Celestinas in Mexico: Challenging Morality and Narrating Sex Work and Love Magic in Mid-Twentieth-Century Popular Press and Comics

Abstract: During mid-twentieth century Mexico, governing powers censored the popular press which incited creative ways to address local issues and concerns about gender and sexuality. In this article, I argue that transmedial feminist archetypal theory offers a framework to our understanding of studying character migrations that challenge censorship across time and texts. More specifically, I study how the writers and creators of mid-twentieth-century Mexico activate and allude to the late-medieval Spanish archetype, celestina, to comment on moral issues, such as sex work and witchcraft, that affect local society. Crime news journalists and comic scriptwriters inventively adapt Celestina-type women in stories of prostitution and love magic during a time of fervent censorship of the popular press. After discussing the prevalence of female "types" in Mexican literary and cultural studies and how the malleability of the celestina category can continue to be adapted to new texts and contexts, I analyze how a crime magazine from the 1940s and two comics from the 1940s and 1960s, respectively, refer to local working women as celestinas who are constructed as tempters and inciters of immoral behavior. This essay's findings will reshape our understanding of female archetypes within Mexican popular culture and concurrently, challenge the tendency to see comics and crime news as marginal texts. This study re-centers ephemeral and popular publications and argues that the existing scholarship of Mexican cultural studies merits a deeper investigation of how working woman types are employed to address local issues of morality and censorship in mid-twentieth century press and culture.