Everyday Reading: Print Culture and Collective Identity in the Rio de la Plata, 1780-1910

Introduction

Introduction Do you know what PATRIA means? Surely your little ears have heard this word. And on more than one occasion, seeing the enthusiasm with which men pronounce“patria” in the streets, you have felt the urge to join them, to cry out and mix your joy and enthusiasm with that general feeling of happiness. —José Manuel Eizaguirre, La patria: Elementos para estimular en el niño argentino el amor á la patria y el respeto á las tradiciones nacionales (The patria: Elements for stimulating in the Argentine child love for the patria and national traditions)  In these words from his 1895 textbook, addressed to the “niño argentino ” (Argentine child), Eizaguirre draws our attention to one of the crucial forces behind the formation of collective identity: print.1 Eizaguirre promises to satisfy the young reader’s curiosity about the meaning of patria, or the fatherland. In turn, he humbly requests his audience’s attention“so that these pages leave a lasting imprint on your spirit.”2 He goes on to remark that sharing a sense of national pride is every citizen’s duty, and that every girl and boy should strive to understand the reasons that inspire the profound love for the patria—something everyone of course wanted to feel. All that was needed to achieve this was a little reading. Making up the region known as the Río de la Plata, Uruguay and Argentina are Latin America’s most complete examples of how the intersection between print media and collective identities developed.3 Today, visitors to the capital cities of Montevideo and Buenos Aires cannot help but notice the deep roots of written culture that are visible in the city centers. Corrientes Street, one of the main thoroughfares in Buenos Aires, is lined 1 for miles with bookstores and bookstalls. In Montevideo, where bookstores abound as well, one can visit a general outdoor market on Sundays where booksellers’ tables are spread over more than five blocks.Across both countries, from coastal cities to interior towns, kiosks (the likes of which there is no parallel in the United States) hawk newspapers, magazines, cheap histories, pulp fiction, and even reprints of“classics.”With such value placed on the written and printed word, it is no surprise that Uruguay and Argentina had the highest literacy rates in Latin America from the late nineteenth century up through the first years of the twenty-first century.4 The reach of print culture in the region is a true success story for Latin America. The intriguing questions are these: How did literacy, written culture , and the clear public concern with writing and reading become both so widespread and integral to identity in Uruguay and Argentina? What made Rioplatense print culture unique in the context of Latin America? This book provides some answers to these questions through a panoramic view of the development of this print culture, from the arrival of the first printing presses on the eve of the wars of independence to the first centenary celebration of independence in 1910. Everyday Reading is about the special relationship between print, the public sphere, and politics in the Río de la Plata. It connects the many ways of experiencing reading to the activities, festivities, and daily chores and realities of a century that ended with the establishment of Latin America’s most successful systems of public primary education. And it offers a broader understanding of what it meant to read and to be a reader, and how these practices affected identity. My regional focus is central to my argument and imperative for grasping the full impact of the connections between print and politics, for Uruguay and Argentina shared a common historical experience up to the early twentieth century. Both were part of the colonial viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata, which fragmented into smaller political units during the wars of independence. The civil wars of the middle 1800s were fought across the Uruguay-Argentina border, with soldiers and military leaders from both countries battling both Uruguayan and Argentine opponents, and their ramifications affected the entire region regardless of topographical divisions . The late nineteenth-century push for public education in Uruguay went hand in hand with its development in Argentina. The architects of these systems—Domingo Sarmiento on one side and José Pedro Varela on the other—traveled together, they read each other’s writings, and they 2  Everyday Reading inspired each...