“Learning to fun”. Pedagogy and control of the sociability in the Buenos Aires press (1932-1943)

Abstract

This article analyses the speeches of pedagogy and control of playful sociability promoted and emitted by some newspapers of the province of Buenos Aires during the conservative regime. Our goal is to detect the continuity of the civilizing concerns of that press referring the amusement, sociability and leisure forms chosen by the bonaerenses in those years, as well as the difficulties seen by journals in order to normalize those practices. Likewise, we seek to describe the relationship between press, notable citizens and the rest of local inhabitants by focusing on the debates about the necessity of controlling some recurrent practices of entertainment, as Carnival and football. In that sense, the article identifies the mission that press tried to perform as a civilizing factor of local customs in the Interwar and Second War World period, its confidence in the capacity of local sociability planning and the recognized difficulties to succeed in that attempt.