Robert Buffington analyzes how during the Porfiriato's final decade (1900–1910), “socialist-inspired” penny press journalists—a little-studied group who identified with the working class and whose writings circulated widely—critiqued the Porfirian state's modernizing project. The penny press elaborated an alternative popular liberal pantheon for the nation that created an awareness of gender and class, encouraged new attitudes toward work and leisure while satirizing the bourgeoisie, and displaced traditional honor-based relations between the sexes with a more companionate, modern intimacy. Historians have used the penny press but have not engaged with the complex texts accompanying the images as Buffington has, deciphering the complex argot, double entendres, puns, and word games interspersed with Mexico City's working-class caló dialect. Buffington offers a useful methodological guide by exploring iconographic conventions in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Mexico and explaining how journalists designed images and texts to convey meaning through spatial relations (pp. 42–45). Buffington richly synthesizes...
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