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

were expecting a funny story. In addition, they were very popular at the time, issuing
more than 100,000 copies per week each, and reaching more than 200,000 at their
peaks. Thus, the number of readers that they reached was large. Those who bought and
read them every week likely shared the worldview represented in the comics. Finally,
while the stories of Hermelinda Linda are set in Mexico City, Los Agachados portrayed
the countryside (although it also presented urban issues and points of view). The
situations in La Familia Burrón took place in Mexico City’s downtown, although some
issues are set in the countryside or even overseas. Thus, the three of them offered
different perspectives from different realities.
I begin with comics because it was easier to track recurrent topics in comics. The
number of issues consulted was very large, and I was able to locate themes which were
repeated frequently. In films, perhaps due to their length, treatment of topics was less
iterated. In the comics, when a topic appeared consistently in numerous issues, such as
machismo in La Familia Burrón, I considered it to be a social concern and looked for it
not only in the other comics but also in the films. This helped me to create an ‘index’ of
relevant topics and later to analyse how they were expressed, how the topics were
related to Mexican reality, and why humour was used to discuss them. Only a selection
of the large number of possible examples was included in this research. In appendix two
the reader can find charts which detail which topics were discussed, what they were
expressing and how they benefitted the reader.
In chapter four, the same techniques are applied to films. The films are El Águila
Descalza by Alfonso Arau (1969), Mecánica Nacional by Luis Alcoriza (1971),
Calzonzin Inspector by Alfonso Arau (1973), and Tívoli by Alberto Issac (1974). The
choice of these films is not arbitrary either. All four were classified as comedies when
they were released. El Águila Descalza was an independent film financed by the
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