Chapter 7 is about well-known politicians in Latin America during the 1920s-1930s. The term populism is brought up, and its relevance to Latin America during the 1930s. More advanced technology and mass media is continued in this chapter. This time, what is new  are radios, radionovelas, comic books, movies, songs, etc. Listening to the radio was apparently the most popular type of mass media at this time because everyone could listen to news and people thought that it was good way to communicate with others in their community. Because listening to radio was so popular, many politicians took advantage of the radio by making announcements and sending messages through it for people to hear and be aware of what they say. Pretty similar to what many politicians do today, except we don’t use radio much anymore, we use social media and TV!

Getting to the part on politicians, the ones that stood out for me in this chapter were Lazaro Cardenas, and Juan & Eva “Evita” Peron. Lazaro Cardenas succeeded Plutarco Elias Calles who was “Mexico’s most powerful figure” (Dawson, p.213). What is great about Cardenas is how modest and generous he was. His salary was cut by a half and would cancel his cabinet meetings to visit the poor (p.213). He was about land reform and distributing them to the poor. On the other hand, the Perrons were very famous in Argentina. Eva, also known as Evita, was an actress who happened to fall in love and became a mistress of Juan Perron. Both grew up in poor/working-class families. The controversial part of their relationship is that many suspected they were using each other for publicity. Eva would take advantage of her fame and use it to promote Perron. Later on, many people wanted Eva to run for vice-president next to her husband as president. I do actually have ambivalent feelings about the Perrons. Although Juan seemed to have great plans in mind as politician, he failed to accomplish those things and was later on exiled. I also did not really understand why many people wanted Evita to run for vice president without having a lot of political experience.