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Radio in Revolution: Wireless Technology and State Power in Mexico, 1897–1938

2017; Duke University Press; Volume: 97; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00182168-4214486

1527-1900

Joy Elizabeth Hayes,

Media, Communication, and Education

Radio in Revolution offers a clearly written, meticulously researched, and previously untold chronicle of the role that radio technologies played in revolutionary Mexico. It makes an important contribution to Mexican radio studies and early twentieth-century Mexican history by identifying how Porfirian and revolutionary governments used radio communications for strategic coordination and state building. While the study offers important new insights into radio's role in the Mexican Revolution, it has two serious shortcomings. First, Radio in Revolution makes numerous overly ambitious claims about the political and military impact of radio technologies that are not supported by the evidence. Second, the book overstates the continuities and downplays the differences in radio technologies across the 40-year period covered in the study. This leads to exaggeration of the influence of radio technologies, a lack of contextualization of their use, and potential confusion about which technologies are being described by the term radio. Despite these weaknesses, the book offers original research on radio communications that may be of considerable interest to specialists in Mexican history.A closer look at two main arguments illuminates the book's strengths and deficiencies. First, Radio in Revolution argues that “radio technologies were crucial to certain attempts to centralize state power in Mexico during the late Porfiriato” (p. 4). Chapter 1 states that the Porfirio Díaz administration erected ten radio stations between 1900 and 1910 in order to pursue the goal of “establishing a radio network” to facilitate state control over the national territory (p. 16). Despite referencing several government reports, the chapter presents no evidence that a national radio network was envisioned, planned, or executed by the Díaz regime. In fact, the terms radio station and radio network are typically associated with radio broadcasting, which did not come to Mexico until the 1920s. Before then, radio technology in Mexico was based on Guglielmo Marconi's original spark-gap transmitter, which used a telegraph key to send messages in Morse code from point to point. Thus, rather than supporting the argument that radio was a crucial means of state communication, evidence from chapter 1 indicates that the state used radio technologies in a limited capacity to augment Mexico's telegraph system. Specifically, radio transmissions were used to extend telegraphic communication to outlying areas, like Baja California and the Yucatán Peninsula, where it was prohibitively expensive to lay telegraph cables. In the late Porfiriato, radio supplemented Mexico's growing national web of communications anchored in wired telegraphy, railways, ships, the postal system, and the press.Radio in Revolution also claims that radio was “decisive to the outcome of the Revolution and subsequent plans for solidifying the nation-state” (p. 4). Chapters 2 and 3 offer evidence that revolutionary leaders and the early revolutionary state used radio in innovative and strategic ways to establish and consolidate territorial control. Radio was still primarily used as an extension of the telegraph during the 1910s, but its unique ability to broadcast messages (which could be overheard by other parties) began to be harnessed and exploited. A compelling example is Pancho Villa's use of radiotelegraphy in the battle of Torreón in 1914. However, to argue that radio was decisive to the outcome of the revolution is to ignore the fact that radiotelegraphy was still ancillary to wired telegraphy. Radio was neither powerful enough nor reliable enough to operate as an independent communication system in Mexico in the 1910s. Indeed, Radio in Revolution offers a nuanced discussion of Venustiano Carranza's efforts to build the first high-power transmitter and receiver in Mexico City with the help of German expertise and technology. Beginning in 1919, this powerful station allowed the Mexican state to communicate directly with both international and national radiotelegraph stations. Before the 1920s and 1930s, however, neither radiotelegraphy nor radio broadcasting were primary means of communication in Mexico. Radio's “decisive” influence on the course of the revolution, then, is overstated.In sum, Radio in Revolution traces the deployment of radio communications in Mexico between 1897 and 1938 and investigates its impact on the course of the Mexican Revolution and postrevolutionary politics. The book provides a trove of previously unpublished evidence about wireless telegraph use in the 1900s, 1910s, and 1920s, primarily by the government, revolutionaries, and the military. Chapters 1 through 3 examine how the Porfirian government and revolutionary regimes adopted radiotelegraphy as a means of protecting the national territory from both internal and external threats. Radio in Revolution makes its most unique and important contribution to Mexican radio studies by illuminating the prebroadcasting history of Mexican radio. Chapter 4 claims that the Adolfo de la Huerta revolt of 1923 “caused lasting ramifications for wireless development in Mexico, especially increasing authoritarian and monopolistic tendencies” (p. 128). However, the chapter provides no evidence of a causal link between the rebellion and authoritarian regulations adopted in the mid-1920s and early 1930s. Finally, chapters 5 and 6 detail the postrevolutionary state's growing use of radio for point-to-point communication and for propaganda broadcasting during the 1920s and 1930s. These chapters offer new evidence about the use of radio technologies in both military and civilian logistics and in state efforts to inculcate citizens with revolutionary nationalism.