The Impossible Americas: Argentina, Ecuador, and the Geography of U.S. Mass Media, 1938--1948

During the final years of the United States' Good Neighbor Policy and amid World War II, the U.S. government created a mass-media campaign directed at Latin America. This campaign sought to rile criticism of the Axis powers while, at the same time, generating popular enthusiasm for the United States' commercial and cultural presence in the region. Ideas about global geography became a critical element of this campaign, which promoted the concept of "continental unity" as a central message on the radio, in print, and in maps. Parts I and II of this dissertation examine how geography and media became integrated into U.S. "cultural geopolitical strategy"---a coordinated effort to influence popular ideas of political geography abroad. These chapters use the radio programming of the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs, corporate advertising, The Reader's Digest and the Map of Hispanic Americas as specific examples. They show that the spread of U.S. mass media was not only intrinsically connected to war strategy, but also incorporated ideas of class, commerce, and race into a modern spatial conceptualization of U.S.-centered capitalism.;Parts III and IV examine the conflicts and popularity of this mass media campaign in Ecuador and Argentina. In taking a transnational lens, these sections show that U.S. ambitions to influence popular ideas about global geography were challenged and complicated by national cultural geopolitical strategies and public cultures on the ground. Rather than understand these media's reception as a statistical count of popularity, analysis centers on how the geopolitical ideas that composed their central messages became integrated and contested in local and national debates over nation, regionalism, and globalism.;In Ecuador, the rising presence of U.S. mass media and the United Americas campaign coincided precisely with a turning point in national geopolitical history: both the United States and Ecuador used imagery of regionalism and the presence of transnational shortwave radio as a part of public diplomacy and mass media campaigns. Meanwhile, the transnational production of national culture functioned as an illustration of the paradoxical ways in which empire and nationalism could become mutually constituting. In Argentina, the geopolitical idea of American Unity functioned as an important discourse for anti-fascist protest during World War II, and, by the close of the war, began to symbolize a more permanent geography of international connection for the political identity of the "middle class.".;In examining these very different histories of media and geography, this dissertation contextualizes both the popularity and rejection of U.S. media---and its internal cultural geopolitical frameworks---as a part of both local and global history. It draws connections between seemingly disparate sites and actors---scientists, diplomats, missionaries, radio listeners, and readers---in order to piece together a portrait of the ways in which mass media became a critical element in the histories of empire and geopolitics in the United States, Ecuador and Argentina.