Cantinfladas of the PRI: (Mis) Representations of Mexican Society in the Films of Mario Moreno

Resumen

In The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Marx wrote that all great, world-historical facts and personages occur twice, the first time as tragedy; the second as farce. Confronted by the tumultuousness of Mexico's extended revolution, he might have added a third occurrence in the form of carnival. The world that Lázaro Cárdenas turned upside down, between 1934 and 1940, became a tragedy during the presidential administration of Miguel Alemán, from 1946 to 1952. The populist Partido Revolucionario Mexicano (PRM), intended to consolidate the working-class gains of the Cárdenas era, was co-opted by Alemán to the service of trickle-down development policies under that oxymoron of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI).