Wireless: Radio, Revolution, and the Mexican State, 1897-1938

Abstract

This dissertation explores the interplay of early radio technology and twentieth-century state power in Mexico. It argues that wireless technology was crucial to government attempts at incorporating frontiers, foreign policy, the outcome of the Mexican Revolution, and the formation of the single-party state that ruled from 1929 to 2000. Examining radio development in Mexico is especially useful because political leaders first incorporated the technology immediately preceding a fractious revolution turned civil war. The subsequent dissolution and reconsolidation of the political order shows how wireless technology affected new attempts at state building during the first half of the twentieth century. Initially used as a tool of centralization, trade, and military domination, the Revolution proved that in the hands of insurrectionists and foreigners, radio could also be a tool of decentralization. The Revolution intensified the tendency of leaders to focus on the medium's military potential as warring factions incorporated wireless devices to advance their causes. The destabilizing potential of the technology pushed the victors to pursue a policy of strict surveillance and regulation over radio, provoking heightened attempts at centralization and monopolization. At the exact time that the warfare wound down, advancements in wireless technology gave rise to a more expansive form of communication--broadcasting. Radio was no longer used solely as a point-to-point tool of generals and communications officers; it had become the first electronic form of mass media, a crucial medium for integrating the general population across the national territory by means of generating consent, and at the same moment that a revolutionary government was attempting to consolidate its control militarily and culturally. These coinciding processes helped establish populist politics in Mexico earlier than in other Latin American nations.