La Confederación Argentina y sus subalternos: Integración estatal, política y derechos en el Buenos Aires posindependiente (1820–1860)

Abstract

This book connects subaltern studies, Indigenous history, the history of the African diaspora, and gender studies by comprehensively examining the relationship of the government of the province of Buenos Aires led by Juan Manuel de Rosas (1829–52) with various subaltern groups. Ricardo Salvatore asserts that Rosas retained power and consistent popular support by controlling the territory through war, disseminating propaganda (via print culture and public celebrations) that increased loyalism to the Federalist cause and demonized the Unitarian resistance, and, finally, preserving order in the countryside. This peace was important because agricultural exports provided funds essential for Buenos Aires province, and the larger Argentine Confederation, to battle the Unitarians and foreign enemies.Salvatore shows the increasing influence and burdensomeness of this war-driven state in the lives of individuals who experienced intermittent civil and international war. Poor countrymen, Indigenous groups, and Afro-porteño men were essential to deploying the Buenos Aires militias across the Argentine Confederation. Rosas mobilized a system of values common to different social groups; countrymen paisanos, Indigenous groups, the urban Black population, and large sectors of women supported Rosas and Federalism.The book opens with a historiographical examination of subaltern studies and Latin American history and culture. Each chapter examines how sources were produced in order to determine how Rosas's government differently recorded these subaltern groups depending on political interests. A key agent producing these records was the new countryside bureaucracy, jueces de paz, who maintained social order even under the continuous threat of war. The book refreshingly examines women's role in popular politics given the increasingly political role of women in estancias and in securing food from authorities during wartime. Federalist Rosismo put women in a new position in public space, though in limited and episodic ways. Salvatore also challenges the definitions of subalternity by considering Unitarian rural proprietors as subalterns, even though they were generally wealthy and well educated, because the state persecuted them and put them in a position of subalternity. He shows this in his analysis of rural constitutionalism and Hilario Lagos's 1852–53 rebellion. Sources and their examination are richer for countrymen and Indigenous groups—for instance, the nuanced analysis of how the soldier-peasant was both oppositional to the state and loyal to the politics of Federalism—but less substantial for Afro-descendants (whose support the regime considered complete) or women (who were not seen as political agents).While this is the most comprehensive examination so far of the Black population's political engagement with the Rosas government, some aspects are controversial. Salvatore reads the pro-Rosas newspapers' depictions of Black loyalty to deconstruct the voice intended to represent the Black population. This reviewer finds problematic the assertion that the bozal poetry appearing in 1830s Buenos Aires popular newspapers represented the Afro-descendants' aspirations and ways of feelings (p. 284). Rosas did not pass new legislation against slavery but continued with the 1813 legislation ending the slave trade and instituting the new legal status of libertos. Indeed, Rosas extended libertos' service through militarization, and thus they were coerced to serve. Rosas's measures of 1833 and 1839 against the slave trade were meaningless, as there was no ongoing large-scale slave trade to Buenos Aires in the 1830s. Salvatore correctly identifies that continuous Black militarization loosened slavery's bonds in the 1830s, but this was gendered, with coercion and slavery under other names (e.g., patronato) applied to women and children. As Rosas did very little regarding freedom, perhaps we should look more carefully at the politics of equality—for instance, at the right to vote for free Black men and access to education.Some typical postabolition measures occurred in Buenos Aires while slavery still existed. For instance, in the early years of Rosas's rule, the province's proprietors requested a “census of servants,” a register of enslaved men and women who hired themselves out. This police intervention in domestic labor relationships is telling of a certain “rebellion of servants” taking place amid political turbulence (1828–30) and the lack of social deference that increased elites' anxieties (p. 87).The book successfully identifies the theme of the “threatened republic” as the unifying feature of Rosismo Federalism, which solidified relationships between Rosismo and different subaltern groups with their own interests and led to the system's survival (p. 290). Salvatore argues that Argentina under Rosas was a fragmented and unfinished republic, based on these somewhat corporate alliances between widely different groups.