Cement became the ideal material for the post-revolutionary period in Mexico due to its alignment with the industrial logic of the time and its efficiency in meeting the demands of the early 20th-century construction boom. To promote its widespread use, the Portland Cement Promotion Committee was established in 1923 by various industry stakeholders. However, its acceptance and popularity were not immediate.
During this period, Federico Sánchez Fogarty—editor of several magazines throughout the 1920s and 1930s—emerged as a key figure in shaping the public discourse around construction and materials. Far ahead of his time, he recognized the immense value of public relations within the industry, the strategic importance of collaboration with other creative agents, and the latent political power of the rising corporate construction sector.
One of his most significant platforms was Cemento magazine, published between 1925 and 1929 with a monthly circulation of 12,000 copies across the country. The magazine sought to inaugurate a new era in construction through new symbols and language. Through its pages, the cement industry built a carefully curated narrative that elevated cement to an almost cult-like status—tailored to the post-revolutionary national discourse and the broader economic and social reconstruction of the country.
The magazine’s 30 covers allow us to trace the ideological evolution of the material and understand how cement came to occupy a place in the popular imagination. Cement played a defining role—across multiple scales—in the shaping of Mexican modernity in the early 20th century. It became a tool of ideological indoctrination, offering both specialists and the general public the knowledge and technical resources to adopt it as part of a new revolutionary nationalist vision. In this context, cement was framed as both symbol and substance: “the letter and the verb of contemporary architecture.”
Tania Tovar Torres