Urban Chroniclers in Modern Latin America: The Shared Intimacy of Everyday Life

Latin American and Latino Art and Culture

by Viviane Mahieux

An unstructured genre that blends high aesthetic standards with nonfiction commentary, the journalistic crónica, or chronicle, has played a vital role in Latin American urban life since the nineteenth century. Drawing on extensive archival research, Viviane Mahieux delivers new testimony on how chroniclers engaged with modernity in Mexico City, Buenos Aires, and São Paulo during the 1920s and 1930s, a time when avant-garde movements transformed writers' and readers' conceptions of literature. Urban Chroniclers in Modern Latin The Shared Intimacy of Everyday Life examines the work of extraordinary raconteurs Salvador Novo, Cube Bonifant, Roberto Arlt, Alfonsina Storni, and Mário de Andrade, restoring the original newspaper contexts in which their articles first emerged. Each of these writers guided their readers through a constantly changing cityscape and advised them on matters of cultural taste, using their ties to journalism and their participation in urban practice to share accessible wisdom and establish their role as intellectual arbiters. The intimate ties they developed with their audience fostered a permeable concept of literature that would pave the way for overtly politically engaged chroniclers of the 1960s and 1970s. Providing comparative analysis as well as reflection on the evolution of this important genre, Urban Chroniclers in Modern Latin America is the first systematic study of the Latin American writers who forged a new reading public in the early twentieth century.

234 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2011

Reviews

[Julian · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely brilliant.
I was lent this book by the very author herself (she happens to be a neighbor) with the question in mind being, "What does a PhD look like?"

The bar has been set impossibly high.

Mahieux forwards her coverage of Latin American cities via invaluable historical context and profound literary analysis. The history and people you're exposed to, or at least the ones I was suddenly made aware of, were never more than a mere abstract thought of "there have always been elites."

From this largely unbeknownst vantage point of post-revolutionary &/or post-industrial autochthonous agitation, Mahieux has taken histories which would have otherwise merely flitted across ones conscious as being transient periods, and utilized them as the windows of profound analysis.
The names are distinctly Latin American, but the themes transcend both the time and place of the book: the place of journalism in high society, the disconnect between capitals and rural areas: the transition from mixing bowl to melting pot: the uniquely spasmodic shift from the 3rd world to the 2nd world and all this entails.

Personally, Salvador Novo was my favorite character largely because the reoccurring themes of paradoxes and acculturation seemed to exist as if in a microcosm within Novo and his various pseudonyms.

I began this book knowing nothing of Latin American Chroniclers, the genre, and knowing a sterile AP class's synopsis of these countries' growth circa late 19th century and early to mid 20th. I've closed it ravenous for Latin Literature (should my Spanish allow) and with a profoundly altered view of journalism in today's and yesteryear's society.

Thank you.