Nuestro Futuro ¿Hombres Libres, O Esclavos?: Imagining US–Mexican Cooperation against the Axis Powers in a World War II Propaganda Comic

Abstract

The creation of the OIAA in 1940 (at the time named the Office for Coordination of Commercial and Cultural Relations between the American Republics) was a new step in the development of the economic and the political relationship between the USA and Latin America dating back to the nineteenth century. In 1823, the Monroe Doctrine defined the efforts of European powers to colonize Latin America as acts of aggression that would require US intervention. Although largely disregarded in Europe, in Latin America, the Monroe Doctrine operated as a unifying belief in the special link between the new Western Hemispheric republics (Sexton 2011). In 1904, President Theodore Roosevelt’s Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine claimed that the USA had become “an international police force” and therefore had the right and the power to intervene into the internal affairs of Western Hemispheric countries (Roosevelt 1927, 114–115). The Clark Memorandum of 1928 claimed that the USA held a self-evident right to defend itself and its political and economic interests. Unsurprisingly, this foreign policy of intervention, used whenever the USA felt its economic and political interests threatened, placed the country in an unfavorable position with many Latin American republics. To combat this Pan-American hostility, in his 1933 Inaugural Address, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt launched the Good Neighbor policy, which re-imagined Pan-American unity through respect for national sovereignty (Pike 1992, 272–296; Pike 1995; Green 1971; Gellman 1979). The operations of the OIAA emerged from the larger Good Neighbor policy, both in cultural and in economic terms (Cramer and Prutsch 2012; Rankin 2009; Cramer and Prutsch 2006; Pike 1995, 251–254; Green 1971, 88–89, 133–134; Gellman 1979, 149–167). Since its inception in 1940, the OIAA aimed “to assist in the preparation and coordination of policies to stabilize the Latin American economies, to secure and deepen U.S. influence in the region, and to combat axis inroads into the hemisphere, particularly in the commercial and cultural spheres” (Cramer and Prutsch 2006, 786). Mass culture was called upon to help attain these political and economic goals.