Anderson - Modernization, Nation-Building, and Television History

Mirta Varela

While histories of cinema tell how filmmakers rose from the obscurity of Le Grand Caf in Paris to the summit of artistic recognition, histories of radio tend to emphasize the experiments carried out by passionate young men in homemade laboratories before radio became a widespread medium in the 1930s. In both cases, the story of a shift from the margins to center stage reveals legitimacy based on cinema or radios popularity, or the recognition of their technical or aesthetic virtues. In contrast, the launch of television in many parts of the world was marked by grandiose state rituals led by presidents in national public buildings that contributed to an external institutional legitimacy. Society did not take long to acknowledge this righteousness, since the state had already established its importance from the very beginning. This origin of television left no doubts about its value as a political tool to construct hegemonic power. By contrast, its aesthetic and revolutionary potential would always be regarded with suspicion. The history of television cannot be explained solely through its origin, but it is worthwhile to evaluate this initial moment that presented features common to many countries, as well as national nuances. In this regard, the inaugural ceremonies, which were attended by officials from the national governments with the explicit aim of reinforcing national values by way of modern technology, are events particularly suitable for comparison in the history of television.

The first countries to begin regular television broadcasts in Latin America were Mexico, Brazil, Cuba, and Argentina between September 1950 and October 1951.

Finally, moving on to Cuba, the island had one of the most developed private broadcasting systems in Latin America by the mid-twentieth century, a system that was fully transformed after the Cuban Revolution triumphed in 1959. In this regard, television could be considered part of a history of technical and cultural modernization undertaken by other media sources in these countries in the past. However, television also coincides with a phase of major political, economic, and cultural transformations that changed the role of each of these countries on the continental market. During the two decades in which Latin American television systems were built, launched, and consolidatedfrom the mid-1940s through the mid-1960smuch was changing in the Americas. Cuba became a cultural and political point of reference for Latin American artists and intellectuals as it was forced out of commercial trade; the Mexican cultural industry experienced solid economic growth; Argentina relinquished its hegemonic position; and the Brazilian cultural industry began to rise. Therefore, we could hypothesize that television starts just as the history of the cultural industry in each of these regionsand the relations among the principal domestic markets of cultural goods in themhad reached a turning point. Thus, analyzing the inaugural ceremonies from this perspective can offer unique insight into these processes.

In all four of the countries that are the focus of this study, there were events organized in conjunction with national administrations in order to officially launch television: Presidents Miguel Alemn Valds (Mexico), Carlos Pro Socarrs (Cuba), and Juan Domingo Pern (Argentina) each gave a speech on the new medium during the inauguration of television in their countries. In short, these were ceremonies that brought into play a conception of what was public: the role of television and its place in national history. In this regard, it is useful to note that these ceremonies were not exclusive to Latin America, but instead characteristic of the beginnings of television almost worldwide. In the case of Germany, for example, the 1936 Olympic Games were chosen as the framework for the introduction of television by the Nazi regime. In the United States, it was the 1939 Worlds Fair in New York, and the first broadcast images showed President Franklin D. Roosevelt giving a speech to an audience of international politicians that included the Queen of England. As for Spain, where television did not appear until 1956, the inaugural event was a mass led by a representative of the pope, broadcast from an altar that had been set up at the channels studio.exhibition was about more than simply showing the power of each national administration. Instead, an appropriate framework was chosen to broadcast the symbols of the nation: the Olympic City and sports in Germany (sports, nationalism, and TV would become a strong trio from then on); the Worlds Fair and technological modernity in the United States; and mass and Catholicism in the case of Spain. In Brazil, the topics and traditions that contributed to consolidating national myths became resources for legitimizing the new television medium at the service of national entrepreneurs, not of the state. In this way, the symbols of the nation prevail over the differences between commercial and public services. The relationship between television and the nation appeared even when technical infrastructure was not national at all.

However, focusing exclusively on these events can be problematic. In a certain way, this emphasis contradicts the interpretation of history as a process and the conception of the media as an integrated system. It is impossible to overlook the justified suspicions associated with histories that hone in on the inaugural moment. Jean-Louis Comolli has defined the histories of cinema as a catalogue of the first time that , and I have no intention of repeating this scheme with respect to television. Thus, while this chapter does consider a focus on inaugural events useful, it is nevertheless important to critically reflect on this decision.

Media events as defined by Daniel Dayan and Elihu Katz became huge celebrations of mass communications in the second half of the twentieth century. Therefore, a more detailed historical analysis will help to define television as an institution and outline its relationship to other political, economic, and cultural institutions that have played significant roles in the processes of modernization.

The observation of certain features of these opening ceremonieslike the location chosen for the transmission, the main speaker, the size of the audience, and the relationship between the event, other media, and the television programming after the eventallows us to point out the similarities and differences in the meaning of this new medium in each of the countries where it was incorporated. Thus, by using common elements from events that took place right around the same time, one of the objectives of this work is to highlight the nuances that differentiated the launch of television in each of these places in order to reach certain hypotheses for a comparative investigation of the media in Latin America during this period. The descriptions of the inaugural events in Mexico, Brazil, Cuba, and Argentina come from print media sources and surviving film reels. Few moving images of these ceremonies remain, and the respective television channels stored no recording of their live broadcasts at that time; however, the existence of film shows the political importance of these events.