Un microcosmos de la sociedad argentina polarizada en El basural de Carlos Gorostiza

Abstract

The late Carlos Gorostiza, playwright, novelist and former Argentine Secretary of Culture, is most well-known for his dramatic works, and scarce attention has been given to his 1988 creative non-fiction novel El basural (The Garbage Dump). Nonetheless, this text, which centres on a public dispute over the existence of a dump in a Buenos Aires neighbourhood, accurately mirrors the socio-political divisions which permeated Argentine society for much of the twentieth century. I argue that the two sides of the conflict—the waste-pickers who inhabit the dump and depend on it for their survival, and their contemptible middle-class neighbors—represent conflicting groups in twentieth-century Argentine society: respectively, the working class and the middle-class medio pelo. By chronologically linking the plot and the publication of the novel to key political and social developments in Argentine history, I demonstrate its relevance, highlighting the author’s criticism of the medio pelo, the segment of the middle-class which simulates an upper-class existence.