La Moda and Diario de la Tarde: Two Approaches on “Spanishness” in the Dawn of the Print Market in Buenos Aires (1837-1852)

Abstract

The question at the center of this article inquires on the role that Spanish literature played in the press during the development of the print market in Buenos Aires. We explore the problem about “spanishness” in the local papers as an object of discourse, in La Moda, and as a factor in editorial practices, in daily press such as Diario de la Tarde and El Nacional. We propose that the writings of authors like Mariano José de Larra and Manuel Fernández y González were involved in the process of the introduction of reading as an entertainment in the Buenos Aires’ press in the mid-nineteenth century. Yet, this is a fact obscured in the historiographic common sense, which tends to highlight the anti-spanish discourse of the dominant intellectual elite of the “generation of ‘37”.