Mexican Revolution
Journalism and propaganda

Anti-Díaz publications before the outbreak of the Revolution helped galvanize opposition to him, and he cracked down with censorship. As President Madero believed in freedom of the press, which helped galvanize opposition to his own regime. The Constitutionalists had an active propaganda program, paying writers to draft appeals to opinion in the U.S. and to disparage the reputations of Villa and Zapata as reactionaries, bandits, and unenlightened peasants. El Paso, Texas just across from Ciudad Juárez was an important site for revolutionary journalism in English and Spanish. Mariano Azuela wrote Los de Abajo ("The Underdogs") in El Paso and published in serial form there. The alliance Carranza made with the Casa del Obrero Mundial helped fund that appealed to the urban working class, particularly in early 1915 before Obregón's victories over Villa and González's over Zapata. Once the armed opposition was less of a threat, Carranza dissolved Vanguardia as a publication.

Meanwhile, in the United States, Mexican-Americans created newspapers to help with the war effort, denouncing Diaz's regime as well as professing their support to the revolution. There were multiple newspapers written in the Spanish language, most notably, La Cronica, (The Chronicle in English) created by Nicasio Idar and his family in Laredo, Texas, a city which saw much action as a border town. La Cronica, as well as other Chicano newspapers, would mostly cover stories about the Mexican-American and Tejano communities in the border regions, as well as supporting the revolution. These articles were named fronterizo ("by the border" in English), a newspaper dedicated to describing life in the border regions which would write about Mexican-Americans and their long rooted history and culture pertaining to these lands, as people living by the international border would be called fronterizos (border-dwellers). These fronterizos would start out with two goals: to decry the racism and discrimination experienced by Mexicans and Mexicans-Americans in the United States, and to support the ongoing reforms in Mexico, equating the tyranny of Porfirio Díaz to that of white Texan politicians. A month after the start of the conflict, Idar from La Cronica argued that Mexican immigrants and American born Mexican-Americans should be inspired by the revolution's promise of land reform to fight for more civil rights in the United States. Fronterizos worked to produce a nationalistic perspective placing the borderlands as an integral part of Mexican culture, history, and as a crucial part to the revolution, as the borderlands and its communities have been ignored by both the United States and Mexican governments.
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