August 31, 1950: Television Arrives in Latin America

Today in 1950 · Thursday, August 31, 1950

A Bush TV22a television receiver from 1950 (Design Museum, London)

A Bush TV22a television receiver from 1950 (Design Museum, London) · Photo by Daderot, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

On this day in 1950, XHTV Channel 4 signed on in Mexico City, transmitting Mexico's first commercial television signal — the first commercial TV station not just in Mexico but in all of Latin America, and the first in any Spanish-speaking country.

The station belonged to newspaper magnate Romulo O'Farrill and his son, operating through Televisión de México S.A. The technical brains behind the launch was engineer Guillermo Gonzalez Camarena — the inventor who had patented a tri-chromatic field-sequential color television system years before color TV reached most of the world's living rooms.

The sign-on came on August 31; the station's first full formal program aired the next day, September 1: the broadcast of President Miguel Aleman Valdes's fourth state-of-the-nation address. Mexico had experimented with television as early as 1946 under the callsign XE1GC, but XHTV was the licensed, commercial real thing — and the continent followed. Within three weeks, Brazil's first station would sign on too.

Also on this day

  • TWA Flight 903 crashed near Cairo, killing all 55 aboard.
  • The Battles of Haman and the Nam River began as North Korea opened its September assault on the Pusan Perimeter.
  • At Ebbets Field, Gil Hodges hit four home runs off four different Braves pitchers — one of the rarest feats in baseball — as Brooklyn won 19-3.

🎵 On the radio that week: America’s No. 1 song was “Goodnight Irene” by Gordon Jenkins and The Weavers (Billboard best sellers) — its 13 straight weeks at No. 1 was the longest run of the 1950s. That sound never really left — we recreate 1950s doo-wop and slow-dance ballads every week: read the stories behind our songs or listen on the lovesong1950s channel.
🎬 At the movies: “Sunset Boulevard” was climbing the charts — after one industry screening, MGM's Louis B. Mayer raged that Billy Wilder had disgraced Hollywood.
⚾ In sports: Brooklyn's Gil Hodges crushed four home runs off four different pitchers on August 31 at Ebbets Field — 5-for-6, nine RBIs — while the surging Yankees swept past Detroit into first.

Sources: Retrosheet box score: Hodges' four-homer game (Aug 31, 1950) · El Heraldo de Mexico: XHTV's first broadcasts · Infobae: Mexico's first TV program · El Universal: television arrives in Mexico · Wikipedia: August 1950 · Billboard best-seller charts, 1950 (issue scans) · Variety National Boxoffice Survey, 1950 (Lantern scans) · Retrosheet 1950 game logs and box scores. Every fact above is drawn from the records linked here — no dramatization, no invented details.

More from this series: Today in 1950 — the daily archive · every post from August 2026

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