Duke University Press A Sentimental Education for the Working Man: The Mexico City Penny Press, 1900-1910

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. Review "Nobody that I know has systematically used the penny press genre to explore changing gender roles, and much less the historical development of subjectivities in modern Mexico. Although the book's focus is on working-class notions of masculinity, it argues for a broader influence of those notions during the twentieth century. Robert Buffington writes with grace, and few scholars, even writing in Spanish, would be able to reconstruct the meanings of the penny press language like he does." --Pablo Piccato, author of"The Tyranny of Opinion: Honor in the Construction of the Mexican Public Sphere" From the Author Robert M. Buffington is Associate Professor of Women and Gender Studies at the University of Colorado, Boulder. He is the author of Criminal and Citizen in Modern Mexico. About the Author Robert M. Buffington is Associate Professor of Women and Gender Studies at the University of Colorado, Boulder. He is the author of "Criminal and Citizen in Modern Mexico."