Broadcasting the Civil War in El Salvador: A Memoir of Guerrilla Radio (review)
Given the broad scope of this work, as well as the divergent views of the contributors, strong organization proves critical to the book’s success. Acree and González Espitia accomplish this by highlighting themes that appear throughout the work in their introduction and by structuring it into three sections. The first section, entitled “Lasting Impressions,” focus on the process by which citizens and the government alike utilized printed words and images to build legitimacy in new nations. Authors Hugo Achugar and Amy Wright deftly illustrate that printed materials did not influence only the literate. Achugar, for example, asserts that “state art,” such as coins, communicated messages to people of all social classes, because almost all citizens participated in the cash economy. Wright has studied the influence of serial novels in Mexico, emphasizing that by delivering the material in a newspaper, the authors communicated to an audience beyond the elite. For example, she asserts that people frequently read newspapers out loud to illiterate citizens. In the second section, “Cultures on Display,” the authors have focused on how cultural productions such as carnival celebrations influenced the construction of social identities in Latin America. Beatriz González-Stephan studied Venezuela’s first national fair in 1883 to argue skillfully that visual culture, such as the displays at the fair, helped create a national identity by establishing a common narrative among the literate and illiterate. The third section, “Ideologies, Revelations, and Hidden Nations,” is not as cohesive as the first two; instead of sharing a strong thematic connection, these contributions all focus on a single era—the late nineteenth century. Still, the authors have made valuable contributions. Terry Rugeley, for example, demonstrates how the violence of the Caste Wars paved the way for the acceptance of Porfirianism in the Yucatan.