Politics, beauty and youth. The high school liberal discourse of Penumbras Magazine in La Serena (1907-1908)

Abstract

The article analyzes the magazine Penumbras, a newspaper from the Liceo de Hombres high school in La Serena at the beginning of the XX century. As a pioneer educational institution in Chile, it generated groups capable of building written media which merged the intellectual interests and leisure time activities  of local elites. A review of the editorial texts leads you to observe that publications were a playful tool that displayed local, national and international settings of reality; it contemplated the events from a masculine social space in which the Enlightenment ideals of liberal thought stood out. We suggest that the youthful effort in this magazine goes beyond school activities, in the proposed structure of the magazine as well as in its discourse, even though its serious pretensions do not override its juvenile essence. Using a sarcastic style in its criticism and redundancy in its esthetics, politics and beauty are stereotyped, in a way that is consistent with the dynamics of the youth of the turn of the century in the province of Coquimbo.