Abstract

The modernization of the Spanish-American press in the last third of the 19th century was a phenomenon that included, at least in the case of Chile, the articulation between new reading audiences and textual genres adapted to its heterogeneous communicational needs. This scenario led to the overcoming of a doctrinaire journalistic model, focused on the sole defense of the partisan interests of each medium, to an integrative model, delivering instructive but also fruitive readings. In this context, the aim of this study is to analyze one of the first fashion newspapers in the history of the Chilean press, La Semana magazine, founded in Valparaíso by businessman Julio Chaigneau, in order to account for the editorial strategies it adopted to invent/occupy the public space of fashion. We use the operative notion of journalistic strategy proposed by Eduardo Santa Cruz on a textual corpus recovered from an archive work at the National Library of Chile. We concluded that, despite being installed from a commercial and discursive space of pleasant and banal reading, La Semana also worked as a highly politicized media device, which managed to articulate with the emerging social actors that integrated the progressive and democratic forces during the presidential elections of 1876.