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  • Everyday Reading: Print Culture and Collective Identity in the Río de la Plata, 1780–1910
  • Christopher Albi
Everyday Reading: Print Culture and Collective Identity in the Río de la Plata, 1780–1910. By William Garrett Acree, Jr. (Nashville, Vanderbilt University Press, 2011) 304 pp. $55.00

Argentina and Uruguay, on either side of the Rio de la Plata estuary, have the highest literacy rates and most vibrant literary cultures in Latin America. Acree argues that this exceptional intimacy with the printed word began even before the advent of mass literacy at the end of the nineteenth century. From the installation of the first printing press in Buenos Aires in 1780, everyday forms of writing and reading shaped the public sphere in the region like nowhere else in Latin America. Acree roams widely but nimbly over a variety of quotidian reading material, from newspapers and patriotic verse to textbooks and postage stamps. He balances a deep analysis of print media with vivid sketches of the printers, writers, and readers who participated in this unique print culture. Inevitably, however, in a monograph of fewer than 200 pages of text, covering two countries over a long and tumultuous period, historical contextualization is thin, and several important questions remain un-addressed.

Acree examines three key moments in the relationship between print and the public sphere in the Rio de la Plata region. First, he looks at the explosion of print that accompanied the rebellion against Spanish colonial rule starting in 1810. Newspapers and patriotic pamphlets stoked the political revolution, introducing new symbols for the fledgling republics of Argentina and Uruguay. Second, Acree focuses on the popular literature celebrating gaucho life that emerged as cattle raising came to dominate the regional economy during the 1830s. This prose and verse, often read aloud at social gatherings, validated the authoritarian rule of the caudillos Juan Manuel de Rosas in Buenos Aires and Manuel Oribe in Montevideo and demonized their liberal enemies. It assumed a more elegiac tone during the 1860s, as modern agriculture began to make the free-ranging gauchos obsolete.

Acree’s concern with popular modes of print means that he does not discuss the most celebrated piece of gauchesque literature—Domingo Sarmiento, Facundo (Buenos Aires, 1845). A stinging indictment of caudillos and rural culture, written by a liberal exile for an urban elite audience, Facundo would not have been read aloud in the taverns of the Rio de la Plata. [End Page 504]

Finally, Acree examines the role of public primary education in creating a mass reading public by the turn of the twentieth century. His analysis of how children’s textbooks instilled patriotic and republican values, including gender identities, is particularly effective in showing the relationship between print and group identities.

Historians will note a few shortcomings in Acree’s work. He may exaggerate the exceptionalism of rioplatense print culture prior to mass literacy. Mexico, for instance, had printing presses since the sixteenth century and a sophisticated reading public when Buenos Aires and Montevideo were still raw contraband ports. Acree also does not fully explain why Argentina and Uruguay succeeded in promoting mass literacy through public education when the rest of Latin America came up short. Moreover, he concludes on a weak note, discussing stamps, currency, and cigarette cards; a treatment of the popular print media of Buenos Aires and Montevideo in 1910, such as the illustrated magazine Caras y Caretas, would have been a better complement to his examination of the revolutionary press of 1810. It could have shown how print facilitated the process by which European immigrants pouring into Buenos Aires became good citizens (and consumers).

These caveats aside, this elegant volume makes a significant contribution to our understanding of how print culture shaped collective identities during the era of nation-building in Latin America. Its brevity, sparkling prose, and well-selected illustrations recommend it for all scholars interested in print, literacy, and education in Argentina and Uruguay.

Christopher Albi
State University of New York, New Paltz
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