Serial Mexico: Storytelling across Media from Nationhood to Now - Given recent commemorations of the Mexican Revolution, as well as this year of elections for Mexico and its northern neighbor, we’ll hear about a fascinating figure – lovable, laughable Don Catarino, hero of Mexico's very first national comic strip. He appeared toward the end of the Revolution, in a newspaper that would eventually propose him as the next Mexican President (1921).

Amy E. Wright, PhD, is an associate professor of Hispanic Studies at Saint Louis University (SLU).  She has written extensively, in both English and Spanish, about serials, imagery, iconography, pop culture, nation-building and national identities from the 19th century to the present.  Her academic work includes Novels, Newspapers and Nation: The Beginnings of Serial Fiction in Nineteenth-Century Mexico and El Bastardo Mudarra.   As an educator at SLU, she is the past winner of the Helen I. Mandeville Award for Excellence in Teaching in the Humanities, the Reinert Award for Innovative Teaching and Learning, and the Donald G. Brennan Award for Excellence in Graduate Mentoring.  Her efforts to uncover the lost history of the Mexican novel earned a National Endowment for the Humanities Award in 2022.

This award-winning work is now available in her book Serial Mexico: Storytelling across Media from Nationhood to Now.  It ties in two centuries of Mexican serial narratives — striking tales of glory, of fame, of colorful epic characters, grounded in oral folklore — and their subsequent retelling in comics, radio, and television soap operas. Amy’s colorful volume delves deep into this rich national storytelling tradition for the first time, examining nostalgic tales told and reimagined from popular novelas to radionovelas then telenovelas and onward, examining the enduring foundational figures woven into the very fabric of society, from the country’s beginnings into the twenty-first century.  Join us as she describes the results of this extensive effort.