Urban Chroniclers in Modern Latin America: The Shared Intimacy of Everyday Life by Viviane Mahieux (review)

The crónica urbana, a Latin American literary-journalistic genre consisting of short reflections on city life, has garnered critical attention in recent years as scholars examine the form’s place in the region’s literary and cultural modernity. While most studies have concentrated either on the turn-of-the-nineteenth century or the postmodern era, Viviane Mahieux’s Urban Chroniclers in Modern Latin America: The Shared Intimacy of Everyday Life makes an important contribution to crónica studies by exploring how the genre mobilized modern class and gender identities to intervene in larger cultural debates in the 1920s and 30s, a period marked by the growth of the urban middle classes and the rise of the literary avant-gardes. Drawing on the work of Susan Rotker and Vicky Unruh, Mahieux explores the ways in which the chronicle in the 1920s and 30s worked to shape modern class and gender subjectivities by mediating between elite and popular cultures in the mass-media space of the newspaper. Urban chroniclers of the period combined avant-garde literary innovations with Latin America’s incipient mass culture in order to fashion a place for themselves in the region’s shifting cultural landscape during the early twentieth century.

In chapter 1, “Cities, Publics, and Urban Chroniclers in Latin America: 1920s–1930s,” Mahieux explains how the period’s economic and technological modernization made it possible for chroniclers to reach a wider audience than they had a generation earlier. As a result, the chroniclers of the 1920s, unlike the letrados of the traditional Latin American literary and cultural establishment that Ángel Rama and Julio Ramos study, were “accessible intellectuals” who targeted their penetrating social commentaries to a broad audience comprised of readers from the same physical and economic location as themselves. Yet, according to Mahieux, even as the chroniclers of the 20s and 30s participate in mass culture—following the high cultural trends of the period described in Peter Burger’s Theory of the Avant-Garde—, they break with older bourgeois conceptions that view art and the artist as autonomous from the everyday social and economic life of the community. These changes result in a “democratizing” of lettered culture to include popular and middlebrow, as well as elite elements (30).

In chapter 2, “A Common Citizen Writes Buenos Aires: Roberto Arlt’s Aguasfuertes porteñas,” Mahieux explores how the chronicle registers the new class subjectivities that were emerging as a result of Argentina’s rapid development and heavy rates of immigration at the beginning of the twentieth century. Stressing working-class Arlt’s difference from elite Argentine avant-gardists such as Jorge Luis Borges and Oliverio Girondo, Mahieux examines the ways in which the chronicler uses the market and the notion of circulation (of people, goods, and texts) to fashion an identity for himself as a being simultaneously like and unlike his readers.

Chapter 3, “Taking Readers for a Ride: Mário de Andrade’s Táxi,” focuses on de Andrade’s conversational style in the context of modernist São Paulo, where lifeways differed sharply from the traditionalism that still existed in some other regions of Brazil. Mahieux argues that, a reflection of Brazilian modernism’s interest in the vernacular, the dialogical nature of de Andrade’s chronicles helps bridge the gap between art and criticism while, at the same time, representing the country’s cultural heterogeneity.

Chapter 4, “The Chronicler as Streetwalker: Salvador Novo Performs Gender,” explains how Novo in his chronicles subverts gender binaries not only through his transgressive sexuality, but through his willingness to engage middlebrow culture as a means of disrupting the dominant hierarchies of post-revolutionary Mexico. If high cultural canons of the time scripted official nationalism as “masculine,” Novo playfully registers the apolitical “feminine” culture of the cosmopolitan urban middle classes in his chronicles. This chapter, perhaps the strongest in Mahieux’s compelling book, serves as a transition from the...