About This Module
Quino [Joaquín Salvador Lavado], “Mafalda,” Siete Días (Buenos Aires), October 13, 1969, 53. © Sucesores de Joaquín Salvador Lavado.
The setting is Argentina in the late 1960s. A military coup in 1966 sought to transform the country along authoritarian lines with the aims of establishing a political system without citizen representation and that was economically liberal and socially conservative. The regime was hostile to universities, cracking down on more progressive students notably in what was called the Night of the Long Batons when police attacked students, but despite this repression students continued to challenge the government. In 1969 students and workers joined forces in widespread protests against the regime in defense of their rights. The primary source is from the wildly popular Argentine comic strip Mafalda that features a small anti-establishment girl who offers sly commentary on current events. The strip Professor Isabella Cosse has selected for this module allows her to probe issues around authoritarianism and dissent. Her teaching plan helps students unpack the strip frame-by frame to more precisely highlight how it approaches questions about authoritarian control, freedom of expression and censorship. She also provides an exercise that allows students to create their own strips around incidents of repression toward freedom of expression. As part of Authoritarianism 101, this module enables teachers to explore the themes of challenges to authoritarian rule and limits to authoritarian control.
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Contributor
Isabella Cosse
Isabella Cosse is a scholar of gender, childhood, and family history in late twentieth-century Argentina and Latin America. She is a professor of history at Universidad Nacional de San Martín (Argentina) and a researcher at CONICET, Argentina’s National Scientific and Technical Research Council. Her books include Mafalda: A Social and Political History of Latin America's Global Comic and The Cuban Revolution and the New Left: Transnational Histories of Gender, Sexuality, and Family (coedited with M. Chase).
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