Las musas griegas en América Latina: de tuteladoras de la élite a inspiradoras de la cultura popular

Abstract

This text shows the survival of classical mythology in Latin America through the specific case of the Greek Muses, who inhabited Latin American theater halls during the 19th and 20th centuries. After a diachronic tour of the halls where the presence of the Muses can be observed in the facades and interiors, we will try to get closer to the political meaning of the daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne in these spaces of sociability. Once the corpus of coliseums with Muses has been located and systematized, we will propose that Euterpe, Melpomene, Thalia, Terpsichore and their sisters, beyond their ornamental or decorative dimension, could have been the expression of the Latin American bourgeois spirit during the Belle Époque (1870-1920). Later, from the second half of the 20th century, the Muses began to appear in popular and mass culture, democratizing their iconography and meaning without losing their inspirational character.