Consuming Democracy: U.S. Cultural Diplomacy in Mexico, 1945--196

This dissertation traces the development of U.S. cultural diplomacy in Mexico from 1945 to 1968, demonstrating how U.S. cultural and political diplomacy worked to foster a specific vision of postwar democracy, centered on a gendered model of a consumer society. Examining the development of the message of US cultural diplomacy in Mexico from the immediate postwar period through 1968, I argue that U.S. cultural and political diplomacy worked to foster development and modernization, in a particular form, centered around consumption. Focusing on the programs of the U.S. State Department, and later on the U.S. Information Agency (USIA), I examine the growth of American cultural diplomacy both within, and apart from, the enveloping Cold War context. Through this period I trace both the large shifts in policy, programs, and message over the course of two decades, and the moments of possibility, points where the relationship between the two nations was still in flux, to determine the very specific nature of U.S.-Mexican relations within the context of larger global diplomacy.;Mexico provides an excellent example through which to study both the rhetoric of American cultural diplomacy, and its relationship to larger ideas of an international culture in the early postwar period. The interconnected relationship between the U.S. and Mexico goes back centuries; the annexation of Mexican land in the nineteenth century brought Mexican citizens into the United States along with their territory, and Mexico provided raw materials and laborers for the U.S. over the next century. No other American nation has been of as much concern to the United States, as a result of both the history and the border, yet little has been written about the relationship between the two in the Cold War period. Studying Mexico, a major recipient of both U.S. goods and U.S. capital, with a different cultural, political and economic past than European nations, will help historians to understand better the shift in the second half of the twentieth century from defining democracy as mass politics to defining democracy as mass consumption.;Finally, examining the close relationship between the United States and Mexico, and the constant flow of people and goods across the border sheds new light on U.S. assumptions about race, gender and modernity in the postwar period. In addition to highly gendered images of democracy, and the American system of free enterprise that the USIA programs claimed served to stabilize that democracy, cultural programs and propaganda were often created with specific ideas of race, and "development" in mind. The experience of Mexican laborers (braceros) in the U.S. altered cultural diplomacy on the ground, and expands the story of American race relations, and the impact of race on the international image of the U.S. in the postwar years, beyond black and white. Problems and concerns about exploitation by American business and the U.S. federal government, racial difference, different ideas of democracy, and the importance of free enterprise as a foundation to American-style democracy, continue to color the relationship between Mexico and the United States and the debates over immigration, labor and trade, today.