Everyday Reading: Print Culture and Collective Identity in the Rio de la Plata, 1780-1910 by William Acree Jr. (review)

When visiting Buenos Aires or Montevideo, the traveler cannot help noticing the large number of bookstores and newspaper stands on the main avenues, parks, and even at subway stations. The publications for sale range from newspapers, to magazines, to porn, to classics of Western civilization such as Plato, Shakespeare, and Montesquieu. Such a remarkable range speaks to the important place print culture occupies in the Rio de la Plata societies today, an exceptional feature among Latin American countries.

William Acree Jr.'s book investigates the roots of such literary exceptionalism in both countries of Atlantic South America, providing a thorough analysis of the evolution of print culture and reading practices in Rio de la Plata from the late colonial period through the nineteenth century. Using solid archival evidence, the author argues for the intimate connection between print culture and the processes of state formation and subsequently nation building. The book takes a conceptual approach, examining the Rio de la Plata region as a whole, and not overemphasizing modern-day national boundaries. As a result, the author exposes the intrinsic interconnectedness of the political and social processes unfolding in Argentina and Uruguay during the period. Furthermore, the book introduces useful concepts, such as "everyday reading," which takes into consideration not only mainstream authors or print culture, but also accounts for the practices of reading and writing in the region, including poems, oral traditions, cattle brands, pasquinades, stamps, bills, and other print material that circulated in the region.

This carefully crafted book is structured into an introduction, four chapters, and a lengthy epilogue. The first chapter examines the emergence of Rio de la Plata print culture by the end of the colonial period and the heightened importance of print culture during the time of independence movements. In the first decades of the 1800s, newspapers published commercial information, news from other areas of the Atlantic World, poems, and most importantly, political pieces, "a printing revolution that went hand in hand with the wars of independence" (p. 7). In chapter 2, the author further examines the connections between print culture and politics that had been forged in Rio de la Plata by the mid nineteenth century. Specifically, Acree emphasizes the strong connection between popular writing and oral culture in rural areas. The author emphasizes the importance of civil wars, caudillo politics, and gauchesque literature in shaping the "militarization of print culture" (p. 46) and the connections of the printed word to "cattle civilization." The next two chapters examine the expansion of state-sponsored educational systems in Uruguay and Argentina and the dissemination of everyday reading and writing practices in the last decades of the nineteenth and early decades of the twentieth century.

The third chapter examines the role of teachers in promoting writing and reading in schools in urban and rural areas of Uruguay and Argentina. Here, the author examines notebooks, school lessons, and politics of education in Rio de la Plata. The content of textbooks is the subject of chapter 4, "Lessons for a Nation," in which the author convincingly demonstrates the strong connections between nationalistic projects and textbooks published for adoption in schools. In the minds of the oligarchic politicians of the late nineteenth century, education, modernization, and nationalism were intrinsically connected. The author ends his book with a fascinating epilogue examining the popularity and dissemination of other forms of print material, encompassing postcards, propaganda, packaging (matchboxes, food containers), stamps, and other media that promoted everyday reading in the region.

Although the book successfully analyzes the evolution of print culture and reading practices in Rio de la Plata, it would be helpful if the author had offered more insights on reading and writing practices before the independence period. Additionally, the epilogue could have appeared as a full chapter, since it is actually longer than some of the previous sections of the...