Maria Tenorio

En El Salvador de la primera mitad del siglo XIX, contar con periódicos era contar con elementos patentes de “civilización”,  “modernidad” y de “progreso”. En este texto, su autora revela que una publicación periódica era, más que un medio para expresarse o construirse discursivamente, un proyecto “civilizatorio” en realización, aunque sumamente endeble por las dificultades de su financiamiento, por sus vinculaciones político partidistas y, en términos generales, por el escaso peso de la cultura letrada en la sociedad salvadoreña y centroamericana posterior a la década de las independencias.

¿Qué libros se leían en San Salvador durante la primera mitad del siglo XIX? ¿De dónde venían esos libros? ¿Quiénes los leían? ¿Cómo los leían? ¿Cuál era el valor que se daba a los libros en aquel entonces? Estas preguntas servirán de guía para este artículo que se ocupará sobre el consumo cultural de ese tipo particular de impresos. Varios periódicos publicados entre 1824 y 1850 en talleres tipográficos salvadoreños serán los encargados de dar respuesta a las interrogantes. En otras palabras, este estudio explora, en la letra de la prensa salvadoreña post-independentista, la recepción y uso de los libros en su materialidad (en tanto objetos) y en su discurso (en lo que dicen).

A newspaper delivers an imagined world to its readers. The apparently all discursive nature of that imagined world, as Roger Chartier suggests in his studies of print culture, cannot reach any reader apart from its material support. This dissertation explores the discourse and materiality of the press published in El Salvador between 1824 and 1850 in search for the conditions of its possibility and the characteristics of its existence. From the first weekly publication, the Semanario Político Mercantil de San Salvador (1824), to the ironic Periquillo El Hablador (1850), this study examines 25 different newspapers out of the 50 titles published in that Central American country in those 26 years. When journalism started in El Salvador in 1824, this state was part of a larger political unity, the Central American Federation. The regional inscription of the press was not lost after the dissolution of the federation in 1839. Salvadoran newspapers kept naming and mapping the region as a political project. The linkage between the discourse and materiality of the newspaper reveals that journalistic production in post-independence El Salvador was at the same time political and commercial, local and regional, Salvadoran and European. The first weekly and biweekly publications in El Salvador, as historians of the press have pointed out, were endeavors carried out by politically engaged male citizens, but their viability as material objects was possible only if they became consumer goods. The early press had to be commercial in order to be political. If early journalists wrote newspapers in their spare time or as part of their jobs, printmakers did not work for free and printing supplies and equipment had to be paid for as well. Just as the text had to be printed on paper in order to be read, the State of El Salvador could not have been imagined in its press without a network of publications that was mainly Central American, but one that went well beyond the limits of the isthmus: Guatemalan leaflets, French books, Cuban newspapers, and English letters lived side to side with newspapers published in San Salvador, San Vicente, and Cojutepeque in the first half of the nineteenth century.