Ghost Chronicles: Local Newspapers and Urban Imaginaries in San Salvador de Jujuy (1943–1945)

Abstract

In order to explore the meaning or meanings that the phenomenon of urban identity or identities in San Salvador de Jujuy acquired in the Jujuy press, as a result of the competition among the discourses that enunciated it, a corpus of journalistic articles published in the Jujuy newspapers Crónica and El Día during the period 1943–1945 was compiled. In these articles, discursive formations concerning the city were traced, as well as the differential valuation of its actors and spaces.

The chronicles published by these newspapers constituted a way of imposing order on a world in transformation, the small everyday world of the city, at a moment when the available categories were no longer sufficient. In the search for new demarcations, Crónica and El Día resorted to ethnicity read in a colonial, racialist, or Romantic key; to the authority of the national capital as a measure of taste; to Hispanist discourse as a safeguard for threatened harmony; to gender as a barrier between public and private space; to tourism as a new actor determining projects; and to the differential management of space as a possibility for restoring order.

These newspapers maintained that San Salvador de Jujuy was a city, that it needed space and modernity, and also that it was necessary to remember the past. None of these terms is unequivocal. The city is constructed in opposition to other cities, or to some of them, and to nature, which is also a particular kind of nature. Space and modernity, in turn, are managed within projects that link them to a historical tradition granting rights to some inhabitants and not to others.