Matthew B. Karush

National Identity in the Sports Pages: Football and the Mass Media in 1920s Buenos Aires

The 1920s saw the emergence of a distinctive, new urban culture in the city of Buenos Aires. Although this culture did not extend to the borders of the nation, it was a national culture in the sense that it continually manufactured and reproduced images of Argentine national identity. Research conducted over the last two decades has greatly improved our understanding of this new culture. We know that it was, to a great extent, forged in the citys new, outlying barrios where manual workers lived side by side with skilled workers and members of the middle class. The relatively strong performance of the Argentine economy during these years made social mobility a more for realistic aspiration for more people than it had ever been before. Partly as a result of this economic reality, the new barrio culture revealed a less militant attitude on the part of porteño workers, a trend visible as well in the significant decline in membership and effectiveness experienced by labor unions. But the new cultural milieu reflected more than just economic prosperity; it was intimately tied to the birth of a mass culture disseminated by radio, cinema, and tabloid. In particular, the 1920s witnessed the commodification and massification of tango and football, two popular cultural practices that were now transformed into quintessential representations of Argentinidad.

The New Cultural History of Peronism: Power and Identity in Mid-Twentieth-Century Argentina

In nearly every account of modern Argentine history, the first Peronist regime (1946–55) emerges as the critical juncture. Appealing to growing masses of industrial workers, Juan Peron built a powerful populist movement that transformed economic and political structures, promulgated new conceptions and representations of the nation, and deeply polarized the Argentine populace. Yet until now, most scholarship on Peronism has been constrained by a narrow, top-down perspective. Inspired by the pioneering work of the historian Daniel James and new approaches to Latin American cultural history, scholars have recently begun to rewrite the history of mid-twentieth-century Argentina. The New Cultural History of Peronism brings together the best of this important new scholarship. Situating Peronism within the broad arc of twentieth-century Argentine cultural change, the contributors focus on the interplay of cultural traditions, official policies, commercial imperatives, and popular perceptions. They describe how the Peron regime’s rhetoric and representations helped to produce new ideas of national and collective identity. At the same time, they show how Argentines pursued their interests through their engagement with the Peronist project, and, in so doing, pushed the regime in new directions. While the volume’s emphasis is on the first Peron presidency, one contributor explores the origins of the regime and two others consider Peronism’s transformations in subsequent years. The essays address topics including mass culture and melodrama, folk music, pageants, social respectability, architecture, and the intense emotional investment inspired by Peronism. They examine the experiences of women, indigenous groups, middle-class anti-Peronists, internal migrants, academics, and workers. By illuminating the connections between the state and popular consciousness, The New Cultural History of Peronism exposes the contradictions and ambivalences that have characterized Argentine populism. Contributors : Anahi Ballent, Oscar Chamosa, Maria Damilakou, Eduardo Elena, Matthew B. Karush, Diana Lenton, Mirta Zaida Lobato, Natalia Milanesio, Mariano Ben Plotkin, Cesar Seveso, Lizel Tornay

Reinventing the Latin in Latin Jazz: The Music and Career of Gato Barbieri

This article examines the career of Gato Barbieri, a jazz saxophonist from Argentina who relocated to the United States in the 1960s. In this new setting, audiences and critics saw Barbieri as “Latin,” an ethnic category and a musical descriptor that meant nothing to him before he left home. By negotiating the distance between his own sense of self and the perceptions of North American jazz musicians and critics, Barbieri developed a distinctive musical persona. Engaging with the highly politicized free jazz movement and with novel forms of protest jazz, Barbieri articulated Latin-ness as an irreducible difference and an implicit critique of white, North American power and privilege. Since he had no interest or expertise in Latin American music until after he left Argentina, it makes little sense to see him as the bearer of a Latin musical tradition. On the contrary, his musical innovations were the result of the agency he was able to exercise within global structures in which Latin America was associated with exotic, earthy rhythms and with values such as passion and sensuality. At the same time, these associations also limited the ideological challenge posed by his music: Barbieri eventually embraced conventional musical signifiers and thereby reinforced North American stereotypes about Latin identity.

Los Artistas del Pueblo: Prints and Workers' Culture in Buenos Aires, 1917-1935 (review)

Patrick Frank’s carefully researched study offers the only book-length analysis of “the first sustained and organized movement of Social Realism” (p. 18) in Latin America. The Argentine printmakers Adolfo Bellocq, José Arato, Guillermo Facio Hebequer, and Abraham Vigo formed Los Artistas del Pueblo around 1917. (Frank leaves out sculptor Agustín Riganelli, the fifth member of the group, because he worked in a different medium and achieved greater recognition than the other four.) For the next two decades, they rejected both modernism and the stultifying Buenos Aires art establishment in order to produce prints that expressed a deep empathy for the poor and encouraged workers to organize and fight to improve their lives.

The Argentina Reader: History, Culture, Politics (review)

Argentine historiography is haunted by a narrative of decline: a once prosperous, sophisticated, even democratic society gives way over the course of the twentieth century to a third-world economy and an unstable, often barbaric political system. And simplistic, reductive explanations for this disaster are far too common. With this expertly selected collection of primary documents and scholarly works, Gabriela Nouzeilles and Graciela Montaldo have avoided these pitfalls and presented instead a rich and complex introduction to Argentina. For college instructors seeking an English language anthology for a course on Argentine history and culture, this work is simply indispensable.