On 4 June 1931, recently elected congressman General Rafael Melgar proposed to the Mexican Congress and to President Pascual Ortiz Rubio that a ‘Nationalist Campaign’ be launched. The purpose of the campaign was to boost sales of Mexican products among domestic consumers to avert ‘the more or less immediate disaster of Mexico's economy’ in the aftermath of the 1929 Wall Street crash. Melgar presented the Nationalist Campaign project as a comprehensive propaganda effort in the double sense the term holds in Spanish: political propaganda and advertising. He wanted to sell a party-affiliated nationalist sentiment to convince Mexicans to choose national products over foreign ones. According to him, the overhaul of the general population's consumption practices would require intensive nationwide advertising through parades, commercial fairs, and radio stations. ‘The success of the Nationalist Campaign’, Melgar concluded, ‘will mainly depend on the consuming people.’Footnote 1 Using Nationalist Campaign archival documents as a case study, this article argues that the rise of radio, advertising, and consumer culture significantly shaped Mexican musical nationalism in the early 1930s.
Mexican musical nationalism during this period has been approached primarily, though not exclusively, in relation to art music composers and institutions. The desire for a distinctive Mexican music intensified following the Mexican Revolution (1910–20), when the post-revolutionary state needed to consolidate a national identity encompassing diverse populations while mitigating regional disparities and celebrating popular culture.Footnote 2 The unification and institutionalization of musical practices began in the 1920s, primarily through the newly established federal school system, including such institutions as the National Conservatory and the National Symphony Orchestra. My research seeks to explore other musical pathways that simultaneously constituted musical nationalism in order to address the place of media and popular music in this crucial historical moment. While the music of Mexican art composers in the 1930s had a national and, in some cases, international presence among certain audiences, it lacked the massive reach characteristic of musical nationalism's media and propagandistic agendas, needed to instil a national sentiment in the population over a short period of time. Studying the Nationalist Campaign archive helps us rethink the multiple courses of Mexican musical nationalism in the post-revolutionary period.
My research points to several political reasons that explain why Melgar was so interested in radio and music propaganda, despite educational and cultural institutions already being in place. Mexican politics had undergone further centralization with the 1929 emergence of a single party, known as the PNR (National Revolutionary Party, later renamed PRI or Revolutionary Institutional Party), which would remain in power until 2000. Centralization was prompted by perceived threats to Mexican sovereignty on the international stage, arising from the interwar crisis triggered by the 1929 Wall Street crash and the consolidation of the United States as a dominant global power after World War I. Among other nationalist efforts pursuing a unified identity, Melgar's Campaign intended to rally ordinary citizens around the cause of a protectionist economy using persuasion tactics. Once the masses had internalized a shared sense of Mexicanness, the ruling party, the PNR, would be able to appeal to that identity for popular support.
As was the case in other places, radio broadcasting and marketing innovations such as consumer persuasion and sponsored entertainment provided the state with avenues to influence both private and public listening habits.Footnote 3 Within this context, Melgar's Nationalist Campaign employed various strategies, including radio slogans, sponsored concerts, advertisements, parades, and street fairs featuring live music. These efforts sought to cultivate a ‘made in Mexico’ culture, easily recognizable through a musical repertory suitable for widespread consumption. In this article, I concentrate on political radio slogans and their connection to advertising techniques, and on musical radio programming in a party-operated radio station, both of which illuminate how the Mexican state and the people surrounding it used broadcasting to create the sounds that defined the nation.
I see post-revolutionary cultural nationalism as arising from the multifaceted decisions made by various actors such as politicians, cultural intermediaries, artists, educators, media directors, and other agents in response to the broadly outlined state policies. These decisions were not straightforward but rather followed diverse paths depending on factors such as available resources, technology, private-sector support for the state's initiatives, and individual skills and preferences. These resources were mobilized through personal and institutional alliances. The first section of the article reviews some of the findings by scholars of Mexican musical nationalism to provide a general view of the core issues at stake in the post-revolutionary years. The second section delves into the role of radio and its relationship with the Mexican state during the late 1920s and early 1930s. It also analyses the Nationalist Campaign radio slogans in the context of contemporary international advertising theory, which was largely influenced by the United States. Lastly, the third section dissects the Nationalist Campaign's loose definition of ‘national music’ through a series of eight radio concerts broadcast in August 1931 on XEO, the primary station of the dominant political party.
Art music and the Mexican state
Through examining the media networking and musical programming of the Nationalist Campaign, it becomes evident that state-sponsored musical nationalism in early twentieth-century Mexico extended beyond the domain of art composers and major institutions such as the National Conservatory or the National Symphony Orchestra. It manifested in everyday political, educational, and marketing events destined for a broad cross-section of the population. The Nationalist Campaign's fusion of sound and music with marketing and political propaganda reveals how the state apparatus utilized the performative work of everyday sound to shape the post-revolutionary nation. Thomas Turino defines cultural nationalism as ‘the semiotic work of using expressive practices and forms to fashion the concrete emblems that stand for and create the nation’. Here, I expand ‘semiotic’ to ‘performative’, to underscore the real-time physical effect of sonic acts.Footnote 4
Materials from the Nationalist Campaign archive allow insight into a different side of Mexican musical nationalism, one that complements the thorough literature on art music during the first half of the twentieth century found in the works of Roberto Kolb-Neuhaus, Alejandro L. Madrid, Yolanda Moreno Rivas, Robert L. Parker, and Leonora Saavedra, among others. Moreno Rivas, for instance, wrote several books on popular music but chose to focus solely on concert music when she wrote about nationalism.Footnote 5 In what follows, I briefly discuss the central thrust of some of these works in order to contrast their findings with the type of musical nationalism pursued through radio during the first year of the Nationalist Campaign. Noticeably, the central campaign committee based in Mexico City did not include any art music concerts as part of their organized events.
Moreno Rivas wrote in the late 1980s that the main goal of Mexican nationalist composers was to ‘create a sonic language’ that was Mexican and modern, one that could secure a position in the international art music scene alongside such figures as Igor Stravinsky, Béla Bartók, Aaron Copland, and Manuel de Falla.Footnote 6 In Rostros del nacionalismo en la música mexicana, she endeavours to identify the stylistic features of Mexican music of the 1920s–40s, examining compositions created in response to the challenge of reconciling Mexicanness and modern musical trends. According to Moreno Rivas, one of the main components of this search for a distinctive sonic language was the integration of aspects of popular music into the works of such composers as Manuel M. Ponce (1882–1948), José Rolón (1876–1945), Carlos Chávez (1899–1978), Candelario Huízar (1883–1970), Silvestre Revueltas (1899–1940), José Pablo Moncayo (1912–58), and Miguel Bernal Jiménez (1910–58). Moreno Rivas views early twentieth-century nationalism as another effort in the history of Mexican music to blend ‘two sonic worlds’, the popular and the cultured.Footnote 7 She recognizes the link between the post-revolutionary state and Mexican nationalist art music, acknowledging that many concert works sprouted from composers’ and politicians’ ‘belief in the educational, revolutionary, or propagandistic value of national art’, supported by corresponding state resources.Footnote 8 While Moreno Rivas considers that some attempts to blend the popular and the cultivated, such as Carlos Chávez's indigenist pieces, were populist, it is worth pointing out that the results were not popular in the sense of catering to mass consumption.Footnote 9
Writing twelve years later, Saavedra expounded on the gap between popular and art music in the post-revolutionary decades, when musical nationalism took shape. Before the outbreak of the Mexican Revolution in 1910, Manuel M. Ponce converged with composers such as Ignacio Fernández Esperón (Tata Nacho), Mario Talavera, and Alfonso Esparza Oteo, the latter of whom would be a key collaborator in the Nationalist Campaign. Ponce and these other composers proposed the Mexican canción (song) as the core of nationalist music. They arranged multiple popular and traditional songs to make them suitable for the elite salons of the pre-revolution Porfiriato dictatorship (1876–1911).Footnote 10 From the salons, their compositions spread to the middle and working classes through performances in urban venues that programmed medleys of skits, dance, and music known as revistas musicales.Footnote 11 The songs Ponce and his contemporaries arranged between 1900 and 1920 became audience favourites. However, in the 1920s, Ponce went to Paris and became interested in modernism. When he returned to Mexico in 1929, he no longer believed Mexican canción was the main source for a national music, but instead emphasized modernist techniques that could ‘dress up’ traditional melodies. Meanwhile, Fernández Esperón, Talavera, and Esparza Oteo continued to profitably compose songs, incorporating new foreign fashions such as the foxtrot and the tango. Younger composers such as Agustín Lara followed the tradition of Mexican canción, with equal success. The early years of Mexican radio in the 1920s contributed to the diffusion of their songs. As we shall see in the following pages, it is clear that this canción repertory continued to be sought after by radio stations in the 1930s, and was central to the idea of ‘Mexican music’ held by Melgar's collaborators (radio musical directors, orchestra and ensemble conductors).
In the 1920s, art music composers and institutions developed a close relationship with the Department of Education (SEP), which allowed them to distribute their music in state-owned venues and schools. In Sounds of the Modern Nation, Madrid emphasizes the significance of state sponsorship in the production and consumption of post-revolutionary Mexican music, highlighting how aesthetic choices were influenced by sociopolitical conditions.Footnote 12 Unlike Moreno Rivas and Saavedra, Madrid includes microtonal composer Julián Carrillo as part of the ‘intellectual elite that played an active role in representing modernity and nationality in Mexico after the 1920s’, alongside Chávez and Ponce. Madrid observes that ‘the post-revolutionary hegemonic discourse’ created a nationalist ‘musical myth’ that marginalized composers whose aesthetic legacies did not align with state policies, such as Carrillo.Footnote 13 Another instance of the dominance of the nationalist ‘myth of origin’ is the tendency to overlook the modernist aspects of Chávez's music and focus only on its nationalist side. Madrid reminds us that in the 1920s and 1930s, the urgent task was to unify the national identity following the fragmentation caused by the armed struggle of the Mexican Revolution. Nationalist Campaign documents confirm Madrid's observations that overcoming this fragmentation through cultural unification would make possible an ‘efficient industrial and economic network’ to support the modern nation-state.Footnote 14
Saavedra and Parker have thoroughly investigated the life and works of Carlos Chávez, a central figure in Mexican nationalism during the 1920s and 1930s and the nationalist composer best known to Anglo-American scholars.Footnote 15 At the time of the Nationalist Campaign, Chávez conducted the Mexico Symphony Orchestra and directed the National Conservatory. By the Campaign's conclusion in 1934, he had also become director of the Department of Fine Arts (part of the SEP), expanding his influence to schools all over the country and to radio broadcasting.Footnote 16 From these leadership positions, Chávez envisioned a national musical life where all social classes were considered, musical production agreed with society, schools formed good professional performers, the average audience's musical taste improved, and larger audiences listened to quality music.Footnote 17 Despite Chávez's colossal presence in the Mexican music scene, he is not mentioned in Nationalist Campaign documents. As the leader of the Mexican Congress, Melgar had connections to the Department of Education and the National Conservatory, but perhaps no personal relation with Chávez, who belonged to a younger generation of concert music composers. Despite Chávez's nationalist and populist efforts, and despite his many accomplishments as a composer and cultural broker, the reach of art music did not become a massive propagandistic phenomenon.
Of the several scholars who have written about Chávez's contemporary Silvestre Revueltas, Kolb-Neuhaus has produced the first comprehensive view of Revueltas's music in the political context of the 1920s–30s. In his 2023 book Sounds of a Political Passion, Kolb-Neuhaus proposes the innovative thesis that, even though Revueltas has always been catalogued as a nationalist composer, ‘judging by his writings, nationalism as institutionalized by the post-revolutionary Mexican regime, turns out to have been, in fact, one of the composer's principal targets’.Footnote 18 Like historian Alan Knight, Kolb-Neuhaus carefully distinguishes revolutionary politics and nationalism (which Revueltas endorsed) from post-revolutionary ones, concluding that many of Revueltas's works actually satirize institutionalized nationalism of the kind the Nationalist Campaign promoted. During Melgar's Campaign years, Revueltas was working junior positions at the National Conservatory and the Mexico Symphony Orchestra, alongside Chávez. While Chávez was in a prominent political position and very vocal about musical nationalism in the years 1931–4, according to Kolb-Neuhaus, Revueltas ‘remained quiet in word and action’, and ‘refused to comply with the imagery that was massively invading the social space’.Footnote 19 An active socialist, Revueltas disdained the ‘whitening aestheticization of peasant culture’.Footnote 20 This whitening of peasant culture was ubiquitous in the Nationalist Campaign, as is evident in photographs of upper-class Mexicans wearing sombreros and sarapes with their charro and china poblana attire.Footnote 21
As we can gather, the scholarship on art music during the post-revolutionary period challenges the notion of a single Mexican musical nationalism, suggesting instead a complex array of composers’ responses to the hegemonic Mexicanness advanced by the state. These varied responses depended not only on state policies and resources but also on the media that brought the music to the masses. In the 1920s and 1930s, radio attracted national attention and opened up the possibility of communicating with remote audiences who had previously been cut off from musical performances available only in urban centres.
The role of radio in Mexican nationalism remains an open question in music studies. By the early 1930s, pieces by Ponce, Chávez, and Revueltas were regularly programmed on two government-operated radio stations: XFX, managed by the SEP (Department of Education); and XEO (later XEFO), managed by the PNR, the ruling party. Joy Elizabeth Hayes, who has written the most comprehensive English-language history of post-revolutionary Mexican radio to date, reports that art music made up 62 per cent of XFX's programming, with the remainder consisting of traditional regional musics.Footnote 22 Classical music radio concerts on XFX often included European works by composers such as Chopin and Beethoven, and concluded with a ‘pan-Hispanic’ piece by either a Spanish composer (such as Enrique Granados or Manuel de Falla) or a Mexican one. Because the Orquesta Sinfónica de México and other classical ensembles such as the Cuarteto Clásico Nacional had close ties to the SEP, they frequently performed live on XFX, often under the direction of Revueltas or Chávez.Footnote 23 The percentage of art music programmed on XEO has not been determined, but the concerts studied later in this article suggest that classical compositions shared airtime with a significant amount of popular music, including salon pieces and song arrangements. This popular repertory was performed by classically trained singers and musicians.
Despite government efforts to promote ‘good taste’ through art music, the classical pieces favoured by state radio stations failed to garner much interest. Hayes illustrates this with the example of rural communities that received radio sets from the SEP with the dial locked to their station, XFX. When SEP officials revisited these communities, they found that most had modified their radios to tune in to the commercial programming of private stations. These private commercial stations broadcast advertisements for foreign businessesFootnote 24 and music in international genres such as the foxtrot or the newly fashionable ‘tropical music’ from Cuba.Footnote 25 Romantic songs in the Mexican canción tradition were also core radio repertoire, particularly those by younger composers such as Agustín Lara (1897–1970) and Manuel Esperón (1911–2011). Occasionally, private stations featured classical music ensembles conducted by Chávez or Revueltas. For instance, in 1932, XEB ‘El Buen Tono’ appointed Revueltas and violinist José Rocabruna to conduct the radio station's symphonic orchestra, a move the station manager promptly communicated to Melgar to demonstrate XEB's nationalist credentials. XEB manager, Roger Fauré, hoped that these hires would bring ‘the best symphonic works by Mexican composers’ to ‘visible and invisible audiences’.Footnote 26 Song composer Juan S. Garrido recounts that, in the early years of Mexican radio, private XEW and XEB ‘El Buen Tono’ demanded nationalist music from composers and performers.Footnote 27 In fact, commercial radio stations did not oppose the state's nationalist agenda. On the contrary, they embraced it and collaborated with PNR initiatives to gain political advantage and expand their public influence. Recognizing the media's interest in collaborating with the Mexican Congress (which he headed), Melgar called on both state and private radio stations to devote part of their programming to propagating the Nationalist Campaign. Radio concerts were just one means of promoting the Campaign, combined with advertisements and slogans at the beginning of the concerts and between musical numbers.
Radio and the Mexican state
The first public radio-telephone transmission in Mexico happened on 27 September 1921, on a very nationalist occasion: a commercial exposition set up to commemorate the centenary of the Mexican independence from Spain (1810–21). The Mexican newspaper Excélsior reported that the transmission was ‘a most meritorious success for the men of science who serve the government’, achieved ‘exclusively with nationally produced materials’.Footnote 28 Radio stations quickly proliferated across the nation in the years following that first transmission. Thus, when Melgar started sending Nationalist Campaign advertising to the radio stations, the Mexican state had already established a liaison with broadcasters and assimilated this novel communication tool into the nationalist project. Since the 1920s, radio programming in Mexico had combined the post-revolutionary need for identity unification with marketing techniques that were becoming essential to US cultural and economic expansionism after World War I. According to media scholar Michele Hilmes, in the period following the World War I, ‘the instruments of mass communication, especially radio, gave national elites the most powerful tool yet available to them to attempt to shape and control [the] masses’.Footnote 29 As in the rest of the world, radio, mass advertising, and political propaganda were intertwined.Footnote 30
Like the SEP (Department of Education) did with XFX, several government agencies set up their own radio stations, sharing the market with private stations. Of the several stations operating in 1931, Nationalist Campaign documents show links between Melgar and seven based in Mexico City, four of them public (XFX, XEI, XFI, and XEO) and three private (XEB, XEN, and XEW). The public stations started between 1923 and 1929: the federally operated XFX; XEI, Department of War and Navy; XFI, Department of Industry, Labour, and Commerce; and XEO, the official PNR station. The private stations developed at the same time. The tobacco company El Buen Tono launched XEB in 1923, and General Electric introduced XEN Radiomundial, ‘El Vocero de México’, in 1925.Footnote 31 Media entrepreneur Emilio Azcárraga Vidaurreta instituted XEW in 1930, which he dubbed ‘El Vocero de América Latina desde México’. XEW was the most innovative and powerful commercial broadcaster in Mexico during the 1930s.Footnote 32 With the exception of XEN Radiomundial, which upon a change in ownership in 1930 was devoted to the news, all of these radio stations programmed a mix of talk, music, poetry, news, official communications, and advertising. The Mexican government supported commercial radio by offering fiscal and legal privileges, such as low tax rates and long-term permits to operate. In return, private radio stations publicized the Mexican State's ideology, controlled by the PNR since its inception in 1929.Footnote 33
Melgar wanted broadcasters to relay news and advertise events related to the Nationalist Campaign. He first reached out to radio directors through personal letters on 18 June 1931, immediately after President Pascual Ortiz Rubio had approved the Campaign. For the rest of that year, he and his team programmed nationalist talks and regularly sent updates about the Campaign's events and achievements. The details of the collaboration Melgar required from station directors were stated imprecisely in the letters he sent to them. This gave station directors some leeway in how to accommodate the congressman's request, including deciding what kind of music counted as Mexican or when they could best fit some nationalist propaganda into their programming.
The directors of some major commercial stations, including XEB and XEN, showed eagerness to support the Campaign, indicating their loyalty to the ruling party, PNR. In a June 1931 letter exchange, the artistic director of XEB ‘El Buen Tono’, Jesús Corona, assured Melgar that ‘as always, this XEB station is at your entire disposal’ and that they would do everything possible to contribute to the ‘laudable goal’ of ‘making the country consume what it produces’. Melgar replied to Corona thanking him for his good will. By fostering a sense of partnership with the broadcasters, Melgar was able to utilize their resources and strengthen their ties with the PNR's inner circle. Melgar's approach involved personal outreach to radio station directors, offering symbolic prizes and allowing flexibility in their collaboration. Radio stations aired lectures and radio slogans, advertised Nationalist Campaign events, and programmed nationalist concerts to propagandize Melgar's agenda.
In addition to airing lectures, slogans, and music, radio stations collaborated with Melgar (and the Mexican Congress faction he led) by facilitating live broadcasts of events in Mexico City to those unable to attend in person or residing in another state. Aware of radio's power for amplifying public acts, Melgar asked station managers to broadcast the Campaign's two opening events in 1931: the 15 July Great Nationalist Demonstration and the 2–8 August Nationalist Week. Both events were intended to reach large swaths of people and get them excited about a modern nationalism compatible with consumer culture. Given that consumer culture was just starting to take root in Mexican cities, both merchants and customers needed incentives to participate in it, which included flashy pageantry with floats and live music. If people living in Mexico City and the surrounding areas came downtown to buy Mexican products, they could enjoy free entertainment. Otherwise, they could hear live transmissions at home and perhaps be convinced to attend in person the following night. In an age before television, audio broadcasts offered the highest potential for a mediated affective experience that kindled the general population's enthusiasm for the Nationalist Campaign and for the PNR's centralized national brand.Footnote 34
Radio slogans
Do not cheer Viva Mexico. Make it live. Consume national products. Nationalist Campaign of the House of Representatives’ Bloque Nacional Revolucionario.Footnote 35
Melgar envisioned the propaganda/advertising for the Nationalist Campaign relying heavily on radio to air weekly talks by congressmen, music, and a flurry of slogans. On 18 June, only a few days after the Mexican Congress and the president approved the Nationalist Campaign initiative, Melgar and his team assembled a collection of slogans for radio and promptly sent them out to radio stations along with a personal letter to public and commercial station directors, asking for their cooperation. While radio programming in the United States was entirely driven by the demands of advertising funders, in Mexico, the government had the authority to send content (slogans, in this case) to both public and private radio stations for free broadcast.Footnote 36 Understanding this history is fundamental for nuancing an idea of early twentieth-century consumer culture as influenced by local factors rather than being a wholesale import from the United States.Footnote 37 The radio slogans addressed average Mexicans, especially those living in urban areas where imports were readily available, trying to convince them that consuming domestic products was an act of heroic patriotism. Some examples include ‘you shall build the nation by backing the Campaign of the National Revolutionary Bloc [the PNR's legislative branch] of the House of Representatives, in favour of consuming national products’ and ‘Mexican, if you are a patriot, consume national products only’.
In addition to airing the slogans, radio station directors responded to Melgar's letters by proposing special time slots devoted to the Nationalist Campaign, usually one to two evening hours filled with music, a congressman's talk, and the slogans. By Saturday, 20 June, the news-only XEN Radiomundial aired the first in a series of transmissions devoted to promoting the Campaign's inaugural event, the 2–8 August Nationalist Week. XEN's special programming lasted one hour, from 9 to 10 pm. It consisted of a music concert, with the Campaign's slogans announced between numbers.
In case the audience was unaware that these slogans were marketing tools, the XEN Radiomundial speaker let their listeners know that they would ‘repeat [the slogans] every day, until we manage to engrave [record] them in the Mexican people's mind in such a way that, instinctively, subconsciously, they either fulfil those slogans whenever the opportunity arises or feel the sting of self-reproach if they contravene them. Each slogan must become a true postulate.’ These were the words of XEN's director, Fernando Ortiz Monasterio. He was an engineer and a seasoned media expert who had been working in Mexican radio since 1921, and was probably acquainted with the literature on radio and psychological influence. Ortiz Monasterio's confidence that repeating slogans would modify Mexican consumers’ behaviour conformed to contemporary trends in marketing. Melgar shared this belief, emphasizing that ‘advertising and daily repetition, if possible, of slogans that can synthesize the Campaign's premises’ were of the essence for the project's success.Footnote 38 Both Ortiz Monasterio and Melgar knew that advertising was essential for transitioning Mexico from a production-focused to a consumption-driven economy.Footnote 39
Melgar was interested in the massive yet intimate appeal of advertising as an essential component of capitalist economy. He expressed to the director of XEX Excélsior his interest in getting radio broadcasters involved in the Nationalist Campaign because ‘they are the ones that can make news reach every sphere in the country’.Footnote 40 Unlike print media, radio reached rural and urban, illiterate and educated populations in Mexico. Radio promised Mexicans a window into the modern world of mass culture. A 1923 advertisement for Westinghouse radio receivers in Mexico emphasizes the affective power of radio and its capacity to bring the public sphere into the domestic one (Figure 1).Footnote 41 The ad is titled ‘Radio for Everybody’, and the first paragraph persuades the reader that ‘a radio receiver brings the rest of the world to our house. The excitement of radio, the act of listening to musical concerts, singing, and many other interesting things through the air, produces an incomparable sensation that you never tire of.’
8 April 2023, 5. Source: Hemeroteca Nacional Digital de México.
When commercial radio stations started to proliferate worldwide around 1922, advertising became their major financial source in the United States, and this economic model had repercussions in Mexican politics.Footnote 42 Radio advertising promised an almost unlimited power of influence over society for marketers and politicians. Timothy D. Taylor quotes writer and politician Upton Sinclair in 1926 comparing radio listeners to ‘an infant being fed through a tube’, absorbing whatever was broadcast and devoid of agency.Footnote 43 That same year, US president Calvin Coolidge asserted that ‘advertising is the most potent influence in adapting and changing the habits and modes of life’.Footnote 44 The American, capitalist-oriented model for broadcasting influenced Mexican commercial radio because US advertising companies dominated the market in Mexico during the 1920s, and US capital backed several private radio stations.Footnote 45 To compete with foreign entertainment and advertising, Mexican radio stations adopted an import-substitution strategy by emulating formulas that had proven successful in the United States.Footnote 46 Furthermore, US radio advertised to Mexican audiences wherever its airwaves reached, imperilling potential markets for national products. A letter sent to Melgar accused two radio stations in the border states of Coahuila and Tamaulipas of broadcasting English-language advertisements for US products, which the correspondent described as ‘a threat to Mexican culture and dignity’.Footnote 47 It was important for the now PNR-controlled federal government to seize airwave space away from foreign broadcasters that used attractive popular music to promote imports. Historian Alan Knight quotes President (1924–28) and later political master-mind (1928–34) Plutarco Elías Calles saying that ‘the state had to take possession of the minds of Mexicans’.Footnote 48 The PNR created its own radio station (XEO) in 1931 to ‘place the most effective diffusion technique known today at the service of a renovating ideology’.Footnote 49 The Nationalist Campaign's bet on the power of advertising to lure Mexicans away from foreign products and culture exemplifies the international political interest in using media to mould social habits.
Nationalist Campaign radio slogans also demonstrate Melgar's awareness that nationalist consuming patterns and loyalty to Mexican identity were a matter of shaping personal and collective convictions, appealing to the public's ‘goodwill’. Musical entertainment, interspersed with slogans, was a key Campaign tactic to direct audiences to an aspirational lifestyle, one that required forgoing the consumption of imported goods. By 1930, theory of radio advertising had turned away from the ‘feeding tube’ model to emphasize the benefit to the consumer and sponsorship of radio entertainment.Footnote 50 Convincing listeners that they were choosing a new lifestyle by consuming certain products was considered more effective than ads in attracting and keeping customers. Ads should be few and short, inserted in the context of musical entertainment, pep talks, or home advice. The music or the talk shows would retain the listeners’ attention long enough to sell them a lifestyle. At the same time, entertainment would prompt audiences to buy the products advertised out of goodwill, in gratitude for the benefit provided by the broadcast.Footnote 51 Nationalist Campaign radio slogans such as ‘to buy national products is to bring bread to Mexican homes’ promised a better lifestyle to the listeners who voluntarily changed their purchasing patterns. Melgar recommended that two or three slogans be broadcast after campaign-related news clips inserted into radio stations’ music concerts.Footnote 52
Melgar's investment in cultivating a party-directed nationalism in the private home is shown in several slogans targeting women as household administrators. Slogans directed at women included ‘The Mexican woman must be the Nationalist Campaign's most earnest defender, for this way she prepares her children's future’ and ‘Woman, supply jobs for the Mexican factory worker by consuming national products’. A third slogan merged Mexican women's roles as consumers and mothers: ‘Madam, anytime you go shopping, remember that by purchasing Mexican goods, you positively benefit your children and your homeland.’ The power of radio to penetrate the domestic sphere was generally acknowledged at the time, as seen in Christine Frederick's 1925 portrait series of women and children listening to the radio while cleaning and playing at home. In 1930, the female director of the US advertising company McCann wrote that ‘radio is far more intimate and sensitive than other forms of advertising. The fact that it reaches people in the privacy of their homes and is generally listened to by the whole family makes it an extremely intimate matter’.Footnote 53 Nationalist Campaign slogans utilized the intimacy afforded by radio to enlist housewives and families in the PNR's national project. ‘The Mexican home must consume national goods’, radio hosts asserted in between a Manuel M. Ponce song and a congressman's speech exhorting Mexican women ‘without class distinction’ to unite behind the Nationalist Campaign in their subordinate role as men's companions.Footnote 54
Radio advertising for the Nationalist Campaign also served as political propaganda for the PNR, guaranteeing benefits for those who sided with the party's centralized nationalist brand and penalties for those who opposed it. The slogan ‘The House of Representatives’ National Revolutionary Bloc will show full sympathy and support to producers of national products’ made it clear that collaborating with the National Campaign would guarantee the House's dispensing of political and economic favours. Broadcasting of the guidelines for the 2–8 August 1931 Nationalist Week, when business owners were encouraged to sell only Mexican goods, ended with ‘a hearty call to all the republic's merchants’ goodwill, sound judgements, and patriotism’ to ‘try and strictly abide by the rules of the Nationalist Week’. Campaign state committees would publicly list in the press the names of those merchants who did not voluntarily participate, under the rubric ‘non-deferential to the national interest’.Footnote 55 Likewise, Melgar endeavoured to make government and private radio stations credit the Nationalist Campaign and the National Revolutionary Bloc (his faction at the Mexican Congress) for any Mexican music programming they aired. Through persistent correspondence, he persuaded radio managers to either initiate new concert series or link pre-existing ones to major Nationalist Campaign events.
Radio slogans for the Nationalist Campaign advertised a new, institutionalized, economics-oriented nationalism that would result in improved living standards for Mexicans in the early 1930s, many of them disenchanted with the limited redistribution of wealth that the Revolution had promised. State and private radio station speakers promised their audiences that ‘the nation shall be great when we can produce everything we consume’, and reiterated the ruling party's commitment to the working classes, in accordance with revolutionary principles: ‘Provide employment for Mexican workers by consuming our country's products.’ Slogans also appealed to the consuming masses’ goodwill, adding a moral, patriotic dimension to consuming behaviour: ‘Those who have sent the national gold abroad by buying foreign merchandise have no right to complain about the [economic] crisis’, or ‘The most evident expression of tackiness is to prefer foreign goods.’ Radio stations such as the PNR-owned XEO were crucial to the Campaign in Mexico City and across the states.Footnote 56 The mass targeting of Nationalist Campaign slogans depended on domestic and individual consumer habits and political orientations, with radio publicity serving as the ideal persuasive media.
Radio concerts
Melgar understood that Mexican music was vital to Nationalist Campaign propaganda. He corresponded extensively with radio stations and musical ensemble directors in Mexico City to secure musical entertainment for Campaign events. In his letters, Melgar did not provide a definition of ‘Mexican music’, but Campaign supporters quickly extrapolated his ‘made in Mexico only’ policy to musical products. The first to assume that the ‘national products’ encompassed intellectual and artistic works was President Pascual Ortiz Rubio. In a letter he sent to Melgar shortly after the Mexican Congress approved the Nationalist Campaign prospectus, the president described ‘national products’ as ‘goods of any kind, scientific, artistic, literary, material’. Ortiz Rubio went on to define nationalism as ‘the uniform Mexicanization of our racial elements’.Footnote 57 Although Melgar avoided abstract and, above all, racial understandings of Mexicanness in his letters, he was open to the president's interpretation as well as other potential allies’ perspectives. Melgar's nationalism was an economic project reliant on massive advertising, but characterizing musical nationalism depended on radio managers, artistic directors, and ensemble leaders. This section analyses an instance of how musicians working in Mexican public radio interpreted nationalist music in terms of self-sufficiency and massive outreach, as outlined in Campaign communications.
In addition to airing slogans and lectures on nationalist topics, some radio stations offered to dedicate part of their musical programming to the Nationalist Campaign. For example, XEN Radiomundial, a private station, aired a concert ‘exclusively devoted’ to the Campaign on 26 June 1931.Footnote 58 The biggest offer to programme nationalist music came from PNR-owned XEO (later XEFO), whose staff planned an entire concert series in early August. The following paragraphs focus on XEO concert programmes, which were published in the party's newspaper, El Nacional Revolucionario. Every programme for the August concert series was meticulously typed and sent to Melgar, and the archive also has newspaper clippings. Near the end of this section, I mention other Campaign collaborators, such as María Luisa Ross Landa (1887–1945) – a journalism pioneer and the Department of Education's XFX manager – and PNR musician José M. Islas.
XEO aired a series of lectures and concerts during the Nationalist Week from 2 to 8 August 1931, a large-scale retail festival in downtown Mexico City (replicated in other cities) that combined private and public resources and encouraged merchants to sell only national products. Live entertainment and discounts attracted consumers to commercial corridors in downtown Mexico City. Private and public radio stations intensified nationalist propaganda and promoted Nationalist Week events. As the PNR's station, XEO was the Nationalist Week's main communication platform for advertising sales, products, events, and slogans. XEO's nightly concerts provided the cultural counterpart to the retail fair: just as shops stayed open late to make Mexican goods available, XEO programmed two hours of Mexican music for home consumption in the evenings. From the letters that XEO's director (engineer Carlos Peralta) sent to Melgar, we can conclude that the August concert series pursued two goals: first, to hook listeners, captivating an audience for Campaign slogans, lectures, and commercial ads; second, to create a consumer-friendly ‘made in Mexico’ musical roster featuring traditional genres and compositions by Mexican musicians.
XEO used the Nationalist Week to test how a party-owned station could combine political and marketing interests. The concert series was co-sponsored by the PNR and the Mexico City-based National Chamber of Commerce, as announced at the beginning of each concert.Footnote 59 XEO's two hours of nationalist concerts and lectures were attractive to the private sector because the station offered free advertising to merchants and manufacturers participating in the Campaign. In return, businesses paid some of the performers. This strategy was in keeping with the marketing trends of the early 1930s. Advertising executive Roy Durstine said in 1930, regarding sponsored music programming: ‘The public wants entertainment. The advertiser wants the public's attention and is willing to pay for it. Therefore let the advertiser provide entertainment.’Footnote 60 In Mexico, sometimes this ‘advertiser’ was the state, propagating its own agenda. While radio in the United States was entirely funded by corporate advertisers, in Mexico the model was mixed because the state subsidized government-owned radio stations and heavily regulated privately owned ones.Footnote 61 Having the National Chamber of Commerce co-sponsor Nationalist Week entertainment reveals that XEO sought to involve manufacturers and business owners in promoting the PNR's nationalist brand.
Established on 30 December 1930, only a few months before the Nationalist Campaign launched, XEO served its audience a regular sonic diet of Mexican music and party propaganda blended together. The station's regular programming spread the PNR's political goals and praised its achievements, targeting specific audiences through weekly shows such as ‘The Home Hour’ and ‘The Factory Worker Hour’. It also broadcast the news from El Nacional Revolucionario and lectures by congressmen and party members. Nights between 7 and 10 pm were usually devoted to concerts performed in XEO's facilities and transmitted live, sometimes two per night, interspersed with more party news and propaganda.Footnote 62 The concert programmes alternated poetry and music. While XEO was designed to reach all sectors of the population in all states of the federation, it primarily addressed the urban and rural working classes, signalling the ‘ever-increasing inclusivity and acceptance of different social groups’ of Mexican post-revolutionary cultural policy, characteristic of many early twentieth-century populist nationalisms.Footnote 63 Party propaganda formed the core of the station's mission.Footnote 64
For the most part, XEO radio concerts for the August 1931 Nationalist Week followed the same patterns and principles that characterized the station's nightly programming. The usual repertory of XEO concerts included popular and traditional songs, salon pieces, and art music by Mexican composers such as Manuel M. Ponce or Ricardo Castro. European pieces were also common: a Chopin sonata or a Giacomo Puccini aria aired in between an Agustín Lara song and a Castro waltz. A young Jorge Negrete, later known for his ranchera films and songs, debuted at XEO on 29 May 1931, singing the aria ‘Cortigianni’ from Verdi's Rigoletto. Footnote 65 Folk ensembles performed the traditional repertory, such as huapangos and sones, while conservatory-trained singers and musicians were responsible for the remainder of the programmes, which included popular songs by known authors, choral arrangements, and Western art music such as overtures, arias, string quartets, and other genres. XEO had its own trio, as did other contemporary radio stations.Footnote 66 The PNR had a symphonic orchestra directed by the Yucatecan musician Alfredo Tamayo Marín (1880–1957), who was also XEO's artistic director and designed the concert programmes for the Nationalist Week.Footnote 67
The series of eight Nationalist Week concerts that Tamayo Marín planned for XEO exemplify the kind of nationalist repertory that an informed musician and cultural broker considered apt for Mexican radio audiences in 1931. Tamayo Marín had ample experience in both the public and the private sectors. From his native Yucatán in the Mexican Caribbean, he migrated to Mexico City to study voice at the National Conservatory and performed as a tenor in operas and zarzuelas during the years of the Mexican Revolution, working for the company of famed actress-singer Esperanza Iris (1888–1962).Footnote 68 This job likely acquainted him with the demands of commercial performance and audience tastes. In the early 1920s, he worked for the SEP (Department of Education), which the influential cultural policymaker José Vasconcelos directed at the time. Tamayo Marín participated as a music specialist in the SEP.Footnote 69 As a music teacher of the SEP's rural educational missions, Tamayo Marín helped disseminate a uniform repertory of Mexican songs and dances and came in contact with local folklore. According to William Beezley, over the years ‘Tamayo [Marín] had a major part in shaping the music that formed part of cultural nationalism.’Footnote 70 When he was working at XEO, Tamayo Marín meticulously recorded the pieces, composers, and performers he programmed for the Nationalist Week, demonstrating knowledge of a large, eclectic repertory of Mexican music and musicians.
Tamayo Marín introduced two subtle yet meaningful changes in the XEO Nationalist Week concerts compared to the station's usual programming: he avoided foreign composers and increased the number of traditional Mexican pieces. In presenting only Mexican composers and performers, the concerts mirrored the ban on foreign product sales during the Nationalist Week.Footnote 71 On average, concerts included three different performing forces: a traditional ensemble of cancioneros, singers with guitars and other regional instruments; a vocal music combo of conservatory-trained musicians, usually two singers plus piano accompaniment;Footnote 72 and one or more instrumental ensembles such as the XEO's trio or the PNR's Symphony Orchestra. Five of the eight concerts also featured poetry reciters.
In terms of the repertoire, the 188 pieces that constituted the eight concerts in the series can be grouped as follows: canciones by a known author, instrumental pieces, and traditional pieces. For the sake of my argument, I divide the instrumental pieces by whether the composer was still living at the time of the Nationalist Campaign. This separation will allow me to show the direction that nationalist instrumental music was taking in the early 1930s, at least in government-sponsored entertainment. Since I am interested in the performative acts of nationalism and their real-time effects, in the following analysis I consider each time a piece was performed, assuming that repeated performances attest to a piece's popularity with either audiences or performers.
Songs by a known author make up approximately 36 per cent of the repertoire. These songs were a mix of compositions from those who had heralded the Mexican canción as the source for musical nationalism in the early 1910s, and newer composers who had entered the canción market after the Mexican Revolution, bringing regional traditions and an awareness of urban tastes. Among the former were Manuel M. Ponce, Alfonso Esparza Oteo, Ignacio Fernández Esperón ‘Tata Nacho’, Miguel Lerdo de Tejada, and Mario Talavera. Of this older generation, Ponce was the most performed, with six songs. During the 1910s, Ponce had publicly defended the canción genre as ‘real Mexican music’. Publications and performances of Ponce's songs and similar ones, either arranged or newly composed by Esparza Oteo, Fernández Esperón, Lerdo de Tejada, Talavera, and others, burgeoned over the revolutionary decade, penetrating the popular consciousness.Footnote 73 Many of these canciones popularized before and during the Mexican Revolution attained the status of national music in the early 1920s, thanks to performances organized by the SEP. Vasconcelos, who was the Secretary of Education, believed that singing ‘enlightened the spirit’ and viewed songs in the Spanish language as effective tools against US cultural imperialism.Footnote 74 He ensured that Mexican songs were taught in elementary schools and workers’ choirs, published, and performed frequently for a working-class audience to make them a part of mass culture.Footnote 75
In the XEO concerts for the Nationalist Campaign, performances of Ponce's lyrical output were surpassed only by those of the younger Agustín Lara, who emerged as a composer in the late 1920s. Lara quickly rose to fame as a modern songwriter catering to urban sensibilities, with more erotic lyrics and cosmopolitan genres such as the bolero.Footnote 76 The next three most performed vocal composers were Lara's contemporary baritone and songwriter Jorge del Moral (1900–41), Esparza Oteo, and Tamayo Marín himself. Another relatively new trend in Mexico City during the 1920s was Yucatecan trova, a regional style of romantic song that began to attract national attention in urban centres, represented in XEO's programmes by Guty Cárdenas (1905–32) and Ricardo Palmerín (1889–1944). The song repertoire also featured three pieces by commercial composer María Grever (1885–1951), a Mexican who developed her career in New York. Table 1 shows all the song composers programmed more than once during the Nationalist Week concerts at XEO. Most of these songs were performed by conservatory-trained singers and some by traditional ensembles.
Song composers with more than one piece in the XEO 2–9 August Nationalist Week concert series
In the case of popular songs by known authors, ‘Mexican’ meant written by a Mexican. The only thing that the popular songs selected for the XEO Nationalist Week concerts have in common is that the songwriters are Mexican, even if the lyrics, titles, or genres do not necessarily refer to the nation (see Table 3). Still, in-demand genres such as foxtrots and tangos were eschewed, even those authored by Mexican composers. Tamayo Marín was aware that ‘nationalist’ meant resisting US fashions and products. This is evident in the omission of a hit song, the ‘Ann Harding’ waltz (dedicated to the eponymous Hollywood star), by songwriter Carlos Espinosa de los Monteros (1902–77).Footnote 77 XEO had aired the ‘Ann Harding’ waltz six times in the first half of 1931. Instead, Tamayo Marín selected Espinosa de los Monteros's ‘Lloraré’ for the Nationalist Week, perhaps because ‘Ann Harding’ paid too much heed to the US cultural influence that Melgar was trying to counter with the Campaign.
Next to the songs, Nationalist Week concerts featured several instrumental pieces, both old and new, and arrangements written by the directors of some of Mexico City's major musical ensembles. Composers from an earlier generation included Ricardo Castro, Genaro Codina, Ernesto Elorduy, José de Jesús Martínez, Juventino Rosas, and Felipe Villanueva. Rosas and Codina were each represented only by their most famous pieces, which the programme described as ‘immortal’: the Sobre las olas waltz (twice) and the Zacatecas march.Footnote 78 Sobre las olas and Zacatecas had achieved national and international recognition, making them ideal tokens of nationalism.
Castro's intermezzo from the opera Atzimba (1900) and Tamayo Marín's Preludio Maya were the only two pieces with titles referring to indigenous topics.Footnote 79 Table 2 lists the nineteenth-century instrumental music in the series, including arrangements of vocal pieces.
Nineteenth-century instrumental music in the XEO 2–9 August Nationalist Week concert series
XEO's radio concert series leaned towards tonal instrumental music familiar to audiences, such as waltzes, berceuses, or barcarolles, all genres from the romantic era. Since the late nineteenth century, these European genres had been in vogue not only among pre-revolutionary elites, but also across various social strata in cities, towns, and villages. As military and local brass bands proliferated, they exposed urban and rural audiences to a repertory where polkas, waltzes, and opera overtures mingled with regional music.Footnote 80 Tamayo Marín and XEO reinterpreted these popular romantic genres as national heritage when composed by Mexicans. The writer Rubén M. Campos had similarly declared in a 1917 newspaper article that slow waltzes ‘could be considered as a Mexican genre’ thanks to their development by Ernesto Elorduy, Juventino Rosas, and José de Jesús Martínez.Footnote 81 It is no coincidence that all three composers mentioned by Campos were included in XEO concerts. Among works by living art music composers, Ponce's instrumental pieces were the most programmed, with a total of three. Ponce had spent seven years in Paris during the 1920s studying composition with Paul Dukas. He started writing modernist pieces, which he presented in a concert upon his return to Mexico in 1929. However, performers and audiences continued to identify him with Mexican canción and his older, romantic-style compositions, as seen in the selections chosen for the August 1931 XEO concerts (Serenata mexicana, Barcarola mexicana, Gavota).Footnote 82 Former National Conservatory director Carlos del Castillo (1882–1959) contributed one waltz (Vals Perla), and Julián Carrillo (1875–1965) a non-microtonal piece for harp and chamber orchestra, ‘Stella’ (Berceuse, 1897).
Another set of instrumental music composers were orchestra conductors and active PNR collaborators, such as Miguel Lerdo de Tejada (1869–1941), José Briseño, and Esparza Oteo. Other ensemble directors arranged pieces for trio and orchestra, such as Velino M. Preza (1866–1944), director of the Police Band. Overall, for XEO's directors, instrumental ‘national music’ meant music composed and performed by Mexicans, excluding modernist pieces (in the case of art music) and US genres such as the foxtrot (in the case of popular music).
The 1931 Nationalist Week concert programmes suggest that the Mexican Revolution and the subsequent state-sponsored entertainment, including government-operated radio stations, motivated musicians to write nationalist-themed music in the post-revolutionary years. The qualifier ‘Mexican’ or ‘national’ is found far more frequently in instrumental pieces by living composers than in songs or older compositions.Footnote 83 Conversely, of the fourteen nineteenth-century pieces, none bears the word ‘Mexican’ or ‘national’ in the title (Table 3). While several of the pieces by living composers were written in the post-revolutionary years, some date from the revolutionary period (1910–c. 1920). Such is the case with Ponce's Serenata mexicana and Xochimilco (Barcarola mexicana), both from 1915. The Mexican Revolution changed the perspective on what constituted national music in several ways. First, troops from different regions travelled throughout Mexican territory, increasing the circulation of regional musics and dances that were previously unknown outside their area of origin.Footnote 84 In the words of Horacio Legrás, ‘the Mexican Revolution took the regional as its starting point, then spilled over onto a territory that was only half-imagined’.Footnote 85 As we shall see, this was particularly important for traditional music ensembles. Second, since the Revolution was an agrarian movement fought mainly by the dispossessed rural population, authorities, artists, and intellectuals recognized the need to include them in notions of Mexicanness, instead of just the elites. The urban and rural working classes became visible and audible.Footnote 86 Third, the need for a strong unified identity and a central government began to emerge, even as the armed struggles appealed strongly to regional loyalties.Footnote 87
Pieces with titles that include ‘Mexican’, ‘national’, or related terms
On the other side of the spectrum, traditional music leaned heavily towards regional genres or titles, in the understanding that ‘sampling’ regional musics gave a sonic panorama of the richness of national culture.Footnote 88 The possibility of getting exposure through radio attracted cancionero bands from all Mexican regions to the capital city.Footnote 89 Four traditional ensembles participated in XEO's Nationalist Week concerts, all of them cancioneros: Las Tres Huastecas (from the Huasteca region between the Sierra Madre Oriental mountain chain and the Gulf of Mexico), Los Guerrerenses (from the south-Pacific coastal state of Guerrero), The Cancioneros Regiomontanos (from the northwestern industrial city of Monterrey), and the duet Los Cacomixtles. XEO offered a stage for traditional ensembles by organizing contests and then programming the winners, such as Los Guerrerenses and Los Cacomixtles. This initiative reinforced Mexico City's significance in ‘nationalizing’ regional cultural traditions.Footnote 90 Several of the traditional unattributed pieces in the programmes were actually written or arranged by Lorenzo Barcelata (1889–1943), one of the musicians who had his music frequently played at XEO in the 1930s, helping him launch his career as a commercial author and Mexican film composer.Footnote 91
The third Nationalist Week concert featured the commercial Orquesta Posadas (piano, violin, cello, double bass, marimba, saxophone, and drum set), which had recorded with Victor (1929), Decca, and Peerless (1931), and also accompanied renowned singer Pedro Vargas (1906–89).Footnote 92 The participation of Orquesta Posadas in the XEO concerts highlights the significant role that recording musicians, who also performed at radio stations, played in popularizing music. Their performances made music widely available, increasing its chances of becoming audience favourites. Consequently, this music was more likely to be embraced as a symbol of nationalism.
The goal of XEO's Nationalist Week concert series was self-sufficiency. When XEO's director, Carlos M. Peralta, sent the Nationalist Week concert programmes (signed by Tamayo Marín) to Melgar, he proudly stated that ‘during the concerts, we have broadcast 100% Mexican music. We have not needed to import a thing from other countries.’Footnote 93 Peralta meant that all performers and pieces were Mexican. The Nationalist Week's socioeconomic experiment, in which commerce would ‘virtually close’ foreign product sales, aimed to prove to Mexicans in urban areas that their home economies could function exclusively on national products, even if they had to make some sacrifices. Peralta and Tamayo Marín applied the same principle to XEO programming: to provide attractive entertainment with only nationally sourced music. The repertory that the XEO audience had to forego during the Nationalist Week comprised an average of two arias and two instrumental pieces per concert, mostly by French and Italian composers. Also sacrificed were the occasional Spanish zarzuela, Cuban songs, and the fashionable ‘Hawaiian’ guitars (lap steels) that XEO included in its concerts during the first half of the 1930s.Footnote 94 Performance of foreign pieces resumed after the Nationalist Week.
The XEO concerts also served to sell a national image across Mexican territory and abroad. According to Peralta, listeners from many places throughout Mexico, the United States, Canada, Central America, Cuba, and New Zealand reported receiving the nine Nationalist Week concerts, ‘which attests to our broadcasts’ wave clarity and efficiency’.Footnote 95 Indeed, with 940 kHz, XEO had one of the strongest radio signals in Mexico at the time. Owning the wavelength to broadcast Mexican music to distant parts of the world supported the image of a modern country whose cultural and economic goods could compete internationally in terms of exchange rather than dependence.
A ‘Mexican Mosaic’
XEO bid to bring radio listeners from the different Mexican regions on board with the Nationalist Campaign was one of the PNR's centralization efforts. From its inception, XEO attempted to create a unified national radio audience in order to override regional allegiances and identities with a homogeneous, centralized one, a common trait of many Latin American state-sponsored musics.Footnote 96 Hayes notes that
Given Mexico's difficult terrain, limited means of transportation, and low literacy rates, radio was poised to play a central role in connecting dispersed communities and promoting national politics and culture. For the first time, oral culture, drama, and music could be centrally produced and distributed to much of the nation. Although national transmission did not guarantee uniform reception or interpretation, broadcasters worked to standardize a set of cultural practices for national consumption.Footnote 97
Even though commercial stations were more popular among listeners, XEO's potent radio waves served a fundamental purpose: to reach all of the Mexican states and make them participate in the PNR's political project. To this end, Mondays at the radio station were ‘Mexican States Day’, offering concerts that combined regional songs and poems with a few art music works, mostly by Mexican composers. They also featured regional performers who listeners from around the country could recognize.Footnote 98
While ‘Mexican States Monday’ worked to accomplish the PNR's ambition to supersede regional cultures with a national one by way of representation, the Nationalist Week prompted Tamayo Marín to take the concept a step forward in a concert he called ‘Mexican Mosaic’, announced as an extraordinary programme to close the series on 9 August. The concert included one piece for each of the (then) twenty-eight Mexican states plus Mexico City, the Federal District.Footnote 99 The twenty-nine pieces were arranged from north to south and from east to west, starting with Sonora (bordering the Arizona desert) and ending with Quintana Roo (bordering Belize and Guatemala). The selections comprised only popular music. Thirteen (45 per cent) of the pieces were symphonic arrangements, some of them of well-known pieces such as Jalisco's ‘Jarabe’ (known in the United States as ‘The Mexican Hat Dance’) and Oaxaca's ‘La Sandunga’, both of which are ubiquitous tokens of Mexican music to this day. There were also songs accompanied by orchestra and trio, such as ‘Chaparrita’ (soprano, tenor, and trio) representing the state of San Luis Potosí and Fernández Esperón's ‘La Borrachita’ (tenor and orchestra) representing Mexico City.Footnote 100 The entire ‘Mexican Mosaic’ programme lasted three hours, from 8 to 11 pm. Tamayo Marín dedicated the concert to the PNR's National Revolutionary Bloc from the House of Representatives, led by Melgar. Unlike other ‘Mexican Mosaic’ music collections created earlier and later, XEO's 1931 concert derived from the PNR's strategy to bring state senators, governors, and congressmen in line with the centralized party ideology. Reaching directly to radio listeners by playing a piece representative of their state as part of a national musical mosaic presumably connected them to the national project espoused by the party.
Other radio stations
Beyond the PNR's station XEO, the Nationalist Campaign received support from the Department of Public Education's XFX.Footnote 101 The station worked under the PNR's Radio-Telephone Cultural Office and the Department of Educational Outreach (DOR), directed by journalist and teacher María Luisa Ross Landa. Ross's position as radio-telephone department head gave her a prominent role in the early years of Mexican radio, all the more unusual because she was a woman. Unlike most radio station directors, who were engineers, Ross was a music connoisseur. She was a poet, a movie actress, and one of the first women to attend the National Conservatory, where she later obtained a tenured position in Recitation and Declamation. Her journalistic writings often covered music and theatre. Ross introduced Nationalist Campaign slogans into XFX's daily concerts and dedicated Tuesday and Thursday nights to the Campaign, including ‘select music and verses by our poets’. Familiar with the latest developments in advertising theory, she measured the success of Campaign propaganda by the audience's telephone calls and letters to the radio station.Footnote 102 Perhaps her rich credentials led her, even more than Melgar himself, to acknowledge the power of radio to rally popular support.
A few independent musicians volunteered to play in radio and live concerts to get public exposure and partisan support, providing free labour for the Nationalist Campaign. Such was the case with PNR member and frequent XEO participant José M. Islas, who directed the Mexico City-based Orquesta Republicana de México. As is often the case with musicians working for the Campaign, little is known about Islas or his orchestra, other than that the Orquesta Republicana was, according to Islas, ‘an orchestra that stands out from the common, formed by distinguished representatives from our National Conservatory’.Footnote 103 Islas offered Melgar the Orquesta Republicana's services for a concert to be held during the Nationalist Week on 7 August 1931 at one of the city's best-known venues, the Virginia Fábregas Theatre. Islas also volunteered to play a free concert at XEO, which took place on 28 August. The announcement for the XEO concert in the newspaper El Nacional explicitly stated that the Orquesta Republicana performed ‘to demonstrate its support for and adherence to the National Revolutionary Party’.Footnote 104 Upon request from the House of Representatives National Revolutionary Bloc, Islas composed a ‘Great March’ titled ‘Bloque Nacional Revolucionario’. Islas, who had written a few songs and piano pieces, ‘hoped that this musical composition please you [Melgar] and the Mexican people, and that the piece become very popular and be played for a long time so that our people, our society, or better, all who live in the Mexican Republic remember you fondly for your great campaign in favour of the beloved Nation’.Footnote 105 Islas's hopes did not materialize: the ‘Bloque Nacional Revolucionario Great March’ was forgotten, like so many other marches composed for specific political figures or events during the post-revolutionary years. The score survives in the Melgar Collection at Tulane University, a material record of a propaganda piece crafted specifically for a radio premiere.
Conclusion
The sonic and musical aspects of Mexico's early 1930s Nationalist Campaign have not been explored in academia thus far.Footnote 106 Post-revolutionary state formation in a dominant-party model (the PNR), radio technology, and economic protectionism designed to survive the transnational inter(world)war financial crisis converged in the Nationalist Campaign. This Campaign, with a capitalist-oriented take on musical nationalism, addressed the need to bolster Mexico's self-sufficiency in the face of US and European economic dominance. Central to this project was the voluntary identification of the Mexican populace with their nation.
Melgar exemplifies a Mexican political figure in a high-ranking position who embraced consumer culture as part of the party's strategy for post-revolutionary state development. Despite the influence of US imperialism on music and radio consumer culture, national practices in Latin American countries, including Mexico, shaped it in new and unexpected ways. In the Mexican case, a distinctive feature was the coexistence of public and private radio stations, and the state's heavy regulation of private radio broadcasting. The political project of the PNR relied on radio as a key tool in consumer culture to generate and propagate a unified brand of nationalism, in keeping with the needs of centralizing political authority and modernising the state economy.Footnote 107
To paraphrase Sergio Ospina Romero, Mexican musical nationalism in the Nationalist Campaign is a by-product of consumer culture and state policies.Footnote 108 This is demonstrated in the efforts of radio directors and Melgar himself to cultivate nationalism through marketing techniques in vogue in the United States. It is also demonstrated in the programming decisions made by XEO (the PNR's radio station) artistic director Alfredo Tamayo Marín, one of the many actors in the construction of Mexican musical nationalism. By designing nationalist radio concerts that mixed traditional music, salon music comprising popular romantic genres and Mexican songs, including recent hits, Tamayo Marín served two purposes. On the one hand, he was responding to the state's demands to create a musical version of ‘consume products made in Mexico’, and on the other, he was attempting to make musical nationalism a marketable commodity that would appeal to radio consumers. Perhaps in the interest of marketing to radio audiences, contemporary Mexican art music was omitted from Nationalist Campaign musical programming. The Nationalist Campaign's approach to musical nationalism exemplified a fusion of state-driven cultural policies and consumer-oriented marketing strategies, showing how political objectives and commercial interests intertwined to shape post-revolutionary Mexico's national identity.
Radio and the popular dissemination music used in government events such as this campaign reveal another facet of Mexican musical nationalism. The radio concerts programmed as part of the Nationalist Campaign promoted a canon of Mexican music tailored for popular consumption. Live broadcasts of the Nationalist Campaign's events brought the campaign to public attention and facilitated alliances between performers, composers, music educators, radio executives, merchants, and PNR officials. While the importance of live music in studying music and sonority in the Nationalist Campaign is acknowledged, it falls outside the scope of this article. The planning and broadcasting of the Nationalist Campaign concerts helped to create a notion of Mexican music that radio audiences would eventually assimilate. Thus, the definition of Mexican music in the early twentieth century was not solely shaped by theoretical and aesthetic considerations but also by radio broadcasting practices and state-sponsored public events that reached a broad segment of the population.
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