This is a first book by a professor of Spanish who clearly has an interest in the cultural ramifications of the history of print and a love of archives. William Garrett Acree makes a convincing case for the importance of what he calls “everyday reading” in the Río de la Plata and suggests that it was not an accident that Argentina and Uru-guay have had the highest literacy rates in Latin America since the late nineteenth century. Acree defines everyday reading to include a wide variety of activities, from reading newspapers, being read to in pulperías, and seeing advertisements to using schoolbooks, stamps, and currency.According to the author, there were four principal moments when everyday reading led to systemic cultural shifts in the Río de la Plata. The first was the introduction of a printing press into the region in 1780, resulting in what the author considers to be “the first printing revolution” (p. 189). This supposed revolution produced the second key moment: independence and the creation of national symbols for the fledgling republics. The third phase of everyday reading went hand in hand with the emergence of cattle culture and local and national caudillos; it was marked by the creation of gauchesque literature, a literature that reflected and fed the political divide between Federales and Unitarios. The fourth phase saw the creation of late nineteenth- century literacy campaigns and of nationalism, both of which responded to the growing threat of European immigration. In this phase, the emergence of mass distribution media directly and indirectly led to access to a dramatically increased amount of printed material and a growing interest in media content. The wide audience that now experienced everyday reading became a hallmark of the region.Acree employs a wide range of sources to show how everyday reading became everyday literacy over time. Newspapers, national coats of arms, laws and decrees, printed verses, descriptions of patriotic celebrations, cattle brands, textbooks (including their illustrations and covers), popular magazines, paintings, advertisements, cigarette boxes and cigarette cards, photographs, postcards, stamps, and paper currency are only some of the sources that the author uses to make his case. Another strength of this work is the continual comparison between what was happening in Argentina with similar movements in Uruguay. This is particularly true in Acree’s chapter on mandatory primary education, where he shows the strong, ongoing intellectual ties between these two countries as well as a similar chronology in the development of everyday literacy.Unfortunately, in underlining the new “emphasis on the importance of the printed word” that accompanied the May Revolution (p. 17), Acree forgets that Spanish colonial culture was already one in which the written word was important. One need only forage through escribanía records or endless legal proceedings to appreciate the power of the written word throughout colonial Spanish America. Moreover, Acree tells us that everyday reading “brought people together more often than before and in greater numbers . . . . [that] people began associating with each other because of reading, and [that] reading became the centerpiece of sociability . . . . it solidified beliefs and forms of behavior” (p. 4). While an attractive idea, it is hard to prove that this was true. Lastly, the author sees everyday reading as an ever- changing phenomenon and the key to the creation of a “collective identity.” As with all hypotheses that link a historical outcome to one variable, the author’s insistence on seeing a strong link between print culture and collective identity is at times a bit forced. Identity is in itself a slippery category; it is even more difficult to ascertain, for example, the degree to which an illiterate ranch hand’s listening to someone reading a gauchesque poem or a newspaper molded his identity.Nonetheless, this is an interesting and important book on a little- studied aspect of the Río de la Plata. Acree’s writing is clear and relatively free of jargon (but a bit repetitive), although phrases such as “national poetic discourse and imaginary,” “symbolic repertoires,” “modes of seeing,” and “worlds of orality” appear from time to time. Most importantly, this work also suggests that the commonly held view of European immigration as creating highly literate societies in Argentina and Uruguay should be revised to take into account earlier examples of everyday literacy.
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Open Access
May 26, 2023
Natasha Zaretsky 
