Early Twentieth-century Argentina Research Articles

Mil fÓrmulas de cocina “La Negra”: Labour, Gender, And Race In Argentina’s Meat Industry, 1917–1940

This essay explores the interplay of race, gender, and class in early twentieth-century Argentina when major forces such as immigration, urbanisation, and modernisation reshaped women’s work both in the factory and the home. My analysis focuses on Mil fórmulas de cocina “La Negra”, a cookbook published between 1917 and 1940 by the meatpacking plant Compañía Sansinena de Carnes Congeladas, which features photographs from the factory and its workers in between the recipes. First, I refer to the history of the meatpacking plant and its modernisation campaign. I compare the case of “La Negra” to other stereotypes of Blackness in branding in order to explore the relationship between the company’s industrial project and the figure of the Afro-Argentine woman. Second, I examine the cookbook’s texts and images by tracing a parallel between the meatpacking plant’s female workers and the middle-class homemakers who buy and read these cookbooks. In so doing, I argue that La Negra’s cookbooks were a crucial instrument in reinforcing an ideology of domesticity that linked national progress to whiteness and middle-class identity.

Feminist Rehearsals: Gender at the Theatre in Early Twentieth-Century Argentina and Mexico By May Summer Farnsworth. Studies in Theatre History and Culture. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2023; pp. vii + 285. $95.00 paper, $95.00 e-book.

Feminist Rehearsals: Gender at the Theatre in Early Twentieth-Century Argentina and Mexico By May Summer Farnsworth. Studies in Theatre History and Culture. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2023; pp. vii + 285. $95.00 paper, $95.00 e-book.

Serious Maricas and Their Male Concubines: Seeking Trans History and Intimacy in Argentine Police and Prison Records, 1921–1945

Abstract State, legal, and medical experts in early twentieth-century Argentina conflated what would today be distinguished as same-sex attraction and trans or nonbinary gender experience. An urban subculture of self-styled maricas was pathologized by criminologists and occasionally targeted by police. Scholarship on these subjects has often focused on medical and cultural representation, situating maricas in the genealogy of homosexuality. This article brings insights from trans studies to several microhistories from police and prison archives in Rosario and Buenos Aires in order to focus on sociocultural practices. In their courtship rituals, romantic and sexual relationships, and household roles, Emilia, Dora, and La Lita engaged both respectability and sexual playfulness as modes of feminine expression.

Black Legend: The Many Lives of Raúl Grigera and the Power of Racial Storytelling in Argentina

Stories and stereotypes play a key role in dehumanization, argues David Livingstone Smith, and Paulina Alberto's beautiful book absolutely proves it. It deconstructs the legend of an allegedly orphaned and broken character from early twentieth-century Argentina, “el negro Raúl,” and restores the biography of Raúl Grigera, a member of a rich Afroporteño community and a worthy builder of his own celebrity. That celebrity was neither easy nor free. Raúl would pay its cost in life and posthumously, his chroniclers crafting stories of his life within a racist national metanarrative in which Black people in Argentina were out of place or disappearing.The book crosses 150 years of Argentine history, a history not usually thought of and written about in a racial key. Chapters 1–2 discuss Raúl's ancestors, his childhood, and his community. Alberto builds on the pioneering work of George Reid Andrews and Lea Geler on Afroporteño newspapers, and by cross-checking parish, notarial, and property records, she reconstructs the daily life of the diaspora's heirs and their dilemma: reinforce their identity as Afroporteños or voluntarily assimilate into an unmarked Argentina. Raúl's family members made different choices. In this sense, Alberto makes a huge contribution by tracing Raúl's father, Estanislao Grigera, a religious musician who probably organized a “candombe with piano” and embraced a politics of assimilation (p. 59). Alberto fills gaps in his history with extremely well-informed assumptions supported by hundreds of endnotes. As a control, she traces people with similar trajectories, making their lives thinkable despite the silences of the archive about them.The third chapter, on Raúl's youth, begins to present a thesis that runs throughout the book: the early semantic expansion of the term negro from a racial to a popular sense (as Geler put it) or from a diasporic to a social one (as Ezequiel Adamovsky did). Alberto points out that in the first decade of the 1900s this shift began to take place, with messages to Afroporteños about the convenience of abandoning the struggle for affirmative recognition and embracing silence. They were invited to have “the courtesy of not having one's Blackness made into an object of public scorn” (p. 174). The fourth chapter addresses Raúl's years of celebrity: his insertion into show business, possibly by mobilizing his experience and family connections; the (now erased) place of Afroporteños in the development of candombe and tango; and, finally (along the lines of Monica Miller's 2009 book Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Styling of Black Diasporic Identity), the politics of respectability deployed by Raúl as a Black dandy.The fifth chapter analyzes defamation and strong racist stereotyping suffered by Raúl between 1916 and 1930, in the midst of the resignification of Blackness and the political rise of popular sectors in Hipólito Yrigoyen's government. The first Argentine comic strip was important in this process. Dedicated to portraying, or rather imagining, “the adventures of el negro Raúl,” the comic “labored to transform Raúl's fame into infamy, his celebrity into risibility, his agency into docility” (p. 227).Chapter 6 analyzes the many false reports in the press of Raúl's death, discussed as part of the repertoire of confirming the idea of an “inevitable ‘twilight of the race’” (p. 298). Through medical records, journalistic notes, and photos, Alberto masterfully reconstructs Raúl's harsh experience in his last years (intermittent jobs, life on the street, arrests for alcoholism and disorder) until his internment in a mental health institution and, later, in the Colonia Nacional de Alienados. By then, the meanings of Blackness would be rearranged within the framework of the Peronist governments in ways that made the disappearance of Afro-Argentines seem more complete. Finally, in an epilogue, Alberto argues that even the posthumous sympathetic storytelling about Raúl (from the dictatorship to democratization) fell into dehumanization and endorsed the idea that Afro-Argentines had really disappeared. In contrast, Alberto's portrayal of an “unapologetically non-assimilationist” person seeks to contribute to the “narrative shifting” driven by Afro-Argentine activists fighting for the recognition of a racially diverse Argentina (pp. 220, 356).The sources used are varied, even overwhelming. In this sense, the book is a model of the potential of digital humanities, which allowed Alberto to dive into an immeasurable number of newspapers and find daily news about Raúl, his family and friends, and the transformations of his neighborhood and to locate every appearance of “el negro Raúl” as a character in magazines and books. Also, through FamilySearch, Alberto was able to trace Raúl's genealogy from his enslaved ancestors to his siblings, who had been erased from his previous biographies. Along with those sources, hard-to-find ones accessed in person were key too: images from the Archivo General de la Nación, the records of the mental and correctional institutions where Raúl was held, and the cadastral records of his house. In Argentine historiography, the last are not frequently used, and Alberto works the best magic with them, turning laconic pages into loquacious documents.In its thematic and epochal unfolding, the book crosses varied historiographies: of the African diaspora, the city, culture (theater, music, magazines, comics), mental and correctional institutions, the police, Peronism, and, of course, racial narratives and the construction of the Argentine nation. The central thesis highlights the role of a grand anti-Black narrative in shattering the lives of Raúl and those who defied the mandate of invisibility. Black Legend is an example of the potential in crossing social history, cultural history, and literature. Alberto has a privileged pen and an analytical acuity that have been put at the service of tracing and honoring the most denied social actors in Argentine history.

“Times of Extreme Broadcasting”: Argentine Socialism and Mass Culture during the Rise of Commercial Radio (1920–1945)

Compelled to grow politically through cultural and educational activities, Argentine socialists faced a difficult challenge in regard to mass culture in the beginnings of the twentieth century, since the new shows and media seemed to distract the people from more “enlightened” activities that were considered crucial tools for social transformation. However, despite common representations in the leftist culture literature, socialists engaged in different features of mass culture in their intent to grow in Argentine politics. This article analyzes the political positions and innovations in broadcasting regarding socialists in Argentina in the interwar period. By embracing the new dynamics of mass politics, socialists revealed themselves as pioneers in the use of radio broadcasting for political purposes. In this sense, the socialist interventions in radio provide a great opportunity for addressing the growing links between mass culture and mass politics in early twentieth-century Argentina.

Sex, Skulls, and Citizens: Gender and Racial Science in Argentina (1860–1910)

Ashley Elizabeth Kerr's monograph examines racial science, Indigenous peoples, and nation building in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Argentina through the lens of gender. As she notes, this period of Argentine history has been studied by many scholars and from many different angles. Kerr contributes to this existing literature through her multifaceted focus on gender, which she argues has been largely absent in previous scholarship and prompts a reevaluation of the scientists and literary authors whose work she highlights. Kerr compellingly demonstrates the value of gender analysis here, and although the book contains some missed opportunities in terms of engagement with existing scholarship, it makes a valuable contribution to the field that will interest historians and literary scholars alike.Some particularly strong analytical cases here include Kerr's examination in chapter 2 of Lucio V. Mansilla's Una excursión a los indios ranqueles, in which she offers a thought-provoking reading of Carmen, the Indigenous woman tasked with communicating with Mansilla during his negotiations with cacique Mariano Rosas. Kerr reads Mansilla against the grain to argue that Carmen actively used her own gender positionality to manipulate Mansilla, even as he thought that he was manipulating her. Likewise, Kerr's discussion of both the Sociedad de Beneficencia's efforts to distribute Indigenous women and children among wealthy Argentine families after the Conquest of the Desert and the Catholic Church's proposal for Indigenous boarding schools underlines not only the importance of gender in understanding Argentine ideas about race and nation in this period but also Argentina's provocative connections to similar experiences faced by Indigenous peoples elsewhere. In addition, Kerr's analysis of the photographs taken by Samuel Boote (images of Indigenous peoples in captivity during the 1880s) challenges readers to consider the silences and unanswered questions at which the photographs hint. She argues that even if many of these questions cannot be answered, they are nonetheless important to ask because they reveal “a strong historical bias against the details of women's lives and the intimate aspects of history” (p. 93). Finally, analysis of masculinity is perhaps the most powerful part of this book, not least because most of the available sources were written by men. Kerr effectively deconstructs what it meant to be a man (including as citizens and as scientists), as well as men's views of women's roles in creole and Indigenous society. In dialogue with her analysis of women authors like Florence Dixie and Eduarda Mansilla, Kerr reads her male-authored texts against the grain in search of women's agency, often to great effect.Kerr's interesting and wide-ranging study also contains some missed opportunities. Some of the assertions that Kerr makes about existing scholarship overlook research that could have contributed to her own analysis. She argues, for instance, that many historians “have tended to accept nineteenth-century scientific productions and first-person observations at face value, often citing the very texts they have needed to interrogate” (p. 10). This statement seems to ignore the work of ethnohistorians, historians of science, and others who have read these texts critically and whose work could in fact support Kerr's arguments. Similarly, Kerr suggests that existing scholarship has been caught in a false “dichotomy between [understanding nineteenth-century anthropology as] heroic science and genocide,” which discounts the work of historians and cultural studies scholars who have examined the moral complexities of nineteenth-century anthropology (p. 68). Kerr's contribution to the field speaks for itself, and these statements unfortunately distract from the value of her arguments. The absence from the book of scholarship that could support its arguments and even help to answer some of the questions posed as rhetorical (including the work of Axel Lazzari, Ana Ramos, and Susan Sheets-Pyenson, among many others) perhaps simply reflects a difference of disciplinary approach and certainly is a perennial challenge for interdisciplinary scholarship.Kerr's book compellingly demonstrates the presence and importance of women as actors in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century discussions about racial science, Indigenous peoples, and national belonging in Argentina. She also makes clear that gender-based analysis of these historical developments, as well as some of the key literary texts that helped shape these events, is fruitful for generating new questions and insight. This book will be valuable to historians and literary scholars of Argentina, as well as to other scholars interested in gender, race, and Indigeneity in other settings.

Impure Migration: Jews and Sex Work in Golden Age Argentina

Mir Yarfitz takes on the notoriously challenging topic of Jewish prostitution in early twentieth-century Argentina and ably shows the international links and consistent tropes connecting the “white slave trade” to other migratory flows and concerns about race and purity. By tackling the issue with a consciously international focus, the author is able to show the ways that the patterns and concerns in Argentina were echoed worldwide. For Yarfitz, the fight against the “impure” irrevocably shaped the Jewish community in Buenos Aires.One overarching issue facing any scholar writing about this topic is the lack of documentation. Yarfitz's use of League of Nations sources is an important new avenue for scholars, as investigators went undercover around the world to illuminate the migration and working conditions of prostitutes. The author also makes great use of contemporary newspaper sources in Argentina as well as the institutional records of both the organized underworld figures overseeing prostitution and the groups fighting against the “impure.” While we gain a greater understanding of the worldwide perceptions and forces surrounding prostitution in Argentina, the book does not offer enough specifics about the lives and conditions of those actually working in the sex trade.The book moves from the broad and general to the specifics, laying out the tropes around the prostitution networks as well as Jewish patterns and strategies before finally focusing on only Buenos Aires. While the strategy does help the reader apprehend Argentina's place as a node in this larger trade, Yarfitz's strongest and most specific work appears toward the end of the book. When Yarfitz writes about Buenos Aires and the ways that prostitution worked on the ground, readers gain a much greater understanding of the lives of those involved and how the trade worked. He paints the most comprehensive picture yet of the Varsovia Israelite Mutual Aid and Burial Society, the organization of those running the Jewish prostitution trade. There were some points in Yarfitz's argument, however, that seemed to need more exploration. At one point he discusses “the importance of shared nationality and language between pimps and prostitutes,” explaining the reasons that Jewish men chose Jewish women (p. 73). I wished that the author had expanded on this for readers and had given what he believed were the implications for Jewish identity, as well as whether the importance of such commonalities between pimps and prostitutes might have held true for other national and linguistic groups. Yarfitz also noted the “commitment to marriage or marriage-like relationships between pimps and prostitutes” among Jews, another point that could have used more expansion and analysis (p. 75).Sometimes Yarfitz raises central arguments too late in the work. He points out that Jews who achieved financial success in the prostitution trade were able to invest in property and to accumulate wealth in other ways, “blurring . . . the lines” within the Jewish community between those who made their money in respectable trades and those who were “impure” (p. 103). This point, elaborated in chapter 5, dismantles the clear narratives that played out in the antitrafficking literature and demonstrates the fluidity of those who played roles in the prostitution trade. He brings up a few examples of women who began as prostitutes but were able to save enough money to move into other work and be successful—a section that I wished had been more central to the book as a whole. Women were not simply victims and did not necessarily spend their entire lives as prostitutes. As he writes, “Absolute victimization occurred far less than constrained choice” (p. 77). Yarfitz uses two women to illustrate his points—Raquel Liberman and “Esther the Millionaire.” Both have fascinating stories that subvert the narrative that the women involved in prostitution were powerless victims. Liberman successfully used both the Varsovia Society and the police and justice system for her own ends, while Esther was a savvy businesswoman at the apex of the Varsovia Society's hierarchy who gained enormous wealth and status before her fall and prosecution. It is stories like these that complicate and illuminate the narrative of prostitution in Argentina, and I wish there had been more of these throughout the book.Yarfitz's book is a strong contribution to the growing historiography of ethnicity, gender, and prostitution in Latin America. Because of its international focus, this work, more than others, engages with the ongoing debates about the nature of sex work, victimization, and women exercising agency in their own lives. The book will be of great interest to scholars and graduate students working on topics related to Jewish Latin America and early twentieth-century Argentina, as well as to anyone interested in the worldwide prostitution networks of the era.

Sport, Science, and the Social Question in Early Twentieth-Century Argentina: An Analysis of Parliamentary Discussions, 1907–1924

This research reveals an unexplored aspect of Argentina’s sport policy-making process during the first three decades of the twentieth century. Contrary to the common assumption that little attention was paid to sport by early twentieth-century politicians, several bills proposing institutional support for the promotion and organization of national sport were presented in the Argentinean legislature. In order to support these proposals, many legislators resorted to medical and physiological discourse as the most important legitimizing force. Poverty, poor hygiene, and epidemic diseases, generated by rapid modernization and urbanization, urged some turn-of-the-century Argentine political elites to attempt a degree of social intervention within the general framework of the liberal-conservative order, as a way to counteract these evils and further advance the national progress enjoyed since the nineteenth century. In this context, sport was ardently advocated by some politicians as a means to raise scientifically the physical and moral constitution of the ‘Argentinean race’.

“Noble and Delicate Sentiments”

This article explores the emotional community of museum natural scientists in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Argentina, a context in which the growth of museum natural sciences and nation-state formation became closely intertwined. Influenced by powerful nineteenth-century notions of civilization and modernity, Argentine scientists and statemakers sought to create a distinctively Argentine science, which would emulate European science in form but also retain a uniquely national character. A small group of influential museum administrators and scientists consciously strove to strengthen science’s influence in Argentine national society by creating communal norms among scientists that resonated with narratives about civilization and modernity, and that guided proper behavior and emotional expression. Scientists also challenged the expectations of their community, testing the strength of central emotional tenets such as patriotism and objectivity. This article uses emotional communities as a framework for exploring the push and pull between social patterns and individual choices in this critical moment in Argentina’s history, when new and powerful ideas about science—as a modern, objective, and national practice—emerged in tandem with nation-state formation. In particular, this article explores museum natural scientists’ emotional concerns with objectivity and patriotism through a small group of Argentine museum natural scientists: Francisco P. Moreno, Juan B. Ambrosetti, Hermann Burmeister, and Florentino Ameghino.

Legal Culture and State Building: Liberal Constitutionalism and Droit Administratif in early Twentieth Century Argentina

This paper deals with the ways in which jurists and law professors applied transnational systems of public law, in particular US constitutionalism and French droit administratif, in their approaches to the state building process in late nineteenth century Argentina. In covering these movements of adaptation of a nascent legal culture to changing ideological and political circumstances, this article attempts to illuminate the strong links between the process of institutionalization of certain academic disciplines or forms of social knowledge, and modern state building in Latin America.

Photographic Propaganda under Peronism, 1946–55: Selections from the Archivo General de la Nación Argentina

This article analyses a representative selection of photographs from the Archivo General de la Nación Argentina produced by an army of photographers who assiduously chronicled Eva and Juan Domingo Perón’s public engagements. These images were shrewdly informed by an array of popular forms (tango lyrics, the storylines of photo–romances, movies, and radio serials), and by a set of visual models borrowed from the nineteenth-century photography tradition, commercial photography studios of celebrities, Hollywood fashion codes, Soviet-related paradigms anchored in the legacy of the socialist and anarchist movements of early twentieth-century Argentina, and from royal and religious iconography. Through their careful staging before the camera, Perón and Eva amalgamated these visual traditions with their political content in order to reach and unify the multiple socio-political constituencies of Argentina at the time. The conventional aesthetic – in terms of view angles, lighting, and composition – of such images granted their movement a patina of legitimacy and the sense of an enduring legacy.

Glass lantern slides and visual instruction for school teachers in early twentieth-century Argentina

The first institution to promote teacher training for the elementary education system in Argentina – Escuela Normal de Paraná – was created in 1871. Among many teaching aids, this institution had an important collection of lantern slides. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the place of images and visual instruction in the training of teachers in Argentina in the early twentieth century. The paper explores the geographical sub-collection of an archive of 4700 glass lantern slides by focusing on its topics, visual content and structure. The archival organization is analyzed to understand its use as a modernizing pedagogy in an institution that privileged expertise in teaching methods. It is argued that the pedagogic use of lantern slides raised two areas of tension. On the one hand, as a visual technology associated with entertainment, lantern slides had to be recontextualized as a pedagogic aid. On the other hand, the lack of awareness of Argentinean landscapes in foreign slide collections became a problematic issue particularly in the teaching of geography. In order to be conceived as an appropriate form of visual imagery displayed in schools, glass lantern slides were reframed as part of a scientific method of instruction and a national corpus of knowledge.

The Topos of the Guitar in Late Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century Argentina

Regarded as the “national instrument,” the guitar pervades Argentine culture both as musical artifact and cultural emblem. Its image, whether literary, visual, or musical, has been consistently used by Argentine artists and intellectuals to evoke images of argentinidad, or Argentineness. The play of metonymies in which the guitar stands for Argentina, the Pampa, or a woman (who in turn signifies the motherland) is a recurrent feature in Argentine literature. No example can be more pertinent than Jorge Luis Borges's celebrated poem La guitarra, in which the instrument is represented as the shelter wherein the Pampa is hidden, and its music the key that enables the author to grasp its immensity. ... The image of the guitar is also one of the most significant topoi of the rhetoric of Argentine musical nationalism, ranging from the relatively direct, iconic evocations of strummed and plucked accompaniments employed by early nationalist composers, such as Alberto Williams and Julián Aguirre, to the more abstract “symbolic chord” formed by the sounds of the open strings of the guitar (E–A–d–g–b–e′) that became one of Alberto Ginastera's trademarks.2

Boedo Circense: Leónidas Barletta, Raúl González Tuñón, and the Limits of Tradition

The circus and circensian practices lend themselves particularly well to the Latin American avant-gardes as privileged proletarian spaces encompassing both the “crafty” extreme of carnival—in Bakhtin’s sense of subversive and artisan—as well as the commercial, technological aspects of the emerging mass media. This article focuses on the circus as a key link between traditional and modern culture in early twentieth-century Argentina. In particular, it examines the writing of Leónidas Barletta and Raúl González Tuñón, both figures loosely associated with the avant-garde Boedo movement. In the work of these writers, I argue, the circus operates primarily metonymically rather than metaphorically: through a series of interventions, principally Tuñón’s early poems and Barletta’s novel Royal Circo , the working-class suburb of Buenos Aires is laid out as a living theater of marginality in which the circus performs a central role. In his novel, Barletta sees the circensian as a site of greed and hunger in need of either liquidation or refinement—the latter option put to practice in Barletta’s later work as founder and director of the influential Teatro del Pueblo. Tuñón, on the other hand, reconstitutes the circensian as a vital “osmotic” space between memory and modernity, in the process showing how apparently marginal cultural practices could be reconstituted through literary expression.

Chimneys in the Desert: Industrialization in Argentina during the Export Boom Years, 1870 – 1930

The high rate of Argentine industrial growth between 1930 and 1970 took place under an umbrella of protectionism and government intervention in the economy that developed as a worldwide trend. During this era, Argentine scholars from across the political spectrum concluded that industrial growth could not take place on the global economic periphery without these interventionist policies. From populism to desarrollismo, the consensus claimed that industrialization and economic liberalism (that is, free trade policies coupled with a laissez-faire state) were incompatible. In this wide-ranging analysis of socioeconomic transformation in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Argentina, Fernando Rocchi questions this “canonical version” of Argentine industrial growth. He analyzes how these assumptions have led to contemporary historiography’s failure to grasp several crucial developments in turn-of-the-century Argentine economic life.Rocchi contends that this canonical view of economic development was not based on empirical research. On the contrary, it was originally the institutional stance of the Argentine Industrial Union (UIA) and over the course of the century came to dominate both academic scholarship and public debate. In opposition to this view, Rocchi stresses the importance of pre-1930s industrial development and explores, from an innovative and comparative vantage point, the economic obstacles to what he qualifies as a midway industrialization. Historians frequently associate the Argentine economy during the period examined by Rocchi with an agro-export model endorsed by the landowning liberal elite. According to this interpretation, the Argentine elite were bound by their connection with the British industrial economy and were thus driven by their immediate material interests into upholding laissez-faire policies that prevented them from pursuing protectionist measures, encouraging affordable access to credit, and instituting the panoply of incentives necessary for industrial development.Wielding extensive empirical data collected from the archives of several countries, Rocchi demonstrates that the Argentine state did not adhere to a dogmatic economic liberalism but rather developed a pragmatic and eclectic approach involving a combination of protectionism in some branches of production and the application of liberal principles to other branches. Even in the absence of comprehensive state protectionist policies, the rise of the exchange rate after the cyclical crises of the period encouraged weak, middling, and strong forms of import substitution in different branches of industrial protection. These cycles were part and parcel of a stop- and-go logic of economic development that historians have overlooked largely due to the overarching characterization of the period as one of widespread social progress. British firms responded to the periodic upsurges of import substitution pragmatically, often investing in Argentine industrial development when it provided ample opportunities for profit. In addition to an examination of these processes, the author analyzes the records of the UIA, the major banks, and several key industries and in turn demonstrates the widespread existence of affordable credit.This detailed empirical analysis leads Rocchi to develop new explanations for a query of long-standing importance in the economic historiography of Latin America: why did Argentina fail to develop an advanced industrialized economy along the lines of western Europe and North America, despite being one of the world’s wealthiest countries in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries? This question not only haunts the work of historians and economists; it has been at the center of several decades of public debate in Argentina. According to Rocchi, the obstacles faced by Argentine industry in its early period largely stemmed from the small-scale character of the domestic economy, a problem that Stephen Haber also found for the Porfiriato. This fruitful comparison with other Latin American countries was absent from previous generations of scholarship. The focus on the specificity of Argentine development and the eschewing of a comparative approach that characterizes traditional Argentine historiography stemmed largely from a belief in the country’s exceptionalism in relation to the rest of Latin America. Rocchi’s work provides a much-needed and persuasive corrective to the narrow focus of many studies of Argentine social and economic change.One of the fundamental insights of Rocchi’s approach lies in his analysis of industrialization in relation to the development of domestic demand. His innovative study usefully deploys recent “demand-side” interpretations of social and economic development in Europe and North America. The stress on the importance of patterns of consumption allows for new insights often ignored in studies adhering strictly to an interpretation based on the agro-export economic model. The author contends that only the importance of consumer demand can explain why the boycotting of various products became an important strategy for working-class organizations in this period. The attempt to establish and maintain high levels of demand informed both the strategy of industrial firms that sought to develop a paternalist relationship with workers and the impulse to establish a unified market on a national scale. Focusing on the nature of domestic demand also allows Rocchi to observe that the limited scale of the market favored the economic performance of large industries that successfully produced for the entire market, as well as small workshops that specialized in order to meet the needs of a particular niche. In this context, middle-sized establishments faced great difficulties and were largely unable to survive in the market. Rocchi powerfully demonstrates how the development of consumption colored Argentine economic life as a whole.Despite Rocchi’s detailed analysis of industrialization, his work overlooks some important aspects of the Argentine economy. Due to his overwhelming focus on local demand, Rocchi does not consider the seasonal nature of export-oriented industrial production. The emphasis on demand also neglects crucial aspects of the sphere of production, such as the labor process, working conditions, and the political practices of the working class. Although these topics are present in the book, they are mostly reduced to an analysis of the levels of mechanization, the gender division of labor, and the paternalist bonds established between industrialists and workers. Finally, the author’s analysis of the emergence of consumer society in relation to the sophistication of taste in Argentina — in contrast with other Latin American countries — is in tension with his critique of traditional historiography’s assumption of Argentine exceptionalism. Nevertheless, these pitfalls do not detract from the very important departures that Rocchi makes from traditional Argentine economic historiography and its long-cherished account of the country’s industrial development.

‘Things fall apart; the center cannot hold’: Cores, peripheries and peripheral nationalism at the core and periphery of the world economy

In the past several years social scientists have elaborated ‘core- periphery models’ of political change. Such models sought to overcome the nation-state and ‘whole-nation’ bias in comparative research. In these models cores and peripheries are distinguished by three characteristics: a set of attributes for each, characteristics of exchange relations and characteristics of interaction patterns. Central to these models is a territorial structuring of political behavior in which cores and peripheries form geographical contexts for politics. Thus, spatial relations between cores and peripheries achieve significant explanatory power with diffusion processes from the core to the periphery and the peripheral reaction to these playing a key role in accounting for political behavior in each. One such political manifestation is peripheral nationalism, defined as an emotive reaction of cultural defense against the diffusion of economic, political and cultural dominance from the core. This paper examines three explanations for the rise of peripheral nationalism in late nineteenth-century Britain and early twentieth-century Argentina, marking two sites in the core and periphery of the world system. The results demonstrate similarities in social origins of peripheral nationalism at both sites as the product of the economically and culturally marginal middle strata threatened by the expanding influence of the core. However, the research also supports the hypothesis that at the periphery of the world economy during times of economic contraction the economically and culturally marginal lower strata may be mobilized into mass movements. The research concludes that both within-nation-state and global core-periphery dynamics provide concepts for understanding political behavior.

Tenant Mobilization and the 1907 Rent Strike in Buenos Aires

In September of 1907, the residents of a largeconventillo, or tenement house, in Buenos Aires protested a 47 percent rent increase by striking against their landlord and refusing to pay. The strikers called on the residents of other rental buildings to join with them and organized a central committee. The strike spread quickly. By October 1 tenants from more than 750 buildings had joined in the strike. That number increased to nearly 2,000 buildings before the end of 1907. Neighborhood and building committees arose throughout the city as nearly one tenth of the total population of Buenos Aires, and tenants in several other major cities as well, joined the strike in one of the largest and most unusual forms of working-class collective action in early twentieth-century Argentina.