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Chapter 1 Words, Wars, and Public Celebrations The Emergence of Rioplatense Print Culture (1780–1830)  By 6 December 1779, the deal had been sealed. After sitting inactive for more than a dozen years in the dark, dank basement of the University of Córdoba, the first and only printing press of the Cordoban Jesuits was ready to make the journey over to Buenos Aires. When the Spanish crown ordered the expulsion of Jesuits from Spanish America in 1767, the press had been in use for only a year, producing materials for the acclaimed Colegio de Monserrat. It had been disassembled and hastily stored in the basement , with no care taken to prevent moisture from penetrating the wood or to package properly the lead type blocks.1 Only in 1779 was new interest shown in the press, ironically by a representative of the Spanish crown—the newly appointed Viceroy of the Río de la Plata, Juan José de Vértiz y Salcedo. Vértiz, whom historian and one-time Argentine president Bartolomé Mitre later praised as the most progressive colonial official the colonies had seen, had the notion to create a casa de niños expósitos, or orphanage, in Buenos Aires. After all, the city’s population—and number of orphans—was rapidly expanding with the growing importance of Buenos Aires as a commercial port. Vértiz recalled that there was a press in storage in Córdoba (confiscated from the “exJesuits ,” as the viceroy called them), and envisioned financing this humanitarian venture by establishing a print shop in Buenos Aires, in the same locale as the future orphanage.2 In mid-September 1779,Vértiz wrote to the rector of the Colegio Convictorio —formerly de Monserrat—in Córdoba to inquire about the condition of the press and to ask what it would be worth. The rector wrote back, 15 humbly stating that Vértiz could of course have the press, paying the Colegio what suited his fancy. The rector added that since there was no inventory detailing the parts of the press, it was hard to tell what was missing. Its condition, however, was not beyond repair, which was what the viceroy was looking for. On 16 October, Vértiz wrote back to say he would pay the Colegio what the ex-Jesuits had spent in the early 1760s, and asked the rector to set things in order for the press’s voyage.3 Finally, in December, wooden boxes packed full of the press’s parts were loaded into a covered cart owned by a certain Félix Juárez. Juárez directed his oxen along an old colonial commerce route, traversing the pampas, and arrived in Buenos Aires in February 1780.4 There, at the newly created orphanage-print shop named the Casa de Niños Expósitos, the viceroy financed the press’s rehabilitation, and before long, it was turning out publications. Vértiz submitted his argument for the shop to Carlos III, albeit nearly a year after the press had arrived in Buenos Aires and printing activity was well under way. In proper formal style, the king dispatched a royal certificate of approval to Vértiz in which he wrote that the press would be “very useful and even necessary in that city,” and lavished praise on the official for“all you have done regarding this matter, giving you thanks for the notorious zeal with which you labor in the service of God, and for me.”5 Neither the king nor the viceroy imagined he was laying the foundation for the birthplace of revolutionary print media during the wars of independence. By 1810, over 1,200 publications had been printed, including letters, official edicts, textbooks, Rousseau’s Social Contract, bills of sale, and the Río de la Plata’s first newspaper, the Telégrafo Mercantil.6 With the May Revolution of 1810, the Niños Expósitos press became an instrument of the patriots. During the next decade, it fired off thousands of circulars, poems , newspapers, official documents, letters, and patriotic songs, all waging rhetorical war on monarchic power. By the early 1820s, the old press’s type blocks were well worn. It was time to move on. In 1824, Bernardino Rivadavia, who was then minister of the Buenos Aires provincial government , signed into law the new Imprenta del Estado, which would take over the work and some of the materials of the Niños Expósitos print shop. The old press at...

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