A Review of Serial Mexico: Storytelling across Media, from Nationhood to Now

Serial Mexico: Storytelling across Media, from Nationhood to Now by Amy Wright (Vanderbilt University Press, 2025, 302 pages)

When I was in undergrad at Emerson College, I met a student from Croatia who spoke to me in perfect Spanish. When I asked her how she was so fluent, she predictably told me she’d studied it in school. To my surprise, however, she punctuated her explanation with, “I [also] grew up watching Mexican telenovelas!” It was the turning point at which I began thinking of telenovelas as existing beyond televisions in Mexican households.

I went from understanding telenovelas as purely national entertainment to how I understood anime in Mexico. Let me share with you a quick media history lesson: anime reached Mexico in the 1970s because Japanese cartoons were less expensive to import than those from the United States. However, it wasn’t until the early 90s that anime had a national boom. Why? Partly because the two major television channels in the country, Televisa and TV Azteca, began fighting for viewership. And what do we have now? A very loyal fandom. My friend’s reply made me realize that, like anime in Mexico, telenovelas have pushed past linguistic frontiers and reached new audiences. People across the globe were ready to follow Mexican stories of good versus evil in the form of protracted dramas with deliciously wild plot twists.

While some may find telenovela plots melodramatic and predictable, their popularity and cultural significance are undeniable. Hispanic studies professor Amy Wright challenges the platitudinous understanding of telenovelas as not serving any other purpose beyond entertaining viewers with outrageous storylines. In Serial Mexico: Storytelling across Media, from Nationhood to Now, Wright demonstrates that serialized Mexican content like telenovelas has played important roles in how the nation builds its self-understanding through dynamic storytelling.

Be it in the form of comic strips, radio shows, folletines (book chapters published at specific intervals) or nightly episodes, serialized content in Mexico has functioned as a tool for critiquing issues in politics and society. To illustrate this point, Wright demonstrates how comic strips served as an educational tool in the early 20th century. They imparted national and family values and even helped shape the public’s understanding of what an ideal presidential candidate should be. Most importantly, as the chapter on “Don Catarino y su appreciable familia” illustrates, serialized storytelling was a way in which Mexican creators and the public were able to come to terms with the political and social outcomes of the Mexican Revolution (1910-1917). As Wright notes, “there was a palpable need to design an identity appropriate for a ‘new’ country with a long lineage of (often-opposing) forebears…” (78). Don Catarino’s family tree, the “ahuehuete genealógico,” portrays him as both “a product of mestizaje traceable to the first encounters between Spanish conquistadors and Aztec princesses,” and, as a descendant through his patrilineal line, of “a more illustrious lineage of father figures beginning with Father Hidalgo” (94), a national hero of the War of Independence.

Accompanying her analysis, Wright gives the reader plenty of visual archival material with which to immerse themselves. Her explanations come accompanied with examples, allowing the reader to re-create the original audience’s experience as they leaf through a magazine or newspaper. The presence of photographs and illustrations documents the technological advancements of serialized storytelling. Beginning with original photographs of the ancient tomes of Mexico’s first novel, El Periquillo Sarniento (1816), stopping by the illustrations from the golden age of radio and ending with stills from the telenovela El extraño retorno de Diana Salazar (1989), Wright’s text is an exercise in archival research, historical and rhetorical narrative analysis that makes a strong case for intermedial studies. Her focus on the evolution of seriality across media in Mexico is not just a methodological display of archival mastery but also offers a basis from which we can begin to hypothesize how serialization will evolve in the future.

Serialized storytelling is alive and well today. If you visit online comic strip apps (such as Webtoon, Tappytoon and Mangatoon) you will be able to access hundreds of independent comics from all sorts of genres.  Many have been so well-received that they have been subsequently adapted into movies and television shows. Capitalizing on this, large publishing houses have begun to share their own well-established comics in those apps, hoping to capture market share. Reading Wright’s book has changed my online comic reading habit. When reading Korean slice-of-life comics, I now ask myself, to what extent do the protagonists recreate or challenge traditional values? What do the protagonists from several comics have in common, and what might that mean about the nation’s developing politics?

I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in the craft of serialized storytelling, the utility of its communicative form throughout the 20th century and the trajectory it continues to follow today. And, if I might add a personal note, I could not shake the feeling with each page that Wright escribió este libro con cariño. It made the reading experience all the more enjoyable.

Andrea Garza Erdmann is a doctoral candidate in Mexican Literature at Harvard. She focuses on gothic elements in 21^st-century narratives. You can find her published work in the edited volume Casas Tomadas: Monsters and Metaphors on the Periphery of Latin American Literature and Media (2025).

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