Viviane Mahieux (2011)
Austin: Texas University Press, 234 p.
Reviewed by Pedro M. Cameselle
Fordham University, New York
By the 1920s, many Latin American cities were well into an epoch
of dramatic change marked by economic modernization, rapid
industrialization and urban growth. In Urban Chroniclers in
Modern Latin America, Viviane Mahieux provides a compelling
account of the transformation of the crónica urbana within
this historical context by examining the writings of five
chroniclers: Roberto Arlt and Alfonsina Storni in Buenos Aires;
Salvador Novo and Cube Bonifant in Mexico City; and Mário de
Andrade in São Paulo. The Latin American crónica, or
chronicle, is defined as “a somewhat unstructured genre that
combines literary aestheticism with journalistic form” (1).
The book is grounded within the leading scholarship on the
subject, underscored by the works of Aníbal Gonzalez, Julio Ramos
and Susana Rotker. However, Mahieux sharpens the focus of the
chroniclers during the under-investigated period of the 1920s and
early 1930s, to demonstrate how this literary-journalistic genre
took new forms and played a decisive role in the configuration of
Latin American literary modernity. By analyzing chroniclers in a
period “when modernizing media and avant- garde movements
dramatically changed how writers and consumers thought about
literature” (3-4), this research contributes to the existing
literature as it explains the manner in which the chronicle
secured such an important position in contemporary Latin America.
More specifically, the author argues that the chroniclers’
shifting relationship to media and literary culture resulted in
greater accessibility to the public, the rise of which
corresponded with the growth of mass- circulation newspapers at
the turn of the century. The chronicle of the 1920s and 1930s
helped shape modern urban culture by reflecting on everyday city
life, which demanded and allowed for a rearticulating of ideas,
values, and imaginings in an increasingly modern world. The
tension between cosmopolitanism and nationalism and the interplay
between gender, class and the chronicle are major themes explored
throughout this study.
With regard to methodology, Mahieux relies on a “dual reading of
the chronicle” (7) approaching the genre in a literary manner
(e.g. tropes and style) while also considering the chronicle’s
context of production and reception. The lucid synthesis of
literature- journalism and the particular circumstances of each
city is one of the most persuasive aspects of this book.
The first chapter explores the early trajectory of the chronicle
(considered a dying form in the late nineteenth century) and
reveals chroniclers’ concerns with modernity. For Manuel Gutiérrez
Nájera, who wrote in the
1870s–1890s, the arrival of the telegraph symbolized the threat
technological development posed to his profession. After all, what
would be the need for a leisurely and intimate newspaper column
when new technologies allowed for speedy news reports? Similarly,
the likes of Rubén Darío, José Martí, and other modernistas shared
broader concerns about modernity. In the context of an
increasingly technological world that potentially required the
subjugation of art for commercial concerns, the chronicler would
now have to adapt to a larger, more diverse, and (perhaps) less
educated audience. Eventually, new media helped usher in “a more
flexible repositioning of the genre as part of daily practice–both
of reading and of writing–that shaped the chronicler’s role as a
cultural mediator” (8). Writers reinvented themselves as
“accessible intellectuals” (23), in their efforts to adapt to a
genre that was becoming a mix of art and markets.
The next two chapters discuss how Roberto Arlt and Mário de
Andrade traversed notions of cultural citizenship, urban and
national identities, and traditionalism during an era of massive
European immigration and economic prosperity in Buenos Aires and
São Paulo. Through an analysis of Arlt’s Aguafuertes porteñas,
published in El Mundo in Buenos Aires, Mahieux reveals how
the chronicler simultaneously witnessed and fomented urban change
as rapid population growth altered the cultural and social role of
the city’s newspapers. For example, in writing about the changing
cityscape from a perspective understood by his lower and middle
class readers, Artl provided an aesthetic value to the street
culture described in his columns, thus validating them as sources
of literary worth. Similarly, Andrade’s chronicle Táxi in São
Paulo, demonstrates the role the chronicler played as “an
intellectual agent of movement” with the ability to “make cultural
experiences accessible to a reading public” (91-92). Andrade’s
interest in Brazilian nationalism highlights some of the
limitations of the chronicle beyond the city, as his writings were
unable to closely link the urban identity in São Paulo with
broader national imaginings in other regions of Brazil.
Chapter four discusses Salvador Novo’s articles in the weekly
magazine El Universal Ilustrado during the early 1920s.
Like his contemporaries in Buenos Aires and São Paulo, Novo’s
chronicles reflected an interest in writing about mundane and
lighthearted subjects in Mexico City’s daily life. In the
aftermath of the Mexican Revolution, the literature proposed by
intellectuals and the government was “often defined in sexually
charged terms” (100). In this context, literature that evaded
“masculine” post- revolutionary social or political matters, like
Novo’s, was dismissed as effeminate and outside the intellectual
mainstream. Despite this outsider status, Novo found and generated
cultural significance in the growing commercial media, eventually
achieving prominence as public figure “by transforming himself
into a protagonist of his own texts” (124) and thus becoming an
essential part of the urban consumer culture.
In chapter five, Mahieux emphasizes the relationship between
gender and the chronicle by analyzing the works of Alfonsina
Storni in Buenos Aires and Cube Bonifant in Mexico City. As
chroniclers, both female authors forged public personas as
intellectuals, complicated categorizations of modern femininity in
patriarchal societies, and like Arlt, Andrade and Novo, also
contested class-based social hierarchies. Moreover, that Storni
and Bonifant needed to enter the workforce (as chroniclers), like
many of their female readers, reveals much about the period. In
sum, this final chapter examines the “role women were playing in
modern life and, in turn, the effect that modernity was having on
women” (126).
Urban Chroniclers is clearly a product of extensive
archival research and carefully considered secondary sources,
ideal for graduate and advanced undergraduate students seeking a
nuanced understanding of Latin American literature, society and
history. Nevertheless, the biographical background on the
chroniclers discussed is often limited; as such, additional
information on the authors would enhance the reader’s interests
and serve as a richer source of reference.
By the end of the twentieth century the genre had achieved a
respectable standing in society, exemplified by the likes of
Carlos Monsiváis, Elena Poniatowska and María Moreno. Change, and
the anxieties and opportunities that it generated, is one common
thread throughout the book’s narrative. It is then fitting that
the author concludes by prompting the reader to consider how the
shift to the Internet and “increasingly virtual” communities from
print newspapers and urban communities may present new
opportunities and challenges for the chronicler.