Revista Korpus 21 - Volumen 4, número 10

KORPUS 21, VOL. 4, NÚM. 10, 2024, 113-126
beliefs, and private disputes. In other words, the
media created the substrate for nation and modern
citizenship.
Affective links forged by the media are often
hard to find and harder to measure. Yet, they
are elements of history, perceptible through intimate
biography. Consider: In the early 1940s
Pepe’s mother Lupe worked at a wartime mica
factory in Oaxaca. Her husband had gone to
Mexico leaving her with two young children:
would he return, would he call for them to join
him or would he abandon them? Lupe sang sacred
music in church choirs, but she also listened
to the tunes played over the radio in the tenement
she and her boys occupied. She would
sit at her sewing machine in the late afternoon
singing the deeply impassioned songs of Maria
Grever she had learned from the radio:
Bésame, con un beso enamorado
Como nadie me ha besado desde el día en que nací,
Quiéreme, quiéreme hasta la locura
Y así sabrás la amargura que estoy sufriendo
por ti. 2
“Why are you crying?” Pepe would ask his
mother. “Because I want to talk to your father.
I want to tell him how lonely I am. I miss him so
much. I want all of us to be together” and she
would embrace us and kiss us. She would stroke
our hair and give us the love she felt for him”.
José Zuñiga Sr., Pepe’s father, did call for
them. They joined him in a cramped apartment
in the Colonia Guerrero in 1943 when Pepe was
six years old. The Philco radio played all day as
the parents, tailor and seamstress, sewed. It
played into the night. Theirs was not a happy
marriage: Lupe was jealous, José stepped out a
lot, his sisters and mother tortured her, and he
did not defend his wife; he thought she favored
her brother over him; he doubted their first born
was his. This mistrust exacerbated the everyday
struggle to put food on the table, to keep the
children clothed, in shoes, and in health. The radio
smoothed over grievances. It calmed tempers. It
filled life with intimate feeling. It fomented communication.
The entire family delighted in rendering
verdicts in cases of marital discord brought
2 “Kiss me, with a kiss of love/As no one has kissed me since
the day I was born/ Love me, love me like crazy/ And you will
know the bitterness I am suffering for you”, see: , November 10 th , 2023.
to the air by La Doctora Corazón, “Queridos amigos,”
she told her listeners, “Write to me, because
remember, I make your problems my own”.
The impassioned boleros they heard created
sympathies shortening the affective distance
between Lupe and José, even when their reverie
drifted in different directions. When they
listened to Maria Luisa Landin sing Amor perdido,
maybe José, Pepe imagined, was thinking
about the mysterious Lidia, about whom it was
rumored he had had an affair, or perhaps Lupe
felt a profound sadness believing that José did
not return her love. Maria Luisa Landin’s tender
lament touched Lupe in its excruciating selfdepreciation:
“It’s sure you are happy without
me… you were never mine… No, when you pass
me on the street you needn’t say hello. I am
not wounded”. Yet the song ends on a glorious
note of applause: “Let us cheer for pleasure and
love!”. José and Lupe, helped by a short rupture
in which Lupe asserted her rights, stayed together
till the end of their long lives. He came to
see her, as he told Pepe, as O-Lan, the wife in the
movie The Good Earth, long-suffering, abused,
and yet responsible for the family´s survival and
success.
Music, which wafted from every jukebox or
radio in every store, smoothed the sharp edges
of scarcity, distrust, conflict, and loneliness that
marked the neighborhood and its immigrant
families fighting to make ends meet and to get
ahead, to save themselves from alcoholism,
crime, jail, sickness, defeat, all of which lingered
around the corner and in their midst. As an institution
of the state’s soft power and of market
expansion (it advertised soaps, candies, toothpaste,
shampoo, chocolate milk, aspirin), radio
directly targeted children from an early age. The
Zúñiga children listened to Nick Carter Detective
and the mysteries of El Monje Loco, who
immersed them in vicarious suspense and terror;
Cuca la Telefonista, who made them giggled
at her silly jokes; the history of Emperor Maximiliano
y Empress Carlota they tried to follow.
Above all, they listened to Cri-Cri, the singing
cricket created by Gabilondo Soler who from
1934 sang to millions of Mexican children each
weekend over XEW, La Voz de Latinoamérica
desde México.
Cri-Cri sang about the same middle-class values
promoted by Pepe´s public primary school:
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