The Normalization of Economic Life: Representations of the Economy in Golden-Age Buenos Aires, 1890-1913

Abstract

This essay examines the cultural impact of the market transition in Buenos Aires during the so-called golden age (ca. 1890–1913), when Argentina experienced a process of export-led growth, centered on agriculture and livestock. The international mobility of labor and capital resources, in a context of an expanding frontier, facilitated rapid and important gains in productivity. By the turn of the century, a model of accumulation based on mass immigration, foreign capital, and the redistribution and use of land taken from indigenous peoples was firmly established. Important changes in technology (breed selection and threshing machines) and social relations (tenancy and sharecropping) modified the landscape of the pampas. The city experienced more directly the turmoil of “progress,” receiving massive inflows of immigrants from Europe and rapidly absorbing modern means of transportation and distribution. Soon, a large consumer market developed, underscoring the modernity of the city’s economy. Some scholars view this period as a turning point in the history of Argentina. Social and urban historians have noted two fundamental changes: the revolution of wheat that transformed the social landscape of the pampas; and the modernization of the city that ultimately allowed some improvement in the living conditions of immigrant workers. Labor historians found in this period a deepening of class confrontations: the transition from artisan-based and ethnically divided working-class communities to a politically active and organized working-class movement under socialist and anarchist leadership. The very success of capital accumulation made the disparities in the distribution of income and wealth all the more evident, facilitating the diffusion of radical ideologies. Anarchist-dominated labor unions, mutual-aid societies, socialist cultural centers, and renewed activism within the workshops signaled the emergence of class politics.