Culture of Class: Radio and Cinema in the Making of a Divided Argentina, 1920-1946

Abstract

This innovative book builds on and goes beyond recent scholarship on the rise of mass culture in Latin America. Matthew Karush offers a thorough yet nimble investigation of both the cinematic, popular musical, and theatrical products of Argentina’s emerging culture industry and the heated critical debates about the nature and effects of these products. He follows interweaving cultural and political trajectories from the birth of Argentine radio to the sudden rise of Juan and Eva Perón to political power. This chronological framework is crucial, as Karush argues that the Argentine mass culture of the 1930s and early 1940s did not posit a unified nation but instead conveyed messages of sharp class division, pitting hard-working, honest members of the poor and working class against a corrupt and decadent domestic aristocracy. Argentine mass culture was not a field of harmonious dreams but rather a battleground where competing factions sought to impose their will. By the early 1940s, the defiant populists had won, prefiguring and providing the cultural points of reference for their ensuing political rise.A comparison of Hollywood screwball comedies of the 1930s with Argentine comedies of the same period makes this argument forcefully. Both genres were enthusiastically populist, exalting the scrappy resourcefulness of working-class men and the steadfast virtues of working-class women. But Hollywood comedies like It Happened One Night (1934) hinged on sympathetic portrayals of the foibles and flaws of both working-class men and rich girls, and they ended with harmonious union that dissolved class barriers: rich and poor were both improved by compromise and resolution. In Argentine films like La rubia del camino (1938), in contrast, the working-class men had no flaws and the rich girls no virtue — at least until they “choos[e] barbecued meat over precious jewels” (p. 172). As Karush notes, these plots inverted Pygmalion, implying that “the rich woman can only discover her true self when she sheds the cultural baggage of wealth under the tutelage of a poor man” (p. 173). The aspiring radio actress Eva Duarte did not need to change much to turn this message into one of political mobilization a few years later, following her marriage to Juan Perón.The triumph of this sharp-elbowed populism was neither inevitable nor complete. Instead, the cultural battleground of the 1930s was marked by shifting alliances and anxious interrogations. Messages of working-class solidarity were combined with “consumerist titillation, conformism, the celebration of individual upward mobility, misogyny, and other conservative messages” (p. 16). Karush argues that the political populism of the 1940s internalized these contradictions and that the successful incorporation of the conflicting messages of mass culture explains the wildfire spread of Peronism.Rejections and denunciations of mass culture became part of mass culture. They were not so much steamrolled as reconfigured into nostalgic or nationalist trends within cultural production. Like every urbanizing country of the period, Argentina nurtured popular music whose lyrics celebrating the rustic countryside never completely obscured rhythms honed in the dockside bars of the capital or orchestration borrowed from Holly wood soundtracks. Such combinations generated both fodder for debate and ways of talking about imagined communal identity within the midst of rapid modernization.This book is steeped in deep familiarity with and affection for Argentine popular and erudite culture. Karush draws authoritatively on an extensive filmography and discography as well as extensive reading of the popular press, high-toned critical reviews, and specialized trade publications within the culture industry. The argument is theoretically aware but firmly grounded in analysis of the works in question: the Argentine films, music, and radio theater of the 1920s through the 1940s. Karush never loses sight of films and recordings as both artistic statements and artifacts in a broader cultural landscape, and he offers illuminating interpretation of both major works and lesser-known but nonetheless revealing productions. This depth and balance make this a rich and rewarding work.This book will be essential reading for specialists on modern Argentina. Karush assumes a basic familiarity with Argentina’s political development and grounds his work with careful responses to the extensive historiography of the Argentine working class, but he writes accessibly, following a clear, explicit framework. As a result, this book will be useful in graduate seminars but also appropriate for use in upper-level undergraduate seminars. It makes a welcome and important contribution to the developing field of the popular cultural history of modern Latin America.