Between Exile and Labor Migration at the Opera House: Uruguay’s Comedia Nacional in the Postwar Era, 1947–58

My paper highlights the importance of regional migration and political exile in shaping national culture in Uruguay during the middle of the twentieth century. Focusing on the Comedia Nacional, a theater company founded by the municipal government of Montevideo in 1947, I examine the careers of dramatic authors and itinerant theatrical performers in the creation of state-sponsored mass culture in the decade following World War II. The Comedia Nacional’s expansion occurred when the Uruguayan government created cultural policies to enhance its place as a modern welfare state in South America. In twentieth-century Uruguay, theatrical culture had been largely defined by the cultural commerce that developed between Buenos Aires and Montevideo. The Comedia Nacional’s backers drew on the unique cultural heritage of the region to assert equal footing for theatrical production in Montevideo in comparison with the larger Argentine capital.

            This paper considers the importance of post-war cultural exchanges as the Comedia Nacional incorporated migrant performers, directors, and producers from Uruguay, Argentina, and Spain. The Comedia Nacional arguably represented the most ambitious initiative of the post-war welfare state in Uruguay to contribute to cultural commerce across South America. Its development also reflected the possibilities for state-sponsored cultural initiatives in Latin America that emerged from urban municipalities after the Second World War. This history also provides insights into the place of short-term migration in the development of Latin American cultural production during the immediate post-war era when migration of artistic performers was caused by censorship in Argentina. While the Comedia Nacional attained reasonable critical success in the late 1940s and during the 1950s, it struggled to consistently attract a mass audience, thereby contributing to the uneven development of mass culture industries in Uruguay.