About Caras y Caretas

Caras y Caretas

Caras y Caretas was a historic Argentine weekly magazine founded in Buenos Aires in 1898 and published, in its original run, until 1941. It was a magazine of political satire, humour and topical issues, visually displayed through cartoons and photographs, and it became one of the most popular publications of its era. A previous version had been published in Uruguay between 1890 and 1897. The Argentine magazine's first number was released on 19 August 1898 and had 24 pages. More than a century after that first run ended, the title was relaunched in 2005 under the direction of the historian Felipe Pigna, and publishing records listed it as having been published since then.

Few Argentine magazines carry as much historical weight. Scholarly studies described Caras y Caretas as a visual technology that became an integral component of the citizenship training of contemporary urban citizens, and as a publication that charted the evolution of the illustrated magazine from a satirical publication on politics and current affairs into the popular illustrated magazine — a commercially minded enterprise, distributed by railway across the country, that helped create a middle-class reading public and shape public opinion in the young Argentine republic.

From Montevideo to Buenos Aires

The magazine began in Uruguay. Caras y Caretas was founded in Montevideo in 1890, with political satire, humour and topical issues as its main features, displayed through cartoons and photographs. Eustaquio Pellicer, associated with the French artist Charles Schütz, was its director from its first number, dated 20 July 1890, until issue 144. At the invitation of the Argentine journalist Bartolomé Mitre Vedia, Pellicer moved to Buenos Aires, establishing the Argentine edition of the magazine there.

The Argentine magazine's first number, released on 19 August 1898, had 24 pages, with cover art by Manuel Mayol for issue number one. Publishing records list Bartolomé Mitre y Vedia as publisher from 1898, list José S. Álvarez as founder, and credit Pellicer as the driving editorial figure who brought the formula across the Río de la Plata; the seed record for this profile summarised the founding as the work of Eustaquio Pellicer and Bartolomé Mitre Vedia. However the credit is divided, the transfer itself is the founding fact: a successful Uruguayan satirical weekly was replanted in a much larger market, in the capital of a country filling with immigrants, railways, newspapers and voters.

The team: Mitre Vedia, Pellicer and Mayol

Caras y Caretas was very popular during its first years of existence, with Mitre y Vedia as director, Pellicer as writer and the Spanish artist Manuel Mayol as artist, doing most of the covers and interior illustrations for the magazine. José Sixto Álvarez, mostly known by his nickname Fray Mocho, was one of the most frequent collaborators from 1898 until his death in 1903; reference works also named Álvarez as the magazine's founder, and he later gave his pen name to an entire successor magazine, Fray Mocho, founded in 1912 by former Caras y Caretas collaborators.

That founding team explains the magazine's formula. Pellicer brought the satirical conception and the writing; Mayol's covers gave the magazine a recognisable face at the kiosk — issue one's cover art was his; and Mitre Vedia, a journalist from one of Argentina's great press families, gave the enterprise standing and direction in Buenos Aires. A weekly that had to be recognised instantly, bought impulsively and read with pleasure was built, above all, on drawn covers and caricature, and Caras y Caretas had in Mayol one of the masters of that art in Argentina.

Satire, photographs and the illustrated weekly

The magazine's categories were political satire, and its frequency was weekly. Its defining mixture, present already in Montevideo, combined political satire, humour and topical issues displayed through cartoons and photographs. That combination — caricature beside the new technology of photography — was the magazine's modernity. Caricature interpreted public life; photography certified it. Together they let a weekly speak to readers of every level of literacy in a city of immigrants, many of them newly arrived and still forming their Spanish.

Academic study of the magazine, including the chapter on Caras y Caretas in the volume Periodicals in Latin America, argued that through its pages one could chart the evolution of the illustrated magazine from a satirical publication to the popular illustrated magazine: a commercially minded publishing enterprise that produced and distributed, via the railway system, periodicals that drew on novel printing technology. The study understood the magazine as a visual technology integral to the citizenship training of urban citizens, whose graphic aspect allowed traditional and modern modes of seeing to coexist, and which produced a conspicuous knowledge that shaped public opinion, a middle-class audience and the consolidation of democratic politics.

Literature inside a popular magazine

From 1924, Caras y Caretas published short tales from local writers such as Roberto Payró, Arturo Capdevila, Carrizo and Gálvez, according to its reference history. The detail matters because it shows the magazine maturing with its audience: a satirical weekly founded in 1898 had become, by the 1920s, a venue where Argentine readers encountered Argentine fiction. Horacio Quiroga, among the greatest Spanish-American short-story writers, also published work in its pages — a 1998 university edition collected his exemplary biographies published in Caras y Caretas in 1927.

This literary dimension separated the magazine from a purely humorous sheet. Its readers received, in a single weekly package, caricatures of politicians, photographs of current events and fiction by the writers who were creating a national literature. Histories of the magazine by scholars such as Geraldine Rogers, whose book studied its culture, politics and spectacle in the early twentieth century, and Ana Moraña, who studied the magazine between 1898 and 1910 as a fiesta of modernity, treated that mixture as its essence: Caras y Caretas was where modern Argentina saw itself, laughed at itself and read itself at the same time.

Audience and the making of a middle class

Scholars consistently described the magazine's audience in class terms: the Oxford Academic study argued that Caras y Caretas produced knowledge that shaped public opinion, a middle-class audience and the consolidation of democratic politics. Howard Fraser's earlier study, Magazines and Masks, read the magazine as a reflection of Buenos Aires between 1898 and 1908. The magazine arrived exactly when Argentina's cities were creating that middle class — clerks, teachers, shopkeepers, railway employees, immigrant families rising into property and education — and it gave the new class a weekly mirror.

Distribution followed the railways, which carried the magazine beyond Buenos Aires into the provinces, making it a national institution rather than a purely porteño one. Its popularity in its first years, attested by its reference history, rested on that reach combined with its accessibility: a magazine of pictures first and text second could cross the era's barriers of language and schooling, and its satire taught the habits of democratic scepticism — laughing at presidents and ministers — to readers who were themselves new to citizenship.

Buenos Aires at the turn of the century

The magazine's Buenos Aires was a city being transformed at extraordinary speed: mass immigration, new avenues and theatres, electric light, the first cinema shows, a port crowded with ships and a political system still dominated by an oligarchic republic in which elections were managed and fraud was common. Caras y Caretas chronicled that city from 1898 onward, and its caricatures of the era's politicians and social types became the visual shorthand through which later generations imagined the period.

Its headquarters and production were in the capital, and its subjects were disproportionately the capital's life — its streets, theatres, racetracks, carnival and scandals — even as the railways carried it nationwide. In that sense it performed for the whole country the service of defining what modern urban life looked like. To study the magazine, as its scholars do, is to study Buenos Aires learning to see itself.

The end of the original run in 1941

The original Caras y Caretas published from 1898 to 1941, when its final issue of the first era appeared. Forty-three years is an exceptional lifespan for a weekly magazine, and its survival into the 1940s carried it through eras its founders could not have imagined: the first democratic elections under universal male suffrage, the 1930 coup, the conservative decade that followed and the approach of the Peronist transformation that would remake Argentine media after its closure.

By the 1940s the media environment that had made the illustrated satirical weekly supreme had dissolved: radio was in every home, cinema newsreels showed the week's events in motion, photography had passed to faster newspaper and magazine formats, and a generation of new titles competed for the reader. The magazine's 1941 closure ended the first era of a title that had, however, already fixed its place in the national memory — a place strong enough that the name could be revived, more than sixty years later, and be instantly understood.

The 2005 relaunch under Felipe Pigna

Caras y Caretas was relaunched in 2005 under the direction of historian Felipe Pigna, having been published since then, according to its reference entry, with Felipe Pigna listed as publisher of the second era from 2005. The revived magazine's company was listed as Grupo Octubre. A paid circulation of 29,000 was recorded for 2008 — a modest figure beside the mass reach of the original, but a real one for a cultural-political monthly in twenty-first-century Argentina, and evidence that the revival was a functioning publication, not a ceremonial gesture.

The relaunch traded on memory deliberately. Pigna, a popular historian known for bringing Argentine history to mass audiences, was a fitting director for a title whose original had been a school of citizenship: the new Caras y Caretas likewise presented history, politics and culture to a general reader. The revived magazine maintained a website at carasycaretas.org.ar, giving the historic title a digital presence its founders could not have foreseen.

Legacy and present status

Caras y Caretas's legacy is foundational for Argentine media. It pioneered photojournalism and caricature in Argentina, in the seed record's summary of press history, and shaped the country's political satire. Every later Argentine satirical magazine — from the humour weeklies of the mid-twentieth century to Humor Registrado under the dictatorship — worked in a tradition Caras y Caretas had established: the drawn cover as political argument, the caricature as news, laughter as a citizen's right. Its scholarly afterlife, in books by Rogers, Moraña and Fraser and in digital archives of Argentine magazines, remains unusually rich for a popular weekly.

Its status is therefore double, and this profile has kept both halves in view. The historic magazine described in most of the record — the weekly of Pellicer, Mitre Vedia, Mayol and Fray Mocho — was a closed publication of 1898 to 1941, written about here in the past tense. The name, however, was revived in 2005 under Felipe Pigna and Grupo Octubre and was published thereafter, so Caras y Caretas is at once one of the great closed magazines of Argentine history and a living title that claims descent from it — a continuity no other Argentine magazine of 1898 can match.