Readers, authors and consumers: The feminine uses of the album in Latin America

Abstract

A typical 19th-century album (although still popular during the first decades of the 20th century) consisted of a bound book with blank pages that served as a repository for various collectible objects and writings. There, you could find autographs and manuscripts from the owner’s friends, music sheets, drawings, poems, translations and, over the decades and as technology advanced, it also included photographs, postcards of landmarks and celebrities, newspaper clippings, among other objects. Together, these pieces comprise an attractive intersection of subjects, discourses, habits and traditions that allow us to study the dynamics of socialization and reading practices of that time from a context that is not limited to national life, since the album connected the owner with a cosmopolitan community. With the analysis of the disagreement between Mariano José de Larra’s and Domin- go F. Sarmiento’s opinions on the nature and women’s uses of the album, and with the study of some copies owned by women in and from Latin America, this essay approaches the album as an object that generated new reading practices and socialization dynamics for women, at the same time that it inserted other logics for the production of knowledge throughout the 19th and the first decades of the 20th century. The album allows us to reconsider the predominance of the written word in the studies of 19th and 20th cultures in Latin America, the content and form of our archives, and the incidence of gender relations in the conformation of historical, literary, and consumption accounts in the continent.