At the beginning of the 20th century Caras y Caretas (Faces and Masks) was one of the most widely-read magazines in Buenos Aires. A collective venture, run mostly by exiles, it was dedicated to the Argentinian context as well to European traditions.
The magazine was founded and led mainly by Spanish artists who had recently migrated to Argentina. Most of those involved were either related to one another or already friends. This bears witness to the extensive network of the local Spanish community, with its many connections that provided help to newcomers.
Caras y Caretas was founded by Eustaquio Pellicer in October 1898. Pellicer was a journalist who had left Spain for Montevideo (Uruguay), at the age of 27, in 1886, before moving to Buenos Aires in 1892. In Argentina, he joined the network of Spanish migrants. There, he found most of his collaborators, such as the artists  artists Francisco Fortuny, Manuel Mayol, José María Cao, Felipe Barrantes, Ramon de Castro Ribera and Arturo Eusevi. Most of them had studied fine arts before arriving in Argentina and, thanks to the Spanish network, were able to start contributing to various journals soon after their arrival. Like Pellicer, Mayol and Cao, there were many Europeans on the staff, among them Lasso de la Vega, Eusevi, Lorente, Daireaux, Grandmontagne, Bernárdez, and Soussens. Laass, the director of the paper's publishing company, and Berger, the chief lithographer, were German.
Throughout the magazine's pages, writers and illustrators dealt with issues of cosmopolitanism, the interchange of ideas, sharing and differences, in a country where, at the beginning of the 20th century, one in four people was a European immigrant. Caras y Caretas reflected this situation, for example by addressing the language issue. Argentine Spanish was flexible and constantly changing as it adopted foreign words, a development criticised by purists who struggled to keep the language unadulterated. Many of the articles were peppered with Italian, German or French words that had been integrated into the urban language. Also, many advertisements were written in foreign languages and the local people could perfectly understand them. The mixture of nationalities was also visible in the illustrations and pictures that appeared. One example is an image showing a German man, Herr Hünlich, dressed as a gaucho, wearing the traditional clothing of the Argentine countryside (Anonymous 1901). The magazine assumed the paradoxical character of an Argentine identity containing within it an immigrant component.