Browsing by Author "Olcott, Jocelyn"

This dissertation explores the quotidian experience of economic development by studying both the material realities and discursive worlds of 1960s Argentina. I reveal the gendered relationship between economic development and an expanding consumer culture by analyzing the use, circulation, and meanings attributed to household appliances by journalists and public intellectuals. In the late 1950s, many economists, politicians, and intellectuals fervently believed they had found an economic model -- developmentalism -- that would finally provide the means of raising Argentines' standard of living and make the Argentine economy as robust as those of the United States and Northern European countries. Household appliances played a key role because they achieved both those goals, (supposedly) improving women's lives in the process by in part facilitating their increased participation in the workforce. Developmentalists believed their economic model to exist independently of ideology and cultural influences, but their model encountered cultural realities that limited its success. Consumerism--the way through which Argentines interacted with development--and its effects on family and gender relationships complicated the process. Both supporters and critics of developmentalism attacked women's roles as consumers to articulate many of their protestations against changes in women's status and to express anxieties about seemingly unrelated social and cultural changes. I argue that through the course of the 1960s the discussion about consumerism increasingly became a way through which different groups offered distinct visions of how "Argentine society" ought to be transformed.

This study draws on a broad array of written and oral sources. To trace the connection between economic development and consumer society, I interweave an analysis of economic and infrastructural data - such as production statistics or the availability of gas, water - with a study of socio-cultural discourses found in a wide variety of magazines, essays, films, and interviews. I juxtapose these sources in unusual ways to demonstrate two things. First, the cross-referencing of disparate sources to reveals a fuller, more complete picture of economic development and its effects--transcending macro-structural phenomenon to offer a view of quotidian change. And, two, this more complete pictures details how a narrative of hope and idealism evolved into one of anxiety and vitriol as the decade progressed.

Contests over Contraception in Late Twentieth-Century Mexico follows how the birth control pill became immoral and centers Mexican Catholics in this history. From the early 1960s to the early 1970s, Mexican Catholic bishops, priests, and married couples debated the morality of the pill. Because the pill was primarily a hormonal invention, as opposed to a barrier method, it inspired many questions and debates about the purpose of sex. In the 1960s, the Church was reevaluating its doctrine—including its approach to sex and marriage—amidst modernization, social change, and cultural upheaval. Instead of assuming a monolithic Mexican Church, Contests over Contraception centers on the diversity of Catholic actors and their ideas. I argue that at the heart of these pluralistic debates about the morality of the pill was the contested place of nonprocreative sex in marriage, otherwise known as conjugality, marital intimacy, and pleasure. My work places the question of marital intimacy at the center of these debates, unsettling many of the dominant narratives about the Church in Mexico and Latin America in this period: a critic of economic oppression or a defender of family values. Just as much as the very real economic circumstances led many Mexicans to be concerned with family size, this concern was not mutually exclusive with concerns over marital intimacy and pleasure, as often inadvertently assumed. The fear of couples resorting to abortion was powerful enough to reconcile many of these different concerns and push Mexican Catholics to consider approving the pill.This dissertation demonstrates that this history is much more than one of Catholic dissent or obedience in response to the Pope's prohibition of the pill in 1968. When we turn to Mexico, we see that these debates were about how couples, not individuals, made these decisions about their reproductive lives together. And so, marital intimacy—when and why couples should have sex and whether the pill could facilitate this process—was an important one. Concerns over economic circumstances only raised the stakes. This research suggests that the question of birth control is distinct from abortion, and invites a different set of questions, especially when studied in Mexico. Contemporary terminology used to discuss sexuality and reproduction (such as left/right or pro-life/pro-choice) did not apply to these complex debates in the 1960s. Centering on how Mexican Catholics conceived of conjugality, or pleasure between spouses, moves away from the equally important focus of individual rights and autonomy when discussing reproduction and sexuality. Historicizing how and when the pill became immoral in Mexico suggests reproductive matters were politicized at different rates across the world.

My dissertation examines the circular transit of ideas about race and identity. Through transnational archival research and oral histories in North Carolina and throughout Mexico, I argue that migrants' ideas about race differed depending on their sending community. I use the experiences of migrants from Cherán, Michoacán, to emphasize that race making is a fluid process. Though historians conventionally have treated ethnic and racial categories as separate, if often intersecting, I treat them as fundamentally similar and interchangeable. While the majority of historical scholarship on Mexicans in the United States focuses on areas that were once part of Mexico (like the US Southwest), my study attends to how ideas about race form differently in regions traditionally isolated from Mexican migration, like North Carolina. This research reveals that indigenous migrants' identities developed and transformed differently, intimately linked to the ways racial and ethnic histories have been propagated and lived by Mexican citizens in diverse regions of Mexico. My dissertation also demonstrates that migrants not only adopted the racial ideas of their receiving state, but they also transmitted racial knowledge back to their home communities. In doing so, this history of migration to the United States both begins and ends outside of the country. In our increasingly global and transnational context, my project changes our understanding of how racial formations are generated in a transitional world.

This dissertation examines Mexico City’s material politics of print—the central actors engaged in making print, their activities and relationships, and the legal, business, and social dimensions of production—across the nineteenth century. Inside urban printshops, a socially diverse group of men ranging from manual laborers to educated editors collaborated to make the printed items that fueled political debates and partisan struggles in the new republic. By investigating how print was produced, regulated, and consumed, this dissertation argues that printers shaped some of the most pressing conflicts that marked Mexico’s first formative century: over freedom of expression, the role of religion in government, and the emergence of liberalism. Printers shaped debates not only because they issued texts that fueled elite politics but precisely because they operated at the nexus where new liberal guarantees like freedom of the press and intellectual property intersected with politics and patronage, the regulatory efforts of the emerging state, and the harsh realities of a post-colonial economy.

Historians of Mexico have typically approached print as a vehicle for texts written by elites, which they argue contributed to the development of a national public sphere or print culture in spite of low literacy levels. By shifting the focus to print’s production, my work instead reveals that a range of urban residents—from prominent printshop owners to government ministers to street vendors—produced, engaged, and deployed printed items in contests unfolding in the urban environment. As print increasingly functioned as a political weapon in the decades after independence, print production itself became an arena in struggles over the emerging contours of politics and state formation, even as printing technologies remained relatively unchanged over time.

This work examines previously unexplored archival documents, including official correspondence, legal cases, business transactions, and printshop labor records, to shed new light on Mexico City printers’ interactions with the emerging national government, and reveal the degree to which heated ideological debates emerged intertwined with the most basic concerns over the tangible practices of print. By delving into the rich social and cultural world of printing—described by intellectuals and workers alike in memoirs, fiction, caricatures and periodicals— it also considers how printers’ particular status straddling elite and working worlds led them to challenge boundaries drawn by elites that separated manual and intellectual labors. Finally, this study engages the full range of printed documents made in Mexico City printshops not just as texts but also as objects with particular visual and material qualities whose uses and meanings were shaped not only by emergent republicanism but also by powerful colonial legacies that generated ambivalent attitudes towards print’s transformative power.

Tolerance is considered foundational for a multicultural society to defuse tensions over race, religion, and sexuality. However, critics of tolerance point out that its reliance on the consent of the majority to extend equal rights to a minority, along with its liberal method of individualizing prejudice, does not result in equality. This project historicizes tolerance by examining the trajectory of its adoption by leftist political parties in Mexico to address concerns over sexual identity and difference. It demonstrates that the embrace of tolerance was not only a political strategy for electoral gain, but also a method to maintain a masculinist party. By endorsing a policy of tolerance through the expansion of the principle of private life, leftist parties claimed solidarity with the feminist and sexual liberation movement rather than engage with their criticisms of the heterosexism of leftist militancy.

Issues of sexuality, particularly homosexual and reproductive rights, were in an uneasy, if not antagonistic, relationship with the revolutionary politics of left-wing organizations such as the Mexican Communist Party (PCM) since their foundation. However, between 1976 and 1981, leftist parties shifted their stances. Adopting a policy of tolerance, party leaders hoped to reconcile the growing lesbian, gay and feminist movements with their rank and file because these social movements provided the potential votes that could launch the Left out of electoral obscurity. Revolution in the Sheets traces the limits and outcomes of this strategy. Tolerance did little to stem homophobia or sexism among leftists in Mexico. Furthermore, militants rejected the tolerance policy because sexual politics were the primary outlet for rank and file leftists to dispute intra-party tensions, vocalize intimate grievances, and distinguish themselves from one another for political gain. In the end, the shift to tolerance – a defining feature of the conflicts over the cultural turns that marked the last decades of the twentieth century – was a contingent product of intimate feuds, electoral strategy, and interpersonal relationships.