The walkers of the miracle. From the valley to the city in local notices

Abstract

The work focuses on a set of audiovisual materials that bear witness to the pilgrimage of Cachi, a municipality of the Province of Salta (Argentina), within the context of the religious feast of the Lord and the Lady of Milagro. The festivity represents an important day at the calendar, and thus it becomes a moved case for the point of view of media of the capital of the province as well. The research matches a journalistic report made by Channel 11 during 2012, a note issued by Channel 7 in 2016, and the documentary "El Milagro" (1996), by filmmaker Alejandro Arroz. The analysis mapped how the journey of pilgrims who arrive in the city becomes visible. In such journey, multiple identities, territories, and representations are inscribed. We inquire on the way in which the media favors certain ecclesiastical voices and how the popular gaze manages to filter through the images affecting the journalistic discourse. Finally, we analyze the modes in which the discourses of the pilgrims contaminate the discourse of the journalistic information, creating hesitation spaces where the established can be questioned. The methodology is analytical and contrastive to be able to determine qualitatively constants and alterations over time: on the one hand, this methodology allows us to analyze the way in which representations are constructed and, on the other, the length of time of such representations.