James P. Brennan

The Argentine Silent Majority: Middle Classes, Politics, Violence, and Memory in the Seventies by Sebastián Carassai (review)

In 1969, Richard Nixon, coined the term “silent majority” in a famous speech in which he outlined his plans for the Vietnam War. Rather than presenting the “secret plan” to end the war as he had promised in the 1968 presidential campaign, Nixon appealed to the country’s “silent majority” to support a “peace with honor.” Nixon’s silent majority cut across class lines and included the American working class who, the newly-elected Republican president rightly believed, overwhelmingly supported the war and opposed an ignominious withdrawal of American troops before victory.

Chimneys in the Desert: Industrialization in Argentina During the Export Boom Years, 1870-1930 (review)

idea is that all of them fall within “cultural studies,” a broad term that covers a wide gamut of theories about Latin American culture: from ideas of national identity and national icons, to differing cultural practices that also define culture and identity, as in the case of football, soap operas and boleros. The individual essays are well written and complex. The volume provides a tour of where and what the discipline is, along the way providing many examples. It serves as an insightful and flavorful guide to current issues of cultural discourses in Latin America.

Poor Peopleis Politics: Peronist Survival Networks and the Legacy of Evita (review)

tial similarities and saw in South Africa a model they should avoid. In the discussion on the 1890s (the more important and interesting of the two decades), the author might have stressed the importance of the boundary dispute with Chile more strongly. Prospects of war with Chile deepened efforts to recruit the support of the Italian community and to assimilate the immigrants. War-mongering created the brand of late-nineteenth-century rabble-rousing nationalism, fanned by the tabloid journalism, known as jingoism. In Argentina, La Prensa of Buenos Aires led the press in the same direction as William Randolph Hearst in the United States and Lord Northcliffe in Britain. In the late 1890s, during the same conflict, conservative politicians such as Zeballos launched the first populist movements in Buenos Aires, which became prototypes of the mass movements of the twentieth century. The rise of popular nationalism in Argentina is closely related to changes in urban society and to the looming issue of social and political control in a multiethnic and multiclass society.