Camila O’Gorman driven off stage

The mechanisms of censorship in Buenos Aires and Montevideo, 1856-1857

Abstract

This article explores the circumstances surrounding the unsuccessful attempts to stage the play Camila O’Gorman by Heraclio Fajardo in Buenos Aires in 1856 and in Montevideo in 1857. In the political context in which Buenos Aires sought to differentiate itself from both the tyranny of Juan Manuel de Rosas and the government of the Argentine Confederation, the author accused the heirs of “rosismo” of operating in favor of censorship. However, a set of less evident interests emerge from a corpus that gathers the voices of a diversity of actors involved in the debate about the play, (and which projected themselves onto the norms and institutions that were supposed to regulate theatrical activity): ecclesiastical and municipal authorities, family members, writers and the press. Through the study of this event, we intend to reconstruct the relevant and interacting contexts of a particular mechanism composed of pre-existing tensions: between clericalism and anticlericalism, liberty and order, the government and the Catholic Church, the present and the recent past, public and private.