A Sentimental Education for the Working Man: Mexico City, 1900-1910

FAIN: FB-52468-06

Robert M. Buffington
Regents of the University of Colorado, Boulder (Bowling Green, OH 43403-4401)

This project reconstructs the complex and shifting conditions under which early twentieth-century Mexican working-class men emerged as sexed and gendered subjects. By examining alternative masculinities at work or under construction in Mexico City’s satiric penny press for workers during the early twentieth century, it challenges the reduction of working-class masculinities to the macho. It argues that working-class men—whose lived experience forced them to confront modernity’s contradictions in ways their bourgeois counterparts never did—played a definitive role in the development of modern male subjectivities in Mexico.

Associated Products

A Sentimental Education for the Working Man: The Mexico City Penny Press, 1900-1910 (Book)
Title: A Sentimental Education for the Working Man: The Mexico City Penny Press, 1900-1910
Author: Robert M. Buffington
Abstract: In A Sentimental Education for the Working Man Robert Buffington reconstructs the complex, shifting, and contradictory ideas about working-class masculinity in early twentieth-century Mexico City. He argues that from 1900 to 1910, the capital’s satirical penny press provided working-class readers with alternative masculine scripts that were more realistic about their lives, more responsive to their concerns, and more representative of their culture than anything proposed by elite social reformers and Porfirian officials. The penny press shared elite concerns about the destructive vices of working-class men, and urged them to be devoted husbands, responsible citizens, and diligent workers; but it also used biting satire to recast negative portrayals of working-class masculinity and to overturn established social hierarchies. In this challenge to the "macho" stereotype of working-class Mexican men, Buffington shows how the penny press contributed to the formation of working-class consciousness, facilitated the imagining of a Mexican national community, and validated working-class men as modern citizens.
Year: 2015
Primary URL: http://https://www.dukeupress.edu/A-Sentimental-Education-for-the-Working-Man/index.html
Secondary URL: http://www.amazon.com/Sentimental-Education-Working-Man-1900-1910/dp/0822358824
Publisher: Duke University Press
Type: Single author monograph

"Toward a Modern Sacrificial Economy: Violence against Women and Male Subjectivity in the Turn-of-the-Century Mexico City Penny Press" (Book Section)
Title: "Toward a Modern Sacrificial Economy: Violence against Women and Male Subjectivity in the Turn-of-the-Century Mexico City Penny Press"
Author: Robert M. Buffington
Editor: Victor Macías-González and Anne Rubenstein, eds.
Abstract: Addresses attitudes towards male violence against women in the Mexico City penny press and related publications, 1900-1910.
Year: 2012
Primary URL: http://www.unmpress.com/books.php?ID=1409574270
Publisher: University of New Mexico Press
Book Title: Masculinity and Sexuality in Modern Mexico

“La violencia contra la mujer y la subjectividad masculina en la prensa popular de la Ciudad de México en el cambio del siglo” (Book Section)
Title: “La violencia contra la mujer y la subjectividad masculina en la prensa popular de la Ciudad de México en el cambio del siglo”
Author: Robert M. Buffington
Editor: Claudia Agostoni and Elisa Speckman Guerra, eds.
Abstract: Addresses working-class attitudes towards male violence against women in the Mexico City penny press and related publications, 1900-1910.
Year: 2005
Primary URL: http://www.historicas.unam.mx/publicaciones/catalogo/ficha?id=450
Publisher: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México
Book Title: De normas y transgresiones. Enfermedad y crimen en América Latina (1850 - 1950)

“Homophobia and the Mexican Working Class” (Book Section)
Title: “Homophobia and the Mexican Working Class”
Author: Robert M. Buffington
Editor: Robert McKee Irwin, Ed McCaughan and Michelle Nasser, eds.
Abstract: Examines working-class attitudes towards male effeminacy in the Mexico City penny press and related publications, 1900-1910.
Year: 2003
Primary URL: http://www.palgrave.com/us/book/9781403960498
Publisher: Palgrave
Book Title: Centenary of the Famous 41: Sexuality and Social Control in Mexico, 1901

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