Hemispheric Travelers on the Rioplatense Stage

In mid-July 1886 Sarah Bernhardt arrived to Buenos Aires, where she gave a limited number of functions before traveling to nearby towns and across the Río de la Plata to Montevideo. Her tour tells us about her fearlessness to brave Transatlantic travel. But beyond this quality of her character, her time in the Plata river region reveals a rich entertainment market whose performers followed a circuit including Rio de Janeiro, Porto Alegre, and, above all, Montevideo, Buenos Aires, and smaller towns along the tributary rivers leading to the Río de la Plata. The decade of 1880 was a moment of significant growth in the number of participants in this entertainment market, but by this time it already had a history half a century deep. Beginning with Bernhardt’s tour and then working backward to uncover the widespread presence of Italian, French, and North American performers in Argentina and Uruguay, this article showcases performance circuits and hemispheric travelers who staged opera, the bizarre, and circus and equestrian spectacles, and who were especially successful in attracting crowds. The result was the emergence of an entertainment market that ignited a passion for attending the circus and the theater.