Urban Chroniclers in Modern Latin America: The Shared Intimacy of Everyday Life

Chapter 2. A Common Citizen Writes Buenos Aires: Roberto Arlt’s Aguafuertes porteñas

I have the weakness of believing that the language of our streets,the language in which you and I converse in the café,in the office,in our intimate exchanges,is the real language.That I shouldn’t employ such terms to talk about lofty subjects? And why not, my friend? I am no academic. I am a man of streets, of barrios, like yourself and so many others. —Roberto Arlt,“How WouldYou Like Me to Write forYou?” El Mundo, September 3, 1929 Roberto Arlt did not consider himself an academic. Instead, he called himself a man of the streets, of neighborhoods and cafés, just another citizen among the many who lived Buenos Aires during the 1920’s. In his numerous years as a chronicler,Arlt put this boast into practice, letting few areas of his city escape his sharp gaze and witty comments. Most of the works of this prolific journalist, novelist, and playwright, today recognized as one of Argentina’s most influential writers, are set in the gritty reality of modern Buenos Aires.While Arlt’s daily journeys through this city in search for topics for his chronicles clearly shaped his conception of urban life, journalism also framed his writing in a very literal way—many of his works, regardless of genre, were marked by the urgency of a deadline and written in the noisy confines of the newspaper room. Chapter 2 A Common Citizen Writes Buenos Aires Roberto Arlt’s Aguafuertes porteñas 33 | Roberto Arlt’s Aguafuertes porteñas Arlt began writing chronicles for the newspaper El Mundo when it first came out in May 1928, and he continued publishing in it on an almost daily basis until his death on July 26, 1942. His column first appeared with the title Aguafuertes porteñas and his signature in August 1928, but he would alter its name various times throughout the following years. After the fall of President HipólitoYrigoyen and with the military dictatorship of the 1930’s, Arlt became highly critical of the government’s abandonment of the working classes.He used his chronicles,now entitled Buenos Aires se queja (Buenos Aires Complains), to denounce social problems such as urban planning, hospital hygiene, and the poor conditions of schools.1 When he traveled as a correspondent for El Mundo in 1935–1936, his titles varied according to location: Aguafuertes africanas, Aguafuertes asturianas, Aguafuertes madrileñas, and so on. With his return to Buenos Aires, the column changed from Tiempos presentes (Present Times) to Al margen del cable (On the Margins of the Newswire), where he privileged international issues such as World War II. Arlt’s first articles are firmly grounded in the everyday life of Buenos Aires and, more specifically, in the practice of specific cultural cartography of the city.They portray the middle and lower working classes, describing anecdotes set in bustling streets such as Corrientes and Florida, newly developed neighborhoods, cafés, cinemas, and parks.They bear witness to the social and political conditions of the time by depicting urban characters and their changing lifestyles: the photographers of public plazas who were losing their clientele due to the new popularity of portable Kodak cameras, the unemployed who frequented cinemas during the day to postpone returning home empty-handed, middle-class families and their attitudes toward marriage, would-be movie stars and the promoters of the new acting schools that preyed on their Hollywood ambitions. Arlt’s Buenos Aires was a diverse space where the traditional middle class coexisted with newly settled immigrants and where a variety of accents and expressions could be heard on the streets. “Aguafuertes porteñas,” the title of Arlt’s first column in El Mundo, already evokes the complex cultural status of the chronicle.An aguafuerte is an etching,a painstaking and original rendering of,in this case,BuenosAires street life.2 But etchings are also prints, which links them to the press and to the possibility of their mechanical reproduction and distribution.By the 1920’s,etchings were hardly innovative in comparison with the increasingly popular medium of photography. Instead, they suggested a slightly archaic stylization that photography did not connote by combining traditional Urban Chroniclers in Modern Latin America | 34 techniques of representation with the novelty of serial reproduction. An etching, or aguafuerte, thus pinpointed the duality inherent to the genre of the chronicle.As a literary text, the chronicle is unique and crafted...