Individual and Press in the Southern Cone of America (1808-1824)

Editorial Criteria of Admissibility as an Entry Point to the Sociohistorical Study of the Political-Communicational Field

Abstract

This article examines the operation of the notion of the individual in the Latin American political-communicational field during the independence period (1808-1824), drawing on a corpus of 1,026 personal letters published in 24 newspapers from Argentina, Chile, and Peru. It proposes an operative translation of the individual as a text that enunciates an "I" —implicit or explicit— and argues that letters published in the press constitute evidence of the editorial criteria that determined which individual voices were admissible in each context, rather than direct expressions of individual subjectivity. The analysis identifies three modalities of the local individual: the veiled individual, whose voice detaches itself from Ancien Régime markers through anonymity or pseudonym; the civic individual, who crosses the threshold into the public sphere under their own name; and the instituting individual, who establishes a new communicational authority in the emerging journalistic field. These findings engage with Danilo Martuccelli's work on the revolution of individualism in Latin America, contributing historical-empirical evidence for the political-communicational field.