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Álvaro Obregón’s Assassination: Conflicting representation of heroism, martyrdom, & death in the Greater Mexican press Carmen Kordick Rothe Yale
University On Tuesday, July 17, 1928, while
attending a ritzy celebration of his recent reelection, President-Elect,
Álvaro Obregón was shot six times pointblank in the back by a
twenty-three year old cartoonist. The
next morning, on Wednesday July 18, 1928, an official portrait of the
President-elect with a tie and suit jacket on, cropped to hide his maimed
arm, dominated the front-page of both Mexico City’s Excélsior
and the Los Angeles Spanish daily La
Opinión. Despite the immediate resemblance of the two front-pages,
closer examination of the newspapers reveals that editors and writers were
not only addressing different audiences, but that they employed the
assassination to express very different images of Mexico. These different
visions of Mexico are apparent in the newspaper’s portrayal of Obregón’s
assassination, his assassin, José de León Toral, and the newspapers’
presentation of the Calles administration’s response to the murder. A political assassination, such as Obregón’s provides an ideal aperture through which to explore Mexican nationalism, not only because of the traditional relationship between heroic sacrifice and nation building, but because of the intense relationship between Mexican national identity and death, as well. In my paper I will examine how two newspapers, separated by a national border, presented their readers with multiple visions of Mexico through images of heroism, martyrdom, sacrifice, and murder employed in their coverage of Obregón’s assassination. While La Opinión employed these tropes to suggest the possible collapse of the Mexican Revolution, Excélsior instead suggested that Obregón’s death could be understand as an affirmation of Mexico’s commitment to the Revolution. These different visions of Mexico, presented on both sides of the U.S.-Mexican border, are important because they suggest the beginnings of a separate Mexican-American national identity that while still deeply tied to events and symbols of the metropole employed them to different ends.
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