Leticia Neria PhD thesis - Research@StAndrews:FullText ...

would be mere entertainment. Yet they clearly go beyond pure amusement, and that
makes them relevant and interesting for students of social phenomena.
In Hermelinda Linda, La Familia Burrón and Los Agachados, there were
numerous references to what were considered to be social problems at the time. In their
pages the government, public servants, and police, were criticised. Nevertheless,
because of self-censorship, the army was not criticised, and Los Agachados was the
only one that openly disapproved of the Mexican army. The most recurrent groups
portrayed were governors, diputados and police, who were described as lazy, negligent,
dishonest, untrustworthy, lacking expertise, incompetent, corrupt and abusive of their
power.
However, the authorities were not the only ones questioned, society more
broadly also came under scrutiny. Machismo was revealed and ridiculed, principally in
La Familia Burrón and Los Agachados, while Hermelinda Linda portrayed machismo
but with minimal criticism. The comic books also criticised the behaviour of the youth
and their portrayal is unflattering. Young people were described as selfish, moaners,
emulators of foreign values (principally US ones), immature politically, prone to
involvement in violent groups such as guerrillas, drug-taking hippies, ignorant of moral
values, and disrespectful of adults. Foreigners and the common stereotypes that were
part of the social imaginary were represented and exaggerated, which help us construct
a better knowledge about what the Mexicans thought about those from other
nationalities. Finally, poverty was approached through humour as a way to point out its
existence and in order to take account of this social tragedy.
In this chapter I examined how humour and images link us to real life situations,
and in these comic books we recognise how some of the situations are related to real
ones. At the same time, we understand that they belong to a world that does not exist,
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