Diplomatic History - 2004 - FEIN

s e t h f e i n*
New Empire into Old:

Making Mexican Newsreels the Cold War Way
To me it does not seem that we can meet the threat of Communism by

stressing primarily anthropological and cultural approaches to American
Studies. —Samuel Flagg Bemis1
The study of American culture has traditionally been cut off from the study
of foreign relations. —Amy Kaplan2
In much recent theory the problem of representation is deemed to be

central, yet rarely is it put in its full political context, a context that is pri-
marily imperial. Instead we have on the one hand an isolated cultural sphere
believed to be freely and unconditionally available to weightless theoretical
speculation and investigation, and, on the other, a debased political sphere,
where the real struggle between interests is supposed to occur. To the pro-
fessional student of culture—the humanist, the critic, the scholar—only one
sphere is relevant, and, more to the point, it is accepted that the two spheres
are separated, whereas the two are not only connected but ultimately the
same. —Edward Said3
*The author thanks archivist-historian extraordinaire David Langbart for help in locating
the main primary sources cited in this essay. He also acknowledges the State Department’s
FOIA team, especially Robert E. Service, for its declassification of those materials. He
expresses his gratitude to his fellow members of the Little Summit—Amy Chazkel, Joanne
Freeman, Christopher Hill, and Pablo Piccato—for their harsh and helpful reading of an early
attempt to assemble Project Pedro’s story, Virginie Marier for her research assistance and deft
critique of various versions, and Karen Garner for her suggestions about the entire essay’s final
form. Finally, he thanks Mary Litch of Yale’s crack Information Technology Services for
digitizing this essay’s images and John Lewis Gaddis for asking, “So what?”
1. Samuel Flagg Bemis to Charles Seymour, 23 February 1949, Folder 797, Box 67, Series
II, Group 74, Samuel Flagg Bemis Papers, Archives and Manuscripts division, Sterling
Memorial Library, Yale University (hereafter SFBP).
2. Amy Kaplan and Donald E. Pease, eds., Cultures of United States Imperialism (Durham,
NC, 1993), p. 11.
3. Edward Said, “Secular Interpretation, the Geographical Element, and the Methodol-
ogy of Imperialism,” in After Colonialism: Imperial Histories and Postcolonial Displacements, ed.
Gyan Prakash (Princeton, NJ, 1995), p. 34.
Diplomatic History, Vol. 28, No. 5 (November 2004). © 2004 The Society for Historians
of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR). Published by Blackwell Publishing, Inc., 350 Main
Street, Malden, MA, 02148, USA and 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK.
703
14677709, 2004, 5, Downloaded from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-7709.2004.00447.x by UMAR - Universidad del Mar, Wiley Online Library on [14/08/2023]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License
704 : d i p l o m a t i c h i s t o r y
In 1957 Mexico City was the site of funerals for two celebrities, each responsi-
ble for the cultural production that marked twentieth-century Mexico: painter
Diego Rivera and movie star Pedro Infante.4 It is unsurprising that one of
Mexico’s leading newsreels, Noticiario clasa, would feature segments about the
passing of these two icons of postrevolutionary culture. But it was surprising
that these images would be encountered, decades after their commercial exhi-
bition, not in the Filmoteca of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México,
where one was accustomed to finding forgotten Mexican films, but buried in
motion-picture vaults containing the output of the (now defunct) United States
Information Agency (USIA); that records regarding their production and dis-
tribution could best be recovered not through research in Mexico City but
through a Freedom of Information Act request to the Department of State; that
those who produced Noticiario clasa and its successor productions gave them a
secret name, Project Pedro, unknown not only to the millions who viewed them
but even to the technicians who produced them. Perhaps it is not so surprising,
however, if we consider Project Pedro as part of the archive of U.S. empire, an
outpost of the formal system of extraterritorial control of information institu-
tionalized and globalized through Cold War.
between american studies and diplomatic history

Empire is no longer a controversial word in discussions of U.S. past and
present. Since the end of the Cold War’s bipolarity, discussions of empire are
everywhere.5 One of the most compelling conceptualizations, Neil Smith’s
biography of geographer Isaiah Bowman, argues that the Cold War’s bipolar
cartography hid the United States’ global ambitions, which have better come
into focus since the Soviet Union’s demise.6 This rendition clarifies the links
between Washington’s current invocation of “globalization” and its deployment
of “civilization” at the last century’s outset, when, as Walter LaFeber explained
in his first book, The New Empire, the United States began to assemble a foreign
4. Noticiario clasa 834 and 803; all audiovisual citations are to the Records of the United
States Information Agency, Record Group 306 (NARG 306), Motion Picture and Sound
Recording Branch, National Archives II, College Park, Maryland. On Infante’s funeral, see
Anne Rubenstein, “Bodies, Cities, Cinema: Pedro Infante’s Funeral as Political Spectacle,” in
Fragments of a Golden Age: The Politics of Culture in Mexico, 1940–2000, eds. Gilbert Joseph,
Anne Rubenstein, and Eric Zolov (Durham, NC, 2001).
5. Production has particularly picked up since 9/11. For a few prominent post-2000 exam-
ples, across ideological and methodological spectrums, see Niall Ferguson, Colossus: The Price
of America’s Empire (New York, 2004); John Lewis Gaddis, “Setting Right a Dangerous World,”
The Chronicle of Higher Education Review 48, no. 18 (2002); David Harvey, The New Imperial-
ism (New York, 2003); Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA, 2001);
Chalmers A. Johnson, Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire 2nd ed. (New
York, 2004).
6. Neil Smith, American Empire: Roosevelt’s Geographer and the Prelude to Globalization
(Berkeley, CA, 2003).
New Empire into Old : 705
policy to pursue its extraterritorial economic interests. It was an empire not

because it looked like other empires, but because, like those others, it invented
new ways of attempting to control people and places beyond the nation’s terri-
torial boundaries with a minimum of colonial commitments.7
This essay argues that the Cold War transformed the new empire into an
old one, one that deployed communication technologies within an extensive
everyday system of extraterritorial engagements managed by metropolitan
bureaucracies that sought to control people in places beyond the nation’s
borders. What had been an informal empire in an age of multipolarity came in
an age of bipolarity to resemble a formal one. Nowhere was this felt more than
in the very realm in which U.S. commercial expansion before the Cold War had
made its most notable impact on the rest of the world, audiovisual culture.
Washington’s Cold War work, first in film and later in TV, resembles what
Daniel Headrick described as nineteenth-century European imperialism’s use
of communications and transportation to knit together its colonial possessions
through “the unleashing of overwhelming force at minimal costs.”8
The Cold War’s formal empire had a relationship to the informal one that
preceded it. While before World War II U.S. diplomacy worked to expand the
economic activities of U.S. culture industries, in the Cold War it sought to
exploit their commercial reach for political ends: to profit ideologically from
the public appeal of U.S. mass media, to propagate in specific and general ways
the global mission of U.S. foreign policy, to convince people that the U.S. way
was the best way to the future. The improvised roles that Washington played
in producing mass media in each of the world wars became institutionalized in
the Cold War, as official production and dissemination compensated for per-
ceived deficiencies in distribution or content of the state’s culture industry allies.
The notable cultural diplomacy of the Cold War’s old empire—its simultane-
ous refiguration of antifascism as anticommunism and of World War II’s
international communications in Cold War institutions (most notably the
7. Walter LaFeber, The New Empire: An Interpretation of American Expansionism, 1860–1898

(Ithaca, NY, 1963).
8. Daniel Headrick, The Tools of Empire: Technology and European Imperialism in the Nine-
teenth Century (New York, 1981), pp. 10–11. See, also, Walter LaFeber, “Technology and U.S.
Foreign Relations,” Diplomatic History 24, no. 1 (Winter 2000). The literature on empire and
U.S. mass culture tends to be more polemical than analytical; three landmarks are Ariel
Dorfman, The Empire’s Old Clothes: What the Lone Ranger, Babar, and Other Innocent Heroes do
to our Minds (New York, 1983); Herbert Schiller, Mass Communication and American Empire,
2nd ed. (Boulder, CO, 1992); Jeremy Tunstall, The Media Are American (New York, 1977). Two
works that advance the study of mass media as culture beyond the arid terrain of cultural impe-
rialism are Néstor García Canclini, Hybrid Cultures: Strategies for Entering and Leaving Moder-
nity, trans. Christopher L. Chiappari and Silvia L. López (Minneapolis, MN, 1995); Jesús
Martín-Barbero, Communication, Culture and Hegemony: From the Media to Mediations, trans.
Elizabeth Fox and Robert A. White (London, 1987, 1993). For what is still the best analysis
of the literature about mass culture and imperialism, see John Tomlinson, Cultural Imperial-
ism: A Critical Introduction (Baltimore, MD, 1991).
USIA)9—depended upon the prewar era’s new empire’s commercial spread of

mass culture abroad (and at home).10
Since the end of global bipolarity, “empire” ’s impact can be felt in the reori-
entation of one of the Cold War’s foundational fields of knowledge production,
of national identity formation, of the very idea of U.S. culture, American
Studies. A bit more than a decade ago, in the Cold War’s afterglow, Amy Kaplan
wrote of a trinity of absences: “the absence of culture from the history of U.S.
imperialism; the absence of empire from the study of American culture; and the
absence of the United States from the postcolonial study of imperialism.”11 No
one would say that those absences exist today. The list of compelling explo-
rations, self-identified as American Studies, of U.S. imperial cultures continues
to grow.12 One of the best of these recent works that examine the mutual con-
9. The best overview of the USIA’s bureaucratic operation remains Robert E. Elder,
The Information Machine: The United States Information Agency and American Foreign Policy
(Syracuse, NY, 1968). Historical works on U.S. foreign policy and culture in Europe have
proliferated. Some highlights are: Jessica Gienow-Hecht, Transmission Impossible: American
Journalism as Cultural Diplomacy in Postwar Germany, 1945–1955 (Baton Rouge, LA, 1999);
Walter Hixson, Parting the Curtain: Propaganda, Culture, and the Cold War, 1945–1961 (New
York, 1997); Richard Kuisel, Seducing the French: The Dilemma of Americanization (Berkeley,
CA, 1993); Richard Pells, Not Like Us: How Europeans Have Loved, Hated, and Transformed Amer-
ican Culture since World War II (New York, 1997); Reinhold Wagnleitner, Coca-Colonization and
the Cold War: The Cultural Mission of the United States in Austria after the Second World War
(Chapel Hill, NC, 1994).
10. The literature about U.S. diplomacy’s commercial and ideological relationships to
culture industries continues to grow since the appearance of Emily Rosenberg’s Spreading the
American Dream: American Economic and Cultural Expansion, 1890–1945 (New York, 1982); on
the important interwar relationship with Europe, see Frank Costigliola, Awkward Dominion:
American Political, Cultural, and Economic Relations with Europe, 1919–1933 (Ithaca, NY, 1984).
One of the most interesting (and neglected) works, because it deals with how state and film
industry intervened to Americanize the U.S. domestic market at cinema’s birth, is Richard
Abel, Red Rooster Scare: Making Movies American, 1900–1910 (Berkeley, CA, 1999). Other
notable works are: Ruth Vasey, The World According to Hollywood, 1918–1939 (Madison, WI,
1997); Todd Bennett, “Culture, Power, and Mission to Moscow: Film and Soviet-American
Relations during World War II,” Journal of American History 88, no. 2 (September 2001);
Thomas Doherty, Projections of War: American Culture and World War II (New York, 1993);
Clayton Koppes and Gregory Black, Hollywood Goes to War: How Politics, Profits, and Propaganda
Shaped World War II Movies (Berkeley, CA, 1990); Kyoko Hirano, Mr. Smith Goes to Tokyo:
Japanese Cinema under the American Occupation, 1945–1952 (Washington, DC, 1992). On
the prewar confrontation of U.S. corporate work culture in the Americas, see Thomas F.
O’Brien, The Revolutionary Mission: American Enterprise in Latin America, 1900–1945 (Cam-
bridge, 1996).
11. Kaplan and Pease, eds., Cultures of United States Imperialism, 11.
12. Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the
United States, 1880–1917 (Chicago, IL, 1995); Matthew Frye Jacobson, Barbarian Virtues: The
United States Encounters Foreign Peoples at Home and Abroad, 1876–1917 (New York, 2001);
Melani McAlister, Epic Encounters: Culture, Media, and U.S. Interests in the Middle East,
1945–2000 (Berkeley, CA, 2001); Mary Renda, Taking Haiti: Military Occupation and the Culture
of U.S. Imperialism (Chapel Hill, NC, 2001); Robert W. Rydell, All the World’s a Fair: Visions
of American Empire at American International Expositions, 1876–1916 (Chicago, IL, 1984);
Shelley Streeby, American Sensations: Class, Empire, and the Production of Popular Culture
(Berkeley, CA, 2002); Laura Wexler, Tender Violence: Domestic Visions in the Age of Imperialism
(Chapel Hill, NC, 2000). On the relationship between twentieth-century U.S. international
stitution of national culture and international relations, Christina Klein’s

mapping of Asia in the Cold War U.S. social imaginary, reprises Kaplan’s
mission statement when it (correctly) insists that “[t]he foreign and the domes-
tic spheres, far from being neatly separated as they have been in most accounts
of American political and cultural history, impinge on each other in unexpected
ways.”13 And the current state-of-the-field anthology, The Futures of American
Studies—a decade-later followup to Cultures of United States Imperialism—
announces an international turn as the sine qua non of the contemporary inter-
disciplinary study of U.S. culture.14
Such recent congratulatory assertions of innovations say more, however,
about how post-Cold War American Studies has discovered the world than
about the absence of empire, culture, or the domestic sphere from the study of
U.S. diplomatic history. It was in fact the combined study of empire, culture,
and the domestic sphere that generated the critical energy that, four decades
ago, cracked the Cold War’s historiographical consensus about the nonimperi-
alism of U.S. foreign policy and society. No scholar contributed more to that
methodological shift than did Walter LaFeber with the publication of his first
book. The New Empire emphasized how imperial foreign policy was part of the
same social field that produced imperial culture at home. At a moment when
American Studies continued to reproduce not only its essentializing national-
ism but also its essentializing (inter-)disciplinarity, the (then) new diplomatic
history of LaFeber, inter alios, methodologically united not only the interna-
tional and the national but also the cultural and the political. That LaFeber
himself might cringe as he reads the implications of his work for that of so-
called new Americanists (or even postnationalists!) does not diminish the sig-
nificance of his contribution to a cultural turn in U.S. diplomatic history. His
approach to domestic culture, to intellectuals and ideas, may not sound much
like American Studies ca. 2000, but it was very much in line with that field’s
methodology ca. 1960.15 In short, as the Cold War igloo that contained U.S.
diplomatic historiography began to melt between the 1950s and 1960s, the
exceptionalizing methodological iceberg on which American Studies floated
remained frozen.
Cold War foreign policy itself reinforced the essentializing disciplinary
boundaries of American Studies that excluded the study of international rela-
tions as it constructed a native-born civilization that promoted a U.S. identity
globally. Exceptionalism demanded not only a classless capitalism but also a
relations and historiography, see Ian Tyrrell, “Making Nations/Making States: American His-
torian in the Context of Empire,” Journal of American History 86, no. 3 (December 1999).
13. Christina Klein, Cold War Orientalism: Asia in the Middlebrow Imagination, 1945–1961
(Berkeley, CA, 2003), p. 263.
14. Donald E. Pease and Robyn Wiegman, eds., The Futures of American Studies (Durham,
NC, 2002).
15. See LaFeber, The New Empire: An Interpretation of American Expansionism, 1860–1898,
chapter 1.
nonimperial globalism.16 Anticommunism nationalized the study of American

culture “in the age of three worlds,” divorcing it, as Michael Denning has
recently shown, from a less nationally bounded cultural studies.17 These Cold
War boundaries proved too well defended for even a renowned exponent of an
exceptionalizing anti-imperial interpretation of the history of U.S. foreign
policy to transgress within one of American Studies’ establishment sites.18 Long
before American Studies discovered the external sphere, no less an ideological
nationalist and methodological externalist than Samuel Flagg Bemis lobbied for
diplomatic history’s inclusion in American Studies at Yale. Rebuffed by the
founding figures of his university’s American Studies program, Bemis com-
plained to Yale’s president, Charles Seymour, in 1949:
I have just read with much interest your inspiring address to the returning
graduates on Alumni Day, February 22, stressing the importance of a “thor-
ough and fundamental understanding of American principles” in order to
meet the Communist threat in a positive way. With this idea and purpose I
heartily concur, and stand ready to co-operate as much as permissible. Would
you not agree that a thorough grounding in the guiding principles of Amer-
ican foreign policy, as formulated and developed throughout the history of
our international relations, should be an important requirement of such a
curriculum of American Studies as is suggested? My colleagues and friends,
professors [Ralph] Gabriel and [A. Whitney] Griswold, inform me that no
course in the History of American Foreign Policy will be required in the cur-
riculum of American Studies. I suggested to Professor Griswold that this
must be an oversight, but he said that it was not. To Professor Gabriel I sug-
gested that such a course ought to be required, but he does not find himself
in agreement; he explained to me that the main emphasis of American
Studies is primarily “anthropological.” . . . To me it does not seem that we
can meet the threat of Communism by stressing primarily anthropological
and cultural approaches to American Studies while at the same time ignor-
ing the guiding principles of our foreign policy and the history of our polit-
ical relationships with Russia and the other nations of the world. Do not the
last two World Wars and the parlous state of the world at present prove that
we cannot isolate American studies from American foreign policy any more
than we have been able to isolate American politics from foreign wars? This
is such an important academic principle that, interested as I am in both
American studies and the history of American foreign policy and inter-
16. On exceptionalism, see Michael Kammen, “The Problem of American Exceptional-

ism: A Reconsideration,” American Quarterly 45, no. 1 (March 1993); Ian Tyrrell, “American
Exceptionalism in an Age of International History,” American Historical Review 96, no. 4
(October 1991); and Nathan J. Citino, “Comparative History and the Global Frontier-
Borderlands Approach in American Foreign Relations,” Diplomatic History 25, no. 4 (Fall 2001).
17. Michael Denning, Culture in the Age of Three Worlds (London, 2004), chapter 9.
18. On the Cold War at Yale, see Michael Holzman, “The Ideological Origins of Ameri-
can Studies at Yale,” American Studies 40 (Summer 1999).
American relations, I cannot pass it by in silence to you. Even though col-

leagues and friends, for whom I have the greatest respect may think me mis-
taken on this point I would like to leave my position on record.19
Bemis lost that battle. He playfully noted his recent curricular defeat when,
that same year, he published the first volume of his biography of John Quincy
Adams.20 The front of the Pulitzer Prize-winner’s dust jacket announced its
contents as “an American study,” which Bemis, as he noted in his unpublished
memoir, meant “tongue in cheek because of a friendly contention with col-
leagues who insisted that American Studies need not require any history of
American foreign policy and diplomacy.”21 I admit that I sometimes wonder
how he would feel about the fact that my own U.S. international history courses
are cross-listed in American Studies. That is, I think Bemis might be appalled
by how American Studies has affected the historical study of U.S. diplomatic
history and foreign policy even as he would be pleased that U.S. foreign policy
and diplomatic history are part of American Studies.22
Bemis’s concern about “cultural approaches” notwithstanding, American
Studies’ importance to the current practice of diplomatic history has been pro-
found. It has particularly contributed to the contextualization of U.S. foreign
policy as part of a broader cultural field that reproduces gender, race, and class
relations.23 However, cultural studies, of which American Studies is ultimately
a part, has not yet made as large of an impact as it could on the study of U.S.
culture outside the United States. That is, diplomatic history’s approach still
too often conflates the study of cultural diplomacy, an empirical category, with
cultural history, a methodological one.24 Similarly, even as American Studies has
embraced the idea of empire it continues, as does much diplomatic history, to
19. Samuel Flagg Bemis to Charles Seymour, 23 February 1949, Folder 797, Box 67, Series
II, Group 74, SFBP.
20. Samuel Flagg Bemis, John Quincy Adams and the Foundations of American Foreign Policy
(New York, 1949).
21. Samuel Flagg Bemis, “The Pedagogical and Historical Peregrinations and Reflections
of Samuel Flagg Bemis” [1964], p. 419, Box 49, Series II, Group 74, SFBP.
22. For an example, see the most recent description of International History of the United
States in the Twentieth Century in Yale College Programs of Study: Fall and Spring Terms,
2003–2004 99.7, 1 August 2003, p. 325. On Bemis, see Mark T. Gilderhus, “Founding Father:
Samuel Flagg Bemis and the Study of U.S.-Latin American Relations,” Diplomatic History 21,
no. 1 (Winter 1997); Gaddis Smith, “The Two Worlds of Samuel Flagg Bemis,” Diplomatic
History 9 (Fall 1985).
23. One specific area where culturalist work has contributed immeasurably to the
advancement of our understanding of foreign policy as text and context is gender. See Frank
Costigliola, “The Nuclear Family: Tropes of Gender and Pathology in the Western Alliance,”
Diplomatic History 21, no. 2 (Spring 1997); Frank Costigliola, “ ‘Unceasing Pressure for Pene-
tration’: Gender, Pathology, and Emotion in George Kennan’s Formation of the Cold War,”
Journal of American History 83, no. 4 (March 1997); Robert D. Dean, Imperial Brotherhood:
Gender and the Making of Cold War Foreign Policy (Amherst, MA, 2001); Emily S. Rosenberg,
Financial Missionaries to the World: The Politics and Culture of Dollar Diplomacy, 1900–1930 (Cam-
bridge, MA, 1999).
24. For an example, see Mark Frey, “Tools of Empire: Persuasion and the United States’s
Modernizing Mission in Southeast Asia,” Diplomatic History 27, no. 4 (September 2003).
neglect the empire itself. In so doing, it perpetuates the exceptionalist founda-

tions of its Cold War formation. Even as the field has complicated our under-
standing of what U.S. nationality is and is not, it does not—all of its talk of
internationalization notwithstanding—meaningfully include within its walls
research about U.S. culture beyond the United States. As American Studies has
moved toward a critical study of U.S. culture, it continues to exceptionalize the
U.S. case by too often positing U.S. imperialism as sui generis.25 If the United
States is, and has indeed been, an empire, the study of its culture must involve
the study of non-U.S. peoples and places. That work has been done generally
not by those trained in American Studies, or diplomatic history, but by its Cold
War first-cousins in Area Studies.26 As we ignore the boundaries that still divide
the study of U.S. culture within and without the United States we must also
disregard the ones that separate the study of international politics and culture.27
Just as transnationality has allowed us to see beyond the nation and beyond
25. Much recent comparative historical work has emphasized the commonalities between
U.S. imperialism and that of other nations. See, for example, Michael Adas, “From Settler
Colony to Global Hegemon: Integrating the Exceptionalist Narrative of American Experience
into World History,” American Historical Review 106, no. 5 (December 2001); Paul Kramer,
“Empires, Exceptions, and Anglo-Saxons: Race and Rule between the British and United States
Empires, 1880–1910,” Journal of American History 40 (March 2002); Ann Laura Stoler, “Tense
and Tender Ties: The Politics of Comparison in North American History and (Post) Colo-
nial Studies,” Journal of American History 88, no. 3 (December 2001).
26. The best statement about the usefulness of Area Studies for research about global cul-
tures, relevant for the practice of U.S. international history, is Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at
Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis, MN, 1998), chapter 1. Some useful
examples, across fields, that work from without to understand U.S. international history are:
Jeffrey H. Jackson, Making Jazz French: Music and Modern Life in Interwar Paris (Durham, NC,
2003); Gilbert Joseph, Revolution from Without: Yucatán, Mexico, and the United States, 1880–1924
(Durham, NC, 1988, 1982); Gilbert Joseph, Catherine LeGrand, and Ricardo Salvatore, eds.,
Close Encounters of Empire: Writing the History of U.S.-Latin American Cultural Relations (Durham,
NC, 1998); Julio Moreno, Yankee Don’t Go Home!: Mexican Nationalism, American Business
Culture, and the Shaping of Modern Mexico, 1920–1950 (Chapel Hill, NC, 2003); Matthew Con-
nelly, A Diplomatic Revolution: Algeria’s Independence and the Origins of the Post-Cold War World
(New York, 2002); Louis A. Pérez, On Becoming Cuban: Identity, Nationality, and Culture (Chapel
Hill, NC, 1999); Micol Seigel, “The Point of Comparison: Transnational Racial Construction,
Brazil and the United States, 1918–1933” (Ph.D. diss., New York University, 2001); Mauricio
Tenorio-Trillo, “Stereophonic Scientific Modernisms: Social Science between Mexico and the
United States, 1880s–1930s,” Journal of American History 86, no. 3 (December 1999); David
Thelen, “The Nation and Beyond: Transnational Perspectives on United States History,”
Journal of American History 86, no. 3 (December 1999); David Thelen, “Rethinking History
and the Nation-State: Mexico and the United States,” Journal of American History 86, no. 2
(September 1999); Daniel T. Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age
(Cambridge, MA, 1998); Kate A. Baldwin, Beyond the Color Line and the Iron Curtain: Reading
Encounters between Black and Red, 1922–1963 (Durham, NC, 2002).
27. The most sustained synthetic statement about the relationship of American Studies
and Areas Studies to an interdisciplinary U.S. international history is Michael J. Hogan,
“ ‘The Next Big Thing’: The Future of Diplomatic History in a Global Age,” Diplomatic History
28, no. 1 ( January 2004). See also Michael H. Hunt, “The Long Crisis in U.S. Diplomatic
History: Coming to Closure,” Diplomatic History 16, no. 1 (Winter 1992). On recent moves
toward Latin America, see Max Paul Friedman, “Retiring the Puppets, Bringing Latin America
Back In: Recent Scholarship on United States-Latin American Relations,” Diplomatic History
27, No. 5 (November 2003).
international relations, adoption of transdisciplinarity, advocated by Walter

Mignolo (and others) as an alternative to interdisciplinarity’s implicit reification
of separate academic areas, offers a way to think beyond the limits of not only
scholarly and national borders but also the conventional routes traveled by
scholars moving between fields.28
between east and west, mexico and the united states

After World War II, Good Neighbor discourse became derivative of Cold
War strategy and East-West relations replaced hemispheric essentialism as the
international framework for U.S. propaganda in the Americas. Where Latin
America had provided a prewar laboratory for the development of the interna-
tionalist ideology that globally underwrote the U.S. war effort, in the postwar
period it became (until the Cuban revolution) a screen onto which U.S. foreign
policy and Cold War culture projected extrahemispheric concerns, generated
by international relations in Europe and Asia.29 The Korean War and NSC-68’s
globalization of containment changed the Cold War everywhere, in every way.
In the Americas, for example, until the 1950s the United States Information
Service (USIS) continued to distribute materials produced for Good Neighbor
objectives during World War II. After Korea, USIS began to distribute more
ideologically charged anticommunist materials, but ones that were derivative of
foreign policies developed for other areas of the world rather than composed
for inter-American communication.30
In the 1950s Washington’s great global fear—from Cairo to Paris, Bandung
to Mexico City—was neutrality. This fear produced the idea of the “third
world,” as it was initially conceived in the decade’s opening years, to take hold—
as a world between East and West—before its most widely understood mean-
ings moved from political to socioeconomic terms in the 1960s.31 A principal
28. Walter D. Mignolo, Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and
Border Thinking (Princeton, NJ, 2000), pp. 207–08. For a useful critique of transnational and
diaspora studies as dangerously establishing a new essentializaing postnationality, see Arif
Dirlik, Postmodernity’s Histories: The Past as Legacy and Project (Lanham, MD, 2000), chapter 7.
29. On the role of the Americas in the development of cultural diplomacy, see Frank
Ninkovich, The Diplomacy of Ideas: U.S. Foreign Policy and Cultural Relations, 1938–1950 (Cam-
bridge, 1981). On Cold War in the Americas, across time, see David Green, The Containment
of Latin America: A History of the Myths and the Realities of the Good Neighbor Policy (Chicago,
IL, 1971); Stephen G. Rabe, Eisenhower and Latin America: The Foreign Policy of Anticommu-
nism (Chapel Hill, NC, 1988); Gaddis Smith, The Last Years of the Monroe Doctrine, 1945–1993
(New York, 1994).
30. See Seth Fein, “Everyday Forms of Transnational Collaboration: U.S. Film Propa-
ganda in Cold War Mexico,” in Close Encounters of Empire: Writing the Cultural History of U.S.-
Latin American Relations; Gerald K. Haines, The Americanization of Brazil: A Study of U.S. Cold
War Diplomacy in the Third World, 1945–1954 (Wilmington, DE, 1989).
31. On the political idea in its African and Asian contexts, see H. W. Brands, The Specter
of Neutralism: The United States and the Emergence of the Third World, 1947–1960 (New York,
1989). On its development as a social category, see Arturo Escobar, Imagining Development: The
Making and Unmaking of the Third World (Princeton, NJ, 1995); Robert A. Packenham, The
Dependency Movement: Scholarship and Politics in Development Studies (Cambridge, MA, 1992);
question posed by the USIA’s 1956 “Barometer Study on Public Opinion” in

Mexico elucidates Washington’s anxieties about the unwillingness of people to
choose sides in the Cold War: “At the present time do you personally think that
Mexico should be on the side of the Communist powers, on the side of the anti-
Communist powers or on neither side?” The aggregate response confirmed
Washington’s worries: 71 percent of the 1,455 respondents, from across
Mexico’s largest twenty-three towns and cities, answered, “Neither side.”32
Concern about Soviet mass-media incursions that exploited third-world neu-
tralism were both context and pretext for USIA’s covert work to transnational-
ize its film presence in the Americas. Turner Shelton, director of the agency’s
Motion Picture Service, explained to its Latin American bureau in 1955 that
transnationalized newsreel production in Mexico offered a unique opportunity
to wage Cold War within the Americas. While Washington focused its atten-
tion elsewhere, intelligence about the area “reports that the Soviet Embassy in
Mexico has recently aided in the establishment of a firm for the distribution of
Russian films in Mexico and Central America. This is another demonstration
of what the opposition is up to, using Mexico as a base for operations. In our
discussion last October, we agreed on the desirability of using the newsreel
device in Brazil and Mexico. The Brazilian program is moving along very well.
. . . I think it is highly desirable to proceed with the planning and development
of this project” for Mexico.33 Consequently, in May 1956, USIA director
Theodore Streibert asked the agency’s General Counsel to authorize plans for
“Project Pedro,” the agency’s code name for its attempt to take control of a
Mexican newsreel. To implement it, USIA turned to an expatriate Hollywood
executive, Richard K. Tompkins, who had overseen earlier agency efforts at
covert production of anticommunist film propaganda in Mexico City, the era’s
world capital of Spanish-language filmmaking. As Streibert explained: “This
project involves dealing with a ‘front man’ . . . for purchase of a half-interest in
one of the two leading newsreel companies in Mexico . . . and for performance
by him of the production aspects of the newsreel operation, including the inte-
gration of Agency footages [sic] into the reels.”34
Washington’s and Hollywood’s complex relations with Mexican film pro-
ducers between the Second World War and the Cold War contributed to both
the notable opportunities and the limits Project Pedro encountered in its actual
Robert A. Packenham, Liberal America and the Third World: Political Development Ideas in Foreign
Aid and Social Science (Princeton, NJ, 1973).
32. “Barometer Study on Public Opinion: Preliminary Report,” p. 3, USIA Office of
Research, Country Project Files (1951–64), Box 72, NARG 306.
33. “Mexican Newsreel Project,” Shelton (IMS-USIA) to Frank H. Oram (IAA-USIA), 31
March 1955, USIA Accession Lot 62C185, Box 11, author’s Freedom of Information Act
request, State Department case no. 200004119.
34. “Delegation of Limited Contractual Authority to T.B. Shelton,” Theodore C.
Streibert to Clive L. Duval, 11 May 1956, “Mexican Cartoons: Project Pedro,” Folder 2,
Motion Picture Rights and Permissions files, NARG 306.
operation in Mexico. Cross-border commercial collaboration forged in the

interests of antifascism broke down after the war, as the U.S. industry, freed
from the coercive structure of instrumental wartime dependence on Washing-
ton, sought to contain (or co-opt) its southern competitor’s international
growth. However, even as commercial relations became less harmonious, links
between Hollywood and the Mexican industry, both behind and on the screen,
persisted, facilitating Washington’s anticommunist mission. Tompkins person-
ified those film-industry connections across the antifascist/anticommunist
divide as well as Hollywood’s commercial and political, informal and formal
connections to U.S. transnational and international relations. In the early 1950s
he had operated Latin America’s most important film studio, Mexico City’s
Estudios Churubusco, built during World War II by a transnational partner-
ship between Hollywood’s Radio Keith Orpheum (RKO), headed at the time
by Tompkins’s uncle, N. Peter Rathvon, and Mexico’s leading mass-media
magnate, Emilio Azcárraga Vidaurreta.35
Tompkins’s prior anticommunist film projects in Mexico—production of two
cartoon series and a feature film—had mobilized Mexican resources to reach
spectators throughout the Americas. By contrast, Project Pedro focused pri-
marily on Mexican moviegoers. As with those earlier Cold War projects, the
impetus for covert control of a Mexican newsreel came from USIS officials in
Mexico City who sold their plan to the agency’s audiovisual planners in Wash-
ington. As the new program commenced, the embassy’s top USIS official, its
Public Affairs Officer (PAO) Jack McDermott, expressed his enthusiasm to the
agency’s film chief: “I consider this an extremely important project. If it is suc-
cessful it will reach a highly significant element in Mexico with messages car-
rying our objectives. I believe that the proposed grant of approximately $68,000
is fully justified in our effort to advance U.S. objectives in Mexico.”36 In fact,
Project Pedro’s first-year costs would finally approach $100,000, once Tomp-
kins finally succeeded in obtaining control of an established national enterprise,
which was not easily accomplished.37
35. On Tompkins and Estudios Churubusco, see Seth Fein, “Transcultured Anticommu-
nism: Cold War Hollywood in Postwar Mexico,” in Visible Nations: Latin American Cinema and
Video, ed. Chon Noriega (Minneapolis, MN, 2000). On World War II and Hollywood in
Mexico, see Seth Fein, “Myths of Cultural Imperialism and Nationalism in Golden Age
Mexican Cinema,” in Fragments of a Golden Age: The Politics of Culture in Mexico, 1940–2000,
eds. Gilbert Joseph, Anne Rubenstein, and Eric Zolov (Durham, NC, 2001); and Seth Fein,
“Transnationalization and Cultural Collaboration: ‘Mexican’ Cinema and the Second World
War,” Studies in Latin American Popular Culture 17 (1998). On the postwar decline in com-
mercial relations between the two industries, see Seth Fein, “From Collaboration to Con-
tainment: The International Political Economy of Mexican Cinema after the Second World
War,” in Mexico’s Cinema: A Century of Films and Filmmakers, eds. Joanne Hershfield and David
Maciel (Wilmington, DE, 1999).
36. McDermott to Shelton, 30 January 1957, “Mexican Cartoons: Project Pedro,” Folder
2, Motion Picture Rights and Permissions files, NARG 306.
37. See Shelton to McDermott, 29 January 1958; “Amendment No. 5 (Agreement No. IA-
2428) ‘Project Pedro’,” 21 April 1958, USIA Accession Lot 66A274, Box 84, author’s Freedom
Project Pedro was part of a wider field of national projects in Latin America,
notably in Bolivia, Chile, Ecuador, and Brazil. In each of these countries, USIA
directly aided national newsreels. These nationally distinct programs attempted
to compensate locally for what the USIA neglected to do centrally in the 1950s
owing to the relatively minor position Latin America held in the global for-
mulation of U.S. foreign policy. As USIA film chief Shelton expressed it to the
embassy’s PAO during Project Pedro’s first months of production: “one of the
principal reasons for establishing the Pedro project was the fact that there is a
great dearth of material available here on matters relating to Mexico or, for that
matter, Latin America in general. I think you can well understand that the news-
reels of the world (and we have access to practically all of them) cover that which
is most news-worthy, and it is true, I believe you will agree, that Mexico and
Latin America, in general do not occupy a very important place in the overall
news-making activities of the world today. This, of course, operates as a severe
limiting factor on the material with any significance to Mexico which is avail-
able to us.” Hence, from Washington’s perspective, Project Pedro’s value would
be not principally as an outlet for international footage but as a transnational
producer of Mexican news within a Cold War frame. “I think you should use
every single means at your disposal,” Shelton advised the USIS in Mexico City,
“to persuade Tompkins to cover as many local happenings as possible which
have some significance because this will, of course, enhance the value of the
reel. We can, of course, supply a very considerable amount of general news
material composed of events that happened around the world, but I believe that
the thinking so far has been that we should stick as closely as possible to events
having some relation to Mexico and Latin America.”38
Unlike its other American newsreel relationships, which simply received
international footage shot by U.S. companies, Project Pedro involved Wash-
ington’s covert ownership of a national entity. The particular history of the U.S.
presence within Mexican film production—a presence that since World War
II mixed commerce and propaganda, Hollywood and U.S. foreign policy—
facilitated that intervention. And that history converged with that of commer-
cial U.S. newsreels at home and in the world in the mid-1950s. As Project Pedro
began, many of the dominant U.S. newsreels were ceasing production, as living
rooms replaced movie theaters as the site of audiovisual news consumption. In
fact, the two major newsreels that survived into the late 1960s, Hearst and Uni-
versal, did so because of USIA contracts to produce information for those areas
of the world where television had not yet achieved hegemony.39 While they
receded nationally, U.S. newsreels also declined internationally throughout the
of Information Act request, State Department case no. 200004119 (hereafter cited as SD-
FOIA).
38. Shelton to McDermott, 29 May 1957, SD-FOIA.
39. Raymond Fielding, The American Newsreel, 1911–1967 (Norman, OK, 1972), 308–309.
decade. As a USIS assessment noted, “American newsreels are on their way out
in Mexico.” Between 1955 and 1958 the number of U.S. productions exhibited
went from five to two, and the remaining pair, MGM and Universal, were
winding down their operations. The embassy concluded that “for all practical
purposes the propaganda impact of American newsreels in Mexico has van-
ished.” This vacuum stimulated Washington’s desire to engineer a Mexican
alternative to the commercial representation of its view of the world presented
by U.S. companies, since “Mexican newsreels . . . remain the only effective film
medium for reaching 35 mm [i.e., commercial] audiences in Mexico.” As was
the case across media and across the world, USIA moved in Mexico to work
directly in an area where it deemed the commercial presence of U.S. informa-
tion inadequate to wage Cold War.40
Project Pedro also developed at a moment of notable national as well as
international change in Mexican mass communications. Not only were U.S.
newsreels decreasingly visible, Mexican television production and reception was
growing rapidly. Between 1956 and 1958 the estimated number of Mexican
television sets in operation more than doubled (from 170,000 to 375,000) as
did the estimated audience they served (from 1,020,000 to 2,250,000, within a
national population of around thirty million).41 USIA frequently placed mate-
rial on Mexican TV, but it did not directly produce any programs on a regular
basis for the tightly controlled monopoly. U.S. corporate sponsorship of
Mexican news was, however, present from the outset of TV production in 1950,
when General Motors began to underwrite Mexico City Channel 4’s nightly
fifteen-minute newscast.42
Despite television’s rapid development in Mexico relative to the rest of Latin
America, it did not displace motion pictures as the dominant form of audiovi-
sual mass communication in the 1950s. Moviegoers encountered eight nation-
ally distributed weeklies that, like the rest of Mexican mass media, were privately
owned by members of the political establishment (or their cronies) and
depended upon official patronage. Moreover, like the era’s feature films, news-
reels operated within the representational parameters established by the state-
party’s culture.43 This was as much a matter of internal producer behavior as
external state intervention by the censors who worked in the Secretaría de
40. “Motion Pictures: Newsreels in Mexico,” USIS Mexico City to USIA, 11 July 1958,
pp. 1–2, SD-FOIA.
41. “Television Facts Summary: Latin America Area,” S-42-58, Office of Research, Special
Reports 1953–63, Box 15, NARG 306.
42. José Luis Gutiérrez Espíndola, “Información y necesidades sociales: Los noticiarios
de Televisa,” in Televisa: el quinto poder, ed. Raúl Trejo Delarbre (Mexico City, 1985), pp. 65–66;
Fernando Mejía Barquera, La industria de la radio y la televisión y la política del estado mexicano,
Volumen I (1920–1960) (Mexico City, 1989), pp. 162–95.
43. On the ideological relationship between the Mexican state and mass culture, see Roger
Bartra, Blood, Ink, and Culture: Miseries and Splendors of the Post-Mexican Condition, trans. Mark
Alan Healey (Durham, NC, 2002); Claudio Lomnitz-Adler, Deep Mexico, Silent Mexico: An
Gobernación (Interior Ministry). Newsreels shared with feature films a close

relationship to political power not only behind the screen but on it. There they
reconfigured the dominant images as well as messages of narrative cinema,
which itself was a regular topic, as newsreels spent much celluloid highlighting
the nation’s film industry, particularly the comings and goings of its movie stars.
In doing so, Mexican newsreels reproduced the celebrity culture, evident in
print and radio as well as film, that transformed popular entertainers into offi-
cially sanctioned symbols of national identity and projected politicians, espe-
cially the president, in the glamorized language of film culture (see figures 1
and 2). The president’s activities—opening of public works projects, attendance
at various political functions, meeting with visiting leaders from other nations—
dominated Mexican newsreels’ political reporting. Hence the culture of
celebrity produced by Mexico’s mass media merged politics and entertainment
in the nation’s capital city.
Just as the presidency was the nation’s political metonym, Mexico City was
its geocultural synecdoche. Like so many of the feature films that they preceded
on Mexican movie screens, newsreels highlighted Mexico City as modern
metropolis, showcase of contemporary architecture, cosmopolitan nightlife,
popular entertainment, and, above all else, the mass-culture industries that pro-
jected the capital city’s culture nationally as lo mexicano.44 Mexico City was the
production site for all of Mexico’s national newsreels, and they all conflated the
nation with the capital city.45 Project Pedro’s productions contributed to this
overrepresentation of national metropolis. Mexico City simultaneously served
as political stage, history textbook and museum, and exemplar of modern work,
consumption, and leisure. Moreover, Mexico City exercised national cultural
authority behind the screen, through the Federal District’s strict regulation of
the content and commerce of public entertainment in the country’s largest
motion-picture market and singular site of industrial film production.46
As Project Pedro completed its fourth month of production, the embassy’s

PAO indicated how the agency could best provision footage to supplement (less
ostensibly political) locally produced material in order to project the Cold War
in a topical register calibrated for Mexican consumption: “What then is wanted?
In general terms, items that have genuine interest, events that show progress,
Anthropology of Nationalism (Minneapolis, MN, 2001); and Carlos Monsiváis, “Notas sobre la
cultura mexicana en el siglo XX,” in Historia general de México, ed. Daniel Cosío Villegas
(Mexico City, 1988).
44. On the transition from countryside to cityscape as the dominant national representa-
tion in Mexican cinema, see Jorge Ayala Blanco, La aventura del cine mexicano en la época de oro
y después (Mexico City, 1993), pp. 93–107.
45. See Ricardo Pérez Montfort, “El discurso moral en los noticieros fílmicos de 1940 a
1960,” in Los archivos de la memoria, ed. Alicia Olivera de Bonfil (Mexico City, 1999).
46. José Agustín, Tragicomedia mexicana 1: la vida en México de 1940 a 1970 (Mexico City,
1990), pp. 136–40.
Figure 2: Movie star Dolores del Río at a 1957 luncheon honoring the Mexican film indus-
Figure 1: President Adolfo Ruiz Cortines speaking at 1957 Freedom of the Press Day cele-
bration, Noticiario clasa 810 (reproduced at the National Archives).
try, Noticiario clasa 800 (reproduced at the National Archives).

international cooperation, or with human appeal. What are some of these?

Some footage of braceros working under good conditions to offset the public-
ity which has shown only the seamy side. Mexicans preferably, or even Latin-
Americans, at various cultural, commercial or scholastic pursuits in the U.S.
They may be artists, students, researchers, or important visitors. American busi-
ness firms with branches in Mexico bringing Mexicans to the U.S. for training
as executives. Footage in this field is ideal to show the benefits of American
capital operating abroad.” Regarding direct references to the Cold War, Jack
McDermott suggested scenes showing Washington working for social progress
more than against the Soviet Union: “Since the Agency is placing heavy empha-
sis on People’s Capitalism, the Geophysical Year and Atoms for Peace, events
related to these broad headings ought to be covered on a regular basis.” Refer-
ences to Moscow should respond to specific Soviet information initiatives—for
example, “adverse propaganda regarding [nuclear] fallout”—or directly drama-
tize the Kremlin’s work to undermine the U.S.-led cause of world peace:
“Coverage of a UN Security Council or General Assembly meeting on those
occasions when Russian delegates are shown obstructing the work of peace or
arms control are good newsreel standbys.”47 From Project Pedro’s outset the
embassy constantly demanded more international footage about Cold War con-
cerns elsewhere in the world or production of special material in the United
States it deemed of interest to Mexican spectators. For example, in one instance,
USIS was livid that, “Despite a specific request by wire for coverage on the visit
of Cantinflas [Mexican movie star Mario Moreno] to Washington not one foot
was received. Cantinflas is a national hero and since he made an obvious hit on
his visit, Mexico could have exploited the occasion to great advantage. It is dif-
ficult to understand why the Agency passed up this opportunity.”48
Project Pedro unfolded within a deeply developed national film culture that
informally as much as formally imposed its own representational rules enforced
by the intricate personal and discursive interactions between official Mexico
and commercial mass-culture producers and consumers. Beyond USIS’s explicit
recognition that waging audiovisual Cold War in Mexico meant antineutralism
more than it did anticommunism, McDermott’s request for the agency to supply
specific “message material” implicitly expressed a contradiction in Project
Pedro’s operation: Mexicanized production—that conformed to state regula-
tion, audience expectations, and business practices—could not produce what
Washington considered effective propaganda. Indeed, binational relations with
Mexico presented particular challenges to Washington’s bipolar globality. This
was due not only to the centrality of the history of conflict with the United
States to official and popular conceptions of Mexican identity but also to con-
temporary cross-border issues. Most notably, the Eisenhower administration’s
47. McDermott to Shelton, 12 June 1957, pp. 1–2, SD-FOIA.

48. McDermott to USIA, 16 May 1957, SD-FOIA.
1954 implementation of Operation Wetback (its militarized repatriation of

undocumented workers) was a source of public resentment, more significant for
Cold War relations than Mexico’s unwillingness to endorse U.S. diplomacy in
Guatemala, preceding the CIA’s overthrow of Jacobo Arbenz.49
producing project pedro

Tompkins first focused on one of the most well-regarded (if financially shaky)
Mexican concerns, España-México-Argentina (EMA), producer of the news-
oriented Noticiero mexicano and the magazine-format Cine selecciones. Owned by
General Juan F. Azcárate, a politically well-connected ex-military officer and
diplomat, EMA had particularly close relations to the state. While all com-
mercial newsreels in Mexico depended on various levels of official patronage,
the government had directly subsidized EMA’s operations since the Second
World War, regularly utilizing Noticiero mexicano as a commercial outlet for offi-
cial images and messages not only nationally but also in the United States,
where the company had established distribution throughout the Spanish-
speaking southwest.50 An EMA product, secretly controlled by the USIA, could
be used to reach Mexicans (and Mexican Americans) within the United States
(where the agency was legally prohibited from distributing its materials) as well
as in Mexico. EMA’s equally impressive history of international distribution
southward fit well with the USIA’s secondary desire that Project Pedro repli-
cate the cross-border circulation of its other anticommunist Mexican film
activities, notably Tompkins’s cartoons and a feature film made with Washing-
ton funds. These had effectively drawn upon Mexico’s international standing as
a major film producer to export U.S. messages through Mexican movies. Like-
wise, USIA believed that “newsreels with Mexican attribution would have value
outside the country and that arrangements for distribution should take into
account desirable outlets in neighboring areas.”51
Tompkins’s agreement with the USIA demanded that he conceal his Wash-
ington connections from his local partners and the host state as well as the
49. This was expressed in Mexican film by director Alejandro Galindo’s ¡Espaldas mojadas!
[Wetbacks!] (1953), the release of which was delayed for two years at the behest of the
State Department, which worked to have it suppressed throughout Latin America. See Seth
Fein, “Dicen que soy comunista: Nationalist anticommunism and Mexican Cinema in the 1950s,”
Nuevo Texto Crítico 10, no. 21 ( Jan–June 1998). On Operation Wetback, see Juan Ramón
García, Operation Wetback: The Mass Deportation of Mexican Undocumented Workers in 1954
(Westport, CT, 1980) and Julian Samora, Los Mojados: The Wetback Story (Notre Dame, IN,
1971). On U.S.-Mexican relations in the 1950s, see Olga Pellicer de Brody and Esteban
Mancilla, Historia de la revolución mexicana, 1952–1960: El entendimiento con los Estados Unidos
del desarrollo estabilizador (Mexico City, 1978).
50. See, for example, General Juan F. Azcárate to Adolfo Ruiz Cortines, 24 February 1954;
and 2 September 1953, expediente 523.3/14; and Carlos González (EMA) Ruiz Cortinés, 25
July 1957, exp.151.3/1811, ramo Ruiz Cortines, fondo Presidentes, Archivo General de la
Nación, Mexico City.
51. “Mexican Newsreel Project,” Shelton (IMS-USIA) to Frank H. Oram (IAA-USIA), 31
March 1955.
Mexican public. It directed him to “negotiate, in the name of his controlled

company, the ‘Dibujos Animados, S.A.’, and ostensibly as sole interested party,”
for the right to control EMA’s weekly productions.52 This presented problems
since the deal’s structure had to appear to abide by postwar Mexican laws that
required majority national ownership in designated industries. Owing to its
prominence as the leading producer of national culture and an internationally
recognized symbol of national achievement, the film industry was, in fact, the
first of the sectors legally declared as critical to Mexican sovereignty. Tomp-
kins’s engagement of a prestanombre (Mexican citizen to front for U.S. capital)
was a widespread practice. However Project Pedro’s ideological (rather than
strictly market) objectives and Washington’s demands that its own control be
absolute as well as covert necessitated unusually complicated contractual
maneuvers, both between Tompkins and his Mexican associates as well as
between USIA and Tompkins. To such ends, USIA instructed that 940 of the
enterprise’s shares be divided evenly between Tompkins and Azcárate and that
the remaining 61 be assigned to Tompkins’s Mexican attorney, Pedro del Villar.
These would be “endorsed in blank by del Villar in private and thereupon will
be placed in a safe deposit box,” effectually dormant; “This procedure tends to
preclude disclosure that 49% of the stock is owned or controlled by a non-
Mexican, and thereby protects 61 shares from escheat to the State under local
law.” Project Pedro depended upon Tompkins’s ability to construct a politically
(as well as financially) viable operation: “the approval of the Mexican Govern-
ment to these sales (to Tompkins and del Villar) will be obtained by the
Grantee.” But the USIA, not Tompkins, ultimately would control production:
“it is clearly understood and stipulated that the U.S. Government shall be the
owner-in-fact of the entire 531 shares of stock thus to be acquired, and the use
of such ownership and the operation of the Company shall be in accordance
with the Government’s wishes.”53
The agency’s plans for Project Pedro required absolute control of newsreel
content. Direct ownership of local production distinguished Project Pedro
from USIA’s other unattributed newsreel projects. For example, unlike its exten-
sive Project Kingfish—through which the agency distributed newsreel footage
shot by U.S. commercial contractors to productions in Asia and Africa—Project
Pedro would produce the Cold War in Mexico. The weight of two decades of
national development of an industrial film culture gave rise to this imperial
objective and need. To produce effective messages for Mexico, ones that would
supposedly nudge national discourse toward the United States, demanded both
recognition and subversion of Mexican newsreel culture. This duality under-
52. “Agreement and Terms of Grant between the United States of America and Richard
Kelsey Tompkins,” 4 June 1956, p. 2, SD-FOIA.
53. Amendment No. 1, Agreement No. IA-2428, 17 October 1956, pp. 1–2, 4–6; and
“Checklist for P.A.O., Project ‘Pedro’ Amendment of 10/17/56,” SD-FOIA.
mined the deal with EMA. Tompkins and Azcárate agreed to financial terms
but parted ways over editorial authority. This was the non-negotiable issue for
USIA.
In search of a new entree to national production and distribution, Tompkins
turned his attention to Noticiario Nacional, S.A., a company jointly owned by
Gabriel Alarcón, who controlled the mammoth Cadena de Oro network of
movie theaters, and the político Luis Manjarrez, senator from the state of
Puebla. Underlining the always present connections between politics and pri-
vately owned mass communications in Mexico, Alarcón’s fortunes had grown
through his alliance with Puebla’s dominant political boss, Maximino Avila
Camacho (1891–1945), who served as secretary of communications and public
works in the presidential administration of his younger brother, Manuel
(1897–1955), during World War II.54
Less financially sound than EMA, Noticiario Nacional was desperate for new
capital. The debt-ridden Alarcón welcomed Tompkins’s overture, but the
embassy paused over the additional funds required by its front-man to make
this deal.55 Despite the deal’s cost, USIS considered the company a more attrac-
tive opportunity than EMA, because its long-running main product Noticiario
clasa “is the oldest production of its kind in the Republic of Mexico—and the
only one locally produced which has maintained its ‘news’ tenor,” while many
of its competitors had shifted to magazine formats comprised of lighter subject
matter.56 As much as the quality of its production, USIS valued Noticiario clasa’s
extensive exhibition, noting that it “has among the best distribution arrange-
ments of any Mexican newsreel.” In arranging access to that national audience,
the new agreement between USIA and Tompkins reproduced the basic struc-
ture of the EMA deal, but involved a more complex corporate arrangement
whereby a separate Mexican company, Impulsora Anahuac, S.A., headed by
Tompkins (and that included Alarcón and Manjarrez, as well as del Villar as offi-
cers), would actually own Noticiario Nacional. Meanwhile, that company’s
board would be reconfigured in public records to include Tompkins in a seem-
ingly secondary position.57
The covert control Tompkins achieved over a major newsreel satisfied
Washington. USIA’s Motion Picture Service’s chief outlined its benefits to the
agency’s General Counsel, who had to approve the contract: “Two features in
54. “Motion Pictures: Newsreels in Mexico,” 11 July 1958, p. 3. On Alarcón’s relationship

to Avila Camacho, see Andrew William Paxman, “William Jenkins, the Private Sector and the
Modern Mexican State,” M.A. thesis, University of California, Berkeley, 2002, chapters 5
and 6; and Wil Pansters, Politics and Power in Puebla: The Political History of a Mexican State
(Amsterdam, 1990), pp. 62–63.
55. McDermott to Shelton, 18 January 1957, SD-FOIA.
56. “Report to Mr. R. K. Tompkins on Operations of Noticiario Nacional, S.A. and
Impulsora Anahuac, S.A.,” from Cantwell Brown, 7 January 1958, p. 1, SD-FOIA.
57. “Amendment No. 3, Agreement No. IA-2428, ‘Project Pedro,’ ” 31 January 1957,
SD-FOIA.
particular distinguish this arrangement from the prior ones in desirability: first,
because, for the first time we have a written agreement signed by the indige-
nous principals that commit them to go forward with the operation; second,
because we are dealing through a new ‘holding’ corporation, which . . . is
already organized (incorporated), and need only be activated. Additionally it is
worthy of note that the newsreel now to be controlled (‘Noticiario clasa’) is con-
sidered to be by far the best in Mexico, and it is the one [ex-PAO] Mr. Ander-
son initially tried to ‘infiltrate’ when he first went to Mexico (the company
producing this reel has heretofore been too well off financially to be interested
in any overtures).” Compared to earlier options, Shelton judged that “Ou[r]
control (through Tompkins) of the operation will be implemented and strength-
ened in several ways: As ostensible owner of 50% of the company, and as
Chairman of the Board with statutory veto authority of such office, Mr. Tomp-
kins will be able to exert all practical control on both companies and their
operations.”58
In effect, the new system involved a double prestanombre. Tompkins’s
company, Impulsora Anahuac, would control Noticiario Nacional, which would
ostensibly continue to operate under Alarcón’s leadership. At worst this arrange-
ment risked revealing a link to Tompkins, who was, in any case, a well-
established member of the Mexican filmmaking community, but his own links
to USIA would remain contractually hidden. An additional advantage of the
deal was Cadena de Oro’s distribution of Cine mundial produced by Productores
Unidos, S.A. Emilio Azcárraga Milmo operated Productores Unidos, part of his
father’s (Emilio Azcárraga Vidaurreta’s) mass-media empire, which had long-
standing links of its own to U.S. radio and motion-picture concerns as well as
the U.S. government.59 Through Tompkins’s arrangement, USIA would be able
to place footage with Cine mundial as well as with a biweekly regional newsreel,
Actualidades del norte, that Alarcón produced for circulation in the eighty
theaters he operated in and around Monterrey, Mexico’s northern industrial
capital.60
Project Pedro commenced operation in February 1957. USIS noted that “it
was immediately apparent that Noticiario Nacional had been greatly misman-
aged,” and the embassy engaged Arthur Andersen and Co. to audit its new
enterprise. Surveying local operations, Noticiario Nacional’s (USIS-imposed)
58. “Project Pedro: Amendment No. 3 to Grant Agreement IA 2428(1/31/57)”; Turner B.

Shelton to Frank C. Tribbe, 11 February 1957, p. 2, “Mexican Cartoons: Project Pedro,”
Folder 2, Motion Picture Rights and Permissions files, NARG 306, underlining in original.
59. José Luis Ortiz Garza, La guerra de las ondas: Un libro que desimiente la historia “oficial”
de la radio mexicana (Mexico City, 1992); José Luis Ortiz Garza, México en guerra: La historia
secreta de los negocios entre empresarios mexicanos de la comunicación los nazis y E.U.A. (Mexico City,
1989).
60. “Agreement entered into by Mr. Emilio Azcárraga M., representing ‘Productores
Unidos,’ S.A. and Mr. Luis C. Manjarrez, representing ‘Noticiario Nacional,’ S.A. and Mr.
Gabriel Alarcón Chargoy, 24 September 1956, “Mexican Cartoons: Project Pedro,” Folder 2,
Motion Picture Rights and Permissions files, NARG 306.
general manager, Cantwell Brown, determined that increased investment was

necessary, since production quality would have to be immediately improved in
order to stabilize the firm’s finances: “Upon contact with the various advertis-
ing agencies who represent the largest volume of potential for the operation it
was found that the reputation of the Company and the popularity of the vehicle
itself was so poor that a complete lack of confidence existed.” This was a crucial
problem since Mexican newsreels paid fees for exhibition and funded produc-
tion strictly through sponsorship. Because there were no plans for funding
beyond the agency’s initial investment, after which Project Pedro was to func-
tion self-sufficiently, it was imperative that it soon attract new advertisers.
Brown outlined a plan for establishing a commercially viable operation that
closely related upgrading output on the screen to increasing management’s
control behind it. “Immediate improvement of the content and tenor of the
News Reel to enhance its popularity” was the key to profitable propaganda.
This would allow for necessary “build up of distribution and exhibition, espe-
cially to include more first run houses in Mexico City.” However, in order to
begin more efficient production of messages, it was necessary to immediately
implement “proper accounting procedures and internal operations,” which
would require “personnel changes,” including “a reduction in union payroll”
and more management control of “job specification.” As production quality
rose, Brown planned to raise fees for ads and install a commission system for
selling spots that would “stimulate customer confidence and secure more busi-
ness.” He also recommended development of a 16 mm version of Noticiario clasa
for provincial distribution in venues unequipped for 35 mm projection. Finally,
and unrealistically, the company intended to lobby the Federal District’s author-
ities to expand the permissible number of ads per reel. While in its first six
months of operation Noticiario Nacional lost over two hundred thousand pesos
($16,000), the embassy considered the fact that the deficit could now be reli-
ably reported, through its new biweekly accounting practices, as a sign of
progress. More impressively, exhibition expanded.61
During Noticiario Nacional’s first six months of USIS management, it
slightly more than doubled its national presence, eventually reaching 288
screens. By the end of 1957, its productions were shown weekly in 307 theaters
nationally, 53 of which were in Mexico City. Noticiario clasa had added a dozen
theaters in the capital, eight of which were first-run outlets that quadrupled its
screentime among the city’s leading venues. The company boasted that, “[o]f
these eight 2 are of the best in the City.” In addition to the eight movie palaces
it obtained through “agreement with Cadena de Oro,” Noticiario Nacional had
negotiated “separate contracts for Palacio Chino and the Versalles [sic],” two
more leading downtown theaters. Tompkins credited USIA’s international
footage for Noticiario clasa’s expanded exhibition. Since March, “foreign mate-
61. “Memorandum on Operations of Noticiario Nacional, S.A.,” Cantwell C. Brown, 28

August 1957, SD-FOIA.
rial of international origin was inserted,” not based strictly on its intended ide-
ological effect but in anticipation of “genuine and universal interest” that had
palpable public appeal. Brown concluded, “The vehicle has been improved
gradually until now it is of interest to theatergoers, not merely tolerated by
them.” He calculated that it “has a propaganda impact of 1,643,540 persons per
week.”62
Although USIS officials expressed satisfaction at the newsreel’s improved
quality and expanded audience, they (correctly) doubted that it would soon pay
for itself (even if Tompkins achieved all their recommendations for cost cuts
and revenue expansion). The main problem was that only 38 percent of possi-
ble advertising time was currently sold: “the weekly cost of getting out the news-
reel is some $43,000 [pesos] on top of which there was another $8,000 [pesos]
to be paid to the four Mexican businessmen who fronted as the operation’s man-
agement. If the newsreel sold all of its advertising spots, it would take in only
$49,500 [pesos, or 3,960 dollars].” USIS estimated that if would be at least six
months until “even a break-even condition” could be achieved.63 In fact it would
never break even. This was a problem for Mexican newsreels generally, not just
Project Pedro. As Noticiario Nacional reported: “Federal District decree inser-
tions in the news reel are limited to four spots and one publicity item. This
places a definite ‘top’ on potential income from the operation.”64
The state’s regulation of newsreel ads assured dependence on extracommer-
cial (usually political) sources of revenue in exchange for representation. Such
contrived “news” segments regularly provoked public incredulity and antipa-
thy: “The definition of ‘indirect publicity’ appears to be rather flexible, inci-
dentally, and very often the number of such items exceeds by far the official
figure of one. Audiences are extremely sensitive to material of the ‘indirect’
variety, and such items are often met with loud whistles, the Mexican equiva-
lent of the Bronx cheer. But more often than not the patience of the Mexican
audience is strained to the breaking point, and the public indulges in the not
too diverting, but somewhat consoling, game of trying to guess who paid for
what—and did he get his money’s worth.”65 Just as all Mexican newsreels
depended upon various forms of official and unofficial subsidies from Mexico
City sources, Project Pedro depended upon Washington’s secret payments in
order to meet its costs. In its case, its extracommercial relations produced
expanded international coverage that seemed actually to enhance its reception,
as long as it did not appear didactically ideological (which, in fact, it rarely
did).
62. Ibid., p. 2; “Report to Mr. R. K. Tompkins on Operations of Noticiario Nacional, S.A.

and Impulsora Anahuac, S.A.,” 7 January 1958, p. 5.
63. Unsigned memo to McDermott, 2 September 1957, SD-FOIA.
64. “Memorandum on Operations of Noticiario Nacional, S.A.,” 28 August 1957, p. 1.
65. “Motion Pictures: Newsreels in Mexico,”11 July 1958, pp. 2–3. For similar patterns in
the era’s photojournalism, see John Mraz, Nacho López: Mexican Photographer (Mïnneapolis,
MN, 2003), pp. 35–37.
USIA’s official mission did not include covert operations. Selling democracy
secretly was publicly ruled out when the agency was formed in 1953. Never-
theless, USIA did regularly produce materials without attribution. If publicly
challenged, legally it would have to admit its involvement. In fact, its objective
in Mexico and elsewhere was to work covertly from within apparently sover-
eign national mass media. USIS was aware of the risks this posed to Washing-
ton’s very interests in sponsoring Project Pedro, the international image of the
United States as a beacon of freedom in the Cold War. The embassy’s PAO
believed that USIA could survive public fallout from disclosure that it provided
unattributed newsreel material to a Mexican firm, but it would have more dif-
ficulty countering revelations of its secret ownership of a Mexican company:
“the fact that the USIS in Mexico was in reality the majority stockholder in a
firm engaged in the production and showing of newsreels, if it became known,
would occasion serious embarrassment to the U.S. Government. The newsreels
themselves would be discredited and since the ownership of stock in such a cor-
poration in Mexico is illegal, the corporation itself would be seriously damaged.
. . . It is noted that the production of movies is one of the so-called seven
restricted industries in Mexico.”66 To avoid such disclosure, USIS assiduously
operated Project Pedro as a Mexico City enterprise that abided by local regu-
lation. Regarding Tompkins’s position, Shelton pointed out that, “I think the
pertinent point is that as far as Project Pedro is concerned that Tompkins is not
the majority stockholder. His ownership is exactly equal to that of the other
proprietary group. His control is by virtue of tacit agreement and offices held.
He does not have ‘stock control’ of the company’s affairs. Since Mexican nation-
als own 50% of the stock, the corporate structure is legal and the stock own-
ership of Tompkins (an American national) is fully disclosed. Therefore it would
be our thought that disclosure of the Agency’s ‘control’ of Tompkins, except
of course as the publicity might affect its business success, could not affect the
corporation.”67
In Mexico, as much as anywhere else in the world, the agency succeeded in
penetrating a locally legitimate national mode of cultural production through
implementation of “gray propaganda,” covertly produced and distributed infor-
mation that did not attribute its connection to the agency. Officially, it did not
engage in the “black propaganda” (covert misinformation and psychological
warfare) that was the domain of the CIA (whose international subsidization of
intellectuals and mass media is better known, if still inadequately researched, to
historians of Cold War Europe).68 As a former USIA deputy director explained
66. “OCB Paper ‘Principles to Assure Coordination of Gray Activities,’ ” Jack C.

McDermott (USIS-Mexico) and Winston M. Scott (OCB Designee) 19 November 1957,
p. 2, SD-FOIA.
67. Shelton to McDermott, 22 July 1958, USIA Accession 66A274, Box 84, SD-FOIA,
underlining in original.
68. SeeVolker R. Berghahn, America and the Intellectual Cold Wars in Europe: Shepard Stone
between Philanthropy, Academy, and Diplomacy (Princeton, NJ, 2001); David Caute, The Dancer
in his history of the agency, “Unattributable material . . . is that which is pre-

pared and disseminated in such a way as to obscure or mislead the audience as
to its origins. USIA does not engage in this kind of propaganda, leaving it to
the Central Intelligence Agency.”69 In Project Pedro’s case, the distinction was
in practice nonexistent. In fact, in one instance, CIA challenged USIA to prove
that Project Pedro (and another plan, “Project T,” for Tompkins to produce an
anticommunist feature film) was “within the responsibility boundaries” sepa-
rating the two agencies’ respective missions. In advising Ambassador Hill about
how to handle the bureaucratic dispute over “the two covert film projects of
USIS in Mexico,” McDermott explained, “the U.S. Government owns no stock
nor any interest in a Mexican firm. It has a contract with the American [Tomp-
kins] to supply footage for the newsreel and retains control of the newsreel’s
content” but the “stock ownership aspect . . . no longer exists,” owing to Project
Pedro’s financial restructuring in August 1958, and therefore did not trespass
on the CIA’s terrain.70
Project Pedro’s successful competition for national advertising was critical to
its operation as a Mexican concern. Its most conspicuous national sponsors were
corporate holdovers from Noticiario Nacional’s operation under Alarcón and
came from the same Puebla-based clique that was closely tied to national pol-
itics and economics since Avila Camacho’s presidency during World War II.
Banco Comercial Mexicano, owned by Manuel Espinosa Yglesias, and José
García Valseca’s publishing empire each sponsored short introductory segments
above the newsreel’s title. García Valseca’s Novedades newspaper was a close
state-party collaborator that quietly published stories planted by the PRI71 (and
was also a key recipient of USIA material). Mexican newsreels frequently adver-
tised affiliations to particular print media. EMA’s Noticiero mexicano, for example,
publicized its alliance with the major daily El Universal. Noticiario clasa’s opening
credits announced its ties with García Valseca’s sports magazine Esto. As was
generally the case, the sponsoring publication had no actual editorial role in the
newsreel’s production; it simply paid a fee for the advertising. Esto was Noticia-
rio clasa’s second largest sponsor, and the newsreel frequently featured its
exploits, as well as those of affiliated publications in its “news” segments. Other
major Mexican retail and manufacturing concerns—such as Corona beer,
Defects: The Struggle for Cultural Supremacy During the Cold War (New York, 2004); Christo-
pher Lasch, “The Cultural Cold War: A Short History of the Congress for Cultural Freedom,”
in Towards a New Past: Dissenting Essays in American History, ed. Barton J. Bernstein (New York,
1968); Frances Stonor Saunders, The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and
Letters (New York, 1999).
69. Thomas C. Sorensen, The Word War: The Story of American Propaganda (New York,
1968), p. 65.
70. McDermott to Hill, 10 December 1958, SD-FOIA.
71. Stephen R. Niblo, Mexico in the 1940s: Modernity, Politics, and Corruption (Wilmington,
DE, 1999), p. 349.
Canada shoes, and Pal nail polish—sponsored Project Pedro’s newsreels.

Transnational U.S. companies were also regular advertisers, not due to Project
Pedro’s covert connection to Washington but because of their commercial inter-
ests in Mexican consumption; they regularly advertised with other reels as well.
Coca-Cola was by far Project Pedro’s largest source of advertising revenue.
Goodyear, Kodak, and Jeep were among the other prominent U.S. multina-
tionals that purchased Project Pedro advertising spots in Noticiario clasa and its
successor productions.72
Some of the principal figures operating behind the screen showed up on it.
Noticiario clasa projected segments, for example, about the social activities of the
Alarcón and Azcárraga clans.73 One issue conspicuously brought together the
international and the national, when it showed Emilio Azcárraga V.—the dom-
inant figure in midcentury Mexican mass communication and one of Washing-
ton’s key covert collaborators—being named Executive of the Year for 1957 by
the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in Mexico.74 Meanwhile Ambassador Robert
Hill’s activities, his appearances with President Ruiz Cortinez and his airport
arrivals in Mexico City, were the only regular representations of the embassy.75
Project Pedro did subtly intervene in national politics in a way that con-
formed to general newsreel practices of highlighting favored politicians. Across
the two sexenios it spanned, the last third of Adolfo Ruiz Cortines’s administra-
tion (1952–58) and the first half of Adolfo López Mateos’s (1958–64), one gov-
ernment figure, greatly favored by U.S. foreign policy, remained Project Pedro’s
most prominent national political figure (following the two presidents them-
selves). USIS newsreels regularly featured Antonio Ortiz Mena, Ruíz Cortines’s
director of the federal government’s Social Security Institute and subsequently
López Mateos’s treasury secretary. Ortiz Mena appeared frequently not only at
each president’s side but also officiating independently at public events and
meeting with prominent U.S. officials to discuss economic issues between the
two neighbors. A proto-técnico (forerunner of the type of politician that came
to dominate the PRI’s last two decades of presidential hegemony), Ortiz Mena’s
singular on-screen presence reflected Washington’s support for a pro-U.S.
politician whom it hoped would eventually assume the presidency.76
72. “Report of Gross Income from Space Sales by Category,” in “Report to Mr. R. K.
Tompkins on Operations of Noticiario Nacional, S.A. and Impulsora Anahuac, S.A.,” 7 January
1958, p. 12.
73. Noticiario clasa 834, 848.
74. Noticiario clasa 802.
75. Noticiario clasa 815, 818, 823, 838, 847, 856; El mundo en marcha 9, 56.
76. Noticiario clasa 851, 855, 857, 860, 867; El mundo en marcha 110, 141, 155. On Ortiz
Mena’s role in U.S.-Mexican relations under López Mateos, see Olga Pellicer de Brody and
Esteban Mancilla, Historia de la revolución mexicana, 1952–1960: El entendimiento con los Estados
Unidos y la gestación del desarrollo estabilizador (Mexico City, 1978), pp. 259–67; Agustín, pp.
196–200. On his proximity to the PRI’s presidential nomination in 1958, see Juan José
Rodríguez Prats, El poder presidencial Adolfo Ruiz Cortines, 2nd ed. (Mexico City, 1992), p. 236.
The intensity of USIA’s effort to control Noticiario Nacional’s everyday

operation matched that applied to maintaining the company’s national appear-
ance. Just as Noticiario Nacional presented a front for Tompkins’s own domes-
tically registered company, Impulsora Anahuac, the expatriate’s firm, provided
a Mexican front for USIA. Tompkins agreed to clear every single substantive
decision about production with the embassy’s USIS staff, which, in turn, regu-
larly informed the agency’s motion-picture chief about actual local operations.
At least two members of a Newsreel Review Board—comprised of the post’s
PAO, the Deputy PAO, Information Officer, and Films Officer—reviewed each
issue and forwarded a report to Washington. In addition, the embassy shipped
a 35 mm print of every exhibited edition to the agency for its own review
(unintentionally preserving an audiovisual record of Project Pedro of use to
historians). USIA also required Tompkins to submit a quarterly “Progress
Report” about the enterprise’s operation that combined “narrative and statisti-
cal” assessments.77
USIA’s evaluation of Noticiario clasa scrutinized the newsreel’s content as
much as its finances. One such report made by Shelton, at the end of 1957, typ-
ically evaluated narrative structure and topical content of six consecutive entries.
The agency’s motion-picture chief favorably noted the high degree of regular-
ity in form from episode to episode, combining various quantities of sequences
comprised of footage about international events “supplied by the [USIA’s] news-
reel pool” with national footage, usually about events in and around Mexico
City that “included everything from boxing and beauty queens to public works
projects.” The report further noted “[i]ndirectly, it can be said that the U.S. was
referred to in at least one story in every issue. A direct reference was made in
all but one issue and in one an indirect reference was made. Peaceful uses of
atomic energy was referred to in three different issues, all three of the stories
concerned had an international connotation.” There was locally shot footage of
“Ambassador R. Hill arriving in Mexico and later presenting his credentials,
and Dr. Milton Eisenhower’s visit to Mexico.” Like numerous other such
reports, this one judged “the technical quality of the reel to be good,” praising
its editing, narration, and overall “composition.” However, its final analysis of
ideological impact echoed similarly qualified assessments across Project Pedro’s
four years of operation: “Content-wise the reel would be classified as national
in character except for the pool supplied material which would add an occa-
sional touch of international coverage.”78
USIA dissatisfaction over the lack of locally produced political messages per-
sisted throughout Project Pedro’s operation and continued to generate tensions
77. “PAO’s Checklist for ‘Project Pedro,’ ” 31 January 1957, SD-FOIA.

78. “Content analysis of Not. Clasa.” Shelton to Ed Garro (IMS), 27 December 1957,
“Mexican Cartoons: Project Pedro,” Folder 2, Motion Picture Rights and Permissions files,
NARG 306.
between Washington and Mexico City over their Mexican newsreels’ content.
Two years after Project Pedro began, USIA’s exasperated Motion Picture Service
director regularly sent the same kind of critique to the agency’s Mexico City
proconsul that he had since production began: “The real program value of
projects such as the Mexican newsreel is achieved through materials shot in
the local country in support of U.S. objectives in that country. . . . It is not the
intent to completely ‘carry’ the reel through stories that we supply. It is for
this reason that we have been so insistent that USIS work with the local pro-
ducer to see that materials of program value are photographed in Mexico;
and that a USIS staff member work with the producer on editing and writing
the material to insure that we get the maximum benefit from materials
photographed.”79
Unhappy about Project Pedro’s performance during its first ten months of
operations, USIA ordered both a new audit of its finances and a USIS assess-
ment of its “performance from a non-fiscal point of view.”80 McDermott
supported continuation of Tompkins’s undertaking, even though “it will require
additional subsidization for another year before it becomes completely self-
supporting.” He blamed the financial failure on “undue optimism” and “a lack
of sufficient knowledge of newsreel operation here.” But the PAO believed that
Project Pedro’s future “depends in large measure on Washington,” on the
USIA’s ability to provide better footage, not drastic changes in Mexico City
operations.81
Based on this evaluation, USIA continued to fund Project Pedro, making sig-
nificant new disbursements in the first half of 1958. However, by the summer,
unable to pay its bills, including its debt to Alarcón, Tompkins’s Impulsora
Anahuac went into liquidation, and Noticiario Nacional released its final issue
of Noticiario clasa after two decades of production. But this was not Project
Pedro’s last reel. In fact, U.S. officials in Washington and Mexico City saw
Impulsora Anahuac’s demise as an opportunity to start a new enterprise from
scratch that would draw upon the previous year and a half’s experience as it
implemented reforms to improve management and content (and to exchange
USIA’s position as a secret owner to a potentially less embarrassing role as a
secret contractor).82 Despite its shortcomings, Project Pedro offered a unique
angle of access, otherwise unavailable to the United States in Mexico. In assess-
ing the overall situation of Mexican newsreel production and consumption, as
Noticiario Nacional dissolved, USIS noted that Mexico offered few opportuni-
ties for consistent control of any of the nationally run operations, many of which
79. Shelton to McDermott, 23 March 1959, SD-FOIA.

80. Shelton to McDermott, n.d. (ca. late January 1958); and “Memorandum of Questions
Prepared by Frank Tribbe,” n.d (ca. late January 1958), SD-FOIA.
81. McDermott to Shelton, 24 January 1958, p. 2, SD-FOIA.
82. “Amendment No. 6, Agreement IA-2428, ‘Project Pedro,’ ” 11 August 1958, SD-
FOIA.
frequently swapped footage “with European reels—including those behind the

Iron Curtain.” Even if Washington was able to displace such Eastern Bloc
arrangements, by expanding distribution of its own footage (already regularly
accepted by two privately operated concerns, including Azcárraga’s Cine
mundial), “USIS would not, of course, be in a position to control the contents
of the entire reels, just as it cannot control the entire contents of newspapers
like EXCELSIOR or NOVEDADES or [Azcárraga’s] Radio Station XEW or
any of the scores of newspapers, magazines and radio stations it deals with” in
Mexico.83
In fact broadcast culture, not only radio but also television, provided criti-
cal intertexts for Project Pedro’s reformulation. Concerned about declining
audience for its Sunday night El mundo en marcha radio show, in 1958 USIA
commissioned a public-opinion study of the weekly current-events program’s
reception. Broadcast from “Mexico’s leading radio station, XEW” in Mexico
City, the show was relayed across the rest of the Azcárraga-operated national
network of 44 stations. Its opening and closing motto—“The world marches
on!”—deliberately echoed the similar signature line of the March of Time
film series produced by Henry Luce’s communications empire between the
mid-1930s and mid-1950s. The pseudo-newsreel had had close relations to
the Good Neighbor policy, especially with regard to production about
Mexico.84 The survey compared audience attitudes toward radio news to com-
peting forms of current-events-oriented mass media. It indicated that radio
remained the most influential form of Mexican mass communication about
national and international events; informants placed its diffusion ahead of news-
papers and its authoritativeness above that of newsreels, which had wide expo-
sure but were viewed more as entertainment than journalism. The report
recognized that television’s daily impact would eventually supersede radio’s but
had not yet done so owing to the still-prohibitive cost of receivers. Neverthe-
less, millions of Mexicans had regular contact with TV culture, and its presen-
tation of current events suggested the same authority that radio commanded.
With specific regard to El mundo en marcha, the study concluded that the
covertly operated USIS radio program, produced under contract by J. Walter
Thompson of Mexico, remained a credible source of information even though
some respondents complained that certain international events and issues went
83. “Motion Pictures: Newsreels in Mexico,” USIS Mexico City to USIA, 11 July 1958,
pp. 3–4, USIA Accession 66A274, Box 84, SD-FOIA, capitalization in original.
84. El Mundo en Marcha #302, Walter Thompson de México, S.A., Depto. De Radio
y Televisión, 17 August 1957, USIA Accession 66A274, Box 91, author’s SD-FOIA; “OCB
Paper ‘Principles to Assure Coordination of Gray Activities,’ ” p. 3. March of Time had a long
history of collaborating with the U.S. foreign policy in Mexico: Seth Fein, “Hollywood,
Mexico-United States Relations, and the Golden age of Mexican Cinema” (Ph.D. diss., Uni-
versity of Texas at Austin, 1996), pp. 283–90. On Luce’s film operation, see Raymond Field-
ing, The March of Time, 1935–1951 (New York, 1978).
under-reported compared to competing mass media that more critically covered

the United States.85
When USIS officers in Mexico City reconfigured Project Pedro’s finances
and form they cited its well-regarded radio program by naming its new news-
reel El mundo en marcha. In doing so, USIS signaled its newsreel’s link to broad-
cast culture as well as Luce’s film series. El mundo en marcha was an audiovisual
hybrid that brought television-style news production into Mexican movie the-
aters just as U.S. and Mexican corporate and state interests sought to expand
TV in Mexico. Its electronic-inflected introductory sound track and its staccato
narration contributed to this effect. El mundo en marcha’s eventual employment
of Telesistema’s ubiquitous newscaster Jacobo Zabludovsky as its editorial direc-
tor and narrator made explicit the connection between small screen and big.
The link was formal as well as personal. Prior to El mundo en marcha, Mexican
newsreels buried the narrator’s name along with that of the other technical staff
in the concluding credits. Borrowing from television, El mundo en marcha estab-
lished its identity as intertwined with that of its celebrity journalist at each issue’s
start. Zabludovsky had been present at the birth of commercial Mexican tele-
vision in 1950 when he produced and hosted the nation’s first newscast,
sponsored by General Motors.86 Prior to going to work for Tompkins in 1960,
Telesistema’s star had already performed at the Cold War nexus of Washington
and Mexico City mass media. In October 1957 he hosted a prime-time Channel
4 special (secretly authored by the USIA) that used the occasion of the United
Nations’ twelfth anniversary to concentrate attention on recent Soviet actions
in Hungary.87
By the time Zabludovsky added his name and voice to El mundo en marcha,
then, he had accumulated significant cultural capital in print and radio as well
as TV. Its redeployment by Tompkins on Mexico’s movie screens attracted
the host state’s attention. The second in command of the Interior Ministry’s
office of cinema affairs, Carment Baez, privately expressed her administration’s
approval of Zabludovsky’s appointment: “We wish to congratulate the R. K.
Tompkins Company and the management of the newsreel ‘El mundo en
marcha’ for having acquired the services of Mr. Jacobo Zabludovsky as Edito-
rial Director. . . . [My office] has taken due note of this step and will be collab-
orating closely with ‘El mundo en marcha’, which will be held up to the other
newsreels as an example of what a good newsreel should be and how to inform
85. “A Study of Audience Opinions of the ‘El mundo en marcha’ and Exposure to
Advertising Media,” November 1958, International Research Associates, S.A. de C.V., Mexico
City, File MX5805, Box 74, USIA Office of Research, Country Project Files, 1951–64, NARG
306.
86. Claudia Fernández and Andrew Paxman, El Tigre: Emilio Azcárraga y su imperio Tele-
visa (Mexico City, 2000), pp. 162, 54–58. Zabludovsky would continue to be the face of Mexican
TV news for decades, hosting the Televisa monopoly’s prime-time broadcasts into the 1990s.
87. “OCB Paper ‘Principles to Assure Coordination of Gray Activities,’ ” McDermott and
Scott, 19 November 1957, p. 5, SD-FOIA.
the Mexican public properly.”88 In fact by the beginning of 1960, El mundo en

marcha was widely considered to be “the leading Mexican weekly newsreel.” Its
distribution had climbed to 358 theaters nationally.89
Changes on the screen came with changes behind it. R.K. Tompkins y Aso-
ciados, S.A., openly owned and operated El mundo en marcha, while retaining
access to its predecessor’s wide distribution through Cadena de Oro. Alarcón,
however, was no longer a partner in production. Tompkins’s new company
paid him a flat exhibition fee ($9,000 for the first six months of operation),
conforming to usual industry practice. Regarding content, Washington finally
agreed in writing to provide “message material” as requested by Mexico City,
but it insisted that Tompkins’s uncle, ex-RKO chief N. Peter Rathvon—who
had long experience facilitating Washington’s covert production of foreign films
in Europe as well as the Americas—take over everyday management of his
nephew’s newsreel.90 This was part of the agency’s effort to impose “closer
supervision by USIS” of Project Pedro to implement “a planned systematic
approach to coverage and use of local stories that can further program
objectives.”91
The new format’s aggregate success did not, however, resolve the ongoing
struggle between Washington and Mexico City over content. Unsatisfied with
USIA’s response to its general requests for coverage about certain topics, the
embassy began making “hard and specific requests for footage.” These solicita-
tions ranged from coverage of activities of prominent Mexicans in the United
States—such as a lecture by historian Edmundo O’Gorman at the University
of Indiana, composer Carlos Chávez’s term as the Charles Eliot Norton chair
in poetics at Harvard, an Albuquerque concert by the Mexican Symphony
Orchestra, mass-media magnate (and Project Pedro collaborator) Emilio Azcár-
raga’s reception of an award at Columbia University, and Mexico’s equestrian
jumping team’s competition in Washington—to that of specific Cold War
geopolitics—including resumption of nuclear testing by the Soviet Union, the
crisis over Formosa, the pullout of U.S. forces from Lebanon, and British Prime
Minister Harold Macmillan’s visit to Moscow.92
Evaluating El mundo en marcha’s first three months of operation, Tompkins
defended its use of Mexican material and blamed Washington for not supply-
ing sufficient foreign footage: “local coverage has been good, in fact more exten-
88. Carment Baez to RK Tompkins Asociados, S.A. de C.V., 6 January 1961, “Mexican
Cartoons: Project Pedro,” Folder 4, Motion Picture Rights and Permissions files, NARG 306.
89. “Report on Story Usage, Mexican Newsreels,” USIS-Mexico City to USIA, 6 January
1960, SD-FOIA.
90. “Amendment No. 6, Agreement IA-2428, ‘Project Pedro,’ 11 August 1958, pp. 5–6;
“30 September 1958 Agreement between USIA and R. K. Tompkins y Asociados,” SD-FOIA.
In addition to his work in Mexico, Rathvon supervised covertly funded film production in
Europe, including a 1956 film, secretly funded by the CIA, based on George Orwell’s Nine-
teen Eighty-Four, see Saunders, The Cultural Cold War, p. 295.
91. Daniel Garcia (IMS) to Shelton, 25 November 1958, SD-FOIA.
92. “Motion Pictures: Newsreel Guidance,” USIS-Mexico, 9 October 1958, SD-FOIA.
sive than competitive reels. The ‘international’ material supplied has been dis-
appointing, both by reason of the material selected and because such timely
material as has been provided consistently arrives to hand so late as to be unus-
able.”93 Rathvon and McDermott also continued to blame the agency for a lack
of message material to interpolate with El mundo en marcha’s local production.
But Shelton defended his unit’s work, citing its comparative success elsewhere:
“We have this same kind of project going in numerous other countries all over
the world, and in these countries the newsreel is generally considered to be one
of the most effective of all program vehicles.”94 He advised Rathvon that “[w]e
had always expected that the reel would never carry more than 1/3 international
stories, and that at least 2/3 of every issue would be Mexican material.” USIA
had increased its delivery of international footage to ease Project Pedro’s initial
reorganization under the ex-Hollywood executive, but Washington expected a
more Mexican-centric Cold War production for the future.95
There were, in fact, obstacles to USIA’s objectives that were endemic to
Project Pedro’s operation within the highly regulated Mexican film industry.
For one, cost remained an issue. As the embassy’s PAO explained: “the opera-
tors, while willing to cover such outstanding events as the Acapulco meeting of
the two presidents [López Mateos and Eisenhower], and any items we request
within the Federal District, have placed limitations on coverage anywhere in
Mexico unless reimbursed for travel expenses.”96 In 1959 changes in the Federal
District’s regulation of newsreel advertising that reduced the number of twenty-
second spots from five to four challenged Project Pedro’s attempts to achieve
self-sufficiency, forcing it to continue to depend on Washington subventions. A
year after starting El mundo en marcha, Rathvon reported, “[d]ue to the growing
reputation of the reel we might well be able to maintain it on at least a break-
even basis were it not for the arbitrary and harassing action of the government
of the Federal District in regulating all the news reels and revistas. . . . It is too
early to judge our chances of breaking even next year, but you can readily see
the difficulty we would be in without outside support.” El mundo en marcha’s
production chief suspected that rival print media might have been behind the
new efforts to squeeze the finances of newsreels. In any case, the change forced
newsreels to search for more “informal” funding, whether from national or, in
Project Pedro’s case, international patrons.97
Beyond the impact of its commercial regulation, the state’s official censor-
ship also limited Project Pedro’s editorial autonomy. For example, footage of
“Vice President Nixon’s welcome in Washington following his South American
tour, was not used by CLASA because the Mexican Government film censor’s
93. “Project Pedro: Quarterly Progress Report,” R.K. Tompkins, 14 November 1958, SD-
FOIA.
94. Shelton to McDermott, 23 March 1959, SD-FOIA.
95. Shelton to Rathvon, 20 April 1959, SD-FOIA.
96. McDermott to Shelton, 6 April 1959, SD-FOIA.
97. Rathvon to Shelton, 10 September 1959, SD-FOIA.
office removed all Nixon footage from all newsreels distributed in Mexico.”
This ban included “scenes of the Vice President’s reception in Uruguay and
Argentina which, though they showed no violence, arrived here after the Lima
and Caracas receptions. . . . The Directorate General of Cinematografía
informed USIS ‘extra-officially’ that the footage had been deleted in order to
avoid any unfavorable reactions among theatre audiences in Mexico,” where
Nixon had made a successful official visit in 1956.98 Here was an irony of
Mexican mass culture: the authoritarian state’s control of content forced it to
anticipate public opinion. Widespread recognition that the state determined
what was privately exhibited meant that film censors expected that audiences
viewed newsreels as signs of official sentiment. In this case, as in others, the
state was unwilling to sanction a commercially produced presentation that
seemed too pro-American. The PRI’s own reliance on anticommunism in the
late 1950s to suppress domestic opposition, for example by imprisoning dissi-
dent labor leaders as foreign-directed subversives, demanded that it perform its
Cold War sovereignty through independence from Washington’s foreign
policies.99
Rituals of PRI rule also dictated specific changes. Government censors, for
example, banned El mundo en marcha’s experiment with diegetic sound, instead
of the usual voice-over narration, in its coverage of Ruiz Cortines’s 1958 Informe
(state of the nation) address. USIS reported that “[t]he live sound footage was
deleted by the Government’s censorship office . . . on the grounds that theatre
audiences might register disapproval.” Apparently it felt the aural effect would
reduce the president’s aura.100 In another case, government censors cut footage
of Ambassador Hill’s attendance at the annual commemoration of the Niños
Héroes, the legendary boy cadets who sacrificed their lives in defending Mexico
City from invading U.S. forces in September 1847. The scene had included
important Mexican politicians seated near the ambassador and, hence, violated
“a Presidential directive forbidding closeups in newsreels of politicians, all of
whom seem to be vying for position in the interregnum” between López
Mateos’s July election and December inauguration. But this was not the only
material state censors deemed beyond the pale for that week’s issue; they
also banned footage of devastating floods, prompting a USIS official to
comment that “ ‘newsreel’ is hardly the term to use in describing this kind of
product in Mexico.”101 His observation revealed also a perhaps half-conscious
recognition that “U.S. propaganda” was hardly the term to describe Project
Pedro’s output.
98. “Motion Pictures: CLASA Newsreel,” McDermott to USIA, 14 August 1958, SD-
FOIA.
99. Agustín, Tragicomedia mexicana 1: la vida en México de 1940 a 1970, p. 176.
100. “Motion Pictures: EL MUNDO EN MARCHA Newsreel,” USIS-Mexico City to
USIA, 8 September 1958, SD-FOIA.
101. “Motion Pictures: EL MUNDO EN MARCHA Newsreel,” USIS-Mexico City to
USIA, 26 September 1958, SD-FOIA; El mundo en marcha 56 was the affected issue.
The state’s quotidian control of content affected all Mexican newsreels, not
just Project Pedro. But it affected Project Pedro differently, since its objectives
strove for Cold War significance according to Washington’s ideological agenda,
not Mexico City’s. Still, the most important force limiting what Project Pedro
projected in Mexican movie theaters was not state intervention but public recep-
tion. In explaining why so few locally produced Project Pedro segments ven-
tured into Cold War politics, an unusually astute agency analyst pointed
out that “there are very definite limitations on what can be done locally and
used to further program objectives. Not the least of these is the suspicion
that Mexican audiences have toward local stories carried by their newsreels
since almost all such stories are but thinly disguised paid advertisements.”102
Freedom from the need to impose such unpopular stories helped El mundo
en marcha achieve its favorable reception, even as its lack of Cold War
messages frustrated its Washington benefactors. Hence, what had made Project
Pedro an increasingly popular product with growing national distribution—how
much it combined the best parts of other Mexican newsreels with international
footage—rendered it ineffective propaganda to Washington eyes. While its
Mexicanized content and form preserved its covert relationship with USIA, it
also minimized the agency’s influence on production. This communications
conundrum frustrated a USIA assessor: “my position has never yet been clearly
outlined as to how far USIS can control, suggest, or define our stake in this
operation, partly due, of course, to the shrouds imposed on our relationship.”
Of particular concern, as his mid-1960 evaluation observed, was its seemingly
pointless overproduction of trivial segments about social life and diversions [see
Figure 3]: “It should also be noted that out of the average reel of 699 feet, 249
feet is on sports—mostly bullfights, local boxing and soccer. Possibly this is due
to something in relation to their need for placing their advertising plugs; but
to my mind it is definitely affecting the use of your clips sent from the United
States.”103
Washington never understood why so much of what was shot in Mexico
City seemed apolitical. Rathvon explained that the very aspects of El mundo en
marcha’s content that USIA criticized, namely its representation of popular
culture and social amusements, were what provided the newsreel its public cred-
ibility: “the local footage has been predominant and we have won acceptance
as a Mexican reel. Although it is not always easy to find entertaining material
we have done an increasingly effective job. The emphasis on sports and bull-
fights is not simply filler. It is what the Mexican theatre-goers want and
expect.”104 Message footage had to come from New York, because it could
not be adequately constituted from Mexican material. To do this better,
102. Daniel Garcia (IMS) to Shelton, 25 November 1958, SD-FOIA.

103. “Munda [sic] En Marcha Newsreel,” Robert E. Macaulay to McDermott, 22 August
1960, SD-FOIA.
104. Rathvon to Shelton, 5 May 1959, SD-FOIA.
Figure 3: Mexican newsreels prominently projected bullfighting and other sports events that
often generated “sponsorship fees” for “incidental product placement, usually a beer or soft
drink,” such as in this scene, Noticiario clasa 828 (reproduced at the National Archives).
McDermott urged Shelton’s Motion Picture Service “to install an Assignments

Editor,” as had other USIA mass-media branches, to oversee production and
distribution of footage for specific USIS clients. Such coordination was neces-
sary, because “[m]aterials shot in Mexico cannot form the bulk of the reel for
program objectives. We have and shall continue to catch any item of program
value in Mexico. But there aren’t enough of them to carry the reel week in and
week out.” The problem regarding “program objectives”—i.e., Cold War
content—“is and always has been the lack of sufficient program material from
your shop delivered in time to be of program value.”105 This meant specially
requested footage, not general material distributed globally, “since this would
be self-defeating in a country like Mexico which is strongly nationalistic, and
obviously suspicious of a reel that could be suspected of too much lending from
USIS.”106
105. McDermott to Shelton, 6 April 1959, SD-FOIA.

106. “Report on Story Usage, Mexican Newsreels,” USIS-Mexico City to USIA, 6 January
1960, SD-FOIA.
How much Project Pedro served U.S. foreign policy would remain a baf-
fling question for its Washington and Mexico City patrons. Despite both its
ideological shortcomings and the fact that USIA footage “is also gratefully
accepted by other newsreels with no charge,” the unusual access Project Pedro
provided Washington led the embassy’s PAO to “reluctantly recommend,” in
February 1959, that Ambassador Hill support subsidizing Tompkins’s operation
for an additional year: “We do control this newsreel as to content and they are
pleased to carry what we want. Other newsreels use whatever of the offered
footage they desire. Such control is good for any special occasion that might
arise.”107 As we will see, it was in fact the broader field of Mexican public culture
reproduced by Project Pedro’s competitors that limited USIS’s ability to shape
Tompkins’s increasingly popular production.
projecting project pedro

As the struggles between Mexico City and Washington make clear, what
appeared on the screen is notable for how closely it conformed to the broader
field of Mexican newsreel production. Project Pedro contended with the pro-
duction-consumption matrix generated by its intertextual relationship to other
Mexican newsreels, formal and informal state restrictions regarding content,
and its anticipation of the expectations of national spectators. Its form and
content converged more than diverged from that of its competition. As it
changed from Noticiario clasa to El mundo en marcha, and as each of those prod-
ucts underwent revisions, Project Pedro never satisfied the aspirations of its U.S.
government conceivers. Its success at entering the Mexican newsreel field as a
legitimate product of national communication rendered it an inadequate form
of anticommunist propaganda. Here, the transnational was at odds with the
international; the Mexicanization of U.S. resources within the local environ-
ment of political and cultural production in Mexico City diminished Project
Pedro’s ability to “Americanize” Mexican mass media and to propagate Wash-
ington’s foreign policy.
In practice, most of Project Pedro’s effect was negative. It controlled what
was not seen more than it imposed what was. Across its entire operation, for
example, segments about the Soviet Union were notably rare. This conformed
to the logic of Mexican foreign policy in the late 1950s and early 1960s, which
ostentatiously touted its international independence from the United States to
compensate for its rightist policies at home and its increasingly close economic
relations with its northern neighbor. Only occasionally did direct references to
the Soviet Union appear, such as Khrushchev’s infamous anti-U.S. diatribe at
the United Nations in 1961, annual commemorations of Moscow’s suppression
of the 1956 Budapest uprising, or images of East Germans fleeing to the West
107. “Newsreel Contract Amendment,” McDermott to Ambassador Hill, 17 February

1959, SD-FOIA.
prior to the Berlin Wall’s construction.108 Regarding U.S. foreign policy, the
emphasis was unsurprisingly on nonmilitary, technological achievements and
the progress they promised to the rest of the world. Most notable among these
was the Eisenhower administration’s Atoms for Peace initiative, which sought
to erase destructive associations of U.S. atomic power by demonstrating the
progressive ends to which Washington intended to direct nuclear energy glob-
ally.109 In one of Project Pedro’s few direct references to U.S. military power,
El mundo en marcha covered the Acapulco visit of the nuclear submarine Paul
Revere, which had recently seen action in Korea.110
U.S. leadership in science was a dominant theme of agency-supplied footage.
Following the Soviet Union’s successful October 1957 Sputnik launch, U.S.
space exploration became a prominent presence. Noticiario clasa even reconfig-
ured its opening sequence at the end of 1957 to associate its dissemination with
satellite communication. Animation depicted a rocket launched from a map of
Mexico, the scene then shifted to an aerial view of the country, and finally of
Earth from outer space as the soundtrack produced wan electronic beeps sup-
posedly emanating from an orbiting satellite. The new title read: “NOTICIAS
NACIONALES E INTERNACIONALES DEL SATELITE,” and the news-
reel was retitled Satélite, although satellite communication had no role in the
newsreel’s distribution.111
In Sputnik’s wake, the representational practices of U.S. foreign policy
became centered on extraterrestrial achievement (matching the new orientation
of domestic educational and science policy) by depicting the U.S. response, its
Explorer satellite, to the Soviet challenge.112 Through outer space Project Pedro
connected Mexican development with U.S.-Mexican relations. For example, El
mundo en marcha prominently featured the opening of a space tracking station
in Guaymas, Sonora.113 The segments emphasized the installation as a national
site of technological advancement operated by Mexicans in the service of world
progress. Hence, the manned Mercury missions of the early 1960s became a
source of not only U.S. advancement but also Mexico’s, facilitated by techno-
logical transfer from the United States. In this case, El mundo en marcha relo-
calized the Cold War in the provinces and in the U.S.-Mexican borderlands, as
it remapped Mexico’s place in global history through its contribution to extra-
terrestrial exploration as international scientific ally of the United States. In a
more terrestrial cross-border moment, U.S.-Mexican relations, transnational
capital and Mexican popular culture converged when, in a spot sponsored by
Coca-Cola of Mexico, Noticiario clasa featured the 1957 Little League World
108. El mundo en marcha 21, 55, 153, 155, 156, 157.

109. Noticiario clasa 810, 816.
110. El mundo en marcha 109.
112. Robert A. Divine, The Sputnik Challenge: Eisenhower’s Response to the Soviet Satellite
(New York, 1993).
113. El mundo en marcha 149, 152.
Figure 4: The White House visit of the 1957 Little League World Series champs, Monter-
rey Industrial, offered Project Pedro a unique cross-border opportunity, Notciario clasa 823
(reproduced at the National Archives).
Series victory of the Mexican team from Monterrey. Footage of the clinching
game was followed by that of a White House reception where the Mexican
players met President Eisenhower [see figure 4].114
International events appear in USIA-supplied newsreel footage described by
locally developed narration. Often third-world flashpoints provide opportuni-
ties to represent the United States as supportive of postcolonial nation-states.
In the Suez Crisis’s aftermath, Noticiario clasa focused on Ralph Bunche’s role
in directing the United Nations’ involvement in that Middle East conflict’s res-
olution. Beyond underlining cases where U.S. foreign policy supported decol-
onization or noninterventionism in the postcolonial world, the mobilization of
Bunche’s visage (in Ghana as well as in Egypt and Jordan) sought to demon-
strate that the United States was a meritocracy that had produced one of the
world’s most famous diplomats, an African American leading the work of the
United Nations.115 Like contemporary overt USIA productions distributed
globally, Project Pedro also went to great lengths to project progress in U.S.
race relations and the professional achievements of African Americans within

115. Notciario clasa 800, 802, 806.
the United States. In the 1960s USIA propaganda would “discover” the U.S.
Latino presence in order to advance its leadership of the Western Hemisphere,
but in the late 1950s African Americans still stood for all people of color in the
United States in the audiovisual competition for hearts and minds in the so-
called third world.116 Other international episodes that threatened U.S. prestige
among nations of the nonaligned world could not entirely be erased. In early
1961, for example, Patrice Lumumba appeared as Jacobo Zabludovsky flatly
narrated that the “ex-Prime Minister of the Republic of the Congo had been
shot while trying to escape from prison.”117 More typical were seemingly
innocuous segments about Laotian peasants struggling against Communist
incursions from Vietnam.118
While it is notable how rarely images from contemporary Cold War
battlegrounds appeared, there are instances that jar conventional teleologies.
Through the footage distributed globally by USIA, and interpolated by Project
Pedro’s newsreels, we can recover liminal moments in the history of U.S.
foreign policy during the Cold War and of the power of national forces of
production to shape the content of Washington’s transnationally produced
propaganda. At the outset of 1959, for example, El mundo en marcha critically
compared the arrival of ousted Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista in Mexico to
his initial exile there twenty years earlier. Over images of Cubans denouncing
their ex-leader and a portrait of Fidel Castro, the narration describes the revo-
lution’s triumph in positive terms.119 A later segment about Castro’s April 1959
visit to the United States includes footage of prorevolutionary street demon-
strations punctuated by a final shot of an English-language sign that states, “We
love you Fidel.”120
More significant, and predictable, than El mundo en marcha’s initially favor-
able Castro coverage is its virtual noncoverage of Cuba after U.S.-Cuban rela-
tions took a decisively negative turn. The absence of anti-Castro propaganda
between April 1959 and April 1961 reveals much about Project Pedro’s local
operation. El mundo en marcha neither reproduced Mexican mass media’s
generally favorable coverage of the revolutionary regime, including Mexico’s
friendly diplomacy with Castro’s government, nor did it express Washington’s
increasingly open hostility to Havana. Just as the newsreel’s national operation
curtailed negative reporting about Cuba, its USIA connection prevented any
positive representations. But in the aftermath of the Kennedy administration’s
Bay of Pigs fiasco, USIS invoked Cold War politics to pressure U.S. multina-
116. On the presence of race in U.S. foreign policy in this period, see Mary Dudziak, Cold
War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy (Princeton, NJ, 2000) and Penny
M. Von Eschen, Race Against Empire: Black Americans and Anticolonialism, 1937–1957 (Ithaca,
NY, 1997), chapter 7.
118. El mundo en marcha 55, 56, 57, 140.
tionals in Mexico to withdraw their ads from competing newsreels that favor-
ably covered Havana. In late summer 1961, the embassy’s PAO “called in all the
USA advertising companies and advertisers, and told them he thought it inap-
propriate that they should be the principal financial support of two Commu-
nist-owned newsreels in Mexico; they agreed to withdraw all advertising from
those Reels; in redistributing that advertising, ‘Pedro’ received enough financ-
ing so that for the first time it showed a profit for several weeks in August and
September.”121 Following its coverage of Castro’s first visit to the United States,
El mundo en marcha’s next, and final, mention of Cuba was unavoidable. In the
immediate aftermath of the Bay of Pigs invasion it projected Ambassador Adlai
Stevenson defending the United States in the United Nations Security Council
against Cuba’s accusations that it had covertly directed the counterrevolution-
ary invasion.122 Kennedy’s admission of U.S. involvement, days later, unsur-
prisingly received no play at all. Coverage of the Cuban missile crisis did not
produce a dilemma for El mundo en marcha, because by 1962 Project Pedro no
longer existed.
Long considered cost ineffective, Project Pedro persistently elided the expec-
tations of the officials who commissioned its production. This was particularly
perplexing for those who oversaw the program from Washington, since Project
Pedro seemed to have the most favorable conditions of all USIA’s transnational
audiovisual operations: “the Agency has never been at all satisfied with the fin-
ished product—neither as to what it contains or how it handles its content. This
is a real anomaly. No one questions the sincere loyalty of the Americans asso-
ciated with the Reel (Tompkins and his wife, and his uncle, N.P. Rathvon, semi-
retired, who used to own R.K.O.), and IMS sends it more and better footage
from New York than any of the 50 or so other Reels in the world that we have
working arrangements with. Somehow, at USIS level, liaison dissolves and there
is no effective control or guidance.” Motion Picture Service officials speculated
over whether or not Project Pedro had been sabotaged by USIS officers in
Mexico City who possibly resented the direct connections between the Mexican
newsreel operations and Washington or the fact that the project was a legacy
of an earlier USIS regime.123
While never grasping Project Pedro’s inherent contradictions, derived from
the particular context of Mexican state and culture industries, USIA did recog-
nize that the endeavor’s demise meant the end of a uniquely positioned outpost
of empire: “Our present situation, organizationally, is ideal, and was achieved
over a period of several years at considerable cost and difficulty, using devious
121. “Project Pedro,” Frank Tribbe to Irwin (General Counsel’s Office), 12 October 1961,
p. 1, “Mexican Cartoons: Project Pedro” Folder 2, Motion Picture Rights and Permissions
files, NARG 306.
123. “Project Pedro,” Frank Tribbe (General Counsel’s Office) to Irwin (IGC) 26 July
1961, p. 2, “Mexican Cartoons: Project Pedro,” Folder 2, Motion Picture Rights and Permis-
sions files, NARG 306, underlining in original.
means and four corporate organizations. If the project is killed, these American
owners would be unable to operate without our subsidy and would be unwill-
ing to operate in the ‘local manner,’ as described above, and so would sell the
Reel. Once sold, the loss would be irretrievable and we could not expect to re-
establish our position. Our present Reel has a good local standing and is not
known to have any USA Government connection.” El mundo en marcha had even
recently “received a commendation from the government’s movie control office,
saying it was an example to the other newsreels of what such a vehicle should
be.” Although USIA regularly provided footage to another Mexican producer,
it would never have in Mexico the editorial license, however limited, that
Project Pedro provided.124
Despite Project Pedro’s declining costs, by the end of 1960 the embassy’s
PAO had turned against the enterprise. Jack McDermott appealed to the
agency’s Latin American area office in a campaign against the Motion Picture
Service’s desire to continue its subsidization of Tompkins’s newsreels.125
Throughout 1961, he insisted that the Motion Picture Service’s director, Turner
Shelton, who believed that Project Pedro was a critical counterweight to
“Communist-controlled” Mexican newsreels, “go to Mexico himself and inves-
tigate thoroughly why ‘Pedro’ is ineffective (if not actually counterproduc-
tive).”126 At the same time, McDermott successfully lobbied the Kennedy
administration’s new ambassador to Mexico, Thomas Mann, to kill Pedro.127 He
explained that the newsreel’s failure was due not to USIS mismanagement but
to the difficulties of profitably producing propaganda within a Mexican news-
reel given local conditions, especially state regulation. He objected to Shelton’s
urgent advocacy of Project Pedro’s continuation: “Turner makes the point that
if this is killed we leave the field to the Commies. Such is not the case. There
are seven newsreels in action, two of which [including EMA’s] are controlled by
the outfit which uses Bloc footage. Two others would continue to use our
footage, but at no cost to us. . . . He has a fetish about these classified projects
and has probably wasted more money than any other element in the Agency.”128
If, in the end, the local context of its production limited Project Pedro’s
impact as propaganda, foreign policy determined the timing of its termination
in September 1961.129 By then, the Americas were at the center of Washing-
ton’s conceptualization of the Cold War as public diplomacy. The kind of inat-
tention to the region that had prompted the need to formulate transnational
124. Ibid., 2–3.

125. McDermott to John P. McKnight, Jr. (USIA Assistant Director, Latin America), 27
September 1960, SD-FOIA.
126. McDermott to McKnight, 5 July 1961, SD-FOIA.
127. McDermott to McKnight, 4 August 1961; McKnight to McDermott, 11 August 1961,
SD-FOIA.
128. “Newsreel Project,” McDermott to Thomas Mann, 18 July 1961, SD-FOIA.
129. “Termination Settlement Agreement,” 30 September 1961; Murrow to USIS-Mexico
City, 26 September 1961, SD-FOIA.
production of propaganda within Mexico was replaced by the Alliance for

Progress and Washington’s reassertion of the Western Hemisphere idea as
central to its global public diplomacy.
between culture and politics, bemis and l a feber

At the bitter end of 1959, Samuel Flagg Bemis drew upon his reading of the
U.S. past to oppose publicly what he viewed as the Eisenhower administration’s
timid Latin American policy. The historian published an essay in U.S. News &
World Report entitled “A Way to Stop the Reds in Latin America” that proposed
a resolution restoring Washington’s historic right (and duty) to intervene
unilaterally against American incursions by extrahemispheric powers. Appalled
that as the Eisenhower Doctrine underwrote unilateral U.S. intervention in
Lebanon the administration ignored its 1823 progenitor, Bemis offered an
attenuated strategic justification for an Americas-first defense policy based in a
rejuvenated Monroe Doctrine: “Scarcely anything . . . would please the Red
imperialists more than the neutralization of the Panama Canal or the transfer
of its control and defense to the Republic of Panama, like the Suez Canal to
Egypt. It would split our present global strategy into a two-ocean strategy and
prevent the Panama Canal’s being used by the West as a substitute for a blocked
Suez Canal.” More than the Cuban revolution, more than Vice President
Nixon’s rocky reception in South America, nationalist rioting in the Panama
Canal Zone provoked Bemis’s jeremiad over the decline of U.S. power in the
Americas. At the heart of his fulmination was a desire to remasculate U.S.
foreign policy at what was, in Bemis’s view, still its geohistorical center. More
than his reluctance to recognize that U.S. interests had moved, as Neil Smith
puts it, “beyond geography,” that the Middle East had replaced the Americas
as the primary region for U.S. security, that the Suez Canal had replaced the
Panama Canal as the intercontinental crossroads of U.S. foreign policy, Bemis’s
diatribe demonstrates the centrality of empire for U.S. culture. His rhetoric
reveals that “loss” of the Panama Canal was more than a threat to national secu-
rity, it was a threat to national identity: “The United States should make it clear
to the world that in the Panama Canal Zone it will continue to act as if it were
sovereign, as indeed, it has an explicit treaty right so to do, and to stick beyond
any cavil to the military defenses of that waterway.”130
Among the responses Bemis received (and saved) to his essay is a letter from
a Henry Mayers expressing alarm about the U.S. failure to compete with Soviet
130. Samuel Flagg Bemis, “How to Stop the Reds in Latin America,” U.S. News & World
Report, 28 December 1959. Bemis only voted once for a Democratic presidential candidate; he
voted for Kennedy in 1960, because he believed him more hawkish than Nixon, whom he
judged based on the Eisenhower administration’s foreign-policy record. LaFeber turned his
attention to the Panama Canal in Walter LaFeber, The Panama Canal: The Crisis in Historical
Perspective (New York, 1979). See Neil Smith, American Empire: Roosevelt’s Geographer and the
Prelude to Globalization, chapter 1. For more on Bemis and the Cuban Revolution, see Gaddis
Smith, The Last Years of the Monroe Doctrine, pp. 98–103.
propaganda in Latin America. The Los Angeles resident’s missive echoes

contemporary concerns about Washington’s incompetence in the Cold War
competition for third-world hearts and minds, recently popularized in the
muckraking bestseller The Ugly American.131 The inquisitive citizen asked
the Yale professor if he did “not believe there is a diplomatic bargaining basis
in the polite but firm reminder that we, too, are not without continental ‘agit-
prop’ potentials, far beyond what we are employing today?”132 In fact, Project
Pedro, and its analogous (if less invasive) projects elsewhere in the Americas,
sought to contend with Soviet challenges to the Western Hemisphere in sophis-
ticated forms that attempted to nationalize media and messages through
transnational systems of production within other American nations. It was not
visible to Henry Mayers, as so much of the Cold War in the Americas was pub-
licly (and is historiographically) invisible prior to 1959. Project Pedro stands
less between the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations than it does more
generally between the 1950s and 1960s in how it allows us to see the transitions
underway in Washington’s approach to the hemisphere, between the CIA’s over-
throw of Arbenz and the Cuban revolution’s of (Washington’s man in Havana)
Batista; between Vice President Nixon’s vexed visit to Caracas in 1958 and Pres-
ident Kennedy’s triumphal tour through the same city in 1962; between the
Cold War’s reverberations in the Americas and the Americas as a principal area
of Cold War confrontation; between a foreign policy that approached the third
world with a conservative strategy of containment to one characterized by
liberal rhetoric advocating social change.133
All of the above changes can be summarized by the change in international
communication as film gave way to television or (as McLuhan put it) as the hot
gave way to the cool medium for expression and dissemination of the U.S.
message in the Americas (and wherever else possible) in the rest of the world.134
However, while the completion of that transition from large screen to small was
most visibly marked by Edward R. Murrow’s appointment as the Kennedy
administration’s director of the USIA (and the simultaneous bestowing of
cabinet-level status to that post), its initiation preceded liberalism’s return to
the White House. In 1960 the Eisenhower administration developed a region-
wide approach to news production for the Americas with its inauguration of
a weekly fifteen-minute unattributed newscast produced in separate Spanish and
131. William J. Lederer and Eugene Burdick, The Ugly American (New York, 1999
[1958]).
132. Henry Mayers to Samuel Flagg Bemis, 28 December 1959, Folder 659, Box 52, Series
II, Group 74, SFBP.
133. Stephen Rabe, The Most Dangerous Area in the World: John F. Kennedy Confronts Com-
munist Revolution in Latin America (Chapel Hill, NC, 1999); Michael E. Latham. Moderniza-
tion as Ideology: American Social Science and “Nation Building” in the Kennedy Era (Chapel Hill,
NC, 2000).
134. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York,
1964).
Portuguese versions and broadcast throughout the Kennedy and Johnson

administrations.
In viewing Project Pedro in a transnational context, as part of the history
of the United States within Mexico, we must not conflate the history of the
newsreels’ production with their history as culture. What happened behind the
screen is only part of the story. Just as important for the scholar of international
history, for the scholar of Mexico and the United States, is what happened on
the screen and what happened around it. As Edward Said observed about the
contemporary study of imperial culture: “the problem of representation is
deemed to be central, yet rarely is it put in its full political context, a context
that is primarily imperial. Instead we have on the one hand an isolated cultural
sphere believed to be freely and unconditionally available to weightless theo-
retical speculation and investigation, and, on the other, a debased political
sphere, where the real struggle between interests is supposed to occur.” Leaving
aside the question of whether Said’s own work always follows the project he
imagines, it is difficult to deny the value of his conclusion that such a division
of scholarly spheres does exist and is a false dichotomy, that the political and
the cultural “are not only connected but ultimately the same.”135
Just as the history of these films, distributed weekly between 1957 and 1961,
are part of the exogenous history of the United States, they also are part of
Mexico’s endogenous history, the context in which their meanings were pro-
duced, that is, where their public history as culture (not to be confused with
their secret history as instruments of cultural diplomacy) was made. To avoid
that public history is to avoid confronting the presence of Infante and Rivera
as well as the overall content and form of Project Pedro’s productions deter-
mined by the broader field of Mexican mass culture that ultimately determined
not only the newsreels’ audiovisual production but the production of their
meanings, of their reception at the point of consumption. Perhaps we need to
posit here a notion of cultural empire without cultural imperialism; that is,
echoing Ranajit Guha’s conclusions about colonialism in South Asia, we need
to note conceptually the dissonance between imperial institutions and social
power on the ground.136
Project Pedro’s history simultaneously demonstrates the limits of U.S.
power in the Cold War as well as the limits to conventional historiographical
constructions of that power. History and historiography are, of course, always
mutually constitutive; so too are the representational machinery of U.S. foreign
policies and those policies themselves. If ultimately Washington waged Cold
War to convince national societies across the globe to follow its leadership, then
the production of propaganda cannot be viewed as a mere sideshow, a reel deriv-
135. Edward Said, “Secular Interpretation, the Geographical Element, and the Method-
ology of Imperialism,” p. 34.
136. Ranajit Guha, Dominance without Hegemony: History and Power in Colonial India
(Cambridge, MA, 1997).
ative of a more real story or as the soft derivative of hard policies. In other
words, the reel is real. And the images projected on the screen reproduce the
forces of production behind, around, and in front of it.
In the post-Cold War as in the Cold War, U.S. foreign policy seeks to
control the everyday representation of the world transnationally. In the Cold
War, bipolarity forced U.S. methods underground as it feared charges of
imperialism while it managed its empire in the name of freedom, anticommu-
nism, and anti-imperialism. In the post-Cold War, unipolarity allows the United
States to operate openly as it imposes imperial infrastructure in the name of
free markets and democracy. In contrast to the United States Information
Agency’s covert production of Project Pedro in the Cold War, post-Cold War
Washington’s Broadcasting Board of Governors has overtly imposed its recently
launched Arab-language satellite television network for the Middle East, Al-
Hurra (“the free one”). In so doing, it demonstrates the longevity, across the
Cold War/post-Cold War divide, of U.S. foreign policy’s desire to control infor-
mation beyond the borders of the United States, even as it trumpets free
markets as the way to free ideas.137 But as it learned during the Cold War, Wash-
ington is learning again in the post-Cold War that imperial designs are often
frustrated by local receptions. Arjun Appadurai’s observation about methodol-
ogy for the study of globalization holds true for investigation of Cold War and
post-Cold War transnational culture, when it demands “examination of how
locality emerges in a globalizing world, of how colonial processes underwrite
contemporary politics, of how history and genealogy inflect one another, and
of how global forces take local form.”138
It may seem odd to end an essay dedicated to Walter LaFeber with a recon-
sideration of Samuel Flagg Bemis, but it should seem oddly logical. In part
this is because their work is dialectically bound, because Bemis’s exceptionalist
notion of “protective imperialism” was what so many so-called revisionists
wrote against, methodologically as well as ideologically.139 Bemis was aware of
this. In his memoir he flintily noted, “Some of today’s critics of American
foreign policy are prone to find their own country in the wrong, without com-
paring it with the other side. They would doubtless brand as ‘corny’ or ‘square’
my defense, subject to scholarly truth and balance, of the record of the United
137. For an analysis of how Bush II foreign policy perpetuates a longer twentieth-century
history of imperial designs, see Walter LaFeber, “The Bush Doctrine,” Diplomatic History 26,
no. 4 (Fall 2002). On Al-Hurra and U.S. foreign policy, see Seth Fein, “The Medium Shapes
the Message,” Yale Global Online, 7 May 2004, at http://yaleglobal.yale.edu/display.article?id
=3831.
138. Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization, p. 18; see also Seth
Fein, “Culture across Borders in the Americas,” History Compass (2003), at http://www.history-
compass.com/Pilot/northam/NthAm_CulturesArticle.htm.
139. Samuel Flagg Bemis, The Latin-American Policy of the United States (New York, 1971),
p. 110.
States in its dealings with other nations. One of my colleagues in another uni-
versity is said to have begun a course in the subject by referring to me as Samuel
American Flagg Bemis.”140 Yet both Bemis and LaFeber understood that the
sources of twentieth-century U.S. globality (whether viewed from a critical or
triumphal perspective) began in the formulation of the Western Hemisphere
idea.141 And it is well known, not just by his students but by his readers, that
LaFeber shares Bemis’s assessment about one of the key architects of the foreign
policy that conceptualized the position of the United States in the Americas:
“No one man has been more important in the foundations of American foreign
policy. If you don’t agree that John Quincy Adams was America’s greatest Sec-
retary of State, name a greater.”142 It was the Monroe Doctrine’s mixture of eth-
nocentric idealism and defensive rhetoric that has framed the discourses of U.S.
expansion, as both new empire and old, from multipolarity to bipolarity to
unipolarity.
To study that imperial expansion, U.S. diplomatic history must continue to
move not only toward culture but also the world. It must, to poach from
Chakrabarty, provincialize the United States.143 For if, as the words of Samuel
Flagg Bemis and Amy Kaplan attest and as the works of Walter LaFeber have
always demonstrated, the history of U.S. international relations is central to the
study of U.S. culture and society, then scholars must be willing to do on a soci-
ocultural level, at the nexus of the international and the transnational, the work
that Bemis advocated for the study of diplomacy: to work beyond the borders
of the United States. Bemis’s emphasis on the importance of multinational
research expressed his belief that the history of U.S. development was intimately
related to its international relations.144 Just as the history of culture cannot be
viewed as a derivative of more conventional designations of international
power—as discrete economic, political, or military fields—the history of the rest
of the world must be seen as part of the history of the United States. To do this,
American Studies and diplomatic history must embrace that other refugee of
Cold War knowledge production, Area Studies. If American Studies matured
in the crucible of the Cold War’s first decade, when the United States needed
to promote itself as a leading civilization vis-à-vis Europe, Area Studies “took
140. Bemis, “The Pedagogical and Historical Peregrinations,” p. 373.

141. See Arthur Whitaker, The Western Hemisphere Idea: Its Rise and Decline (Ithaca, NY,
1954); and Lester Langley, America in the Americas: The United States in the Western Hemisphere
(Athens, GA, 1989).
142. Bemis, “The Pedagogical and Historical Peregrinations” p. 418; see Walter LaFeber,
ed., John Quincy Adams and American Continental Empire: Letters, Papers, and Speeches (Chicago,
IL, 1965).
143. See Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical
Difference (Princeton, NJ, 2000).
144. Bemis’s earliest works exemplified this concern. See The Diplomacy of the American
Revolution (Washington, DC, 1935); Jay’s Treaty: A Study in Commerce and Diplomacy (New York,
1923); Pinckney’s Treaty: America’s Expansion from Europe’s Distress, 1783–1800 (Baltimore, MD,
1926); as well as Samuel Flagg Bemis and Grace Gardner Griffin, Guide to the Diplomatic History
of the United States, 1775–1921 (Washington, DC, 1935).
off” in its second, when U.S. foreign policy sought to win third-world hearts
and minds. To bring together American Studies and Area Studies, cultural
studies and diplomatic history, is to bring together the history of the United
States and the rest of the world, to reformulate endogenous and exogenous
realms as relational rather than fixed. It is to see Project Pedro—itself a remnant
of that critical moment between American Studies and Area Studies, between
Bemis’s protective imperialism and LaFeber’s new empire, between Berlin and
Havana, between the 1950s and 1960s—at once as part of the concentric his-
tories of U.S. foreign policy and Mexican culture. It is to place international
history in a transnational frame: to see Mexico as part of the history of the
United States and the United States as part of the history of Mexico.

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s e t h f e i n*

New Empire into Old:

To me it does not seem that we can meet the threat of Communism by

In much recent theory the problem of representation is deemed to be

between american studies and diplomatic history

policy to pursue its extraterritorial economic interests. It was an empire not

7. Walter LaFeber, The New Empire: An Interpretation of American Expansionism, 1860–1898

USIA)9—depended upon the prewar era’s new empire’s commercial spread of

stitution of national culture and international relations, Christina Klein’s

nonimperial globalism.16 Anticommunism nationalized the study of American

16. On exceptionalism, see Michael Kammen, “The Problem of American Exceptional-

American relations, I cannot pass it by in silence to you. Even though col-

neglect the empire itself. In so doing, it perpetuates the exceptionalist founda-

international relations, adoption of transdisciplinarity, advocated by Walter

between east and west, mexico and the united states

question posed by the USIA’s 1956 “Barometer Study on Public Opinion” in

operation in Mexico. Cross-border commercial collaboration forged in the

Gobernación (Interior Ministry). Newsreels shared with feature ﬁlms a close

As Project Pedro completed its fourth month of production, the embassy’s

try, Noticiario clasa 800 (reproduced at the National Archives).

international cooperation, or with human appeal. What are some of these?

47. McDermott to Shelton, 12 June 1957, pp. 1–2, SD-FOIA.

1954 implementation of Operation Wetback (its militarized repatriation of

producing project pedro

Mexican public. It directed him to “negotiate, in the name of his controlled

54. “Motion Pictures: Newsreels in Mexico,” 11 July 1958, p. 3. On Alarcón’s relationship

58. “Project Pedro: Amendment No. 3 to Grant Agreement IA 2428(1/31/57)”; Turner B.

general manager, Cantwell Brown, determined that increased investment was

61. “Memorandum on Operations of Noticiario Nacional, S.A.,” Cantwell C. Brown, 28

62. Ibid., p. 2; “Report to Mr. R. K. Tompkins on Operations of Noticiario Nacional, S.A.

66. “OCB Paper ‘Principles to Assure Coordination of Gray Activities,’ ” Jack C.

in his history of the agency, “Unattributable material . . . is that which is pre-

Canada shoes, and Pal nail polish—sponsored Project Pedro’s newsreels.

The intensity of USIA’s effort to control Noticiario Nacional’s everyday

77. “PAO’s Checklist for ‘Project Pedro,’ ” 31 January 1957, SD-FOIA.

79. Shelton to McDermott, 23 March 1959, SD-FOIA.

frequently swapped footage “with European reels—including those behind the

under-reported compared to competing mass media that more critically covered

the Mexican public properly.”88 In fact by the beginning of 1960, El mundo en

102. Daniel Garcia (IMS) to Shelton, 25 November 1958, SD-FOIA.

McDermott urged Shelton’s Motion Picture Service “to install an Assignments

105. McDermott to Shelton, 6 April 1959, SD-FOIA.

projecting project pedro

107. “Newsreel Contract Amendment,” McDermott to Ambassador Hill, 17 February

108. El mundo en marcha 21, 55, 153, 155, 156, 157.

114. Noticiario clasa 823.

124. Ibid., 2–3.

production of propaganda within Mexico was replaced by the Alliance for

between culture and politics, bemis and l a feber

propaganda in Latin America. The Los Angeles resident’s missive echoes

Portuguese versions and broadcast throughout the Kennedy and Johnson

140. Bemis, “The Pedagogical and Historical Peregrinations,” p. 373.

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