News of the tribute to Rosalía de Castro in Porto (1954)

Abstract

After 70 years, Rosalía's sculpture resists as a place of memory in an environment that is now far from being the locus amoenus described in the speeches of the inaugural event held in 1954 in Galiza square. The perennity of the stone, in pink granite, seems to symbolize, beyond a shared landscape in the northwest of the peninsula, the fortress of the ties linking the North of Portugal and Galicia. A connection often related to culture, linguistics and literature, but also to politics and consequent instrumentalizations. This text proposes a look into the past through the news of the inauguration of the monument published in the main Galician newspapers and in the Portuguese Jornal de Notícias and O Comércio do Porto. Following several parameters of content analysis, the importance and relevance given to the event was compared in a total of 18 news articles. This first approach was further complemented by the study of discourse in relation to the political context, specifically the projection of the poet's image and the indoctrination of the peninsular fraternity.