Isabella Cosse

ISABELLA COSSE A Social and Political History of Latin America’s Global Comic Mafalda A book in the series LATIN AMER I CA IN TRANSLATION / EN TRADUCCIÓN / EM TRADUÇÃO Sponsored by the Duke– University of North Carolina Program in Latin American Studies Mafalda A Social and Po liti cal History of Latin Amer i ca’s Global Comic ISABELLA COSSE TRANSLATED BY LAURA PÉREZ CARRARA Duke University Press Durham and London 2019 ©2014 Fondo de Cultura Economica de Argentina, S.A. El Salvador 5665, CP, 1414, C.A.B.A. – Argentina English Edition © 2019 Duke University Press Printed in the United States of Amer i ca on acid- free paper ∞ Cover designed by Matt Tauch. Text designed by Drew Sisk. Typeset in Garamond Premier Pro, Folio, and ITC Lubalin Graph by Westchester Publishing Ser vices The Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available at the Library of Congress. ISBN 978-1-4780-0513-1 (ebook) ISBN 978-1-4780-0507-0 (hardcover) ISBN 978-1-4780-0638-1 (paperback) Cover art: Mafalda cartoon © Joaquín Salvador Lavado (Quino). For Emilio and Tomás CONTENTS List of Illustrations ix Acknowl edgments xi INTRODUCTION 1 CHAPTER 1 Marks of Origin: Middle Class, Modernization, and Authoritarianism 12 CHAPTER 2 Controversial Mafalda: From Radicalization to State Terrorism (1968–1976) 54 CHAPTER 3 Global Mafalda: Circulation, Appropriations, and Resignifications 102 CHAPTER 4 An Antiestablishment Voice in Turbulent Times 137 CHAPTER 5 Mafalda, the Myth 170 CONCLUSION 207 Notes 215 Bibliography 243 Index 259 ILLUSTRATIONS Figure 1.1. Quino, untitled strip published in the “Gregorio” supplement of the magazine Leoplán (Buenos Aires), ca. June 1964 21 Figure 1.2. Quino, “Mafalda,” Primera Plana (Buenos Aires), September 29, 1964 23 Figure 1.3. Quino, “Mafalda,” Primera Plana (Buenos Aires), October 6, 1964 23 Figure 1.4. Quino, “Mafalda,” Primera Plana (Buenos Aires), October 20, 1964 26 Figures 1.5–1.7. Ads featured in Primera Plana (Buenos Aires), September 29, 1964, and October 27, 1964; and Quino, “Mafalda,” Primera Plana (Buenos Aires), November 17, 1964 27 Figure 1.8. Quino, “Mafalda,” Primera Plana (Buenos Aires), October 27, 1964 30 Figure 1.9. Quino, “Mafalda,” El Mundo (Buenos Aires), March 24, 1965 33 Figure 1.10. Quino, “Mafalda,” Primera Plana (Buenos Aires), December 8, 1964 35 Figure 1.11. Quino, “Mafalda,” Primera Plana (Buenos Aires), January 19, 1965 36 Figure 1.12. Quino, Mafalda 1, strip 4 39 Figure 1.13. Quino, “Mafalda,” El Mundo (Buenos Aires), June 29, 1966 47 Figure 1.14. Quino, “Mafalda,” El Mundo (Buenos Aires), August 22, 1965 52 Figure 2.1. Andrew Graham- Yooll, “Mafalda: The Star with No Illusions,”Buenos Aires Herald, October 1, 1967 57 Figure 2.2. Siete Días (Buenos Aires), July 2, 1968 59 Figure 2.3. Quino, “Mafalda,” Siete Días (Buenos Aires), May 11, 1970 61 Figure 2.4. Quino, “Mafalda,” Siete Días (Buenos Aires), August 5, 1968 63 Figure 2.5. Quino, “Mafalda,” Siete Días (Buenos Aires), no. 90 (January 27, 1969) 64 Figure 2.6. Quino, “Mafalda,” Siete Días (Buenos Aires), April 14, 1969 73 Figure 2.7. Quino, “Mafalda,” Siete Días (Buenos Aires), October 13, 1969 74 Figures 2.8–2.10. “El desafío cordobés,” Siete Días (Buenos Aires), special edition, June 2, 1969, and “Mayo: De corceles y de aceros,” Siete Días (Buenos Aires), June 8, 1969, no. 108 75 Figure 2.11. Quino, “Mafalda,” Siete Días (Buenos Aires), no. 146 (February 23, 1970) 76 Figure 2.12. Quino, “Mafalda,” Siete Días (Buenos Aires), no. 162 (June 15–21, 1970) 78 Figure 2.13. Quino, “Ajedrez,” reproduced in “Un grupo de extremistas,” El Día (Buenos Aires), December 16, 1970 80 Figure 2.14. Quino, “Mafalda,” Siete Días (Buenos Aires), no. 207 (May 3, 1971) 84 Figures 2.15–2.18. Jenning’s brand Mafalda and Manolito soaps and Rayito de Sol brand Mafalda doll, ca. 1970, courtesy of Antonio Torres, Club del Cómic, Buenos Aires. Plastic Mafalda doll, ca. 1970, courtesy of the Pérez Carrara family, Montevideo. 89 Figure 2.19. Quino, “Mafalda,” Siete Días (Buenos Aires), no. 301 (February 19, 1973) 95 Figure 2.20. Quino, “El palito de abollar ideologías” poster 96 Figure 2.21. Bootleg version of the poster “El palito de abollar ideologías,” reproduced in “Quino,” Buenos Aires Herald, April 5, 1975 100 Figure 3.1. Cover of Marcelo Ravoni and Valerio Riva, Il libro dei bambini terribili per adulti masochisti 106 Figure 3.2. Cover of Quino, Mafalda, la contestataria 109 Figure 3.3. Cover of Il Mago, no. 1, Mondadori, 1972 114 Figure 3.4. Cover of El Globo, no. 1 (March 1973) 119 Figures 3.5–3.6. Dolls produced in Spain u nder copyright and prob ably marketed in Latin Amer ic a, ca. 1980 129 Figure 3.7. Quino giving a talk at Gandhi bookstore, ca. 1977, holding a rec ord of the Music for unicef Concert, which featured artists such as abba, Elton John, and Olivia Newton- John 132 Figure 3.8. Untitled work by Mexican artist Jorge Tovar, ca. 1981 133 Figure 4.1. Photo graph of the slain Pallottine priests and seminarians, included as evidence in the 1977 criminal court case file 141 Figures 4.2–4.3. Covers of Quino, Mafalda 1 and Mafalda 10 154 Figure 4.4. Advertisement for the Mafalda movie featured in the newspaper La Nación (Buenos Aires), December 3, 1981 156 Figures 4.5–4.7. Three- panel strip sent by Quino to President Raúl Alfonsín during the Easter Week military uprising of 1987 165 Figure 5.1. Caricature drawn by Quino in 1990 for Argentine Culture Week, or ga nized by the Madrid Mayor’s Office 177 Figures 5.2–5.4. Statue and plaque located on the corner of Chile and Defensa Streets, in the neighborhood of San Telmo 196 Figures 5.5 and 5.6. Mafalda items sold in stores in the area 198 x Illustrations ACKNOWL EDGMENTS I began my research with the aim of understanding the relationship between family and class in the turbulent Buenos Aires of the 1960s, but I soon realized I was dealing with a phenomenon that exceeded by far that period and space. That realization led to this book, which tells the social and po liti cal history of Mafalda— Latin Amer i ca’s most popu lar comic strip both on the continent and in the world— and, in doing so, offers a narrative of the recent past, a past that is still pre sent in the dilemmas faced by the region and by socie ties today. Undertaking research on a continental and transnational scale in Argentina is not a simple task, and neither is it easy to have the outcome of that research published in En glish, much less by a publisher as prestigious as Duke Univer- sity Press. I am fully aware that if I have had the satisfaction of overcoming the many obstacles and challenges posed by this work it is b ecause Mafalda opened many doors for me, because I had the support of countless accomplices (friends, colleagues, publishers, archivers, Mafalda fans) who w ere willing to help, and because I worked under institutional conditions that allowed me to concentrate on my research. I would like to begin t hese acknowl edgments by giving thanks for all of that. I conducted this study in my capacity as career researcher of the National Scientific and Technological Research Council (conicet), headquartered at the Interdisciplinary Institute of Gender Studies (iiege) of the School of Phi- losophy and Lit er a ture, Universidad de Buenos Aires. As I write these pages, I fear for research activities in the country, as the government’s science policy suf- fers under bud get cuts and the application of business criteria to mea sure intel- lectual production. In this sense, I would like to highlight that an offshoot of an investigation— because writing a book on Mafalda was not part of my original research plan— led to a book that won the Premio Iberoamericano Book Award from the Latin American Studies Association (lasa), and which was picked up by Duke University Press to be translated and published in En glish, and whose appeal goes beyond colleagues and people in academia. It is a book that can interest, and even excite, a wide range of people, from my Bolivian neighborhood grocer (who carefully weighed copies of my book so I could mail them) to the children in the “Mafalda” school in Buenos Aires where I first presented my book, to the many people in Chile, Mexico, New York, and other places who shared with me their ideas about the comic strip and their memories. I said that the proj ect was an offshootb ecause I did not originally in- tend to focus on the comic strip, but this research is very much connected with concerns ( family history, the 1960s, memory, and the dictatorship) that have interested me since my undergraduate years at Universidad de la República, in Uruguay, and my PhD dissertation work (on f amily mandates in the 1960s), conducted under the aegis of the History Program at Universidad de San An- drés, in Argentina. Nonetheless, I knew that I owed myself a more thorough study on these subjects. I discussed an initial idea at a 2010 workshop titled “Laughter in History: Everyday Life, Family, Gender, and Sexualities in Argen- tina through Humor, 1910–2010,” jointly or ga nized by Karina Felitti, Valeria Manzano, and me (as all three of us were very interested in humor in con- nection with our research) and sponsored by Universidad de San Andrés, the Institute of Higher Social Studies (idaes) of Universidad Nacional de San Martín, and the iiege of Universidad de Buenos Aires.

Load more