Bonds of Solidarity in the Streets: Newsboys and Journalists in Mexico City, 1911–1914

Drawing on analyses of newspapers, plays, novels, and broadsheets, during my talk, I trace the emergence and circulation of an “iconography of danger” by journalists, graphic artists, and reformers as newsboys confronted work-related accidents and death in the streets in Mexico City during early 1911. Although journalists, writers, and reformers highlighted sympathetic notions of newsboys facing accidents on street corners and death on trains, playwrights and graphic artists popularized the notion of newsboys as mischievous and mistrustful. In this talk, I will also analyze how newsboys and journalists responded to these narratives of danger in the streets and the press by forming bonds of solidarity through the organization of funeral trains and funeral processions through the same streets in which journalists wrote and newspaper vendors sold papers. Newsboys and journalists also fundraised money for the establishment of housing lodges and mutual aid societies. I contend that such collective actions among journalists and child newspaper vendors between 1911 and 1912 paved the way for the politicization of former newsboy and editor Rafael Martínez (Rip-Rip) in the pages of El Democrata (1914-1918) and the efforts of newspaper vendors outside Mexico City in the port city streets of Veracruz during the spring of 1922 before the establishment of the Union of Newsboys in January 1923 in Mexico City.

All UCL staff and students welcome. Contact Feryal Awan and Diana Sousa for more details. 

If you’d like to lead a session—whether it’s a lecture, a workshop on an in-progress grant application or article, a book reading, or another activity—please let us know. Sessions can be kept informal, limited to CCSC staff and student members, or opened to the wider public, depending on the nature of the event and your preference.

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The Critical Childhood Studies Centre is a home for world-leading scholarship about childhood as a socio-political, cultural, and historical phenomenon in diverse global contexts. The Centre provides a focal point for faculty and students at all levels in UCL to engage in innovative and multi-disciplinary research, teaching, and public engagement geared towards achieving social justice with and for children and young people.