About La Maga

La Maga

La Maga was an independent cultural magazine first published in Buenos Aires in 1991 — its number 0 was launched on 1 August 1991 and regular publication followed that September, with the directory record dating its first public issue to 5 September 1991. It was a cultural fortnightly, a quincenario, of interviews, essays, a full agenda and arts coverage across music, theatre, dance, cinema, books and visual arts, and it became a reference of 1990s Argentine cultural journalism. La Maga was born as a professional project of the first graduating class of the journalism school Taller Escuela Agencia, TEA, financed by the school, and it appeared as an alternative to the frivolous cultural journalism of the Menem era. It was published for nine years, in several stages, and closed at the end of the 1990s, having trained a generation of cultural journalists who went on to found other Argentine magazines.

A Magazine Born in a Journalism School

The origin of La Maga was unique in Argentine magazine history. It was born as a professional project of the students of the first promotion, of 1987, of the technical course in journalism at the Taller Escuela Agencia, TEA. Its creator, Carlos Ares — professor, director of TEA and creator of the magazine — recalled that he formed groups of five students to produce works of journalistic investigation, promising that the school would edit the best work and make it professional. The chosen work was an investigation into the life of the comedian Alberto Olmedo, titled Queríamos tanto a Olmedo. Ares then convened the graduates to make a magazine of cultural information financed by TEA. The first name proposed, El Polvo, was rejected by the graduates as liable to be confused with another kind of content. They adopted La Maga instead, and even the name carries two competing foundation stories, both preserved in the record: Ares maintained it had nothing to do with the character of La Maga in Julio Cortázar's Rayuela, while Julio Petrarca, the magazine's first head of newsroom, maintained that he clearly remembered the meeting at which the name was decided and that Cortázar's soul was present at it.

Number 0 and the Launch of August-September 1991

On Thursday 1 August 1991 the number 0 was launched — an eight-page fortnightly distributed among the editorial team, colleagues, collaborators and possible advertisers, anticipating the official exit of the magazine. Its presentation declared that La Maga would specialise in the world of culture as a phenomenon with its own characteristics requiring special attention, and announced that it would be sold in kiosks and the principal hotels and cultural centres of the city, with a print run of 4,000 copies. The directory's seed record dates the first publication to 5 September 1991, which corresponds to the magazine's regular public run that followed the August preview issue; both dates belong to its documented launch sequence. The full edition ran to twenty-four pages with thirteen rotating sections: music, visual arts, dance, theatre, melancholy, agenda, brief notices, cinema, video, spaces, media, books and thought. Its design emulated, completely and explicitly, that of the newspaper El País of Spain, an idea adopted because there were no resources for an original design — an honesty about means that characterised the enterprise.

An Alternative in the Age of Menemismo

La Maga defined itself against the cultural discourse of its decade. While the hegemonic cultural discourse of 1990s Argentina revolved around the exposure of politicians in comedy and entertainment programmes, and the press echoed that frivolous gaze and the assiduous contact between officials and show business, La Maga offered an alternative cultural treatment. Scholarship on the magazine described its first stage — the age of innocence, its first three months and nine numbers including number 0, from the fortnight of 1 to 14 August 1991 — as a proposal alternative to a cultural journalism impregnated by Menemist frivolity and the logic of spectacle. Against a field of specialised magazines concentrated in single arts — literature magazines such as Babel, cinema magazines such as El Amante, music magazines such as Pelo — La Maga united the fragmentation of the Argentine cultural press and expanded the thematic universe of cultural magazines by including within itself sections on theatre, dance, music, books, cinema, visual arts and media. Its central cover article ordered the sections of each issue, so that the fortnight's chosen theme led the reader into the whole.

Sections and the Cultural Agenda

The practical heart of La Maga was its agenda. Alongside interviews, essays and criticism, each issue carried recommendations covering cinema, music, children's activities, visual arts, conferences, courses and seminars, and brief notices that functioned as classified advertisements serving the cultural community — sales of instruments, tools and films, or offers of acting classes. The magazine thus served two readers at once: the consumer of Buenos Aires culture who needed to know what was on, and the producer of that culture — the actor, musician, teacher and bookseller — who needed a noticeboard. That service function, modelled on the culture pages of El País, distinguished La Maga from purely critical reviews and helps to explain its reference status in 1990s cultural journalism: it was used, fortnightly, by the city's cultural public, not only read. Its thirteen rotating sections allowed it to keep that breadth without requiring every subject in every issue, a structure that small cultural magazines of the period rarely sustained.

People: Ares, Petrarca and a Generation of Journalists

The genealogy of La Maga ran backwards and forwards through Argentine journalism. Backwards: Carlos Ares had worked at the magazine Humor and had participated in El Periodista de Buenos Aires in 1984 as head of the special reports section, and at the newspaper La Razón from 1985 to 1987, bringing the experience of the democratic-era press into a school-born magazine. Forwards: many of the young journalists formed at La Maga later created magazines such as La García and Barcelona; among those who passed through it were Ingrid Beck, Pablo Marchetti and Diego Battle, later prominent names in Argentine cultural and satirical journalism, and Judith Gociol, who formed part of the founding group of the cooperative Lavaca and later of Nómada. A magazine that began as a graduation exercise thus became, in effect, a second school: the place where the cultural journalists of the following decade learned the trade by practising it in print, fortnightly, before a real kiosk audience.

Stages Across Nine Years

Academic work on La Maga characterised its trajectory in stages across its nine years of existence. The initial stage, the age of innocence, lasted only three months, comprising the first nine numbers, and positioned the medium as a cultural magazine with the treatment and format of a newspaper. Later stages, described in the undergraduate research that first systematised its history, followed its informational transition through the decade, as the magazine adapted its format and its discourse to the changing hegemony of porteño cultural journalism in the 1990s. The magazine's television criticism was separately studied as a case of how a cultural publication positioned itself, at the height of neoliberal policies under Menemism, as a contestant of that model, generating a space of dispute and disagreement from a cultural viewpoint. The exact date of its final issue is not firmly established in the sources consulted for this profile — the seed record states only that it closed in the 1990s, while the scholarly record establishes nine years of existence from 1991 — so this profile states that limit openly rather than inventing a closing date.

Closure at the End of the 1990s

La Maga closed at the end of the 1990s, after nine years of publication that had begun with a school-financed number 0 of 4,000 copies. Its end belonged to the economics of independent cultural publishing in Argentina's late-1990s recession, in which kiosk sales and cultural advertising contracted together and small fortnightlies without a large publishing house behind them had the least margin. What can be verified is the shape of the whole: launched in Buenos Aires in 1991 from the Taller Escuela Agencia, published as a twenty-four-page cultural fortnightly with thirteen sections, recognised as a reference of 1990s Argentine cultural journalism, and closed as the decade ended, leaving its complete early run — the first eight publications of 1991 are the standard scholarly corpus — preserved for study at the Universidad Nacional de La Plata's repositories. The Hemeroteca Pública José Hernández of the Buenos Aires Legislature likewise preserved it among the cultural titles of the period.

Legacy

The legacy of La Maga was generational. It proved that a cultural magazine of professional standard could be created from a journalism school, without a proprietor or a patron, and it offered Buenos Aires, for nine years, a cultural journalism that treated culture as a field with its own characteristics requiring special attention — the promise of its number 0. Its treatment of television, its interviews and essays, and its agenda were studied in theses and conference papers as evidence of an alternative discourse within the hegemonic culture of Menemist Argentina. Above all, its people carried it forward: the founders of La García and Barcelona and the journalists of Lavaca learned their trade in its pages. For the WorldNM directory, La Maga stands as the cultural fortnightly of 1990s Buenos Aires: born at TEA in August and September 1991, printed in 4,000 copies, written by the young, and closed at the decade's end, having become a reference of Argentine cultural journalism.