boldface type.^[80] Newspaper advertisements likewise stressed the links between wanton youth and the new music, proclaiming, "Rock 'n' Roll! The rhythm that maddens youth." And despite the pretense that this was a film about youth, as with Semilla de maldad the warning "Adults Only!" separated it from that other class of rock 'n' roll films promoted as "family oriented." For in Juventud desenfrenada , potential viewers were also enticed with the knowledge that the young actress, Aida Araceli, sheds her clothes: "The Youngest Nude in the World," one advertisement boasted.^[81]

In an all-out effort to promote the film and deflect conservative criticism of its content, a contest was held in which participants answered the question, "What was it that most impressed you about 'Juventud Desenfrenada'?"^[82] The winners were a male doctor and a female student. The latter's answer was published in full by the newspaper Excélsior:

I was impressed by the intelligence of the format of the film, which captured all of the psychological moments which youth of our time are passing through and which, unfortunately, our parents cannot appreciate because theirs was another era. The problem of misled youth that the film presented interested me intensely. But how can youth follow the good path if society offers us so few examples? The excess of money in some homes and the lack of culture and comprehension in others is one of the causes of this problem. The only salvation is that youth turn their eyes toward morality and religion.^[83]

Juventud desenfrenada encapsulated the association between delinquency, rock 'n' roll, and the undermining of buenas costumbres that had begun to enter into the public discourse. As Federico Arana writes in describing the mounting impact of this and other related films, "The press did not cease to point out the horrible plague of rebellious youth, driven by a diseased and money-making spirit."^[84]

Rebeldismo Sin Causa

As in the United States, reports of juvenile delinquency leapt onto the front pages of Mexican newspapers, and critics lost no time in associating the apparent crime wave with rock 'n' roll and the degenerative moral values it introduced. For many, these new values reflected not progress but affronts to the traditional roles of men, women, and children in society. Rock 'n' roll fostered an attitude of confrontation and chaos, reflected especially in what one author has labeled the "rich iconography of delinquency" that

accompanied the new youth culture in the United States but that seems pertinent in part to Mexico as well: "The styles we associate with it—leather jackets, blue jeans, the 'ducktail' haircut, the preference for the motorcycle—were all associated in the consciousness of the 1950s with rebellious, discontented, working-class teenagers who were always 'at risk' for delinquency."^[85] One significant difference in Mexico, however, was the fact that this youth culture did not percolate from the working classes upward but, rather, the reverse. Curiously, when Marlon Brando introduced his working-class gestures and speech to Mexico City audiences in The Wild One (1953), his character at one level reflected the outlaw aura of Pancho Villa, whom O'Malley labels "the rebel without a cause."^[86] Villa, in fact, was the one revolutionary hero deemed too caustic by the state to incorporate into the official Revolutionary pantheon.^[87] For in Brando, as in Villa, a model of insubordination was nurtured explicitly from the rootlessness of the lower classes. Seeing The Wild One , "the imitators of Marlon Brando look[ed] for that equivalent language, that similar mode of speaking, prohibited and subversive, which commits an outrage against buenas costumbres," writes the novelist Parménides García Saldaña.^[88] In emulating Brando, Mexican middle-class youth were, of course, pursuing an image of working-class culture taken from the United States. Yet their linguistic material, at least, came from closer at hand. For that "equivalent language" that García Saldaña writes about was to be found among inhabitants of the lower-class barrios in Mexico City, the only ones "who have the words which come closest to the image of the [rebel] hero and his mode of speaking.... There [in the barrio] is the language: greasy, untidy."^[89] This transgression of the grammatical boundaries that delineated class differences not only challenged a notion of "proper culture" but introduced the prospect of plebeian disorder as well. As Johnny Laboriel, lead singer of the band Los Rebeldes del Rock, recalls:

Coming out of the film, The Wild One with Marlon Brando, I knocked out some guy. Can you imagine? It's incredible how much of an influence that whole scene was. We rode around on motorcycles, with chains. I got kicked out of military school. We copied everything from the films, which we saw in the matinees. You know, you want to stand out so you adopt the pose of the winner. You see a film where everyone's drinking and singing, and you want to stand out in life too, so you do the same. It's incredible, rock 'n' roll was this wild thing. That's why it became a culture unto itself. Our parents didn't even have time to tell us not to do it; it hit like an avalanche. It was really incredible.^[90]

Whereas Marlon Brando in The Wild One glorified the language, attitude, and fashion of the working-class hoodlum, James Dean in Rebel without a Cause (1955) offered an image of the alienation and defiance of privileged youth.^[91] If imitators of Brando introduced a threatening image of the plebeian released, the influence of Dean became associated in the public eye with material excess and political corruption. Upper-class youth, whose wealth gave them access to luxury consumer items, such as cars and motorcycles, found that they could brandish their insolence with impunity because of political connections and class status; they became derisively referred to as los juniors . As García Saldaña writes:

The rebellion of the admirer of James Dean (his violations of law and order) served to demonstrate to the rest that Papa was an important and influential person in Mexico City. Little Dean felt rebelliously content racing around in Dad's car, showing off at parties that he was The Son of His Dad, embellishing himself in the role that Daddy had Lots of Money and Daddy gave him all the money he asked for to get English cashmere suits, clothing from the United States, gold bracelets, etc. This Dude played the part of Don Juan well, his car attracting all the girls from private colleges for merry people to fall in love with him.^[92]

Indeed, in the public mind-set the relationship between these films and juvenile delinquency was so close that the press appropriated the phrase re-beldismo sin causa (rebellion without a cause) as its standard description for youth disorder. At the same time, attacks on delinquency also opened up a populist but safe political space in which abuses of power by the rich were publicly condemned. Reporting the capture of two youths for check fraud, for example, a newspaper article described them as "two perfect examples of what have been called 'rebels without a cause'—20 and 24 years old, good seeming and well dressed, from wealthy families, superior education, and great desires to become professional delinquents."^[93]

Debates about the rise in delinquency were complicated by the fact that it was linked to mass culture introduced from the United States. This raised the larger security question of a generation of youth that had chosen to adopt the rebellious posture introduced by a foreign culture. Attacks on the youth culture thus became part of a larger critique of the mass media in general and the foreign mass media in particular, which were collectively regarded by intellectuals, the press, and eventually the government authorities as directly undermining the social fabric of Mexican society. For some, this became a question of cultural imperialism. The fact that national filmmakers emulated a formula of youth rebellion only contributed to the

material for this debate. Indeed, the mass media provided a new discursive lens through which arguments over national identity, social stability, and patriarchy could be buttressed as well as reexamined.

Culture Wars and the Backlash Against Elvis Presley

The tension between accepting rock 'n' roll as a modernizing agent and viewing it as the embodiment of a threat to social stability was manifested in the press and the public mind-set during the mid-to-late 1950s. This conflict mirrored the profound changes present in everyday life: the increased cultural and economic ties with the United States, manifested especially in the rising consumer culture; the rapid transformation of the urban environment, reflected in both the development of new public works and increased rural migration to the capital; a political environment in which the rhetoric of the Revolutionary Family belied the reality of a closed political system. The official heroes of the Revolution had come to have less relevance for a new generation of urban youth who discovered a closer connection with James Dean and Elvis Presley than with Benito Juárez or Emiliano Zapata, much less Jorge Negrete or Javier Solís (both renowned ranchera singers). This fact was not lost on concerned editorialists and members of the government. "Foreign influence, that which is established by stronger countries over those which are economically weaker," one writer editorialized, "shines itself directly in the environment.... James Dean is the mirror where today's youth look."^[94] "The struggle is an arduous one," another editorial stated, "because concepts and habits from other countries and races have filtered into Mexico which differ diametrically from the nature of our lives and ideology."^[95] Signposts of cultural hybridization were everywhere. While some may have seen this as heralding a liberalization of authoritarian values, others viewed the changes with alarm. The clearest culprit was the influence of an increasingly globalized mass-media culture, which transformed figures such as Brando, Dean, and Presley into teenage idols, whose dress, gestures, and even language became incorporated into the lexicon of everyday rebellion:

The majority of these young punks are dressed extravagantly, not only Texan style [that is, blue jeans and boots] but in clothing never before admitted under the criterion that we have for these things, and imitating the styles which appear in the cinema, foreign magazines and among some exotic visiting artists. Becoming lost is the unity within the family and respect for one's elders, in the belief that the norms and customs that structured the home are now "old fashioned" and don't match up to the demands of modern development.^[96]

Nothing less than the future direction of society itself was at risk in these cultural transformations.

What was at stake in the triumph of one discourse over the other was a cultural framework through which the process of modernization could be negotiated. At one extreme, embracing a version of rock 'n' roll stripped of meaningful social conflict suggested the possibility of experiencing the pleasures of modernity without the pain of the social costs of adjustment. At the other extreme, demonizing the youth culture by linking it with social disorder served as a prop to resist the unsettling transformations of an economy that was undergoing rapid changes in social and cultural values. In this, there was a curious coincidence of criticism from both conservatives and leftists. For example, the famed muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros, a life-long communist who was later jailed for his support of striking workers, was quoted in 1957 as saying: "Pornographic films and rock 'n' roll and its derivatives have [brought] Mexican youth to the border of an irredeemable moral crisis."^[97] Rock 'n' roll had emerged as a central fixture in the struggle over the terms of Mexican modernity.

By the start of 1957, the mania for rock 'n' roll had begun to reach new heights. In January it was announced that Mexico City would stage its first " 'Rock 'n Roll Festival' ... with the participation of the most important bands, jazz groups and interpreters of this new rhythm." The public was invited "to take part in the [radio and television] transmission [by] dancing and singing rock'n roll."^[98] As Federico Arana observes, "The public was so enthusiastic for the new rhythm that no one was shocked by the news appearing in the press that Elvis would be coming to Mexico," an event strongly lobbied against by the Mexican League of Decency.^[99] Though Presley was said to have declined an invitation to participate in the festival, he donated a guitar, "an exact replica of the one which he uses, so that it can be presented to the best jazz group which interprets rock'n roll."^[100] Shortly thereafter, a Mexico City radio station carried an exclusive interview with Presley. Calling him "a consecrated artist," a newspaper reviewer noted that the interview "plainly confirms the prestige of 'Champion of Musical Hits' which the radio-listening public of Mexico has granted to [Radio Exitos],"^[101] one of two stations (Radio Mil was the second) dedicated to serving a younger-generation listening audience during the late 1950s.

The emergent cultural wars over rock 'n' roll, however, took a dramatic turn shortly thereafter. On 19 February a comment gleaned from an alleged border interview with Elvis Presley appeared in a sidebar of the gossip columnist, Federico de León, in which the rock 'n' roll star was quoted

as saying, "I'd rather kiss three black girls than a Mexican." Two days later, a Mexican woman was quoted in the same column as saying, "I'd rather kiss three dogs than one Elvis Presley." At first unnoticed by the public at large, this exchange soon unleashed a torrent of anti-Presley criticism that sustained a powerful backlash against Presley and the mass media itself. Most people now dismiss the remark as completely false, some even attributing it to an act of political vengeance against Presley. For instance, Herbe Pompeyo of Polygram Records in Mexico City claims that a "high-up Mexican political figure" wanted to contract Presley for a private party, for which he sent the performer a blank check to fill in as he wished. Presley, according to the story, returned the blank check, so the politico, extremely offended, invented the storyline about Elvis not liking Mexican women.^[102] For Arana, who went to great lengths to investigate the credibility of de León's citation, the quotation amounted to nothing short of a conspiracy by "government officials [and] the newspapers in which they collaborate"^[103] to "liquidate the rock and roll monster"^[104] that had been unleashed by the mass media. In fact, even at the time different commentators questioned the authenticity of the quotation. In one case, a writer drew the connection to conservative opponents seeking to "indefinitely proscribe this rhythm,"^[105] as had recently occurred in Cuba. There, during the waning days of Fulgencio Batista's dictatorship, rock 'n' roll was denounced as "immoral and profane and offensive to public morals and good customs."^[106] In an effort to defend his own honor—and record sales—Presley responded to the charges by answering that he "has never used disrespectful terms for Mexican women." Moreover, "a certified copy of this declaration" would be immediately available in Mexico for his fans.^[107]

Fallout from the alleged comment, true or false, nonetheless had an immediate impact on the direction of public discourse. What is especially interesting is the way in which this response was couched in gendered terms, rather than directly challenging the comment as racist.^[108] Radio Exitos, which only a short time before had received accolades for its exclusive interview with Presley, announced that it was now leading a boycott of the "insolent artist" after having read de León's column over the air. The station, described as "enjoying the largest youth audience in the capital," reportedly received "thousands of telephone calls from all social strata supporting the decision to completely suppress [Presley's] records."^[109] The reporter who filed this story made little effort to hide his bias: "Quite commendable is the action taken by this radio station, which spontaneously came out in defense of the dignity of Mexican women." Next to the article

is a large photograph of Presley, mouth open and eyes angled downward, in an open-collared shirt and sports jacket. The caption reads, "He's very manly," an assertion mocked by the accompanying text: "Dressed in woman's clothing, nobody would say he's a man."^[110]

That Presley had gone from the epitome of virility to being called a transvestite was actually a short leap in gendered logic. By challenging the traditional boundaries of dance performance—for a man, shaking hips and contorting lips were considered "feminine" gestures—Presley had actually made himself vulnerable to the charge of maricón (homosexual). Attacking Presley thus became linked to a reaffirmation of Mexican masculinity, which had been undermined not only by the popularity of this imported idol (who shook his hips and sneered) but also by the "modern values" he heralded. His emasculation by the press can best be described as a rhetorical strategy for the strengthening of a heroic nationalism subverted by the transnational mass media. The latter were blamed for having introduced competing male icons of authority and, thus, for displacing an image of youth as obedient and of women, in particular, as the bearers of "proper education and values." Presley had institutionalized a gaze of defiance and a gesture of chaos—the confrontational, unbounded territory introduced by rock 'n' roll—which challenged society by its direct appeal to youth. After all, it was Presley and his ilk who, by seducing the hearts of young Mexican women (and inducing Mexican men to mimic him), had cast a spell on countless youth, drawing them away from the traditional values and national heroes propagated by the PRI. Questioning Presley's manliness was one way of undermining his authority as a sex symbol and role model.

The uproar over Presley's alleged remark came just days before the release of a musical-spoof film entitled Los chiflados del rock'n roll . By examining the transformation in marketing of this film we capture a glimpse of the significance of the Presley uproar. Roughly translated as, "Crazed for Rock'n Roll," the film featured renowned ranchera performers Agustín Lara, Pedro Vargas, and Luis Aguilar and thus fell well within the boundaries of a discourse on rock 'n' roll as novel musical style rather than youth rebellion. A reviewer noted that the film "neither exalted Presley, nor had the slightest relationship with his excesses."^[111] But the timing was such that the producer, Guillermo Calderón, faced pressures from groups organizing against Elvis Presley to prevent the film's release.^[112] Overnight, advertisements for the movie changed dramatically to incorporate the dispute over Presley. Whereas earlier advertisements had featured caricatured drawings of the featured artists, now they juxtaposed a series of well-

armed, male "revolutionary" fighters (in large sombreros) firing point blank at a feminized Elvis Presley—tight pants revealing hips distorted to exaggeration—under the heading, "Die Elvis Presley!" (see Figure 1). Cheering on these "revolutionaries" are drawings of full-busted women in bikinis, Playboy-bunny versions of the legendary adelitas (female followers of the revolutionary struggle).^[113] During this same period, leaders of the Federación Estudiantil Universitaria (FEU), a powerful student group linked to conservative elements of the government, planned "a gigantic protest against the dancer and actor ... during which there will be a 'burning' of [Presley's] records ... who, in public declarations, sought to defile the Mexican Woman."^[114] Playing on this theme of a public bonfire, a subsequent advertisement for Los chiflados announced that the film was in its "second 'burning' week!" The text continued:

Burn his records!
His forelock!
His photos!
His guitar!
Burn everything that you wish, but ...
Put yourself in a good mood by coming to a 'burn'
With the true kings of fun and of Rock'n Roll!^[115]

A different advertisement for the film played even more directly on the idea of Mexican machismo as the safeguard of patriarchal values, this time by linking it with rock 'n' roll itself: "Long live the authentic kings of rock 'n' roll, valiant and 'profligate' ... but incapable of lacking respect for a woman!" Adding emphasis to the notion that Mexican men were in fact superior to their U.S. counterparts, the text continued: "Even if she's light-skinned [güera ] and doesn't speak Spanish!"^[116] Mexicans, in other words, did not need an outsider to teach them how to be "real men." Moreover, they had their own men capable of performing rock 'n' roll (e.g. Agustín Lara), but within the gendered boundaries of respect that delineated buenas costumbres. This respect presumably preserved the modernizing aspects of rock 'n' roll along with its machismo, while policing it from falling into desmadre.

Complicating the public's response to Presley's remark were the contradictions encoded in the youth culture itself. On one hand, rock 'n' roll symbolized the leveling of an older order. The rock 'n' roll gesture—characterized by rupture and defiance—directly challenged the steady gaze of parental authority, substituting rebellion for obedience. Such defiance,

Figure 1.
Following the scandal over Elvis Presley's alleged comment,
movie advertisements for Los chiflados del rock'n roll
changed dramatically. Source: Excélsior, 9 March 1957, A21.

in turn, opened up a critical space for women, who began to question their own subordinate role. This relationship between policing the boundaries of respect for one's elders and upholding patriarchal authority over women was made explicit in the conflict over Presley. One writer, for example, made little effort to hide his antagonism toward rock 'n' roll, emphasizing the view that Mexican honor and virility were at stake in the protests against Presley: "Fortunately the Mexican [man] has a high sense of dignity, respect for women, virility and authentic probity that loathes anything that offends the Mexican woman. The sentiment of repulsion toward the wretched and unsettling rhythm has flown toward the four cardinal points since we learned about the infamous insult that was hurled at our women from one of [Presley's] television programs in the United States."^[117] To be sure, the most reactionary elements rallied to the cause of rock's expulsion. Federico de León, responsible for publishing the alleged Presley remark, thus wrote triumphantly (though prematurely) that "Mexico is celebrating the funerals of 'rock 'n' roll.' "^[118]

On the other hand, rock 'n' roll embodied a concept of modernity that coincided with the progressive, consumer-oriented platform of the Revolutionary Family itself. Rock 'n' roll's spirit of innovation and restless energy offered an image of youthful exuberance and progressive change that symbolized a nation on the move, one bounding out of the poverty and backwardness associated with the pre-World War II period toward a new Mexico, allied with the United States and confident to be host of the Olympics in the decade ahead. Suppressing the styles of youth was a reflection of closed-mindedness, for one must keep pace with the times. "Youth of today," argued one writer, "shake to modern rhythms just as others before them did to the rhythms of their era."^[119] In fact, the student group that organized the burning of Presley records, the FEU, sought to isolate Presley from the rock 'n' roll trend in general by announcing that the "struggle is not exactly against rock and roll, but against Presley who offended our women with his public remarks."^[120] For the "modernizers," therefore, ultimately the question was how to censor the noxious influences of the mass media while retaining the modernizing elements so basic to an image of progress. "The advantage" for Mexico, according to one editorialist, "is that in spite of the 'rock and rollers,' our youth, in the majority, have not lost their sense of responsibility toward their country, the family, and themselves."^[121] Preserving these values within the framework of a modernizing ideology was the task at hand. Hence the battle against Presley became less a struggle against rock 'n' roll per se, except by the rhythm's most

ardent detractors, than a struggle to protect the buenas costumbres that undergirded a patriarchal society and state.

The King Creole Riot

A second incident involving Elvis Presley, this time a riot at the screening of his film King Creole, occurred in May 1959 at the Américas Cinema in Mexico City. Newspaper announcements for the film, whose title was translated as Melodía siniestra (Sinister Melody), had appeared only the day before. Moreover, these were sparse and lacked the graphics that usually accompanied films of the rock 'n' roll genre. One, for example, simply proclaimed: "Elvis Presley. The idol of the young in his first great dramatic performance." This was not to be a family affair: "Adults Only," the advertisement intoned.^[122] According to newspaper accounts, the unrest began when more than 600 "rebels without a cause" entered the theater without paying. Taking to the balcony section, they "dedicated themselves to destroying the seats, which they threw onto the floor below them, along with bottles, lit papers and all class of projectiles." But the real raucousness erupted when a group of females tried to leave the theater and "were stripped of their clothing by the savages, whose pawing left them naked." The newspaper went on to describe the rioters as "in the majority, university students." However, this claim was contested by the student leader "Palillo," an organizer of the anti-Presley protest more than a year earlier, who responded that "hundreds of [nonuniversity] youth" were also involved, a point which, even if exaggerated, suggested a certain class diversity on the part of the audience.^[123]

The sensationalist tone of the article was not entirely off base, though there were clear biases. The account, for example, fails to mention the fact that riot police (the feared granaderos ) arrived on the scene and brutally accosted exiting youth at random, noting only that "there were no arrests."^[124] The Mexican novelist Parménides García Saldaña, a cult figure of the later counterculture generation, afterward wrote a short story titled "El rey criollo," based on this event. The story gives us a feeling for the charged atmosphere of the theater, no doubt a reflection, in part, of youth efforts to "reclaim" Presley as a virile hero of the young, after the attacks he had faced a short time earlier. The cinema became an anarchic, masculine-defined public space that united teenagers from different neighborhoods and classes beyond the realm of parental or state authority. As opposed to the university, here was a setting policed solely by youth (an ironic mock-

ery of the announcement's warning, "Adults Only"). Given the opportunity, the crowd unleashed its rebellious defiance, drunken with the pleasures of self-authority. As the lights went down, García Saldaña relates, a national news-service clip was shown, and "everyone [started] telling the asshole narrator to shut-the-fuck-up." The buenas costumbres that dictated proper language and etiquette (especially toward elders in authority) was gleefully put aside. The audience then burst into song: "Me voy pa' el pueblo, hoy es mi día, chingue su madre la policía," which roughly translates as, "I'm with the people, today's my day, screw the police."^[125] The theater pulsated with the desmadre of rock 'n' roll.

Yet this disorder, which cast aside the buenas costumbres inculcated by one's parents and elders, reinscribed the commanding gaze of male over female. The nominal independence that some women experienced in relationship to traditional gender roles (that is, attending the theater without a male chaperone) was swept away by the male-controlled space of the movie house. As García Saldaña relates:

[W]e entered the theater and went up to the balcony. Up there it was just for the guys, raucous and not a single gal. It was as if at the entrance they had put a sign saying that the men go up and the women down, or something to that effect.... Before the film began, it was pure chaos, a fuckin' riot as they say more vulgarly. The different gangs shouted: Here the Guerrero [neighborhood]! Here the Roma! ... And then some chicks come in with leather jackets with swastikas painted on them, pony tails and bobby socks real rock and roller like, with their books and notebooks. And a group of guys gang up around them [and shout], "Dance!"^[126]

In commanding the women to dance, the men here made explicit their control over women's bodies while emphasizing their own role as narrators of youth rebellion. According to García Saldaña, partway through the movie another group of girls entered the theater, looking for seats:

And out of the silence game the shout, "Meat! Meat! Meeaat!" And a group of guys went flying at them. And they started to scream and the guys began to make fun of them, grabbing their asses, their breasts, everything.... Some guys tried to stand up for them, they began throwing fists and the girls managed to get out, half-dressed. It seemed that everything had calmed down, but then they started to tear up the seats and throw them and everyone ran like crazy in all directions, as if the theater were on fire.^[127]

Unfortunately, we do not know more about the specifics of what actually happened in that theater: how class tensions may have played a part, to what

extent the insults and grabbing were limited to one group of boys, rather than a cross-section of the audience, and so on. In any event, the scene quickly turned into a riot once the police arrived. Federico Arana recalls that as he was running out of the theater and into the street he was cornered by a group of granaderos. Without provocation, they "kicked us in the stomachs and beat us with their rifle butts, meanwhile making fun of our situation, in a perverted and cowardly way, until they managed to capture a few scapegoats."^[128] In the public's mind the riot clearly signaled nothing less than the breakdown of social order under the degenerate influence of rock 'n' roll. That several women were practically raped in public only reinforced the belief that a loosening of feminine virtue was directly connected to youth's confrontational posture and thus the collapse of patriarchal authority.

Editorialists were quick to seize the opportunity to once more link an evident crisis in values with the influence of rock 'n' roll. In one example, the social caricaturist Abel Quezada used the occasion of "Teachers' Day" (15 May) to make a commentary on the idea that youth paid more respect to Elvis Presley than to their elders (see Figure 2). Titled "Maestro de la juventud," the cartoon played on the double meaning of maestro as denoting both teacher and, literally, master . The cartoon shows a humble-looking student, bowing slightly and offering a bouquet of flowers to a towering giant; only his legs and part of an arm fit into the frame. Labels indicate to us that the giant is none other than "Elvis Presley" and the humble student, "El rebelde sin causa."^[129] In another cartoon, also by Quezada, rock 'n' roll is represented as a fascistic device manipulating the masses. Under the title, "Al son que le toquen" (To Whichever Tune They Play), a jukebox blaring the words "rock and roll" is directly compared with Hitler's and Mussolini's entertainment" of the masses in their own times.^[130]

Responding to what it described as "a rising and threatening sickness which is manifest in the so-called 'rebels without a cause'," Excélsior editorialized that the "primary cause is found in the breakdown and disunion of the Mexican family over the last years."^[131] A rising consumer culture, coupled with a liberalization of attitudes toward divorce, directly contributed to the undermining of parental authority and thus the loss of respect of child toward adult, according to Excélsior . "This is beginning to be not a plague, but a luxury of modernity," the newspaper lamented shortly thereafter. "The young want to be free and sovereign men [sic ], rich and adventuresome, owners of cars and participants in worldly pleasures, when they hardly have reached the age of fifteen."^[132] For middle-class teenagers, however, as Federico Arana recalls, the reality was more that "we lived narrow,

Figure 2.
Cartoonist Abel Quezada's critique of Elvis
Presley came on Teacher's Day 1959, Source:  Excélsior,
15 May 1959, A7. Used by permission.

boring, almost provincial routines." He continued, "In general, the 'rebels' weren't much besides shy and ordinary kids who put on red nylon jackets like that of James Dean or leather ones like Marlon Brando...and annoyed their family with their baneful mania of seizing the bathroom with the object of practicing the Elvis style raised-lip, popping a zit here or there and maintaining the hair mop and ducktail in good form."^[133] But for the authorities, highlighting the connection between delinquent youth and privilege served to distract from the larger question of mounting poverty in the

urban slums and the dictatorial nature of political society. Later the attorney general, Fernando Román Lugo, in seeking an explanation for delinquency by youth "who are not in poverty, who live in well-formed homes, who are not lacking in entertainment or stimulation," ascribed the problem to "the lack of a Mexican feeling in our homes" brought about by an absence of discipline.^[134]

The Social Threat of Rebeldismo

The perceived crisis in the family became directly linked to political unrest across the nation as strikes erupted during the transition from the administration of Adolfo Ruiz Cortines (1952–1958) to that of Adolfo López Mateos (1958–1964), former secretary of labor. During 1958–1959, union conflicts extending across a spectrum of workers—telegraph, teachers, railway, and petroleum—and centered in the capital "captured the imagination" of the nation and, according to one author, "caused the regime to totter visibly."^[135] Significantly, these labor challenges reflected rebellion by dissident union members (catalyzed by Demetrio Vallejo of the railway workers) against their corrupt leadership. "The demands of the rank and file developed out of grievances which sprang from the realization that the party-union relationship [had] changed from union support of the party to party domination of the unions, by means of venal leaders."^[136] The repudiation of the charrismo system—the political imposition of union bosses by the PRI—paralleled, if only symbolically, the questioning of authority reflected in the youth culture itself. Particularly disconcerting was a strike led by elementary school teachers, which lasted for nearly two months and was characterized by open confrontations with the police. "How is it possible to establish mental discipline in children when the teacher revolts and becomes a striker?" demanded an editorial in Excélsior . Discipline must start within the family, for the nation was a reflection of this basic social unit. The breakdown of institutional hierarchy must be checked at its roots: "Once the 'rebellion without a cause' has started, in that domestic error a new spirit shines in the heart of the child within the school; because here they do not instruct the students in the inviolable and absolute respect for private property, nor in the individual and reciprocal needs for order, nor in the deference owed to hierarchy and one's elders, nor in the moral obligations and social obligations between adults and minors."^[137] As the family unit itself continued to show signs of greater liberalization, connections between workers' "lack of discipline" and the lack of parental control over

children became more urgent. At one point the weekly newsmagazine Jueves de Excélsior editorialized:

It's a shame to contemplate that in Mexico the principle of authority has been lost and that because of this problems are arising daily, ranging from the apparently insignificant rupture in the harmony of the family, due to [parents'] lack of influence over their children, to the nationally transcendent disturbances such as the wrongful stoppage led by railway workers, the recent strike by teachers, and the disorders at the National Polytechnical Institute. Youth vandalism, whose seed is found in the bosom of the Mexican family...is another nuance of this grave problem, in that its full branches touch all spheres of government, dangerously threatening the security of the country.^[138]

The threat of university students' unrest was of particular concern, especially following earlier protests over transportation fare increases and efforts of solidarity with striking workers. This fear was reflected, for example, in an editorial entitled "Rights and Obligations" published in the progovernment magazine Juventud, edited by an organization called "Center for Civic Publicity":

The first obligation of the student is to study. The effort made by the family and the nation to give the student a career must have as a compensation an attitude of personal responsibility on the part of the student. The time to study is sacred. To waste it in idleness, squander it in the skipping of classes, put it to poor use in fights and fruitless disturbances—quite distinct from the fight for a just cause—is to waste this collective effort and prejudice the individual, taking away opportunities to prepare oneself for a remunerative job and [to be] socially useful.^[139]

The problem of delinquency—rebeldismo—was thus seen as more profound in its implications than mere appearance. It suggested a frontal challenge to traditional social hierarchies not only of teacher to student and parent to child but also of union boss to worker, police to citizen. "If this amoral condition continues to penetrate our society," intoned Excélsior, "it is no exaggeration to say that the collapse of the family will lead to the collapse of society, the state, and the nation."^[140] Capturing these fears was a drawing for the June 1959 cover of Jueves de Excélsior, featuring a semiclad woman startled out of bed by lurking shadows on the wall. On the bedspread are the initials, "D.F.," indicating that the woman represents the capital district. Projected on the wall are three red shadows with separate texts superimposed: "Rebel" (with a Presley-style hairdo and a dangling cigarette), "Assailant" (a man covered by a face scarf), and "Criminal" (a

man in a gangster-style hat). At the bottom of the drawing appears the word "Insomnia."^[141] Plainly, the alarming interconnections among youth rebellion, robberies, and "illegal" strikes were causing many sleepless nights for the capital's denizens.

Reimposing A Culture Order

Articulating a "crisis of values" as lying at the heart of other social ills conveniently deflected questions concerning the larger issue of Mexico's authoritarian regime. As was the case historically and would continue to be true in the decades ahead, the PRI manipulated conflicts over cultural issues as a means of absorbing criticism without directly threatening its hold on power.^[142] The debate over "family values" in which rock 'n' roll played such a central role thus allowed the regime to focus on the issue of cultural content in the mass media, rather than the political content of elections and syndicate repression. More specifically, attention was raised by the growing trend away from traditional cultural values, reflected in the youth culture and linking this shift to the undermining of an older, more familiar cultural order. This was a transformation the incoming López Mateos administration, initially at least, sought to address. Having declared during his campaign for the presidency that he intended to govern "on the extreme left within the Constitution" (he later softened his rhetoric after some U.S. $250 million left the country from the private sector), López Mateos fomented a spirit of cultural and economic nationalism.^[143] This bolstering of Mexico's folkloric heritage was balanced by efforts to project an image of Mexico domestically and abroad as a modern, cosmopolitan nation. Such a dual strategy was reflected, for example, in the twin completion during his administration of the Museum of Modern Art and the massive Museum of Anthropology, both located in Chapultepec Park in Mexico City. The president also extended support for the Ballet Folklórico, a dance troupe that had been transformed into a national symbol of Mexican cultural authenticity during the previous administration.^[144]

Facing pressures from the League of Decency as well as the Mexican Society of Authors and Composers, which had seen its members' earnings drop dramatically as foreign artists dominated the airwaves, López Mateos highlighted his commitment to native song. As I noted above, ironically this decline in domestic interest was the flip side of an export boom in Mexican music throughout Latin America, the United States, and Europe. In early 1959 the secretary of communications announced that radio stations with less than 25 percent native content would be fined 5,000 pesos (U.S.

$400). To assist in their programming formats, a catalog of acceptable Mexican tunes prepared by the Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes (INBA), the government performing arts bureaucracy, was "mailed to stations throughout the republic."^[145] Shortly thereafter, Variety reported that government "inspectors are now busy making a day and night check of all music" in an effort to enforce the native-preference order.^[146] In apparent conjunction with this policy, the Department of Music at the UNAM organized what was announced as the first "Song Fair," the aim of which was "to present tunes no longer popular from older composers." As Variety described the fair's organization: "All will be of the romantic ballad type and [the] festival will nix anything that smells of modern rhythms or commercial tunes, which would 'mutilate' [the] whole idea of [the] festival."^[147] These actions coincided with the announcement that plans were under way to centralize a collection of "[a]ll of Mexico's folklore music...via records, text, choreography, still photos and motion pictures" in a new museum, a reflection of concerns that native music be forever preserved.^[148] There was even a youth group, "Juventudes Musicales de México," formed most likely with government funding, that was dedicated exclusively to the "object of infusing and exalting a love for good music among the youth of Mexico." In a letter to López Mateos, the director of the organization asked that the Mexican leader accept the title of "Honorary President" and thus assume "aegis of this institution, not only because you are Mexico's first citizen but for your love of culture and of our youth."^[149] In another example, the governor of the state of Aguascalientes petitioned to receive federal assistance for a campaign promoting native musical performances in the countryside, describing this tactic "as the best dike against the invasion of cha-cha-chás, 'rock'n roll' and other exotic rhythms that threaten to displace music that is authentically Mexican."^[150]

These actions emerged in the context of a wider struggle by conservatives to root out "immoral" influences more generally and mass cultural influences in particular. In 1959 a sweep by the appointed mayor of the Federal District, Ernest P. Uruchurtu, led to the closing of numerous nightclubs and an imposition of a 1:00 A.M. curfew on night entertainment, in a move that Jueves de Excélsior claimed "has merited the most enthusiastic applause of society." Under a photograph of young couples dancing in a ballroom setting, the text read: "GREAT PART of the clientele of the more than 200 cabarets and metropolitan hovels are made up by youth from both sexes that hide away in the depravation and become converted into social pariahs, without occupation or benefit."^[151] In the realm of mass culture,

pornography, delinquency, gratuitous violence, and, significantly, "distortions of language" all became a central focus of the brewing backlash.

This moralization drive ironically coincided with an announcement by the National Chamber of Broadcasting Industries (a private industry group) that Mexican programming was "classified among the most moral and clean in the world,...far above the broadcasts of Cuba and the United States."^[152] This statement no doubt reflected the association's efforts to deflect mounting criticism aimed at the mass media. In fact, as early as January 1957 the film section of the Department of Interior Affairs had notified the Association of Film Producers and the National Chamber of Cinematographic Industries that "all films which present nudism...[and] abuse themes dealing with immorality" in foreign, as well as in Mexican films, were henceforth prohibited.^[153] Pressure to create such a censorship board had come from the Mexican League of Decency, which applauded the decision and was also directly represented on the board.^[154] As one writer editorialized, foreign films had become a danger "by exploiting crime to such a detailed extent that they constitute a true school for all of the misled inclinations of an unsettled youth." At the same time, "native cinema had committed grave errors for the sin of profit" by exploiting an image of the Mexican character that glorified violence while distorting the "authentic" nature of local customs. At stake was an "accurate" representation of Mexico: "[A]s the majority of these national productions are exported and seen abroad, this has been creating a truly noxious propaganda, instead of presenting the real aspect of Mexico and the Mexicans, exalting its authentic traditions, its genuine virtues, the simpleness of its customs, and the multi-chromatic beauties of its folklore, with respect to regional characteristics, without hodgepodge or adulterations."^[155] Local productions were thus pressured toward self-censorship while foreign films faced the prospect of being denied entry altogether.

In early 1958, for example, Variety noted that the U.S. film, Runaway Daughters (translated as "Lost Adolescence") was "the first to get gonged in the government's intensified cinematographic moralization drive."^[156] After the outbreak of violence at King Creole, future Elvis Presley films faced a ban. Throughout the 1960s other films, including ones by Presley and the Beatles, also faced censorship or restrictions on their exhibition permits. In 1965, for instance, the Beatles' A Hard Day's Night was shown only after a ten-month wait imposed by the censorship board.^[157] Films that depicted Mexico in a negative light, "reflecting real or imagined slights of national honor,"^[158] were especially subject to closer scrutiny throughout

this period as part of a broader campaign to contain an image of Mexican development. Banned, for instance, was Frank Sinatra's Marriage on the Rocks (1966), which the government found represented Mexico "as a primitive country without medical care, drinking water or municipal services and where the most important business was the divorce industry."^[159] While on the whole it appears that these guidelines were subject to negotiation and the conflicting pressures from film distributors, by the end of 1959 the campaign against immoral themes and distortions of national character culminated in legislation aimed at radio and television as well, as we will see in a moment.

The moralization drive begun with film reflected a more profound sense that mass culture had become a pernicious vehicle misrepresenting Mexico, on one hand, and undermining the bedrock of traditional patriarchal values, on the other. The impact of this campaign is revealed in part by an examination of the records during this period for the Qualifying Commission of Magazines and Illustrated Publications, the official government censorship bureau for printed materials. While the commission was largely ineffectual, serving more as a lightning rod to deflect conservative criticism than to actually maintain policing powers, the debates and discussions found in its annals are an important reflection of the concerns raised about the damaging role of mass culture then being expressed. In writing a history of the commission, Anne Rubenstein has argued that the Mexican state, "by appearing to limit printed entertainment in Mexico without actually exercising control, opened up a space in the public discourse for conservative protest that would not lead to serious political challenges or violence."^[160] Nevertheless, the commission's guidelines suggested a great deal about its rigid sensitivity to offensive material that had ramifications on the public debate at large. First written in 1944 when the commission began its work and updated in 1953, these guidelines stated: "It is immoral and contrary to Education [to] publish, distribute, circulate, present or sell in public" material which contained the following characteristics:

I. Writings, drawings, etchings, paintings, printed matter, images, advertisements, emblems, photographs or other objects which stimulate the excitement of dangerous passions or sensuality, and

II. Publications, magazines or comic books of any of the following types:

a) that adopt themes capable of destroying the devotion to work, the enthusiasm for studies...;

b) that stimulate the excitement of dangerous passions or of sensuality which offends modesty and proper behavior;

c) that stimulate passivity, the tendency toward idleness or faith in fate as a regulator of conduct;

d) that contain any sort of adventure in which, eluding law and respect for established institutions, the protagonists obtain success in their undertakings...;

f) that, with the intention of pursuing the story plot or due to the nature of the characters, directly or indirectly provoke disdain toward the Mexican people, their abilities, customs, traditions, history or democracy;

g) that utilize texts which systematically employ expressions that offend the correct use of the language; and

h) that insert articles, paragraphs, scenes, plates, paintings, photographs, drawings or etchings which, by themselves, contain the aforementioned objections.^[161]

The concern with "expressions that offend the correct use of the language" (section IIg) is particularly relevant, for the popularization of barrio slang was associated with moral degeneracy and violence. Policing the boundaries of grammar was regarded as central to the maintenance of social order itself. In one example, the permit for an entertainment magazine, Follies de América, was denied by the commission for "offending good taste and the respect which we owe to the language." The committee member reviewing the solicitation argued that the magazine used "vocabulary that is frankly coarse and precocious" and that "falling into the hands of adolescents [will] incite them to drain their vital energies that are necessary not only for their physical development, but for the profundity and clutches of their minds." In sum, the reviewer argued, "the nation is passing through a cultural crisis which is accentuated with this type of publication."^[162] Another magazine, Diversiones , "which is advertised as specializing in cinema, theater, radio and television," was also declared "illicit" because of the nature and tone of its contents: "The material which illustrates the magazine is constituted in great part by semi-nude movie personalities, or tourist nightclubs, what they now call the older cabarets. The rest of the illustrations correspond to scenes involving modern dances such as the cha-cha-chá, the yompy [sic ], rock-and-roll, etc." Of particular concern to the reviewer was the repeated printing of common slang which, "besides its vulgar style, is an affront to syntax."^[163] Despite its judicial ineffectiveness,

the concerns of the commission are evidence of the persistence of doubts and hostilities expressed toward the youth culture and the pressures that helped shape its containment during first half of the 1960s. But if the commission ultimately lost the battle to restrict the popularization of rock 'n' roll, its moralization drive did have an impact on later fanzines' contents: in praising Presley (whose comeback was already at hand) and other youth idols, magazine editors made every effort to argue for the "clean intent" of rock 'n' roll artists and steered clear of sensationalizing their immoral excesses.

The most important feature of this moralization drive was the public debate over proposed legislation that would, for the first time, create specific legal guidelines for television and radio broadcasting. A special congressional commission was established in late summer of 1959 in the wake of the King Creole incident, with the aim of "prohibit[ing] the diffusion of songs and programs which are outspoken apologies for crime and which, per se, contribute to the growing wave of crime and homicides in Mexico."^[164] Prior to such legislation, guidelines had been largely set by the National Chamber of Broadcasting Industries in cooperation with the secretary of communication. But with the new legislation the "ethical guidelines" supposedly followed by the chamber were expanded on and written into law, though with evident influence by the chamber itself (which publicly supported the legislation).^[165] One voice that challenged the proposed law was the Asociación Interamericana de Radiodifusión (AIR), a nongovernmental organization which lobbied on behalf of broadcasters throughout Latin America. In a letter to President López Mateos the president of AIR urged that new legislation was unnecessary and could only result in the undermining of free expression, "that nourishing element of our times."^[166] Unmoved, López Mateos voiced in a speech made before a meeting of AIR delegates in Mexico on the eve of the vote in Congress: "To be Mexican is to be free and the law that is being debated to control Mexican radio and television, thought over and discussed by Mexicans, will provide for the guarantee of expression in Mexico."^[167] As the legislation came to a vote in the PRI-controlled Chamber of Deputies (where it passed without a single dissenting vote), one congresswoman summed up her support:

[R]adio and television have permitted excesses in their programming that affect the morality of our homes and it is clear to think that if the child or young adult lacks a spiritual base, [one that is] doctrinaire and moral, they will adopt, without a doubt, the examples which they hear and pick up from transmitted programs lacking adequate orientation

and without precise goals. For this reason, the [proposed legislation] establishes maximum responsibility for the sponsors and organizers that allow transmission of programs which damage children and contribute to juvenile delinquency and the formation of men and women without moral scruples and lacking respect for society.^[168]

As passed by the Congress in January 1960 the Federal Law of Radio and Television stated the following goals:

1. To affirm the respect for social morality, human dignity and family ties;

2. To avoid noxious or disturbing influences on the harmonious development of children and youth;

3. To contribute to the cultural elevation of the population and to conserve its national characteristics, customs, and traditions, the propriety of the language, and to exalt the values of Mexican nationality;

4. To strengthen democratic convictions, national unity, and international friendship and cooperation.

To achieve these goals in part, the state authorized for itself the right to free airtime lasting up to one-half hour daily, "dedicated to the diffusion of themes of educational, cultural, and social orientation."^[169] (This followed the concession for the creation of an educational channel earlier in 1958.)^[170] The bill sanctioned additional state programming for those "stations which, because of their power, frequency or location are likely to be captured abroad, in order to divulge cultural representations of Mexican life, increase commercial relations, intensify tourist propaganda, and transmit information about national events."^[171]

The legislation, however, contained a mixed message concerning the question of free expression and censorship. On one hand, it stated that the "right to information, expression and reception by radio and television is free and consequently will not be the object of any judicial or administrative inquisition nor limitation by any prior censorship, and that it will be authorized under the terms of the Constitution and the law."^[172] This, however, was directly contradicted in a following article, which established explicit boundaries on free expression. Not only were cultural and grammatical transgressions proscribed, but, significantly, so too were defamations of public heroes and, in apparent deference to the League of Decency, of religious beliefs. Article 63 thus stated: "Prohibited are all transmissions that cause the corruption of the language and are contrary to buenas costumbres, whether that be via malicious expressions, impudent words or images,

phrases or scenes involving double meaning, apologies for crime or violence; also prohibited is all that denigrates or is offensive to the civic cult of the heroes and religious beliefs, or racially discriminates; furthermore, prohibited are the use of jokes in poor taste and offensive noises."^[173] At the same time, the law stated that broadcasters "must take advantage of and promote local and national artistic values and expressions of Mexican art."^[174] Expressions in a foreign language were also prohibited unless authorized by the secretary of interior affairs, and then only in cases where "a Spanish version, [either] exact or summarized" was used.^[175] Foreigners were explicitly prohibited from becoming associates of or controlling the broadcasting medium in any shape or form.^[176]

Enforcement of this extensive law (105 articles) was to be divided among three governmental bureaucracies: the Departments of Communications and Transportation; Interior Affairs; and Public Education. That these new legal guidelines were never scrupulously followed is indicative of the political influence which owners of the mass media, such as the Azcárraga family, exerted. Indeed, as Variety remarked, if followed to the letter the legislation would have meant "a death knell to the hundreds of ranchera ditties here which eulogize killers, drunks and general no-goods."^[177] Like the Qualifying Commission for Magazines and Illustrated Publications, the legislation aimed at radio and television lacked judicial enforcement. However, its existence did have an important impact on the public discourse and would be used periodically to justify government harassment and occasional censorship of radio and television broadcasts. Even before the law was implemented, for example, a decree by the Office of Public Events of the Federal District "strictly prohibited comics and impersonators from using [offensive] mannerisms in their presentations," which included "appearing like homosexuals."^[178] It would seem that homosexual behavior threatened patriarchal values by mocking the virility of all men and thus, by implication, subverting the protective role of man over woman.

With regard to the rhythm that in no small part energized the nationalist and patriarchal spirit behind the new legislation, Excélsior announced in a headline on the eve of the vote in Congress: "Young People Have Forgotten Rock'n Roll and Prefer the Oldies." According to a radio-station survey, Mexican youth had "turned their backs on the rabid 'rock-roll' [sic ]" in favor of more "sentimental melodies."^[179] But this appears to have been more self-congratulatory than accurate. That same week, for instance, Variety reported that disc jockeys from two Mexico City radio stations were being sent to the United States "to perfect their English and to brush up on modern radio broadcasting procedures."^[180] And in numerous middle-class

homes, boys were already tuning their electric guitars and honing their gestures in reverent emulation of their pop heroes. The real impact of the legislation was that it exerted pressures toward self-censorship. This self-containment of media representation affected all matters of entertainment, including the imminent explosion of a homegrown rock 'n' roll movement by youth, the subject of the next chapter.