2006 Tinker Summer Research Report Mayra Botaro Spanish and Portuguese "Textualizing History: Press and the Social Imaginary During 'El Sitio Grande' (1843-1851)"

One of many drawings depicting a scene from the siege. This one appeared in El Telégrafo de la Línea.

Between 1843 and 1851, Montevideo was a city under siege (the so-called “Sitio Grande”) by both Argentine and Uruguayan military forces, with two coexisting governments: one inside the city walls; the other, established in the Cerrito, supported by Argentine dictator Rosas. During this time, the press served as a vehicle for political discourse between the two opposing governing factions, and acted as the medium by which intellectuals carried out a struggle to manipulate the national conscience in order to construct a history of the homeland that lived up to their claims. Through readings of one of the chief press periodicals, El Nacional (1838-1846), I was able to confirm and find evidence for much of what I had already suspected: the explicit will to morph a real contemporary historic referent, “the city under siege”, into a tangled web that would later on assume an epic stature, whereby events and real documents were tainted and interwoven with the fiction of classical, biblical, and scientific narratives.

My theoretical questions revolved around the way in which the different discourses of expectations, beliefs, myths, and ideologies that a given community maintained were articulated, and how and to what extent this community used them to effectively re-invent its own history. So much so, that by the time the renowned French novelist Alexandre Dumas published his 1850 book Montevideo ou une nouvelle Troie, its title (carefully crafted in the imagination of the collective national consciousness for 8 years) had already become the way by which Montevideo was to be known for the latter half of the 19 th century and the first decades of the 20 th.

First page of periodical El Tambor de la Línea.

The main goal for my research was to explore the discursive strategies that were utilized in these various texts to undermine the authority of official political discourses and practices, giving way to non-official voices. I also intended to examine the intellectual devices of appropriation through which writing recorded and transformed the social and political reality of the siege, and produced fictional narratives that provided a sense to the historical scenario and led to the conformation of collective identities contributing to the process of national consolidation. As I set out to determine the operative limits and boundaries between history and fiction (as portrayed within the struggles for political and representational hegemony, transmitted through hybrid discourses and rhetoric), I conceived this project as a case study in the examination of the way in which certain discourses collaborate in designing Latin-American imaginary in the 19 th century, truly granting decisive meaning and authenticity to real events.

In order to better understand the emergence of El Nacional and the way it operated in its literary milieu, this summer (2006) I spent 5 weeks in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and one week in Montevideo, Uruguay. I visited select Latin-American archives and libraries to track down documents and materials that were otherwise inaccessible from the United States. In Buenos Aires, Argentina, my research took me to the Biblioteca Nacional, the libraries and archives of Facultad de Filosofía y Letras and Instituto Ravignani, at the Universidad de Buenos Aires (UBA), Archivo General de la Nación Argentina, Universidad Nacional de La Plata, Colegio Nacional de Buenos Aires, Museo Mitre, and the Biblioteca Nacional Argentina.

Legend on the importance of public libraries in the fight against authoritarian style of governments. Mural, East entrance of Biblioteca Nacional del Uruguay.

In my travels to Montevideo, Uruguay, I not only visited the Biblioteca Nacional del Uruguay, but also the Museo Romántico, Museo Histórico Nacional, and Museo Casa de Lavalleja, where I was able to immerse myself in the country’s 19 th century culture and legacy, and familiarize myself with the venues where all the events mentioned in the periodicals had taken place.

The local archives of Montevideo and Buenos Aires helped me understand the different dialogues El Nacional maintained with other newspapers, pamphlets, official decrees, maps, private and public letters, diaries, travel narratives, and socio-political events, and also facilitated my finding of a series of related periodicals: El guerrillero de la línea, El tambor de la línea, and El Telégrafo de la línea. I could also have access to the extremely rare El artillero de la línea (1843), which was very generously photocopied for me by the Director of the Museo Histórico Nacional. Ultimately, my archival research revealed El Nacional as a multiple project that while questioning the straightforward relationship between sovereignty and political representation, contributed to the foundation of a literature of the siege, thus breaking new ground for the textualization of the national History.

One of many notes that I encountered during this trip announcing the temporary closing of one the libraries due to an employee Union meeting. This one was a courtesy of Biblioteca Nacional del Uruguay.

In addition to what I have already stated, I believe that in carrying out this project I gained much more than I set out to do. I am grateful to the Tinker Committee for allowing me the time and space to conduct my research but I also need to thank them for having given me the opportunity to contribute to the preservation of Latin American cultural heritage through my photographic work (I have collected more than 3,000 photographic samples of periodicals and private documents throughout this research). Given the conditions in which these materials exist, and the past history of destruction and oblivion that haunts Argentinean and Uruguayan libraries, it is doubtful that they will survive another five years.

I am currently working on a publishable scholarly article that includes a critical and central body of analysis in the form of an anthology and I am also working in the draft for an academic conference presentation at the forthcoming LASA conference in 2007.

The airline ticket that made this project possible was generously provided by the Tinker Foundation through the Center for Latin American Studies (at UC Berkeley), and I am extremely grateful for the support of both these institutions.

Subscription to a periodical belonging to Andrés Lamas. Photograph taken in Archivo General de la Nación Argentina.