Maternity and mobility: immigrant women and their street sales in the pages of Buenos Aires illustrated magazines, Buenos Aires 1898-1918.

Abstract

The article analyzes the speeches and representations that operated after the “maternalization” of immigrant women who worked as street vendors, in the pages of two illustrated magazines in Buenos Aires in the change from the 19th to the 20th century: Faces and Caretas and PBT. In the itinerant bodies of these women, exposed to the representational exercise that aroused their double trajectory of mobility - transatlantic migration and wandering through the streets of the Argentine capital - the primary function assigned to them by the State in the construction of the nation was inscribed: Being mothers of future citizens. Methodologically, the proposed analysis, based on the historical approach with a gender perspective, reconstructs the characteristics attributed to the street vendors, through a thorough study of the images and texts that are referenced by the Faces and Faces magazines (Period II, 1898-1920) and PBT (I Period, 1904-1918).