Bad Language, Naked Ladies, and Other Threats to the Nation: A Political History of Comic Books in Mexico by Anne Rubenstein

Author:Anne Rubenstein [Rubenstein, Anne]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Publisher: Duke University Press
Published: 2012-07-31T16:00:00+00:00

Commissioners

The men and women who staffed the commission struggled with the moral and political questions raised by the goal of controlling the content of mass media: they believed in the urgency of their task. The first commissioners seem to have been chosen less for their devotion to the hard work of setting up a new bureaucracy than for their public reputation for morality.3 For example, Amalia Castillo de Ledon had already made a name for herself as the president of a group of elite Mexico City women (El Ateneo de Mujeres de México) and an enthusiastic supporter of Avila Camacho’s literacy campaign.4 After 1952, the classifying commission demonstrated even more personal involvement in the business of comic book censorship, as evidenced in the memoranda they wrote and in the statements they made in their private meetings. Many of the commissioners took a sincere interest in their task and expressed genuine outrage at some of the publications which they supervised.

Over the years, the commission’s makeup has remained remarkably stable. Its members, as representatives of the branches of the executive, were supposed to resign every six years, at the end of each presidential term. The key membership of the commission, however, often outlasted changes of administration. Fernando Ortega ran the office from 1944 through 1958. A lawyer who helped write the 1944 legislation creating the commission, Heraclio Rodríguez Portugal, represented Gobernación on the commission from 1952 through 1955, and then represented the Federal District through 1957, when he became legal adviser to the commission. These men formed a link between the first and second incarnations of the classifying commission, but newer members also tended toward long terms. A representative of the Procuduría General, Gonzalo Hernandez Zanabria, sat on the commission from 1952 through 1976. Javier Piña y Palacios both presided over the commission and represented the Department of Public Education on it from 1952 through 1965. María Lavalle Urbina advised the commission in 1956, then represented Gobernacíon from 1957 through 1964. A comic book publisher, Octavio Colmenares Vargas, represented the interests of the magazine industry from 1958 through 1965, and again from 1971 through 1975. A few members lasted a year or less.5 Yet for the most part, there was much more continuity than change in the makeup of the classifying commission.6

La Comisíon Calificadora did not occupy a very distinguished position in the federal bureaucracy, to judge by its minuscule budget. Commissioners never received the yearly salary due them until 1953; even then, it was a paltry 7,200 pesos a year. In 1957, the president of the commission received a raise, to 12,000 pesos a year. Salaries were not raised again until 1972, despite a 1965 memorandum from the commission to the secretary of public education calling their earnings “ridiculous.”7 The commissioners usually held other jobs; still, judging by the amount of written material they left behind and the schedule of commission-related meetings they kept, they put in a significant amount of time working for the commission (perhaps as much as twenty hours a week), for which they were poorly reimbursed.

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