Words, wars, and public celebrations: The emergence of rioplatense print culture

By 6 December 1779, the deal had been sealed. After sitting inactive for more than a dozen years in the dark, dank basement of the University of Córdoba, the first and only printing press of the Cordoban Jesuits was unearthed and packed up to make the journey over to Buenos Aires. When the Jesuits were expelled from Spanish America in 1767, the press had only been in use for a year, producing materials for the acclaimed Colegio de Monserrat. It had been disassembled and hastily stored in the basement, with no care taken to prevent moisture from penetrating the wood or to package properly the lead type blocks. Only in 1779 was new interest shown in the press, ironically by a representative of the Spanish Crown-the newly appointed viceroy of the Río de la Plata, Juan José de Vértiz y Salcedo. Vértiz, whom the historian and one-time Argentine president Bartolomé Mitre later praised as the most progressive colonial official the colonies had seen, had the notion to create a casa de ni-ños expósitos (orphanage) in Buenos Aires. After all, at the end of the eighteenth century, the city's population (and number of orphans) was rapidly expanding with the growing importance of Buenos Aires as a commercial port. Vértiz recalled that there was a press in storage in Córdoba (confiscated from the "ex-Jesuits," as the viceroy called them), and thought that he could finance this humanitarian venture by establishing a print shop in Buenos Aires in the same locale as the future orphanage.¹ He argued the case to Charles III, though nearly a year after the press had arrived in Buenos Aires and printing activity was well underway. The king approved and, in proper formal style, dispatched a royal certificate to Vértiz in which he wrote that the press would be "very useful and even necessary in that city," lavishing praise on him for "all you have done regarding this matter, giving you thanks for the notorious zeal with which you labor in the service of God, and for me." ² Neither the king nor the viceroy imagined that they were laying the foundation for the print shop that would be the birthplace of revolutionary print media during the wars of independence.