Before Television, There Was Only Voice

Before Televisa packaged melodrama for screens, Mexican families leaned toward radios and built entire worlds inside their heads. One voice. Sound effects. Music. Everything else came from imagination.

That was how Porfirio Cadena entered homes. Not as an image, but as a presence.

“¿Por qué se hizo criminal el ojo de vidrio?” The question crackled through speakers starting in the 1950s, crossing Mexico and pushing deep into the United States. The line landed in kitchens, patios, ranch houses, and crowded living rooms where the radio stayed on like a household member. The story was written by Rosendo Ocaña from Montemorelos, Nuevo León, and built like a corrido. A poor man gets hurt. The powerful walk away clean. The wounded one becomes the cautionary legend.

Porfirio wasn’t born evil. Wealthy men from his village murdered his father. A corrupt judge named Don Ricardo ignored evidence and let the killers walk. The law closed ranks. Violence filled the vacuum. The story never begged for sympathy or asked for moral permission. Rural Mexico already knew what happens when justice becomes a private club.

Radio demanded work from the listener. Producers built atmosphere with whatever they had. A child crying. Dogs barking. Sobs manufactured in recording booths. Music borrowed from classical compositions. Narrator Rómulo Lozano Morales set scenes while voice actors including Honorato Gutiérrez, Felipita Montes, and Licenciado Enrique Ávila Rubi brought enemies and allies to life. Audiences did the visual labor themselves.

No one ever saw Porfirio. They invented him.

Children in rural pueblos decided how the glass eye caught the light. Families in the Huasteca Potosina leaned closer to transistor radios and filled in the dust, the sweat, the fear. When Porfirio rode into Laguna de Sánchez hunting Don Benito Cuevas, listeners constructed the streets, the faces, the silence right before a shot. When he lost his eye defending his father during the assassination, audiences built the horror without cameras. That was the trick. Radio never showed the wound. It handed people the sound of it and let their minds do the rest.

Mario Fernández carried all of it with his voice. Rage, restraint, grief, resolve. The performance traveled through 990 AM on La T de Monterrey and spilled outward through broadcasts heard in Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, Venezuela, and the Dominican Republic. By 1965, households scheduled their days around airtime. The saga stretched across thousands of chapters, one long, patient telling of how a man becomes an outlaw when the system protects killers with clean hands.

Fernández inhabited the role so completely that decades later, in a 1985 television interview on Domingo Ocho, he spoke as the character rather than about him. “Porfirio...o sea, este servidor, nació por allá Laguna Sánchez, un lugar muy bonito cercano a Monterrey, por cierto...hay muy buenas manzanas,” he explained, describing the fictional outlaw’s birthplace as though recounting his own origins. The role didn’t sit on him like a costume. It seeped into him.

The character’s grip proved strong enough to jump formats. Paolgra publishing house adapted the story into fotonovela form. From 1965 to 1969, over two hundred issues of Doña Sara, La Mera Mera magazine featured photo montages directed by Francisco Javier Camargo with art by Guillermo Marín. The images gave Porfirio a face. Something vanished in the process. Radio let every listener shape him into the version they needed, scarred exactly the right way, looking exactly like the fear or rage they understood.

Ocaña died in August 1990. Fernández followed in 1994. The story outlived both creators. Episodes still circulate, preserved and digitized on YouTube, Amazon Music, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts. New listeners experience the story as earlier generations did, hearing it first and seeing it only through their imagination.

Porfirio Cadena never existed, but his legend persists because audiences built him themselves. That was radio’s power before television made imagination optional. One voice could create an entire world, and people hungry for stories finished the work inside their own minds.

@Santitos

@salinasmariasantos

Copyright © 2026 Maria Santos Salinas for FRONTeras.