Cultural magazines as ‘passage spaces’ during the Argentine democratic transition

The ‘Villa María case’ in the eighties

Abstract

This article is based on the project "Archive of Cultural Magazines of Córdoba", dedicated to the recovery, archiving, and critical study of independent cultural magazines produced in the province of Córdoba, Argentina, during the 20th and 21st centuries. It is another link in the research field on Argentine magazines aimed at expanding archival and critical development, in this case focused on the provincial territory. Specifically, we address a phenomenon observed in the city of Villa María between 1980 and 1992, where ten cultural magazines were published with almost no overlap. We will analyze the magazines Impulso, Huérfanos, and Río de Pájaros, which have a journalistic profile, starting from a period as important for Argentine political and cultural history as the democratic transition. Our research questions refer to what the archive is capable of revealing about the era: firstly, how to historicize from the detail the characteristics of aesthetic production, experimentation, and debate (themes, writings, recognizable issues, authorial dialogs) that unfolded in the magazines with the intention of reflecting on the democratic transition. Secondly, what interpretations emerge when considering the corpus as a temporal frieze, to analyze the characteristics of a young language that began to become visible through different genres (narrative, poetry, opinion pieces, graphic stories, illustrations, comics, critical production).