The children of Billiken. Infancy in Buenos Aires in the first decades of the twentieth century

Abstract

The aim of this article is to widen and enrich the approach towards children, as regards cultural construction, during the first decades of the 20th century. For that purpose, I analyze the children´s magazine Billiken from its launching in the market, in 1919, until 1936, when it is noticeable that it has become a model for other similar publications. The communication formula of the children´s magazine of teaching and entertaining, of stimulating the imagination and trying to channel the children´s actions, of presenting educational material, at the same time that the columns that appear to be counterhegemonic in the school field were a fertile ground for several childhood representations to coexist. This way, by analyzing the work of Constancio Cecilio Vigil -director and then editor of the magazine- and the sections provided by Billiken, this paper aims to identify the proposed child´s model and the tension that may arise from that construction and from other representations of childhood that circulate inside the same magazine.