Monica A. Rankin . !México, la patria! Propaganda and Production during World War II . (The Mexican Experience.) Lincoln : University of Nebraska Press . 2009 . Pp. xiii, 366. $30.00.

Abstract

Monica A. Rankin's study of Mexican propaganda during World War II provides readers with a new and in-depth understanding of how Manuel Avila Camacho's government convinced a reticent nation to enter a war in which the country had little at stake as an ally of its northern nemesis. The book is well researched and based on a wide and interesting array of U.S. and Mexican primary sources. Despite its subtitle, the book says little on Mexican agricultural and industrial production during the war in comparison to its coverage of Mexican and U.S. propaganda. According to Rankin, to build public support for the war, Mexican leaders “redefined the country's revolutionary past as one of pro-democracy, and they placed the Revolution in the context of the anti-totalitarianism of World War II” (p. 4). Mexican propagandists equated Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, and Francisco Franco to Mexican dictator Porfirio Díaz, and World War II to the 1910 Mexican Revolution. They claimed the Allied war effort would spread democracy worldwide like the revolution did in Mexico. Rankin states that Mexican officials got the idea of linking the international war to Mexico's Revolution from the general public, particularly the hundreds of letters written to Avila Camacho's administration in mid-to-late 1942, shortly after Mexico declared war. Rankin argues, and most scholars would already agree, that Mexico City saw the war as a means to advance Mexican industrialization. What remains unclear from Rankin's study is whether Avila Camacho's government actually believed its own wartime rhetoric concerning freedom and democracy, or whether it employed such rhetoric in a Machiavellian attempt to “rally people around the flag” so as to advance a federal project that sought to modernize the national economy. To put it another way, Rankin does not spell out how Mexican officials could hypocritically champion overseas democracy while building a domestic one-party corporatist system at home.