Cultures of the Popular in the Modern Hispanic World

How many cassette tapes do you still own? In one hundred years, how many TikTok videos or Instagram posts will still be accessible? Yet much of today’s news and mass culture is produced and disseminated via transient means. Just as in previous eras.

Hispanic popular cultures of previous centuries, once intended for a broad audience, can now only be glimpsed in fragile, and frequently overlooked, media such as chapbooks, newspapers, journals and early sound recordings. This bilingual collection explores aspects of the ephemeral cultures of Spain and Latin America between the sixteenth and twentieth centuries, taking advantage of the recent digital turn in the humanities.

The first section examines the varied audiences for mass literature in Spain and the authorities’ attempts to censor and control it. The second looks at pliegos sueltos, songbooks and collections of popular poetry in Argentina, Mexico and Chile. The third section concentrates on questions of performance, studying placards which originally accompanied oral readings of pliegos sueltos, news ballads and zarzuelas. The volume concludes with a focus on three case studies: the travels of an eighteenth-century giant and the reception of his self-fashioning in Spain, the diffusion of the works of a Spanish pulp novelist in Portugal and Brazil and the revival of a Peruvian festival of popular music in the early twentieth century.

Throughout, the chapters show how the increasing digitisation of library and archival collections has enabled much of this ephemeral material to be ’discovered’, analysed and compared, leading to new understandings of how popular culture developed and migrated and, indeed, what is meant by ’popular’.