ABSTRACT
Latin American magazines of the first half of the twentieth century have been studied mainly as documents of intellectual history or as sites for literary innovation in avant-garde movements. However, from the perspective of print culture studies, the materiality of such magazines is associated with concrete aspects of their contexts of production and reception and with the technologies they entailed. This chapter introduces—from a new materialist perspective—magazines as bodies driven by conflicting temporalities, that are not self-contained but instead a product of specific technologies and defined by their interaction with other bodies by means of what can be described as “digestion” processes. The chapter shows how these magazines made use of both existing print media technologies and modern ones in order to explore the expressive potential of graphic media, broaden their audiences, and access and disseminate information. With this in mind, it analyzes the functions of carteles (posters) in illustrated magazines and student periodicals from 1900 through the 1920s (Zig-Zag, Caras y Caretas, Sucesos, and Claridad), and of press clippings as resurfacing media in cultural periodicals from the 1930s and 1940s (Babel, Repertorio Americano, and Ultra).
