This article examines the survival strategies employed by the widows of railway workers in Argentina during the early twentieth century. Rather than portraying these women as passive recipients of assistance from trade unions or railway companies, this study highlights their active agency in securing financial support. Through petitions, legal claims, and persistent negotiations, widows sought compensation, pensions, or employment opportunities to sustain their households after the loss of their husbands, many of whom had died in work-related accidents. While railway companies often resisted granting compensation, widows strategically navigated bureaucratic and legal structures, sometimes leveraging union support or mobilizing collective solidarity. Their actions challenge conventional narratives of working-class women’s dependence, revealing instead a landscape of struggle, resilience, and negotiation. Ultimately, this study contributes to broader discussions on gender, labour, and social protection in industrializing Latin America. It sheds new light on how widows intervened and participated in the construction of union senses and practices of solidarity advocating for their rights in a male-dominated sphere.

Feminist Rehearsals is a comparative study of Argentine and Mexican theatre as it intersected with the struggles for women’s rights in the first half of the twentieth century. It is essential reading for all students and scholars of Latin American theatre and performance.

Does proportionality increase turnout? This article studies a national electoral reform in early twentieth-century Argentina that was implemented asymmetrically across districts, creating a natural laboratory in which some districts oscillated between electoral systems across elections. Leveraging this unusual variation in a difference-in-differences design, this article shows that a shift from multi-member plurality rules towards a slightly more proportional system—which removed one-third of the contested seats from the grasp of the dominant party—led to a four percentage point increase in turnout. An investigation into causal mechanisms indicates that more proportional rules, by increasing the odds that smaller parties obtain seats, promoted strategic party entry and intensified electoral competition, both between and within parties. These findings complement existing quasi-experimental results that focus exclusively on elections in European democracies, confirm that parties are able to adapt immediately to changes in electoral rules, and refute the belief that proportionality does not affect turnout in Latin America.

Feminist Rehearsals: Gender at the Theatre in Early Twentieth-Century Argentina and Mexico (review)

Feminist Rehearsals: Gender at the Theatre in Early Twentieth-Century Argentina and Mexico by May Summer Farnsworth (review)

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 e-book. - Volume 65 Issue 1

Military and Catholicisms in Twentieth-Century Argentina: from a Political and Ideological History to a Social and Cultural History

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

The article analyzes the way in which the so-called "antipositivist reaction" was deployed in the Argentine philosophical field at the beginning of the twentieth century and its relationship with the politicization and professionalization of philosophy. The paper reconstructs the controversy over the definition of philosophy established by the group of young people who in 1917 founded in Buenos Aires the Colegio Novecentista and the Cuadernos (1917-1919) with whom they defended socialist scientism and met around the Journal of Philosophy and its director José Ingenieros. Inscribed in intellectual history, this reconstruction attends to the history of the book and the edition to illuminate the material channels that made possible the circulation of the antipositivist reaction and offers new information about the initial trajectory of intellectuals who were relevant both in the philosophical and literary field of twentieth-century Argentina.

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.

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.

Charles W. Bergquist (1942–2020)

Peronism is one of the most conflictive issues in Argentina's history, still generating contrary positions and heated debates. It is impossible to ignore Peronism as one of the counterparts of Argentina's political culture and it is essential to understand it to achieve full knowledge of the twentieth century's Argentina. One of the characteristics of Peronism is the integration and mobilization of popular sectors previously absent from the political scene. By broadening the support base, incorporating industrialists or landowners, encouraging mass unionism and re-organizing the State, Peronism becomes a populist movement. The purpose of this paper is to study Juan Peron's first presidency between 1946 and 1952, focusing on the outcome of his economic and social policies implemented in 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.

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’.

Reviewed by: Theatrical Topographies: Spatial Crises in Uruguayan Theater Post-2001 by Sarah M. Misemer Victoria L. Garrett Misemer, Sarah M. Theatrical Topographies: Spatial Crises in Uruguayan Theater Post-2001. Lewisburg: Bucknell UP, 2017. 215 pp. ISBN: 978-16-1148-797-8. Situating itself in the context of such global crises as Argentina's and Uruguay's 2001/2002 monetary crisis, the 2008/2009 Wall Street financial crisis, the Arab Spring, the rise of ISIS and ISIL, and narcotrafficking, this book examines the expressions of crisis of traditional spaces of power, such as the state, in twenty-first century Uruguayan independent theater. As such global events illustrate, when competing viewpoints or contradictory frameworks of power meet, a crisis is provoked. Theatrical Topographies explores the spaces of such geographic, cultural, social, gendered, and aesthetic crises. Presenting a wealth of knowledge about the independent theater scene, the book focuses on select works by Gabriel Peveroni, Marianella Morena, Santiago Sanguinetti, Gabriel Calderón, and Sergio Blanco. By drawing on cutting edge theories of space, gender, performance, geography, and globalization, Misemer presents fresh and innovative approaches to contemporary theater studies. The first chapter teases out extensive intertextual references between Peveroni's Shanghai and both his two previous plays Groenlandia and Berlin as well as Jorge Luis Borges's "The Garden of Forking Paths." These intertexts open multiple interpretive paths that illuminate contemporary crises related to biopolitics and biotechnology. Misemer analyzes how identity is destabilized through the Shanghai's theme of DNA kits, as well as how the play's global spaces simultaneously evoke different geographies (from other plays and references), their (violent) histories, and themes specific to Uruguay. As she persuasively argues, post-dramatic insertions that disrupt linear plot lines allow for meaning to be produced in the spaces between [End Page 179] different texts, histories, and geographies. The result is a play that questions the efficacy of different economic models and the implications of bodies under biotechnology. Misemer's chapter on sex, gender, and national identity in Morena's work shows how her renditions of the classics Don Juan and Romeo and Juliet position identity and economics as places of crisis, contestation, and ambiguity. She posits that Don Juan: el lugar del beso's emphasis on tongues, oral sex, and consumption repositions feminist discourse over Uruguay's patriarchal landscape and creates an economic space of crisis. Her analysis unveils a connection between Don Juan's infamous sexism and contemporary consumerism, which illustrates the uneven effects of globalization wherein we both consume and are consumed. Misemer aptly explores Las Julietas' use of psychogeography as a critical response to the control represented by urban planning, revealing hidden cartographies and inviting new perceptions of Uruguayan identity in the twenty-first century. Analyzed in the context of other cosmopolitan versions of Romeo and Juliet, Morena's treatment of gender deconstructs, demystifies, and deflates the cultural baggage of Uruguay's national identity to render certain obsessions ridiculous. In Chapter 3, Misemer reads Sanguinetti's Ararat o Las moscas sobre Valkulnichuk and Nuremberg as placing the concept of justice and religion in crisis. Whether evoking the story of Noah's ark, Russia during World War II, or the Holocaust, both works link genocide and justice, as well as World War II and contemporary Uruguay, by focusing on the crisis of human rights and memory. In particular, she focuses on the Jewish Midrashic tradition, which is a performative, improvised act of interpreting scriptures that decenters the text's singular meaning and thus places in crisis univocal accounts of history. Misemer's extended engagement with studies of the ultra-right in twentieth century Argentina effectively makes the case for anti-semitism as a defining political framework for political power in Río de la Plata. Likewise, the insertion of footage from the Nuremberg Trials and Sergei Eisenstein's film Battleship Potemkin evokes Uruguay's recent dictatorship and impunity laws in a way that superimposes disparate geographies and time periods to demonstrate the current emergence of neo-fascism, particularly with the extreme right in Germany and Russia. The result, as she reveals, is a complex engagement with the vexed negotiation between local and international pressures. The final full chapter explores concepts of...

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.

ABSTRACTRecent work on posthegemony has sought to displace the theory of hegemony as the primary mode of understanding politics, particularly with respect to Latin America. However, this work has yet to address the history of the theory of hegemony in Latin America itself. The present article traces the history of the theory of hegemony as a reference point for Marxists in twentieth century Argentina, working through key texts from the theory’s regional introduction by Héctor Agosti, through the work of Pasado y Presente, to that of Ernesto Laclau. I argue that the theory of hegemony in the Argentine context has historically served to place intellectuals and their productions at the centre of history, and has conceived of political strategy and organisation from this perspective. Understanding this limitation and its history, I conclude, will give posthegemony theory the strategic and conceptual bearings by which to surpass the problematic of hegemony.