Print (and Broadcasting) Capitalism in Times of Crisis: The Quest for a Unified Language Market in Buenos Aires, 1935–1943

Abstract

Throughout the late 1930s and early 1940s, what we nowadays term Hispanofonía faced a deep crisis when the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War shifted the centre of intellectual life and the print industry definitively from the Iberian Peninsula to the Americas. At that time Mexico City and Buenos Aires were renowned for their editorial and intellectual prowess which spread from there to the rest of the Spanish-speaking world. This paper focuses on the development of print capitalism to media capitalism in a time when broadcasting exploded as a mainstream form of communication, reaching every home and in so doing becoming a battlefield for ideological language issues. In this context, a number of intellectual figures in Argentina began to question the role of the State in the development of cultural guidelines for the industry—considering whether such input was a risk worth taking in the pursuit of a unified Spanish language.