William O. Jenkins (1878-1963) was a Tennessee farm boy who ventured to Mexico in search of fortune and became that country's wealthiest and most infamous industrialist. Dropping out of Vanderbilt, Jenkins eloped with a southern belle and settled in Mexico in 1901. Driven by a desire to prove himself - first to his wife's snobbish family, then to elites who disdained him as an American - Jenkins would spend the next six decades building an enormous fortune in textiles, property, sugar, banking, and film.
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The hostile takeover of the Banco de Comercio in 1954 made way for the era of Manuel Espinosa Yglesias, who would transform the bank into Mexico's largest. However, the episode is more historically notable for what happened behind the scenes: the first large-scale hostile takeover in Mexico; the fact that those who lost control of the bank numbered among the country's most powerful businessmen; the illegal participation as chief purchaser of the foreign citizen William Jenkins, and, as this article argues, the state's approval of the deal on the basis of the distinct political affiliations and relationships of the parties involved. Overall, the episode offers a case study in Mexican state-capital interdependence.
Observers of Latin America have long regarded the pervasive relationship between the region's governments and its privately owned media, especially its TV-based conglomerates and its often oficialista newspapers, as one of accommodation or interdependence. For much of the twentieth century, hegemonic governments, whether military dictatorships or the lengthy dictablanda perpetrated by Mexico's Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), prolonged their rule in part by relying on compliant media to collectively act as a ministry of propaganda; in turn, TV hegemons such as Brazil's Grupo Globo, Mexico's Televisa, and El Salvador's Eserski family were permitted to maintain their quasi-monopolistic status, while newspapers retained generous state subsidies, which in most cases they needed for their survival.
During the Second World War, a convergence of local acting and directingtalent and rising production levels gave birth to the Golden Age of MexicanCinema, a phenomenon facilitated by reduced competition from Hollywood,Argentina, and Europe. However, as of 1946, high output masked a growingmalaise within Mexico's film industry, manifest in a decline in cinematicoriginality and a dependence on cheaply-made genre pictures. Traditionally,the slow demise of the Golden Age has been blamed on two factors: first,the influence of William Jenkins, an expatriate U.S. investor who developeda near-monopoly of theaters that privileged Hollywood fare at upmarketscreens and financed local production in a way that kept budgets low; second,the creative stagnation of Mexico's directors, whose union admitted fewnew members. This article explores those allegations while also considering other key factors of the decline: the risk-averse role of producers, thepopulist media policies of the Mexican state, and international trends suchas the resurgence of competing film industries. The article therefore
El artículo trata del género biografía empresarial en México y consta de tres partes. En la primera, valoro lo ya escrito, que se puede catalogar o como libros de encargo –que son la mayoría y típicamente carecen de valor analítico– o como obras independientes; también explico la escasez del géne- ro biográfico en este país, a diferencia de la tradición sajona. En la segunda parte, ofrezco siete razones para considerar al género biográfico de utilidad histórica y sociológica, algunas pertinentes al ámbito mexicano y otras re- levantes al estudio de la historia en general; complemento esta sección con unas conclusiones tomadas de mi reciente libro Jenkins of Mexico (en español: En busca del señor Jenkins). Por último, sugiero cómo se puede emprender una biografía empresarial en México, con referencia a fuentes públicas, privadas, periodísticas, orales y archivísticas.
