CULTURE OF CLASS

Radio and Cinema in the Making of a Divided Argentina, 1920&ndash1946By MATTHEW B. KARUSH

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2012 Duke University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-5243-3

Contents

Acknowledgments……………………………………………….1Introduction………………………………………………….191 Class Formation in the Barrios………………………………..432 Competing in the Transnational Marketplace……………………..853 Repackaging Popular Melodrama…………………………………1334 Mass-Cultural Nation Building…………………………………1775 Politicizing Populism………………………………………..215Epilogue The Rise of the Middle Class, 1955-1976…………………225Notes………………………………………………………..251Bibliography………………………………………………….269

Chapter One

CLASS FORMATION IN THE BARRIOS

Los tres berretines (1933), one of Argentina’s earliest feature-length sound films, is a comic meditation on modernization, consumerism, and mass culture. An opening montage of congested downtown streets set to jazz music establishes the film’s setting in cosmopolitan, chaotic, ultra-modern Buenos Aires. The camera then leaves the city center and enters one of the quieter outlying barrios. Here, the hubbub is created not by cars and pedestrians but by a group of kids playing soccer in the street. The camera settles on the exterior of a hardware store and then moves inside, where the owner, the Spanish immigrant Manuel Sequeiro, is helping two women interested in purchasing an electric bed warmer. The women are dissatisfied with the model the store owner shows them. It seems this apparatus is “vulgar,” not at all like the ones they have seen in the movies and in magazines. Manuel declares that he doesn’t sell “cinematic bed warmers” and angrily shoos the women out of his store. His bad mood worsens when the soccer ball the kids are playing with flies through the front door, smashing into the merchandise. Cinema and soccer are, along with tango, the three berretines, or “popular passions,” of the film’s title. And like his store, Manuel’s value system has been upended by these new mass cultural practices and the desires they have awakened. As we soon learn, his wife and daughter have abandoned their domestic responsibilities in favor of frequent trips to the cinema with a male friend of dubious sexuality. One of his three sons wastes his days fantasizing about making it as a tango composer despite his complete lack of musical education, while another dreams of becoming a star soccer player. Meanwhile, the economic crisis of the period has dampened the prospects of his one worthy son, an unemployed architect whose financial difficulties are about to cost him his upper-class girlfriend. Manuel’s traditional values—hard work, patriarchy, education—seem suddenly useless, replaced by the consumerist titillation offered by movies, tango, and soccer. Yet the film offers a happy ending. Although denounced as “bums” by their father, both the tango composer and the soccer player find success. The latter becomes a star forward and convinces the management of his club to hire his architect brother to design the new stadium, thereby rescuing him from poverty and allowing him to marry his girlfriend. In the end, Manuel himself embraces the new mass culture, climbing a telephone pole in order to join thousands of fans cheering on his soccer-playing son.

Most obviously, Los tres berretines is about the quest for upward mobility: both Manuel’s commitment to work and education and his sons’ pursuit of success on the stage or in the stadium are strategies for improving one’s class position. But between these two paths from rags to riches, the film clearly sides with the pursuit of stardom, poking fun at both the immigrant’s faith in hard work and his pursuit of middleclass respectability. Lorenzo, the soccer-playing son, saves the day and Eduardo, the architect, gets the girl, but the star is unmistakably Luis Sandrini, who plays Eusebio, the would-be tango composer. Spending the day hanging out in café, happily whistling his tango and being victimized by swindlers who promise to help him get it transcribed, Eusebio poses a clear alternative to the gospel of hard work and personifies mass culture’s promise of an escape from drudgery (see figure 1). Moreover, Eusebio’s success as a composer depends upon his rejecting pretentiousness and embracing plebeian tastes: when he pays a café poet to write lyrics for his tango, he rejects the first draft as too fancy and holds out for what the poet disdains as “pedestrian verses.” The result is “Araca la cana” (“Look Out for the Cops”), a tale of frustrated love told almost entirely in lunfardo, the famously disreputable porteño slang. Similarly, the final, carnivalesque image of Don Manuel perched on the telephone pole outside the soccer stadium underscores the defeat of his apparently old-fashioned notions of respectability. Manuel has overcome his condescension toward Argentine mass culture; he has recognized the value and the beauty of both tango and soccer. If the third berretín is excluded from this happy resolution—Lorenzo’s soccer success “cures” his sister and mother of their unhealthy cinema addiction—it might well be because the movies being shown in Buenos Aires theaters in 1933 were overwhelmingly foreign productions. Like the cinematic bed warmer of the opening scene, these imports are merely the occasion for frivolous, unproductive consumption. By contrast, Argentina’s domestically produced mass culture is productive; it has reunited the Sequeiro family and enabled its immigrant patriarch both to reconcile himself to the modern world and to assimilate into the nation.

Los tres berretines must be understood in the context of a complex process of class formation under way in the Buenos Aires of 1933. During the preceding decade, dynamic economic growth and industrial development produced significant social mobility, a mushrooming consumer culture, and the rapid expansion of new barrios that were home to a heterogeneous population of blue- and white-collar workers as well as small business owners and professionals. But if these developments encouraged a blurring of class distinctions, Los tres berretines reveals forces pushing in the opposite direction. While Eduardo’s commitment to hard work and education leaves him unemployed, his brothers succeed precisely by rejecting those values. This film, like so many other mass cultural products in these years, celebrates the cultural practices of Argentina’s poor, not the diligence of its upwardly mobile architects. The movie’s rags-to-riches narrative reads as escapist fantasy, a fantasy that spoke not to typical, middle-class values like hard work, education, and respectability, but to a sense of pride in Argentina’s plebeian popular culture. The resonance and power of such populist messages in the mass culture of this period suggest that class-based identities persisted in these years.

This chapter will situate the emergence of Argentina’s new mass cultural technologies and commodities within the context of the rapidly changing economic, political, and social conditions in Buenos Aires. Although the radio and cinema reached a massive audience throughout the country, both media targeted the capital city first and foremost. And in the rapidly growing barrios of Buenos Aires, class identity was very much in flux. Residents of these neighborhoods were the targets of various competing and contradictory messages: from commercial advertising’s promises of upward mobility to the barrio improvement associations’ paeans to progress and “culture,” from the appeals to national unity favored by politicians to the labor movement’s insistence on working-class solidarity. This was not a population that had sorted itself into rigid, class segments. Since mass cultural entrepreneurs needed to build an audience within this milieu, their radio programs and movies were influenced by existing discourses. Nevertheless, the fluidity of class identities in this period meant that the new mass culture would exert a profound influence of its own on the consciousness of porteños. During the 1920s and 1930s, many porteños would follow the Sequeiro family in embracing a nation constructed in large part by mass culture.

MOBILITY AND ETHNIC INTEGRATION IN A TIME OF GROWTH

Beginning in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, Argentina experienced a vertiginous process of economic growth, demographic expansion, and modernization. The nation’s insertion into an increasingly globalized economy as a major producer of wool, beef, and wheat led to impressive growth rates and massive immigration. Between 1875 and 1930, Argentina’s population exploded from two million to twelve million, and its gross domestic product increased by a factor of 20. And despite its long-standing image as an essentially agrarian country, Argentina also achieved significant levels of industrialization in this period, both in sectors connected to the export business as well as in the production of consumer goods for the growing domestic market. By 1914, in fact, the industrial sector was the nation’s largest employer, and 58 percent of the population lived in cities. The social and cultural transformations that accompanied these processes were dramatic to say the least, and nowhere were they more evident than in the city of Buenos Aires. Although the export boom of the late nineteenth century led to the rapid growth of several provincial cities, Buenos Aires dominated the nation’s banking system, its import and export trade, and its nascent industrial sector. The political and economic primacy of the capital city imposed a severe limit on development elsewhere: by 1914 Greater Buenos Aires was home to 25 percent of the nation’s population, a proportion that would continue to rise in subsequent decades.

Paradoxically, the massive scale of immigration to Argentina in this period may have facilitated a relatively rapid process of national integration. Historians have long questioned the popular image of the country as a melting pot, in which a national culture emerged magically from the blending of various European strains. Immigrants often preferred to marry people of the same ethnic and even regional background, and this preference likely slowed the process of assimilation. Moreover, regional and ethnic identities flourished in the host country, nurtured in part by an extensive network of ethnic mutual aid associations, clubs, newspapers, and other institutions. By 1925, for example, the Spanish community in Buenos Aires enjoyed a total of 237 voluntary associations. Italians, the largest immigrant group in Argentina, did not lag far behind. In 1908 there were seventy-four Italian mutual aid societies in Buenos Aires with a total membership of more than fifty thousand. Nevertheless, these ethnic affiliations did not prevent the rapid Argentinization of the immigrant population. The fact that men always outnumbered women within the immigrant communities forced a great many Italians and Spaniards to marry Argentine women. And fragmentary evidence indicates that the Argentine-born children of immigrants tended not to take ethnicity into account when choosing a spouse.

More important, immigrants in Argentina were not marginalized to the extent that they were in other host societies. This is not to deny that Argentine elites and intellectuals were often extremely xenophobic. During the early twentieth century, anarchist mobilization helped inspire a profound anxiety about the effects of immigration, and the state responded with repressive deportation measures and an intensely patriotic curriculum in the schools. Still, other, less coercive forces were at work. Unlike, say, New York City, Buenos Aires was never a city of ghettos. In fact, in 1910 the Argentine capital had one of the lowest average indices of ethnic segregation in the world, a pattern that continued as the city expanded. Similarly, immigrants in Argentina were far less likely to be relegated to certain occupations at the bottom of the social structure. The major immigrant groups were well represented among property owners and within the Argentine elite.

Even if the notion of a melting pot is too simplistic, the pioneering Argentine sociologist Gino Germani was probably right to argue that what might be seen as the assimilation of immigrants into a dominant culture is more accurately described as a process of cultural “fusion.” Given the small size of the pre-immigration population, immigrants enjoyed a demographic dominance in Argentina that they lacked anywhere else. By 1914 foreign-born men outnumbered native-born men in Buenos Aires and several other cities. That same year, 80 percent of the Argentine population was composed of immigrants and the descendants of people who had immigrated since 1850. Although the country was home to significant communities of Russians, Poles, and Ottoman Turks, the majority of immigrants came from Italy and Spain. As a result, the religious, cultural, and even linguistic differences between immigrant and native populations were minimized. Immigrants could not, of course, reproduce Old World societies in America, but they did fundamentally remake Argentine culture. This impact is partly visible in the many Italian and Spanish customs adopted as Argentine: the opera and the zarzuela, which dominated popular entertainment offerings in the early decades of the twentieth century, or the pasta, pizza, and puchero that continue to be staples of the local diet. But ethnic integration is perhaps even more obvious in what might be called cases of “invisible ethnicity.” The Podestá brothers, Uruguayan-born sons of Genoese immigrants, virtually invented the circo criollo, an enormously popular turn-of-the-century entertainment that celebrated the rustic talents and culture of the Pampas. Their ethnic origin posed no obstacle to their ability to play the role of quintessentially Argentine gaucho heroes like Juan Moreira. Similarly, when Argentine soccer teams played rivals from abroad, sports columnists saw the local players as representatives of a criollo, or native, style, regardless of their actual ethnicity. The Argentine club Provincia that faced a visiting Scottish team in 1928 included such surnames on its starting roster as Bearzotti, Talenti, Tornatti, and Lunghi, yet they were described by one reporter as “a team of native boys (muchachos criollos).”

In truth, ethnic identity had not disappeared, so much as it had been relativized. Immigrants continued to be the butt of jokes as they had been since the late nineteenth century, when the character of Cocoliche was created in order to ridicule Italian newcomers for their broken Spanish and their desperate efforts to assimilate. But by the turn of the century, cocoliches were clowns whose participation was required in any enactment of criollo or native culture; the presence of an Italian immigrant now lent authenticity to representations of the nation. Similarly, making fun of immigrants was the central comic ploy of the sainete, the short play that dominated porteño theater in the early decades of the twentieth century. Increasingly, though, this humor had a gentle, lighthearted tone. By the 1920s many sainetes depicted the embarrassment that the children of immigrants felt for the awkward and old-fashioned customs of their parents. By laughing at these jokes, audiences were not only teasing immigrants; they were also endorsing the assimilationist project of the second generation. Los tres berretines, which originated as a sainete, reveals the same attitude: Manuel Sequeiro is comically out of touch with current Argentine popular culture, but successful assimilation requires only that he learn to love the soccer and tango music of his sons. In the 1920s immigrants continued to be targets for xenophobic, nationalist intellectuals as well as for playwrights pursuing an easy laugh, but their children were widely seen as Argentine. Ethnic affiliations persisted, as the vitality of Italian and Spanish mutual aid associations attests, but they did not block the emergence of more inclusive, hybrid forms of national identity.

Immigration came to an abrupt halt in 1930, when the international Depression began to take a significant toll on the Argentine economy. The end of the era of massive immigration reinforced the declining significance of ethnic division, as the proportion of foreigners in the Argentine population fell from 40 percent in 1930 to 26 percent in 1947. But economic developments continued to reshape the population of Buenos Aires. Although the interruption of international trade reversed nearly a decade of strong economic growth, the Argentine economy recovered more quickly than most of the more developed world. By 1934 grain exports had resumed, and economic recovery was in full swing. Meanwhile, the Depression had provoked a deepening of the process of import substitution industrialization under way since the 1890s. Led by growth in textiles, the manufacturing sector boomed. As David Rock notes, “In 1935, the value of industrial production was still 40 percent below that of the agrarian sector; in 1943 industry surpassed agriculture for the first time.” Beginning in the late 1930s, this industrial growth produced a significant flow of migrants from country to city. Between 1937 and 1947, 750,000 migrants, mostly from the neighboring provinces of Buenos Aires, Santa Fe, Entre Ríos, Corrientes, and Córdoba, arrived in Greater Buenos Aires, where they now represented a significant proportion of the growing industrial workforce.

(Continues…)

Excerpted from CULTURE OF CLASSby MATTHEW B. KARUSH Copyright © 2012 by Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.