About Nosotros

Nosotros

Nosotros was a cultural magazine published in Buenos Aires from 1907 to 1943. Founded by Roberto Giusti and Alfredo Bianchi, it became one of Argentina's leading literary and cultural reviews of the early twentieth century and one of the longest-lived magazines of its kind in the country. Its headquarters were in Buenos Aires, and it enjoyed high levels of popularity and circulation not only in Argentina but also in other Latin American countries. Nosotros belonged to the generation of great illustrated and cultural magazines that included Caras y Caretas, El Hogar and Mundo Argentino, yet it stood apart from them by the seriousness and openness of its literary project. It was willing to maintain dialogue with all sectors of Argentine cultural life, and its editor Giusti later contrasted it with the more selective Sur by saying that Nosotros was open to all Argentine writers, whether they were sixty or twenty-five years old.

Founding by Giusti and Bianchi in 1907

Nosotros was established by Roberto Giusti and Alfredo Bianchi in 1907. The two founders built more than a magazine. Under the management of the poet Rafael Obligado and through the institutionalisation of the editorial group around a cooperative society, Nosotros grew into a publishing house as well, becoming a prolific editorial label in its own right. Scholarship based on the magazine's correspondence, its complete collection and memoirs of the period reconstructed that editorial group from within for the years 1907 to 1920 and showed how decisive the cooperative structure was to its growth. In a press market where literary magazines commonly died within a year, a cooperative society gave Nosotros continuity of ownership, a shared stake for its editors and a platform from which books could be published alongside the review. The founding arrangement thus explained, in part, the thirty-six-year run that followed.

An Open and Eclectic Editorial Project

The defining trait of Nosotros was openness. Where later magazines curated a small circle, Nosotros tended to be eclectic and to include work of very varied quality, maintaining dialogues with all sectors of Argentine cultural life and taking an interest in the problems of Latin America as a whole. It adhered, in the description preserved in reference accounts, to a view of ideological evolution, and it offered on occasion something like paternal advice to the younger, more acrimonious avant-garde magazines that debated around it. That posture was both its strength and its limit. It made Nosotros a common house for Argentine letters, a place where established and emerging writers could appear side by side, and it made the magazine an indispensable record of what the culture was actually reading and arguing about. It also meant that Nosotros rarely set an aesthetic standard with the sharpness of a more selective review — a role that passed, after 1931, to Victoria Ocampo's Sur, which recruited talent that the older magazine had helped to form.

Contributors: Borges, Korn, Gálvez and Others

The contributor list of Nosotros documented its centrality. Jorge Luis Borges was among its contributors, and his writings there from 1921 declared his distance from futurism and Spanish ultraísmo, marking an early public stage in the formation of Argentina's most famous writer. The philosopher Alejandro Korn was another significant contributor, although his contributions were not regular, and his lectures and essays in Nosotros were later studied on the seventieth anniversary of his death as contributions from the past to the present. Manuel Gálvez served as the magazine's art critic. José Bianco, later the central figure of Sur's editorial office, started his career through essays published in Nosotros. Álvaro Melián Lafinur published criticism in its pages. Various Spanish writers also published articles in Nosotros during its run, giving the review a transatlantic dimension at a time when Buenos Aires was consolidating itself as a Spanish-language publishing capital. Few Argentine magazines could show so many major careers passing through a single title.

Nosotros and the Question of Argentine Identity

Nosotros published through the decades in which Argentina argued most intensely about what it was. Mass immigration, the Centenary of 1910, the First World War and the Russian Revolution all pressed on its pages. Scholarship on the magazine showed that under the influence of the war and the Revolution, it went through intense political and ideological debates that undermined the cohesion of its editorial group and threatened its continuity. It was also a venue for the era's cultural nationalism: studies of the imagining of el ser argentino, the Argentine being, drew on its pages, where romantic concepts of nationhood were debated by early twentieth-century intellectuals. The magazine's interest in Latin American problems gave those debates a continental frame rather than a purely porteño one. To read Nosotros across its run was therefore to follow, in one continuous publication, the shift from liberal optimism before the war to the crisis of liberalism in Argentina between 1930 and 1955 that later historians described.

Relations with the Avant-Garde and with Sur

Nosotros stood in a generational relation to the avant-garde magazines of the 1920s — Prisma, Proa, Martín Fierro and their rivals — and later to Sur. The young Borges published in Nosotros as well as founding his own short-lived reviews, and the older magazine watched the Florida and Boedo controversies without fully joining either camp. When Sur appeared in 1931, the comparison became explicit. The Cambridge history of Sur noted that Nosotros was the only magazine to rival Sur in length and scope of publication, but that the differences were marked: Nosotros was open and eclectic, Sur maintained its standards and restricted its dialogue to a small group and to certain foreign writers. Nosotros continued into the 1930s, but in decline; its moment, in that judgement, had ended in the 1920s, and it was Sur that set the standard for the coming years. That verdict should be read as a description of influence, not of value: the archive Nosotros left was broader precisely because it had refused to narrow itself.

The Publishing House and the Cooperative

The magazine's importance was inseparable from the publishing enterprise behind it. Nosotros became, under Rafael Obligado's management and its cooperative society, a prolific publishing label, and the boundary between the review and the book list was porous: authors introduced in the magazine could be carried into volumes, and the review in turn drew authority from the books it issued. That model — magazine as the visible front of a cooperative cultural institution — distinguished Nosotros from both the proprietor-driven illustrated weeklies and the patron-funded reviews that followed. It also helps to explain its reach beyond Argentina. A magazine backed by a functioning publishing house travelled through book trade channels into other Latin American countries, where reference accounts confirmed it enjoyed high popularity and circulation. No verified circulation figure for Nosotros is given in the sources consulted here, and this profile does not invent one; the qualitative evidence of continental distribution and thirty-six years of continuous publication is strong enough on its own.

Decline and Closure in 1943

Nosotros folded in 1943, closing a run that had begun in 1907. The decline had been visible since the 1930s, as a new generation of magazines, a changed political climate after the 1930 coup, and the tightening economics of the Depression and war years eroded the conditions that had sustained it. The internal ideological debates that had shaken its editorial group during and after the First World War were an early warning of how difficult it would be to hold an deliberately open, all-sectors review together as Argentine politics polarised. By the time it closed, its historical work was done: it had carried Argentine literary culture from the Centenary era through the avant-garde years and into the age of Sur. Its closure in 1943 ended the longest continuous experiment of its generation in open cultural editorship in Buenos Aires.

Legacy and Scholarly Standing

The legacy of Nosotros was archival as much as literary. Because it published so widely for so long, historians used it as primary evidence for subjects ranging from Alejandro Korn's philosophy to Italian futurism's Latin American echoes, from cosmopolitanism and cubism in art criticism to transatlantic dialogue among the literary magazines that bridged Argentina, Mexico and Spain between 1920 and 1930. A complete collection of the magazine survived for scholars to work from, together with the editorial correspondence that made an inside history of its group possible. In the WorldNM directory's terms, Nosotros represents the early twentieth-century cultural review at its most durable: founded in 1907 in Buenos Aires by Giusti and Bianchi, open to writers of sixty and of twenty-five, read across Latin America, and published without interruption until 1943. Argentina produced flashier magazines and more selective ones, but few that served, for thirty-six years, as the common room of a national literature.