Isabella Cosse. Mafalda: A Social and Political History of Latin America's Global Comic. Translated by Laura Pérez Carrara. Latin America in Translation Series. Durham: Duke University Press, 2019. Illustrations. 288 pp. $26.95 (paper), ISBN 978-1-4780-0638-1.
Reviewed by Matías Hermosilla (SUNY Stony Brook)
Published on H-LatAm (June, 2021)
Commissioned by Casey M. Lurtz (Johns Hopkins University)
In 1998, Anne Rubenstein’s Bad Language, Naked Ladies, and Other Threats to the Nation: A Political History of Comic Books in Mexico led scholars to recognize that cartoons are useful sources for navigating the political, social, and cultural history of Latin America. Two decades later, that narrative was reinforced by the publication of Isabella Cosse’s Mafalda: A Social and Political History of Latin America’s Global Comic. Cosse’s book is a crucial contribution to the study of popular culture and humor in Latin America, showing that comics retain, and can be used to access, the social, political, and cultural dynamics of past eras.
Cosse’s book navigates what she calls the “most famous and popular Latin American comic strip in the world,” Mafalda (p. 1). The cartoonist Quino’s Mafalda documented the story of a rebellious and empowered middle-class Argentinian girl who confronted the challenges of life in the 1960s. By following this comic, Cosse traces the transmission of political, cultural, and social imaginaries from the local/national level to a regional/global scale. But how and why did this comic strip that started in Argentina in 1964 gain global recognition? According to Cosse, it is because Mafalda represented two ideas that the entire world was grappling with in the 1960s: the consolidation of the middle class and the challenge of social modernization (new technology, urban change, radical youth culture, feminism, and the modification of gender roles). In a way, Mafalda was a rebel and a vanguardist character who challenged the traditional family model and was always a “step ahead” of the political and cultural mainstream.
Cosse’s arguments are posed in discourse with the scholarship on the global 1960s in Latin America, which tries to de-isolate the history of that region by studying Latin America from a global perspective and, at the same time, explicate the ways the Third World influenced the First.[1] Cosse used primary sources from archives in Argentina, Mexico, and Spain, and also drew sources from Italy and Chile. The project required a visual and discursive analysis of comic strips and films, but also the recording of interviews with Quino, his wife and agent, Alicia Colombo, publishers, booksellers, readers, and fans from all around the world. Additionally, Cosse accessed Quino’s personal archive, as well as newspaper, governmental, and university archives. Brought together, these materials gave life to the social history of Mafalda and the societies that the cartoon reflected and dialogued with.
The book is organized chronologically into five chapters. Chapter 1 explores the birth of the comic strip in a political magazine in 1964. Fascinatingly, Cosse confronts standard assumptions about political polarization in 1960s Argentina. She argues that the Mafalda character proved the modernity of the 1960s, and particularly the rise of the middle class, and challenged the cultural basis of Argentine society. Chapter 2 explores the history of Argentina from 1967 to 1976, a decade marked by political polarization, increased violence, and state terrorism. In this chapter, Cosse traces discourses on Mafalda during the Juan Carlos Onganía dictatorship (1966–69), when the right conceived of the Mafalda character as an intellectualized girl who symbolized the dangerous rebelliousness of youth while those on the left viewed her as an expression of the privileged petite bourgeoisie.
Chapter 3 brings in the global context. It is a model of effective global history scholarship. Tracing the networks of circulation of Mafalda outside Argentina, specifically in Mexico, Spain, and Italy, the author argues that there was a “transnational community” that came together around concerns about modernization and that a cultural creation from the Third World subverted the “traditional” directionality of global cultural circulation, proving that creations from the “South” can have relevance in the “North.” Chapter 4 refocuses the discussion on Argentina by showing the challenges that Mafalda faced during the violent dictatorship that started in 1976. The cartoon strip earned great cachet as a symbol of anti-authoritarianism and, as a result, was lauded when democracy was restored in 1983. Finally, chapter 5 analyzes the historical legacy of Mafalda, the nostalgia of the 1960s, and its relevance in Argentina and around the globe through its consumption by transgenerational audiences.
Cosse’s book is a model for historians studying popular culture. Although I wish it dealt more extensively with the comic’s global impact, the book employs a unique methodology to demonstrate how local imaginaries can influence a global audience. This book opens up new questions about the potential of popular culture as a primary source to study the past. It also questions the narrative of Latin American historical isolation, imposed through the narrow study of national dynamics, by showcasing the success of a comic strip in which an Argentinian girl shared her opinions with the world.
Note
[1]. Some of the important books are: Eric Zolov, The Last Good Neighbor: Mexico in the Global Sixties (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020); Chen Jian et al., eds., The Routledge Handbook of the Global Sixties (New York: Routledge, 2018); Patrick Barr-Melej, Psychedelic Chile: Youth Counterculture and Politics on the Road to Socialism and Dictatorship (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017); Aldo Marchesi, Latin America’s Radical Left (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017); Vania Markarian, Uruguay, 1968: Student Activism from Global Counterculture to Molotov Cocktails (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2016); Valeria Manzano, The Age of Youth in Argentina: Culture, Politics, and Sexuality from Peron to Videla (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014); Victoria Langland, Speaking of Flowers: Student Movement and the Making and Remembering of 1968 in Military Brazil (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013); and Quinn Slobodian, Foreign Front: Third World Politics in Sixties West Germany (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012).
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Citation:
Matías Hermosilla. Review of Cosse, Isabella, Mafalda: A Social and Political History of Latin America's Global Comic.
H-LatAm, H-Net Reviews.
June, 2021.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=55970
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