The Darkening Nation: Race, Neoliberalism and Crisis in Argentina [Paperback ed.] 1786832216, 9781786832214

Citation preview

IBERIAN AND LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES

The Darkening Nation

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Series Editors Professor David George (Swansea University) Professor Paul Garner (University of Leeds) Editorial Board David Frier (University of Leeds) Lisa Shaw (University of Liverpool) Gareth Walters (Swansea University) Rob Stone (University of Birmingham) David Gies (University of Virginia) Catherine Davies (University of London) Richard Cleminson (University of Leeds) Duncan Wheeler (University of Leeds) Jo Labanyi (New York University) Roger Bartra (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México) Other titles in the series Catalonia: National Identity and Cultural Policy Kathryn Crameri Melancholy and Culture: Diseases of the Soul in Golden Age Spain Roger Bartra The Poetics of Otherness in Antonio Machado’s ‘Proverbios y Cantares’ Nicolas ­Fernandez-­Medina The Spanish Golden Age Sonnet John Rutherford María Zambrano: A Life of Poetic Reason and Political Commitment Beatriz Caballero Rodríguez Nationalism and Transnationalism in Spain and Latin America, 1808–1923 Paul Garner and Angel Smith (eds) The Enlightenment in Iberia and ­Ibero-­America Brian Hamnett Graciliano Ramos and the Making of Modern Brazil: Memory, Politics and Identities Sara Brandellero and Lucia Villares (eds)

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IBERIAN AND LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES

The Darkening Nation Race, Neoliberalism and Crisis in Argentina

IGNACIO AGUILÓ

UNIVERSITY OF WALES PRESS 2018

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© Ignacio Aguiló, 2018 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any material form (including photocopying or storing it in any medium by electronic means and whether or not transiently or incidentally to some other use of this publication) without the written permission of the copyright owner. Applications for the copyright owner’s written permission to reproduce any part of this publication should be addressed to the University of Wales Press, 10 Columbus Walk, Brigantine Place, Cardiff CF10 4UP. www.uwp.co.uk British Library CIP A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 978-1-78683-221-4 e-ISBN 978-1-78683-222-1 The right of Ignacio Aguiló to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 79 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Typeset by Mark Heslington Ltd, Scarborough, North Yorkshire Printed by CPI Antony Rowe, Melksham

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¿Te acordás cuando regresaste enamorado de tu viaje por todo Latinoamérica? … Que te sentías latinoamericano … Me decías que para ellos éramos Nueva York, y que por suerte la Argentina nunca iba a estar en el nivel de pobreza que vivían ellos. ¿Te acordás? … Bueno, ahora nos hemos latinoamericanizado, andá al barrio de Once y vas a ver en qué se transformó, otro que un mercado persa. ¿De qué te quejás?, tenés que estar contento, ahora sos un latinoamericano de verdad … Enrique Medina – La espera infinita (2001)

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Contents

Series Editors’ Foreword

ix



List of Figures

xi

Acknowledgements Introduction

xiii 1

Exceptionalism Migration Space Multiculturalism Structure and texts

10 11 15 17 20

1

Neoliberalism and its crisis

25

2

The historical construction of whiteness in Argentina

38

3

Facing darkness in the literature of the crisis

51

Literary production and the crisis 52 ‘Asterix, el encargado’ 57 La Villa62 Cucurto 67 4

‘A Bolivian walks into a bar …’: race in New Argentinian Cinema84 The renovation of Argentinian cinema 86 Bolivia91 Copacabana100

5

Amerindians, fashion models and picketeers

109

Huellas111 La conquista del desierto123 Grupo de Arte Callejero (GAC) 132

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viii Contents 6

Cumbia villera and the new racialised marginality

141

Cumbia music in Argentina 143 The boom of cumbia villera146 Racialising the villero youth149 Afterword

166

Notes

174



203

Works cited

Index

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Series Editors’ Foreword

Over recent decades the traditional ‘languages and literatures’ model in Spanish departments in universities in the United Kingdom has been superseded by a contextual, interdisciplinary and ‘area studies’ approach to the study of the culture, history, society and politics of the Hispanic and Lusophone worlds – categories that extend far beyond the confines of the Iberian Peninsula, not only in Latin America but also to Spanish-speaking and Lusophone Africa. In response to these dynamic trends in research priorities and curriculum development, this series is designed to present both disciplinary and interdisciplinary research within the general field of Iberian and Latin American Studies, particularly studies that explore all aspects of Cultural Production (inter alia literature, film, music, dance, sport) in Spanish, Portuguese, Basque, Catalan, Galician and indigenous languages of Latin America. The series also aims to publish research in the History and Politics of the Hispanic and Lusophone worlds, at the level of both the region and the nation-state, as well as on Cultural Studies that explore the shifting terrains of gender, sexual, racial and postcolonial identities in those same regions.

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List of Figures

Figure 4.1 Figure 5.1 Figure 5.2 Figure 5.3 Figure 5.4 Figure 5.5 Figure 5.6 Figure 5.7 Figure 6.1

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Dancers rehearsing in Copacabana (2006). Dir. Martín Rejtman Abipón: Noviembre by Gaby Herbstein (1999). Included in Huellas Yámana: Julio by Gaby Herbstein (1999). Included in Huellas Toba: Enero by Gaby Herbstein (1999). Included in Huellas Ocupación militar del Río Negro bajo el mando del General Julio A. Roca, 1879 by Juan Manuel Blanes (1896) La conquista del desierto by Leonel Luna (2002) Photograph of the monument to Julio A. Roca in downtown Buenos Aires, by Alejandro Aguiló (2017) Roca’s ­anti-­monument, by Grupo de Arte Callejero and Comisión A ­ nti-­monumento a Roca (2003) Pablo Lescano by Vera Rosemberg (2010)

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Acknowledgements In writing this book, I have been privileged to benefit from advice from many people. I would like to thank my colleagues at the University of Manchester, particularly Lúcia Sá, James Scorer, Frank ­Eissa-­Barroso, Valentino Gianuzzi and Blanca González Valencia, who kindly gave me feedback on the contents of this book. I owe special gratitude to Karl Posso, who believed in this project from the moment it was just a few poorly written sentences in an email. His precious advice, direction and generosity were crucial for the development of the ideas contained in this volume. Jens Andermann and Peter Wade provided me with invaluable input through their comments and inspiration through their work. I am also immensely indebted to Cara Levey and Matías Dewey for their help during the early stages of my academic career. I am very grateful to the artists and institutions who granted me permission to reproduce their works: Gaby Herbstein and Dana Kamelman, Leonel Luna, Martín Rejtman and Rosa Martínez Rivero, Vera Rosemberg and staff at the Museo Histórico Nacional. Sarah Lewis from the University of Wales Press has been extremely helpful and supportive throughout the elaboration of this book. I would also like to thank the anonymous reviewer for the very useful suggestions. During the development of this project, I have enjoyed the friendship of many people who have contributed to making Manchester feel like home: Miquel Pomar Amer, Maurício Sellmann Soares de Oliveira, Gustavo Carvajal, David Jiménez Torres, Suzanne Boerrigter, Nicole Peters, Christian Declercq and Gözde Naibog˘lu. My family, and especially my parents, have been an unconditional source of support, love and encouragement. Without them, this book would not have been possible. Finally, I would like to thank Mary, with whom I greet the dawn and stand beside. This book is dedicated to her, in love and solidarity.

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Introduction

In January 2016, the Central Bank of Argentina revealed its plans for new peso banknotes designs, which would substitute depictions of national heroes with those of autochthonous animals such as the jaguar, the condor, the hornero bird,  the Southern right whale, and the guanaco. The announcement was followed by an article in the country’s leading conservative newspaper, La Nación, entitled ‘Argentina es África’ (Argentina is Africa), which reported some of the public’s initial reactions.1 The replacement of the country’s founding fathers by local fauna ignited outrage in a significant number of La Nación’s readers who pointed out that the South African rand, the Congolese franc and the Zambian kwacha also included native animals in their designs. This likening to Africa was, for them, not only unjustified but also insulting. A reader stated: ‘Los países del Tercer Mundo tienen animales en los billetes. No somos un país del Tercer Mundo’ ­(Third-­World countries have animals in their banknotes. We’re not a ­Third-­World country). Another argued: ‘Argentina es un país con historia. Estos animales nos hacen parecer una jungla incivilizada a la que el hombre blanco acaba de llegar’ (Argentina is a country with history. These animals make us look like an uncivilised jungle where white men have just arrived). The racial overtones were also reflected in other comments, which claimed that the fauna in the notes implied that Argentina was ‘uno esos países de población mestiza’ (one of these countries with mestizo population). References were also made to the Brazilian real, which features endangered native animals. For the readers, old tropes that postulated the opposition between Western civilisation and the Other as a figure of nature persisted as frameworks to conceive African nations and Brazil. The commentators seemed to imply that, if African countries – and Brazil – had

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wildlife in their banknotes, this was because they had no choice: their national histories lacked scientific and cultural achievements, architectural landmarks or distinguished personalities. Argentina was, on the contrary, a place that could pride itself on having all of this, according to the readers; featuring animals was simply nonsensical. The statements’ racial overtones also indicate that this rejection of the new banknotes’ designs was as much an attempt to distance Argentina from Africa’s associations with poverty as from its associations with ­non-­whiteness. Both, in fact, were perceived as intrinsically interrelated. This obsession with presenting itself as a white civilised nation is far from recent in Argentina. Such racial anxieties ­vis-­à-­vis comparisons with Africa – or other Latin American countries – have been a common feature in public and everyday discourses for decades. Still, if anything, they indicate that this ­self-­perception as white is far from unquestioned; on the contrary, it needs constant reaffirmation and policing. The renowned travel writer Paul Theroux was quick to identify this inclination during his travels in Argentina. He too compared Argentinians with Africans but, interestingly, it was white South Africans whom, for him, they resembled: But, of all the people I met in South America, the Argentines were the least interested in the outside world or in any subject that did not directly concern Argentina. They shared this quality with white South Africans; they seemed to imply that they were stuck at the bottom of the world and surrounded by savages.2

In 2001 and 2002, Argentina was in the midst of what was arguably its most dramatic economic, political and social crisis since its return to democracy in 1983. In this context, these anxieties and concerns about ‘becoming’ African or Latin American became a frequent presence in the media, expressed with a high sense of urgency and distress by intellectuals, politicians and journalists. For example, cultural critic Beatriz Sarlo stated in 2002: ‘Nosotros nunca pensamos que podíamos llegar a compararnos con algunos países pobres de África’ (We never thought we could end up comparing ourselves to some poor African countries).3 In another article entitled ‘Africanización’ (Africanisation), published in the ­centre-­left newspaper Página/12, Manuel Fernández López affirmed: ‘el país hoy (es) una Euráfrica, donde unos viven como en Europa y los demás como en el continente negro’ (the country

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Introduction

3

is now a ‘Eurafrica’ where some live like in Europe and the rest like in the Dark Continent).4 In a similar tone, novelist and conservative intellectual Marcos Aguinis warned: ‘Si no luchamos por una utopía, terminaremos como un pobre país africano’ (If we don’t fight for a utopia, we will eventually become a poor African country).5 National Minister for Social Development Juan Pablo Cafiero, in turn, claimed: ‘la Argentina está latinoamericanizada … 39 ó 40 % de la población (vive) en esas condiciones’ (Argentina has been Latin Americanised … 39 or 40 % of the population (lives) in these conditions). Of course, these analogies aimed to stress the extent of the financial meltdown that the country was undergoing, with alarming poverty levels and unemployment rates. ‘Becoming’ African or Latin American expressed panic about becoming poorer. However, ­long-­standing discursive traditions of disavowed racism explain how it also implied a process of symbolic ‘darkening’: these fears of national ‘Latin Americanisation’ or ‘Africanisation’ articulated poverty with race, suggesting a correlation between underdevelopment and n ­on-­ whiteness. Although not directly stating it, all these voices, from the Left to the Right of the political spectrum, were raised in a shared expression of concern about the possibility that Argentina was in the process of ceasing to be ‘white’. Instead, they implied, it was becoming like the Third World countries from which it had attempted to distance itself. A wide variety of studies has examined the financial implications of the Argentinian crisis and its political consequences. There has also been some scholarly attention devoted to the cultural and literary repercussions and representations of the crisis. However, few studies have comprehensively looked at how the financial meltdown was read through race by sectors of Argentinian society. In this book, I look at cultural products created during this period of national emergency to show that the crisis induced a preoccupation with questions of nationness and national belonging in Argentinians, which was partly crystallised through discourses of whiteness. Widespread fears of impoverishment and tangible experiences of social descent during this period were frequently framed as a process of blackening, ‘Africanisation’ and ‘Latin Americanisation’. Different strategies were implemented to deal with this alleged threat to the white national self – illustrated by the rise of ­middle-­class racism against immigrants and the poor. But the racial encoding of social crisis also ignited in others a need not to

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preserve but to critically revise these national identity templates articulated around whiteness. Culture, in particular, constituted a platform through which many of these critical discourses were expressed. The analysis of literature, film, art and popular music of the time will demonstrate that, in this state of social decomposition and economic meltdown, cultural products contributed to the exposure and examination of the often subtle ways in which race intervenes in definitions of national belonging and difference. Simultaneously, they also suggested alternative models and discourses of nationality. Given that the Argentinian crisis was the direct result of neoliberal reforms, this book is also concerned, in a broader sense, with neoliberalism and its relationship with nationness and race. By neoliberalism, I understand here not just an economic ideology of market rule, as in neoclassical and ­neo-­Marxist thought, nor a flowing and diffuse assembly of productive technologies of normalisation, as in more recent approaches derived from Michel Foucault’s pioneer reflections on governmentality and biopolitics. Instead, following Loïc Wacquant, I conceive neoliberalism as an articulation of state, market and citizenship, in which the first is utilised to impose the stamp of the second onto the third.6 The advantage of this definition is that it goes beyond understandings of neoliberalism in purely economic terms but maintains the distinction between state and citizenship, which allows for scrutinising the privileged role of state apparatus in the crafting and production of the social. Neoliberalism does not imply a retreat of the state but its reconfiguration as a regulatory agent, responsible for guaranteeing the free interplay  among market  agents – an example of this is the fact that certain traditional functions of the state, particularly its punitive role, have experienced an expansion with neoliberalism.7 Latin America is an interesting context in which to analyse neoliberalism. There is ample consensus that neoliberalism was first applied in Chile following the 1973 coup  d’état, and rapidly spread to other countries in the region. In this sense, Latin America constituted an early laboratory for neoliberal experimentation. In the subsequent three decades, most Latin American nations would experiment with radical neoliberal reforms that would lead to a profound transformation of the social fabric and, in most cases, to an exponential increase in inequality and poverty. The particularities

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Introduction

5

of Argentina’s neoliberal experience and its subsequent crisis will be examined in detail in Chapter 1 but, at this point, it is useful to provide a brief account of said transformations. As in Chile, it was also a dictatorial regime that marked the transition towards neoliberalism: the Proceso de Reorganización Nacional (National Reorganisation Process), which ruled the country between 1976 and 1983. During the return to democratic governance under Raúl Alfonsín, from the centrist Radical Party (UCR), some neoliberal policies continued, but there were no significant developments in this direction. Nonetheless, neoliberalisation returned in full force in the two-term presidency of Peronist Carlos Menem, which lasted from 1989 to 1999. Traditionally a working-class party, the Peronist Party reinvented itself as an alleged agent of modernisation, bringing about a draconian programme of state reform, privatisation and deregulation that would, eventually, have catastrophic effects on ­ socio-­ economic indicators. Historically, Argentinians had enjoyed higher standards of living than most of their Latin American counterparts: in 1974, only 8 per cent of the population was living below the poverty line; during the neoliberal crisis, this figure increased to 57.5 per cent – of which 27.5 per cent were unable to afford essential food items.8 The widespread impoverishment and disenfranchisement produced by neoliberalism did encounter resistance. Initially, it was ­working-­class people who opposed these reforms, as they were the first ones to be affected by unemployment, privatisation and cuts in social welfare. However, at the turn of the t­wenty-­first century sectors of the middle class also joined the opposition to neoliberalism as they started to feel the effects of the country’s s­ocio-­economic transformation. In 1999, Fernando de la Rúa won the presidential elections. He did so on a ticket from Alianza para el Trabajo, la Justicia y la Educación (Alliance for Work, Justice and Education), a political coalition of the Radicals, to which he belonged, and FREPASO, a new progressive political movement created by dissident Peronists and other c­ entre-­left forces. Despite coming from the opposition, his government continued many of Menem’s policies in a climate marked by economic recession (which had started in 1998), excruciating poverty and unemployment levels, and civil disaffection with the political establishment. The situation eventually erupted on 19 and 20 December 2001, when the people took to the streets and forced the fall of de la Rúa’s government. Throughout 2002,

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many ­ direct-­ democracy initiatives prospered, some of which originated in the late 1990s, such as neighbourhood assemblies and piqueteros (protest groups composed of unemployed people whose primary modality of protest were picket lines). ­Centre-­left Peronist Néstor Kirchner became president in 2003 and was able to stabilise the country through a combination of ­ neo-­ developmentalist economic policies, institutional reforms that partly addressed citizens’ demands for political change and disarticulation of civil activism. In this book, I propose an understanding of the crisis that goes beyond the economic and political events of 2001 and 2002. I conceive the crisis as spanning from the late 1990s to the mid-2000s, years marked by neoliberal governance, the dramatic fall of s­ ocio-­ economic indicators, institutional fragility and civil discontent and mobilisation. I also look at certain developments that took place in previous years. As Cara Levey et al. argue, the crisis can be seen as a series of responses to ‘both old and new problems – many of which predate 2001. In particular, the origins of these issues can be traced back to the neoliberal decade of the 1990s and to the military dictatorship’.9 The 1990s were in fact enormously transformative, not only economically and socially, but also culturally. They constituted a period of ‘heightened neoliberalism’, in which traditional forms of political identification – particularly those linked historically to the working class and the Peronist Party – suffered dislocation, while dreams of national exceptionality experienced exacerbation. Frederic Jameson argues that one of the main traits of neoliberalism is the collapse of the distinction between economy and culture – a process that he denominates ‘dedifferentiation’.10 In the case of Argentina, explaining why social decline was partly lived through a language of race implies considering neoliberalism also as a cultural project – something that I will discuss in depth in Chapter 1. In order to understand why whiteness played such a crucial role in the way in which the crisis was experienced and framed it is also necessary to look at the ways in which race has historically shaped Argentina’s discourses of national belonging and difference. In the first decades of the twentieth century, as Latin American countries experienced processes of consolidation, mestizaje became a dominant paradigm of nationhood in the region. Opposing contemporary theories of scientific racism, which signalled racial

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Introduction

7

mixture as an obstacle for modernisation, mestizaje celebrated the progressive demographic force of mixing and the uniqueness of Latin America. It promoted a homogeneous national character, a superior synthetic product embodying all the ‘natural’ qualities of ­pre-­existing racial groups. In Argentina, however, it was not the mestizo but the European immigrant who was hailed as the symbol of the nation during this crucial moment of national affirmation. Argentina went on to present itself as an anomaly in the region: a white Europeanised society surrounded by m ­ ixed-­race countries. The causes of this exceptionality were attributed, according to official discourses, to the extinction of indigenous and A ­ fro-­ descendant populations in the second half of the nineteenth century and the massive arrival of Europeans at the turn of the twentieth century, all processes that had almost entirely whitened the country by the 1920s.11 Although similar narratives were articulated in Uruguay and southern Brazil, and to a lesser degree in Chile, only Costa Rica can be perhaps compared to Argentina in terms of the success of such paradigm of racial uniqueness and white nationhood. However, in the case of Costa Rica, the country’s alleged whiteness has been traditionally traced back to Spanish settlers during the colonial era rather than attributed to t­urn-­of-­ the-­twentieth-­century European migration. Argentina’s whiteness, like mestizaje, was not merely an ideological construction: undoubtedly, the scale of white migration to Argentina was unparalleled in other Latin American countries, including those that also received large contingents of Europeans. However, as I will explain in Chapter 2, this process did not imply, as it was alleged, Argentina’s complete whitening. Many people of indigenous, African and mixed background were forced to incorporate, in extremely disadvantageous ways, into a social structure predicated on the alleged uniformity of the population.12 Whiteness became common sense and taken for granted: Argentina was hailed as a ­‘race-­less’ country while, in everyday reality, the inequalities that race produced contributed to the longevity of social hierarchies. This double movement through which subaltern sectors were simultaneously included in and excluded from Argentinian society was not dissimilar to mestizaje, which also aimed to both amalgamate the national population under one single form of racial and cultural identity and obscure racism. However, by founding racial homogeneity on whiteness rather than on racial

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miscegenation, Argentina could claim greater success on the road to progress, at least according to contemporary ­Euro-­American scientific racism. Despite their celebration of racial mixture, many mestizaje supporters assumed that n ­ on-­white elements – which were seen as ‘weaker’ – would be eventually absorbed or diluted in the mix, leading to civilisation and development.13 Argentina presented itself to the rest of Latin America as already white, and thus, ahead in the run to join the ‘civilised world’. Indeed, as early as 1895, a census official claimed: ‘The Asiatic and African races clearly exist only in diminutive proportions such that their influence with respect to the country’s development (transformación) is null. The same can be said with respect to the Indians.’ 14 As can be seen, Argentina’s whitening implied a rather vague notion of whiteness, one that could, at times, symbolically include ­non-­white people into the national community but would also reinforce racial disparities in everyday interaction. Because of its flexibility and vagueness, the scheme, like mestizaje, also allowed the emergence of interstitial spaces through which subaltern sectors were able to explore forms of resistance. In fact, Argentina’s combination of discourses of homogeneity with an asymmetric social structure based on race and class were contested throughout the twentieth century – particularly with the rise of Peronism as a political articulator of the rural multitudes of indigenous and mixed backgrounds that migrated to the capital city in the 1930s and 1940s. The combined process of rural–city migration, the transition towards an industrial economy, and the empowerment of the masses implied that the distance between whiteness as a discourse of nationhood and the country’s reality could be exposed. And yet, although Peronism brought about a significant disruption of the nation’s racial imaginary, it did not imply its replacement with an alternative discourse of race. Many ­middle-­class Porteños (as the inhabitants of Buenos Aires are known) reacted to the increasing visibility of the lower class coming from the provinces partly by means of racial language. However, like many other popular Latin American political movements/parties of the time, the Peronists did not see themselves necessarily in distinctive racial terms. Likewise, ­middle-­class Porteño racism was perceived mainly as a comment on workers’ alleged vulgarity, unsophistication and lack of civility, illustrating how race continued to be referred to in elliptical and circuitous ways despite the racial and social anxieties

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Introduction

9

produced by the emergence of Peronism. The expression cabecita negra is the most w ­ ell-­known example of the oblique manner in which class and race were articulated in ­anti-­Peronist sentiment: the term, which is the name of a South American bird (Carduelis magellanica, known in English as ‘hooded siskin’), was used to refer pejoratively to the ­dark-­skinned workers. In subsequent years, a new word would emerge to refer to the masses: negro, which in Argentina does not imply an African background but, like cabecita negra, unacceptable social behaviour linked to a provincial background and, implicitly, racial miscegenation. In subsequent years, other actors – like the radical Left in the 1970s or indigenous activists from the 1980s onwards – also engaged critically with the idea of Argentina as a homogeneously white country but, for different reasons, experienced limited success. Whiteness continued as a n ­ on-­renounceable project of nationhood, at least for the middle- and u ­ pper-­class sectors that have traditionally enjoyed a more dominant position in the definition of the national self. In this book, I will demonstrate that the crisis produced by neoliberalism contributed to a profound questioning of Argentina’s whiteness, which was partly expressed through cultural production. To do so, I have identified four analytical dimensions that will guide the discussion. I will look at: first, the impact of the crisis on the myth of Argentina’s exceptionalism and its relationship with middle-­ ­ class imaginaries; secondly, the construction of certain Latin American migrants as a racial alterity; thirdly, the identification of the shantytowns as the locus of a new racialised marginality; and, finally, the rise of neoliberal multiculturalism. During the course of this book, I will examine how various art forms engaged critically with these diverse elements, at times focusing specifically on one of these four factors, at others, looking at how two or more interact in specific manifestations of racial domination. Through this, I aim to show how culture not only reflected but also r­ e-­signified the debate on race in this period, and the particular link between the crisis and Argentina’s narratives of whiteness, Europeanness and racial homogeneity. I will proceed to provide an outline of each of these dimensions.

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Exceptionalism The cultural products examined in this book suggest critical engagements with the belief held by the middle class that its social decline was an indicator of the country’s fall from grace, the end of Argentina’s exceptionalism. Exceptionalism is a central component of the nationalist imagination, in the sense that it was constitutive of romantic conceptions of folk and nationhood. In the case of Argentina, the narrative of exceptionalism was founded, as Tulio Halperin Donghi explains, on the unparalleled realisation of the civilising project of European modernity in the last decades of the nineteenth century.15 In the 1950s and 1960s, different theories of modernisation reformulated and refined the correlation between development and whiteness/Europeanness. Their aim was to demonstrate that the country’s high standards of living and education in comparison to most of its regional counterparts were partly the consequence of Argentina’s vast middle class resulting from the immigration experience of the early twentieth century.16 This interpretation was embraced and appropriated by these sectors. Argentina’s dramatic impoverishment at the turn of the ­twenty-­first century was, therefore, also perceived as a crisis of a model of nationhood constructed around whiteness and ­middle-­classness. The presence of flags and other national symbols in civil mobilisations during 2001 and 2002 showed that protestors were motivated by a shared concern for nationness.17 And in fact, there was a boom in the publishing of essays on this theme, such as Aguinis’s 2002 book El atroz encanto de ser argentinos (The Atrocious Charm of Being Argentinians), which sold around 200,000 copies despite the recession.18 In the face of the extent of the catastrophe affecting the country, demands to revise and clarify national identity multiplied. The fundamental question that required an urgent answer was: ‘Why, if we were so exceptional, did we end up like this?’ Through the analysis of the cultural products included in this book, I will explain that the use of tropes such as ‘Latin Americanisation’ and ‘Africanisation’ demonstrate how social malaise was expressed by Argentinians through racial language and anxieties rooted in enduring historical patterns and discourses. The fact that poverty led to a s­ elf-­perception as n ­ on-­white revealed the extent to which social differences are intertwined with racial

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Introduction

11

categories. As Emanuela Guano and Galen Joseph show, historical ideas of Europeanness, education and civilisation that constituted the founding myths of the nation were reinvigorated during the late 1990s by some sectors of the middle class. They did so primarily to deal with their disenfranchisement but, furthermore, as a strategy of resistance to the increasing awareness that their historical whiteness was under threat.19 I will show how these particular concerns of nationness and whiteness are interrogated in cultural products that expose the constructedness of narratives of exceptionalism, therefore suggesting a critique of the social regime that positions whiteness as normative and as neutral.

Migration Some of the cultural productions featured in this study address discrimination against immigrants from specific countries (mainly Bolivia, but also Paraguay, Peru and the Dominican Republic) during neoliberalism and the crisis. This discrimination was usually condemned in public and academic discourses of the period, yet the immigrants’ racialisation was rarely criticised.20 David Theo Goldberg states that the problem with such a posture is that it portrays racial violence as a deviance but does not question the existence of racial categorisations, ignoring or ­ side-­ lining the conceptual and political connections between race and racial domination.21 I will explain how the cultural products in this work reveal this racialisation to be the imposition of a specific normative that constructs nationality as a signifier of ­non-­whiteness. Along with ‘Africanisation’, the trope of ‘Latin Americanisation’ was common in public discourses during the crisis, specifically to refer to the threat posed by the alleged ‘invasion’ of Bolivians, Peruvians and Paraguayans. However, these anxieties during this period cannot be explained solely by a factual increase in immigration. The 2001 Census reveals that South American immigrants constituted a mere 2.8 per cent of the population (a figure similar to those of previous censuses).22 This number does not include undocumented immigration but, even if this was similar in size to authorised immigration, the proportion would still be relatively small (5.6 per cent). For Alejandro Grimson, two interrelated causes explain the increasing visibility of immigrant

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groups: first, the fact that they had relocated in recent years from border provinces to Buenos Aires, as a result of the crisis of local economies; secondly, the progressive impoverishment of the population due to neoliberalism, which fuelled xenophobic anxieties reinforced from above.23 The use of racism by neoliberalism is related to the latter’s impact on the social fabric. Neoliberal reforms involve a double movement: on the one hand, the axing of state welfare, the precarisation of jobs and the growth of poverty and unemployment; on the other hand, the extension over civil society of the logic of the market – expressed in homo oeconomicus as a model of behaviour – along with the weakening and disarticulation of local bonds and solidarities. The racialisation of immigrants – that is, the identification of an internal threat that is also external – plays a crucial role in this process since it is instrumental in counterbalancing the negative effects of neoliberalism on citizenship while maintaining social cohesion. This explains why, in Argentina, prejudice against South American immigrants was promoted in state discourses. The government postulated that, rather than resisting labour market flexibility, workers should beware of immigrants who were stealing their jobs. However, immigrants were not competing for jobs with the Argentinians, but the other way around, since occupations traditionally rejected by locals now came to be appreciated in a context of pervasive unemployment.24 Anticipating xenophobic and nativist sentiments that would become widespread in the United States and Europe in subsequent years, in ­turn-­of-­the-­twenty-­first-­century Argentina, certain immigrants from other Latin American countries were portrayed as responsible for the rise in unemployment and the collapse of public services. In 1999, for example, Governor of Buenos Aires – and future president – Eduardo Duhalde affirmed that ‘cada día hay menos trabajo y es necesario repartirlo entre los argentinos’ (every day there are fewer jobs and it’s necessary to distribute them among Argentinians). Immigrants were also presented as a menace to the cultural cohesiveness of the national self. For example, an article in La Nación entitled ‘Más americanos que nunca’ (More (Latin) American than ever) stated that the new migrants questioned the idea of ‘Argentina como prolongación de Europa’ (Argentina as an extension of Europe).25 But perhaps the most compelling example of this is a 2000 cover of La Primera de la Semana, a magazine directed

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by Daniel Hadad, a media entrepreneur and journalist closely linked to Menem. It features a man against a background of the Obelisco, the iconic monument of Buenos Aires, and an Argentinian flag, the headline being ‘La invasión silenciosa’ (The silent invasion). The use of racial stereotyping to emphasise the stigma is evident: the man chosen for the cover has strong Andean features, is shown naked from the waist up, and the image has been clumsily manipulated to make him look as if he is missing one of his front teeth. Inside, the report states that immigrants – described as having ‘caras aindiadas y oscuras’ (dark and ­Indian-­like faces) – steal jobs and abuse the national health system, therefore suggesting that the causes of the crisis of public services were not neoliberal policies but these racialised undocumented immigrants. To be effective, racist discourses from above usually need an affective base. Indeed, if they manage to interpellate sectors of the population, this is because they build on established antipathies and anxieties. Gastón Gordillo, in this sense, suggests understanding Argentinian whiteness not as myth or ideology, but as an articulation of space and affect: I conceive of White Argentina, first and foremost, as a geographical project and an affective disposition defined by the not always conscious desire to create, define, and feel through the bodily navigation of space that the national geography is largely European. But this is a haunted and e­ ver-­incomplete project, a whiteness that feels under siege.26

Gordillo’s proposal is useful in the sense that it highlights the visceral and emotive dimension of racism, and the fact that the propensity to long for a white nation in certain Argentinians cannot be seen as a purely logical and rational process. Nonetheless, completely disregarding the problem of hegemony implies sidelining the ways in which historical prejudices developed dialectical relations with state and institutional discourses, as shown before. Without contemplating this dimension, it would be difficult to explain why, although highly ‘visible’ in phenotypic terms, Korean, Chinese, Taiwanese and Japanese immigrants were not seen as a threat to the cohesion of the national self during the crisis. Unlike Peruvians, Bolivians and Paraguayans, Asian immigrants were never the focus of the state’s stigmatising practices and rhetoric.27 As Teresa Ko shows, they have actually been

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systematically sidelined from public debates, even from those articulated around the logic of neoliberal multiculturalism.28 Class also mediated this differential process of racialisation, since Asian immigrants tend to be ­middle-­class and engage in ethnic economies – retail supermarkets (Chinese), dry cleaners (Japanese), p ­ hoto-­ developing shops (Taiwanese) and textile and clothing manufacturing businesses (Koreans). Thus, contrary to South American immigrants, they were not seen as direct competitors for jobs during the crisis. The different attitudes towards Asian immigrants and ­ A sian-­ A rgentinians exemplify once again the articulation of class and race in Argentina, since those who are the poorest are also placed at the bottom of the racial hierarchy. It also illustrates how the reproduction of racism is sustained both on state discourses and processes that identify certain groups as a potential menace to the integrity of the social body and the affective disposition of sectors of society towards these issues. The differential racialisation of immigrants also proves the overwhelming ­pre-­eminence of Buenos Aires in the definition of national discourses of whiteness and racial difference. For example, unlike Peruvian, Paraguayan and Bolivian immigrants, who relocated en masse to the capital city from border provinces in recent years, Chilean immigrants continued to work mostly in Patagonia (53 per cent), which partly explains their less blatant racialisation in institutional and media discourses.29 The distinction between regional immigrants shows the extent to which fears of ­‘Latin Americanisation’ were mainly linked with indigeneity and poverty. Accordingly, a continuum was established in which Paraguay, Bolivia and Peru, countries where indigenous cultures enjoy a robust presence, were identified as the other end of the racial spectrum in relation to Argentina. Furthermore, the exoticisation of the minority of A ­ fro-­Brazilians who live in Buenos Aires illustrates the different ways in which racial domination operates through differential classification and variable degrees of segregation and discrimination. For example, Alejandro Frigerio shows that, rather than as a Brazilian religion, Umbanda was presented in Argentina as an expression of an ancestral African culture.30 By linking Umbanda to a mythical Africanness rather than to ­ real-­ life A ­fro-­ Brazilians, it could be marketed more efficiently as an ethnic practice.

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The cultural products featured in this study expose and examine how, during the crisis, historical categories of internal racial otherness, namely negro, were used to racialise Bolivians, Paraguayans and Peruvians. Likewise, they question how this racialised representation was used to identify the Argentinian precariat as foreign, equating negro with n ­ on-­Argentinian. In this operation, they reflect on how narratives of whiteness were applied by the dominant sectors to construct the n ­ on-­white at times as Argentinian and others as foreigners.

Space One figure that is present in many of the cultural products analysed in this book is that of shantytowns, which are known in Argentina as villas or villas miseria. For Wacquant, slums and ghettoes can be seen as spatial devices that reconcile the opposing objectives of capitalist exploitation and racial subordination. 31 In other words, because a particular population is necessary for the economy, its location within the city is required. However, since this population constitutes a racially subordinate group and its segregation needs to be reinforced continually, the interaction between this group and the dominant population has to be kept to a minimum and restricted only to economic functions. Thus, ghettoes and shantytowns confine a previously racialised group, but also contribute to the group’s continuing racialisation. They do so by placing racial domination and spatial segregation in a process of constant reinforcement: in public discourses, the ­slum-­dweller is a racial Other because he or she lives in a racialised space, and this space is racialised because it is where the racial Other resides. In Argentina, the racialisation of shantytowns is by no means a particular feature of the crisis: in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the works of Hugo Ratier and Mario Margulis already showed how villeros (as ­slum-­dwellers are known in Argentina) were identified by the middle class as ­non-­whites.32 An example of this is the expression negro villero as a figure that combines both space and race. What the cultural products analysed in this work demonstrate is that the stigmatised construction of villeros during the 1990s and the crisis was partly based on historical racialised stereotypes, but

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also contained new, distinct features. Shantytowns experienced significant growth during the 1990s and the crisis. The population of the area encompassing the city of Buenos Aires and Greater Buenos Aires grew by 9 per cent between 1991 and 2001 while the number of people living in shantytowns and informal settlements increased by almost 45 per cent (from 410,479 to 594,781).33 Only in the city of Buenos Aires, in the same period, the number of ­slum-­ dwellers doubled (from 52,608 to 107,805) while the overall population decreased by 6.7 per cent.34 In the past villeros were integrated into the social body, albeit in limited ways, mainly through their intermittent participation in the economy and the education system. However, as Javier Auyero notes, in the 1990s villeros experienced the deterioration of the links to larger society due to impoverishment, unemployment, state abandonment, and the fragmentation and privatisation of urban space.35 This progressive detachment from other social sectors was mainly visible in the identification of new forms of marginality. I will explain how the cultural products under analysis engaged with these figures of racial otherness while simultaneously considering their relationship with the shantytown as a racialised space and Buenos Aires as a white/Europeanised city. In doing so, I will demonstrate how the crisis represented not merely the continuation of old prejudices but a new moment in the racialisation of villeros, linked to the consolidation of an exclusionary and unequal cityscape. This process of urban ­ re-­ engineering can be interpreted as the particular manifestation in Buenos Aires of a world phenomenon that has its most extreme expressions in the megalopolis of the global South. In fact, many urban planners and academics defined these transformations as the ‘­ Latin Americanisation’ of Buenos Aires, once again reproducing the trope of Europeanness and exceptionalism – in this case, manifested in the traditional representation of Buenos Aires as the most Europeanised city in Latin America.36 As Guano states, ‘(c)onstructed in racial and cultural terms, this Europeanness posited ­middle-­class Porteños as displaced from a more “civilized,” more “modern” elsewhere to which they essentially belonged’.37

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Multiculturalism Another central element of concern of this book is the relationship between neoliberalism and multiculturalism. When neoliberalism came into existence, it did so in societies that were already being altered in a multicultural direction as a result of several ­ socio-­ political, economic and cultural conditions. Key neoliberal actors like the World Bank, UNESCO, the ­Inter-­American Development Bank and the European Union saw in multiculturalism a source for transforming cultural minorities into efficient players in the global economy.38 The recognition of plurality was, consequently, expressed in legal rights, public policies and reforms for the accommodation of cultural difference, and also in the expansion of a market for the consumption of ethnicity. Neoliberalism also used multiculturalism as a force that could contribute to the disarticulation of traditional forms of identification and politics based on class. This was strategic given the fact that, in Western countries, workers constituted the leading opponent to the transition to a p ­ost-­ industrial, ­ post-­ welfare social order. In Latin America, the 1980s and 1990s also saw an expansion of multiculturalist policies and inititatives, particularly centred on indigeneity. This process was triggered by growing indigenous organising, influenced by the waves of democratisation in the region and the impact of transnational discourses and practices of radical multiculturalism.39 The neoliberal state attempted to channel indigenous activism by establishing procedures through which these groups were allowed expression and recognition, albeit confined to areas considered desirable by the market and ­non-­ threatening to state power.40 In this context, indigenous groups and, lately, ­Afro-­descendant activists have been, at times, successful in navigating the frameworks of neoliberal multiculturalism to put forward their demands and redefine the terms of relations between them and the state. However, the transformative aspirations of indigenous and ­Afro-­descendant groups in Latin America have also encountered resistance and limitations. The political implications and conflictive instances of diversity have been systematically undermined to the benefit of a rhetoric that acknowledges heterogeneity but not necessarily inequality.

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The aforementioned process also affected Argentina. Although not to the extent of Bolivia, Ecuador, Central America or Mexico, the 1990s still saw a significant increase in grassroots indigenous activism in the country. This growth was parallel and sometimes intersected with the development of neoliberal forms of multiculturalism. In 1992 Argentina adopted the Convention 169 of the International Labour Organization that requires that indigenous and tribal peoples are consulted and give their consent on issues that affect them – this was ratified in 2000 and came into force in 2001. Another example of the impact of multiculturalism in Argentina is the removal, in the 1994 constitutional reform, of article 75, which stated that it was Congress’s responsibility to ‘conservar el trato pacífico con los indios, y promover la conversión de ellos al catolicismo’ (to keep a pacific relationship with the Indians and promote their conversion to Catholicism). In its place, an article that recognises that indigenous peoples ­pre-­exist the Argentinian n ­ ation-­ state in ethnic and cultural terms was added. The reform also guarantees the right to legal personhood for their communities and the communal possession and property of the lands they traditionally occupy. Finally, in 1995 the Instituto Nacional contra la Discriminación, la Homofobia y el Racismo (INADI) (National Institute against Discrimination, Xenophobia and Racism) was established. It was not just the introduction of legislation that exemplifies how neoliberalism favoured certain multicultural initiatives in Argentina. Particularly in Buenos Aires, immigrant communities and indigenous groups were not only discriminated against; at times, they were also subject to celebratory discourses framed mainly according to the priorities of the state, international institutions and the market.41 A tourist guide published in 2001 by the Government of the City of Buenos Aires exemplifies this confluence of the state and market in order to aestheticise diversity but, simultaneously, contain the visibility of racially subordinated groups within institutional frames: Vivir en Buenos Aires es un viaje por numerosas costumbres culturales … Ya parte del paisaje convierte a Buenos Aires en una metrópoli con rincones de otras culturas como Londres, Nueva York o San Francisco. Ellos (los inmigrantes) comparten espacios en festivales, fiestas y ferias de colectividades. Allí, entre un ají de gallina del Perú y una feijoada brasileña, mezclan la cultura local con las suyas y construyen una Buenos Aires cada vez más mestiza.42

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(Living in Buenos Aires is a journey through numerous cultural traditions … Part of its landscape already turns Buenos Aires into a multicultural metropolis like London, New York or San Francisco. Immigrants share spaces in festivals, parties and community fairs. There, among a Peruvian ají de gallina and a Brazilian feijoada, they mix the local culture with theirs and construct a Buenos Aires that is increasingly mestiza.)

This paragraph illustrates how state discourses propose a valorisation of diversity, perceived as facilitating Buenos Aires’s old ambition of belonging to the transnational network of global cities. The capital city is presented as more mestiza in order to be seen as more Western – that is, able to keep up with the standards of modernity identified with diversity trends in the United States and Europe. This paradox exemplifies how these international conceptions of racial and ethnic heterogeneity were appropriated and ­re-­signified in Argentina. It also shows that the relation between racial difference and state discourses was not always necessarily monolithic, given that the guide was produced by the FREPASO administration led by Aníbal Ibarra, which governed the city of Buenos Aires between 2000 and 2006. The cultural products studied in this book appropriate and criticise these celebrations of ­ethno-­racial diversity. Through their analysis, I will show that racial discourses during the crisis not only responded to the country’s decline but also expressed the impact of regional and transnational processes and rhetoric. In particular, I will demonstrate that some of these cultural products suggested alternative conceptions of intercultural relations that denounced how neoliberal multiculturalism can mask racism, while others reinforced the fixation of racially subordinate groups as signifiers of domesticated exoticism. In this regard, this book adopts a comprehensive approach that looks at how neoliberalism in Argentina led to a celebration of a particular form of state- and ­market-­sanctioned multiculturalism but also examines how this multiculturalism was destabilised by the crisis of the neoliberal project. The outcome of this destabilisation was the rise of racism and nativism – a process that would also affect Europe and the United States in the post-2008 scenario, as Brexit and the election of Donald Trump show. This impugnation of neoliberal multiculturalism as a result of the Argentinian crisis, nonetheless, would also give rise to alternative and progressive forms of

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accommodating diversity, more in line with the tradition of radical multiculturalism.

Structure and texts A key feature of this book is that it encompasses cinematic, artistic, musical, and literary legacies. The analysis will prove that, throughout the crisis, culture in a general sense, and not specific cultural products in ­self-­contained fashions, emerged as a platform for the discussion of race beyond their particular spheres of influence. Thus, regarding organisation, the volume has been divided into six chapters: two contextual ones followed by chapters dealing with a particular art form. Each chapter also deals with a specific form of racialised alterity: while the chapters on literature and cinema examine representations of the immigrant as external Other, the ones about art and cumbia music focus on the internal Other: the Amerindian and the negro, respectively. In this regard, this work addresses the reciprocal relation between racism and nationalism and how this is deployed to identify internal and external enemies against which the purity and unity of the nation should be defended.43 Chapter 1 offers a more detailed account of the crisis, to expand on and complement my earlier statements regarding this vital issue of the book. In particular, it will sustain my claim about the importance of framing the crisis as a combination of processes encompassing the late 1990s and early 2000s rather than merely the episodes that took place in 2001–2. It will also show how neoliberalism went beyond the economic r­e-­engineering of the country. It will demonstrate how it brought about fundamental cultural changes that explain why the crisis was also lived as a crisis of nationness and expressed through a language of race. Chapter 2 explains the historical processes that led to the configuration of Argentina’s racial dynamics at the time of the crisis, highlighting discontinuities and continuities in the way in which whiteness has defined the terms of national belonging. Both contextual chapters will provide a hermeneutic foundation for the reading of the chosen cultural products that will follow. In Chapter 3, I study novels and short stories by Washington Cucurto, César Aira and Fabián Casas that show the increasing

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concern with social reality and race in Argentinian literature during the crisis. These texts were selected because they interpellate the ­white-­implied reader through a ­re-­elaboration of the dominant discourses of race, which questions racial domination and the reification of certain groups as racial Others. Likewise, they focus on the immigrant as a new figure of racial otherness against an alleged white national culture, which in practice was identified with the middle class. I show that these texts construct realist portrayals of the crisis, race and the city, only to subvert them using different strategies aimed at overcoming binary images of race. Through the figure of the ­author-­narrator, Cucurto offers a portrayal of the experiences of immigrants from Paraguay, Peru and the Dominican Republic, constructed as hyperbolised characters obsessed with cumbia music and sex. He challenges both romanticised and demonised images of racialised immigrants using the kitsch and the grotesque, to expose the racial anxieties of Porteños during the 1990s in relation to the alleged ‘invasion’ of ­non-­white immigrants. Aira’s La Villa (2001) (Shantytown) describes the interactions between white ­middle-­class characters and racialised immigrants from the villas, showing the multiple mediations of race and space in Buenos Aires. I will demonstrate that, by means of the absurd and the surreal, it exposes the arbitrariness and artificiality of racial discourses by the dominant white culture. In turn, Casas’s ‘Asterix, el encargado’ (2005) (Asterix, the Caretaker) confronts this Porteño perspective with the culture of the racial Other through the description of an Andean ritual in a villa. I argue that the text can be read as a satire of the fantasies of becoming present in many travel accounts in which the civilised narrator aims to experience the world of the Other to escape the alienation of modern life. The fetishisation of racial diversity through this practice is therefore criticised. Chapter 4 continues analysing the immigrant as a racialised figure, focusing on what is perhaps the ultimate expression of alterity in the dominant racial imaginary: the Bolivian. Here, I dissect the process through which ­Bolivian-­ness, a form of national belonging, becomes a signifier of n ­on-­ whiteness that can be, alternatively, appropriated within the racist discursive and affective strategies of the impoverished middle class and within neoliberal multiculturalism frameworks that celebrate n ­on-­ conflictive diversity. To do so, I turn to film, focusing on Israel Adrián Caetano’s

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Bolivia (2001) and Martín Rejtman’s Copacabana (2006). These two films allow two different and oppositional readings of the racialisation of Bolivian immigrants in Buenos Aires in this period. Bolivia underlines the racial violence perpetrated by Porteños because of their disenfranchisement, showing how racism is exercised in everyday life and the limits and paradoxes of this in connection with the crisis. Copacabana portrays the preparations for festivities organised by a Bolivian community in Buenos Aires. The film addresses the potential exoticisation of Andean immigrants in the context of ­post-­modern aesthetic idealisation of diversity. In this chapter, I also demonstrate that Copacabana favours a more independent and s­ elf-­reflexive spectatorial activity than Bolivia, by stressing the presence of the camera and the spectator’s need to address the ethical issues inscribed in the racialisation of the characters in the film. In Chapter 5, my attention switches from the external to the inner Other by looking at indigeneity in the context of the crisis. In ­nineteenth-­century ­nation-­building discourse, Amerindians were presented as the final obstacle to progress. It is within this conception that the 1879 military campaign known as the Conquest of the Desert, which captured the territories in Pampa and Patagonia under indigenous control, was presented as the conclusion of the process of national organisation and, as such, as a new foundation of the country. This portrayal of indigeneity as the ultimate barbarism also served to justify the violence of the campaign and the subsequent marginalisation and invisibilisation of indigenous communities in Argentina. In the chapter, I study three distinctive engagements with indigeneity in art. First, Gaby Herbstein’s Huellas (2000) (Traces), a fashion calendar in which models are photographed performing as different indigenous groups. I will show that, although presented as a critique of Argentina’s racial politics, it ends up being problematic due to its fetishisation of indigenous cultures. Secondly, I will engage with Leonel Luna’s La conquista del desierto (2002) (The Conquest of the Desert). This artwork is an interpretation of the canonical image of the Conquest of the Desert, Juan Manuel Blanes’s Ocupación militar del Río Negro bajo el mando del General Julio A. Roca, 1879 (1896) (Military Occupation of the Río Negro Under the Command of General Julio A. Roca, 1879). I will demonstrate that La conquista del desierto proposes an elaborate critique of Argentina’s regime of racial

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domination by linking indigenous genocide in the nineteenth century with the exclusion and discrimination of the poor during the crisis through a perspective that highlights the usually masked articulation of race with class in modern Argentina. Lastly, I look at an art intervention by the collective Grupo de Arte Callejero (Street Art Group) on the Buenos Aires monument to Julio Argentino Roca, the general – and, later, president of Argentina – who designed and led the Conquest of the Desert. This intervention, I explain, also suggests connections between n ­ ineteenth-­ century state violence against indigenous people and contemporary processes of discrimination. In Chapter 6, I analyse the case of cumbia villera. Cumbia is a type of dance music from the Caribbean coast of Colombia popular throughout ­Spanish-­speaking Latin America. Cumbia villera is, as the name indicates, a variety of cumbia that originated from the Buenos Aires shantytowns and achieved tremendous commercial success during the crisis. It also sparked intense controversy. I argue that this polemic was not so much linked to cumbia villera’s celebration of crime and drugs, but to the fact that it cast light on the constant racism experienced by ­slum-­dwellers. In particular, it highlighted how the articulation of space, class, gender and race in this period led to the construction of a new figure of racialised marginality, the young male negro villero, which was portrayed in media and institutional discourses as a public threat. I will demonstrate how cumbia villera appropriated and ­re-­signified this stigmatised notion to create an aesthetic ideal that symbolically inverts social and racial hierarchies. In this conception of the social order, the negro villero can claim ­pre-­eminence and symbolically reverse power relations through the values associated with cumbia music. I contend that this provided an empowered alternative form of identification for those disenfranchised and racialised sectors of the male villero youth. Contrary to the other chapters, in this case, the intended audience of the cultural product being analysed belongs to racially subordinate groups. The description of the selected materials indicates that this book’s main interest rests in cultural products identified with the dominant white ­middle-­class culture. This decision is motivated by the fact that they provide what could be described as critical perspectives from ‘the inside’ of the exhaustion of the dominant narrative of whiteness that positioned white ­ middle-­ class

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identification as ­pre-­eminent. Thus, they constitute exercises in ­self-­reflexivity that give an idea of how the crisis of national identity and whiteness was lived and addressed by the same social segment that had sustained these narratives in the past. This does not mean that the white m ­ iddle-­ class population was the only one that experienced a destabilisation of established ideas of nationness. As a matter of fact, the precise aim of including cumbia villera is to offer a complementary perspective as it shows how sectors that have historically been excluded from these narratives of whiteness also became participants in their critique and scrutiny. Another selection criterion is the relationship between culture and politics. I will mainly consider cultural products that conceive cultural production not necessarily in denunciatory or emancipatory terms (the only exception being Grupo de Arte Callejero). This decision is motivated by the aim to analyse cultural products that explore alternatives to politicised art and identity politics. However, even if these cultural expressions reject traditional engagé discourses, they attempt – and, as I will show, at times succeed – to articulate an oppositional discourse that addresses the oppressive nature of Argentina’s racial politics. They do so in ways that challenge the conception of culture as a space for totalising narratives. In the face of a crisis of models of nationness, these cultural products postulate the impossibility of comprehensive discourses and political certainties. As I will show, they nonetheless can venture the possibility of more inclusive and ethical forms of multiculturalism in their critique.

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1

Neoliberalism and its crisis

In an infamous television advert produced by the military junta in 1978, a man is shown against a blank background. In front of him, there is a chair with the sign ‘Industria nacional’ (National industry). As the man examines the chair, a voiceover points out that years of protectionist economic policies in Argentina had resulted in a local industry that, due to its near monopolistic status, tends to produce inferior quality products for a captive market. That the chair breaks when the man sits on it seems to demonstrate this point. He then turns to see, to his delight, many different chairs, all of them imported. The voiceover explains that the arrival of imported merchandise thanks to the reduction of import taxes not only will allow for a wider range of choices and b ­ etter-­quality goods but will also strengthen the national production, given the beneficial effects of unregulated competition. Produced at a time of drastic ­free-­market reforms that reduced import barriers and allowed for cheap imports, the advert was designed to spawn popular endorsement for the Proceso’s economic plan. Besides dipping import tariffs, the plans also included a severe increase in foreign debt, imposition of a pay freeze, and devaluation. The military junta announced these financial measures as a comprehensive attempt to replace the allegedly declining economic structures generated in Argentina during decades of i­mport-­substitution industrialisation (ISI). ISI had been the main economic paradigm in Latin America in the ­post-­war period, its underpinnings being the belief that s­tate-­led industrialisation constituted the path to s­ ocio-­ economic development and, consequently, national sovereignty. By the time of the 1976 coup, the official rhetoric of the military and its allies, the elite economic establishment, was that the levels of state

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intervention and market regulation that ISI required were having a pernicious effect on the economy (as the television ad illustrates).1 Similar discourses proliferated in other parts of the Western world against embedded liberalism, which contributed to presenting the neoliberal reforms of the junta as inevitable and necessary while they were, in fact, part of a deliberate scheme to restore class power to the elites. This plan involved, first, a massive transfer of national income from, principally, the workers to the financial sector, transnational capital and the landowning oligarchy, and, secondly, the severe weakening of ­working-­class mobilisation. Under ISI, the workers were the leading force behind industrial production and the primary consumers of manufactured goods. This central role in the dynamics of economic production also implied a high capacity for political organisation; this was precisely what the Proceso wanted to axe. Deindustrialisation, in this regard, was used along with state terrorism to socially disciple the masses. Contrary to what the chairs advert claimed, the arrival of imported goods was not aimed to strengthen local industry: it was meant to undo it. Job precarisation and unemployment, downward social mobility and the debilitation of trade unionism all contributed, along with political violence, to the disarticulation of ­working-­class activism. The project of the dictatorship, nonetheless, encompassed more than economic ­re-­engineering and civic repression. The neoliberal turn carried out by the Proceso was also aimed to transform the way in which subjectivities were produced. ISI had been the economic pillar of a social model that included two dimensions: the first one was the recognition of the state as fundamentally responsible for producing and maintaining social cohesion, mainly through welfare, but also through mediating between the workers and the industrial bourgeoisie. The second dimension was the symbolical and material incorporation of the masses to the orbit of the nation along with the expansion of the middle class, all of which was framed under a conception of society as relatively homogeneous.2 Citizenship, in this framework, was defined mainly through access to s­ ocio-­economic rights, which had to be provided and guaranteed by the state. With its emphasis on the benefits of consumer choice for the individual, exemplified by the chairs advert, the Proceso introduced a shift in forms of citizenship. In a context in which most Argentinians did not have access to basic human and civil rights,

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27

one right was nonetheless positioned as fundamental: that of shopping. Citizens now could rest assured that their freedom to choose would be protected by the very same state that denied all other liberties – implicit was the fact that one had to be, as the person in the advert, white, middle class and, preferably, male. In fact, the freedom to consume, far from universal, relied on the material exclusion of broad sectors of society from, precisely, consumption. By positioning shopping as the fundamental right on which citizenship was founded, the dictatorship was signalling one of the essential aspects of the cultural changes taking place as the country made the transition to neoliberalism. The Proceso dismantled a model of society based on the social cohesion of identities rooted in work and locality and replaced it with an individualistic paradigm of citizenship constructed around consumer sovereignty.3 This model would find its hyperbolic manifestation years later, during the Menem administration, and would lead to the perception, among certain sectors of society, that through easy access to imports, credit and cheap dollars Argentinians had finally achieved their destiny as First World citizens. The subsequent explosion of this model at the turn of the t­wenty-­first century due to impoverishment and unemployment would not only be experienced by Argentinians as an inability to exercise their rights to consume but as a comprehensive crisis of citizenship and national identity. In 1983, when the country finally returned to democratic rule after seven years of dictatorship, it was drastically transformed in every possible sense. Despite having won with a broad mandate, Alfonsín was severely constrained throughout his presidency. He favoured gradual economic reform rather than a process of abrupt and comprehensive deregulation of the market and, in fact, in his first years, the official strategy was to strengthen the declining industrial sector and redistribute income. However, the government was progressively pushed towards more neoliberal positions: large foreign debt loomed continuously over the government and implied increasing interference in domestic policy from multilateral  credit institutions like the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. The national elite economic establishment also put constant pressure on Alfonsín’s administration, as did the trade unions, which were in the process of reconstitution. A series of military insurrections by sectors of the

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army that wanted to stop prosecutions of military human rights violators also exposed some of the government’s weaknesses. In 1989, presidential elections took place amidst grave hyperinflation crises produced by the failure of Alfonsín’s successive economic plans, which had been systematically boycotted by local and transnational financial groups in what has been described as an ‘economic coup’.4 The Peronists, who were fully recovered from their 1983 electoral defeat, capitalised on people’s discontent and Menem won comfortably against Radical candidate Eduardo Angeloz. With inflation reaching 4,925 per cent and lootings taking place in the major cities, Alfonsín was forced to step down six months before his mandate was due. Menem’s coming to power marked a new approach by power groups in their attempt to continue and accentuate the neoliberal turn initiated in the 1970s, since this time this would be pursued by democratic means. Changes in the international context partly explained this change of strategy. The fall of the Berlin Wall, it was argued, implied that ­American-­led globalisation was unavoidable and only a modernised open economy aligned with the United States would put Argentina in a more advantageous position to face this process. Argentina, in Foreign Minister Guido Di Tella’s words, was willing to have ‘relaciones carnales y abyectas con los Estados Unidos’ (carnal and abject relations with the United States). On the domestic front, the chaotic scenario of Alfonsín’s last years in power had facilitated support for an accentuation of neoliberal reforms. As had been the case during the Proceso, Menem presented his economic package not as a political decision but as the only possible course of action. For example, his 1989 address to the Congress on the occasion of the debate on the State Reform Law that would give the green light to widespread privatisation emphasises the urgency to take the ‘unavoidable’ measures that will allow the pursuit of (a rather vague) national greatness: Vamos a privatizar todo aquello que sea necesario, no por una cuestión de dogma sino por una cuestión de necesidad … Como tantas veces lo señalé, yo no creo ni en el privatismo ni en el estatismo. Yo creo en el ‘Argentinismo’ con mayúsculas, no en la soberanía del hambre, del atraso y de la decadencia, sí en la soberanía que nos permita nuestra recuperación definitiva. Pero esto no significa, naturalmente, que reformar el estado sea simplemente sinónimo de privatizar empresas públicas. Se trata de un medio instrumental,

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insisto, para poder cumplir con nuestros verdaderos fines de justicia, independencia y soberanía … Entiendo que estamos en una encrucijada que trasciende en lo económico y lo político para ubicarse en lo cultural.5 (We are going to privatize as much as necessary, it’s not a question of dogma but of necessity … As I pointed out many times, I don’t believe in privatism or statism. I believe in ‘Argentinism’ with capital letters. I don’t believe in the sovereignty of hunger, backwardness and decadence; I believe in the sovereignty that will allow us to recover definitively. But this doesn’t mean, of course, that reforming the state is simply a synonym for privatising public companies. It’s an instrument, I insist, to fulfil our true aims of justice, independence and sovereignty … I understand that we’re at a crossroads that is cultural and goes beyond economic and political issues.)

Argentinismo is used here as an alternative to political ideology in an attempt to, precisely, d ­ e-­politicise discourse and policy. Menem uses keywords from the Peronist rhetoric but hollows them out, transforming them into vague and general concepts that, because of their ambiguity, are beyond any set of ideological beliefs. After all, who could be against justice, independence and sovereignty in an abstract sense? The subsuming of the economic and the political into the cultural signifies the turning of neoliberalism into common sense. The Convertibility Plan of 1991, designed by Menem’s Finance Minister Domingo Cavallo, was successful in tackling the hyperinflationary trend. It consisted of an orthodox plan of adjustment organised around fiscal tightening, a peg between the local currency peso and the dollar, and the unrestricted opening of the economy. What followed was a period of economic prosperity and consumer boom, propelled by large flows of foreign investment, with GDP growth of 12.7 per cent in 1991 and 11.9 per cent in 1992.6 Macroeconomic growth and stability was saluted by large sectors of the population. Economic gurus in Argentina and abroad praised Menem’s ‘economic miracle’. There were, apparently, many signs that Argentina had finally embraced the road to development: the abundance of imported goods and affordable credit, the modernisation of services, now under private ownership, and the Americanisation of infrastructure, expressed in modern shopping malls, luxury hotels and branches of international chains.

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The initial effects of these reforms fostered a shared feeling of optimism amongst Argentinians, providing neoliberalism with the social validation it had lacked in the past. This was particularly so amongst members of the middle class, who saw their First World aspirations finally materialised. An Argentinian, it seemed, could finally buy the same products as an American or European, travel the world, and enjoy a lifestyle that had been denied in the past but to which many felt entitled. This was Argentina arriving at its historical ‘destiny’ of greatness.7 If the dictatorship had redefined the citizen primary as a consumer, now Argentinians could indulge themselves in the full exercise of their fundamental right. But more importantly, it was the final confirmation that Argentina did have an exceptional status within Latin America, one that put it in a position of proximity to the central countries – more developed and civilised and, also, whiter. This idea, which had shaped generations of Argentinians, had always appeared elusive, unattainable, utopic. It seemed to be materialising at last during the early 1990s. The celebration of consumerism, frivolity and opulence characterised this period, which went on to be known as the fiesta menemista (the Menemist party). Menem himself was the embodiment of the spirit of the time: breaking the mould of the traditional Peronist politician, his behaviour at times resembled that of a celebrity. For a while, he drove a 120,000-dollar Ferrari Testarossa (a gift from an Italian businessman that he eventually, and reluctantly, returned) and presented himself as a womaniser. In one appearance on a popular television programme in 1990, Menem reacted with a laugh when asked about the multiple affairs attributed to him by the media: ‘¿Están preocupados o envidiosos?’ (Are you worried or jealous?), he asked. This exemplifies how he deliberately presented himself as the ‘Argentinian macho’: arrogant, witty and capable of seducing attractive women. Menem’s integration of politics with what is known in Argentina as farándula (the showbiz world) acknowledged the increasing centrality of the media in social dynamics. As with other dimensions of the economy, the media experienced extreme concentration and oligopolisation in this period. This was propelled by the privatisation of television channels in 1990 and the rise of cable television during the decade: by the turn of the ­twenty-­first century, Argentina had one of the largest pay television penetration rates in

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the world and the largest in Latin America.8 Television’s influence in the shaping of political life grew exponentially and, eventually, politics became subsumed under the logic of the mass media and showbiz.9 Ideologies and political debates were simplified and undermined to the detriment of the p ­ re-­eminence of the image and, specifically, of corporality.10 Menem proved to be extremely comfortable in the new mediatised scenario: he regularly appeared on television, although he tended to prefer comedy and entertainment shows rather than political programmes. He used his charismatic and colourful personality to advance a view of him as someone who had come to reform politics, favouring h ­ igh-­ impact interventions rather than the debating of ideas and policies.11 This depoliticised ­mass-­mediatised public persona introduced by Menem was embraced not just by the Peronists, but also by the entire political class. It was frequent for politicians to befriend local celebrities and, particularly, fashion models and actors, and to organise lavish parties in Miami and Punta del Este. Sexism was proudly exhibited. For example, prominent male political figures could often be seen on the evening television show A la cama con Moria (In Bed with Moria), in which a famous diva wearing sexy nightgowns interviewed personalities in bed. The guests, from all political parties, enthusiastically joined the presenter in conversations riddled with sexual innuendos. Some female politicians also joined this trend of c­ elebrity-­like behaviour. Noticias, one of the country’s leading magazines, featured María Julia Alsogaray on its cover wearing just a draped fur. Alsogaray was, at the time, in charge of overseeing the privatisation of the telephone company Entel. Menemismo was also rooted on personalist tendencies that, although common in Argentinian politics in the past, found new manifestations in Menem. The concentration of power in the figure of the president was presented as a necessary evil in the face of the state of emergency the country was in during the hyperinflation episodes at the turn of the 1990s. Excessive concern for legality and respect for institutions, it was argued, could obstruct or slow down the procedures that the country needed to recover from the economic crisis. However, once the situation was stabilised, Menem continued to exercise power in autocratic ways. In ten years as president, he issued 545 executive decrees, thus systematically

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­ y-­passing Congress. He also expanded the Supreme Court from b five to nine members and appointed five close allies as justices, thus guaranteeing control over the power of the judiciary. Widespread corruption also marked these years: affaires d’état that involved kickbacks, peddling influence and, on some occasions, suspicious deaths and assassinations, became regular features. However, despite Menem’s frivolousness and autocratic tendencies and the government’s rampant corruption, he was r­e-­elected by a large margin (44.94 per cent) in 1995, after a constitutional reform allowed him to stand for a second mandate. This revealed the extent to which his government had been able to build social consensus around neoliberalism. Menem’s success in the polls could not hide the fact that the adverse outcomes of the economic model were increasingly conspicuous: the ­already-­declining local industry had quickly fallen apart due to the flood of cheap imports. As a result, the rate of open unemployment skyrocketed, going from 6.3 per cent in 1990 to 17.3 per cent in 1996, showing that the economic growth produced by neoliberalism did not translate into job creation.12 Unemployment became structural, but job precarisation became widespread as well. A series of measures first introduced in 1991, allegedly to ‘modernise’ labour relations, in practice axed workers’ rights and truncated job stability. In this context, the state exacerbated the adverse effects of deindustrialisation due to cuts in welfare provision and comprehensive privatisation. By 1995, the number of people employed in s­ tate-­run companies had been reduced by almost 70 per cent.13 Inequality also escalated: in 1974, the country’s Gini coefficient was 0.36 and the ratio of the average income of the richest 10 per cent to the poorest 10 per cent was 12.7. These were figures comparable to many developed countries.14 By 1996, the Gini coefficient was 0.49, and the ratio was 33.84. Figures were even more alarming in 2001: 0.51 and 58.4 respectively.15 Finally, between 1991 and 2001, and despite the sale of most state assets, foreign debt more than doubled.16 Neoliberalism in the 1990s, in sum, gave way to an unprecedented concentration of wealth. In 1998, the economy went into recession, provoked by the intrinsic limitations of the economic model, tied to an overpriced exchange rate and excessively vulnerable to exogenous shocks, such as the Russian and Asian financial crises of 1997 and 1998.17 Menem’s response was more economic orthodoxy. Increasing

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demands to address the ‘social consequences’ of the economic model and rejection of the rampant corruption of Menemismo handed victory in the 1999 elections to Alianza’s candidate, De la Rúa, who obtained 48.5 per cent of votes. During his electoral campaign, he framed Argentina’s recession as produced not by the inherent logic of neoliberalism but by the rampant corruption of Menem’s government. In a famous television spot, he responded to criticism that he lacked charisma by saying: ‘Dicen que soy aburrido. Será que no manejo Ferraris’ (They say I’m boring. It must be because I don’t drive Ferraris), emphasising that his differences with Menem were not so much political or economic as they were moral. De la Rúa guaranteed that he would bring back economic growth without affecting the exchange rate, something that gained him the support of large sectors of society that were not willing to give up on Convertibility. These people feared that the end of the parity between the dollar and the peso would bring hyperinflation back and, more crucially, an end to their First World aspirations, even if everyday reality made evident that this had always been a fantasy. In the end, De la Rúa’s government failed to deliver on both fronts. The revelation that members of parliament had accepted bribes from the executive to pass a labour reform law in 2000 showed that Alianza was not much more transparent than the Peronists. It also led to ­ Vice-­ President Carlos Chacho Álvarez’s resignation, following his dissatisfaction with the way in which De la Rúa had dealt with the scandal. The government also failed to contain the declining s­ ocio-­economic situation, partly because the foundations of the neoliberal model remained untouched. Proof of this was the appointment of Cavallo as Finance Minister in March 2001, in a desperate attempt to save the monetary regime. Legislative elections in October of the same year strengthened Peronist control of both chambers of Congress. They also illustrated society’s disenchantment with the political system: 27.2 per cent of the electorate did not vote despite it being compulsory (although in practice rarely penalised), and 21.9 per cent of the voters cast spoilt ballots.18 However, civil society’s disillusionment was not only expressed at the ballot box. In the late 1990s, sectors of the precariat that were unable to find expression through their traditional representatives (the Peronist party and large unions) started to develop new tactics of resistance to neoliberalism. The piquetero

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movement, composed of unemployed people, is the iconic expression of these new forms of underclass mobilisation. From 1996, they began to systematically mount picket lines in national highways and city streets. Blocking traffic was used by piqueteros as a strategy to put pressure on the state and obtain concessions in the form of state assistance programmes and food that were, in turn, utilised to sustain community projects such as soup kitchens and allotments. Increasing piquetero activism was a sign of how the social and political situations were escalating: in 1998, there were fi ­ fty-­ eight route blockages: two years later the number would rise to 514, and totalled 1,383 in 2001.19 The number would reach a record 2,336 in 2002.20 In December 2001, after three years of recession, the economy collapsed: there was a drain of domestic funds and, in order to prevent a f­ ull-­scale bank run, the government froze bank savings, a measure that was infamously known as the corralito (playpen). Simultaneously, food riots – some of them encouraged by the Peronists – multiplied in Greater Buenos Aires, bringing back memories of Alfonsín’s last months in power. On the evening of 19 December, De la Rúa declared a state of siege to contain the unrest, to which people reacted by taking to the city’s streets, especially in the capital. Banging pots and pans and chanting ¡que se vayan todos! (they all must go!), protesters demanded not only the resignation of the president and his cabinet but also expressed their rejection of the entire political establishment. In the wake of a brutal repression by the police that killed more than thirty people, De la Rúa resigned on 20 December, unable to find political support from his own party and the Peronists. Álvarez’s earlier resignation implied that there was no deputy to take over. The degree of civil unrest can obviously be explained by the scale of the economic crisis, which had affected not only the workers but also the middle class, for a while safe from the effects of neoliberalism. Disillusionment with political parties and with representative democracy should also be mentioned – and ¡que se vayan todos! has become an iconic expression of this dissatisfaction with the deinstitutionalisation of politics under Menem and De la Rúa. Nevertheless, cultural factors also played a key role in the widespread eruption of social discontent.21 The calamitous end to the First ­World-­ness dreams promised by neoliberalism was, for the middle class, particularly traumatic: once again, and perhaps more cruelly

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than before, everything had fallen apart just when it finally seemed that Argentina was definitively realising its exceptional destiny. As Colin M. Lewis puts it, ‘(p)ossibly more than other t­wentieth-­ century “shocks to the system,” the Argentinazo constituted a crisis of culture and confidence about national identity’.22 As will be demonstrated during the course of this book, this crisis of nationality templates exposed the latter’s racial foundations, constructed around whiteness, Europeanness and ­middle-­class-­ness. Two interrelated processes marked the period that followed the 2001 protests: widespread political activism and the reaction by the status quo. The comprehensive mobilisation of sectors of civil society questioned the political establishment on the basis that it lacked legitimate representation and did not provide citizens with effective solutions. Over the course of December 2001 and throughout 2002, the number of ­grass-­roots groups multiplied: to the piqueteros can be added n ­ on-­partisan popular assemblies formed by ­ middle-­ class people who, contrary to the apathy expressed during the 1990s, were now actively involved in ­direct-­democracy experiences. In an attempt to respond to and disarticulate civic activism, the political establishment reorganised under the aegis of the Peronists, who saw this as their opportunity to return to power. Adolfo Rodríguez Sáa, Governor of the province of San Luis, was appointed caretaker president on 23 December. He immediately declared a default on public debt, the biggest in modern history up to that point. However, his presidency only lasted a week due to continuous demonstrations and the quick loss of Peronist support. The Congress then appointed Duhalde as president on 2 January 2002. One of his first measures was a devaluation that in the immediate term accentuated the economic crisis even further: the first trimester of 2002 was the worst in Argentina’s recent economic history, with a 16.3 per cent contraction in GDP.23 Inflation rose to 41 per cent, unemployment reached a record of 21.5 per cent in May (34.2 per cent when we include the subemployed) and more than half of the population fell below the poverty line.24 In the course of 2002, Duhalde’s government attempted to demobilise civil society and disarticulate interclass solidarities between ­working-­ class piqueteros and ­middle-­class popular assemblies, which were summarised in the slogan piquete y cacerola, la lucha es una sola (picket line and pot, the struggle is the same), a reference to their respective protest modalities. Media campaigns were implemented in order to

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demonise piqueteros, explicitly suggesting that, unlike the rest of society, they were not contributing to the overcoming of the crisis. By resorting to historical racial prejudices against the lower class, interclass bonds were progressively eroded. Roberta Villalón suggests that racial stigmas influenced the undermining of support for piquetero causes. ‘The class position (­ low-­income) of the picketers evoked ­ long-­ standing racist responses that tended to associate middle- and u ­ pper-­class, white, and European features with social desirability, legality, and properness and l­ower-­ class, d ­arker-­ skinned, and indigenous or Latin American features with social marginality and deviance’.25 In June 2002, the police severely repressed a piquetero protest and killed two demonstrators, in an episode known as the Avellaneda Massacre. Proofs emerged that the repression was not a response to the protestors’ violence, as the government initially stated, but was planned beforehand to undermine piquetero activism and dissuade further demonstrations from all sectors of society. The plan backfired and Duhalde, affected by the scandal, called early presidential elections for March 2003. In May 2003, when Kirchner assumed the presidency, the economy was already starting to show signs of recovery, and GDP grew for the first time in four years.26 His inaugural speech was riddled with references to ‘normality’, establishing what his government’s priorities would be: the reconstitution of state authority, stabilisation of the economy and demobilisation of citizenship.27 He continued previous state attempts to disarticulate popular protest, although switching from intimidation and repression to strategies of c­ o-­option, division and integration of subordinated political groups into the apparatus of the state.28 Kirchner also introduced ruptures with the 1990s that found broad endorsement from civil society and helped to reconstitute political authority. His policies in the areas of human rights, institutional reform and the increase of state intervention in the economy were among the most popular of these initiatives. In terms of foreign policy, rather than automatic alignment with the United States, as during the 1990s, Kirchner prioritised cooperation with other South American countries (particularly Brazil). His coming to power coincided, in this sense, with the s­ o-­called Pink Tide, a series of political changes in other Latin American nations that led to a general turn towards more ­neo-­developmentalist policies, to the detriment of 1990s f­ree-­market orthodoxy. Under Kirchner, the

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economy saw a strong revival, with growth rates of 8.8 per cent in 2003, 9.0 per cent in 2004, and 9.2 per cent in 2005.29 Unemployment went from 24 per cent in 2002 to about 11.6 per cent in 2005, the year in which a large part of the public debt was successfully restructured.30 Although by 2005 some 24.7 per cent of the population was still estimated to live in conditions of poverty, with 8.4 per cent in extreme poverty, and the Gini coefficient still showed severe inequality (0.493), it is possible to state that the financial meltdown had been reverted.31 By then, the country was entering a new period, profoundly changed by the consequences of the crisis, which were not only economic and political but also cultural.

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The historical construction of whiteness in Argentina

The decades that followed the Second World War saw the end of the apogee of scientific racism as the dominant paradigm to explain human difference in the Western world. In the preceding decades, voices from the scientific community had already impugned the belief of the innate superiority of whites. However, the defeat of Nazi Germany, decolonisation processes in Africa and Asia, and the desegregation of the United States in the 1960s meant that the notion of race as a biological reality was progressively dismantled while its association with specific dynamics of power and domination was denounced. Rather than a primordial characteristic of human beings, race was shown to be a social construct, a particular way (or ways) of organising forms of physical difference like skin colour or hair that attributes a correlation between the latter and people’s behavioural and cultural characteristics. In the second half of the twentieth century, the preoccupation with phenotype that characterised previous racial thinking seemed to give way to an emphasis on culture and locality, with race being increasingly replaced in public and academic discourse with ethnicity. This has not implied, as anticipated and announced, the disappearance of race or the shift towards a p ­ ost-­racial time. On the contrary, evidence indicates the persistence of race and racism despite the discredit that biological explanations about human difference have experienced. According to Wade, race’s endurance as a central social mediation that determines people’s lives and chances suggests that it was never solely about phenotype and, instead, always entailed a constant movement between nature and culture.1 Likewise, the pervasiveness of racial categorisation and racism also exposes the

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limitations of social constructionism as a paradigm for analysing race. Although it has contributed to the exposure of the relations of domination that racial thinking and classification have sustained and reproduced, a constructionist approach, by itself, cannot explain the forms in which race is experienced as a reality. As Wade points out, ‘people may behave as if races did exist and, as a result, races do exist as social categories of great tenacity and power’.2 Thus, race needs to be understood as a fiction that has been made real as the result of the prolonged and continuous constructions of social spaces, discourses and practices.3 Frederic Cooper and Rogers Brubaker’s critique of the limitations of purely constructivist approaches to race and other identitarian categories can complement the previous point. They are particularly wary of p ­ ost-­modern or ­post-­structuralist views of identity as inherently fluid, multiple and fragmented. According to these authors, these frameworks tend to sideline the fact that, in everyday life, identity also entails a sense of sameness and continuity.4 If our racial or gender identities were perennially unstable, contingent and in flux, how could we explain their centrality as lived experiences? All of the above highlights the importance of looking at race, as Wade suggests, through the prism of historical change and stability.5 Change is related to race’s specific history and developments. This encompasses its opaque emergence in Europe during the early modern period, its later reinvention as a set of theories about human difference as natural between the nineteenth and m ­ id-­ twentieth century, its role in the process of European colonial expansion and, finally, the transition towards an alleged ­post-­racial world in recent decades. The stability of race is, in turn, linked to the fact that, throughout all these centuries, it has always been used to describe and classify groups in terms of shared traits, either physical or cultural, or both, that are supposed to be transmitted across generations. Along with these changes and continuities, it is important to factor in the dialogues between academic and popular understandings of race. This is what Wacquant characterises as ‘the continual barter between folk and analytical notions, the uncontrolled conflation of social and sociological understandings of “race”’.6 Finally, it is necessary to see the intersection of race with other social variables, especially considering that race, as mentioned before, can be present masked in the languages of class and space.

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Consequently, my approach to the analysis of race in Argentina will consider the former’s history, elements of rupture and continuity, specific manifestation in discourses, practices and institutions, and articulation with other social mediations within specific sets of power relations. The connections between Argentina and the rest of Latin America, with its distinctive history of racial relations, will be considered. In the aftermath of the independence war, criollos – a term generally used to refer to A ­ merican-­born children of peninsular Spaniards – consolidated as the new ruling sector, effectively claiming for themselves the task of establishing the foundations of the new Argentinian nation. As in other Latin American countries, there was not ethnos that preceded the nation: n ­ ation-­building had to be parallel to ethnogenesis. In this context, the question of what kind of nationals should be created was a pressing and crucial one.7 Along with criollos, free and enslaved blacks, assimilated Amerindians (particularly in the northeast), mestizos and other mixed people constituted a highly heterogeneous and fragmented popular sector that needed to be homogenised. What prevailed initially was a fairly inclusive understanding of national belonging rooted in voluntarist or political ideas, which framed nationality in terms of citizenship.8 Virtuous citizens would be constructed through the combined forces of liberalism, education and work regardless of class or race (although not of gender, which effectively acted to exclude women from civic life). In this process, these highly diverse groups would be fused into one single form of national identity.9 The limits of the nation were consequently framed territorially and legally, not in ethnic, cultural or linguistic terms: everybody had a place in the nation imagined by the criollos as long as they wanted to inhabit the national soil, give up their cultural affiliations, and embrace a shared undifferentiated citizenship.10 In particular, this discourse interpellated blacks, who constituted as much as 30 per cent of the population of Buenos Aires in the early nineteenth century. They had actively participated in the country’s independence war and now demanded real integration into the emerging Argentina. In this sense, the abolishment of slavery in the 1853 Constitution, preceded by the 1813 Law of Freedom by the Womb that granted manumission to children of slaves, can be seen as a direct outcome of this political or voluntarist conception of nationality.

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In practice, this radical egalitarianism was more nuanced. Liberals grew wary of the masses, partly due to their support for federal caudillo Juan Manuel Rosas, who ruled Buenos Aires between 1829 and 1832 and then again between 1835 and 1852. Rosas was seen as the epitome of tyranny and the main obstacle to progress and civilisation, identified with capitalism, republicanism and urban life. The fact that blacks and mestizos alike backed him was, in the liberal mind, a proof that these groups were unable to rule themselves. Belief that the masses could be turned into nationals persisted, but this process was now seen as more challenging and protracted than anticipated. Key intellectuals of the period, like Juan Bautista Alberdi and Domingo F. Sarmiento, were convinced that European population should be imported to accelerate the realisation of progress, given the deficiency of the local population. 11 Northern Europeans, they claimed, were already educated in the forms of liberalism and capitalist labour, and their arrival would act as a catalyst for the development they envisioned for the country. Consequently, an article was included in the 1853 Constitution specifying that the federal government would foment European immigration.12 In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the state’s basic structures were finally in place and decades of internal conflict over the construction of the nation seemed over. The establishment of a central state apparatus was parallel to the exponential expansion of capitalist systems of production and trade, as Argentina entered the world’s economy as a producer of agricultural exports and recipient of British manufactures and capital. In this context of accelerated modernisation, conceptions of nationality were r­ e-­signified under the influence of contemporary E ­ uro-­American scientific racism.13 This articulation of state construction, capitalist expansion and racial thinking found one of its crudest expressions in the 1879 Conquest of the Desert. The expansion over the southern frontier would be accompanied, from 1884, by military advance over the other area under indigenous control, the Chaco, in the northeast. These campaigns allowed the appropriation of extensive territories for the prosperous ­agro-­export economy, along with the affirmation of state sovereignty and the delineation of the nation’s territorial limits. But they also expressed the change in the elites’ views about Amerindians as a result of racial theories. Indigenous people were seen now not only as ‘savages’ but also as destined to become extinct

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as a result of their own primitiveness and inferiority in relation to whites. During these campaigns, thousands of indigenous people were killed. This violence, nevertheless, was presented as just accelerating what was inevitably going to happen by natural causes. Parallel to the capture of indigenous lands, efforts to attract Europeans as a way to whiten the population and sustain capitalist development intensified. Offices were opened in strategic European cities to promote Argentina as a destination, jobs and land were widely promised and subsidised steamship tickets were offered. The 1876 Immigration and Colonisation Law, which defined who could be classified as ‘immigrant’ and be granted immigration rights, made explicit the preference for European contingents.14 In this enterprise, Argentina was not alone: encouraging European immigration as a strategy for whitening was common among most Latin American elites of the time.15 What makes the Argentinian case stand out is the extent of its success: between 1880 and 1914, around 4.2 million people, mostly Europeans, came to Argentina. Between 2.7 and 2.9 million eventually settled permanently.16 One million more Europeans arrived in the 1920s.17 In global terms, between 1880 and 1930, immigration to Argentina was second only to the United States in absolute numbers, and was first in proportional terms.18 To give an idea of this, in 1895, out of a national population of almost four million, 25.5 per cent were from abroad. By 1914, the total population had doubled, reaching eight million, of which 30.3 per cent were foreigners. In Buenos Aires, the evolution was more dramatic: in 1895, two of every three residents were foreigners and in 1914, half of the capital’s inhabitants. Despite this impressive demographic growth, the impact of immigration was less significant outside Buenos Aires and the centre and littoral regions. In the ­ north-­ western provinces of Tucumán, Salta and Jujuy, indigenous groups had been part of local economies and societies as early as the colonial period – and continued to be so in the early twentieth century.19 Furthermore, the aggressive violence of late n ­ ineteenth-­century advances over Pampa, Patagonia and Chaco did not imply the complete annihilation of all indigenous populations living there (except in Tierra del Fuego).20 Gastón Gordillo and Silvia Hirsch state that discourses of extinction were so dominant that they were even reproduced during the twentieth century by people who were

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critical of the Conquest of the Desert.21 Evidence shows that the state acted to whiten the indigenous survivors by implementing a model of hierarchical integration in which they were coerced into abandoning their cultural practices, identities and names, and incorporated by force into the productive, institutional and judicial structures of the nation. Through this process, they officially became Argentinians, removed from any racial or ethnic labels. 22 Another common strategy to whiten them was to construct them in legal and cultural terms as criollos.23 Because criollo was traditionally a term that emphasised having been born in the Americas but at the same time implied, in some way, a reference or connection to Europe (in colonial times, criollos were legally Spaniards), its ambiguous character allowed the whitening of those sectors previously identified as indigenous and mestizo.24 The implementation of the term criollo was combined with discourses that argued that the indigenous communities had become extinct, eventually fossilising these groups in the pre-1880 period. Oscar Chamosa argues: While in most Latin American countries assimilation implied that indigenous people could pass as mestizo, in Argentina to assimilate meant to adopt an intermediate category of criollo, which as a result of the cultural politics of the time was ultimately equivalent to Europeanness.25

The cultural apparatus of the state was also applied to whiten ­ fro-­descendants who, at the turn of the twentieth century, were A also declared officially ‘extinct’.26 The official narrative pointed out that their demography was already in decline due to the yellow fever epidemic of 1871 and their participation in the Independence War and the Triple Alliance War against Paraguay (1864–70). The whitening impact of immigration had been the final factor in A ­ fro-­ Argentinians’ disappearance.27 George Reid Andrews was amongst the first scholars to challenge this narrative of extinction, claiming that blacks were underrepresented in late ­ nineteenth-­ century censuses.28 He argues that the introduction of the category of trigueño (which indicates dark skin but not necessarily African background) implied that l­ighter-­skinned A ­ fro-­descendants were not categorised as black in state statistics, in a procedure that resembled the use of criollo described by Chamosa.29 This explains why, according to the censuses, the black population of Buenos

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Aires decreased from 15,000 (out of a total population of 65,000) in 1838 to 8,000 (of a total population of 433,000) in 1887.30 Also, interracial marriage with Europeans represented an instrument for social mobility, which explains the dilution of African phenotypes. By the early twentieth century, it seemed, the elites had succeeded in their efforts to transform Argentina into a homogeneously white country. ­ Afro-­ descendant and Amerindian elements had been either physically eliminated or whitened, while contingents of Europeans kept on arriving in the port of Buenos Aires. Now that the political and economic structures of the nation were firmly established, it was expected that immigrants would contribute to the emergence of a national culture – the outstanding component of the ­nation-­building process. This national culture should be a crisol de razas: the product of the fusion of all these different European ethnicities under the tutelage of the elites. However, rather than passively accommodating to the structures designed for them by the ruling sectors, immigrants sought to participate in the nation on their own terms. They created associations and mutual societies to preserve their cultures and languages and promoted anarchist and socialist ideas and practices to resist widespread exploitation. For the elites, the immigrant started to be perceived not as a force of progress but as a threat to the cohesion of the nation, and they reacted through a combination of forced acculturation and coercion. Educational policy, the establishment of patriotic rituals and the introduction of compulsory military service in 1904 exemplify these assimilationist efforts and, specifically, the will to ‘Argentinise’ the children of migrants. The 1902 Residence Law, which facilitated deportation, constituted an example of the punitive counterpoint to the first approach. Hygienist discourse and Lamarckian eugenics (which, ironically, had been initially picked up by socialist groups) also contributed to framing this process through the lens of biology and medicine.31 In racial thinking of the time, race could mean basic human groups (black, white, Amerindian) but also specific ethnic formations and nationalities. Immigrants were, in their majority, not the industrious and civic ­Anglo-­Saxons dreamt of by Alberdi and Sarmiento, but poor Italians and Spaniards (2 million and 1.4 million respectively), considered racially weak.32 As such, they were seen as a potential risk to the health of the ‘Argentinian race’. By 1910s, positivists like José Ingenieros or José María Ramos Mejía sought to contain this

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risk of ‘contamination’ and improve the general population through programmes of public health and social reform.33 In these, issues of sexual reproduction and gender (particularly, control over women’s sexuality) were central. A conservative form of cultural nationalism developed simultaneously to the development of these eugenicist programmes. Unlike social reformists, cultural nationalists were less optimistic about the possibility of reverting Argentina’s demographic degeneration. In the late nineteenth century, writers from the elite like Eugenio Cambaceres, Julián Martel and Miguel Cané had already articulated a racist cultural discourse in naturalist narratives that stigmatised poor European immigrants as threats to the moral and physical health of the upper classes.34 Early ­twentieth-­century cultural nationalists differed from these oligarchic writers in their identification with an Argentinianness rooted on a romanticised version of the past and Hispanic traditions, the epitome of which was the gaucho. In public conferences, essays and literary texts, they argued that the purity of the national type was under threat due to the inundation of deprived Europeans brought by the ‘decadent’ cosmopolitan elite. They also challenged the alleged inferiority of the Latin or Hispanic race in relation to ­Anglo-­Saxons. Amongst these cultural nationalists and other sectors of the upper class, a­ nti-­ Semitism was widespread and would have terrible consequences during the 1919 Tragic Week, in which the police, army and r­ ight-­ wing paramilitary groups carried out a pogrom against the ­Russian-­ Jewish community of Buenos Aires.35 But despite the cultural nationalists’ fears of national dissolution due to immigration, their position never really challenged the dominant discourse of a white Argentina.36 The gaucho figure that this group identified as the paradigm of the Argentinian race was a romanticised p ­ ure-­blooded criollo stripped of past references to blackness and mestizaje.37 In the first decades of the twentieth century, race started to be atomised and fused into other markers of difference as the image of Argentinian society as predominantly white became dominant.38 Argentina had become a ­‘race-­less’ country, predicated on the evident whiteness of its population. However, if ­non-­whiteness had deliberately been made invisible by the cultural apparatus of the state, this did not imply that this invisibility was complete. N ­ on-­ whites had been diluted by the effect of European migration and incorporated to the masses as undefined and ­ de-­ ethnicised

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individuals, but phenotype as a marker of race could not be made invisible in daily life. The masses’ physical appearance in everyday interaction was a constant reminder of the ­constructed-­ness of this national whiteness and the need to police it at all times to guarantee its existence and reproduction.39 As a matter of fact, this difference was necessary for the maintenance of the status quo. This is linked to one of the crucial paradoxes of modern nationhood: on the one hand, unequal distribution of power and goods requires racial domination as part of a hierarchy that also includes class, gender and culture. On the other hand, to sustain racial domination, the nation needs to be presented as homogeneous and cohesive, thus repressing forms of racial heterogeneity.40 Thus, as in other contexts, the invisibility of race was combined with silence. Indeed, in those cases in which race could not be made invisible, it had, at least, not to be uttered – which meant, partially, that racial differences were referred to in other languages and forms, such as idioms of class and culture. Racial homogeneity had been achieved at the price of a very ambiguous understanding of whiteness. The 1940s produced a significant destabilisation of the national whiteness established in the previous decades. The political organisation, under Peronism, of n ­ on-­white migrants from the interior who had arrived in Buenos Aires to work in the growing industrial sector acted as a reminder of the fragility of Argentina’s alleged whiteness. Racial and class anxieties exacerbated, especially amongst those Porteños who, to their horror, had to share the public space with the empowered popular sector. The discontent and anxiety that Peronism produced in these groups was crystallised mainly through the use of racial language, specifically via the particular discursive construction of Peronists as racial Others. Conservative Adolfo Mugica complained that the country had turned into ‘una inmensa merienda de negros’ (an immense bedlam of negros) and nationalist Juan Carulla claimed that Argentina was becoming ‘darker’ and Latin American.41 Cabecita negra would become the term most strongly associated with ­anti-­ Peronist racism of the period, even if there are no written registers of its use during Peronism.42 The category illustrates the particularities of racial discrimination in Argentina, since it connotes racial difference but avoids references to historical racialised identities such as Amerindian, A ­ fro-­descendant or mestizo. Instead, it refers to issues of class, civility and education.43 Cabecita

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negra progressively withered away in the late 1960s, eventually being replaced by negro, which would seem, in principle, to refer directly to race. Yet, like cabecita, it carries an intrinsic ambiguity: although at times it can be used as a term of endearment, its use in quotidian interaction often implies being poor, vulgar and lacking socially acceptable behaviour (although it does not imply a Peronist allegiance like cabecita). Nevertheless, it would be a mistake to just consider this a racialisation of w ­orking-­ class behaviour and condition, given that negro also assumes that the person will most probably have ­non-­white features, demonstrating how racism has acted in Argentina also by preventing race to be spoken as such. The construction of the cabecita negra and the negro as internal figures of racial otherness exemplifies this double need for homogeneity and difference that is at the core of modern nationhood. Peronism, in this sense, implied the exposure of racial domination against ­non-­whites. However, as was the case with other mass political movements in Latin America at that time, it neither explicitly attempted to disarticulate racism nor was organised as a racial movement. As Diana Lenton points out, Peronism’s main concerns were harmonising and homogenising society, and thus it downplayed ethnic or racial conflicts while emphasising loyalty to Perón and belonging to a rather diffuse idea of the people united against the oligarchy.44 Elena concurs with this interpretation but adds that, in early Peronism’s engagement with race, overlapping trends coexisted: First, Peronists authorities displayed little interest in challenging dominant conceptions of nationalism, which rested on the premise that massive immigration had successfully Europeanized and whitened society and that Argentina was racially different from, if not superior to, most other Latin American nations … That said, Peronist authorities muted the exclusionary features of whiteness by insisting on national unity: there was, in theory, room for all in the New Argentina. This second tendency helps explain the political reticence to walk into the potential minefield of difference.45

Adamovsky and Garguin argue that it was during the Peronist years, and as a reaction to precisely the empowerment of the ­dark-­ skinned masses, that ­middle-­classness consolidated as a nationness discourse for those sectors that identified with the image of a white Argentina, but did not belong to the traditional oligarchy. 46 ­Middle-­ classness crystallised what, it was claimed, distinguished Argentina

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from other Latin American countries: in this sense, it became an articulator of ideas associated with whiteness, Europeanness, upward social mobility and education. As such, it was instrumental in bringing together different groups under one form of identification and redrawing the lines of exclusion and inclusion that delimited the national community, symbolically excluding the Peronist masses. The consolidation of this type of m ­ iddle-­class form of identification allowed the continuity of narratives of whiteness and national exceptionalism in the second half of the twentieth century, despite the challenge presented by the relocation of the masses from the social, geographical and political margins to the centre during the 1940s and 1950s. Renowned academics of the time, like Gino Germani and José Luis Romero, argued about the centrality of the middle class for social development and made calls for this social sector to assume its role as agent of progress and modernisation and repository of the moral consciousness of the nation. Their ideas would be extremely influential in the configuration of nationness around m ­ iddle-­class whiteness, habits and affects.47 The persistence of whiteness throughout the twentieth century as an unwavering project of nationness despite challenges and crisis cannot be considered just a matter of simple imposition from above. Imaginaries of racial homogeneity and the ambiguity of racialised subjectivities in Argentina meant that n ­ on-­white groups could use them to distance themselves, at least momentarily, from stigmatised identities. For example, by presenting themselves as criollos, people could downplay their indigenous ancestry, which was seen as a sign of inferiority in the dominant culture. In this sense, Argentina’s vague ideas about whiteness also had an inclusive component. Yet, even if the popular sectors could use these racial categories to claim membership of the national community, it was ultimately the dominant sectors that retained the central power to racialise and ­ de-­ racialise. Richard Dyer introduces the idea of ‘degrees of whiteness’ as a result of its flexibility since it allows constant changes to the criteria for inclusion, and the privileges associated with being white. He argues: ‘The instability of white as skin colour is not only a means for policing who at any given historical moment is going to be included in or out of the category, but also to differentiate within.’ 48 At the same time, it would be a mistake to present these narratives of whiteness as hegemonic. In

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fact, the social and political struggles of the decades that followed the ousting of Perón in 1955 indicated that the n ­ on-­white Peronist multitudes could be repressed but not completely contained. The radicalisation of the m ­ iddle-­class youth in the 1970s also opened up new paths through which Argentina’s social – and also racial – order was challenged. Nevertheless, the conflicts of these years also showed that, even if not hegemonic, the notion of Argentina as a white Europeanised country was quite resilient in the face of contestation from the masses and l­eft-­wing sectors. The repression unleashed by the Proceso vigorously reaffirmed the idea of Argentina as a homogenous society founded on Europeanness and whiteness. The dictatorship traced its genealogy back to the nineteenth-­ ­ century ­ nation-­ building elites and celebrated with pomp the centenary of the Conquest of the Desert in 1979, deliberately manifesting its allegiance to the project of a white Argentina.49 Nonetheless, in a continuation of previous discourses, race and racism continued to be disavowed (both constantly present and denied). In the ­post-­dictatorship context, indigenous activism led to the introduction of legislative reforms that formally acknowledge the rights of indigenous peoples. These include, along with the constitutional recognition of their cultural and ethnic ­ pre-­ existence, the 1992 adoption of International Labour Organization Convention 169. These successes achieved by indigenous organisations gave partial visibility to more diverse conceptions of the nation. However, in practice, the gap between legislation and policy during the 1990s was (and remains) appalling.50 Furthermore, despite this turn towards more diverse conceptions of the nation, whiteness as the official modality of nationality experienced a heyday during Menem’s years. Official discourses of ­First-­Worldness and modernisation produced by the rhetoric of neoliberalism emphasised once again Argentina’s whiteness and, to an extent, its exceptionalism in relation to other Latin American countries. As Guano puts it: With their emphasis on the consumption of imported goods and lifestyles, the neoliberal reforms of the 1990s did not simply produce, but were founded upon, what was in fact a p ­ re-­existing narrative of the self and its relation to an elsewhere – its exclusion from and desire for a First World to which most of the middle classes of Buenos Aires felt an entitlement.51

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It is possible to state that, notwithstanding confrontations throughout the decades, whiteness persists as an unswerving ideal of nationness. Nonetheless, I will show that despite this, the crisis constituted a moment in which there was a critical assessment of this paradigm of nationality, which was ­de-­naturalised, exposed and, occasionally, opposed by segments of the social echelons that previously sustained it. In this context, culture became a crucial platform for the channelisation of these discourses and practices and their critique of race.

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3

Facing darkness in the literature of the crisis

This chapter considers the intersection of racial discourses in the literary production of César Aira, Washington Cucurto and Fabián Casas, in terms of representational politics of race and the crisis. These texts portray encounters between white m ­ iddle-­class characters representing the dominant culture and different constructions of social and racial alterity, mainly articulated around the image of the Latin American immigrant in Buenos Aires. Also, common to all these texts is the parody of stereotypical racist concepts. As will be shown, by portraying the different tensions and interactions between ­middle-­class characters and immigrants as mediated by racial language, these texts propose a critique of two kinds of representations of Buenos Aires. The first one is the traditional image of the capital city as a Europeanised/white locus. The second one relates to recent portrayals of Buenos Aires as a multicultural city in which the immigrant as a signifier of racial diversity is fetishised as a manifestation of modernity. The organisation of the texts in the chapter mirrors their potentiality to counter dominant racial discourse. It starts with Casas’s ‘Asterix, el encargado’, a short story in which the protagonist participates in an Andean ceremony in a Buenos Aires shantytown.1 It will be shown how the story can be read as a parody of fantasies of becoming that end up constructing the racial Other as belonging to a primitive world. Aira’s La Villa is an early depiction of cartoneros, the cardboard collectors whose image would become one of the most distinctive of the crisis.2 It will be demonstrated that, by means of the use and later unravelling of social realist codes, this text ­de-­ naturalises the Porteño m ­ iddle-­class perspective that sees immigrants

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as racial Others. The last section of the chapter will be devoted to Cucurto. I argue that the use of humour and the grotesque in his work suggests a more critical assessment of notions of whiteness and racial otherness. I will concentrate primarily on his prose work published during the early 2000s. The decision to focus on these texts is based on the fact that, as I will show, many of the techniques through which Cucurto engages with race are more noticeable and refined in these texts than in his early – mainly poetic – output. Before proceeding to the analysis, I will briefly provide some context to characterise the literature of the turn of the t­ wenty-­first century – particularly its work with the category of literary realism – and introduce the authors whose work I will examine.

Literary production and the crisis As in other Latin American countries, the 1990s were marked by the concentration and ­ de-­ nationalisation of the national publishing industry: by the turn of the ­twenty-­first century, around 75 per cent of the market was controlled by international conglomerates, from Spain especially.3 The financial turmoil of 2001–2 deeply affected the publishing industry, which experienced a 50 per cent reduction in sales and a 12 per cent decrease in the number of books published – this latter figure rises to 22 per cent if reprints are not taken into account.4 Overall, approximately two hundred bookshops closed down.5 The drastic fall in the population’s purchasing power, the devaluation of the peso and the strengthening of the euro made books, at that point mainly brought from abroad, an onerous expense. However, once the impact of the crisis diminished, the lack of access to imported books opened up opportunities for local publishing and the sector experienced a swift revitalisation: between 2003 and 2004, production increased by 50 per cent in relation to 2001–2, becoming the third ­fastest-­growing industry in the aftermath of the crisis and returning to near p ­ re-­crisis figures.6 More impressive than these numbers is how the recovery took place: international conglomerates relocated part of their production to Argentina and there was a proliferation of new medium-­ ­ sized publishing houses like Santiago Arcos Editor, Interzona and Editorial Mansalva. Concurrently, alternative

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publishing strategies that drew on late-1990s artisanal journals and publishers gave way to innovative projects such as Eloísa Cartonera, which was founded in 2003 by Cucurto and artist Javier Barilaro, with the support of Fernanda Laguna, to sell h ­ and-­made books of Latin American literature manufactured with cardboard bought from cartoneros. Small publishing houses were key actors behind the gradual recovery of the publishing industry in Argentina from 2002 onwards.7 In fact, according to official figures, while during this period production by multinationals rose between 23 per cent and 27 per cent, independent publishers (defined in this case as those with turnovers of no more than half a million pesos per year) increased theirs by 47.7 per cent.8 The revitalisation of the publishing sector in the ­post-­crisis period was also linked to the activity of local authors, especially young writers, for whom the opportunities for publishing increased in the aftermath of devaluation due to the appearance of new publishing houses. In fact, 70 per cent of all new titles published between 2004 and 2005 were by Argentinian writers, mostly emerging authors.9 Cucurto and Casas are among the most prominent exponents of this crop of novel writers, which also includes Dalia Rossetti (­ pen-­ name of Laguna), Martín Gambarotta, Juan Diego Incardona, and Gabriela Bejerman. Despite their heterogeneity, these authors can be roughly characterised as sharing a preoccupation with the present and, specifically, by their ­near-­documentary descriptions of real-­ ­ life places and people, and constant allusions to popular culture and orality, in a gesture that led them to define their work as realist. As I will show, the increasing importance of race and class during this period was reflected and used by many writers as a signifier of realism. Beatriz Sarlo describes this narrative strategy as ‘ethnographic’.10 She argues that, if the interpretation of the dictatorial past defined 1980s literature, the literature of the crisis can mainly be characterised by its representations of a present of social degradation. Graciela Speranza also applies the trope of ethnography to describe literary works that were attentive to, in her words, ‘lo que se ve y se oye en las calles de Boedo, la bailanta o el chat, aquilatado en el protagonismo de lúmpenes o individualidades sobresalientes del barrio bajo’ (what can be seen and heard in the streets of Boedo, in the cumbia nightclub, the online chat room, all of which is examined through underclass protagonists or exceptional individuals from the slums).11

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This ethnographic approach explicates the growing attention to racial issues in this particular literary production, which mirrors the multiplied presence of race in social reality. In fact, the presence of immigrants as racialised figures in the literary production of Casas, Aira and Cucurto was replicated by many authors who turned their attention to these alleged new figures of migration – particularly the Bolivian immigrant. In this regard, it is worth mentioning Bolivia Construcciones (2006) (Bolivia Constructions) and Grandeza boliviana (2010) (Bolivian Greatness) by Bruno Morales (pseudonym of Sergio Di Nucci), a series of novels centred on the daily experiences of Bolivian bricklayers in Buenos Aires. Another example is Ricardo Strafacce’s La boliviana (2008) (The Bolivian Woman), a novella that can be linked to Cucurto’s and Aira’s kitsch and parodic style in its inversion and satire of racialised representations of Bolivianness and Argentinian exceptionalism. This interest in race in Argentina during the early 2000s was not restricted solely to these new narratives. There was also a rise of historical fictions that revised the founding narratives of modern Argentina and inverted established representations of n ­ ineteenth-­ century Amerindians. Examples of this are Guillermo Saccomano’s La lengua del malón (2003) (The Malón’s Tongue), Leopoldo Brizuela’s ‘El placer de la cautiva’ (2000) (The Pleasure of the Captive Woman), or Florencia Bonelli’s Indias blancas (2005) (White Indians).12 This drive to rewrite these foundational fictions, nonetheless, diverged from the other approach to racial storytelling in the sense that race was still conceived as something that could only be discussed in the context of the ­nation-­building era – before immigration and, allegedly, whitening. In this sense, the ‘ethnographic’ texts departed from these fictions in that they engaged with race in a contemporary context, and thus, exposed its mediation in everyday reality, allowing for a more profound conceptualisation of the racial dimension of Argentinian society and the impact of the crisis on it. One of the most salient aspects of the ‘ethnographic turn’ is its particular vindication of a type of literary realism that does not necessarily aim to convey the illusion of mimesis.13 These new writers’ idea of realism can be considered a form of ‘transfigured realism’, of the kind crafted by Aira.14 Indeed, in his narrative, the search for procedures to document the world coexist with the systematic subversion of realism: ‘la trama suele tener elementos

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fantásticos o sobrenaturales, pero la puesta en escena siempre quiero que sea lo más realista posible, incluso con detalles que observo en mi vida cotidiana’ (the plot usually has fantastic or supernatural elements, but I always want the setting to be as realist as possible, even with details that I observe in my everyday life).15 The merge of these, in principle, opposite elements consolidated in the 1990s: in this decade, Aira moved from the parodic reinterpretations of n ­ ineteenth-­century Argentinian fiction that marked his early production (and that can be considered pioneer examples of the aforementioned ­counter-­narratives of national history that became fashionable in the new century) to stories set in contemporary times. These narratives often take place in the Porteño neighbourhood of Flores (where he lives) and include multiple references to social reality and actual people (himself included). The 1990s is also the period in which he established himself as one of the most controversial and influential writers in Argentina. The controversies around his figure are mainly linked to the fact that Aira never edits his work and publishes everything that he writes, which results in an overproduction of texts, the quality of which can be irregular. At the time of writing this book, he has published more than eighty titles, mostly novels that rarely exceed a hundred pages. However, despite the vastness and uneven quality of his oeuvre, many of Aira’s novellas have been critically acclaimed and translated into French, English, Italian, Portuguese, Greek, German, Romanian, and Russian. He has received numerous awards, as well, including a Guggenheim Fellowship for Creative Arts in 1996 and the Roger Caillois French Literary Prize for Latin American Literature in 2004. In 2002, he was shortlisted for the Rómulo Gallegos Prize, in 2014 for the Neustadt International Prize for Literature, and in 2015 for the Man Booker International Prize. In Casas and Cucurto, the influence of Aira’s combination of realist conventions and surrealism/absurd elements is visible. Both writers, and particularly Cucurto, have claimed to base their work on e­ xtra-­diegetic reality; yet, they tend to undermine any mimetic ambition through strategies of estrangement and satire. For example, Cucurto refers to his style as realismo atolondrado (scatterbrained realism), which he defines as ‘una literatura basada en el ridículo, en el absurdo, en el despepite de vivacidades estrafalarias’ (a literature based on ridicule, absurdity, and on the outburst of bizarre vivacities).16 The fact that Cucurto uses words

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like estrafalario, absurdo or ridículo to describe his style of realism illustrates that he is more interested in the hybrid narratives of Aira (and Fogwill) than in social realism. Therefore, although he claims to capture characters, situations and marks of orality that are very much based on reality, Cucurto’s literature is, like Aira’s, full of parody, delirium and kitsch. On a similar note, Casas has ironically defined his style as realismo márcico, a pun involving magical realism and football hero ‘Beto’ Márcico. Cucurto’s and Casas’s particular integration of elements from popular culture, oral language and realism, was also shaped by their early association with poetry. Argentinian Poetry of the 1990s is an umbrella term used to refer to the different – and sometimes opposite – aesthetics developed by poets born in the 1960s and 1970s, whose interpretations of American objectivist poets and Néstor Perlongher’s n ­eo-­ baroque formulations introduced significant innovation in the final years of the twentieth century.17 For Cecilia Palmeiro, it is possible to see a similar movement from poetry to prose in many of these writers in the early 2000s, which also signalled their transition into the mainstream.18 Casas and Cucurto exemplify this: both began their literary careers as poets in the 1990s and later turned to fiction, eventually signing to Emecé Editores, one of Argentina’s largest publishers. However, they have also continued to publish with independent and even artisanal publishers, like Eloísa Cartonera. Alternating between independent and mainstream publishing houses is also one of Aira’s distinctive features, giving the frequency of his publications, with an average of three novels per year. Due to this oscillation between independent and large publishers, and their work with realism and intertextuality, the three writers considered in this chapter tend to be perceived as established yet unconventional authors. Their particular status explains that they are usually consumed by m ­ iddle-­class readers whose level of education and cultural capital allows them to identify the constant intertextual and metatextual references. In the case of the texts analysed here, which deal specifically with race, it would be possible to say that, for these white middle- and u ­ pper-­middle-­ class readers, they allow the opportunity to gaze at this alterity from the safety of the text. What provides the space in which to interrogate the relation between literature and racial discourses is precisely the way in which these literary productions act upon this construction of the implied reader as experiencing a combination

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of guilty fascination with the Other and complicity with the parody in the texts.

‘Asterix, el encargado’ Originally published in 2005 by Santiago Arcos Editor, Los lemmings y otros (The Lemmings and Others) is a collection of fi ­ rst-­person narratives told by a character named Andrés, based on Casas himself. In fact, he claims that all the short stories are derived from his and his friends’ experiences growing up in the neighbourhood of Boedo – hence, Speranza’s reference to this place in her assessment of new writers’ ‘ethnographic spirit’. Boedo occupies a peculiar position in the Porteño imaginary: it is traditionally seen as aw ­ orking-­class district yet this proletarian identity is mainly related to the legacies of European immigration and, hence, not as charged with racialised language as other w ­ orking-­class areas of the city or the conurbano. In fact, Adrián Gorelik argues, following Luciano Privitellio, that Boedo has always been ‘un típico barrio “progresista” de clase media’ (a typical ‘progressive’ m ­ iddle-­class neighbourhood).19 What is more important, the barrio is strongly associated with many of the most iconic elements that define traditional Porteño identity: tango, café culture, many literary and artistic collectives like the Boedo Group, and the San Lorenzo de Almagro football club. The first four stories in Los lemmings y otros take place in the 1970s and focus on the narrator/protagonist’s childhood and adolescence. ‘Asterix, el encargado’ is the first story to feature Andrés as a young adult and is set around the late 1980s, early 1990s. In the text, the Porteño world, represented by the protagonist, and the Andean culture brought to Buenos Aires by Bolivian immigrants come face to face in a nocturnal encounter. In this sense, even if the story is not set during the time of the crisis, its theme anticipates the fascination with the Other that will be a defining feature in the early 2000s. Roughly, it could be said that Casas refers to an increasing awareness about immigrants in the 1990s that would lead to their high visibility during the crisis – which is what Aira acknowledges in La Villa and Cucurto’s works exacerbate. ‘Asterix, el encargado’ is structured as a memoir or a roman à clef: ­well-­known streets, shops and bars of Boedo provide the setting for

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the first part of the story, which describes the protagonist’s relation with, and eventual separation from, his girlfriend. Overwhelmed by post-­ ­ break-­ up depression and the anxieties associated with his transition to maturity, Andrés starts befriending his building’s caretaker, an enigmatic character from the Argentinian littoral region whose blond hair and moustache reminds him of the famous Gaul – thus, the nickname Asterix. To help him with his personal problems, the caretaker suggests that they go to a place to which he allegedly ‘goes often’, though he does not provide any more details. Despite the mysterious nature of the invitation, Andrés accepts. After a long bus ride and walk, they finally arrive in an open space in a shantytown where the narrator finds dozens of euphoric drunk people fighting. The portrayal of the ­slum-­dwellers in an ecstatic state, crying, screaming, deliberately creates a primitivist scene in which shantytown appears as what Carlos Altamirano and Sarlo (following Borges) call orilla (margin): a surreptitious space through which the rural (or, in this case, the Andean) infiltrates and contaminates Buenos Aires as white/Europeanised city.20 The encounter with the Other is initially violent and disturbing. Johannes Fabian argues that, in ethnographic research, the interaction between the anthropologist and subject is founded in coevalness, in both parties sharing time.21 Nonetheless, in the discourse of traditional structuralist anthropology, this coevalness is denied because it constructs the time of the Other as static, unchangeable, suspended, while the ethnographer’s time, in contrast, is in motion, active, orientated towards the future. This denial of coevalness permeates Casas’s description of the scene, to the point that the narrator describes the festival as ‘una kermés de la Edad de Piedra’ (a Stone Age kermesse), therefore locating them in a different archaeological period.22 At this point, a relation with these ­ pre-­ historicised Others seems impossible: ‘Asterix y yo caminamos lentamente, esquivándolos’ (Asterix and I walk slowly, avoiding them).23 What the narrator avoids clarifying is that the narrator is attending a tinku – a ritualised form of combat from the Andes that pays tribute to Pachamama, the deity of nature and life – and that the location of the events is the Barrio General San Martín, formerly called Villa 12. Known informally as Barrio Charrúa, it is populated mainly by Bolivian immigrants and their children. Only two pieces of information allow the reader to vaguely identify where the two men

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are heading: the narrator states that, on their way to the mysterious event, he and Asterix pass by the site of the future San Lorenzo stadium; Asterix later recommends the narrator to come and see the Virgin of Copacabana Festival, a Bolivian festivity organised every year in Barrio Charrúa (which will be discussed in depth in the following chapter, when I examine Rejtman’s film Copacabana). These two rather imprecise topographical references contribute to linking text and social reality. However, the tone of this section, which precedes the tinku, is also marked by the narrator’s feeling of disorientation and mystery – he does not know where they are going and neither does the narratee – that stresses how the characters are moving away from the familiar space of the Porteño locus. After this initial description of horror when confronted with the Bolivians, a sudden change affects the narrator when he is obliged to participate in the tinku: he overcomes his initial panic and decides to fight. However, he does it not to defend himself but rather as a way of completely opening up to the disruptive power of the Other. The experience, in the end, allows him to achieve satori (a Buddhist concept that denotes a moment of sudden enlightenment) and come to terms with his afflictions. Una mujer se me acercó gritándome algo en un idioma extraño. Me dio un vaso de plástico y tomé un poco y otro poco me lo tiré en la cara. Ardía como la puta madre. Entonces algo me sucedió … Por algún motivo inexplicable, en un abrir y cerrar de ojos, ya no sentía ningún miedo físico. Fuera lo que fuera estaba claro que yo era un miembro de esa tribu … Un morochón con la camiseta de un club de fútbol se me vino encima. Era un hermano enloquecido. Nos empezamos a pegar de lo lindo. No me dolían los golpes, no sentía el cuerpo … Y tuve satori.24 (A woman came to me shouting something in a strange language. She handed me a plastic cup and I drank a little and I threw the rest on my face. It burned like a motherfucker. Then something happened to me … For some inexplicable reason, in the blink of an eye, I no longer felt any physical fear. For whatever reason, it was clear that I was a member of that tribe … A big ­dark-­skinned guy with a football jersey came towards me. He was a mad brother. We started to hit each other big time. The blows didn’t hurt me, I didn’t feel my body … And I had satori.)

In the passage, the narrator reinterprets the violence and estrangement as a passage to a state in which he turns into a member of that

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tribe and the Bolivian becomes a brother. The protagonist’s transformation is nonetheless presented as irrational; what is more, the narrator refuses to search for a possible explanation. In this context, the inclusion of the word morocho incorporates a subtle racial commentary: the meanings of the term in Argentinian society are ambiguous, as it can refer to a white person with dark hair (and, therefore, not make any allusions to race) but also to someone who has dark skin and Amerindian features.25 In this latter case, the word could have a racist connotation, illustrating once again how race is usually present in Argentina in oblique and ambivalent ways. In ‘Asterix, el encargado’, the use of the augmentative suffix, nevertheless, accentuates the racial reference. What is interesting is how the protagonist simultaneously highlights the otherness of the Bolivian by describing him as morochón and at the same time undermines it by both stating their shared belonging to the tribe and calling him his hermano. Victor Turner notes that, in preparation for the transition to new stages of being through rituals, liminal subjects are placed in an ambiguous situation: they are stripped of their past attributes but are not entitled to those of the future state. In his words, ‘liminal entities are neither here nor there; they are betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention, and ceremonial’.26 In ‘Asterix, el encargado’, the fighting is introduced by the narrator as this liminal stage in which he is taken out of his culture and positioned in an undetermined i­n-­betweenness that will eventually advance towards a full awakening to the Other. For Turner, one critical component of liminality is the disappearance of ­socio-­structural distinctions as a result of the common subjugation to the ritual, leading to absolute equality. Turner uses the term communitas to describe this feeling of full, unmediated comradeship that emerges from the collapse of structure and hierarchy in liminal situations.27 He contrasts communitas with the differentiated and unequal modes of p ­ olitico-­ legal-­ economic relations that characterise social structure. In ‘Asterix, el encargado’, the narrator’s fear and rejection give way to a feeling of communion with the Other in which the differences between the Porteño culture and the culture of the racial Other are, in his perception, replaced by a profound bond among equals, a universal brotherhood. The unstructured and undifferentiated interrelatedness with the Bolivians experienced by the narrator is

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described, thus, as a communitas in which the discourse that sustains a dichotomy between whiteness and ­ non-­ whiteness can be surmounted. The narrator presents the experience of the tinku, therefore, as a moment in which social and racial asymmetries are put aside through an intense communal sentiment founded not on discourse but on the tactile and affective experience of ritual combat. The participation in the tinku does not only involve the union with the Other in communitas; it also contains an experience of becoming-­ ­ Other that leads to an atavistic enlightenment. This transformation is not only shown as inexplicable but, what is more, the narrator seems to have no intention of looking for an explanation. The narrative can be connected, in this sense, with Julio Cortázar’s ‘La noche boca arriba’ (1956) (The Night Face Up).28 In this short story, a man who has been hospitalised after having a motorbike accident dreams that he is a Mesoamerican Amerindian being chased by the Aztecs. In Cortázar’s text, the protagonist eventually realises that he is the Other: his convalescence in the hospital is a dream, and not the other way around. In the case of ‘Asterix, el encargado’, nonetheless, the character’s whiteness, and the privileges it entails in contemporary Buenos Aires, are never questioned. In fact, the description of the tinku can be read as a satire of fantasies of ­becoming-­Other and, in particular, of those travel accounts in which the white man, faced with a world he sees as savage, feels identities become uncertain and give way to becomings. The story draws an analogy between the Porteño narrator as the civilised explorer and the Bolivians as Amerindians living in the heart of darkness. The shantytown becomes this unchartered territory, the uncolonised space of the primitive. The momentary ­self-­othering in the ritual ends up being an illusion of b ­ ecoming-­ primitive, framed as a liberating experience of pure cognition that allows the narrator to fill the void related to his b ­ reak-­up and anxieties. As Carole Sweeney states, ‘the trope of the primitive seemed to offer a redemptive mythological space in which time was still whole and had escaped the alienation of modernity’.29 In this sense, ‘Asterix, el encargado’ parodies white Porteño experiences of self-­ ­ discovery through the Other: the protagonist’s feeling of communitas masks the reification of the Bolivian as a signifier of what Raymond Williams calls ‘the unformed and untamed realm of the ­pre-­rational and unconscious’.30

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The Bolivian is a representative of a savage p ­ re-­modern culture that facilitates the discovery of originary plenitude and wholeness, a temporary alternative community for the alienated Porteño. Accordingly, the scene portrayed does not diverge much from mainstream discourses of neoliberal multiculturalism: the identification of all ­ non-­ Western cultures as interchangeable – illustrated by the fact that the Andean tinku constitutes a pathway to Buddhist satori – implies the totalisation of the Other and her or his reduction to a set of p ­ re-­existing categories of difference. This difference, in its exoticism, functions as a means of dealing with modern life’s frustrations. Through this, ‘Asterix, el encargado’ parodies the idealisation of Andean cultures by Porteño urbanites in the face of the increasing visibility of these immigrants at the turn of the t­wenty-­ first century. Mainly, it criticises their desire to experience the Other without necessarily addressing the conflictive and political aspects of interculturality.

La Villa Similar to ‘Asterix, el encargado’, La Villa also narrates the experiences of Porteño characters who visit a Buenos Aires villa. And also like in Casas’s short story, references to ­real-­life streets, places and shops allow the reader familiarised with Buenos Aires to identify the shantytown, even if it is never named – in this case, it is the Villa 1–11–14 in Bajo Flores (not far from Barrio Charrúa). The 2001 census estimated that 21,693 people lived in it, accounting for 20 per cent of the ­slum-­dwellers in Buenos Aires during the crisis.31 Villa 1–11–14 borders with the m ­ iddle-­ class neighbourhood of Flores, where most of the novel’s characters live, including the protagonist Maxi, the young son of a ­well-­off shopkeeper, with a muscular body honed through daily visits to the gym. Besides working out, Maxi’s only other activity is helping cartoneros carry their wheelbarrows as they make their cardboard collections every evening. It is explained that this voluntary work started out rather spontaneously as a result of the fact that Maxi’s evening walks coincided with the hour in which cartoneros emerged from the shantytown to collect cardboard. In his usual rounds, Maxi gets closer and closer to the shantytown and becomes fascinated by it. His antagonist is a corrupt police inspector named Cabezas who is investigating

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a vast network of Peruvian and Bolivian drug traffickers operating in the shantytown. Furthermore, he suspects that Maxi is involved in it. To solve the case, the officer pretends to be the father of a girl killed in a ­drug-­related incident and asks Maxi’s sister Vanessa and her best friend Jessica for help. As is usually the case with Aira’s stories, the novel becomes increasingly frenetic and ludicrous as it progresses. In the end, and under a deluge of ridiculous proportions, Cabezas tries to capture Maxi, whom he thinks offers the key to a large drug shipment. The boy, unaware of the danger, is saved by the s­ lum-­dwellers, who hide him in the shantytown. The crooked inspector is shot down by the police under the instructions of the Judge Plaza, whose son, who was doing undercover work in the shantytown, was mistakenly assassinated by Cabezas. Initially, La Villa resembles a social realist novel in its portrayal of the transformations that Buenos Aires underwent during the crisis. First, it focuses on one of the most distinctive emblems of this period: the cartoneros. Historically, the informal collection and sale of cardboard and glass as a means of coping with unemployment have been widespread, and by no means unique to Argentina. In the late 1990s, approximately 25,000 cartoneros (or cirujas as they were known) were active in Greater Buenos Aires, and an estimated 100,000 people lived directly or indirectly from this activity.32 The crisis not only increased this number but also extended collection routes to include Buenos Aires’s middle- and u ­ pper-­middle-­class neighbourhoods, such as Belgrano, Flores, Caballito and Palermo. This gave rise to displays of interclass solidarity but also ignited mixed responses in certain Porteños. For some, the evening sight of cartoneros coming from shantytowns and the suburbs acted as a reminder of the country’s decline and as a materialisation of fears of a foreseeable future of poverty. At times, cartoneros were perceived by some to be invading these ­well-­off spaces.33 In this sense, Aira’s text could be said to have seismographic qualities, as it detects and records some of the social changes taking place in the midst of the financial meltdown. Another crucial aspect of the crisis that Aira considers is the identification of Buenos Aires’s shantytowns as the space of a new racialised marginality represented by immigrants. Guano argues that this process was framed within ‘a discourse that posited a white, middle class, and modern “normalcy” as the only legitimate modality for spatial and cultural citizenship in Buenos Aires’.34 ­ Middle-­ class normative cartographies of belonging,

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structured around class, race and nationness, were produced by those who, like the novel’s characters, were living in the proximity of shantytowns and areas populated by immigrants. According to Guano, in a context of financial hardship and impoverishment, this allowed Porteños to stress social difference and reassert their collective identity.35 Laura Podalsky states that the portrayal of ­slum-­dwellers in 1950s and 1960s social realism attempts to contrast the alleged humanity of the poor with the commodity fetishism of the middle class, but is nonetheless structured around a ­middle-­class perspective regarding what the poor are supposed to think or aim for.36 Aira seems to replicate this model by constructing the novel around a ­third-­ person narrator who adopts the perspective of m ­ iddle-­class Porteños. The implied reader is, therefore, invited to identify with their viewpoint and, especially, with their construction of the immigrant and the shantytown partly through racial language. As in ‘Asterix, el encargado’, all the Porteño characters have names. Furthermore, the reader is allowed access to their thoughts through s­tream-­of-­ consciousness narration, and Flores is described with painstaking realism (as a matter of fact, by means of an actual city map, it is possible to follow the routes the characters take throughout the novel). The narrative’s identification with the middle class is so unequivocal that the ­slum-­dwellers do not have names or voices; they are, like the Bolivians in ‘Asterix, el encargado’, a collective entity. The only one who is developed as a character is Adela, the Peruvian maid – described as having ‘rasgos indios’ (­ Indian-­like features) – who functions as a sort of translator of the n ­ on-­white world of the shantytown for the white Porteños. However, throughout the novel, the m ­ iddle-­class characters struggle to identify her: ‘Ella (Adela) también parecía boliviana, y como a Vanessa todos los bolivianos le resultaban iguales, no estaba segura de no haberla confundido con otra … En esas razas, además de no reconocer a los individuos, no podía calcularles la edad’ (The maid looked Bolivian too, and Vanessa might have been getting mixed up because to her all Bolivians looked the same, she wasn’t sure of not having seen her again … When it came to these racial groups, she could not distinguish between individuals or guess their age).37 For Porteños, phenotype as a signifier of race justifies why, from their perspective, immigrants are indistinguishable and interchangeable. Simultaneously, this exemplifies how nationalities are racialised.

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Thus, in the same way that the production of nationhood implied the fiction of homogeneity, immigrants from adjacent countries are also homogenised by the ­middle-­class discourse. Adela’s depersonalisation replicates what Albert Memmi calls ‘the mark of the plural’; that is, the fact that the Other ‘is never characterized in an individual manner, he is entitled only to drown in an anonymous collectivity’.38 In the novel, the ­slum-­dweller is always ­de-­subjectified and undifferentiated: ‘Con el tiempo llegaron a conocerlo (a Maxi) todos los cirujas de la zona; era él quien no los distinguía, se le confundían, pero le daba lo mismo’ (All the local scavengers got to know him eventually, though he couldn’t tell them apart, not that it mattered to him).39 What is more, if Adela does eventually emerge as a character with a name and a face in the story, this is due to the fact that she cleans the flats in Maxi’s building; once she returns to the shantytown, she vanishes from the narrative. An example of this is the fact that, when Maxi runs into her at the entrance to the slum, he hardly recognises her. In here, out of context means outside the building in which she works, and he lives, which is for Maxi the natural space of interaction with the immigrant. When she goes back to the world of the Other, where she belongs, her identity becomes diffuse, unrecognisable. Therefore, Adela only exists as an object of the discourse of the dominant culture, which is the realm of narration. La Villa’s methodical realism creates a double stereotype: first, that of the villero/cartonero as racial Other (which reproduces a r­ eal-­ life ­middle-­class stereotype); secondly, that of this stereotyping middle class. It is precisely by progressively undermining the realism that the novel criticises both the racist stereotype and the stereotype of the white middle class associated with the production of these stereotypes. Through these two interrelated procedures, Aira exposes the arbitrary nature of racialisation. For example, the clear racial distinction between Argentinians and immigrants, articulated around racial language, is subverted by introducing the character of Judge Plaza. Although, as a social type, Judge Plaza represents the authority of the Argentinian state (theoretically, a white nation), the narrator describes her as having indigenous and mulatto features.40 Likewise, the ­slum-­dwellers are initially depicted by the narrator as ­ dark-­ skinned in extremely demeaning ways ‘negra como una cucaracha’ (black as a cockroach) but later on, the assertion is made that there is nothing that helps distinguish

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them from Argentinians: ‘estaban vestidos como cualquier otro argentino, y se comportaban igual’ (looked and behaved like any other Argentines).41 As can be seen, all the previous references to phenotype as a mark that facilitates distinction between whiteness and ­non-­whiteness, Porteños and immigrants, are suddenly left aside. Argentinianness is transformed into an identity that is not linked to a white or Europeanised background but can be performed and staged by means of clothing and behaviour. From all the examples of how Aira plays with stereotypes, it is the shantytown itself that constitutes, perhaps, its most compelling one. Rather than contempt and rejection, it generates fascination, particularly in Maxi, who becomes increasingly obsessed with it. If Flores is described with painstaking realism, the shantytown, instead, is depicted as a surreal place. In the novel, the m ­ iddle-­class neighbourhood is just a boring and repetitive sequence of buildings, while the shantytown constitutes a wonderfully complex feat of architecture that defies the laws of geometry: ‘Era un anillo de luz, con radios muy marcados en una inclinación de cuarenta y cinco grados respecto del perímetro, ninguno de los cuales apuntaba al centro, y el centro quedaba oscuro, como un vacío’ (It was a ring of light, with clearly marked lines going in at an angle of 45 degrees to the circumference, none of them leading to the centre, which was dark as a void).42 Both Miguel Vitagliano and Annelies Oeyen agree that this representation of the shantytown as closed, enigmatic and circular and as the space of the fantastical is directly linked to the trope of the labyrinth in Argentinian literature – especially in the work of Jorge Luis Borges.43 The representation of the slums as a magical labyrinth, according to Oeyen, suggests a more positive portrayal of the poor and the immigrant because it breaks with the stereotype of misery usually associated with the villeros.44 However, although the trope of the labyrinth is undoubtedly linked to fantastic fiction, it is important to remember that slums are in fact labyrinthine. Contrary to the dominant grid pattern in Argentinian cities, the lack of infrastructure, urban planning or adequate construction in the shantytowns has resulted in overcrowded, narrow passageways in which an outsider can easily get lost. The shantytowns are not magical but degraded labyrinths. Aira’s labyrinthine slum is an image which belongs not only to fantasy but also to reality – actually, one of the harshest realities of the crisis: that of those who had to go

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through people’s garbage in order to make a living. It is because of this that La Villa’s portrayal of the shantytown as a magical labyrinth is entwined with stark descriptions such as ‘laberinto maloliente de casillas de lata, donde se hacinaban los más pobres entre los pobres’ (malodorous labyrinth of tin shacks, where the poorest of the poor huddled for shelter), which frame the space of the shantytown, constructed as racialised by the m ­ iddle-­class characters, not only as fantastic but as deteriorated.45 As James Scorer puts it, ‘Aira allows for a double move: the ability to wonder at the space of the villa – of imagining it – without denying the material reality of poverty’.46 In this sense, Aira’s novel has the merit of casting visibility to the reality of poverty, destitution and discrimination that affects immigrants while at the same time reminding the reader, through his playing with stereotypes and genre formulations, about the limits of literature to capture these experiences. The portrayal of the villa as a fantastical locus thus replaces the miserabilist stereotype with another stereotype: one that draws on colonial and primitivist portrayals of the ­non-­white as living in a magical era not affected by modernity’s disenchantment with the world. By reproducing these tropes of the Other as a p ­ re-­modern magical creature, Aira produces a ­self-­reflexive moment in the white ­middle-­class readers, casting light on the impossibility of text to fully satisfy their ethnographic curiosity.

Cucurto Of all the authors to have emerged at the turn of the ­twenty-­first century, Cucurto is regarded as the most innovative in terms of depicting the new racialised marginality associated with immigration from adjacent countries and the Dominican Republic. His portrayal of this social sector incorporates elements that are identified with them and, to an extent, the precariat – particularly cumbia music, a central influence on Cucurto. The settings of his stories follow a similar pattern: they take place in ­working-­class neighbourhoods of Buenos Aires populated by immigrants like Constitución and Once, or modern conventillos (tenement housing for poor immigrants). All these components are presented using a style that, in its uses of the grotesque, parody, intertextuality and kitsch, shows the influence of Aira, Copi, the authors involved in the 1970s

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journal Literal (Lamborghini, Ricardo Zelarayán), Perlongher and Alberto Laiseca. Race constitutes a major theme of Cucurto’s oeuvre since it stresses how social asymmetry structures specific racialised experiences in contemporary Buenos Aires. In fact, not only are stories and characters overtly defined by race but n ­ on-­whiteness also structures his particular construction of an authorial figure. Cucurto’s second book, La máquina de hacer paraguayitos (1999) (The Machine to Make Little Paraguayans), includes an afterword signed with his real name, Santiago Vega, which explains that all the poems in the volume are by an obscure ­Afro-­Dominican writer named Wáshington Elpidio Cucurto, of whom Vega is solely the compiler.47 In the following books, the split into two personas, Cucurto and Vega, would give way to a blurring of the distinction between them, or, more precisely, Vega’s vanishing. As Diana Irene Klinger indicates, what we have here is a case of Vega progressively assuming in real life the features of the character that he created.48 The fact that Cucurto is the protagonist and, usually, the ­first-­ person narrator of his stories suggests continuity between author and text. This continuity became progressively more s­ elf-­referential as he started to gain recognition as a writer. Cucurto the character is still Dominican in his early poetry and ‘Cosa de negros’ (2003) (literally, Black People’s Stuff, although it could also be understood as Negros’ Stuff). However, from ‘Las aventuras del Sr Maíz’ (2005) (The Adventures of Mr Corn) onwards it will assume all the features of Vega.49 In fact, this novella starts with Cucurto’s birth, this time not in San Juan de la Managua in 1942, as in La máquina de hacer paraguayitos, but in a w ­ orking-­class family in Quilmes in 1973 – which is his real place and date of birth. This rebirth marks the convergence of author and character into a single biography: the text describes his youth working in a supermarket, befriending immigrants and attending cumbia nightclubs, explains his literary origins and ideas, and recounts the genesis of his nom de plume. ­Self-­ reflexivity is emphasised in the subsequent book, El curandero del amor (2006) (The Healer Who Cures Heartbreaks), in which Cucurto the character is, like the author, an established writer recently signed to Emecé, and also Eloísa Cartonera’s factotum.50 The element that connects early and later constructions of Cucurto the character is, I argue, race. In ‘Las aventuras del Sr Maíz’, as he recollects a night out with fellow p ­ oet-­friends, he

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differentiates himself from the rest through race: ‘Bromeaban mucho con los putos y los negros. Yo era un negro’ (They joked a lot with poofs and negros. I was a negro).51 Of course, Cucurto’s s­ elf-­ description as negro in this passage refers partially to class, as it shows him being ­ out-­ of-­ place in such an essentially ­ middle-­ class environment as the Buenos Aires’s literary circle. However, it would be a mistake to reduce negro to just a signifier of class. After all, his decision to present himself initially as a black Dominican and then as a negro from Greater Buenos Aires indicates the importance of looking at race as a mediation in its own right. As will be shown, the connections between negro and black­/Afro-­descendant present in Cucurto’s literature reflect, precisely, on the racialised nature of social relations in Argentina. The relation between character and author is extended to Cucurto’s corporeality in the covers of his books, which usually feature him. In these images, his dark skin is darkened more by means of ­make-­up and photo editing: for example, on the cover of El curandero del amor, he is portrayed with a fake afro hairstyle and wearing healer’s clothes, while in Cosa de negros, he is depicted as ­Afro-­Caribbean. The exaggeration of his n ­ on-­whiteness and the oscillation between different racialised identities can be read as a critique of ­middle-­class constructions of all forms of racial difference as foreign and alien, regardless of their origin. Therefore, whether he is a negro, an ­Afro-­Peruvian healer, or a black Dominican does not make much difference: for the white, these figures represent interchangeable forms of the same racial otherness. Actually, in ‘Las aventuras del Sr Maíz’, Cucurto is constantly confused with an ­Afro-­Dominican despite being Argentinian.52 The act of displaying and exaggerating his dark skin in the book covers points towards the centrality that his ­real-­life background and phenotype have in the construction of an authorised literary portrayal of the racial Other. His tendency to burst into his stories through various bizarre literary avatars – a technique also used by Aira with different intentions – could also be seen as a way of legitimising his representation of i­ntra-­ diegetic reality with autobiographical experience.53 Specifically, it aims to construct a voice that belongs to the Other in contemporary Buenos Aires: the negro and the racialised immigrant (and, as explained, Cucurto has assumed both personae). The fact that Cucurto willingly aligns himself with a stigmatised identity in and beyond the texts is, of course, part of a marketing

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operation. To promote the release of El curandero del amor, Emecé designed an advert in which a black woman resembling one of the ­Afro-­Dominican prostitutes that populate Cucurto’s stories holds the book and a volume of Borges’s complete works close to her breasts, as she asks the imaginary interlocutor: ‘Adivina con cuál disfruté más’ (Guess which one I enjoyed the most with). The advert plays with the widespread view of Borges as asexual, contrasting it with the stereotype of the hypersexual black man, in this case, attributed to Cucurto, who is identified as ‘dark’ in two senses: negro and ­ Afro-­ descendant. Nonetheless, this authorial construction works not only in marketing terms but also as literary strategy and a way of positioning himself with regards to the Argentinian canon. This satirical correlation between high literature and sexual repression/impotence (or, even, castration) is contrasted with the liberating force of Eros that ‘bad literature’ and the popular embody. The gradual turn towards more s­elf-­reflexive constructions of Cucurto the character by increasing the similarities with ­real-­life Santiago Vega can be seen, in this regard, as an attempt to legitimise this voice as a product of the world that is being narrated. In a way, it could be linked to Casas’s play with the autobiographical voice, although the former does not engage with such a socially stigmatised identity. Ariel Schettini contends that Cucurto the writer ‘no puede menos que ofrecerse a sí mismo (como personaje) como si a cada palabra dijera “yo la puedo decir y la puedo nombrar con esta violencia porque nací en el mismo lugar donde nació este lenguaje”’ (can’t help but offering himself (as a character) as if with each word he was saying “I can say it and I name it with this violence because I was born in the same place where this language was born”).54 Cucurto does not propose an alliance between the voice of the subaltern and the written word of the lettered author (characteristic of, for example, the gauchesca genre). He creates, instead, a representation of the world of the Other that is legitimised not on the alleged mimetic reproduction of its language, but on the authority of his own authorial figure.55 In this sense, Klinger argues that Cucurto’s works can be described according to what Mary Louise Pratt denominates ‘autoethnographies’: instances in which colonised subjects attempt to represent themselves to the colonisers in ways that engage with the latter’s terms.56 Autoethnographic texts involve a selective collaboration with and appropriation of the

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discourses of the dominant culture, which are combined or permeated in numerous ways with the discourses of subordinate groups. The outcomes of this are s­elf-­representations that often address audiences from the dominant sectors. Such is the case of Cucurto, whose portrayals of the racial Other, aimed at m ­ iddle-­class readers, combine intertextual references that require certain cultural capital with forms of orality from poor and immigrant communities. Cucurto’s main literary capital is the promise of granting the ­middle-­class reader ­first-­hand access to a precariat world that is inaccessible outside the text because of the very logic of asymmetry and segregation that has only been exacerbated by the crisis. As he puts it, ‘(m)i literatura está basada en la oralidad, porque empecé a escribir a partir de lo que escuchaba … Yo sabía que ese mundo no lo conocía nadie, lo viví de muy chico y para mí es un mundo maravilloso’ (My literature is based on orality, because I started to write based on what I heard … I was aware that no one knew this world, I experienced it since I was a little boy and for me it is a wonderful world).57 As can be deduced, in this case nadie has a specific connotation: the middle and u ­ pper-­middle classes that define the terms of cultural representation. Cucurto takes for granted that the places he describes are unknown to his readership because they are beyond this social frontier. In ‘Cosa de negros’ he welcomes his imaginary ­middle-­class interlocutors to this Other space formed by neighbourhoods and locales they would rarely visit: Señoras y señores, bienvenidos al fabuloso mundo de la cumbia. Están ustedes por ingresar con boleto preferencial (y en Ferrari) al magnífico barrio de Constitución, cuna de la mejor cumbia del mundo, donde todo es posible … Controlen sus bolsillos, cuiden sus carteras.58 (Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the fabulous world of cumbia. You’re about to enter with a VIP ticket (and in a Ferrari) the magnificent district of Constitución, cradle of the world’s best cumbia, where anything is possible … Watch your pockets, look after your wallets.)

The last sentence, warning the readers that they are entering a strange place but also mocking m ­ iddle-­ class concerns about ­lower-­class criminality, stresses social distance between text and

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readership. In ‘Noches vacías’ (2003) (Empty Nights), Cucurto already knows the answer when he questions the imaginary interlocutor about the fictional cumbia nightclub that provides the setting for the story: ‘Yo quisiera hablar del Samber … ¿Lo conoce? ¿Fue alguna vez? Bueno, no importa, yo voy a contárselo todo … (U)sted de acá va directo al Samber’ (I would like to talk about the Samber … Do you know it? Did you ever go there? Well, it doesn’t matter, I’m going to tell you everything … (F)rom here you go straight to the Samber).59 This procedure contrasts with ‘Asterix, el encargado’ and La Villa. In these texts, ­middle-­class characters share the enthralment with the Other that Cucurto identifies in his potential readers, but racialised marginality is approached from a ­middle-­class perspective. In the case of Cucurto, it is the voice of the racial Other that addresses the implied readers: ‘A ustedes, porteños de Corrientes y Callao, un día los voy a llevar a conocer el Zanjón de la Encarnacena. ¡Pa’ que se encuentren de una vez por todas con la América Morocha!’ (One day I’ll take you all downtown Porteños to Zanjón de la Encarnacena. So ya’ finally see the ­ dark-­ skinned Latin America!).60 Another example of this positioning of the narrative in the space of the Other is the footnote that accompanies the title of ‘Noches vacías’, in which Cucurto explains that this is the name of ‘una famosa cumbia’ (a famous cumbia song).61 Martín Kohan correctly argues that the need for a footnote indicates that the song might be famous, but not amongst the author’s readership.62 Cucurto takes the cue from Kohan to produce a fake review of his own work signed by fictional Paraguayan literary critic, in which the phoney reviewer parodies his readers’ fascination with the precariat: ‘Antes de Cucurto, ¡no sabíamos un pepino de la República Dominica y del Paraguay! Y a Constitución íbamos a tomarnos el tren a Mar del Plata’ (Before Cucurto, we knew nothing about the Dominican Republic and Paraguay! And we went to Constitución just to catch the train to Mar del Plata).63 Although Cucurto emphasises the social tensions that intervene in the construction of the immigrant as a racial Other, he also remarks that the division between whiteness and ­non-­whiteness is not that ­ clear-­ cut. The outcome of years of neoliberalism, he suggests, rather than realising dreams of a First World Argentina, have resulted in the ‘Latin Americanisation’ of the social body, both in ­socio-­economic and racial terms. ‘Cosa de negros’ refers to

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the way in which the fiesta menemista of the early 1990s gave way to the crisis by describing a similar festive context turned into national disaster. In this case, the commemoration of the quincentenary of Buenos Aires provides a futuristic setting – 2036 or 2080, depending on which of the two foundation dates you deem correct. The context described, full of anachronisms, is clearly that of the collapse of the neoliberal dream as a result of the crisis: ‘Todo era fiesta, baile, alcohol, sexo, alegría. La República Revolución Productiva del Disparate se iba apagando lenta, como una estrella fugaz. Dentro de poco no quedaría nada’ (Everything was party, dance, alcohol, sex, happiness. The Nonsense Productive Revolution Republic was waning slowly, like a shooting star. Soon nothing would be left).64 Revolución productiva was one of the slogans of Menem’s 1988–9 presidential campaign. In the carnivalesque setting proposed in ‘Cosa de negros’, Buenos Aires has been virtually taken over by immigrants. The celebrations consist of a large cumbia concert that takes place not in the Plaza de Mayo, historical and political centre of the city, but in a venue called El Rincón del Litoral, in Constitución. Furthermore, the master of ceremonies addresses the audience in both Spanish and Guarani, the indigenous language widely spoken in Paraguay. In fact, unable to contain his patriotic feelings, the speaker ultimately turns the event into a glorification of the wonders of Paraguay.65 That the novel ends with Argentina being invaded by the Dominican Republic accentuates ‘Cosa de negros’’s subversion of the images of modernity and whiteness promised at the beginning of the neoliberal reforms of the 1990s. At the same time, this satirical engagement with ­ middle-­ class concerns for the city’s declining status as a white space due to financial meltdown and immigration echoes xenophobic anxieties common in official discourses during this period. For example, in 1995, Foreign Minister Guido Di Tella forecast that 20 per cent of the Argentinian population would be of Paraguayan or Bolivian background by 2020.66 In ‘Cosa de negros’, Di Tella’s ludicrous prophecy materialises, in the sense that the capital city is presented as a tropical locus far from the images of Europeanness that once characterised it. The trope of invasion as a threat of racial contamination allows Cucurto to establish a critical link between stereotypical m ­ iddle-­ class racist overtones during the crisis and the demonising portrayals

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of rural migration produced during Peronism. In the 1940s and 1950s, texts by a­ nti-­Peronist authors like Ezequiel Martínez Estrada’s ‘Sábado de gloria’ (1956) (Glorious Saturday) and Borges and Adolfo Bioy Casares’s collaboration ‘La fiesta del Monstruo’ (written in 1947, published under the name H. Bustos Domecq in 1955) (The Feast of the Monster) insinuated continuity between Peronism and ­nineteenth-­century ‘barbarism’. This was achieved through a series of equivalences: the cultural and social opposition between Buenos Aires and the provinces, Perón as a reincarnation of Rosas, and the cabecitas negras as direct heirs of the black and mestizo masses that supported Federalism.67 The reference to nineteenth-­ ­ century ‘barbarism’ in ­ anti-­ Peronist texts can be interpreted as the literary expression of the mode in which the Porteño middle class perceived and experienced both the migratory process and Peronism in social and racial terms. As mentioned earlier, the social and political anxieties resulting from interclass ­co-­existence in public spaces, loss of exclusivity, mass consumption and ­ working-­ class empowerment, transformed the provincial immigrant into a figure of racial otherness during the Peronist years. Maristella Svampa adds that Peronism also performed an appropriation and revalorisation of ‘barbarism’ by identifying it with el pueblo peronista (the Peronist people).68 This traditional antagonism between Peronism and ­ anti-­ Peronism, and the way it was exacerbated by ­anti-­Peronist literature, is a fundamental point of reference for Cucurto. Allusions to this literary tradition aim to stress that, despite the political oscillations of both the middle class and Peronism during the second half of the twentieth century, the social apprehensions and tensions that influenced the racialisation of provincial immigration in the 1940s reappeared during the crisis. This time, the racism was directed at Peruvians, Paraguayans, Bolivians and Dominicans. An example of this is his rewriting of Cortázar’s ‘Casa tomada’ (1951) (House Taken Over), entitled ‘Dama tocada’ (2008) (literally, Touched Lady; it refers to the ­touch-­move rule in checkers).69 The original story by Cortázar centres on the life of two bourgeois siblings who inhabit a large Buenos Aires house. Their tedious life – both live off the family’s estate, are unmarried, childless, and spend their days engaged in futile activities – is disturbed by an unnamed and unseen presence that progressively takes over the house room by room, until one day they are forced to leave. The reading of ‘Casa tomada’

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as an expression of m ­ iddle-­class Porteños’ feeling of being invaded by provincial immigration during Peronism was suggested by Juan José Sebreli and, as Carlos Gamerro points out, became paradigmatic.70 Cucurto’s short story is also told in the ­first-­person, but from the perspective of the usurper. The narrator is a ­twelve-­ year-­old living in an anachronistic colonial Buenos Aires, where people speak using contemporary slang and dance to cumbia. He describes himself as negro, thus playing with the ambiguity of the word. Given the extent of the city’s slave market in colonial times the character could be African; however, the absurd tone of the text also suggests that he could be negro in contemporary terms. Cucurto creates a hybrid subjectivity, one that embodies the worst racist stereotypes associated with both blacks and negros. The protagonist and two freed black slaves are taken as lovers by two u ­ pper-­class sisters. Named Irene and Victrola Campos – a reference to Victoria and Silvina Ocampo, both central figures in the ­twentieth-­century Argentinian literary world and fierce a­nti-­ Peronists – they are described as excited at the prospects of experiencing the alleged superior sexual prowess of black men.71 The protagonist and his friends decide to kill the sisters and stay in the mansion as squatters, but soon afterwards, as in the original story, a strange presence invades the house. The usurpers are finally expelled but, for them, the eviction from the house and the return to the plebeian world is experienced as liberating.72 The rewriting of a text widely identified with ­ anti-­ Peronist discourse through a bizarre portrayal of colonial Buenos Aires suggests a connection between African slaves, cabecitas negras and contemporary Latin American immigrants. These connections reflect on the different efforts to invisibilise and eradicate ­non-­ whiteness throughout Argentinian history. As Ben Bollig states, Cucurto ‘carries out both a r­ e-­elaboration of national myths and a construction of his own literary language for the depiction of culture linked to the “negro” in Argentina – Peronists, immigrants, descendants of indigenous or African people, migrants from the interior provinces’.73 In a way, Cucurto argues that the same racial domination continues to act upon n ­ on-­white sectors even today – and that it comes to the fore during moments of intense social crisis. Simultaneously, the story satirises primitivist representations of blackness, especially those associated with an uncontrolled sexuality and violence, along with the demonised literary

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representations of the working class in ‘La fiesta del Monstruo’ or ­nineteenth-­century texts like José Mármol’s Amalia (1851) and Esteban Echeverría’s ‘El matadero’ (written between 1838 and 1840, published in 1871) (The Slaughter Yard). ‘La fiesta del Monstruo’ is, in fact, a rewriting of Echeverría’s short story, the text that, as Ricardo Piglia puts it, not only founded Argentinian literature but also these hallucinatory and paranoid images of the masses.74 Thus, Cucurto exposes the linkage between high/lettered culture and racial domination; that is, the discursive dimension of this aforementioned racial violence. In fact, the blacks’ expulsion from the house they have occupied by force in ‘Dama tocada’ can also be read as their removal from high culture, a realm in which these subordinated subjects have no place. The reproduction and exacerbation of the trope of the n ­ on-­ white as monstrous is the primary strategy through which racial domination is criticised in Cucurto’s work. Characters are only interested in beer, cumbia and sex; they are the victims of neoliberalism but also embody all its negative values: selfishness, greed and absence of any class solidarity. In ‘Las aventuras del Sr Maíz’, Cucurto gets his penis covered in gold to pass as a sexual deity to whom Dominican women offer money, food and sexual favours in exchange for miracles. He feels no remorse in swindling poor undocumented Dominicans who, in the context of the financial meltdown, are struggling to make ends meet. His perversity reaches such levels that, when a mother asks the narrator to cure her disabled son, his only reaction is to ejaculate in the boy’s Afro-­ mouth.75 In another passage, he follows his girlfriend’s ­ Dominican cousin to the bathroom with the intention of having sex with her. What happens next far exceeds the worst stereotypes of ­non-­whites as savage, lascivious and filthy. Sonrió y se metió en el baño. Sin decir nada, me le metí detrás. El piso estaba mojado y maldecí. ‘¡Qué asco, qué olor a mierda!’, dije. ‘No, Cucu, estás equivocado, es el olor del amor’. ¡Cómo aquella negra podía ser tan cochina! Me calentó la cabeza y de un tirón, le arranqué la bombacha … Quedó con el culo al aire y se la mandé toda de un solo, resbaladizo y embarrado empujón de mierda. Le mandé leche rápido más que nada para salir de ese baño asqueroso … La negra hizo algo increíble, agarró mierda del mismo inodoro y se la llevó a la boca … y me dio un beso con mierda suave, intenso … (A)quello era pura suciedad de negros que no se bañan, de animales salvajes comemierdas.76

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(She smiled and entered the bathroom. Without saying a word, I went after her. The floor was wet and I cursed. ‘How revolting, it smells of shit in here!’ I said. ‘You’re mistaken, Cucu, this is the smell of love.’ How could that nigger be so dirty! She turned me on and I tugged her knickers … Her ass was exposed and I penetrated her deeply with a single, slippery and muddy push of shit. I came quickly, mainly in order to leave that filthy bathroom … The nigger did something incredible, she took shit from the toilet and put it in her mouth … and she gave me a soft, intense kiss with shit … (T)hat was pure dirtiness of niggers who never wash, of savage ­shit-­eating animals.)

The overwhelming scatological allusions, and the pleasure and repulsion that the narrator experiences, can be read as a satire of the abject imaginary historically associated in colonial discourse with blackness. Cucurto’s abject images are, of course, far from being as intense and troubling as those of the social Other in ‘El matadero’ or ‘La fiesta del Monstruo’, precisely because their parodic intention is always underscored. However, if they manage to be disturbing even for the reader who understands the irony behind the horrifying representations, this is because they evoke the racial discrimination and violence in Argentinian society during the crisis.77 In other words, as in La Villa, he shows the stereotype’s constructedness, in this case through humour: the demonising representations of the ­non-­white are maximised to the point of ridiculousness. However, in a more comprehensive and systematic way than Aira, Cucurto highlights the fact that the stereotypes of the negro and the immigrant are framed within a particular discourse linked in social reality to the racism that the crisis has served to reinforce. These images of abjection criticise not only the stigmatisation and racialisation of the immigrants but also their idealisation in ­middle-­class consumption of social exoticism and racial difference. This romanticised image can only reproduce the reification of the immigrant as a signifier of an exotic culture. In that respect, the characters in Cucurto’s texts seem to reject the patronising or redemptory discourse of multiculturalism. It is worth mentioning, in connection to this, a controversy involving Cucurto’s poem ‘De cómo son hechos los Arco Iris y por qué se van’ (On How Rainbows are Made and Why They Leave), included in his first book Zelarayán (1998).78 In the text, the Korean owner of a Buenos Aires garment factory refuses to pay one of his employees, who comes from Salta

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or Bolivia (Cucurto uses both terms without distinction), for the day’s work. The employee responds by torturing the Korean and raping his teenage daughter. Here, Cucurto alludes to an issue that received media coverage during the crisis and its aftermath: the slave-­ ­ like conditions in which many undocumented Bolivian immigrants were employed in sweatshops – some of them run by Koreans.79 Cucurto’s deliberate use of humour is intended to intensify demonised portrayals of both immigrants (the Korean as an exploiter and the mestizo immigrant as brutal and a rapist). Nonetheless, the limitations of this strategy, which relies on the complicity of the implied reader, come to light when the reader fails to get the joke. This was precisely the case when a public library in Santa Fe received copies of Zelarayán in 2002. The donation of books from independent publishers to public libraries was part of an ­ ill-­ fated initiative by the National Commission  for Popular Libraries that was eventually abandoned as a result of the crisis. The library’s authorities rated the book ‘denigrating, xenophobic and pornographic’. In response to the complaint, the Commission authorised the institution to discard the copies using the method it thought most convenient: the library decided to burn them.80 The construction of difference based on the binary whiteness­/ non-­whiteness is underscored as one of the foundations of class inequality in social reality. However, Cucurto’s work also engages critically with these distinctions. He does so by stressing the instability of the mythologies of Argentinian exceptionalism and narratives of whiteness as a result of social changes. His use of the image of the immigrant, in this regard, not only responds to a contemporaneous phenomenon – the particular racialisation of these individuals during the crisis – but also to the fact that the migrant is a literary figure that, because of its intrinsic characteristics, can be used to transgress binaries. Antonio Cornejo Polar highlighted that the migrant, especially one who migrates to the whiter space of the modern South American metropolis, is capable of positioning her- or himself in two opposing poles: that of origin and arrival.81 The migrant, therefore, can amalgamate or integrate experiences and states without necessarily producing a stable or coherent form of identity. As Abril Trigo suggests, Cornejo Polar’s concept of migration can be read as migrancy, which can be understood, according to the definition by Iain Chambers, as the

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literary manifestation of a movement that is always in transit and uncertain. It is a movement that calls for ‘a dwelling in language, in histories, in identities that are constantly subject to mutation’.82 The underpinnings of Cornejo Polar’s reflections on migration draw on his previous work on heterogeneity, ignited by his dissatisfaction with the concept of transculturation as developed for literary criticism by Ángel Rama following the work of anthropologist Fernando Ortiz. Transculturation, Cornejo Polar argues, presents a series of epistemological limitations because it perceives Latin American literature and culture as being constructed through the selective integration of diverse elements (autochthonous, foreign, oral, lettered, and so on), thus favouring the idea of synthesis.83 Therefore, the dialectic nature of transculturation implies that the diversity of Latin American societies, and accommodated manifestations of Western and ­ non-­ Western cultures and subjectivities, are mainly portrayed in literature as harmonious, sidelining the conflicts inscribed in them.84 For Cornejo Polar, Néstor García Canclini’s concept of hybridity, although more refined than transculturation due to its focus on history and mutability, is also problematic. The author criticises the fact that the category borrows heavily from the discourse of biology and genetics. Furthermore, it tends to offer a celebratory view of mixture that can, potentially, sideline the extent of social disparity and power asymmetry that permeate Latin American societies.85 He proposes the concept of heterogeneity to refer to the fact that literary and cultural creation always carries with it the fracture between diverse and opposing cultural systems that confirm the contradictory and unstable nature of Latin American nations. Heterogeneous literatures, thus, reject narratives of national and cultural unification and reconciliation, by always emphasising the fractured and disjointed condition of Latin American societies. For Cornejo Polar, migrant discourse represents the archetypal figure of heterogeneity, since it is articulated around two or more diverse and sometimes contradictory experiences and imaginaries that are not synthesised but integrated into conflictive and ­non-­ dialectic manifestations: I suspect that the contents of multiplicity, instability and displacement, which migration implicitly embodies and its unavoidable reference to a diverse variety of s­ocio-­cultural spaces which spread themselves out even more when they are articulated through

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migration, make it especially appropriate for the study of the intense heterogeneity of a large part of Latin American literature.86

Migrancy constitutes, in Cornejo Polar’s elaborations, a manifestation of the plural and often inharmonious nature of Latin American cultures, an idea that can also be applied to Cucurto’s literature. In fact, Cucurto’s texts can be considered in toto as constructing a heterogeneous space that continually transgresses the idea of nation and city as racially and culturally uniform social bodies. In a context of social crisis that has reinforced racism, Cucurto’s immigrants resist by ‘contaminating’ contemporary Buenos Aires, creating a language and spaces in which the difference and racial dichotomies of Argentinian racism can be undermined. An example of this is the cumbia nightclub, the space of plebeian celebration that characterised the 1990s. Cucurto’s characters are fascinated with the cumbia nightclub, to the point that going there becomes their raison d’être. The protagonist of ‘Noches vacías’ describes the Samber club where the story takes place as ‘el universo. Todas las razas, todos los tamaños, todos los colores’ (the universe. All races, all sizes, all colours).87 In Cucurto, cumbia music and the cumbia nightclub are potentially subversive of the whiteness­/non-­whiteness dichotomy because they allow the unregulated encounter and mixing of bodies through dancing and sex: ‘Ay, la sagrada morochosidad del mundo. Aguante las mezclas, los mestizajes, los criollismos, viva el indio con el español … de ahí viene la cumbia’ (Oh, the sacred d ­ ark-­skinned of the world. Long live mixtures, miscegenation, the criollo traits, long live the Indian with the Spanish … cumbia comes from there).88 Thus, the cumbia nightclub represents the transformation of racial alterity into a multiplicity of subjectivities that defy the fixation produced by social and racial domination. However, once again this portrayal of heterogeneous spaces does not imply idealisation: the cumbia nightclub is also portrayed as the place of violence against women, of death, of unplanned pregnancy. In a surreal scene, the protagonist of ‘Noches vacías’ smashes the head of a woman – who claimed she was pregnant with his child – against the pavement outside the Samber.89 In ‘Hasta quitarle Panamá a los yanquis’ (Until I Take Panama Away from the Yanks), a young boy, with whom Cucurto has an affair, collapses and dies on a street in Constitución after a night out at the Bronco nightclub. In El curandero del amor, Cucurto’s teenage lover and cumbia dance companion undergoes a backstreet abortion that almost kills her.

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Like the cumbia nightclub, the conventillo represents another heterogeneous space created by migrancy, ruled by sex and cumbia, and doubly situated in ­Afro-­Caribbean and Argentinian culture. It constitutes a liminal space that threatens the stability of discourses of national homogeneity through precisely what this society rejects and despises, a place of both joy and misery. This ambivalence is expressed by the narrator in ‘Las aventuras del Sr Maíz’: Entrar en aquel conventillo era ingresar al Caribe en plena Sudamérica. Bachatas, arroz con pollo, dominicanas moviendo el culo. La Raza Inferior Multiforme, futbolera, machista y retrógrada fluyendo por todas partes. Bueno, a rodearme y embadurnarme con la mugre de la turba horrible, que nace de la mezcla del indio con el español, iba yo convencidísimo de que era lo único que deseaba hacer por el resto de todos mis emputecidos días.90 (To walk into that conventillo was like getting in the Caribbean in the middle of South America. Bachata music, D ­ ominican-­style chicken and rice, Dominican girls moving their asses. The sexist backward ­football-­loving Inferior Multiform Race was flowing everywhere. To be surrounded and covered by the filth that comes from the mix of the Indian and the Spanish was the only thing I wanted to do for the rest of my fucking days.)

In Cucurto, social and racial boundaries and categories are represented in a way that recalls what Trigo denominates, in opposition to frontera (border), as frontería (frontier): ‘more a space than a line, more a highway than a signpost, more a liminality than a limit’.91 Yet it is not just loci and characters that integrate antagonistic elements without any dialectic resolution: in Cucurto, narration itself becomes a ­non-­dialectic mixture of registers and languages. The narrator often mixes Spanish with Guarani, creating a diglossic discourse that stresses the conflicts between the dominant culture and that of the Paraguayan immigrant (and thus, between Spanish and Guarani language, European and indigenous/mestizo culture) by putting together both registers without any synthesis or suture. In fact, the way this affects legibility is another manifestation of this rejection of harmonisation. This procedure through which dissimilar elements are combined in a dissonant manner can be linked with the rhizomatic variations inscribed in the poetics of ­neo-­baroque suggested by Perlongher. In fact, the reterritorialisation – and degradation – of language in Cucurto resembles that of Perlongher with n ­ eo-­baroque, which he transforms into neobarroso,

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in reference to the muddy waters of the River Plate but also to its mixture with low culture.92 At the same time, very much in the fashion of the neobarroso, the instability of identities, the kitsch, and hyperbolised sexuality are exacerbated by means of the chaotic accumulation of Latin American dialects and references, and the confusion of the high and low. The result of this is the transformation of the boundaries between the dominant and subordinated cultures into transitive liminal spaces – the fronterías described by Trigo. That borders can become uncertain does not imply that the balance in power between the two social realms is even. Cucurto does not propose an idealised view of diaspora as politically disruptive. As Mabel Moraña argues, racial and social divides do not disappear as an effect of migrancy but are at once underscored and exposed, and therefore called into question.93 Through this link between migrancy and n ­ eo-­baroque as complementary procedures, the potential to subvert naturalised cultural manifestations of social asymmetry and domination are put forward. Cucurto stresses the presence of social divides that are expressed in racialised language while, at the same time, ­de-­naturalising the racial categorisation that structures this discourse. In doing so, he suggests a possible destabilisation of Argentinian narratives of whiteness and exceptionalism that addresses the impact of the social transformations brought about by the crisis. In conclusion, in this chapter I have shown how, during the crisis, certain literary productions engaged critically with discourses of race, focusing particularly on the immigrant as a racialised figure. This engagement was entwined with references to the social and spatial transformations of the city generated by neoliberalism, all elements that contributed to the texts becoming gritty depictions of the reality of Buenos Aires during the crisis. However, this referentiality was at the same time undermined by various elements used to ­de-­naturalise and uncover racialisation. I examined the particularities and potential of these multiple operations to dismantle or subvert the discourse that constructs the immigrant as racial alterity. While ‘Asterix, el encargado’ parodies the fascination with the racial Other as a signifier of a primitive world that allows the white protagonist to overcome the anxieties and pressures of modern life, La Villa and Cucurto offer critical assessments of the discourses used in social and racial domination by dismantling stereotypes. La Villa portrays a similar fascination and encounter of

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the white middle class with the Other through the reproduction, and later erosion, of stereotypes associated with the villero/cartonero. This subversion of stereotypes exposes the limits of literature; the text also reminds the reader of the social reality of penury and racism beyond literature from which they emerge. Cucurto also highlights, in a much more radical way, the constructedness of images of race while calling attention to racism and marginalisation. His engagement with social and racial violence is done in a more ruthless way than Aira, constantly reminding the reader of the extent of the destitution brought about by the crisis. He also underscores, nonetheless, the connections between the neoliberal project and other historical forms of racial domination and exclusion, including those produced in literature, by tracing a connection between blackness, the negro and contemporary immigration. The next chapter will look at race in a particular strand of cinema produced during the crisis. This cinema was sustained on the production of a crop of young filmmakers determined to engage, as these writers did, with a present of social crisis through the incorporation of realist conventions and anthropological curiosity without necessarily claiming to capture ‘life as it is’.

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4

‘A Bolivian walks into a bar …’: race in New Argentinian Cinema

On 28 October 2008, the Argentinian Football Association (AFA) confirmed a rumour that, for days, had circulated in the local and international media: Diego Maradona was going to take over as manager of the national team. The announcement took the world of football by surprise and was received with mixed feelings among Argentinians. Football in Argentina is, in Archetti’s words, ‘an obsession, a locus of pride and disenchantment, of joy and sadness, an important arena for obtaining victory and global recognition’.1 Given the sport’s centrality in the national life, offering such a job to Maradona, whose previous managerial experience was not only limited but also unsuccessful, was seen as audacious. However, the recent bad performances of the national squad and lack of support from players had forced Alfio Basile’s resignation as head coach, and AFA aimed to revitalise the team by appointing the man who, like none other, embodied Argentina’s footballing glories. Maradona’s first three matches provided reasons to be optimistic: Argentina returned to the winning streak and the style of playing showed signs of progress. It seemed that el Diego was proving wrong all those who doubted his suitability for the role. And then, on 1 April 2009, Argentina lost against Bolivia in La Paz by six goals to one. Many Argentinians were in disbelief. Journalists and broadcasters used words such as ‘shame’ and ‘humiliation’ to describe the result. The only other occasion in which the national team had conceded six goals was in 1958. But it was not just the

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broad margin of goals that made the defeat shocking; it was also the rival. Even if Argentinian football had struggled to recover part of its faded grandeur in the past years, its superiority in relation to Bolivia, historically one of the weakest teams in the region, seemed to be taken for granted. The extent to which the defeat was lived as a national drama is illustrated by one chronicle in Clarín, the country’s largest newspaper, which stated: ‘Las lágrimas que no hubo en el vestuario tras la histórica derrota ante un equipo Clase C, ya se habían desparramado en el desparejo césped boliviano’ (Tears were not seen in the dressing room after the historic loss facing a ­C-­class team; they had already been spilt on the unevenly cut Bolivian turf).2 ‘Para la historia negra’ (For the black history) was the headline chosen by Olé, Argentina’s most important sports daily. As usual with Olé’s titles, which are known for their puns, there was an ambivalence in the choice of words: the defeat could be interpreted as a catastrophe, an event that belonged to the ‘dark history’ of Argentinian football, but it could also be interpreted as a milestone for Bolivia as a country of negros. To understand what allowed for this ambiguity, we need to consider the transformations that the concept of negro underwent during the 1990s. As explained before, the term had been used in previous decades to construct an internal social Other that, by means of racial language, could be excluded symbolically from the nation. However, during neoliberalism, the uses of negro were expanded. As Mario Margulis and Grimson have pointed out, negro became cognate with bolita, the pejorative term used to refer to Bolivians. That many local negros started to be identified as Bolivians was instrumental in reinforcing the identification of n ­on-­ whiteness as something that came from abroad and had no place in the nation as portrayed in the ­middle-­ class imaginary. This allowed the maintaining of the notion of Argentina as essentially white. To bring another example from football, the identification of the supporters of Argentina’s most popular club, Boca Juniors, with the Bolivian community by rivals from River Plate shows how the masses, historically hailed as negros, also became ‘Bolivianised’ during the crisis. The increasing identification of Bolivians with negros, in turn, allowed the racialisation of nationality, in a context in which dominant groups were fuelling xenophobic and racist anxieties as a way of dealing with the social discontent produced by the general

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s­ ocio-­economic decline. But this was not just a t­ op-­down approach: if these discourses were effective in fuelling racist sentiments among parts of the disenfranchised middle and working classes, it was because they connected with p ­ re-­existing anxieties and negative views about local negros. Another factor that explains the effectiveness of these racialisation strategies was that they allowed those who had been historically hailed as negros to distance themselves, albeit momentarily, from the stigma by transferring it to Bolivians, Paraguayans and Peruvians. Racialising the immigrants allowed the masses to include themselves, even if temporally and precariously, in the national community from which they had been historically excluded. This explains why the local precariat also embraced public a­ nti-­immigrant discourses instead of favouring ­intra-­class solidarity in the face of a shared experience of exploitation and discrimination. In this chapter, I examine the impact of neoliberalism on the identification of the Bolivian as a radical form of racial alterity by looking at two films by leading directors associated with the s­o-­ called New Argentinian Cinema: Israel Adrián Caetano’s Bolivia and Martín Rejtman’s Copacabana. Each film provides a different and complementary perspective on the process through which Bolivians were racialised. Bolivia is a fiction film that explores the mediation of race in a community in decomposition: a Buenos Aires bar and grill frequented by taxi drivers. It focuses on how the racialisation of Bolivians is used by the local l­ ower-­middle and working classes to express anxieties ignited by their increasing disenfranchisement as a result of the crisis. Copacabana, in turn, is a documentary that follows the efforts of Bolivian immigrants living in a Buenos Aires shantytown to precisely articulate organic forms of community in order to face their own marginal position and counter this racism from mainstream Argentinian society. As with literature, I will briefly discuss the situation of cinema during the crisis and characterise the way in which emerging directors engaged with this event, focusing on their work with cinematographic realism.

The renovation of Argentinian cinema Within cultural practice, the case of cinema during the crisis is exceptional because it did not experience the financial meltdown

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in the same way as the literary, music and art markets. These industries suffered significant shrinkage during 2001–2 and only started to show signs of recovery in 2003. Film, in contrast, was already on an upward trend in 2001–2: in 2001, f­ orty-­seven films were released, which corresponded to 12 per cent of the total national screen share; in 2002, the numbers were f­orty-­six and 10.21 per cent respectively.3 These figures, when compared with the eleven films released in 1994 (a mere 2 per cent of the screen share), illustrate that Argentinian film was experiencing a resurgence from its own particular crisis, which contrasted drastically with the economic recession of the time.4 The upward trend continued in subsequent years ­(fifty-­three films in 2003, ­sixty-­nine films in 2004).5 The boom in film production was the result of, primarily, increasing public funding via INCAA, the National Institute for Cinema and Visual Arts, the budget of which was significantly increased thanks to the 1994 Cinema Law. The law, which was passed in an attempt to shake Argentinian cinema out of stagnation, established screen quotas for domestic films, granted autonomy to the INCAA, and significantly boosted the funds available to it. By introducing taxes on television screenings, cinema tickets and video rentals, INCAA’s budget tripled between 1994 and 1995 and continued to grow in subsequent years, reaching a record figure of fifty million dollars in 1998, despite the inception of state withholdings a year before.6 The availability of state funds, combined with investment from private television networks, contributed to the rise of a model of domestic blockbuster capable of imitating glossy Hollywood productions.7 Parallel to this, INCAA implemented grant schemes for ­first-­time directors that, in a relatively short time, allowed the consolidation of a host of new auteurs. Although these emerging filmmakers were quite reluctant to be seen as a collective, they were identified in some circles as New Argentinian Cinema due to the innovations in aesthetic and production terms that they introduced. A defining characteristic was the departure from the style of 1980s Argentinian cinema, which was articulated around a type of middlebrow ­ medium-­ budget drama film, usually directly or indirectly about the recent dictatorial past. As Jens Andermann points out, this enquiry into the dark years of the Proceso rarely addressed the political complexity of the period, opting instead for highly allegorical and pedagogical narratives that aimed to ‘enlighten’ the viewers.8 In the end, the spectator was ‘forced’ to

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identify with the ethical position favoured by the film, leaving little space for interpretation. This cinema was initially successful in critical and commercial terms, both domestically and abroad, as the cases of María Luisa Bemberg’s 1984 Camila, Luis Puenzo’s 1985 Oscar winner La historia oficial (The Official Story), and Fernando Solanas’s 1986 Tangos, el exilio de Gardel (Tangos, the Exile of Gardel) illustrate. Yet, by the mid-1990s it was in a profound crisis. New Argentinian Cinema reacted against this type of film, turning its eye to the present. Using realist aesthetics and minimalistic storytelling, it explored the multiple impacts of neoliberalism on the social fabric with surgical precision and anthropological curiosity. In Gonzalo Aguilar’s words, ‘cinema in Argentina in recent years has had such a powerful obsession with the flow of the present that a cultural critic would be able to use its films to inventory the transformation of the 1990s’.9 The opposition between 1980s cinema and New Argentinian Cinema resembles the fracture between ethnography and interpretation that Sarlo identifies as the main difference between ­post-­dictatorship and ­turn-­of-­the-­twenty-­first-­century Argentinian literature. However, as with Cucurto, Casas, and Aira, these filmmakers’ ethnographic concern and use of realist conventions should not be read as an attempt to provide a mimetic portrayal of reality. The intention of late 1990s cinema was not to offer certainties about the social context they depicted, like previous Argentinian cinema, but to question it. Aguilar and Joanna Page correctly note that, in New Argentinian Cinema, ambiguity is consistently underscored: there is a tendency to leave many aspects of the plot unsolved, identification with characters and situations is undermined, climaxes are uncommon and endings usually do not provide closure to the story.10 In that respect, if many strategies like location shooting, references to real contemporary events, use of ­non-­professional actors and slang are deliberately used to connote realism and originality, there is always a reluctance to assume a clear position of authority regarding what is represented. As Page argues, even if many of the films propose a classification of different facets and subjectivities of the crisis, they do not provide a key with which to access them: New Argentine Cinema allows us to glimpse the marginalized … who are rarely accorded any presence on the big screen, but it also ensures that they remain ‘other’ to us, distant, unexplained, and resisting

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capture on film, always exceeding the frame of the camera or moving out of sight.11

When it comes to racism, the films selected tend to look on racism not just as a state technology. In fact, they mainly consider racism in its capillary form; that is, through displaying its presence in people’s interactions, in order to dissect the link, mentioned earlier, between state racism and racialisation from below. This focus on the private and the everyday is indicative of how these films distance themselves from the didactic and moralistic tone of 1980s Argentinian cinema and also from the ideological overtones of Third Cinema – and the appropriation of these by video collectives after 2001. This emphasis on the m ­ icro-­strategies of racism and the absence of allegorical language does not imply that these films’ comments on race are limited to the particular situations depicted or that they do not allow more general reflections on the issue of segregation or racial politics. However, as mentioned before, because viewers are refused direct explanations and must frequently fill in the gaps in the narrative, they are put in the position of having to generate more autonomous judgement on what they are watching o ­ n-­screen. Before proceeding to the close reading of the selected films, it is important to refer briefly to the choice of a comparative analysis of both fiction and documentary films. Agustín Campero affirms: ‘Algo característico del NCA (nuevo cine argentino) es la disolución de las diferencias entre documental y ficción, tanto en lo que hace a las propias estrategias narrativas como al estatus que tiene esta diferencia’ (A characteristic of New Argentinian Cinema is the dissolution of the differences between documentary and fiction, both in terms of the narrative strategies used as well as in the condition of this difference).12 However, it could be argued that they have become more imprecise rather than dissolved – and the films of Lisandro Alonso are perhaps the most radical examples of this. Nevertheless, as Aguilar correctly argues, the casting of n ­ on-­ professional actors in many of the fictional works of New Argentinian Cinema deliberately functions to give the viewer the feeling that there is a connection between actor and character which is founded on the ­off-­screen reality.13 In these films, acting is presented not as pure performance but as the recovery and repetition of an experience that truly happened to the actor. Federico León and Pablo Martínez’s documentary Estrellas (2007) (Stars) reflects on

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the primacy of social background and phenotype over formal training that is vindicated in the casting preferences of New Argentinian Cinema by focusing on Julio Arrieta, an actor and talent agent from a Buenos Aires villa. Arrieta complains of the fact that rubios (blonds), and not negros, get to play underclass characters in television and film – rubio is a term used by w ­ orking-­class people to refer, pejoratively, to white ­middle-­class individuals who tend to look down on them. ‘El lugar que peleamos es que no contraten a rubios para hacer de negros, nosotros queremos hacer de negros. Somos negros y no nos avergonzamos … Fuimos pobres toda la vida así que es un papel que lo sabemos hacer totalmente’ (What we fight for is that blonds stop being hired to play negro characters; we want to play negro characters. We’re negros and we’re not ashamed of it … We’ve been poor all our lives so it’s a role we know perfectly).14 Bolivia follows this strategy by casting actors who look like the characters they play but, more importantly, look as if they had lived through the same experiences. That all characters have the same name as the people who play them also serves to make the division between reality and fiction less precise. Thus, even if fictional characters clearly lack a life o ­ ff-­screen, links between the r­ eal-­life experiences of the actor and those of the character are usually encouraged. Copacabana, on the other hand, is not completely disconnected from fiction. As I will show, it deliberately undermines the precepts of traditional documentary: as with fiction films and the literary texts in Chapter 3, it does not claim to be a representation of reality but rather a way of interrogating and dissecting how reality is constructed and staged.15 It is not coincidence that Rejtman has described it as ‘una película de ficción hecha con elementos reales’ (a fiction film made with real elements).16 As Andermann states, the possibility of navigating across fictional and documentary films in New Argentinian Cinema also testifies to the local manifestation of a global trend: the resurgence and refashioning of the documentary form thanks to digital technology. In recent years, around 40 per cent of Argentinian films per year were documentaries.17 In this sense, looking at both fiction and documentary film allows scrutinising race from a more comprehensive standpoint, one that benefits from looking and comparing distinct genres but also from examining the intersections and overlaps between them.

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Bolivia Israel Adrián Caetano can be considered a direct product of INCAA’s strategy for talent development that was crucial to Argentinian cinema’s renovation. He was one of the young directors included in Historias breves (Short Stories), a 1995 feature film that compiled the winners of a contest organised by the Institute for ­first-­time filmmakers, and that is seen as a foundational landmark of New Argentinian Cinema. Three years later, his first ­full-­length film Pizza, birra, faso (Pizza, Beer, Smokes) won the Best ­Ibero-­American Film Award and a Jury’s Special Mention  at the Mar del Plata International Film Festival. With over 100,000 spectators, its performance at the box office was also good for Argentinian standards, especially considering the l­ ow-­budget nature of the film. ­Co-­directed with Bruno Stagnaro, Pizza, birra, faso tells the story of a group of young petty thieves who rob a cumbia nightclub to escape their ­prospect-­less lives. The film is widely considered to be New Argentinian Cinema’s first major work, in the sense that it introduced mainstream critics and audiences to the new language that these young directors were developing. With its gritty realism, Pizza, birra, faso offered a desolate portrayal of a country profoundly transformed by years of neoliberalism. Bolivia is Caetano’s second film. It continues this line of devastating representations of economic crisis and social exclusion but focuses particularly on the relation between neoliberal crisis and racism. In fact, it is the film that first looked at the interplay of race and nationality that constructed the Bolivian immigrant as a racial Other during the 1990s. Produced over the course of three years with even more limited funds than Pizza, birra, faso, it maximised this lack of resources to connote realism. The use of grainy black and white stock, untrained actors, location shooting, and a single audio track create the feeling of a raw portrayal of social reality. Like Pizza, birra, faso, Bolivia did very well in film festivals, winning the Young Critics Award in Cannes and the FIPRESCI Award at London Film Festival and, with over 50,000 spectators, its performance at the ­box-­office was reasonably good for a ­low-­budget independently distributed film.18 Furthermore, it was the film with the highest ­per-­theatre average in the week of its release.19 Based on a short story by Caetano’s e­ x-­wife Romina Lafranchini, it depicts three days in the life of Freddy (Freddy Waldo Flores), an

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undocumented Bolivian immigrant who finds work as a barbecue cook at a Buenos Aires bar and grill frequented by taxi drivers. A sign of how the film favours a micropolitical analysis rather than an overarching portrayal of racial relations is the fact that most action takes place inside the bar. The camera’s immobility, combined with the lack of long shots, creates the sensation that the locale, already quite small, is even smaller. This produces a feeling of claustrophobia that, added to the increasing hostility between the characters, stimulates discomfort and anxiety in the audience, as if they were also trapped within the bar’s confined spaces and in the characters’ ­dead-­end situations. In fact, the bar constitutes a sort of enclosed world where everybody is suffering the effects of the economic recession: Oso (Oscar Oso Bertea) is about to lose his taxi because of unpaid debts, the bar’s boss Enrique (Enrique Liporace) is also struggling with indebtedness and street seller Héctor (Héctor Anglada) is thinking of moving back to his parents’ house in Córdoba because he cannot find a steady job. In this climate of shared financial hardship, there are no signs of class solidarity. For example, Enrique takes advantage of Freddy’s undocumented status to exploit him and Oso only gets excuses when he approaches his colleagues for help. In Bolivia the ambience gradually becomes charged with tension and violence as the patrons’ resentment towards Freddy, mainly ignited by their own frustrations and failures, grows. In the end, Oso kills Freddy in a drunken, c­ ocaine-­ fuelled rage.20 Most analyses correctly focus on how the film brings to the fore the discrimination and racial violence against immigrants from neighbouring countries, a topic that had been absent from film production up to that point. However, if racism is criticised, Freddy’s racialisation seems taken for granted. Caetano inadvertently repeats this idea when he describes the process of adapting Lafranchini’s story, which originally centred on Freddy’s love affair with Rosa, a waitress from Paraguay, for film: En realidad cuando escribí el guión lo que me interesaba era la historia (de amor), el tema del racismo no estaba muy presente. Pero inevitablemente al hablar de esos personajes y ambientarlo en ese estrato social hay una serie de temas que aparecen solos y se imponen.21 (When I wrote the script, what actually interested me was the (love) story, the topic of racism wasn’t very present. But, inevitably, when one

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talks about this type of characters and sets the film in that social setting certain themes emerge by themselves and take over the plot.)

That for Caetano the topic of racism was unavoidable reveals the extent to which the stereotype of the Bolivian as a racialised figure was widespread, not only in discourses that stigmatised immigrants but also in those that were sympathetic to them. What this implies is that racial discrimination is conceived as something that should be denounced, but racialisation itself is never problematised and, therefore, is presented as a natural and unavoidable fact of social life. In a sense, this just reproduces a multicultural rhetoric that regards racial discrimination as a deviance but disregards or neglects the importance of racial classification for racism. Contrary to this conception, as well as to Caetano’s words, what the film explores is not race as given but as a process, by showing the progressive construction of Bolivianness into a signifier of both foreignness and ­non-­whiteness in everyday reality. The focus on social interaction rather than state racism allows us to look at how the categories that give form to Argentina’s structures of racial domination were appropriated and implemented by impoverished Porteños as part of their different affective responses to the crisis. For example, at the beginning of the film, not being Argentinian is what marks Freddy’s otherness: despite stating many times that he is from Bolivia, he is repeatedly referred to as Peruvian. Furthermore, in a conversation with taxi driver Mercado (Alberto Mercado), Enrique states that Peru is in Central America. Enrique’s ignorance of basic geography and his m ­ ix-­up over Freddy’s origins show that alterity, at this stage, has to do primarily with nationality. However, after these initial scenes there is a precise moment that marks the sudden emergence of race in the discourse: when Rosa attempts to clean a table on which a man is lying drunk, the latter says to her ‘dejá de romper las bolas, negra’ (stop busting my balls, negra). Enrique then orders Freddy to throw the man out. As Freddy escorts him out, his use of the epithet negro (negro cagón (chickenshit negro), negro de mierda (fucking negro)) indicates how the violence of language racialises nationality. It is usually the case in Bolivia that the episodes of more overt racism are linked to drunkenness. The use of negro, as explained before, not only implied classifying Bolivians and Paraguayans according to a p ­re-­ existing racial category but also adapting it to signify foreignness, thus reproducing the myth that Argentina was white.

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Except for Héctor, who has a provincial ­working-­class background, the customers in the bar are all Porteños who, as proprietors of their means of labour (Enrique owns the bar, and the rest own the taxis they drive), believed in the possibility of upward social mobility. The recession, however, has made these ­middle-­class aspirations unattainable. In this context, racialising Freddy and Rosa allows reinforcing, albeit precariously, a perceived p ­re-­ eminence in relation to these immigrants even if, in reality, the social distance between the locals and the foreigners is shrinking. Social descent is seen as an effect of an unjust economic system that rewards foreigners’ slyness while penalising Argentinians, who allegedly work hard and play by the rules. Max Weber defines class as a situation structured not only by rightful property ownership, as in classical Marxism, but also by the skills and services that one brings to the market, and that determine one’s life chances.22 If this idea is applied to Bolivia, it is possible to see that the film describes how the progressive reduction of the class gap in terms of market capacity (not in, for example, cultural capital or class identification) is expressed through racial language. Nevertheless, this is not just a case of racialising social class, since the fact that these anxieties are framed precisely through racial language reveals the ­pre-­existence of discourses and categories that already identify the Bolivian as a racial Other and not merely as a class subordinate. The opening scene features ‘Condor mallcu’, a 1978 song by Bolivian folk group Los Kjarkas that celebrates the Inca legacy and calls for the unity of Andean people. While the tune is being played, we see titles interspersed with television footage of a 1998 football match between Argentina and Bolivia. Contrary to Maradona’s 2009 debacle, this game was comfortably won by Argentina three to one. The scene works to indicate that the locals identify this footballing superiority as manifestation of their own alleged p ­ re-­ eminence over Bolivians in everyday life – and the shock at the six to one defeat in 2009 seems to confirm this idea of a presupposed superiority. However, in the bar this assumed higher status is not taken for granted. In fact, it needs to be constantly reasserted by means of racialising Freddy. When Enrique asks Oso to leave the bar, the latter replies: ‘¿Vos te pensás que yo soy ese bolita que está transpirando ahí? A mí me vas a respetar, ¿entendés?’ (You think that I’m that bolita workin’ there? You have to show me respect, you understand?). Oso cannot command respect as a paying client

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anymore (he is broke, and Mercado is paying for his drinks); therefore, he demands it because he is Argentinian. The use of bolita to refer to Freddy, with all its racial implications, indicates that for Oso his Argentinianness entails not only a p ­ re-­eminence based on being a national, but also on being white. The shrinking distance between the locals and immigrants, however, does not mean that racial domination and social exploitation have been completely altered: in the bar, Freddy works long hours for little money, paid cash in hand; he is verbally abused and, eventually, killed. The circular narrative suggested by the sign Se necesita cocinero/parrillero (Grill cook wanted) shown at both the opening and ending stresses the structural dimension of this racial violence: Freddy’s death does not have any consequences, and someone else will probably take his place, reproducing a similar pattern of exploitation and discrimination. The fact that Oso kills him high on cocaine also points towards the ironic facet of these cyclical relations: during their night out, Freddy tells Rosa that he had to come to Argentina after losing his cocalero job at home due to coca eradication policies sponsored by the United States as part of its ‘War on Drugs’. The way in which the film portrays migration as an isolated experience somehow neglects the fact that, in reality, it relies on networks of acquaintances and relatives that provide guidance and support. However, Freddy does not have any connections or groups that can provide him with material or affective support. He has arrived alone, does not know anyone, seems lost in the big city, and sleeps in bars until Rosa finds him a room for rent. Unlike the locals, Freddy and Rosa are eventually able to develop a relationship through sharing tips and meals and sleeping together. This form of precarious community in the face of a lack of alternatives suggests possible strategies for dealing with the racism they suffer. Yet, as Gustavo Noriega points out, their solidarity is the direct consequence of the system that oppresses them, not of the intrinsic goodness that is usually attributed to the poor in social realism.23 In this sense, the film underscores that their agency is constrained by forms of racial domination and social exploitation that are imposed on them inexorably. Bolivia highlights the distinction between the locals as victimisers and Rosa and Freddy as victims of racism but also suggests that the situations of the locals and the immigrants are not that different when it comes to finding a way out from the pressure of structural

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forces, namely the recession. The Porteños are dealing with the deterioration of social and affective bonds: friendships, relationships and marriages are suffering the same degradation as their personal finances. In this context, the idea of politics as a possible option with which to confront disenfranchisement is as absent from their lives as it is from Freddy’s and Rosa’s. As I explained, the late 1990s was a period marked by the ­de-­politicisation of the society, before the resurgence of political mobilisation in 2001 (although the precariat and unemployed, who were more harmed by neoliberal policies, started developing resistance strategies earlier). The film, shot between 1999 and 2001, captures the moment immediately before this eruption of ­middle-­class and l­ower-­middle-­class civil activism, when there seemed not to be any options available for this sector to deal with the crisis. Referring to the decline of collective subjects in cinema, Aguilar states that in Bolivia, as in other productions of the period, the lumpens have replaced the people.24 This withdrawal of the people from film is symptomatic of the impact of the end of grand narratives in Argentina and, particularly, of two processes: the transformation of Peronism from w ­orking-­ class movement to facilitator of the neoliberal programme, and the reconversion of the citizen into a consumer. The scene in which Freddy, under Enrique’s orders, refuses to serve Oso a chorizo sandwich due to his debts illustrates this shift in citizenship. Even if he cannot pay, the fact that he is deprived of consumption is read by Oso as a violation of rights and as a sign of his weakness as a citizen. That it is Freddy (who is both an undocumented immigrant and, in his eyes, a racial subordinate, which make him a n ­ on-­citizen) who denies his right to consume is entirely unacceptable. As Scorer points out, the importance of setting the film in a bar and grill should not be underestimated: ‘it functions as a n ­ ational-­ urban symbol, a locale based around the archetypal Argentine product of meat’.25 Indeed, as the national dish, asado a la parrilla (barbecue) constitutes an important articulator of nationness among Argentinians, one predicated on the superior quality of the country’s beef, which is portrayed in the collective imaginary as immune to the country’s decline. Argentina has seen its greatness fade away, it is claimed, but it still has the best meat in the world. In Bolivia, beef as food but also as a symbol of national belonging is presented by the locals as controlled and refused by a bolita/negro.

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This works to legitimise their arbitrary violence on Freddy, since he is identified as the one responsible for their loss of privilege. Conflicts about the definitions of masculinity also intersect with the dynamics of class and race in the bar. The place is the archetypal location of misogynist sociability: the taxi drivers watch boxing matches and ­soft-­core films on television, drink beer, complain about work and ­ex-­wives, make fun of Héctor’s homosexuality, and compete over Rosa’s charms. In this context, her status as a woman, a foreigner and n ­ on-­white, implies that she is in an even more vulnerable position than Freddy. She is perceived as the ultimate subaltern by the locals and, particularly, as sexually available – these kinds of sexual expectations regarding indigenous and mestizo women by white men, and how they are ingrained in specific racial and power dynamics, will be discussed in length in Chapter 5. The financial hardship experienced by Enrique, Oso and the rest, and their inability to be good providers, can also be read as a failure to fulfil a traditional model of masculinity. To this, we can add the failure of being rejected by the waitress when she chooses to go out with Freddy. Racism is, therefore, also a reaction to a perceived emasculation that has to be countered by racialising Freddy to justify the abuse. Freddy’s killer is none other than Oso, who is about to lose his taxi – the very element that defines his capacity to be a worker, provider and consumer; in sum, a man and citizen. Freddy, in turn, has migrated to a hostile society to support his family and spends half of his daily wage – an amount that could have afforded him a hotel room for the night and save him from sleeping in a bar – on a phone call to his family. Contrary to the taxi drivers, he is presented as a concerned and selfless head of household: he is willing to make the sacrifices that Mercado and Oso are not. However, Freddy’s promiscuity and drunkenness on his night out with Rosa later on shows that Bolivia moves beyond simplistic portrayals of the racial subordinate. Although the criticism of racism in Bolivia involves victimisation and miserablism, it neither o ­ ver-­romanticises the victims nor completely demonises the victimisers. Instead, it shows the devastating effect of racial domination and social decomposition in everyday interactions and how limited agency is. Diego Gachassin’s Vladimir en Buenos Aires (2002) (Vladimir in Buenos Aires) provides a counterpoint to Bolivia through its depiction of the misadventures of a Russian engineer (Pasha

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Kyslychko) who comes to Buenos Aires during the crisis. In 1994, Menem’s government authorised a series of agreements to encourage immigration from former Soviet republics. Almost paraphrasing ­ nineteenth-­ century migration narratives, it was argued that these highly qualified white European professionals would compensate the pernicious influence of n ­on-­ white immigrants (the Peruvians, Paraguayans and Bolivians that, according to official discourses, were ‘invading’ the country and affecting its historical whiteness). It was estimated that between 200,000 and 300,000 people would come to Argentina. Eventually, less than 10,000 migrated, mainly from Ukraine (71.5 per cent) and Russia (17 per cent).26 Due to state inefficiency and the crisis, they encountered few job opportunities outside the informal market.27 This is precisely the case portrayed in Vladimir en Buenos Aires: soon Vladimir runs out of money and, frustrated and desperate, ends up taking up a job as a security guard. Therefore, one could say that this depiction of exploitation and immigration does not contrast much, in principle, from that in Bolivia. However, the difference lies in the fact that Vladimir is never racialised: during the ride from the airport, the taxi driver comments: ‘Acá hacen falta más de los tuyos, ¿sabés? Y menos bolitas. Está lleno de bolitas’ (We need more like you, you know? And less bolitas. This is full of bolitas). His misfortune is more to do with his inability to understand and adapt to the local labour market, which is more influenced by informal connections than by merit. Freddy, on the other hand, has fewer aspirations but is nevertheless more resourceful, and adapts rapidly to the new context. However, he is more constrained in the sense that he cannot escape racism. Both films illustrate, in sum, two migrant experiences characteristic of the period of the crisis, showing the dissimilar intervention of race in each case. Another interesting contrast is provided by Daniel Burman’s El abrazo partido (2004) (Lost Embrace), a film that, unlike others in this chapter, proposes a narrative drawing, in part, on the tradition of Argentinian ­comedy-­drama. As in Bolivia, the action takes place in a very enclosed ­semi-­private place which has been affected by the recession: a shopping arcade in which shopkeepers are struggling to make ends meet. In this locale, the phantom of bankruptcy is overwhelmingly present. Many characters, including the protagonist Ariel (Daniel Hendler), fantasise about migrating to Europe, a

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dream that was common at that time, as illustrated by the ­never-­ ending queues to apply for citizenship at the Spanish and Italian consulates in Buenos Aires. However, this is not a portrayal of a community in decomposition: on the contrary, the film shows how certain values such as solidarity and work ethics, which are presented as the core of Argentinianness, can form the basis on which to reconstitute the social body. The shabby arcade allegorically stands for the founding image of the nation as a crisol de razas (melting pot) and suggests how this notion can be ­ re-­ articulated to incorporate the diversity of contemporary Argentina. Characters that symbolise the migration of the ­nation-­building period work side by side with newcomers that represent the new immigration. An ­Italian-­Argentinian family and the protagonist and her mother, who are from a P ­ olish-­ Jewish background, are here portrayed sharing the arcade space with a Korean couple and Ramón (Juan José Flores Quispe), the Bolivian immigrant who works transporting merchandise on a trolley for Ariel’s brother. In this community, everybody accepts their place gladly in the face of the external threat of economic crisis. This fantasy of national unity and racial and social integration finds its climax in the scene in which Ramón and El Peruano, who works for a competitor shopping arcade, race with their carts to solve a quarrel over money between the two galleries. A middle class that is struggling with the financial meltdown can overcome its internal disputes and progress by uniting with the immigrants, the scene seems to suggest. However, during the meeting in which Ramón’s participation is decided by the retailers, he is never asked for his consent, a share of the profits is only guaranteed if he wins, and the presence of a union representative who complains about the arrangement is not welcomed by the shopkeepers. Both Ramón and El Peruano are reduced to pure corporeality, brute force useful only for the transportation of commodities and for racing. This is nonetheless shown not in a critical manner but in a l­ight-­hearted way that allows the relationship between the ­middle-­class retailers and Ramón to be presented according to a particular s­ elf-­absolving paternalist discourse that undermines the othering and exploitation of immigrants from other South American countries.

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Copacabana Martín Rejtman is widely recognised as the main precursor to New Argentinian Cinema. His first feature film, Rapado (Shaved Head), from 1992, already contained many of the aesthetic characteristics that would become defining features of New Argentinian Cinema. It also anticipated many of the production strategies of films like Pizza, birra, faso and Bolivia, by making aesthetic virtue of budgeting restrictions and exploring alternative and segmented funding strategies. Rapado also antedated New Argentinian Cinema in its departure from the codes of 1980s cinema, especially the latter’s tendency to present everything as a commentary on society using moralistic and allegorical language. Rejtman’s subsequent works continued this line: although filmed during the crisis and its aftermath, they seem to lack, unlike Caetano’s films, any recognisable references to the context of their production.28 However, as Scorer and Page argue, in its portrayals of a society and, specifically, a middle class immersed in ­hyper-­commodification and disaffection, his filmography can still be considered as strongly linked to the particular experiences of neoliberalisation in Argentina.29 The failure of work to provide forms of identification due to the rise of unemployment and pecarisation also has an important place in Rejtman’s films. Nevertheless, his engagement with all these particular traits of neoliberalism and the crisis differs drastically from Caetano’s desolate tenor. On the contrary, Rejtman could be compared to Aira in the sense that both expose the absurdity of everyday life and the limits of representation to know and understand this reality. Contrary to the depictions of racial violence and isolation in Bolivia and conviviality in El abrazo partido, Copacabana represents migration as a collective effort through which the Bolivians produce diasporic community by taking the Virgin of Copacabana Festival as its premise (or, more precisely, its excuse). This is an event organised every year on the second and third Sunday of October by the large Bolivian community of Barrio Charrúa in honour of the patron saint of Bolivia. It is said that around 300 people attended the first edition of the festival in 1972. Since then, it has grown to become a central moment for Bolivians in Buenos Aires, as it brings them together around a common expression of national identity and acts as a demonstration of their presence in Argentinian society.30

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Estimates by the Government of the City of Buenos Aires put the number of attendees in later years at 50,000 to 60,000.31 The festival typically starts in the morning with a mass and continues with a procession of the statue of the Virgin through the main streets of the neighbourhood. Troupes called fraternidades parade and perform Bolivian dances after the procession. The festivities usually end with a street party in the evening. During the day, street stands sell food, drink, and merchandise such as Bolivian and Argentinian flags, figurines of the Virgin, and clothes. Copacabana was originally part of a series of documentaries to be aired in 2006 on the Buenos Aires Government’s television channel Ciudad Abierta. This series looked at some of the city’s most popular public events – including the football derby between Boca and River and the student picnics on Spring Day. The inclusion of the festival among the list of events indicates how the Ibarra administration favoured a view of diversity as something that could be capitalised as a signifier of modernity. When Mauricio Macri took over as mayor of Buenos Aires in 2007, he intended to close the channel as part of his conservative agenda and the project of the series was set aside. Rejtman was able to keep ownership of Copacabana, which was eventually premiered at the 2007 edition of the Buenos Aires International Festival of Independent Cinema (BAFICI) to critical acclaim. As can be seen, the film was not produced during the crisis. However, I argue that its analysis is pertinent given that Copacabana is symptomatic of the local manifestation of forms of neoliberal multiculturalism, and particularly their impact on state and civil society. The government’s original interest in capturing the festivity on film exemplifies the ways in which the state sought to manage diversity, in this case in Buenos Aires, and framed it through specific discourses that hail it as a cultural resource that put the city in line with the megalopolises of the Western world. During the 1990s, as Buenos Aires was intensifying its neoliberal reconversion, the festival obtained official endorsement, being declared of ‘municipal cultural interest’ by the Legislature. As Grimson puts it, besides igniting xenophobic and racist sentiment, immigration also demonstrated that Argentina (and especially its capital) were in the path to ­First-­Worldness: the United States had Mexicans, Germany had Turks, and Argentina had Bolivians.32 Within this framework, racial difference was seen as valuable and desirable as long as immigrants obediently accepted their secondary status in society.

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The event’s increasing popularity outside the Bolivian community also illustrated that this rise of multiculturalism in Buenos Aires during the crisis and its aftermath was not just a policy of the Ibarra administration but was also driven by Porteños’ own consumption of ethnicity. For white m ­ iddle-­class Porteños, the festivity allowed an opportunity to gaze at the culture of the Other from a safe position. Marilyn Halter points out that, in Western societies, multiculturalism also serves the dynamics of market segmentation in late capitalism, focusing on affluent, white consumers who want an undefined sense of tradition but are not willing to sacrifice modern conveniences and options.33 Although the confluence between commercial culture and the exotic is by no means a novelty, as the example of primitivism shows, under neoliberalism two entirely new factors introduce a novelty in the way in which this process manifests. The first one is the aforementioned breakdown of the division between economy and culture.34 The second innovation is the dismantling of the essentialist racial typologies of the past – which in the case of Argentina (and Buenos Aires) explains how Bolivianness, a nationality, could be racialised. By showing how those racialised subalterns can be occasionally celebrated in the form of exotic others, Copacabana offers a perspective that is opposite yet complementary to Bolivia’s. As Antonio Gómez puts it, ‘(Bolivia) denounces the discrimination against Bolivians in Argentina from the standpoint of an informed intellectual who needs to educate the public. Rejtman’s approach, in contrast, begins with an admission of ignorance on the subject’.35 Indeed, Rejtman did not come up with the idea for the film but rather chose it out of the list of themes proposed by Ciudad Abierta. En vez de pensar otra alternativa, elegí uno de los temas que se habían propuesto y (el festival de la Virgen) era un tema muy ajeno a mí, así que pensé que si íbamos a hacer un documental, que es un género totalmente ajeno a mí … me parecía que había que ir lejos con la elección del tema. No me interesaba hablar sobre algo que conocía completamente. Me interesaba aprender algo nuevo, conocer algo en el camino, todo documental es un aprendizaje sobre algo, y yo sobre la comunidad boliviana sabía muy poco.36 (Instead of thinking of another alternative, I chose one of the topics that had been proposed to me. It was a topic alien to me, so I thought that if we were going to make a documentary, of a genre totally alien to me … I thought I had to go the distance with the choice of topic. I

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did not want to talk about something that I knew entirely. I was interested in learning something new, learning something along the way. Every documentary is a learning experience about something, and I knew very little about the Bolivian community.)

Rejtman’s admission that the purpose of the film was to learn about something that he, as a white ­middle-­class Porteño, knew little about indicates that the premise of the documentary is not so much to demonstrate a point about the Bolivian community but to explore a particular way of learning about this collective – which in this case, considering the medium, means also a way of looking at it. The nature of the film, its refusal to conform to the ethnographic documentary form by providing clear and distinctive knowledge about the subjects and culture o ­ n-­screen, corroborates this perception: as a documentary, Copacabana says more about who looks than about who is being looked at. Thus, the film can be read more as an exercise of ­self-­reflectivity for the white m ­ iddle-­class gaze. I will explain that the film proposes two procedures to interrogate this way of looking. In the first place, it progressively ­de-­exoticises, and hence, ­de-­racialises the Bolivians; secondly, it exposes the mode of observation that performs the exoticisation: that of the stereotypical white ­middle-­class viewer. By means of this strategy, the film shows that the celebration of Bolivianness as a signifier of diversity within the framework of neoliberal multiculturalism is still problematic since it positions whiteness as normative and sidelines the political and conflictive dimensions of heterogeneity. Copacabana might signal a departure from Rejtman’s trademark offbeat comedies about urban alienation and m ­ iddle-­class apathy, but it still bears the marks of his auterial style: its narrative is ambiguous and fragmentary, it lacks a recognisable point of view with which the spectator can identify, and many of the events portrayed are left unexplained. He opts for what Bill Nichols calls ‘observational mode’ (long takes, synchronous sound, a ‘­ fly-­on-­the-­ wall’ approach, no narration, and no intertitles) but, as will be explained, observation here is not dissociated from reflexivity.37 The film starts with a series of lateral tracking shots from right to left that first show a street of Barrio Charrúa where stands are being prepared for the festival, and afterwards, the same street in the evening, when the feast is finishing. Between the two tracking shots, a montage shows different dancing troupes during the parade. The film rarely devotes more than ten seconds to each group, thus not

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allowing the audience to fully appreciate the choreographies. The fragmentary editing is indicative of the film’s reluctance to indulge the viewer with overreaching knowledge of the events and characters ­on-­screen. The folkloric Andean garments and rhythms go side by side with technocumbia sounds, flashy clothes and the acrobatic movements of the caporales dance, all of which contributes to widening the distance between the culture of the Bolivians and that of the white Porteño audience. This cultural contrast, added to the use of fixed ­medium-­long and long shots with depth of focus and observational approach, positions the audience in the role of detached spectators. Stripped of any establishing information as to what is being shown, the viewers are asked to surrender to the stimuli produced by the colourful and dynamic dances ­on-­screen. Therefore, the Bolivians are presented as exotic figures dancing for the viewer’s enjoyment, racial otherness available for consumption by the white m ­ iddle-­class audience. This scene nonetheless allows an additional interpretation when put together with the second part of the documentary, a longer section that focuses on the everyday life of the Bolivians and finishes with scenes on the border between Argentina and Bolivia, a place that marks the beginning of the migratory experience. This second part functions as a progressive ­de-­exoticisation of the Bolivians. In fact, despite its title and its original intention to create a record of the festival, Copacabana devotes just a few scenes to the event. Immediately after the opening sequence showing the festival, there is an abrupt cut followed by a tracking shot in a clothes factory. Contrary to the tracking shots of the festival, this scene constitutes the return to the time of capital and commodified labour. The Bolivians are not identified here as exotic Others, but mainly as workers. This ­de-­racialised portrayal neither connotes miserablism and exploitation as in Bolivia, nor refers to images of Bolivians as slave workers in the clandestine textile industry as featured in Cucurto’s poetry. At the same time, the prosaic depiction of the working space and the employees absorbed in their routine, added to the constant cacophony of machinery, undermines any lyricism to labour. The laconic images of Barrio Charrúa that follow the scene in the factory function in a similar way, in the sense that they neither victimise nor romanticise the space in which the Bolivians live. Thus, the film departs both from s­ocial-­ realist stereotypes of

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s­lum-­ dwellers as poor but dignified, and from contemporary representations that sensationalise violence, drugs and misery, such as Fernando Meirelles’s Cidade de Deus (2002) (City of God). The main elements that contribute to a stereotypical representation of the villa are carefully avoided: it is the space of the mundane. Through revealing the quotidian, the image of the Bolivians in the villa as a racialised marginality is challenged. Although clearly different from the neighbourhoods and buildings inhabited by white ­middle-­class Porteños, the shantytown is still organised around routine activities such as going to work or school, shopping in the local stores or going for a stroll. The break with stereotypical portrayals of Bolivians as alterity does not imply neglecting the fact that the Bolivians’ situation is precarious. Copacabana avoids easy points of identification between the ­middle-­class audience and the subjects ­on-­screen precisely to obstruct the idea that these groups’ conditions of segregation and discrimination can be understood and ‘experienced’ through film. The distance between the implied viewer and the Bolivians is enhanced by the use of a series of techniques. ­Reverse-­chronology, added to the long shots, the segmented editing, the absence of ­voice-­over, limited information and the use of observation rather than interaction, evoke in the viewer the feeling of being a stranger in a strange land. This sense of estrangement is combined with constant reminders of the presence of the camera, which weakens the pleasure of voyeuristic contemplation. An example of this is the decision to shoot the rehearsals through doors, alleys and windows, emphasising the presence of multiple mediations between the implied viewer and the people o ­ n-­screen. In the scene in which characters are seen through a window, they quickly burst in and out of sight as they practise their dance jumps, thus pointing to a reality outside the space of the screen that cannot be mastered by the gaze. The consequences of this are that the subjects in the film remain elusive, refusing to be completely subjugated to the camera. Both the frame of the camera and the physical frames o ­n-­ screen emphasise the limits of film and gaze to fully typify or reify the Bolivians (see Figure 4.1). The choreographies, at the same time, are indicative of the representation of the Bolivians as a collective of undifferentiated subjects functioning with outstanding precision and coordination. The narrative does not follow a specific character and individuals

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Figure 4.1  Dancers rehearsing in Copacabana (2006). Dir. Martín Rejtman.

are rarely singled out. Actually, in the few moments in which the Bolivians’ voices can be heard in the film, there is a dislocation between voice and face, which contributes to the fragmenting of the subjects and the limiting of the knowledge the gaze is capable of providing the viewer. One strategy is to keep faces outside the frame. For example, in a scene in which a man is showing postcards of Bolivia, only his hands and the postcards are visible. In the final scene on a coach heading for Buenos Aires, a stewardess gives instructions to the passengers, but the camera shows only the insipid road through the window screen. Another way in which voices and faces are dislocated is by reducing the faces’ visibility using lighting or depth of focus, as during a meeting of the festival organisation committee. Finally, in a scene in a telephone booth, a woman speaks to her relatives, with her back to the camera. Her face is only visible in a reflection in the cabin’s mirror. As these examples – particularly the last one – show, the fact that the viewer is not allowed access to the Bolivians’ subjectivities except in an indirect way suggests that the knowledge provided by the film cannot be taken as an objective portrayal of reality. In other words, it is a reflection and, therefore, it should not be fully trusted. The viewer is then caught in an o ­ n-­screen reality that might be deceptive, which questions the status of what is being shown as a comprehensive representation of the immigrants’ reality.

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The portrayal of Bolivians as elusive figures, to whom access is limited, is transferred to the representation of Barrio Charrúa as a place that is unrecognisable for the viewer but is nonetheless located in Buenos Aires. The villa and its Bolivian inhabitants are represented in the film in a situation of both ghettoisation and s­ elf-­ containment with no interaction with the ‘white Buenos Aires’, the city known and inhabited by the audience. The d ­ e-­familiarisation of Buenos Aires contributes to the audience’s interrogation of its position within the social body: the white m ­ iddle-­class city of the spectators is contrasted here with the depiction of an unfamiliar territory, in which, as Andermann states, the Argentinians and not the Bolivians are the outsiders.38 Because Copacabana focuses squarely on Bolivianness as a culture in the diaspora, Bolivia itself is quite absent from the film. In fact, it is not until halfway through when recognisable images of the country can be seen for the first time, in the form of the postcards of Bolivian landmarks that the man shows and describes. The photographs in this scene act like the frames and windows, in the sense that they stress the mediated nature of reception. The framing hinders a clear view of the postcards, allowing the man’s voice to assume a central role. The country becomes, in the person’s narration, an almost mythical place that is contrasted, at the end of the film, with real images of Bolivia – more specifically, of the town of Villazón, on the border with Argentina. These final scenes reveal a dull landscape far from the stereotypical images of Bolivia on the postcards and the man’s idealised descriptions. It is closer to the scenes of the Buenos Aires slums shown at the beginning of the film. There is nothing too distinctive about it: Villazón’s blandness dismantles the exotic Bolivian altiplano landscape of tourist guides and ethnographic documentaries made for the consumption of international audiences.39 Despite the film’s focus on Bolivianness as an identity that is fetishised by neoliberal discourses of multiculturalism, in the final moments of the film there is also an attempt to criticise state racism and xenophobia. The state makes an ephemeral appearance in the form of customs police officers, shown meticulously inspecting bags and documents. Copacabana, which seems to be a film in which politics are absent, insinuates an indirect political commentary by suggesting that the main presence of the Argentinian state in the Bolivians’ lives is through its repressive forces. Bolivia offers a similar

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(although, in line with the film’s style, less subtle) vision. Indeed, Freddy’s relation with state institutions is basically marked by abuse and neglectment: he is harassed by policemen who stop him in the street to ask for his papers (despite it being illegal in Buenos Aires at the time) but his death is neither prevented nor punished by the authorities. In comparison, Copacabana’s final scene offers a more nuanced reflection on institutional discrimination, one that also highlights how state racism, along with multiculturalist consumption, contributes to racialise the Bolivian community in Argentina. In conclusion, this chapter has shown how the films analysed expose the way in which racism functions and is reproduced in everyday interactions in contexts that have all, to an extent, been affected by the crisis. Bolivia offers a critique of the use of race by impoverished Porteños as a way to channel anxieties and frustrations associated with their disenfranchisement as a result of neoliberalism and the crisis. Copacabana, in turn, focuses on dismantling the representation of Bolivian diasporic culture as exotic or victimised by showing how the Bolivians function as a community far from fetishised and racialised representations. In the case of Rejtman’s film, the ­de-­naturalisation of the whiteness of the gaze suggests that the Bolivians cannot be subjected to the disciplinary action of the gaze. There is always a reality that refuses to be represented or explained, because the white middle class can only access the experience of the Other indirectly. The social distance is emphasised through the use of specific techniques such as superimposition of physical frames and borders, fragmentary editing and long shots with depth of focus. This refusal to indulge the viewers’ fantasies of capturing the experiences of the socially and racially subordinated reveals that perception is not neutral, but rather, it is influenced by a form of decoding that is also structured around the director and viewer’s whiteness and ­middle-­classness. This, in turn, can potentially bring the audience to reflect critically on the narratives of Argentina as being homogeneously white.

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5

Amerindians, fashion models and picketeers

During the crisis and its immediate aftermath, art experienced a moment of intense vitality, which was expressed in the profusion of exhibitions and interventions, as well as in the exploration of new aesthetic sensitivities that directly addressed the state of mobilisation of society and the interrogation of national identity. In this chapter, I analyse artworks that proposed innovative engagements with race in Argentina in this period, focusing on indigeneity and, particularly, the legacy of state violence and structural racism associated with the Conquest of the Desert. In this sense, this chapter departs from the previous two in that it looks at a different figure of racial alterity: the Amerindian rather than the Latin American immigrant. It also complements them, demonstrating, once again, that the ­re-­examination of nationness and whiteness across the cultural spectrum engaged critically with diverse constructions of certain people as racial Others. Although the artworks considered in this chapter share a critique of dominant discourses about indigeneity in Argentina, they differ in that they do so using three distinctive approaches. The first approach that I will examine is linked to representations of indigeneity that incorporate codes from art, fashion and advertising photography to break with historical portrayals of Amerindians as racial Others. The works of María Zorzón, Jonathan Delacroix, Patrick Liotta, Florencia Blanco, Rubén Romano, Gaby Herbstein and Guadalupe Miles can be considered within this approach. The analysis will focus on Herbstein’s calendar Huellas, in which white fashion models personify different indigenous cultures. The intervention on ­ nineteenth-­ century Argentinian iconography

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constitutes the second procedure that I will look at in this chapter. The works of Leonel Luna, Daniel Santoro, Gabriel Chaile, and RES fit this description, as they combine the appropriation and r­ e-­ signification of the visuality of Argentina’s founding myths with the aim of highlighting racial domination. I will focus on Luna’s La conquista del desierto since this work reads the political demonstrations of the crisis as a moment inscribed in a particular history of state racism inaugurated with the consolidation of the modern Argentinian ­nation-­state. The third and last approach I will examine is linked to the work of art collectives in the public space. The emerging art scene of the 2000s could be characterised as marked by the dissemination of cooperative forms of organisation, to the extent that only in Buenos Aires there were more than one hundred artist collectives between 2002 and 2004. Although many of these groups were established before the crisis, they found in it a moment of consolidation and reinforcement.1 In this chapter, I will focus on the 2003–5 public interventions on Julio Argentino Roca’s monument in Buenos Aires by Grupo de Arte Callejero (GAC). The artistic expressions considered in this chapter also differ in terms of how they circulated and engaged with the public. GAC illustrates the heightened drive towards horizontal and collective social practices in public spaces while Luna is an example of artwork originally conceived for galleries, museums and art fairs. Herbstein’s production could be said to be in the middle of both tendencies: on the one hand, the circulation of her images encompasses a wider audience due to her status as a fashion photographer; on the other hand, she deliberately seeks recognition from the mainstream art world as an artist. Additionally, her public is, like that of the conventional art circuit, basically of middle- and ­upper-­middle-­ class backgrounds. Conversely, while GAC actively challenges the notion of the autonomy of the artistic field, Luna and Herbstein still conceive it as an independent sphere from other social practices. The relation between art and politics in these three cases also shows a degree of variation. Luna’s work has a strong political message, and Herbstein has been involved in projects of social empowerment for indigenous communities through their artistic production (for example, photography workshops). However, these two artists are far removed from the engagé production that characterised the practices and discourses of GAC and other art collectives during the crisis. The comparative assessment of such

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different artworks will provide, consequently, a comprehensive understanding of the manifold ways in which art engaged with race during the crisis.

Huellas Gaby Herbstein is one of Argentina’s most renowned fashion photographers, and her work has achieved recognition on the art circuit both in Argentina and abroad, including exhibitions at Art Basel and Art Miami. Thus, her production has a wide circulation (for example, in the form of advertisements in magazines) while simultaneously it aims to be invested with an artistic aura, if not by art critics and specialists, at least by the general public. Simultaneously, her work can be considered strongly related to the spirit of the 1990s because of its campiness and certain frivolity, which are also the result of its connection to the fashion world. However, as I will show, the focus on nationhood and race in Huellas, and specifically the way it addressed the exclusion of indigenous cultures from the narratives of nation, is partly influenced by the context of the crisis. Each year, the Herbstein Studio publishes a themed calendar. The chosen subject for the 2000 edition, entitled Huellas, was the indigenous cultures that inhabited and still inhabit the territory of Argentina: Toba, Wichí, Chané, Guaraní, Tehuelche, Mapuche, Yámana, Kolla, Diaguita, Huarpe, Abipón and Selk’nam. Each month’s image corresponded to a particular group, represented by a famous female model in traditional attire. As Figures 5.1, 5.2 and 5.3 show, the images are very stylised and sensual. The calendar was shot in a studio, using props and paraphernalia that, according to research carried out by Herbstein and her team (the results of which were included in the calendar), recreated the landscapes, clothes and cosmology (for example, sacred animals) associated with each culture. Printed copies of Huellas were not for sale but were instead given as an e­nd-­ of-­ the-­ year gift to customers of Diners Club International, which indicates that the primary audience of the calendar was white middle class and u ­ pper-­middle class. Arnd Schneider mentions that the calendar ignited mixed feelings amongst the indigenous consultants and craftspeople involved in making it: while some were positive about it, in the sense

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Figure 5.1 Abipón: Noviembre by Gaby Herbstein (1999). Included in Huellas

that it brought visibility to indigenous cultures, others were critical of the decision to use white fashion models instead of n ­on-­ professional Amerindian models.2 Herbstein justified this choice based on the fact that amateur models would not be able to cope with the requirements of extended photo sessions. Additionally, she argued: ‘The idea was to find among the models those which

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Figure 5.2  Yámana: Julio by Gaby Herbstein (1999). Included in Huellas

most resemble indigenous people’.3 This problematic aspect of the calendar is the focus of Schneider’s analysis.4 However, while his study favours an anthropological approach that centres on the people directly involved in its production and assesses their expressed intentions and reactions, I aim to complement this by engaging directly with the images and analysing the relation

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Figure 5.3  Toba: Enero by Gaby Herbstein (1999). Included in Huellas

between them and the context of the crisis. To do so, I will focus on two aspects that are reflected in Huellas: on the one hand, the racialised economy of desire that neoliberalism exacerbated; on the other hand, the widespread preoccupation with nationness at the turn of the ­twenty-­first century.

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The social impact of the calendar can be understood as a local manifestation of a transnational economy of desire centred on whiteness. Historically, white notions of beauty have enjoyed preponderance in Argentina to the point that even the female icon of the ­non-­white masses, Eva Perón, was the embodiment of the traditional Western paradigm of beauty: white and blonde. The fact that she dyed her hair exemplifies that there was a deliberate effort to conform to this pattern. These notions of attractiveness achieved an unprecedented centrality during Menemismo and the subsequent crisis. It is during this period that Argentina’s boom in plastic surgery began, also influenced by the fact that the absence of import taxes and the d ­ ollar-­peso peg of the 1990s made imported medical technology affordable. Plastic surgery was at its height during the first half of the 2000s, as demonstrated by the fact that Argentina was one of the top five countries with the highest number of procedures per capita in the world.5 Similarly, eating disorders rose sharply: Argentina became the country with the highest incidence of anorexia nervosa and bulimia in the world after Japan.6 Though all these processes are complex and cannot be explained by a single cause, they nonetheless show the prominence achieved in this period by Western standards of beauty – for which the fashion industry constitutes a central point of reference. It is also necessary to take into account the significant mediatisation of society during the 1990s, mentioned in Chapter 1. The subsuming of political and social practices under the logics of the mass media, the showbiz world and the fashion industry implied that the body achieved a central p ­ re-­eminence during this period. The 1990s favoured a conception of the body as something to be exhibited, flaunted and sexualised, but always according to the dominant parameters of the white body. No one exemplified this better than Menem himself. By the time of his election as president, his looks (messy hair, mutton chops, ponchos) deliberately invoked those of Facundo Quiroga, the n ­ineteenth-­ century federalist caudillo from La Rioja whom Sarmiento had hailed as a personification of ‘barbarism’. His deliberate identification with a historical figure demonised in Argentina’s classical liberal tradition – along with his strong provincial accent and informal style – were seen in the eyes of the middle sectors as a display of the lack of civility and sophistication usually attributed to negros. Along with his rustic background and plebeianism, his Syrian roots also contributed

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to his racialisation in the discourse of Porteño society. He was widely known as el Turco (the Turk), a common way of referring in some Latin American countries to people with Arab backgrounds, since ­Middle-­Eastern immigrants arriving at the turn of the twentieth century did so with passports from the Ottoman Empire. His double condition, both provinciano/negro and turco, implied that his transition to a national figure took place in racialised terms. Once he became president, Menem altered his image to cater to the aesthetical expectations of the elite establishment. He cut his sideburns, dyed his hair and wore designer suits and shoes with heels to mask his short stature. He also underwent plastic surgery and hair transplants. Menem’s transformation was satirised in the media and sectors of the middle and upper classes. A popular joke at the time was that, since becoming president, he had become ‘blond, tall and ­blue-­eyed’. Through this, they were mocking his efforts to accommodate to the prevailing standards of handsomeness, thus highlighting that he was still an Other in their eyes. At the same time, the joke was indicating the correlation between class, status, and whiteness: now that Menem was the president – and one who was aligned with the hegemonic power groups and ideology – he was more acceptable for the middle and upper sectors and, therefore, whiter. As mentioned in Chapter 1, Menem also cultivated the image of ­politician-­celebrity and incorrigible seducer. He invited international female celebrities such as Claudia Schiffer and Xuxa to the presidential residence and did not invest much effort in hiding his affair with Playboy model Yuyito González. His eagerness to be seen in public in the company of these famous women, all of whom were the epitome of Western beauty (white, blonde, tall, slim), could be read in racial terms: first, as a display of power (being able to have a white woman); and, secondly, as a way to whiten himself. All the elements above provide context to Herbstein’s rise to stardom and the success of her calendars, showing that they are prime examples of the unparalleled social prominence of the dominant economy of desire – and, consequently, of the fashion and entertainment industries – in the 1990s. In fact, an exhibition was organised to introduce Huellas to the public and the media, during which Herbstein signed copies – an example of her dual status as a celebrity/fashion photographer and art photographer. The event took place in an icon of Buenos Aires’s neoliberal

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gentrification, Abasto Shopping, a recently inaugurated mall that had been the city’s central wholesale fruit and vegetable market up to the 1980s. Herbstein stated that her intention was to celebrate indigeneity through femininity by portraying strong women who transmit a particular mastery of the environment. Nonetheless, the opposite conclusion could also be drawn to the images – that they are a personification of heterosexual male fantasies. Andrew Canessa identifies a paradox in his study of white beauty queens dressed as Amerindians in Bolivia.7 He points out that, in general, while indigenous women have traditionally been seen by white sectors as ugly but sexually available, white women represent the opposite. The figure of the chola domestic has been a particular focus of sexualisation. Mary Weismantel adds: ‘What is at work here is less the championing of n ­on-­ white women as beautiful, than the fascination of a woman who is seen as desirable because she is almost white, and available because she is not’.8 This idea can be extrapolated to the case of Argentina, in which many urban indigenous women work as l­ive-­in maids. It is possible to mention the case of mestizo immigrant women who moved to Argentinian cities from Peru and Bolivia in the 1990s, whose primary occupation involved domestic service or, as the case of Rosa in Bolivia exemplifies, waitressing. What is more, because of the ambiguity of race in Argentina, l­ower-­class women identified as negras can be objects of sexualisation by white heterosexual discourse in similar ways to cholas. Again, the sexual and power dynamics in which Rosa finds herself illustrate this. The photographs in Huellas can be interpreted as offering an imaginary way of overcoming this paradox between sexual fascination and racist disdain identified by Canessa and Weismantel. In other words, the photographs’ eroticism and the models’ revealing outfits allow the spectator’s projection of gendered and racial fantasies about indigenous women as sexually inviting and uninhibited, but these fantasies are contained within ‘acceptable’ bodies: beyond m ­ ake-­up and costume, it is clear that the models are phenotypically white. This process could be seen as an exacerbated example of the sexualising procedure that, as explained, is applied to the chola. Thus, the images provide the pleasures of eroticising and exoticising indigeneity without the consequences or conflicts attached to being attracted to the racial Other. It is important to

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stress that, even if the spectators are not male, white and heterosexual, the ­ subject-­ position to which they are invited to identify is. Besides the projection of sexual fantasies about the racial Other, it is useful to consider Herbstein’s claim regarding Huellas’s status as not only a fashion object or artwork but also a statement on nationhood. From this emerges a second dimension that connects the calendar with the late 1990s and the crisis. A page in the calendar provides information about the cosmology, history and customs of each indigenous culture depicted, along with an extensive bibliography that highlights the rigorous research involved in its preparation. The additions of a photograph of the indigenous consultants who worked in the calendar (with their names and ethnic backgrounds) and a short text by ethnohistorian Carlos Martínez Sarasola also provided legitimacy to the alleged faithful recreation of indigenous cultures and the attempt to raise awareness about them among the public. The aim to increase cognisance of these cultures was presented not only as a celebration of diversity but also, and foremost, as an examination of particular conceptions of nationness. In ‘the making of’ video, Herbstein states: ‘Para ir hacia el futuro tenés que conocer tu pasado, ¿no? Creo que es difícil avanzar sin saber quién sos’ (To go towards the future you have to know your past, right? I think it’s difficult to go forward without knowing who you are). Likewise, the calendar’s art director Julieta Garavaglia adds: ‘Es importante que uno empiece a tomar conciencia de dónde venimos’ (It’s important that one starts to realise where we come from).9 The identification of indigenous cultures as ‘traces’ of Argentinianness – both an outline of the future and a record of the past – was, of course, a marketing strategy that exploited a particular end-­ ­ of-­ the-­ millennium sensitivity that placed Amerindians as signifiers of authenticity and origin. The growing demand for n ­ on-­ Western cultural expressions and figures transformed indigeneity, in Huellas’s stylised and whitened version, into an attractive object for ­middle-­class consumers. Nonetheless, despite the influence of these global trends, Huellas’s discourse was also local in its attempt to capitalise the increasing concern, during the crisis, with issues of nationness and race. In this context of uncertainty about some concepts of national identity, Amerindianness was invested with the attributes of the essential, the timeless and the unchanging. For

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example, an extract from the calendar’s text reads: ‘Así vestían, así vivían. Quedan sus huellas. Tenemos que encontrarlas para encontrarnos. Y empezar de nuevo’ (That’s the way they used to dress, that’s the way they used to live. Their traces remain. We have to find them to find ourselves. And start again).10 Considering the calendar’s m ­ iddle-­class target audience, these fantasies of national ­re-­foundation, despite their simplistic and naïve rhetoric, can be partly connected with specific shared anxieties produced by the country’s progressive decline and the general debate about nationness of the time. However, Huellas does not highlight, despite its claims, the contemporary struggle for visibility of indigenous communities but, rather, is instrumental in fixing these groups in the past. That only traces of indigenous cultures remain in ­ present-­ day Argentina implies the denial of the contemporary Amerindian. Consequently, the indigenous figure is presented only as an antecedent to the modern Argentinian in a state of confusion regarding the true meaning of national identity. The discourse of indigenous people as predecessors of modern Argentinians can be connected with those of the Patagonian Amerindian as an ancestor of the white lettered man, which were common tropes in the rhetoric of ­nineteenth-­century naturalists. ­Eva-­Lynn Jagoe states that ‘Darwin perceives Patagonia and its inhabitants as somehow occupying a different geographical and temporal sphere from his own’.11 Explorers and collectors Francisco Moreno, Ramón Lista, and Carlos María Moyano, among others, appropriated and refined this notion (benefited by the dissemination of evolutionary theory), parallel to the establishment of the disciplinary and institutional foundations of natural science and ethnology in Argentina. Indigenous territories were portrayed as an extensive archaeological site, a prehistoric world that was nonetheless in the process of withering away. This representation included its indigenous inhabitants, represented as living fossils, relics of the past soon to disappear under the inexorable force of modernity.12 According to Andermann, the objective of this scientific discourse was to present these lands as empty spaces awaiting their legitimate owner: the Argentinian ­nation-­state.13 Therefore, military campaigns of extermination and decimation were portrayed as simply accelerating what was seen as an inexorable end. Under the influence of European ethnology, collections of anthropometric photographs of indigenous people, such as those

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held in the archive of the La Plata National Museum, were created to produce a scientific visual record of these indigenous cultures before their imminent extinction.14 It is also important to consider the development of a mass market that facilitated the establishment of what Deborah Poole describes as the visual economy of indigeneity – understood as the circulation of images between places, and the structured effects of this flow for the classification of racialised difference.15 Consumption of postcards and stereoscope pictures portraying native populations as exotic and primitive became common among the emerging Argentinian bourgeoisie, replicating a trend originated in Europe’s imperial powers.16 Examples of this tendency are Antonio Pozzo’s 1878 studio portraits of the legendary cacique Pincén and photographs of indigenous people from the Gran Chaco after the region’s occupation.17 Therefore, as in other countries, in the second half of the ­nineteenth-­century scientific portraits and postcards contributed to the establishment, as part of Argentina’s modern structures of racial domination, of a particular mode of representing indigeneity. Huellas not only appropriates the discourse that claims a lineage of continuity between Argentinians and Amerindians (as human fossils from a different historical time); furthermore, it also reproduces the forms associated with this visual economy by using sepia tones characteristic of these ­nineteenth-­century portraits. Consequently, both texts and photographs reinforce the notion of an extinct ­non-­whiteness. There is an evident tension between representation and social encounter inscribed in Huellas; that is, between the idealised ‘noble savage’ and the real indigenous person, who is degraded precisely because she does not conform to primitivist representations of the Amerindian as living in a pure, ­pre-­modern state. In fact, the media praised the calendar, yet it avoided any reference to the controversial decision to exclude indigenous models. Huellas shows that the only way in which the indigenous cultures can be signified by the dominant culture is by means of the ­re-­enactment of a visual format that refers to a specific moment in the past before Argentina ‘became’ white and racially homogeneous.18 Consequently, it is possible to read Huellas as a ­post-­modern rendering of indigenismo – an ideology that found little development in Argentina. This indigenismo is reconfigured to the particular dynamics of the crisis to suggest an imaginary indigenous ancestry of the nation that invests Argentinians with a

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glorious ­pre-­Columbian past, in contrast to the country’s state of decline at the turn of the t­wenty-­first century. Contrary to this fictional Amerindianness, contemporary urban n ­ on-­white people are far from romanticised figures for the white sectors. There is, nevertheless, one aspect that points towards a possible critical moment in Huellas despite its general inclination to reinforce the very idea it allegedly criticises. Gail Low states that, in racial passing by whites, the c­ ross-­dresser can always reveal or revert to the whiteness underneath the native clothes – that is, go back to their privileged position without any penalties.19 In this sense, Herbstein’s images suggest that indigeneity is a fiction that can be dressed in and staged for the pleasure of the white subject. However, even if the ­cross-­dressed performances of the models reinforce stereotypes of Amerindianness, the campiness of the photographs can potentially take whiteness out of its everyday obscurity. Fabio Cleto states that camp can be defined as a ‘queer mode of being, as posturing a body, as a modality of distribution within social spaces and within the economy of the social contract, and as a mode of communication’.20 Thus, he suggests opening up the concept to cultural products that are outside the homosexual framework theorised by previous scholars of camp, such as Moe Meyers or Jack Babuscio. It is possible to combine Cleto’s reformulation of camp with Andrew Ross’s idea of the ‘camp effect’, to sketch an alternate reading of Huellas that focuses on the performative aspects of the calendar. According to Ross, this effect takes place when certain cultural practices are no longer capable of producing and dictating cultural meanings and are then appropriated and redefined by other audiences, resulting in alternative readings.21 Herbstein’s photographs can alternatively be seen as capable of producing a camp effect in the spectator with a taste for camp. This outcome facilitates a reading of the calendar as not only problematic but also unwittingly destabilising that aura of authenticity with which the Amerindians are invested in Herbstein’s discourse. If Huellas reiterates dominant constructions of white feminine beauty on the bodies of the performers, the ‘camp eye’ in turn emphasises the hyperbolised and kitsch nature of the images. This camp effect stresses the discontinuity between what is being performed and reality. The obvious incongruity between a presence that is the white fashion model, and an absence that is the indigenous woman, makes the whiteness of the model come to the fore and emerge from its neutral status. Dyer argues:

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Whites are everywhere in representation. Yet precisely because of this and their placing as norm they do not seem to be represented to themselves as white but as people who are variously gendered, classed, sexualised and abled. At the level of racial representation, in other words, whites are not of a certain race, they’re just the human race.22

Consequently, for a spectator who decodes Huellas as camp portrayals of indigeneity, the calendar contains a possible site of ambivalence: indigeneity is reinforced as otherness but, at the same time, whiteness is exposed. Herbstein inadvertently gives an indication of this when she justifies the use of professional fashion models: ‘if I have a photograph of a Mapuche woman, it’s just another picture. But a model representing a Mapuche is different’.23 This idea could be ­re-­phrased as follows: a photograph of a white fashion model is just seen as an image of an attractive woman. Nonetheless, a photograph of a white fashion model passing as an indigenous woman paradoxically reveals the performer’s whiteness. Huellas positions indigenous cultures as signifiers through which history and nationness can be ideally reconstructed in a context marked by both the growing impact of forms of multiculturalism, as well as a preoccupation with nationness partly ignited by the crisis. However, because this indigeneity is so skilfully contrived in the photographs, there is a distance between the latter and the indigenous people who are in fact excluded from the representation. This distance could have the potential to expose whiteness. This does not imply that the discourse about indigeneity and the racial passing of the models are not problematic. Leaving my reading to one side, the fact that neither the intended audience nor the press and critics identified any controversial elements in the calendar, while many indigenous consultants expressed disappointment and anger, indicates that, overall, the primary outcome is the reinforcement of constructions of Amerindianness as alterity. Nonetheless, it is important to highlight the possibility, even if somewhat limited, of an oppositional reading that takes these controversial aspects and articulates them using camp to produce spaces in which critical discourses could emerge. This reading may not only lead to a critique of constructions of indigeneity as alterity but, furthermore, of whiteness’s naturalised status in contemporary Argentina and of the dominant economy of desire. In the next sections, I aim to demonstrate that the limitations of Herbstein’s artworks are overcome in La conquista del desierto and GAC’s work.

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La conquista del desierto Leonel Luna has participated in several individual and collective exhibitions, in Argentina and abroad, and since 1992 has been awarded several prizes. For example, in 2002 he received two prestigious awards: the Konex Foundation Award and the International Association of Arts Critics’ Young Artist Prize. His series Visitas: Una épica contemporánea (2002) (Visits: A Contemporary Epic), of which La conquista del desierto is part, was exhibited for the first time in 2004 in Buenos Aires’s Museum of Modern Art. In this series, Luna ‘visits’ many of Argentina’s most canonical paintings, by reproducing key aspects of the original compositions, such as the setting, the colour or the position of the figures, and substituting certain elements (generally the people) with digital photographic montages of protests from 2000 and 2001. This subversion of the paintings’ meaning relies, of course, on the spectator’s recognition of the act of appropriation of these canonical images, which brings forward the question of how a person unacquainted with Argentinian history and visuality would decode Luna’s artworks. However, the status of the paintings appropriated (and of the events depicted on them) implies that most Argentinians would recognise the operation performed in Visitas. Luna’s concern with revisiting n ­ineteenth-­ century national iconography prefigures a trend of the late 2000s, as illustrated by the exhibitions Realidad y Utopía. 200 años de arte argentino (2010) (Reality and Utopia: 200 Years of Argentinian Art), curated by Diana Wechsler, and Panteón de los héroes (2011) (Pantheon of Heroes), curated by Isabel Plante and Sebastián Vidal Mackinson. In fact, Luna participated in both. This preoccupation among artists with canonical paintings indicates the drive to revisit national identity in the aftermath of the crisis in the cultural field, looking at the role of the pictorial in the consolidation of the Argentinian ­nation-­state. Indeed, many of the images revisited by Luna are depictions of historical events that went on to be glorified as Argentina’s origin myths, partly through these paintings. La conquista del desierto reinterprets Blanes’s Ocupación militar del Río Negro bajo el mando del General Julio A. Roca, 1879 (see Figures 5.4 and 5.5). In 1889, the national government commissioned this large epic canvas (355 cm x 710 cm) for the recently founded National History Museum, to commemorate the tenth anniversary

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of the Conquest of the Desert. Today, it continues to be the most iconic visual representation of this campaign. At that time, Blanes was already a celebrated artist, known for his compelling renderings of historical events such as the great yellow fever epidemic of 1871 or the 1825 insurrection that ultimately led to Uruguay’s independence. Thus, he was seen as the most suitable artist to create an artwork that would contribute to the definitive canonisation of the Conquest of the Desert as an iconic moment in the birth of modern Argentina. Blanes chose to depict the ceremony celebrated by Roca’s troops on the banks of the Río Negro on 25 May 1879, in commemoration of the May Revolution. The selection of this particular event proposes the idea of the Conquest of the Desert as a r­e-­founding of Argentina. The composition, which incorporated real and imaginary elements portrayed with extraordinary realism, would go on to constitute an enduring and powerful symbol of nationhood. Carlos Masotta states that, although the Conquest of the Desert was immediately included in the pantheon of great national epics and commemorations, it was Blanes’s painting that definitively cemented it as a central myth of nationhood for the decades to come.24 The artwork is structured around the horseback figures of Roca and his officers in the centre, who seem to advance towards the spectator. At the sides there are two groups, both staring at the officers: on the left, there is a military chaplain, several defeated Amerindians and a white female prisoner of the Amerindians who carries a baby in her arms. On the ­right-­hand side, there is a dog, navy officers and, towards the rear, the scientists and topographers who accompanied the expedition. The troops are located in the background. Between the mounted officers and the Amerindians, there is a black bugler (see Figure 5.4). Andermann reads the painting as the moment of primitive accumulation that institutes Argentinian capitalism and state sovereignty through the seizure of territory, labour force and capital. ‘If the group of scientists and marines on the right … stands for the capture of land (exploration, mapping), the group of Indians on the left, exposed to the twinned vigilance of the military and the church, represents the capture of labor’.25 In fact, as stated in Chapter 2, many Amerindians were forced to become part of the lower strata of the economy. Through this process of forced proletarisation they became seasonal agricultural workers and

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Figure 5.4  Ocupación militar del Río Negro bajo el mando del General Julio A. Roca, 1879 by Juan Manuel Blanes (1896)

members of the police and the military; women and children went into domestic service in the cities. The military is what connects these two processes of land and workforce capture. It embodies the projection of speculative capital that propels the transformation of the annexed territories, allegedly empty and unexploited, into one of the most fertile agricultural areas in the world, first by force and later through the application of rational forms of economic exploitation. According to Andermann, the painting allows both a diachronic and synchronic reading: it simultaneously represents the portrayal of a particular moment, the 25 May 1879 ceremony, and a temporal progression. This latter interpretation positions the image as a teleological movement that, from left to right, symbolises the advance towards modernity.26 The vanquished barbaric past is embodied in the indigenous figures, while modernity is represented by the victorious officers, who almost seem to be pushing the Amerindians out of the frame as a symbol of their exclusion from the nationhood project being carried out. The sailors and scientists on the right symbolise the future of scientific and economic colonisation. It is possible to argue, therefore, that Blanes’s image also stands for the racial paradigm of the emerging nation: on the ­left-­hand side of the picture, ­non-­whiteness fades away, as whiteness consolidates on the r­ ight-­hand side as the founding element of the Argentina to come. As mentioned in Chapter 2, the physical

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extermination of indigenous people ran parallel to that of their cultures, which were made invisible. Luna’s La conquista del desierto does not have the same monumental proportions as Ocupación militar but its size (180 cm x 360 cm) nevertheless resembles that of l­arge-­ scale n ­ineteenth-­ century historical artworks. It respects the composition and the setting but replaces all the characters with photographs of contemporary social actors who can be distinctively identified with the transformations that Argentina – and, to an extent, many other Latin American countries – experienced during the wave of neoliberal reforms of the 1990s. On the ­left-­hand side, Amerindians have been replaced by piqueteros (see Figure 5.5). Piqueteros are here presented as heirs to indigenous and other forms of popular resistance to the consolidation of the liberal state. However, their positioning in the place of Amerindians can also be read as representative of Argentina’s transformation during neoliberalism. If, according to Andermann, the Amerindians in Ocupación militar represent cheap labour being captured by the apparatus of the state as part of Argentina’s ­nineteenth-­century capitalist expansion, the presence of the piqueteros in La conquista del desierto shows that, after the neoliberal reforms of the 1990s, such a workforce was no longer required. As mentioned in Chapter 1, the dismantling of national industry and the transition towards an economy driven by financial speculation pushed unemployment to record levels during the crisis and signalled the changes in the logic

Figure 5.5  La conquista del desierto by Leonel Luna (2002)

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of capitalist accumulation. The central figures stand for other forms of popular resistance against neoliberal reforms in Argentina and Latin America: some resemble piqueteros from CTD Aníbal Verón who used to mask their faces; others look like guerrilla fighters – Zapatistas in particular. Luna portrays these iconic Latin American figures of radical a­ nti-­neoliberal resistance armed with rifles and machine guns and facing the spectator, all of which heightens the feeling of intimidation. The triumphant and overpowering force of the state embodied in the army in the original painting is substituted, in this case, with police officers on the right. They look distracted and careless, most of them with their hands in their pockets, unable or unwilling to impose their force. Luna’s choice to place piqueteros, guerrilla fighters and other a­ nti-­ globalisation activists in the central space, in an apparently threatening stance, proposes an interpretation of the crisis as a popular revolt against neoliberalism with wider regional implications. This reading of the image can be expanded by introducing race. Although the piqueteros organise themselves around ­socio-­political demands, their identification with the Argentinian poor implied their racialisation. I stated in Chapter 1 that expressions such as negros de mierda were used as a strategy to demonise them in the aftermath of the crisis. A more interesting example of how racial discourses mediated public perceptions of piqueteros can be found in the widespread condemnation of piquetero leader Luis D’Elía’s declarations during a public confrontation with actor and radio entertainer Fernando Peña, in 2008. Peña, who came from a w ­ ell-­off background, was highly controversial for his bold declarations about anything from sexuality to Argentinian politics. As a provocation, he introduced D’Elía in his radio show as ‘una nota de color negro’.27 At the other end of the phone, the piquetero leader reacted with anger by stating: ‘Odio a la puta oligarquía. Odio a los blancos. Te odio Peña, odio tu plata, odio tu casa, odio tus coches’ (I hate the fucking oligarchy. I hate whites. I hate you Peña, I hate your money, your house, your cars).28 D’Elía’s statements were widely criticised in the media for allegedly being violent – and indeed they were. Yet few people mentioned Peña’s commentaries. Ariel Armony and Frigerio suggest a possible explanation for the media’s general disapproval of the piquetero’s declarations in contrast with the scant attention generated by the presenter’s racist

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pun.29 For them, by framing social conflict not just in class but also in racial terms (white versus negro), the piquetero had exposed the way in which whiteness in Argentina passes as neutral and thus contributes to sustaining the dominant narrative that race does not influence social asymmetries. This example shows how Peña, a member of the ­upper-­middle class, could publicly call a piquetero leader negro, even if it was not politically correct, yet D’Elía calling an ­ upper-­ class person ‘white’ was unacceptable because this whiteness is naturalised and absent from discourse. It could also be added that D’Elía’s harsh remarks could be presented not just as an attack on a specific social sector but on the whole nation, given the dominant image of Argentina as a homogeneously white country. The Peña–D’Elía case serves to exemplify how race mediates the definitions of the political identity of piqueteros in Argentina. I argue that one of the main innovations in Luna’s artwork is that it stresses this usually sidelined aspect of one of the central political actors that emerged from the crisis. The replacement of the Amerindians with piqueteros in La conquista del desierto, therefore, not only creates an analogy between two figures that represent the ultimate subaltern in present and past Argentinian society but also serves as a reflection on the persistence of racial discrimination entwined with social marginalisation, as part of the regime of racial domination established during the late nineteenth century. In the same way that Cucurto identifies continuity between Peronist cabecitas negras and contemporary immigrants, Luna’s image suggests a reading of the Argentinian precariat conformed by the negros as contemporary victims of the same racism that acted on nineteenth-­ ­ century indigenous people. Furthermore, it can be argued that the artwork not only proposes an analogy but also establishes a direct link between the two groups, due to the negros’ mestizo background. The crisis, therefore, is presented as another expression of the combined violence of capitalist exclusion and state repression on which nationhood is founded, and that systematically acts on those sectors identified as racial Others by the dominant sectors. But the artwork goes beyond suggesting this continuity of racism: it actually disrupts it by positioning the piqueteros in the centre of the composition. In Ocupación militar, the Amerindians are not only located in the left corner of the image: they are literally cornered. It is as if the weight of the horseback figures were expelling them from the frame. From the perspective

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of the viewer, they are withdrawing from the scene – they do not have a place in the nation which is under construction. Nonetheless, the piqueteros in La conquista del desierto advance towards the viewer; their attitude is not of defeat but actually of seizure, as if they were marching to occupy the space that opens up to them, which coincides with the position of the spectator. In the background, more piqueteros seem to advance toward the foreground. The same can be said of the horseback figures resembling a­ nti-­neoliberalism activists. The image inverts the logic of the conquest: what advances is not the state and capital but precisely those who pose a challenge to state sovereignty. In Luna’s image, the uprising of the oppressed also symbolises the return of the repressed by Argentina’s regime of racial domination. What is more, this advance of the piqueteros not just inverts but unmakes the visual form of the painting: it destroys the image from within. At this point it is important to take into account that the status of Ocupación militar as an iconic historical painting condemns the event and figures portrayed, especially the Amerindians, to being figures frozen in time, relics from a past irrevocably lost. Throughout the twentieth century this image contributed to the symbolic location of indigenous people in the past, reinforcing their invisibility in contemporary Argentina. Consequently, by underlining that current negros are the direct descendants of indigenous populations, La conquista del desierto highlights the way that narratives of whiteness have, in fact, masked a racially heterogeneous society. The fragmentation of the original image allows the creation of an oppositional discourse in which past and present unite and give way to a new epic time in which the subaltern challenges one of the foundational myths of the nation through the subversion of an image that has sustained this fiction. The relevance of Luna’s critique lies in its capacity to highlight the nation as a construction that is sustained in conflict and exclusion and the continuous deployment of apparatus of repression on racially subordinated groups. Luna’s destabilisation of the original painting has further implications that add to its critical potential. The first one is connected to the status of Ocupación militar as the definitive depiction of the Conquest of the Desert. In fact, the painting not only forms part of the canon of Argentinian art but also appears on the back of the one hundred peso note introduced under Menem in 1992 in the context of the Convertibility Law. Hence, the image is

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doubly linked to neoliberalism: genealogically and indexically. The Roca note constitutes, therefore, an image that people have been interacting with on a daily basis for years to the point that it became naturalised. However, the reproduction on the note excludes the ­non-­white figures: the Amerindians and the black trumpeter. In this regard, Luna’s analogy between ­nineteenth-­century indigenous groups and ­present-­day piqueteros through the appropriation of Ocupación militar can be seen as a gesture that d ­ e-­naturalises the latter – especially since, as printed on bank notes, it is an everyday image that circulates in society, albeit most of the time unnoticed and unchallenged. This procedure exposes the ideological dimension inscribed in Blanes’s work while a different reading of history is proposed. La conquista del desierto adds another element through which a reflection on the political uses of art is put forward. Luna deliberately employs the more realist capabilities of photography to produce a composition that is nonetheless explicitly n ­ on-­ realist, not only because of the digital montage but also due to his decision to personify many of the horseback figures himself. This paradox also suggests the limits of representation and stresses the constructedness of art. This invites the spectator to go back to Ocupación militar to view the image not as the objective portrayal of a historical event, but as an ideological construction, a myth of nationness that was instrumental in the development of narratives of whiteness. In other words, Luna reminds the spectators that all artwork is, in the end, an artifice, and suggests they decode Blanes’s image through this perspective, again ­de-­naturalising the canonical painting. The impact of Luna’s artwork outside the art circuit in which it originally circulated is an element that adds to the potential of La conquista del desierto to contribute to the critique of narratives of whiteness in the aftermath of the crisis. Between 2011 and 2016 it was part of the school curricula of the Buenos Aires province for the subject Política y ciudadanía (Politics and Citizenship) taught in the fifth – and final – year of secondary education. One of the activities in this course asked students to compare Blanes’s and Luna’s images and reflect on the idea of the nation and the state that each image puts forward, and the role of art in challenging and legitimising social and racial exclusion.30 La conquista del desierto takes this ­ non-­ whiteness that Blanes portrays as disappearing – and that the bank note directly ignores

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– and transforms it into a signifier of an alternative conception of nationness that is discussed as part of larger debates ignited by the crisis. At the same time, this exemplifies that critical engagements with race found in cultural products have also influenced current discussions about racial heterogeneity, including public policy, leading to modifications in the way in which history and citizenship were taught and debated at school level. Furthermore, the case of La conquista del desierto also helps us to assess how, in the aftermath of the crisis, the state appropriated many of these discourses of race to address particular demands for more inclusive representations of the nation.31 One aspect that is not directly connected to Luna’s artwork but nonetheless illustrates the impact on, and the state’s use of, this type of critical discourse of race in the p ­ ost-­crisis is the change to the ­one-­hundred-­peso note announced in July 2012 by Cristina Fernández de Kirchner’s government. To commemorate the sixtieth anniversary of Eva Perón’s death, the national government unveiled a new bank note featuring her portrait. The president announced that this design would gradually replace the one based on Blanes’s image. The reasons behind the initial decision to replace Roca with Evita are manifold. These include the recuperation of many aspects of the Peronist iconography, Fernández’s identification with Perón’s wife, the fact that the one-hundred-peso note was the highest denomination available at the time, and the government’s refusal to officially recognise the high levels of inflation. However, it could also be argued that removing Roca’s image was less controversial than replacing other historical figures because he stands for a particular articulation of nationness and race that, in recent years, has come to be increasingly questioned. That there was little public outcry or attempt to prevent his exclusion exemplifies these changes. The last section of this chapter will discuss the contribution of GAC to, precisely, this raising of awareness about the legacy of Roca and change of public perceptions about his figure and the Conquest of the Desert during the early 2000s.

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Grupo de Arte Callejero (GAC) Lorena Bossi, Mariana Corral, Lorena Merlo, and Violeta Bernasconi, all art students at the Prilidiano Pueyrredón School of Fine Arts, formed GAC in 1997. The group was created with the aim to contribute, through artistic interventions, to the climate of social protest that was beginning to flourish at the time. In fact, 1996 and 1997 could be seen as watersheds given that more systematic and comprehensive forms of resistance to neoliberalism started to develop after years of political apathy and endorsement of Menemismo by civil society. Popular uprisings in Plaza Huincul and Cutral Có – two adjacent Patagonian oil towns severely affected by redundancies occasioned by YPF’s privatisation – took place in both years. The revolts are considered the birth of the piqueteros. Also in 1997, Argentina’s largest federation of teachers’ trade unions installed a large white tent resembling a marquee in front of the National Congress to protest Menem’s controversial 1993 federal education law and demand more funding for primary and secondary education. The protest quickly rallied widespread public support and became a symbol of opposition to neoliberalism. It lasted for 1,003 days, during which a total of 1,380 teachers took turns in the tent and more than 2.8 million people visited it. On 30 December 1999, the protest ended after an increase in teachers’ salaries was approved.32 GAC’s first intervention was precisely in support of the teachers’ dispute and featured thirty murals at different points in Buenos Aires with images of the iconic white smocks worn by state primary schools’ students in Argentina. Soon thereafter, the collective also produced new interventions that addressed many of the effects of neoliberalism on Argentina, like record unemployment and poverty levels and political servility to the United States and international financial organisations. GAC also started to collaborate with human rights groups in escraches, public acts aimed to expose unpunished perpetrators of ­dictatorship-­era human rights violations.33 The group’s strategies and ideology can be linked to international trends of the time, which argued for an art that was public and activist, functioned outside institutional structures, and engaged audiences directly. Known as new genre public art, the focus of these practices is twofold: first, on the specific problems that affect the places in which art is produced; secondly, on the social relations

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that art can generate in these contexts.34 But despite the relevance and influence of new genre public art, GAC was also profoundly shaped by the particular processes that Argentinian society was experiencing at the time, characterised, as mentioned before, by the collectivisation of social practices and the reclaim of public space – particularly during the convulsed summer of 2001–2. GAC and other groups like Argentina Arde, Etcétera (later renamed La Internacional Errorista) and Taller Popular de Serigrafía (TPS) renewed the debate over the relations between aesthetics and social and political involvement. Joint ventures were developed with piqueteros and ­worker-­recuperated enterprises, which led to the establishment of art spaces in the Bauen Hotel and the Brukman textile factory.35 The dominant paradigm of the 1990s – the ­so-­ called arte light – was widely condemned by the new artists as ­a-­politicised and frivolous. Finally, although these groups did not claim a genealogical affiliation with previous experiences, there was an increasing interest in 1960s political art, like the emblematic exhibition Tucumán Arde (1968).36 An interesting example of GAC’s work on race and nationness is their intervention on the monument to Roca located at the intersection of President Julio Argentino Roca Avenue (commonly known as Diagonal Sur) and Alsina Street, in downtown Buenos Aires. The impressive 14-metre high sculptural group features a marble base with two figures symbolising Motherland (patria) and Work, and a granite pedestal topped by a l­ ife-­size equestrian statue of Roca in full general’s uniform. The ensemble was commissioned in 1935, during the conservative restoration known as the Infamous Decade, and inaugurated in 1941. Renowned artists of the time Alejandro Bustillo and José Luis Zorrilla de San Martín were selected for the task (see Figure 5.6). Commemorative monuments like Roca’s operate as signifiers of aspects of the past that are portrayed as collectively relevant and in need of constant celebration and remembrance. When it memorialises national figures and events, monumentality is bestowed with authority regarding a history that citizens are invited to participate in, in a common process through which shared forms of identification are constructed and reinforced.37 Between 2003 and 2005, GAC led several interventions on Roca’s monument to specifically interrupt the symbolic power of the ensemble to fix past and nationhood. The monument was covered with stencils showing

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Figure 5.6  Photograph of the monument to Julio A. Roca in downtown Buenos Aires, by Alejandro Aguiló (2017)

Roca falling from his horse and graffiti messages such as Genocida (Genocide perpetrator) and Es mejor un mayo francés, que un ‘julio argentino’ (A French May is better than an ‘Argentinian July’; it is a pun on Roca’s first names) (see Figure 5.7). The street sign was also

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intervened, with its name replaced with Pueblos originarios (Indigenous/native peoples). Red paint suggesting blood was thrown onto the monument. Fake commemorative medals resembling those traditionally placed to pay tribute to revered figures in memorials were pasted against the base. The false honours were satirically attributed to the Argentinian army, fashion corporation Benetton, energy company Repsol (which acquired YPF in 1999) and Sociedad Rural Argentina (a centennial association that gathers the country’s largest landowners). GAC’s ­ anti-­ monument constitutes a challenge both to the ­nineteenth-­century elites’ official historiography and to the role of monumental public art in sustaining the exclusivist social order established in the n ­ ation-­ building period. Intervening on the monument implies impugning its constant reminding that, despite the challenges from popular actors, certain social hierarchies have systematically continued. In fact, the statue’s strategic location implies that, when congregating in Plaza de Mayo for protests and political events, the ­darker-­skinned multitudes from the south of the Greater Buenos Aires – from the ones that famously assembled

Figure 5.7 Roca’s ­ anti-­ monument, by Grupo de Arte Callejero and Comisión ­Anti-­monumento a Roca (2003).

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to ask for Perón’s release on 17 October 1945 to the piqueteros during the crisis – had to march under the scrutiny of Roca’s figure, projecting itself from above as a reminder of the elites’ values of order, civility and whiteness. However, this interpretation perhaps overestimates the ways in which people engage with certain monuments. As mentioned before, the logic of monumentality implies that the encounter with a monument is supposed to be experienced as a heightened, almost sublime moment. Nonetheless, those positioned in busy areas with higher levels of pedestrian flow and road traffic, as is the case of Roca’s statue, can see their symbolic capacity to link past and present and produce community lessened. This is because, even if they have been originally designed to be set apart from everyday space, they are so interlaced into the urban texture that the hectic walkers and commuters who are supposed to be the recipients of their commemorative power do not necessarily notice them. Ironically, what guarantees monuments a maximum visibility – a central location with higher prospective onlookers – can diminish their efficacy as signifiers of national past and identity (these monuments might still be very visible to tourists, but the effect on them is different). By intervening on the sculptural ensemble, GAC disrupts the normal sight of the monument – or, more precisely, it makes it visible again for the p ­ assers-­by, who are then invited to interrupt their routine and approach the monument to contemplate the intervention and read the messages. Consequently, the monument is removed from its indiscernibility in the cityscape and positioned back in the urban space as a meaningful site of remembrance – but of the nation’s racial violence, instead of its glories. The distance, solemnity and deference that monumental form and patriotic heroes are supposed to instil are challenged here by the act of trespassing the fences and affecting the monument’s materiality, with the onlooker being called on to be a participant in this defiance. The dialogic juxtaposition of monument and ­anti-­monument results in a new form, a c­ ounter-­monument, in which new meanings beyond those communicated independently by each of the works emerge.38 The potentiality of this impugnation of Roca and the exclusionary nationhood project he helped establish lies precisely in its incorporation and subversion of the glorifying narrative of this social order. In this respect, GAC’s work can be linked to Luna’s in its critical appropriation of the state’s ­nation-­building visuality

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with a view to producing a c­ounter-­ narrative of nationhood. Furthermore, both d ­ e-­naturalise representation by reminding the onlooker of the ideological facet of notes and monuments. However, GAC, like Luna, seeks more than just to denounce official interpretations of the past. The ­counter-­monument was produced at a time of renewed efforts to expose, investigate and trial those responsible for human rights abuses during the last dictatorship. This was partly fuelled by the changes in human rights policy introduced by Kirchner, but also drew on grassroots organisations’ struggles to oppose Menem’s ‘oblivion and reconciliation’ position during the previous decade. GAC’s work could be seen as a contribution in highlighting the connections between ­nineteenth-­ century Amerindian extermination and state terrorism during the Proceso. The human rights violations committed during the dictatorship are presented not as an exception but as another episode in a history of state genocide – which can be, as seen, traced back to the very foundation of the state.39 The intervention also highlights other forms of continuity. The fake medals from Sociedad Rural, Benetton and Repsol denounce the complicity of capital in Argentina’s history of s­ ocio-­economic and racial exclusion. Sociedad Rural was a direct beneficiary of Roca’s campaign (which contributed to fund) and its members received substantial shares of the annexed land, including its president, José Alfredo Martínez de Hoz. His homonym grandchild would go on to become, a century later, finance minister of the Proceso and leading ideologue behind the neoliberal turn in the country’s economy. Both men are thus linked to two historical moments in which military violence over certain people was deployed in order to accelerate the s­ ocio-­economic r­ e-­engineering of the country for the benefit of the local and transnational elites. The dictatorship itself claimed its lineage in the ­nineteenth-­century consolidation of the oligarchic state by appropriating the term used to describe this latter episode. The mentioning of Benetton and Repsol, in turn, focus on 1990s neoliberalism as continuator of these previous developments but also as a new phase of capitalist accumulation. GAC’s ­anti-­monument was done at a time in which the conflict between Mapuche communities and the Benetton Group over land in Patagonia was escalating. In 1991, the clothing retailer bought Compañía de Tierras Sud Argentina, a w ­ ool-­ producing company created in 1889 by a small group of British

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investors who, thanks to a fraudulent operation involving the state, received a donation of 805,000 hectares of Patagonian lands.40 Benetton’s acquisition of the Compañía a century later made the Italian corporation effectively the largest landowner in Argentina. Mapuche groups, nonetheless, claim portions of this land as part of their ancestral territory. In August 2002, Benetton succeeded in evicting Atilio Curianco and Rosa Nahuelquir, two Mapuches who occupied 542 hectares of this disputed land. Thanks to the work of indigenous campaigners and the support of national and international human rights organisations, the case achieved prominence in Argentina and abroad, with Curianco and Nahuelquir eventually recovering the land in 2007.41 The advance of the hydrocarbon frontier in Patagonia in the 1990s, parallel to the gradual privatisation of YPF – which would finish in 1999 with its acquisition by Repsol – also ignited further conflict between capital and Mapuche communities. As mentioned, in 1992 Argentina adopted Convention 169 of the International Labour Organization, which requires that indigenous peoples are consulted and give their consent on issues that affect them (which in most countries mainly refers to the impact of extractive industries on ancestral lands). Despite the fact that Argentina’s adoption of the convention was ratified in 2000 and came into force in 2001, legal and administrative gaps and state complicity have implied that, in most cases, there has been a deliberate absence of consultation processes with indigenous peoples. In some cases, indigenous activists have suffered repression, persecution and imprisonment. This is an example of neoliberalism’s ambiguous relationship with multiculturalism, and how it has favoured policies that supposedly protect diversity, without really affecting ingrained economic and political interests. Mapuches have systematically denounced Repsol’s activities, including environmental pollution – especially in groundwater – and alarming levels of heavy metals in members of their communities.42 The references to these corporations in GAC’s anti-­ ­ monument, in sum, contribute to exposing the role of neoliberal protocols in present recurrence of ­nineteenth-­century experiences of territorial colonisation and racial violence. GAC’s intervention was part of o ­ n-­going work carried out by a group led by the historian, writer and activist Osvaldo Bayer that sought the removal of all monuments to Roca in Argentina, the renaming of all streets with his name, the replacement of his effigy

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from the peso note, and the restitution to indigenous communities of all land appropriated during the Conquest of the Desert.43 This initiative had been anticipated by proposals emanating from indigenous communities in Patagonia. In 1997, the Mapuche community Anekón Grande made a request to Bariloche City Council that Roca’s statue (inaugurated around the same time as that in Buenos Aires) be removed from the city’s civic centre. The request was denied on the basis that it is a national monument. In the late 2000s, projects to ­de-­monumentalise Roca multiplied in Argentina. By 2012, more than 120 cities and towns had replaced the name Roca from streets and schools. In this chapter I have presented very distinctive engagements with the concept of the Amerindian that illustrate how, during the crisis, there was an increasing concern in the arts about the place of race in Argentina’s present and history. Herbstein’s calendar illustrates how m ­iddle-­ class preoccupations about contemporary national issues led to an idealisation of the ­pre-­Columbian Amerindian as noble savage, a figure that could symbolically allow the overcoming of these anxieties about the state of Argentina. As I demonstrated, its main effect is the reproduction of primitivist stereotypes of indigeneity and the projection of white fantasies of sexual possession and mastery. Although these issues make it highly problematic, the series still has the potential to open up a space for a critique of this racialised body politics. This is because the absence of the real Amerindian racialises the white models’ bodies and exposes their whiteness, which usually passes as neutral. Luna’s and GAC’s works overcome the contradictions and ambiguities of Herbstein’s images. Both directly trace possible connections between contemporary racial and social exclusion and the ­nineteenth-­century genocide of indigenous communities. They expose the way in which racial domination, which is usually denied or undermined on the basis of the alleged homogeneity of the population, continues to act upon the poor and the Amerindian whose presence in the contemporary nation is still sidelined. It could be argued, perhaps, that La conquista del desierto allows for more spectatorial activity and interpretation, which in turn has the potency of encouraging a discussion of racial domination that goes beyond the restrictions of GAC’s more direct and politicised approach. Its incorporation into the school curricula also

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guaranteed that its circulation, like GAC’s intervention, was not restricted solely to the art world. To close this chapter, it is worth referring to the state’s adoption and ­re-­signification of these critical discourses of racial politics in the aftermath of the crisis. Indicative of this are the uses of La conquista del desierto in education and its public display at the residence of the Argentinian Ambassador in London in 2006 and 2007. GAC’s participation in the 2003 Venice Biennale representing Argentina or their later involvement in the official celebrations of Argentina’s bicentennial also illustrate this confluence of artistic and state discourses. All these examples show not only the impact of these critiques produced during the crisis, but also the complex and ambivalent ways in which the state has both appropriated and channelled these demands for more racially diverse portrayals of the nation.

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6

Cumbia villera and the new racialised marginality

On 25 May 2009, a massive free concert attended by more than two million people – and broadcasted live on public television – took place on 9 de Julio Avenue, in downtown Buenos Aires, marking the official start of the ­year-­long celebrations of Argentina’s bicentennial. Famous musicians from different genres were invited to perform versions of patriotic songs. Among those performed was Leopoldo Corretjer’s ‘Himno a Sarmiento’ (Hymn to Sarmiento), a tune that most Argentinians know very well since it is sung in state and private schools across the country on the occasion of Teacher’s Day and other national commemorations. Performed in cumbia villera style by the genre’s biggest star, Pablo Lescano, and fusion musician Kevin Johansen, the song received the warmest response from the crowd, becoming the highlight of the evening. Lescano’s invitation to perform one of the most important songs in the national songbook at a ­state-­sponsored celebration of Argentina’s 200 years marked the definitive acceptance of the genre in mainstream society. This, however, contrasted dramatically with cumbia villera’s early days during the crisis, when the state, through COMFER (its agency for the regulation of television and radio), took deliberate measures to censor it from the media.1 A few years afterwards, in 2004, Head of the Cabinet Alberto Fernández affirmed in a radio interview that the popularity of the style and its glorification of crime was a major factor behind the escalation of criminality in Argentina.2 That President Kirchner publicly unauthorised Fernández some days later testified that cumbia villera was not only extremely polemic, but also enormously popular. In fact, during the crisis and its immediate aftermath, there was hardly a

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music genre as commercially successful and talked about in Argentina as cumbia villera. The relationship between the success of cumbia villera and the country’s economic breakdown has been the subject of wide academic enquiry.3 Most studies correctly interpret cumbia villera’s poetics as expressing the state of social decomposition and disenfranchisement that the youth of the underclass was experiencing at the time. Nonetheless, what it is usually sidelined in these works is that many of the most successful rock groups of this period, all part of a trend known as rock chabón (lad rock) or rock barrial (neighbourhood rock), were releasing songs for w ­ orking-­ class audiences which revolved around exactly the topics.4 Although the popularity of these bands and their ‘pernicious’ influence on the youth were scarcely debated publicly, cumbia villera, on the other hand, ignited one of the fiercest debates around an art form since the return to democracy.5 Looking back at the history of Argentinian popular music, it could actually be stated that there is a ­long-­standing tradition, going back to tango, of suburban imaginaries centred on male sociability, misogyny, substance abuse and marginality. Therefore, if these themes were neither first popularised by nor unique to cumbia villera, why did the style generate such heated debates and why did the status quo see it as a menace to the social body? I contend that the centrality of race within cumbia villera was precisely what made this music unique. In other words, if cumbia villera was shocking, it was not just because of the values it celebrated, but because it did so through a discourse that ­re-­signified the stigmas associated with being negro in Argentina. I will demonstrate that in cumbia villera, domains such as style, class, territoriality and gender were articulated by race to construct a form of identity that, by presenting itself as ­non-­white, exposed the entanglement of narratives of whiteness and racial domination. As a result, cumbia villera engaged critically with the way in which the villero youth was racialised and demonised by the dominant sectors during neoliberalism and the crisis. Specifically, it showed that this process did not respond merely to traditional portrayals of the villero as a racial and social Other, as identified in the 1960s and 1970s by Margulis and Ratier, but was part of the construction of a new figure of marginality on which social anxieties caused by the country’s situation could be projected. Hence, in this chapter I offer a complementary perspective to that

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of previous ones. By focusing on the case of cumbia villera, I demonstate how culture was also deployed by subordinate groups at the turn of the t­ wenty-­first century as a resistance strategy against exclusion and as a way to expose the combination of narratives of whiteness with racism. The approach favoured in this study of cumbia villera breaks with previous scholarship on the topic, in which the mediation of race is insufficiently problematised or, as the studies by Daniel Miguez and Héctor Fernández L’Hoeste illustrate, examined primarily as a reflection of class. On the contrary, although the reasons for cumbia villera’s success are varied and complex, I argue that the resignification of n ­ on-­ whiteness to produce an idealised villero subjectivity in cumbia villera was an element that added to the multiple ways in which the underclass youth engaged with, consumed and enjoyed this music during the crisis. Furthermore, my approach can also help to explain why, throughout this period, many young people, who were not necessarily villeros but were experiencing the economic and social effects of the crisis, ­self-­ identified with the cumbia villera subculture. Cumbia villera not only allows us to look at continuities and ruptures in the racialisation of the s­ lum-­dweller during the crisis; it also enables us to examine how the intersections of race and cumbia have been interpreted, assimilated, and contested by various sectors of Argentinian society, especially during Menemismo and the crisis. Thus, a brief genealogy of cumbia music in Argentina will precede the analysis of cumbia villera to highlight how the latter appropriates and resignifies the history of the former as non-­ ­ white. This process cannot be considered without a transnational perspective. In fact, as I will explain, cumbia villera suggests a series of analogies between being negro in Argentina and being black (in ­ Afro-­ descendant terms) that mirror the dialectics between the crisis as a local event and global discourses and trends that produced forms of criticism of Argentinian narratives of whiteness and racial homogeneity.

Cumbia music in Argentina Traditional cumbia music can be roughly characterised by a 2/2 or 2/4 beat, preference for minor modes and syncopated melodic

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lines and lyrics that celebrate sensuality and dancing. The genre can be located within what is known in Colombia as música tropical, an umbrella term for styles from the Caribbean Coast region such as cumbia, vallenato and porro, all strongly identified with blackness, sexuality and ­light-­heartedness. Wade notes that this blackness was somewhat diluted when local record companies and radio stations started promoting música tropical in the rest of the country in the 1940s. The reason for this was that these rhythms had to connote blackness as an expression of exoticism, happiness and sensuality to be marketable amongst white audiences, but in a way that did not threaten the racial hierarchy and discourses of Colombian society.6 In a modern stylised form, música tropical was successful throughout Colombia in the 1950s and 1960s. Cumbia, in particular, became very popular in S ­ panish-­speaking Latin America, partly thanks to the consolidation of the Colombian recording industry, which facilitated its exportation. In many countries, it was hybridised with local genres, and many distinctive regional cumbia varieties and scenes emerged, principally in Argentina, Mexico, Peru, and Central America.7 In the 1960s, cumbia became fashionable in Argentina, mainly amid the middle class and u ­ pper-­middle class.8 Cumbia’s success was influenced, as in Colombia, by a fascination with blackness, conceived as primitive yet modern and sexual. The remoteness of the Colombian Caribbean emphasised this exoticism. However, cumbia’s success amongst the young Porteño bourgeoisie did not last long since it was displaced by genres that were perceived to be equally tropical and exciting but also more sophisticated, such as rumba, merengue and bossa nova. The style eventually migrated to ­ lower-­ income provincial audiences. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, it progressively evolved into different regional versions, like cumbia norteña and cumbia santafesina.9 Pujol contends that, for the working class, cumbia was still associated with an imaginary Caribbean or tropical world.10 In fact, the expression música tropical in Argentina, as in Colombia, became a synonym for cumbia. The appropriation of cumbia by the working class was viewed with contempt by the middle and upper classes: cumbia music was regarded as grasa (tacky) and contemptuously labelled música de negros. The discourse of the dominant sectors served two purposes: on the one hand, it stripped the genre of its original connotations of Caribbean blackness, an image that was appreciated due to its exoticism; on the other hand,

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it ­re-­racialised cumbia, this time in negative terms, as the music of the negro, the internal racial Other. The early 1980s marked the end of a long period of internal migration of ­ non-­ skilled workers to Buenos Aires and Greater Buenos Aires that began in the 1930s to 1940s.11 Throughout the 1970s, newly arrived migrants boosted the development of an infrastructure for cumbia in the capital city, just as a similar wave of migration had fostered folkloric music in the 1950s. This infrastructure included record labels, distribution companies, radio shows, magazines and large nightclubs, all of which gradually consolidated what was known as la movida tropical (the tropical music scene). In the 1980s, the two leading cumbia record labels, Magenta and Leader Music, were in a position to distribute música tropical throughout the country, allowing the development of a national market. This partly explains the cumbia boom of the early 1990s: between 1989 and 1991, Ricky Maravilla sold 460,000 copies of his hit song ‘Qué tendrá ese petiso’ (What Does that Shorty Have?), and Antonio Ríos and his group Malagata sold 470,000 copies of their first album.12 However, this commercial boom was also influenced by the cultural changes introduced by Menemismo. In fact, the fiesta menemista found the perfect soundtrack in cumbia’s festive sound, lively feeling and racy topics full of double entendre, which explicates why consumption of the genre expanded from the working class to the middle class. The reception of cumbia by m ­ iddle-­class audiences during the 1990s could be said to resemble this sector’s attitudes towards Menem, in the sense that both represented everything that was rejected: provincialism, lack of sophistication, vulgarity and, in particular, being negro. Nevertheless, it was precisely this plebeianism that made cumbia appealing: it allowed the momentary performance of the codes of negros, especially their alleged cheerful spirit, at a time in which, because of Peronism’s neoliberal conversion and the d ­ e-­politicisation of society, the masses were perceived by the middle class as less politically threatening. This was a time in which the middle class could enjoy being grasa and exhibit their newly acquired wealth brought about by the ­peso-­dollar peg. And so, they accepted cumbia as they embraced Menemismo. However, ­middle-­class consumption of cumbia did not entail its appropriation and whitening. On the contrary, its stigma as música de negros was reinforced.

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The cumbia boom started to show signs of commercial decline in the mid-1990s. Producers decided to promote a more glamorous style described as cumbia romántica, in an attempt to renew and diversify música tropical and to firmly cross over to other social milieus. The shift was not only musical: the short ­dark-­skinned cumbia musicians from the interior, of whom Maravilla was the archetype, gave way to groups of tall, young, white men, loosely based on the format of boy bands of the time such as Take That and Backstreet Boys, as well as acts like Bon Jovi.13 This shows the eagerness of cumbia producers to cater to the dominant codes of beauty and handsomeness whereby the object of desire is, as seen in Chapter 5, tall, white, and, preferably, blond(e). Despite the attempt to appeal to the middle class, cumbia romántica was mainly popular amongst ­lower-­income audiences. It is possible that the ­model-­like looks of these artists also appealed to the masses, due to the predominance of the codes of attractiveness of the white economy of desire. At the same time, the presence of romantic topics of a universal nature in the lyrics meant that audiences could identify with the themes of this variety of cumbia regardless of class. Esteban De Gori traces a correlation between the everyday drama portrayed in cumbia’s love stories (for example, unrequited or forbidden love) and the social drama that, in the late 1990s, large sectors of Argentinian society were starting to experience because of rising unemployment and impoverishment.14 Cumbia villera emerged as a direct reaction or alternative to this type of romantic cumbia. Its explosion in popularity took place in a context in which, despite the recession, the wider market for cumbia had increased dramatically after a decade of steady growth and consolidation. By the late 1990s, la movida tropical was generating average profits of 130 million pesos/dollars per year. Furthermore, there were around three hundred cumbia nightclubs in Buenos Aires and Greater Buenos Aires, which were visited by half a million people each weekend, and two leading television networks broadcast cumbia programmes throughout the day on Saturdays.15

The boom of cumbia villera Cumbia villera can be classed as a hybrid of different cumbia styles. According to Massone and De Filippis, from traditional Colombian

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cumbia it takes the basic beat, the use of minor modes and acoustic or synthesised ­piano-­accordions.16 From Mexican cumbia sonidera it incorporates the use of delay and pitch effects on voices and keyboards, and the exploration of digital sound banks to simulate the brass and percussion sounds that characterise traditional cumbia ensembles. From Peruvian música chicha, which merges cumbia with Andean and Amazonian music and 1960s rock and roll, cumbia villera takes the use of distinctive melodic patterns on the electric guitar. Finally, reggae and ska also have an influence, mainly on the rhythm guitars. The combination of international music styles with lyrics that expressed the social conjuncture of the crisis exemplifies how local and transnational elements intersect in cumbia villera. Between its commercial breakthrough in 1999 and its decline in the mid-2000s, cumbia villera represented the dominant cultural voice of ­working-­class youth. To get an idea of its popularity, it is useful to look at the performance of the Argentinian music market during the crisis. In 2002, just 5,817,700 CDs were sold, compared to the 21,320,298 sold when the recession started in 1999, and record company turnovers fell by approximately 50 per cent – from 162 million pesos to 79 million.17 The turn of the century coincided with the release of ­peer-­to-­peer MP3-sharing Internet services and the popularisation of CD duplicators, which also contributed to the contraction of the music market. Nevertheless, in this adverse context marked by financial crisis and changes in audio technology, cumbia villera’s performance in the market was excellent, illustrated by the fact that the genre sold 215,800 CDs in the first trimester of 2001 alone, which represented approximately a 25 per cent share of the Argentinian recorded music market at the time.18 Furthermore, according to estimates, cumbia villera sold equally well in the broad bootleg market during this period.19 Pablo Lescano, a cumbia producer and musician from La Esperanza, a villa in the north of Greater Buenos Aires, formed what is considered cumbia villera’s first successful group, Flor de Piedra. Although he was only ­twenty-­two at the time, he was already an experienced cumbia musician. He decided to start a new band to record some cumbia songs that he had written in a new style and that were based on his experiences growing up and living in the villa. Entirely composed and produced by Lescano, Flor de Piedra’s debut album La vanda más loca (1999) (literally, The Craziest Vand (sic), it means The Most Wasted Band), became an unexpected

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success, selling more than 150,000 copies and introducing this new sound to cumbia audiences.20 In a matter of months, cumbia villera became extremely popular and there was an explosion of new groups: Damas Gratis (with Pablo Lescano assuming the role of lead singer), Los Pibes Chorros, Yerba Brava, Meta Guacha, El Indio, and SuperMerk2, to name a few.21 Most names involve overt ­drug-­related wordplays. Flor de Piedra, for instance, is the name of a desert plant but could also be interpreted as a reference to a rock of crack cocaine. The expression flor de … is often used in Argentina to praise the quality of something – in this case, the drug. Another example is Yerba Brava (literally, Tough Weed), a pun involving yerba mate and marijuana. A further example is SuperMerk2, a p ­ lay-­on-­words involving supermarkets and cocaine (merca). Musicians living in the villas created some of these groups; cumbia producers from mainstream labels, aware of the sound’s commercial potential, were responsible for the creation of others. In fact, contrary to many racialised and ghettoised music subcultures ­co-­opted by mainstream labels, such as rap music and Brazilian funk, cumbia villera was exposed to the practices and logics of the cultural industry system since its inception. Roughly, it can be said that it was born both in the villas and in the offices of cumbia label executives: Magenta and Leader Music released 80 per cent of all cumbia villera albums.22 Pablo Alabarces and Svampa, among others, identify the genre’s early integration into the mainstream cumbia market as a reason to impugn its ­ self-­ proclaimed status as an unmediated form of expression for the villeros.23 Nonetheless, authenticity in cumbia villera is not associated with an ideal of artistic integrity. ‘Selling out’ is not an issue, since all cumbia villera acts openly express their eagerness to become part of the system and earn money. My interest in this chapter is not to evaluate the villero credentials of cumbia villera’s artists, but rather to analyse how their songs were able to structure a discourse that was both influential and polemic in terms of race during the crisis. The next section will show how the racialised figure of the young villero, produced in the context of growing racial violence, social segregation and ghettoisation brought about by Menemismo and the crisis, was appropriated and ­re-­signified by cumbia villera and its audiences.

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Racialising the villero youth According to Auyero, up until the 1990s the villero was a symbol of racial otherness and social deprivation that was nonetheless integrated into the economy through ­low-­skilled jobs and differential access to consumption.24 As in numerous industrial societies, the basic construction of ­ working-­ class male identity in Argentina throughout most of the second half of the twentieth century revolved mainly around the concept of the worker/breadwinner with particular aspirations to upward social mobility. However, during Menemismo the withdrawal of ­wage-­labour economy, the state’s indifference and the erosion of social capital and community bonds impacted on young men from the lower strata of society. They found themselves unable to conform to this dominant view of masculinity and, additionally, unable to adapt to an alternative model. The transition to a model of citizenship based on the consumer was an added frustration for this sector of the population precisely because of the inability to participate in consumption. Juan Pegoraro, Gabriel Kessler and Marina Medan, among others, have identified the rise of juvenile delinquency during the 1990s as a survival strategy but also as a way to come to terms with the inaccessibility of traditional male identity and consumption.25 Youth disenfranchisement ran parallel with criminalisation by the state; in fact, the two processes reinforced each other. In that decade, the average age of the prison population in the province of Buenos Aires decreased by ten years (from ­ thirty-­ one to ­twenty-­one).26 This process intensified during the crisis, in parallel with the collapse of the economy: by 2003, some 69 per cent of Argentina’s total prison population was under ­thirty-­five years old, 94 per cent of inmates were male, and most of them came from deprived backgrounds (46 per cent were unemployed before incarceration).27 However, rather than discuss the rising delinquency among young ­slum-­dwellers, what I wish to consider is how this constituted the foundations of specific public and media discourses partly mediated by race. These discourses transformed the category of villero, as it was identified before the 1990s – namely, as a racial and class Other who was integrated, albeit precariously, into society through employment and the welfare state – into a signifier of criminality and anomie. Wacquant argues that strategies of this type have gone on to constitute one of the defining features of neoliberal governance in the Western world:

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By elevating criminal safety … to the frontline of government priorities, state officials have condensed the diffuse class anxiety and simmering ethnic resentment generated by the unraveling of the Fordist-­ ­ Keynesian compact and channeled them toward the ­(dark-­skinned) street criminal, designated as guilty of sowing social and moral disorder in the city.28

As Stanley Cohen and Stuart Hall et al. explain, through this type of ‘moral panic’ over certain stigmatised groups the status quo can articulate public consensus around the deployment of the punitive apparatus of the state on society.29 The idea of moral panic as a structure for labelling a sector of the youth underclass as a public enemy is useful in analysing the case of Argentina during the crisis. The late 1990s and, especially, the 2000–2 period were marked by two interrelated processes: the rise of social insecurity due to the financial meltdown, and challenges to state authority exemplified by widespread civil mobilisation and piquetero activism. Some of the strategies through which the state aimed to regain control of the situation included criminalising protest and penalising poverty. Therefore, the implementation of repressive policies in the name of law and order was, in this context, a common practice. The focus on villero youth as a danger to societal values reinforced the perception of a constant threat to citizenship that required tough measures (as I explained earlier, a similar strategy was applied to piqueteros). For example, in 2002 a police chief made the following statement on public television: ‘Las estadísticas dicen que el 80 por ciento de los delincuentes son adolescentes que vienen de las villas’ (statistics show that 80 per cent of delinquents are adolescents who come from the shantytowns).30 The expression pibe chorro (thieving lad) became widely used to refer to these juvenile delinquents who were portrayed as alienated, uncontrollable and lacking the ‘values’ associated with the ‘professional’ criminal – such as not exercising gratuitous violence against the victim of a crime. The term pibe chorro is similar to the Brazilian pivete in the sense that they are subjectivities strongly marked by territorial identification with the shantytown and associated with forms of localised crime that require little planning or ability and usually offer meagre profits.31 However, contrary to the pivete, the racialisation of the pibe chorro, although present in everyday discourses that have continuously constructed this figure as a racial Other, is not recognised in official public discourses. The

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downplayed and rarely acknowledged racialisation of pibe chorros is a fundamental element in their identification as a social menace, chiefly during the crisis. In this regard, part of the relevance of cumbia villera lies in two interrelated issues: on the one hand, it challenged the alleged ­race-­lessness of this representation of villero youth; on the other hand, its critique of the widespread assumption that race and racism constitute factors of limited political importance in Argentina in the context of financial meltdown. Therefore, if appropriating this stigmatised construction of the young villero as criminal and a member of the underclass was, as cumbia villera’s sales demonstrated, an excellent marketing ploy, the gesture also has political significance. The mode in which the demonised portrayal of the young villero combined continuities and ruptures with the past, in the sense that this was a new racialised underclass founded on the historical construction of the villero as a racial Other, is exemplified in Yerba Brava’s ‘Discriminado’ (2000) (Discriminated). It represents villero youth as being defined by three elements: n ­ on-­whiteness (racialised condition), the villa (racialised space) and cumbia (racialised cultural expression), all signifiers of an identity that is doomed to a tragic end as the result of racism and social exclusion. Hijo de padres villeros, con la cumbia se crió, y ahora que está más grande y al baile quiere colar, el rati con bronca grita: ‘Negro villa, ¡vo’ no entrás!’ ... Con el trabajo tampoco pega, de todos lados el rebotó. Cansado el negro ya se rindió. La sociedad no le dio salida y el mal camino él encaró, y en una noche pesada la muerte se lo llevó ... Que por ser negro villero él estaba condenado.32 (The child of villero parents, he grew up listening to cumbia, and now that he’s grown up and wants to sneak in the cumbia nightclub, the bouncer angrily shouts: ‘Shantytown negro, ya’ not come in!’ ... He has no job,

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he wasn’t wanted anywhere. Tired, the negro gave up. Society didn’t give him a chance and he went astray, And in a rough night, death took him away. ... He was condemned for being negro villero.)

The lyrics reflect on the identification of villero youth as a racial alterity in discourses and practices as a means of justifying state violence and segregation. Social exclusion is defined by the character’s racialised condition: nobody wants to hire him, he is not allowed into the cumbia nightclub, he is forced to get involved in crime, and he is killed because that is the destiny of the villero. Ghettoisation as a form of racial domination is present in the crucial importance that space assumes in the process of racialisation, in the sense that he is negro and villero, and the terms are brought together in the construction of stigma. Although the villero is clearly romanticised as an i­ll-­fated hero in the song, it nonetheless addresses the real problem of police brutality towards the youth of the underclass – an issue also denounced in Cristian Alarcón’s n ­ on-­fiction book Cuando me muera quiero que me toquen cumbia (2003) (When I Die I Want Them to Play Cumbia for Me).33 CORREPI, an Argentinian NGO that monitors police and institutional repression, estimates that between 1998 and 2004 a total of 1,282 people were murdered by the police, in numerous different contexts (on the streets, demonstrations, in prisons and police stations) and most of them in Greater Buenos Aires.34 Furthermore, 49 per cent of the victims were between fifteen and ­twenty-­five years old, and 90 per cent of them were from the shantytowns.35 Michel Foucault traces the origins of race in the emergence of sovereign power and disciplinary techniques during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.36 Specifically, he locates these roots in the shifting function of that power from the punishment of subjects to the shaping and regulation of life in the name of society’s best interests. This process implied the need to identify those worthy of living and those who had to be eradicated, as part of the constitution of state authority and the definition of social hierarchy. This binary division of society facilitated the identification of an internal enemy against which society had to defend itself through force but also through law and political domination. According to Foucault, the

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development of race as a biological category structured a field of knowledge and classification instrumental for biopower: In a normalizing society, race or racism is the precondition that makes killing acceptable. When you have a normalizing society, you have a power which is, at least superficially, in the first instance, or in the first line a biopower, and racism is the indispensable precondition that allows someone to be killed, that allows others to be killed. Once the State functions in the biopower mode, racism alone can justify the murderous function of the State.37

As seen in the case of indigenous people, scientific racism not only distinguished the degenerate and inferior from the superior race that constituted the rightful members of society but also made the annihilation of the subaltern race acceptable. Implicit in this is the dehumanisation of the group that represents the racial menace, or at least the degradation of its humanity. Although stripped of biological language, the deprivation of the human condition partly through race can also be found in the example of using the villero as a justification for state violence. In this case, the villero does not deserve to die due to some natural inferiority, yet his death is presented by the status quo as a collateral effect of his own lack of humanity, manifested in criminality, alienation and anomie. What ‘Discriminado’ suggests is that racialisation is at the core of the dehumanisation of the villero. Thus, it indicates how this process allows police abuse to be portrayed as the price to be paid for the security and safety of wider society. Satirical magazine Barcelona referred ironically to this on one of its covers in which they ridiculed the racist overtones of the sensationalist media: ‘La gente debate qué hacer con los negros de mierda. Muchos creen que lo mejor sería la pena de muerte. Algunos proponen la justicia por mano propia. Y otros quieren continuar con el gatillo fácil’ (People are discussing what to do with the fucking negros. Many believe the death penalty would be best. Some suggest taking justice into their own hands. And others want to keep on relying on t­rigger-­happy middle-­ class police).38 The publication parodies stereotypical ­ racism and paranoia about the lower class expressed in demands for tough measures on crime and lenience on the matter of police brutality. These views on delinquency became more common during the crisis, as insecurity moved up in the ranking of society’s preoccupations in several surveys.39 Propelled by the mediatisation

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of society in the 1990s, numerous live broadcasts of h ­ old-­ups with hostages contributed to instilling fear in society regarding villero youth during the crisis. Hence, Barcelona’s dichotomy between a ­‘race-­less’ category like la gente and negros de mierda shows how racialisation distinguishes those who ‘are’ human from those who are less human (or are entitled to less humane treatment) and legitimises police abuse and repression. ‘Discriminado’, in sum, denounces how the tragic reality of the victims of ­trigger-­happy murderers is mediated by specific racial discourses that justify repressive excesses. Michael Herschmann argues that, in late-1980s and early-1990s Brazil, the word pivete was replaced by funkeiro (as young funk enthusiasts from the favelas are known) on television and in the press to link the musical style to the waves of arrastões (flash mob robberies) carried out by teenage delinquents on Rio’s affluent beaches.40 It is possible to observe a similar procedure in the case of cumbia villera: the media and the state were quick to highlight that the linkage between cumbia villera acts and criminality went beyond lyrics, in an effort to demonise and censor these artists. Besides COMFER’s regulations, we can add, for example, a television interview with Lescano in 2001 for current affairs programme Punto Doc/2. At the interview were present two of Lescano’s teenage friends. Punto Doc/2 aired the interview along with footage of the two friends being arrested a week later following an i­ll-­ fated robbery.41 Cumbia villera artists also contributed inadvertently to this by being ambivalent about their affiliations with crime in interviews, never fully admitting to it but always implying it, in a gesture that aimed to profit from the commodification of gangster aesthetics and violent lifestyles that proved to be commercially successful in, for instance, gangsta rap. In ‘Discriminado’, the stigmatised condition of the young villero is expressed in his marginalisation from society and wage labour, which led him to crime. However, it is also present in his exclusion from a realm to which, given that he is the son of villeros and grew up with cumbia, he has a right: el baile (the cumbia nightclub). This stresses the connections between villero and cumbia through race, in the sense that the villero constitutes a social and racial Other and cumbia, a ­non-­white genre. The intersection of space, music, class and race emerges as a central element in the configuration of a villero world; they are not only related terms but become

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interchangeable. Flor de Piedra’s ‘Cumbia cabeza’ (1999; Trashy Cumbia) illustrates these connections. Cumbia, cumbia, ésta es mi cumbia cabeza. Esto lo bailan los negros, tomando coca y cerveza. Porque paro en la esquina con mis amigos a tomar un vino todos me empiezan a criticar, que soy un villero, que soy un negro porque me gusta la cumbia.42 (Cumbia, cumbia, this is my trashy cumbia. This is what negros dance while drinking coke (could also be sniffing cocaine) and beer. Because I hang out with my friends in the corner drinking wine they’re winding me up; they say that I’m a villero, that I’m a negro because I like cumbia.)

The lyrics can be read as listing all the required attributes of the villero: dancing, drinking and taking drugs, hanging out with ­street-­corner friends – but, as the last sentence shows, cumbia constitutes the defining characteristic. Again, there is the interplay of racialised condition, space and cultural expression. In their analyses of Brazilian funk, Hermano Vianna and George Yúdice argue that funkeiros refuse to adhere to established ideologies, opting instead to celebrate individuality through the freedom of dancing.43 Adriana Carvalho Lopes and Adriana Facina add that funk uses and appropriates the negative stereotypes of funkeiros as vulgar and shabby.44 Cumbia villera’s poetics are comparable since they acknowledge and yet refuse to accept the stigmatising discourses of ­non-­whiteness produced by the discourses of status quo. On the one hand, ‘Cumbia cabeza’ underlines the fact that the identity of the protagonist is defined according to the parameters and values of the dominant culture (‘me empiezan a criticar, / que soy un villero, que soy un negro’ (they’re winding me up; / they say that I’m a villero, that I’m negro)). On the other hand, because being a villero is somewhat the result of knowledge, behaviours and credentials that are manifested through actions (drinking, hanging out, liking cumbia), race is d ­ e-­essentialised, shown to be mainly performative. Hence, it is based primarily on elements of cultural capital that need to be deployed and displayed, which implies that being a

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negro is not a natural or essential condition but one that is continuously staged and in need of constant reaffirmation. Exposing the performative dimension of race does not mean that phenotype is ignored in cumbia villera. Corporeality is present, not as a natural and biological fact but rather as a materiality that is also affected by performance. To explain this, it is useful to refer to a comparison between cumbia villera and rock chabón. As mentioned previously, during the 1990s many rock acts shared with cumbia villera an imaginary of male sociability, substance abuse and territorial awareness, yet it was the decisive mediation of race that made cumbia villera much more controversial and threatening to public morals. The fact that spatial loyalty is tied, respectively, to the ­de-­racialised barrio, and to the prototypically ­non-­white locus that is the villa, is an important indicator of the differential intermediation of race in each style. Nonetheless, there is also a contrast regarding the relationship between race and the body. One of rock chabón’s hit songs is La Renga’s ‘Negra es mi alma, negro es mi corazón’ (1995) (My Soul is Black, My Heart is Black).45 It is interesting to compare this celebration of blackness with Pablo Lescano’s slogan ’100% negro cumbiero’ (100% ­cumbia-­loving negro) tattooed on his chest (see Figure 6.1). If La Renga describes a spiritual blackness, Lescano refers to one that is embodied physically. What is more, by stating that blackness is something indelibly marked on the skin, Lescano is referring not to an indeterminate blackness like La Renga, but to Argentina’s particular history of racism against those of indigenous and mestizo background – and their transformation into negros. Drawing on Frantz Fanon, Sarah Ahmed states: ‘When assuming a body image, subjects “take on” the burden of particular bodily others which both precede them and are reinvented by them’.46 Nevertheless, there is also the possibility of agency and resistance to racism through intervening on the body. Racial classification by skin and phenotype is affected by Lescano’s gesture: he classifies his body as negro not by identifying with the phenotypical categorisations imposed on him by racial domination – in fact, he is l­ight-­skinned – but by affecting it with the tattoo and exhibiting it as a badge, once again ­de-­essentialising race. As Lescano’s tattoos suggests, being negro and liking cumbia are intrinsically interrelated in cumbia villera’s ethos. As seen in the previous section, this connection is not something new but rather the result of a process of racialisation that can be traced back to the

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Figure 6.1  Pablo Lescano by Vera Rosemberg (2010)

1960s and 1970s. Nonetheless, the historical relationship between cumbia and n ­ on-­whiteness in Argentina does not mean that there are no ruptures between the villero variety and other forms of Argentinian cumbia. The discourse of cumbia villera places itself in antagonism to 1990s cumbia by claiming to break with the artifice of the latter and ­ re-­ authenticate cumbia music. The opposition between the authentic and the fake is present in uncountable music styles but it was distinctively absent in Argentinian música tropical until the emergence of cumbia villera. Due to cumbia music’s l­ight-­ hearted lyrics, the issue of whether they were an expression of the performer’s true feelings was not relevant. However, for cumbia villera, authenticity is crucial. As I will explain, this is achieved through a similar procedure to the one implemented with villero: the racial stigma produced by the dominant culture (in this case, cumbia as música de negros) is turned into a positive value through which an alternative form of identification is suggested. Lescano stated several times his disdain for the most successful cumbia acts of the 1990s, arguing that, contrary to cumbia villera

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bands, they did not perform real cumbia.47 However, this claim was not sustained on an alleged higher artistic independence or integrity but on the idea that the genre offers a n ­ on-­mediated expression of the everyday reality of the male villero youth. Fabián Gamarra, the singer from Yerba Brava, illustrates this idea when he says: ‘Our audiences live the same lives as us and understand that they can have fun dancing even while hearing the truth’.48 Cumbia music during early Menemismo was instrumental in reinforcing the cultural changes and optimism brought about by neoliberal reforms and also provided with the pleasure associated with momentary ­self-­mockery and plebeianism. Cumbia villera, in turn, portrays the harsh realities produced by the ­ socio-­ economic collapse that precisely followed the fiesta menemista and exposes the other face of the relations between the middle and the working class. This perceived lack of distance between the artist’s performance and the lived experience of the audience is the result of a series of complementary procedures. An obvious one is cumbia villera’s poetics: the description of experiences that are allegedly those of villero youth, the use of slang, and so on. Another important element is having a villero upbringing since it marks a distinct relationship with a set of spatial, class and racial experiences that constitute primary aspects of significance for villero identity. A third aspect that helps establish authenticity credentials is phenotype, which, as explained, can be deployed to enhance the performance of ­non-­ whiteness. As Pablo Lescano himself admitted, his decision to cast Daniel Lescano as Flor de Piedra’s singer was partly motivated by his cara de indio (­ Indian-­like face), deliberately breaking with the ­model-­like white artists with the fashionable clothes and smiley faces that were common in cumbia romántica. Sound is another element that contributes to authentication. Cumbia villera acts display their rejection of the dominant forms of Argentinian cumbia by establishing instead direct connections with Colombian cumbia (that is, the ‘original’ cumbia, and also the only form that can claim to be properly black) and música chicha, the style of the Peruvian cholos. Cumbia villera inscribes itself in an imaginary transnational tradition of cumbia music: one that is at the same time black and mestiza, as well as traditional and modern. The tradition is associated with Colombian cumbia while the use of digital equipment and effects gives it a modern flair. All the aspects above are relevant to the style’s politics of authenticity. However, according to the particular villero ethos

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vindicated by cumbia villera, authenticity cannot be claimed but must be the result of recognition. If it were so easy to identify who is a villero and who is a fake, there would be no reason to have a tattoo like Lescano’s. The constant quarrels between cumbia villera musicians, in which each one questions the integrity of the other’s credentials, suggest that authenticity is a space of contestation. In these arguments, the audience is hailed as the ultimate source of legitimacy, the judges of who is genuine. Lescano contends that looking like a villero might fool the white middle- and m ­ iddle-­upper-­ class audiences, who consume cumbia just because it is fashionable, but not the real audience.49 According to him, the negros cannot be deceived because they are the repositories of the ‘truth’: ‘Si los negros bailan, es porque hago buena música. Es muy jodido hacer bailar a los negros’ (if the negros dance, it’s because I make good music. It’s bloody difficult to make the negros dance).50 This statement stresses the affective and biographical connections between cumbia and the villeros exemplified by ‘Discriminado’: one can appreciate real cumbia only if one is a negro who has grown up in the villa. Argentinian journalist and television presenter Andy Kusnetzoff visited cumbia nightclubs with Lescano while making a programme and his interviews with the audience provided examples that reinforce this perception. For example, a young boy stated: ‘Acá nosotros no le damos cabida a ningún gil, si te subís al escenario te la tenés que bancar. Si no bailamos está todo mal. Los negros queremos cumbia de la buena para bailar’ (We have no time for fools or fakes, if you get on stage ya’ better be good. If we don’t dance there’s going to be trouble. We, the negros, want good cumbia to dance).51 In this case, the role of the audience assumes further importance: they are not only the ones who legitimise what is true cumbia; they also discourage, unmask and punish the impostors: ‘La gilada compra cualquiera pero los que venimos de la villa, no. La cumbia es nuestra’ (The fools buy anything but we, from the villa, don’t. Cumbia is ours).52 This marks cumbia villera as a capital of villeros, which needs to be protected from appropriation by other social sectors. An interesting aspect of Lescano’s pride at making the negros dance is that it explicitly traced a parallel between blackness and the Argentinian negros by applying to the latter the stereotype of blacks as having natural rhythm and being prone to dancing. The slogan ’100% negro cumbiero’ also stresses the historical association

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between cumbia music and the negros in Argentina, while simultaneously establishing a relationship between being negro in Argentina and being negro in A ­ fro-­descendant terms by referring to cumbia’s Caribbean origins and black influence. This would suggest that the language of cumbia music provides a way in which similar but in not identical experiences of racial domination – that of blacks in Colombia and negros in Argentinian villas – can be connected. Cumbia villera, thus, ­re-­signifies what is to be a negro in Argentina: rather than a figure vaguely associated with mestizo and indigenous backgrounds, it becomes a form of identification articulated around an idealised transnational blackness. By identifying the local negros with a transnational blackness that is rooted exclusively in cumbia music and not in phenotype, identity politics or diaspora, the negro villero identity can be entitled to the ‘coolness’ that, in a commodified form, is globally associated with black manhood.53 The use of sportswear in the style of early hip hop fashion or certain elements from reggae culture also exemplifies how cumbia villera performs a highly selective appropriation of elements associated with black subcultures without suggesting an ideological identification with the different manifestations of black politics. These components converge in cumbia villera style in order to assemble a subjectivity that allows access to the cultural capital related to this idealised blackness: sensuality, vitality and excitement. This transference of values and meanings from a romanticised black to the negro villero implies that it becomes a desired status, thus allowing it to deal with a very concrete reality of disaffection – being a marginalised and stigmatised young man from the shantytown during the crisis – and a history of discrimination – that of negros in Argentina. In this sense, it could be said that the d ­ e-­politicisation of blackness that allows its appropriation in cumbia villera entails the possibility of a p ­ roto-­political stance. This is because it at least allows disaffected youth to challenge its stigmatisation and marginalisation. As seen, authenticity for cumbia villera artists is a rare – and therefore – valued asset that needs the constant reaffirmation of the negros. Lescano’s statement that he can make the negros dance illustrates this: he can claim that he is true because the repositories of genuine cumbia like his music. This logic also implies that, if he is true, there must be other acts that are a fake – otherwise, he would not be special. Furthermore, those who attend these groups’ shows must be unauthentic as well, given that the negros cannot be tricked

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when it comes to cumbia. Who make up this audience? In cumbia villera discourse these are the chetos, a term that in Argentina describes ­ upper-­ middle- and u ­pper-­ class people, culturally identified with Europe and the United States. It shares many elements with Peruvian pituco, in the sense that it is not defined purely by market capacity or social status but also by race: the cheto is usually white (and therefore ­‘race-­less’, given whiteness’s neutral status) and discriminates and racialises the poor. In cumbia villera poetics, the cheto represents the nemesis of the villero, but this antagonism is not rooted directly in class or racial struggle, but rather in the conflict over the definitions of authentic cumbia. This could explain the fact that sometimes the cheto is portrayed as wanting to emulate the villero, a real cumbiero: ‘Dicen que los chetos nos están buscando a nosotros / los negros cumbieros de corazón’ (They say the chetos are looking for us / the true c­umbia-­loving negros). 54 Chetos represent the social group that benefits from the implementation of racial domination and social exclusion, and repressive figures such as the police officer and the bouncer are identified as merely guaranteeing this sector’s privileges. Nonetheless, the exacerbated inequalities of Argentinian society during the crisis are sidelined in benefit of an interpretation of social conflict in which the cheto only wants access to the attributes of this imaginary transnational n ­ on-­whiteness that is capitalised by the villero through cumbia. In Damas Gratis’s ‘Quieren bajarme’ (2000) (They Want to Take Me Down), racial discrimination along with police persecution under the rules of the cheto are reduced to a manifestation of jealousy over the character’s love for cumbia: ‘Cheto, la envidia te mata, me quieres llevar / Por ser un pibito bien cumbiambero / me subís a tu patrullero’ (Cheto, envy is killing you, you want to lock me up / Because I’m a ­cumbia-­loving lad / you put me in your police car).55 The villero becomes the subject of the ambivalent desire of the middle and ­upper-­middle classes and the police. On the one hand, these sectors stigmatise and exclude through racialisation, yet this racialisation, when appropriated and exhibited as a mark of identification, emerges as cultural capital that the middle and upper classes want. In Meta Guacha’s frontman Roger Belizan’s words, ‘siempre la gente de guita, la gente rica te critican: “no, porque que es negro, que está mal vestido …”. Te miran de arriba a abajo, pero lo que terminan bailando es la cumbia villera’ (people

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who’re loaded, wealthy people always criticise you: “he’s a negro, he’s badly dressed …”. They look down on you, but what they end up dancing is cumbia villera).56 The construction of the villero as a victimised figure that despite a tragic destiny is able to defy the status quo (the cheto and the police) has the palpable appeal of the underdog. What is more, it constitutes a discourse that allows audiences to make sense of their own position as disenfranchised and racialised sectors, as this statement by a young villero, interviewed by Alejandra Cragnolini, shows: Cuando vos vas caminando para un baile y pasás por un boliche cheto te ­re-­bardean: ‘negro villero’ te dicen … estamos divididos, yo no me junto con los chetos, no me cabe, es como que te sentís perseguido (con énfasis) cuando estás con ellos, te sentís distinto, y es así, sos distinto de ellos (con énfasis). Son todos falsos.57 (When you’re walking to a cumbia nightclub and you pass by a cheto nightclub they mess with you and they call you ‘negro villero’ … We’re divided, I don’t hang out with chetos, I don’t like them, they give you the wiggins (with emphasis) when you’re with them, you feel you’re different, and you’re right, you’re different from them. They’re all phoney.)

Cumbia villera offers a racialised form of identification marked by the valorisation of what is stigmatised, transformed into a signifier of ‘coolness’: being a negro villero implies being able to party, to dance cumbia and to be authentic. What is more, through this transformation, a possible symbolic inversion of the social order is suggested. This inversion could indicate possible reasons for cumbia villera’s success amongst the villero sectors and, also, amongst sectors of the precariat youth for whom identification with dominant models of ­working-­class male identity was not possible due to the financial crisis. As in Bolivia, a crisis of masculinity, expressed in the inability to be a provider and participate in consumption, was crystallised through racial language. However, in this case, rather than the projection of racism on someone else hailed as n ­ on-­white, what takes places is the r­ e-­signification of ­non-­whiteness as a form of identification, precisely because the negros villeros are the racial subaltern. In Los Pibes Chorros’s ‘Negro soy’ (2003) (I’m Negro) the defiant inflection with which front man Ariel ‘El Traidor’ sings ‘mirá qué negro que soy / yo tomo vino en cartón’ (look how negro I’m / I drink cask wine) provides a good example of this revulsive gesture.58

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The fact that cumbia villera artists were able to appeal not just to audiences from the villas but also to other audiences from social milieus that, although not marginal, were suffering the effects of the economic and political crisis, can be related to this last aspect. In her ethnographic study of cumbia villera audiences, Cragnolini shows that many young people from impoverished sectors, who were not ­slum-­dwellers, started to identify themselves as villeros.59 This behaviour contrasts with previous generations of ­working-­class people for whom it was important to dissociate themselves from this stigmatised notion in order to be a ‘respectable’ person. The varieties of cultural capital mentioned above (negro, villero, cumbiero) are organised in an alternative conception of the world that inverts the relationships of domination by putting the subaltern in a superior position in relation to the dominant sectors, or, to use cumbia villera’s vernacular, the chetos. This superiority is clearly not social or economic but moral: the villero is ‘cool’ and authentic, not a fake. Furthermore, he is the embodiment of what is real: a real negro, a real cumbiero and, furthermore, a real man – which implies that the cheto is not a real one. Once more, there is an additional connection suggested between blacks and negros, since the villero identity adopts the stereotypical image of black men’s sexual prowess in comparison to whites. In their ethnographic study of villero youth, Fabián Flores and Adrián Outeda quote a 12-year old boy from the villa: ‘Somos negros villeros y eso no es una ofensa … No me molesta que me digan así … Somos negros, ¿y qué? Peor sería que me digan cheto, eso sí que son todos putos, eso sí que es una ofensa’ (We’re negros villeros and that isn’t an insult … I don’t mind being called like that … We’re negros, so what? It would be worse to be called cheto, they’re all poofs, that’s a true insult).60 The idea of the cheto as puto exposes the strategies through which villero discourse attempts to subvert the social order by claiming a racialised ­hetero-­normative masculinity that locates the villero in a superior position in relation to his emasculated white middle- and ­upper-­class counterpart. This idealised masculinity allows villeros not only to come to terms, at least symbolically, with racism and a socially disadvantaged situation, but also to deal with changing gender roles. The massive incorporation of ­working-­class women into the world of employment in the late 1990s, mainly in precarious jobs paid c­ ash-­in-­hand, was motivated by the need to compensate for male unemployment in

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the household.61 In a context of unfulfilled masculinity and marginalisation, the increasing protagonism of women in the economy brought about significant disruption to the gendered division of labour. Women’s perceived growing independence, both in the public and private sphere, is ­re-­signified in a way that allows men to keep – at least, symbolically – their dominant position. The objectification and degradation of women in cumbia villera lyrics can be read as a form of imaginary reconciliation with the structural changes in the politics of gender relations. This points towards another dimension of this alternative form of identification that attempts to organise and explain the social changes in the male youth precariat during Menemismo and the crisis. Therefore, in cumbia villera discourse, the villero is able to maintain a ­pre-­ eminent position ­vis-­à-­vis the progressive degradation of his real social situation and his incapacity to fulfil the dominant model of masculinity. Besides poetics, another aspect that is important to take into consideration, given that cumbia is, first and foremost, dance music, is dancing itself. The importance of the n ­ on-­ conceptual n ­ on-­ representational side of music can explain why, despite its misogynist overtones, cumbia villera was also successful amongst women. Compared with other styles of música tropical, cumbia villera is characterised by a regular, heavy beat produced by drum machines, a slow tempo, and low bass lines that produce a steady hypnotic rhythm more suitable for dancing to alone than in a couple. Instead of the repetition of established choreographed movements and steps in which communication and coordination with the dance partner are essential, cumbia villera allows a less regulated form of dance, in which each person can move without the need for much discipline. Thus, it offers women a more independent way of dancing, in the sense that they do not need to rely on a male partner to dance, as in other types of cumbia. In fact, many girls prefer to dance with their group of female friends.62 Female audiences can also ­re-­signify the model of femininity in cumbia villera lyrics, which basically consists of an easy woman who is eager to dance cumbia and have casual sex. This suggests another reason why the style is also popular among female audiences, as Silba and Spataro’s ethnographic study shows that many girls tended to reject the image of the submissive woman in traditional romantic cumbia and instead established certain connections with the sexually active

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woman described in cumbia villera.63 This appropriation also involved a transformative process, since it suggests an oppositional reading of cumbia villera’s misogyny: a woman who has an active sex life is not promiscuous but rather a person free to choose her own sexual practices and relationships. In this chapter, I have shown how cumbia villera replaced the neoliberal myth of class conviviality that was epitomised in the early 1990s cumbia boom with songs that signalled the social explosion of the crisis. I demonstrated that the controversy and success around cumbia villera cannot be dissociated from the mediation of race in the historical construction of the villero as a racial Other but, more importantly, from the racialisation of the contemporary young villero as part of his stigmatisation and criminalisation. These procedures were used to portray this sector as superfluous and justify its repression in a context of political turmoil in which the state aimed to deploy its punitive apparatuses to reconstitute its authority after the demonstrations of 2001–2. By appropriating and re-­ ­ signifying these stigmatised concepts, cumbia villera poetics created an ideal of masculinity that positioned the villero as symbolically superior to the chetos. I suggested that this alternative model of identity, in a context of the collapse of traditional forms of ­working-­class masculinity, might have been a reason why certain sectors of the disenfranchised male youth found cumbia villera appealing, although it is clear that this is not the only explanation for its success. In the aftermath of the crisis, cumbia villera’s rapid institutionalisation and the exhaustion of the genre’s formulaic conventions contributed to undermining its revulsive nature. However, its political potential cannot be disregarded completely when we consider that, in a country in which the racialisation of the poor has usually been sidelined, this process was brought to the fore in such a direct way. After all, the image of a contemporary icon of negro culture like Lescano singing ‘Himno a Sarmiento’ – a song that praises one of the key ideologists of the project of a white Argentina – could still be read as a subversive gesture, even if it was performed at a ­state-­sponsored event. Indeed, this also indicates the impact that a r­ e-­evaluation of race and nationness during the crisis had in the subsequent years, which I will discuss next in the Afterword.

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Afterword

It is hard to identify one aspect of Argentinian society that was left untouched by the crisis. The country that emerged from the dramatic events that took place at the turn of the ­twenty-­first century was drastically altered in every possible sense. However, from all these transformations, it is probably those that affected established notions of national identity and race that have been the most ­long-­lasting. At the moment in which this afterword is being written, we are witnessing the end of the ideological model that emerged in the aftermath of the crisis – a model embodied by twelve years of Kirchnerist government and associated national popular and ­neo-­developmentalist policies and rhetoric. The closure of this progressive cycle is parallel to the resurgence of the right, represented by the election of Macri as president in late 2015. Nonetheless, these current dynamics in Argentina do not just signal a political change that, to an extent, is also regional (as indicated by Michel Temer’s appointment as Brazil’s president, roughly around the same time as Macri’s victory). They can also be read as a response from certain social sectors to the ‘darkening’ of the nation. Indeed, the Kirchner years were marked by the increasing critique of whiteness as the only authorised modality of national belonging. In Claudia Briones’s words, during the 2000s ‘la lectura de “lo popular” como fruto de una temprana mezcla ­hispano-­indígena … aparece tomando el centro simbólico de la nación’ (the reading of “the popular” as a product of an earlier ­Hispanic-­indigenous mixture … appears as occupying the symbolic centre of the nation).1 Adamovsky states that, after 2008, the words morocho and rubio, which as seen combine class and racial meanings, started to be featured in Cristina Fernández’s speeches to characterise the political antagonism between Kirchnerists and a­ nti-­Kirchnerists.2 She described herself

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on a few occasions as la morocha argentina and many members of the government and the Peronist apparatus – like Domestic Trade Secretary Guillermo Moreno, or the secretary general of Argentina’s largest trade union federation, CGT, Hugo Moyano – presented themselves in public as morochos.3 As this study has shown, despite their ­class-­based foundations, these expressions are also mediated by race, demonstrating the complex relation between both forms of social identification. It would be a mistake, however, to see this as a reactualisation of Peronism’s traditional homogenising discourse, according to which the nation’s dynamics are reduced to the morochos (as contemporary cabecitas negras or grasitas), struggling against the elites. Official efforts to present Argentina as multicultural and plural were intensified in the Kirchner years. The official bicentennial celebrations of 25 May 1810 can be seen as a compelling example of this turn. The government emphasised the contrast between the 2010 festivities and those of 1910 as an indication of the new diverse conception of nationhood favoured by the government and large segments of society. The contribution of indigenous, ­ Afro-­ descendant and South American immigrants to Argentinian society was recognised and celebrated in massive public events. In fact, the main parade was headed by a dancer representing the nation who was deliberately chosen due to her mestizo features.4 Likewise, a view of Argentinian history that underscored the violence and marginalisation suffered by these groups, as well as by the d ­ ark-­ skinned working class, was prevalent during the commemorations. This exclusion, it was argued, had finally ended in Kirchnerist Argentina. Culture Secretary Jorge Coscia wrote on that occasion: En 1910, la elite dirigente autocelebraba su supuesta condición de nación blanca, homogénea, europeizada, relegando todo lo que pudiera tener un sabor local, criollo o indígena, a un segundo, tercer plano … (E)ste Gobierno no consagra una única manera de ser nacionales, como se hizo hace cien años … Nosotros festejamos la diversidad como nuestra especificidad más valiosa.5 (In 1910, the ruling elite celebrated its supposed standing as a white, homogeneous, Europeanised nation, relegating anything that could have a local flavour, criollo or indigenous, to a second or third plane … (T)his Government does not recognise one sole way of being nationals like it was done a hundred years ago … We celebrate diversity as our most valuable characteristic.)

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In this move towards more heterogeneous understandings of Argentinianness, it is of course possible to identify the impact of multicultural agendas and discourses prevalent in other parts of the world, particularly in other Latin American countries that, in the early years of the ­twenty-­first century, were also ruled by progressive governments. Furthermore, this redefinition of Argentina as a multicultural society also illustrates the strengthening of indigenous and immigrant organisations – and, to a lesser degree, ­Afro-­descendant groups – in the past decades. At the same time, the public interrogation of racial formation in p ­ ost-­crisis Argentina cannot be solely explained by the impact of these processes and discourses. It would be difficult to understand the degree of popular response to these alternate modes of nationality – illustrated, among others, by the record attendance at the bicentennial events – without considering the impact of the crisis in challenging the idea of a white Europeanised Argentina. More specifically, it could be said that Kirchnerist appropriation of these critical discourses was also shaped by the strength with which they circulated in society in the 2000s. This move by the state towards less P ­ orteño-­centric and more plural representations of the nation has not been exempt from controversies. The chief conflict has evolved around the consolidation of extractive activities that have and are affecting the habitat and ­well-­being of indigenous and local communities. As Svampa explains, n ­eo-­ extractivism represents a new logic of accumulation grounded in the o ­ver-­ exploitation of natural resources – most of which are n ­ on-­renewable – along with the expansion of the economic frontier to territories previously seen as unproductive.6 This economic strategy forms part of a regional trend, as similar dynamics have been taking place in other countries in Latin America in past years. Pressure from logging, farming, oil and mining companies, in complicity with provincial authorities and, at times, the indifference – if not, the consent – of the national government have forced many Amerindian groups out of their ancestral lands despite laws being in place that should guarantee their rights to these territories. Many constitutional and legislative mechanisms intended to recognise and ensure indigenous communities’ rights continued to be infringed in the aftermath of the crisis. Parallel to the official celebrations of the Bicentennial, a series of events and protests took place in downtown Buenos Aires

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organised by indigenous movements that impugned what they saw as the government’s opportunistic and propagandistic usage of multiculturalism. In fact, the ambivalent position of the Kirchners divided indigenous movements. It evidences the complex negotiations in which the state engaged to harmonise popular demand to revise models of national identity and race with established local and transnational political and economic interests. In this regard, if the crisis brought about fundamental changes in the definitions of racial and national identity in Argentina, it is important not to overestimate the capacity of these factors to overturn existing power structures altogether. Although the reasons for Macri’s election as president in 2015 are both complex and multiple, they partly indicate that some sectors of society still preferred more restrictive – and whiter – definitions of Argentinianness. They also suggest disenchantment with the Kirchners’ experiments with multiculturalism. As a presidential candidate, Macri was quick to expose some of the failings of Kirchnerismo in this area, as illustrated by his meeting with indigenous Qom activists belonging to the Potae Napocná Navogoh (La Primavera) community who were camping in Buenos Aires to protest of usurpations of their ancestral  land in northeastern Argentina. This was a common strategy among opposing politicians and the media during the last years of Cristina Fernández’s government. Once inaugurated as president, Macri met with several indigenous leaders. Afterwards, he posted on his Twitter account: ‘Para este gobierno, el reconocimiento de las comunidades indígenas y las políticas hacia los pueblos originarios son políticas de Estado’ (For this government, the recognition of indigenous communities and policies towards these populations are state policy). However, the first year of his government has seen an accentuation of the ­neo-­extractivist model (one of Macri’s first measures as president was the elimination by decree of mining taxes), which constitutes, as previously stated, the principal focus of conflict between indigenous groups and the state and the economic establishment. His strategy of stigmatisation of South American immigrants, already in place when he was mayor of Buenos Aires – and exemplified in his response to the occupation of the vacant lands in the Indoamericano Park by Bolivian and Peruvian families in December 2010 – has continued after his appointment as head of state. The introduction of tougher immigration regulations in

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January 2017 illustrates the return of racialising ­anti-­immigrant discourses to the centre stage in ways that resemble the 1990s. Many critical activists, intellectuals and politicians have in fact seen in Macri’s coming to power a return to the Menem era. However, the manners in which Argentinian society has been transformed in the past two decades as a result of the crisis and the experience of Kirchnerismo does not invite easy parallelisms between current and earlier conservative schemes. It looks likely that social movements and sectors of the Argentinian working class and the progressive middle class will put limits on not only a dramatic r­ e-­engineering of social life as the one carried out during the 1990s but also a regression to more exclusive and limited understandings of national identity. In this book, I have undertaken the analysis of multiple cultural expressions produced during the crisis, to demonstrate how cultural production also influenced this reassessment of nationality and racial identity. Although narratives of whiteness have been enormously influential in definitions of Argentinianness throughout the twentieth century, they have usually remained absent from public discourses. They have rarely come to the fore, except at times of grave social discontent. I have shown that the crisis represented one of these rare episodes in which the underlying racial tensions in Argentina were stripped of the invisibility and the silence that have historically surrounded them. In this regard, the cultural products examined here have exposed the normative mediation of whiteness and revealed its embeddedness in ‘­race-­ less’ concepts such as Europeanness, civilisation and, particularly, ­middle-­classness. In doing so, it was possible to see how these indirect manifestations of whiteness facilitate and mask racial domination. The centrality of the middle class in the definitions and representations of Argentina as white justified the decision to focus the critical enquiry mainly on the reactions of this social sector to the impact of the crisis, as well as their strategies to deal with it. Therefore, my reading was structured primarily around a white ­middle-­class audience/readership, even if on some occasions I considered more than one possible interpretation of certain cultural products. As I stated in the Introduction to this book, these cultural products were selected precisely because they represented a critique from ‘within’. This criticism could at times produce

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progressive effects, as exemplified by Copacabana or La conquista del desierto. On other occasions (exemplified by Huellas), they could also be caught up in a series of problems that limited the scope of their critique. In this regard, contemplating other possible readings that are not necessarily white­/middle-­class could help to expand the findings of this investigation. The destabilisation of the dominant construction of Argentina as a Europeanised and racially uniform country principally affected m ­ iddle-­class people but this does not mean that they were the only ones to experience the crisis in terms of race and nationness. It would be interesting to expand current research on the response of these subaltern sectors to notions of whiteness and ­non-­whiteness and the ways they position themselves regarding these categories. Due to the diversity of racialised subjectivities (white, indigenous, ­Afro-­descendant, negro, immigrant) and the fact that at times they can overlap, the analysis of diverse forms of reception could enrich the results of this study. For example, a negra may consider herself as being white when in the company of an immigrant, thus unwittingly reinforcing the discourse of Argentina as racially homogeneous. Furthermore, subordinated groups have intensified their open critiques of race, which does not only take place on the political sphere, but also in the cultural domain. One of the ways in which I attempted to illustrate this was by analysing cumbia villera. I have shown that this style of music was appropriated and used not only by the villero youth it allegedly represents but also by ­working-­class audiences. These people willingly adopted a stigmatised negro identity in the context of financial decline, as a strategy to deal with their own disenfranchisement. In all cases, the centrality of these grassroots ­counter-­discourses of nationness and race cannot be reduced to a mere effect of Kirchnerist empowerment. That the critique of narratives of racial homogeneity was expressed through an array of discourses that involved many forms of racial identities implied that it was not always possible to identify analytical associations between all these cultural products. Their heterogeneity defied easy forms of standardisation. As a matter of fact, these discourses are neither part of a programmatic movement nor a reflection a particular political tendency (except perhaps GAC). The reluctance to combine artistic expression with c­ ounter-­ politics might seem, a priori, to be a limitation of the cultural products analysed, at least in the sense that they could be seen as

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less representative of the social processes and the civil mobilisation of the time. However, I have demonstrated that this perceived ­a-­politicisation did not imply a lack of critical engagement with ongoing social transformations. Actually, the fact that these cultural products did not just focus on specific processes – such as the currency devaluation or the 19 and 20 December protests – allowed these artistic expressions to avoid the dead end that many of the politicised art practitioners encountered when the crisis concluded and they were faced with the dilemma of whether or not to align themselves with Kirchnerismo. Consequently, the analysis of examples from literature, film, art and popular music contributed to the identification of a series of profound ­ long-­ term cultural developments underlying the crisis, which were related to issues of nationness and race. As can be seen, the consequences of these developments have profoundly shaped the recent demand for alternative conceptions of Argentinianness. The present social and political developments and the legacies of the Kirchner years show the importance of producing scholarly work on race that can address the multifaceted situations that emerged from the crisis and developed in the past years. Academic studies on race in Argentina are moving away from traditional foci that were reluctant to use race as an analytical category, incorporating new perspectives and approaches. On that basis, a recommendation for future research could be to integrate the findings of this book with those from works that look at other areas of racial politics in recent and contemporary Argentina. Through this convergence, it would be possible to assess how these different issues have helped to shape present changes in racial discourses in Argentina. Another possible line of future investigation could consider not just the way in which race affects one particular group. It could also contemplate, as this study has attempted to do, Argentina’s multiple racial identities, taking into account how groups are subject to transformation and can, at times, be racialised and ­de-­racialised. The cultural products analysed in this book have expressed simultaneously yet uncoordinatedly the need to interrogate historical narratives of whiteness and racial homogeneity during the crisis. The power of their critique might have not always been refined or sufficient to undermine the foundations of racial domination. However, by highlighting the distance between narratives of race and a social reality of difference and exclusion,

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these cultural expressions were able to open up spaces where voices of dissent were expressed as part of a general attempt to revise the ways in which whiteness has been written in the script of national belonging.

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Notes

Introduction  1 La Nación, ‘Argentina es África’, 15 January 2016, p. 18.   2 Paul Theroux, The Old Patagonian Express: By Train Through the Americas (New York: Mariner Books, 1997), p. 349.   3 Loreley Gafoglio, ‘Beatriz Sarlo, desde el límite’, La Nación, 26 May 2002: http://www.lanacion.com.ar/222161–­beatriz-­sarlo-­desde-­el-­limite (accessed 9 March 2016).   4 Manuel Fernández López, ‘Africanización’, Página/12, 30 June 2002: http://www.pagina12.com.ar/diario/suplementos/cash/2–247–2002– 06–30.html (accessed 9 March 2016).  5 Alfredo Serra, ‘Marcos Aguinis: “Si no luchamos por una utopía, terminaremos como un pobre país africano”’, Gente, 23 April 2002: http://www.gente.com.ar/nota.php?ID=2901 (accessed 9 March 2016).   6 Loïc Wacquant, ‘Three Steps to a Historical Anthropology of Actually Existing Neoliberalism’, Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociales, 20 (2012), 66–79.   7 See Wacquant, ‘Crafting the Neoliberal State: Workfare, Prisonfare, and Social Insecurity’, Sociological Forum, 25:2 (2010), 197–220.   8 Indec, ‘Mercado de trabajo: principales indicadores de los aglomerados urbanos según la EPH puntual’, 25 July 2002, p. 1; Indec, ‘Incidencia de la pobreza y de la indigencia en los aglomerados urbanos’, 31 January 2003, p. 1.   9 Cara Levey, Daniel Ozarow and Christopher Wylde, ‘Revisiting the Argentine Crisis a Decade on: Changes and Continuities’, in Levey, Ozarow and Wylde (eds), Argentina since the 2001 Crisis: Recovering the Past, Reclaiming the Future (New York, NY: Palgrave, 2014), pp. 1–18 (p. 9). 10 Fredric Jameson, ‘“End of Art” or “End of History”?’, in The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern, 1983–1998 (New York: Verso, 2009), pp. 73–92. 11 Tulio Halperin Donghi, El espejo de la historia. Problemas argentinos y perspectivas hispanoamericanas (Buenos Aires: Editorial Sudamericana,

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1987), pp. 189–238; José Luis Romero, Las ideas políticas en Argentina (Buenos Aires: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1975), pp. 167–226; Eduardo Archetti, Masculinities: Football, Polo, and the Tango in Argentina (Oxford/New York: Berg Publishers, 1999), pp. 1–20; Mónica Quijada, ‘Imaginando la homogeneidad. La alquimia de la tierra’, in Homogeneidad y nación con un estudio de caso: Argentina, siglos XIX y XX, by Quijada, Carmen Bernand and Arnd Schneider (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 2000), pp. 179–217. 12 Claudia Briones, ‘Formaciones de alteridad: contextos globales, procesos nacionales y provinciales’, in Cartografías argentinas. Políticas indígenas y formaciones provinciales de alteridad, comp. by Briones (Buenos Aires: Antropofagia, 2005), pp. 11–43 (p. 15); Rita Laura Segato, Alteridades históricas/Identidades políticas: una crítica a las certezas del pluralismo global (Brasilia: Universidade de Brasilia, 1998), p. 51. 13 See Ronald Stutzman, ‘El Mestizaje: An A ­ ll-­ Inclusive Ideology of Exclusion’, in Norman E. Whitten, Jr (ed.), Cultural Transformations and Ethnicity in Modern Ecuador (Urbana/ London: University of Illinois Press, 1981), pp. 45–94. 14 Quoted in Mara Loveman, National Colors: Racial Classification and the State in Latin America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), pp. 192–3. 15 Halperin Donghi, Una nación para el desierto argentino (Buenos Aires: Prometeo, 2005), p. 31; Proyecto y construcción de una nación (1846– 1880) (Buenos Aires: Ariel Historia, 1995), p. 7. 16 See Ezequiel Adamovsky, Historia de la clase media argentina. Apogeo y decadencia de una ilusión, 1919–2003 (Buenos Aires: Planeta, 2009), p. 43; Schneider, ‘Inmigrantes europeos y de otros orígenes’, in Homogeneidad y nación, pp. 141–78 (p. 171); Maristella Svampa, La sociedad excluyente. La Argentina bajo el signo del neoliberalismo (Buenos Aires: Aguilar, Altea, Taurus, Alfaguara, 2005), p. 47. 17 Alejandro Grimson, ‘La nación después del (de)constructivismo. La experiencia argentina y sus fantasmas’, in La cultura de las crisis latinoamericanas, comp. by Grimson (Buenos Aires: CLACSO, 2004), pp. 177–93 (pp. 187–8). 18 Flavia Fiorucci, ‘Fascinated by Failure: The “Bestseller” Explanations of the Crisis’, in Fiorucci and Marcus Klein (eds), The Argentine Crisis at the Turn of the Millennium (Amsterdam: Aksant, 2004), pp. 150–72. 19 Emanuela Guano, ‘Spectacles of Modernity: Transnational Imagination and Local Hegemonies in Neoliberal Buenos Aires’, Cultural Anthropology, 17:2 (2002), 181–209; Guano, ‘The Denial of Citizenship: “Barbaric” Buenos Aires and the ­Middle-­Class Imaginary’, City & Society, 16:1 (2004), 69–97; Guano, ‘A Color for the Modern Nation: The Discourse on Class, Race, and Education in the Porteño Middle Class’, Journal of Latin American Anthropology, 8:1 (2003),

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148–71; Galen Joseph, ‘Taking Race Seriously: Whiteness in Argentina’s National and Transnational Imaginary’, Identities, 7:3 (2000), 333–71. 20 María Carman, ‘La invención de la etnicidad y el desalojo de ocupantes ilegales en el barrio del Abasto de Buenos Aires’, Intersecciones en Antropología, 7 (2006), 387–98; Mónica Lacarrieu, ‘“. . . De todos lados y de ningún lado …”: visibles/visibilizados e invisibles/invisibilizados en busca de un lugar en la Buenos Aires del siglo XXI’, Kairos, 11 (2002): http://www.quadernsdigitals.net/datos/hemeroteca/r_39/nr_563/ a_7834/7834.pdf (accessed 28 August 2016); Gerardo Halpern, ‘Neoliberalismo y migración: paraguayos en Argentina en los noventa’, Política y Cultura, 23 (2005), 67–82; Grimson, ‘Nuevas xenofobias, nuevas políticas étnicas en la Argentina’, in Grimson and Elizabeth Jelin (eds), Migraciones regionales hacia la Argentina (Buenos Aires: Prometeo, 2006), pp. 69–99. 21 David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on Racial Neoliberalism (Malden, MA: ­Wiley-­Blackwell, 2009), p. 225. 22 Indec, ‘Población extranjera empadronada en el país por lugar de nacimiento, según sexo y grupos de edad. Año 2001’, Censo 2001: http://www.indec.gov.ar/censo2001s2/ampliada_index.asp?mode=01 (accessed 13 March 2016). 23 Grimson, ‘Nuevas xenofobias’, pp. 69–99. 24 Grimson, ‘Nuevas xenofobias’, p. 80; Alicia Maguid, ‘Migrantes limítrofes en el mercado de trabajo del área metropolitana de Buenos Aires, 1980–1996’, Estudios Migratorios Latinoamericanos, 35 (1997), 31–62. 25 Claudio Iván Remeseira, ‘Más americanos que nunca’, La Nación, 30 January 2000: http://www.lanacion.com.ar/209631–­mas-­americanos-­que-­ nunca (accessed 18 June 2016). 26 Gastón Gordillo, ‘The Savage Outside of White Argentina’, in Paulina Alberto and Eduardo Elena (eds), Rethinking Race in Modern Argentina (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), pp. 241–67 (p. 243). 27 These attitudes changed in the 2010s, partly due to the expansion of Chinese retail supermarkets. Media campaigns linking the Chinese community with organised crime were common between 2011 and 2013. See for example: ‘“No hay dudas de que existe una mafia china”’, Ámbito Financiero, 10 May 2013: http://www.ambito.com/noticia.asp?id= 687717 (accessed 20 June 2016). 28 Teresa Ko, ‘Between Foreigners and Heroes: A ­ sian-­Argentines in a Newly Multicultural Nation’, in Rethinking Race in Modern Argentina, pp. 268–88. 29 In peripheral societies of Argentinian Patagonia, the racial status of Chileans is more complex and tends to be connected with Mapuche culture. Nonetheless, the impact of this at a national level is minor. See

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Laura Kropff, ‘Indios, chilotes y vecinos en una ciudad patagónica’, Cuadernos de antropología social, 16 (2002): http://www.scielo.org.ar/scielo. php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S1850–275X2002000200005 (accessed 20 June 2016); Indec, ‘Población extranjera’; Carolina Stefoni, ‘Los movimientos migratorios como nuevos agentes de integración. El caso ­Chile-­Argentina’, in Mario Artaza Rouxel and Paz Milet García (eds), Nuestros vecinos (Santiago de Chile: RIL Editores, 2007), pp. 69–82 (p. 72). 30 See Alejandro Frigerio, ‘La expansión de religiones afrobrasileñas en Argentina: representaciones conflictivas de cultura, raza y nación en un contexto de integración regional’, Archives de Sciences Sociales des Religions, 117 (2002), 127–50. 31 Wacquant, ‘A J­anus-­ Faced Institution of Ethnoracial Closure: A Sociological Specification of the Ghetto’, in Ray Hutchison and Bruce D. Haynes (eds), The Ghetto: Contemporary Global Issues and Controversies (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2012), pp. 1–32. 32 Hugo Ratier, El cabecita negra (Buenos Aires: Centro Editor de América Latina, 1971); Ratier, Villeros y villas miseria (Buenos Aires: Centro Editor de América Latina, 1972); Mario Margulis, Migración y marginalidad en la sociedad argentina (Buenos Aires: Paidós, 1968). 33 María Cristina Cravino, Juan Pablo del Río and Juan Ignacio Duarte, ‘Magnitud y crecimiento de las villas y asentamientos en el Área Metropolitana de Buenos Aires en los últimos 25 años’, paper presented at the XIV Encuentro de la Red Universitaria Latinoamericana de Cátedras de Vivienda, Facultad de Arquitectura, Urbanismo y Diseño, Universidad de Buenos Aires, 1–4 October 2008: www.fadu.uba.ar/mail/ difusion_extension/090206_pon.pdf (accessed 5 March 2016). 34 Cravino, del Río, and Duarte, ‘Magnitud y crecimiento de las villas’ (accessed 5 March 2016). 35 Javier Auyero, ‘The ­Hyper-­Shantytown: ­Neo-­liberal Violence(s) in the Argentine Slum’, Ethnography, 1:1 (2000), 93–116 (pp. 98–9); Auyero, ‘Wacquant in the Argentine Slums: Comment on Wacquant’s “Three Pernicious Premises in the Study of the American Ghetto”’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 21:3, (1997), 508–11. 36 See, for example, Adrián Gorelik, ‘Buenos Aires is (Latin) America, Too’, in Rebecca E. Biron (ed.), City/Art: The Urban Scene in Latin America (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), pp. 61–84 (p. 64). 37 Guano, ‘Spectacles of Modernity’, p. 184. 38 Will Kymlicka, ‘Neoliberal Multiculturalism?’, in Peter A. Hall and Michèle Lamont (eds), Social Resilience in the Neoliberal Era (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 99–126. 39 Briones, (Meta)cultura del e­ stado-­nación y estado de la (meta)cultura: repensando las identidades indígenas y antropológicas en tiempos de ­post-­estatalidad

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(Brasilia: Universidade de Brasilia, 1998); Peter Wade, Race and Ethnicity in Latin America (London: Pluto Press, 1997), pp. 112–50; Rachel Sieder, ‘Introduction’, in Sieder (ed.), Multiculturalism in Latin America: Indigenous Rights, Diversity and Democracy (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), pp. 1–23; Arturo Escobar, Territories of Difference: Place, Movements, Life (Durham, NC/London: Duke University Press, 2008), pp. 209–16. 40 Edward Fischer, ‘Indigenous Peoples, ­ Neo-­ liberal Regimes, and Varieties of Civil Society in Latin America’, Social Analysis, 51:2 (2009), 1–18; Charles Hale and Rosamel Millamán, ‘Cultural Agency  and Political Struggle in the Era of the  “Indio Permitido”’, in Doris Sommer (ed.), Cultural Agency in the Americas (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), pp. 281–304 (p. 284). 41 Carman, ‘La invención de la etnicidad’, pp. 387–98 (p. 393); Tianna S. Paschel and Mark Q. Sawyer, ‘Contesting Politics as Usual: Black Social Movements, Globalization, and Race Policy in Latin America’, Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society, 10:3 (2008), 197–214. 42 ‘Ciudad Abierta: La guía total de Buenos Aires’, Secretaría de Cultura, Gobierno de Buenos Aires, 1 (2001), p. 41. Quoted in Lacarrieu, ‘“. . . De todos lados y de ningún lado …”’. 43 Étienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities, trans. of Balibar by Chris Turner (London: Verso, 1991).

1: Neoliberalism and its crisis   1 Regarding the real depletion of ISI, Eduardo Basualdo argues that industrial capacity was far from exhausted and the instability produced by the cycles of expansion and contraction of previous years had been left behind. Juan Graña criticises this view as it seems to sideline changes in the wider international context and their impact on Argentina. See Basualdo, Estudios de historia económica argentina. Desde mediados del siglo xx a la actualidad (Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI Editores, 2013), pp. 115–16, and Graña, ‘Potencialidades y límites de la Industrialización Sustitutiva Argentina (1935–1975). Análisis desde una perspectiva actual y mundial’, Ensayos de Economía, 23:43 (2013), 63–91.  2 Svampa, La sociedad excluyente, pp. 21–2.  3 Svampa, La sociedad excluyente, pp. 21–2.   4 Miguel Teubal, ‘Rise and Collapse of Neoliberalism in Argentina: The Role of Economic Groups’, Journal of Developing Societies, 20 (2004), 173–88.

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 5 Carlos Menem, ‘Discurso al Congreso de la Nación por la Ley de Reforma del Estado’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WU4MNWESmIs (accessed 10 March 2017).   6 Ziya Önis, ‘Varieties and Crises of Neoliberal Globalisation: Argentina, Turkey and the IMF’, Third World Quarterly, 27:2 (2006), 239–63 (p. 244); World Bank, ‘Indicators’: http://data.worldbank.org/indicator (accessed 9 March 2016).   7 Levey et al., ‘Revisiting the Argentine Crisis’, p. 3; Ariel C. Armony and Victor Armony, ‘Indictments, Myths, and Citizen Mobilization in Argentina: A Discourse Analysis’, Latin American Politics and Society, 47:4 (2005), 27–54.  8 Clik, 3:12 (2008), p. 1.   9 Adriana Schettini, Ver para creer. Televisión y política en la Argentina de los 90 (Buenos Aires: Editorial Sudamericana, 2000), p. 17. See also Oscar Landi, ‘Pantallas, culturas y política’, in Guillermo Orozco Gómez (ed.), Miradas latinoamericanas a la televisión (México: Universidad Iberoamericana, A.C., 1996), pp. 33–59. 10 Hugo Hortiguera, ‘Entre palabras: partes privadas, silencios y cuerpos ocultos en la narrativa argentina de los ’90. El caso Federico Andahazi’, CiberLetras. Revista de crítica literaria y de cultura, 6 (2002): http://www. lehman.cuny.edu/ciberletras/v06/hortiguera.html (accessed 27 June 2016). 11 Beatriz Sarlo, ‘Argentina under Menem:  The Aesthetics of Domination’, NACLA Report on the Americas, 28:2 (1994), 33–7. 12 Colin M. Lewis, Argentina: A Short Story (Oxford: Oneworld Publications, 2002), p. 167. 13 Marisa Duarte, ‘Los impactos de las privatizaciones sobre el mercado de trabajo: desocupación y creciente precarización laboral’, in Privatizaciones y poder ecónomico, comp. by Daniel Azpiazu (Buenos Aires: UNQui, Flacos, IDEF, 2002), pp. 69–90 (p. 75). 14 Silvia London and Mara Rojas, ‘El fenómeno de la desigualdad en Argentina’, in Elvio Accinelli and Osvaldo Salas (eds), Crecimiento y distribución del ingreso en América Latina (Mexico: Göteborgs universitet, Universidad de la República, Universidad Autónoma de San Luis Potosí, 2010), pp. 119–42 (p. 137); Daniel Kotzer, Bárbara Perrot and Soledad Villafañe, Distribución del ingreso, pobreza y crecimiento en Argentina (Buenos Aires: Subsecretaría de Programación Técnica y Estudios Laborales, Ministerio de Trabajo, Empleo y Seguridad, 2004), p. 144; World Bank, ‘Indicators’ (accessed 9 March 2016). 15 London and Rojas, ‘El fenómeno de la desigualdad en Argentina’, p. 137; Kotzer, Perrot and Villafañe, Distribución del ingreso, p. 144; World Bank, ‘Indicators’ (accessed 9 March 2016). 16 Basualdo, Estudios, p. 330. 17 Önis, ‘Varieties and Crises of Neoliberal Globalisation’, p. 245.

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18 Marcelo Escolar, Ernesto Calvo, Natalia Calcagno and Sandra Minvielle, ‘Últimas imágenes antes del naufragio: las elecciones del 2001 en la Argentina’, Desarrollo Económico, 42:165 (2002), 25–44 (p. 27). 19 Ignacio García, ‘La economía solidaria y los movimientos piqueteros en la Argentina’, Canadian Social Economy Hub: http://socialeconomyhub. ca/sites/socialeconomyhub.ca/files/CIREIC/Papers/C1 per cent20- per cent20Garcia.pdf (accessed 7 March 2016). 20 García, ‘La economía solidaria’ (accessed 7 March 2016). 21 Armony and Armony, ‘Indictments’. 22 Lewis, ‘Foreword’, in Argentina since the 2001 Crisis, pp. xiii–xvii (p. xv). 23 Indec, ‘Informe del avance del nivel de actividad’, 19 September 2002, p. 2. 24 Indec, ‘Incidencia de la pobreza y de la indigencia en los aglomerados urbanos’, 31 January 2003, p. 1. 25 Roberta Villalón, ‘Neoliberalism, Corruption, and Legacies of Contention: Argentina’s Social Movements, 1993–2006’, Latin American Perspectives, 34:139 (2007), 139–56 (p. 150). 26 ‘La economía creció por primera vez en más de cuatro años’, Clarín, 20 June 2003: http://old.clarin.com/diario/2003/06/20/e-01801.htm (accessed 9 March 2016). 27 Néstor Kirchner, ‘Discurso de Néstor Carlos Kirchner ante la Asamblea Legislativa al asumir como presidente de la Nación en 2003’, Educ.ar.: http://archivohistorico.educ.ar/sites/default/files/x_04.pdf (accessed 9 March 2016). 28 Svampa, La sociedad excluyente, pp. 256–7. 29 CEPAL, ‘Estudio económico de América Latina y el Caribe: Argentina’ (2010): http://www.cepal.org/publicaciones/xml/1/43991­/EEE-­Argentina. pdf (accessed 9 March 2016). 30 CEPAL, ‘Estudio económico’ (accessed 9 March 2016). 31 Indec, ‘Indicadores demográficos de ocupación e ingresos de los hogares, según condición de pobreza. Segundo semestre 2005’: http:// www.indec.gob.ar/nuevaweb/cuadros/hogares_pobreza_continua.xls (accessed 9 March 2016); World Bank, ‘Indicators’ (accessed 9 March 2016).

2: The historical construction of whiteness in Argentina   1 Wade, ‘The Presence and Absence of Race’, Patterns of Prejudice, 44:1 (2010), 43–60.  2 Wade, Race and Ethnicity, p. 13.   3 Wacquant, ‘For an Analytic of Racial Domination’, in Diane E. Davis (ed.), Political Power and Social Theory 11 (Bingley: Emerald Group

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Publishing Ltd, 1997), pp. 221–34 (p. 228); Goldberg and John Solomos, ‘General Introduction’, in Goldberg and Solomos (eds), A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies (Malden, MA/London: Blackwell Publishers Ltd, 2002), pp. 1–12; Wade, Race, Nature and Culture: An Anthropological Perspective (London: Pluto Press, 2002), pp. 1–16; Wade, Race and Ethnicity, pp. 4–14.   4 Frederick Cooper with Rogers Brubaker, ‘Identity’, in Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History (Berkeley/Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 2005), pp. 59–90.  5 Wade, Race and Ethnicity, p. 4–14.   6 Wacquant, ‘For an Analytic’, p. 222.  7 Adamovsky, ‘A Strange Emblem for a (Not So) White Nation: La Morocha Argentina in the Latin American Racial Context, c. 1900– 2015’, Journal of Social History (2016), 1–25 (p. 13).  8 Alberto and Elena, ‘Introduction: The Shades of the Nation’, in Rethinking Race in Modern Argentina, pp.  1–22 (p.  5); Gabriela Nouzeilles,  Ficciones somáticas: naturalismo, nacionalismo y políticas médicas del cuerpo (Argentina 1880–1910) (Rosario: Beatriz Viterbo Editora, 2000), p. 18; Hans Vogel, ‘New Citizens for a New Nation: Naturalization in Early Independent Argentina’, The Hispanic American Historical Review, 71:1 (1991), 107–31.  9 Anne Macpherson, Karin Rosemblatt, and Nancy Appelbaum, ‘Introduction: Racial Nations’, in Macpherson, Rosemblatt and Appelbaum (eds), Race and Nation in Modern Latin America (Chapel Hill/London: University of North Carolina Press,  2003), pp. 1–31 (p. 4). 10 Quijada, ‘Imaginando la homogeneidad’, in Homogeneidad y nación, pp. 179–213. 11 Domingo F. Sarmiento, Argirópolis (Buenos Aires: ­A-­Z Editora, 1994), pp. 71– 2; Juan Bautista Alberdi, Bases y puntos de partida para la organización política de la República Argentina (Buenos Aires: Editorial Losada, 2003), pp. 100–8. 12 It is worth noting that this article has remained untouched despite seven constitutional reforms, the latest undertaken in 1994. 13 Nouzeilles, Ficciones somáticas, p. 19; Alberto and Elena, ‘Introduction’, pp. 6–7; Quijada, ‘Imaginando’. 14 Ley de Inmigración y Colonización de la República Argentina, sancionada por el Congreso Nacional de 1876 (Buenos Aires: M. Biedma, 1881). 15 Richard Graham, ‘Introduction’, in Graham (ed.), The Idea of Race in Latin America, 1870–1940 (Austin: University of Texas Press,  1990), pp. 1–5; Macpherson, Rosemblatt, and Appelbaum, ‘Introduction: Racial Nations’; Wade, Race and Ethnicity, pp. 31–2, 72–5; Nancy Stepan, The Hour of Eugenics: Race, Gender, and Nation in Latin America (Ithaca, NY/London: Cornell University Press, 1991), pp. 71–81.

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16 Ezequiel Texidó, Perfil migratorio de Argentina (Buenos Aires: Organización Internacional para las Migraciones, 2008), p. 7. 17 Jonathan C. Brown, A Brief History of Argentina (New York, NY: Facts On File, 2010), p. 148. 18 Quijada, ‘Introducción’, in Homogeneidad y nación, pp. 7–15 (p. 11). 19 Oscar Chamosa, ‘Indigenous or Criollo: The Myth of White Argentina in Tucumán’s Calchaquí Valley’, Hispanic American Historical Review, 88:1(2008), 71–106 (p. 77). 20 Quijada, ‘Indígenas: Violencia, tierras y ciudadanía’, in Homogeneidad y nación, pp. 57–92 (p. 82). 21 Gordillo and Silvia Hirsch, ‘Indigenous Struggles and Contested Identities in Argentina: Histories of Invisibilization and Reemergence’, The Journal of Latin American Anthropology, 8:3 (2003), 4–30 (p. 11). 22 Please see Briones, ‘Construcciones de aboriginalidad en Argentina’, Société suisse des Américanistes/Schweizerische A ­ merikanisten-­Gesellschaft, 68 (2004), 73–90; Briones, ‘La nación Argentina de cien en cien: de criollos a blancos y de blancos a mestizos’, in Nación y diversidad: territorios, identidades y federalismo, comp. by José Nún and Grimson (Buenos Aires: Edhasa, Secretaría de Cultura de la Presidencia de la Nación, 2008), pp. 35–61; Segato, ‘Los cauces profundos de la raza latinoamericana: una relectura del mestizaje, Crítica y emancipación, 2:3 (2010), 11–44; Grimson, ‘Nuevas xenofobias’. 23 Chamosa, ‘Indigenous or Criollo’, p. 77. 24 Chamosa, ‘Indigenous or Criollo’, pp. 79–81. 25 Chamosa, ‘Indigenous or Criollo’, p. 80. 26 George Reid Andrews, Los Afroargentinos de Buenos Aires (Buenos Aires: Ediciones de la Flor, 1989); Frigerio, Cultura negra en el Cono Sur: representaciones en conflicto (Buenos Aires: EDUCA, 2000); Frigerio, ‘De la “desaparición” de los negros a la “reaparición” de los afrodescendientes: Comprendiendo la política de las identidades negras, las clasificaciones raciales y de su estudio en la Argentina’, in Los estudios afroamericanos y africanos en América latina: herencia, presencia y visiones del otro, comp. by Gladys Lechini (Buenos Aires: CLACSO, 2008), pp. 117–44; Frigerio, ‘“Negros” y “Blancos” en Buenos Aires: repensando nuestras categorías raciales’, in Temas de Patrimonio Cultural 16: Buenos Aires negra. Identidad y cultura, comp. by Leticia Maronese (Buenos Aires: Comisión para la Preservación del Patrimonio Histórico Cultural de la Ciudad de Buenos Aires, 2006), pp. 77–98; Marvin A. Lewis, A ­ fro-­Argentine Discourse: Another Dimension of the Black Diaspora (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1996); Alejandro Solomianski, Identidades secretas: la negritud argentina (Rosario: Beatriz Viterbo, 2003); Florencia Guzmán, ‘Buenos Aires y el Tucumán: los contrastes regionales del legado africano colonial’, in Temas de Patrimonio Cultural 16, pp. 237–54 (p. 242).

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27 Fernanda Peñaloza, ‘Mapping Constructions of Blackness in Argentina’, Indiana, 24 (2007), 211–34 (p. 217). 28 He only found evidence of two black platoons fighting in the Triple Alliance War. In the case of the Yellow Fever Epidemic, he argues that of the 17,729 victims whose race had been specified, only 268 were ­Afro-­descendants. In Reid Andrews, Los Afroargentinos, pp. 92–102. 29 Reid Andrews, Los Afroargentinos, pp. 84, 87. 30 Reid Andrews, Los Afroargentinos, p. 66. 31 See Jorge Salessi, Médicos maleantes y maricas (Rosario: Beatriz Viterbo Editora, 2000), especially pp. 115–27; Stepan, The Hour of Eugenics, p. 58. 32 Texidó, Perfil migratorio de Argentina, p. 7. 33 See Oscar Terán, América Latina, positivismo y nación (Mexico: Editorial Katún, 1983). 34 See David Viñas, Literatura y realidad política:  De Sarmiento a Cortázar (Buenos Aires: Ediciones Siglo Veinte, 1971), pp. 32–41; Nouzeilles, Ficciones somáticas. 35 Ronaldo Munck, Ricardo Falcón and Bernardo Galitelli, Argentina: From Anarchism to Peronism: Workers, Unions and Politics, 1855–1985 (London: Zed Books, 1987), p. 86. 36 An exception amongst these nationalist intellectuals was Ricardo Rojas, who suggested a mestizo model of national identity. See Adamovsky, ‘Race and Class through the Visual Culture of Peronism’, in Rethinking Race in Modern Argentina, pp. 155–83 (p. 161), and Graciela Ferrás, ‘Ricardo Rojas: mestizaje y alteridad en la construcción de la nacionalidad argentina’, Sociedad y Economía, 18 (2010), 9–36. 37 See, for example, Rafael Olea Franco, ‘Lugones y el mito gauchesco: un capítulo de historia cultural argentina’, Nueva Revista De Filología Hispánica, 38:1 (1990), 307–31. 38 Alberto and Elena, ‘Introduction’, p. 6. 39 Gordillo, ‘The Savage’, p. 245. 40 See Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994), pp. 199–244; Wade, Music, Race, and Nation: Música Tropical in Colombia (Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press, 2000), p. 5; Wade, ‘Understanding “Africa” and “Blackness” in Colombia: Music and the Politics of Culture’, in Kevin Yelvington (ed.), A ­ fro-­Atlantic Dialogues: Anthropology in the Diaspora (Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press; 2006), pp. 351–78. 41 Svampa, Civilización o barbarie: el dilema argentino (Buenos Aires: Editorial Planeta, 2006), p. 276. 42 The origins of the term are unclear. See Natalia Milanesio, ‘Peronists and Cabecitas: Stereotypes and Anxieties at the Peak of Social Change’, in Matthew Karush and Oscar Chamosa (eds), The New Cultural History

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of Peronism: Power and Identity in ­ Mid-­ Twentieth Century Argentina (Durham, NC/London: Duke University Press, 2010), pp. 53–84. 43 Milanesio, ‘Peronists and Cabecitas’, p. 56. 44 Diana Lenton, ‘The Malón de la Paz of 1946: Indigenous Descamisados and the Dawn of Perón’, trans. by Beatrice D. Gurwitz, in The New Cultural History of Peronism, pp. 85–101 (p. 101). See also Enrique Mases, ‘La construcción interesada de la memoria histórica: el mito de la nación blanca y la invisibilidad de los pueblos originarios’, Pilquén, 12 (2010): http://www.scielo.org.ar/pdf/spilquen/n12/n12a03.pdf (accessed 26 July 2016). 45 Elena, ‘Argentina in Black and White: Race, Peronism, and the Color of Politics, 1940s to the Present’, in Rethinking Race in Modern Argentina, pp. 185–209 (pp. 186–7). 46 Adamovsky, Historia de la clase media argentina, pp. 239–370; Enrique Garguin, ‘‘‘Los Argentinos Descendemos de los Barcos”: The Racial Articulation of Middle Class Identity in Argentina (1920–1960)’, Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies, 2:2 (2007), 161–84. 47 Adamovsky, Historia de la clase media argentina, pp. 349–70. 48 Richard Dyer, White (New York: Routledge, 1997), p. 57. 49 Javier A.  Trímboli, ‘1979. La larga celebración de La conquista del desierto’,  Corpus, 3:2 (2013): http://corpusarchivos.revues.org/568 (accessed 7 November 2016). 50 James Anaya, ‘Informe del Relator Especial sobre los derechos de los pueblos indígenas’, Naciones Unidas (2012), 10–73; Cletus Gregor Barié, Pueblos Indígenas  y  derechos constitucionales  en  América Latina: un  panorama (Bolivia: Comisión Nacional para el Desarrollo de los Pueblos Indígenas, Gobierno de México, Abya Yala, Banco Mundial, 2003), pp. 105–22. 51 Guano, ‘Spectacles of Modernity’, p. 18.

3: Facing darkness in the literature of the crisis   1 Fabián Casas, ‘Asterix, el encargado’, in Los lemmings y otros (Buenos Aires: Santiago Arcos Editor, 2005), pp. 49–66.  2 César Aira, La Villa (Buenos Aires: Emecé Editores, Cruz del Sur, 2006).   3 Malena Botto, ‘1990–2000. La concentración y la polarización de la industria editorial argentina’, in José Luis de Diego (ed.), Editores y políticas editoriales en la Argentina, 1880–2000 (Buenos Aires: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2006), pp. 209–40 (p. 212).   4 Daniel Link, ‘Literatura de compromiso’, in Geneviève Fabry and Ilse Logie (eds), La literatura argentina de los años 90 (Amsterdam/New York, NY: Editions Rodopi BV, 2003), pp. 15–28 (p. 17).

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 5 Cecilia Palmeiro,  Desbunde y felicidad. De la Cartonera a Perlongher (Buenos Aires: Título, 2010), p. 197.  6 Laboratorio de Industrias Culturales, Secretaría de Cultura, Presidencia de la Nación, Click, 1:1 (2006), p. 2.   7 Hernán Valoni, ‘Pequeñas editoriales y transformaciones en la cultura literaria argentina’, Apuntes de Investigación del CECYP, 15 (2009), 161–85 (p. 172).   8 Centro de Estudios para la Producción (CEP), Secretaría de Industria, Comercio y de la Pequeña y Mediana Empresa, Ministerio de Economía y Producción, ‘La industria del libro en Argentina’: www. industria.gov.ar/cep (accessed 18 May 2016).  9 Valoni, ‘Pequeñas editoriales’, p. 172. 10 Beatriz Sarlo,  Escritos sobre literatura argentina (Buenos Aires: Siglo Veintiuno Editores, 2007), pp. 471–82. 11 Graciela Speranza, ‘Por un realismo idiota’, Boletín del Centro de Estudios de Teoría y Crítica Literaria, 12 (2005), 14–23 (p. 18). 12 See Andrea Bocco, ‘Escrituras y cuerpos cautivos en la Literatura Argentina del siglo XIX y sus revisiones en el XX’, VI Encuentro Interdisciplinario de Ciencias Sociales y Humanas (2009), and Alberto, ‘Indias blancas, negros febriles: Racial Stories and ­History-­Making in Contemporary Argentine Fiction’, in Rethinking Race, pp. 289–317. 13 Sandra Contreras, ‘Discusiones sobre el realismo en la narrativa argentina contemporánea’, Orbis Tertius, 12 (2005): http://www.orbistertius.unlp.edu.ar/numeros/numero-12/16-contreras.pdf (accessed 22 May 2016); Contreras, ‘En torno al realismo’, Confines, 17 (2005), 19–31; Contreras, ‘Narrativa argentina del presente’, Katatay, 5 (2007), 6–9; Martín Kohan, ‘Significación actual del realismo críptico’, Boletín, 12 (2005), 24–35; Speranza, ‘Por un realismo idiota’. 14 Contreras, Las vueltas de César Aira (Rosario: Beatriz Viterbo Editora, 2002), pp. 11–35, and in ‘En torno al realismo’, p. 22. 15 ‘César Aira: “My Ideal is the Fairy Tale”’, Louisiana Channel: http:// channel.louisiana.dk/video/c%C3%­A 9sar-­a ira-­m y-­i deal-­f air y-­t ale (accessed 9 June 2014). 16 Martín Prieto, ‘Arrebatos en el conventillo’, Revista Ñ, Clarín, 20 March 2003: http://www.clarin.com/suplementos/cultura/2002/03/30/ u-00801.htm (accessed 14 October 2016). 17 Edgardo Dobry, ‘Poesía argentina actual: del neobarroco al objetivismo (y más allá)’, in Tres décadas de poesía argentina. 1976–2006, comp. by Jorge Fondebrider (Buenos Aires: Libros del Rojas, 2006), pp. 117–34; Ana Porrúa, ‘Una polémica a media voz: objetivistas y ­neo-­barrocos en el Diario de poesía’, Boletín de Estudios de Teoría y Crítica Literaria, 11 (2003), 59–69. 18 Palmeiro, Desbunde y felicidad, p. 176.

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19 Adrián Gorelik, ‘El color del barrio. Mitología barrial y conflicto cultural en la Buenos Aires de los años veinte’,  Variaciones Borges,  8 (1999), 36–68 (p. 48). Gorelik states that the identification of Boedo with ­ working-­ class culture originates in the Boedo Group, which agglutinated social realist writers in the 1920s. 20 Carlos Altamirano and Sarlo, Ensayos argentinos. De Sarmiento a la vanguardia (Buenos Aires: Ariel, 1997), p. 30. 21 Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (Chichester: Columbia University Press, 2002). 22 Casas, ‘Asterix, el encargado’, p. 64. 23 Casas, ‘Asterix, el encargado’, p. 64. 24 Casas, ‘Asterix, el encargado’, p. 65. 25 See Adamovsky, ‘A Strange Emblem’. 26 Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and ­Anti-­Structure (Chicago: Aldine Publishing Co., 1969), p. 95. 27 Turner, The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1967), p. 100. 28 Julio Cortázar, ‘La noche boca arriba’, in Final del juego (Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 1965), pp. 171–9. 29 Carole Sweeney, From Fetish to Subject: Race, Modernism, and Primitivism, 1919–1935 (Westport, CT/London: Praeger Publishers, 2004), p. 20. 30 Raymond Williams, The Politics of Modernism (London: Verso, 1996), p. 58. 31 María Adela Igarzábal de Nistal and Sonia Vidal, ‘La geografía de los asientos precarios en el AMBA’, in Juan Manuel Borthagaray, María Adela Igarzábal de Nistal and Olga ­Wainstein-­Krasuk (eds), Hacia la gestión de un Hábitat Sostenible (Buenos Aires: Editorial Nobuko, 2006), pp. 283–304 (p. 294). 32 Francisco Suárez, Actores sociales de la gestión de residuos sólidos de los municipios de Malvinas Argentinas y José C. Paz (unpublished Master’s dissertation, Universidad de Buenos Aires, 2001), p. 46. 33 Gorelik, Miradas sobre Buenos Aires. Historia cultural y crítica urbana (Buenos Aires: Siglo Veintiuno Editores, 2004), p. 254. 34 Guano, ‘The Denial of Citizenship’, p. 70. 35 Guano, ‘The Denial of Citizenship’, pp. 70–2. 36 Laura Podalsky, Specular City: Transforming Culture, Consumption, and Space in Buenos Aires, 1955–1973 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2004), pp. 21, 82. 37 Aira, La Villa, pp. 50, 52–3. For quotes in English I will use Chris Andrews’s translation of the novel (Shantytown (New York: New Directions, 2013), p. 42). Interestingly, Andrews deliberately removed the line ‘En esas razas, además de no reconocer a los individuos, no podía calcularles la edad’ (When it came to these racial groups, she could not distinguish between individuals or guess their age),

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probably to downplay the racial references of the original text, which would have a different meaning in an A ­ nglo-­American context. For this readership, the sentence would be most likely interpreted as openly racist while, in Argentina, given the ambiguity of race, it could be also seen as a classist statement. 38 Albert Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonised (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1967), p. 88. 39 Aira, La Villa, p. 12; Shantytown, p. 9. 40 Aira, La Villa, p. 154; Shantytown, p. 128. 41 Aira, La Villa, pp. 51–2, 76–7; Shantytown, pp. 41, 61. 42 Aira, La Villa, pp. 170–1; Shantytown, p. 141. 43 Miguel Vitagliano, ‘Teoría Literaria III. César Aira. La Villa’, Secretaría de Publicaciones del CEFyL, Universidad de Buenos Aires (2007), 1–27 (p. 21); Annelies Oeyen, ‘La villa miseria como laberinto mágico: el caso La villa de César Aira (2001)’, Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, 89:1 (2012), 75–90 (pp. 81–8). 44 Oeyen, ‘La villa miseria’, p. 76. 45 Aira, La Villa, p. 31; Shantytown, p. 25. 46 James Scorer, City in Common: Culture and Community in Buenos Aires (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2017), p. 181. 47 Cucurto, La máquina de hacer paraguayitos (Buenos Aires: Mansalva, 2005), pp. 59–61. 48 Diana Irene Klinger, Escritas de si, escritas do outro: O retorno do autor e a virada etnográfica: Bernardo Carvalho, Fernando Vallejo, Washington Cucurto, João Gilberto Noll, César Aira, Silviano Santigo (Rio de Janeiro: 7Letras, 2007), p. 128. 49 Cucurto, ‘Cosa de negros’, in Cosa de negros (Buenos Aires: Interzona, 2003), pp. 63–172; Cucurto, ‘Las aventuras del Sr Maíz. El héroe atrapado entre dos mundos’, in Las aventuras del Sr Maíz (Buenos Aires: Interzona, 2005), pp. 7–86. 50 Cucurto, El curandero del amor (Buenos Aires: Emecé Editores, Cruz del Sur, 2006). 51 Cucurto, ‘Sr Maíz’, p. 48. 52 Cucurto, ‘Sr Maíz’, pp. 17, 22. 53 Aira’s recurrent presence in his works is aimed to interrupt the continuity between reality and text. See Mariano García, Degeneraciones textuales. Los géneros en la obra de César Aira (Rosario: Beatriz Viterbo Editora, 2006), p. 57. 54 Ariel Schettini, ‘Las puertas del cielo’, Radar Libros, Página/12, 10 August 2003: http://www.pagina12.com.ar/diario/suplementos/libros/10– 684–2003–08–10.html (accessed 15 November 2016). 55 For a discussion of gauchesca see Josefina Ludmer, ‘Oralidad y escritura en el género gauchesco como núcleo del nacionalismo’, Revista de Crítica Literaria Latinoamericana, 22:33 (1991), 29–33, and El género

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gauchesco: un tratado sobre la patria (Buenos Aires: Editorial Sudamericana, 1988). 56 Klinger, Escritas de si, pp. 146–67, and Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London/New York: Routledge, 1992), p. 7. 57 Silvina Friera, ‘“Cuando voy por la calle, las señoras alejan las carteras”’:http://www.pagina12.com.ar/diario/suplementos/espectaculos/4–963– 2005–11–09.html (accessed 25 December 2016). 58 Cucurto, ‘Cosa de negros’, p. 64. 59 Cucurto, ‘Noches vacías’, in Cosa de negros, pp. 5–61 (p. 10). 60 Cucurto, Sexybondi (Buenos Aires: Interzona, 2011), p. 30. Corrientes and Callao is an iconic intersection in Buenos Aires’s city centre, while Encarnacena here refers to the Paraguayan city of Encarnación, located on the border with Argentina. 61 Cucurto, ‘Noches vacías’, p. 5. 62 Kohan, ‘El ojo morocho’, Clarín, 14 June 2003: http://edant.clarin.com/ suplementos/cultura/2003/06/14/u-00501.htm (accessed 14 October 2016). 63 Humberto Anachuri, ‘¡Cucurto Sí!’: http://www.interzonaeditora.com/ titulos/titulo.php?idTitulo=43&idAutor=8 (accessed 14 October 2016). Located four hundred kilometres south of Buenos Aires, Mar del Plata is traditionally seen as the archetypal summer resort for l­ ower-­middleand ­middle-­class Porteños. 64 Cucurto, ‘Cosa de negros’, pp. 118–19. 65 Cucurto, ‘Cosa de negros’, pp. 116. 66 Quoted in Grimson and Edmundo Paz Soldán, Migrantes bolivianos en la Argentina y Estados Unidos (La Paz: Programa de las Naciones Unidas Para el Desarrollo, 2000), p. 14. 67 Ezequiel Martínez Estrada, ‘Sábado de gloria’, in Sábado de gloria (Buenos Aires: Editorial Nova, 1956), pp. 7–78; Jorge Luis Borges and Adolfo Bioy Casares, ‘La fiesta del Monstruo’, in Perón vuelve, comp. by Sergio Olguín (Buenos Aires: Grupo Editorial Norma, 2000), pp. 41–59. Various texts by Julio Cortázar also reproduce demonising images of the provincial immigrant, such as El examen (1950, published in 1985) (The Test) and ‘Las puertas del cielo’ (1951) (The Gates of Heaven), among others. The identification of Perón with the figure of Rosas became widespread after the 1955 coup that put an end to the Peronist government. Interestingly enough, this operation was carried out not only by ­anti-­Peronists but also by historical revisionists. The latter contested the liberal portrayal of Rosas as a tyrant, instead suggesting that he, like Perón, had been a defender of national interests against imperialism. 68 Svampa, Civilización o barbarie, p. 209.

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69 Cucurto, ‘Dama tocada’, in 1810. La revolución de Mayo vivida por los negros (Buenos Aires: Emecé Editores, Cruz del Sur, 2008), pp. 209–17; Cortázar, ‘Casa tomada’, in Bestiario (Buenos Aires: Editorial Sudamericana, 1966), pp. 9–18. 70 Juan José Sebreli, Buenos Aires, vida cotidiana y alienación. Buenos Aires, ciudad en crisis (Buenos Aires: Editorial Sudamericana, 2003), p. 102; Carlos Gamerro, ‘Julio Cortázar, inventor del peronismo’, in Guillermo Korn (ed.), El peronismo clásico (1945–1955). Descamisados, gorilas y contreras (Buenos Aires: Paradiso, 2007), pp. 44–57. 71 Irene is also the original name of the protagonist’s sister in ‘Casa tomada’. Victrola is an uninspired pun between the name Victoria and trola (slut). 72 Cucurto, ‘Dama tocada’, p. 216. 73 Ben Bollig, Modern Argentine Poetry: Displacement, Exile, Migration (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2011), p. 188. 74 Ricardo Piglia, La Argentina en pedazos (Buenos Aires: Ediciones de la Urraca, 1993), p. 3. 75 Cucurto, ‘Sr Maíz’, p. 80. 76 Cucurto, ‘Sr Maíz’, pp. 25–6. 77 Ignacio Aguiló, ‘Tropical Buenos Aires: Representations of Race in Argentine Literature during the 2001 Crisis and its Aftermath’, in Argentina since the 2001 Crisis, pp. 177–94. 78 Cucurto, De cómo son hechos los Arco Iris y por qué se van, in ‘Zelarayán’, included in Las aventuras del Sr Maíz (Buenos Aires: Interzona, 2005), pp. 87–120 (pp. 95–8). 79 Evangelina Himitian, ‘La historia oculta de la ropa que se vende a precios muy bajos’, La Nación, 8 October 2000: http://www.lanacion. com.ar/36114-­la-­historia-­oculta-­de-­la-­ropa-­que-­se-­vende-­a-­precios-­muy-­bajos (accessed 11 June 2016). In 2006, a fire in one of these factories killed six Bolivian workers. Media coverage of the accident and the mobilisation of the Bolivian community contributed to increasing awareness about the exploitation experienced by many of these immigrants. 80 ‘Quemaron los libros de Cucurto’, Clarín, Sí, 7 June 2002: http://edant. clarin.com/suplementos/si/2002/06/07/3–00204.htm (accessed 11 June 2016). 81 Antonio Cornejo Polar, ‘A ­Non-­Dialectic Heterogeneity: The Subject and Discourse of Urban Migration in Modern Peru’, in Rita De Grandis and Zila Bernd (eds), Unforeseeable Americas: Questioning Cultural Hybridity in the Americas, trans. by John Cameron (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000), pp. 112–23. 82 Abril Trigo, ‘Shifting Paradigms: From Transculturation to Hybridity: A Theoretical Critique’, in Unforeseeable Americas, trans. by Christine McIntyre, pp. 85–111; Iain Chambers, Migrancy, Culture, Identity (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 5.

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83 Cornejo Polar, ‘Mestizaje, transculturación, heterogeneidad’, Revista de Crítica Literaria Latinoamericana, 20:40 (1994), 368–71. 84 John Beverley and Alberto Moreiras offer an additional criticism, stating that transculturation is a fantasy of social and racial reconciliation inserted in a teleological view of Latin American modernisation typical of the ideology of developmentalism: John Beverley, Subalternity and Representation: Arguments in Cultural Theory (Durham, NC/London: Duke University Press, 1999), p. 47; Alberto Moreiras, The Exhaustion of Difference: The Politics of Latin American Cultural Studies (Durham, NC/London: Duke University Press, 2001), p. 188. 85 Cornejo Polar, ‘Mestizaje e hibridez: los riesgos de las metáforas. Apuntes’, Revista Iberoamericana, 63:180 (1997), 341–4. 86 Cornejo Polar, ‘A ­Non-­Dialectic Heterogeneity’, p. 114. 87 Cucurto, ‘Noches vacías’, p. 27. 88 Cucurto, ‘Hasta quitarle Panamá a los yanquis’, in Hasta quitarle Panamá a los yanquis (Buenos Aires: Emecé Editores, Cruz del Sur, 2010), pp. 7–93 (p. 17). Originally published online in 2005 in http:// www.eloisacartonera.com.ar/fcucurto1.html. 89 Cucurto, ‘Noches vacías’, p. 41, 90 Cucurto, ‘Las aventuras del Sr Maíz’, p. 61. 91 Trigo, ‘Shifting Paradigms’, p. 104. 92 Néstor Perlongher, ‘Introducción a la poesía neobarroca cubana y rioplatense’, Revista Chilena de Literatura, 41 (1993), 47–57. See also Bollig, Néstor Perlongher: The Poetic Search for an Argentine Marginal Voice (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2008), pp. 157–93. 93 Mabel Moraña, ‘Antonio Cornejo Polar y los debates actuales del latinoamericanismo. Noción de sujeto, hibridez, representación’, Revista de Crítica Literaria Latinoamericana, 25:50 (1999), 19–27 (p. 24).

4: ‘A Bolivian walks into a bar …’  1 Archetti, ‘Military Nationalism, Football Essentialism, and Moral Ambivalence’, in Alan Tomlinson and Christopher Young (eds), National Identity and Global Sports Events: Culture, Politics, and Spectacle in the Olympics and the Football World Cup (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2006), pp. 133–47 (p. 134).  2 Ignacio Ortelli, ‘La Selección sufrió una paliza histórica’, Clarín, 1 April 2009, p. 18.   3 Gonzalo Aguilar, New Argentine Film: Other Worlds, trans. by Sarah Ann Wells (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), p. 221; Pablo Perelman and Paulina Seivach, ‘La industria cinematográfica en la Argentina: Entre los límites del mercado y el fomento estatal’ (Buenos Aires:

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CEDEM, Gobierno de la Ciudad Autónoma de Buenos Aires, 2003), p. 22; Carolina Rocha, ‘Contemporary Argentine Cinema during Neoliberalism’, Hispania, 92:4 (2009), 841–51 (p. 844).   4 Diego Batlle, ‘De la virtual extinción a la nueva ley. El resurgimiento’, in Horacio Bernardes, Diego Lerer and Sergio Wolf (eds), El nuevo cine argentino. Temas, autores y estilos de una renovación (Buenos Aires: Ediciones Tatanka, 2002), pp. 17–28 (pp. 17, 27).  5 Cinenacional.com: http://www.cinenacional.com/estrenos/2001 (accessed 29 April 2017).   6 Perelman and Seivach, ‘La industria cinematográfica en la Argentina’, p. 34.  7 Tamara L. Falicov, The Cinematic Tango: Contemporary Argentine Film (London: Wallflower Press, 2007), pp. 75–113.   8 Jens Andermann, New Argentine Cinema (London: I. B. Tauris, 2012), p. 4.  9 Aguilar, New Argentine Film, p. 65. 10 Aguilar, New Argentine Film, p. 20; Joanna Page, Crisis and Capitalism in Contemporary Argentine Cinema (Durham, NC/London: Duke University Press, 2009), p. 40. 11 Page, Crisis and Capitalism, p. 42. 12 Agustín Campero, Nuevo Cine Argentino. De Rapado a Historias extraordinarias (Buenos Aires: Biblioteca Nacional, Universidad Nacional de General Sarmiento, 2009), p. 75. 13 Aguilar, New Argentine Film, p. 221. 14 Estrellas, dir. by Federico León and Pablo Martínez (2007), 00:21:50. 15 Horacio Bernardes, ‘“Descubrí un mundo dentro de otro”’, Página/12, 23 January 2010: http://www.pagina12.com.ar/diario/suplementos/espectaculos/5–167332010–01–23.html (accessed 24 October 2016). 16 Bernardes, ‘“Descubrí un mundo’. 17 Andermann, New Argentine Cinema, p. 93. 18 Rocha, ‘Contemporary Argentine Cinema during Neoliberalism’, p. 847. 19 ‘Un buen arranque para el film “Bolivia”’, La Nación, 16 April 2002: http://www.lanacion.com.ar/389002-­un-­buen-­arranque-­para-­el-­film-­bolivia (accessed 5 May 2016). 20 That the questioning of Argentina’s racial politics and narrative of homogeneity centres on the private realm is a sign of the crisis of public space as an inclusive locus. The street is as hostile and alienating for Freddy as the bar. As Aguilar points out, he dies precisely on the threshold between the private and the public space (Aguilar, New Argentina Cinema, p. 251). 21 ‘Cannes aplaudió un film argentino sobre los bolivianos y paraguayos’, Página/12, 16 May 2001: http://www.pagina12.com.ar/2001/01–05/01– 05–16/pag30.htm (accessed 5 May 2016).

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22 Max Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretative Sociology, vol. I, ed. by Guenther Roch and Claus Wittich, trans. by Ephraim Fischoff  et al. (Berkeley/Los Angeles/ London: University of California Press, 1968), pp. 304–5. 23 Gustavo Noriega, ‘Freddy toma soda’, El amante, 11:120 (2001), p. 15. 24 Aguilar, New Argentine Film, p. 127. 25 Scorer, City in Common, p. 121. 26 Serge Cipko, ‘Contemporary Migration from Ukraine’, in Roger Rodríguez Ríos (ed.), Migration Perspectives: Eastern Europe and Central Asia, 2006 (Vienna: International Organisation for Migration, 2006), pp. 117–32 (p. 118). 27 María José Marcogliese, ‘La migración reciente de Europa central y oriental a la Argentina, ¿un tratamiento “especial”?’, Revista Argentina de Sociología, 1:1 (2003), 44–58. 28 Diego Trerotola, ‘El inventor de métodos’, in Sergio Wolf (ed.), Cine Argentino: Estéticas de la producción (Buenos Aires: BAFICI, 2009), pp. 101–12 (p. 102); Aguilar, New Argentine Cinema, pp. 17–18. 29 Scorer, City in Common, p. 104; Page, Crisis and Capitalism, pp. 68–80. 30 Susana María Sassone, ‘Migración, territorio e identidad cultural: construcción de “lugares bolivianos” en la Ciudad de Buenos Aires’, Población de Buenos Aires, 4:6 (2007), 9–28 (p. 16). 31 ‘Bolivia en Buenos Aires’, La Nación, 19 October 2008: http://www. lanacion.com.ar/1060416-­bolivia-­en-­buenos-­aires (accessed 16 January 2016); Observatorio de Colectividades, ‘Virgen de Copacabana’: http://www.buenosaires.gob.ar/areas/secretaria_gral/colectividades/?secInte rna=160&subSeccion=518&col=38 (accessed 22 November 2016). 32 Grimson, ‘Nuevas xenofobias’, p. 69. 33 Marilyn Halter, Shopping for Identity: The Marketing of Ethnicity (New York: Schocken Books, 2000), p. 324. 34 Jameson, ‘‘‘End of Art’’’. 35 Antonio Gómez, ‘Argentine Multiculturalism and the Ethnographic Shift in Documentary Cinema: Martín Rejtman’s Copacabana’, Social Identities, 19:3–4 (2013), 340–55 (p. 344). 36 Maite Alberdi and Iván Pinto, ‘Entrevista a Martin Rejtman. A propósito de Copacabana’, La Fuga, 3 (2007): http://www.lafuga.cl/ autor­/maite-­alberdi-­e-­ivan-­pinto/33 (accessed 21 January 2016). Translation from Gómez, ‘Argentine Multiculturalism’, p. 343. 37 Bill Nichols, Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), p. 99. 38 Andermann, New Argentine Cinema, p. 52. 39 Mariano Raffo’s Return to Bolivia (2008) proposes a similar critique of stereotypes of Bolivian landscapes and people. This documentary follows a Bolivian couple that migrated to Argentina during the crisis, as they travel to the home country with their A ­ rgentinian-­ born

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children to visit their relatives. The film highlights the contrast between their urban present and their rural background, associated with a declining world that is represented by the man’s father.

5: Amerindians, fashion models and picketeers   1 See Andrea Giunta, Poscrisis. Arte argentino después de 2001 (Buenos Aires: Siglo Veintiuno Editores, 2009), pp. 25–70; ‘­Post-­crisis: Scenes of Cultural Change in Buenos Aires’, in Jonathan Harris (ed.), Globalization  and  Contemporary Art (Oxford: ­Wiley-­Blackwell, 2011), pp. 105–22 (p. 113).  2 Arnd Schneider, Appropriation as Practice (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2006), pp. 99–104.   3 Quoted in Schneider, Appropriation as Practice, p. 98.   4 Quoted in Schneider, Appropriation as Practice, pp. 91–110.   5 Graciela Gioberchio, ‘El reino del bisturí: Argentina, tercer país en cirugías estéticas’, Clarín, 4 September 2005: http://edant.clarin.com/ diario/2005/09/04/sociedad/s-04415.htm (accessed 10 January 2016); Nerina Sturgeon, ‘Récord: Argentina, quinta en cirugías’, InfoBAE, 15 December 2004: http://www.infobae.com/2004/12/15/157763–­record-­ argentina-­quinta-­cirugias (accessed 25 August 2016). Although foreigners also contributed to the rise in procedures in Argentina after the devaluation that transformed Buenos Aires into a cheap destination for cosmetic and plastic surgery holidays, locals formed the main market for these operations.   6 Asociación de Lucha Contra la Bulimia y la Anorexia: www.aluba.org.ar (accessed 9 August 2016). Oscar L. Meehan and Melanie A. Katzman suggest that the anxieties produced by the financial crisis could have had an impact on the rise in eating disorders amongst the middle class, especially women, which is the group in which these pathologies tend to be more common. See Oscar L. Meehan and Melanie A. Katzman, ‘Argentina: The Social Body at Risk’, in Mervat Nasser, Katzman and Richard A. Gordon (eds), Eating Disorders and Cultures in Transition (New York: B ­ runner-­Routledge, 2001), pp. 138–60.   7 Andrew Canessa, ‘Sex and the Citizen: Barbies and Beauty Queens in the Age of Evo Morales’, Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, 17:1 (2008), 41–64 (pp. 43–4).   8 Mary Weismantel, Cholas and Pishtacos: Stories of Race and Sex in the An des (Chicago, IL/London: University of Chicago Press 2001), p. 159.  9 ­Making-­ of Calendario 2000 – Huellas, 00:00:45: http://vimeo.com/ 14425863 (accessed 30 May 2016). 10 Gaby Herbstein, Huellas (Buenos Aires: FOB, Naciones Unidas, Abasto de Buenos Aires, 2000).

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11 ­Eva-­Lynn Jagoe, ‘Patagonian Peripheries’, Studies in Travel Writing, 7:1 (2003), 29–45 (p. 31). 12 Andermann, Mapas de poder: Una arqueología literaria del espacio argentino (Rosario: Beatriz Viterbo Editora, 2000), p. 126. 13 Andermann, Mapas de poder, p. 126. 14 Martha Garrido, Tatiana Kelly and Alejandro Martínez, ‘Las colecciones fotográficas del Acervo Histórico de la Facultad de Ciencias Naturales y Museo de la Universidad Nacional de La Plata’, Entrepasados, 16:31 (2007), 163–76. 15 Deborah Poole, Vision, Race, and Modernity: A Visual Economy of the Andean Image World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), p. 9. 16 Carlos Masotta, ‘El atlas invisible. Historias de archivo en torno a la muestra “Almas Robadas – Postales de Indios”’, Corpus. Archivos virtuales de la alteridad americana, 1:1 (2011), 1–22 (pp. 3, 7). 17 Like the models in Huellas, Pincén also performed a masquerade of Amerindianness. According to a chronicle in La Nación, the perito Moreno, who was accompanying the cacique, suggested to him that he got rid of his poncho, stripped from the waist up and held a spear, so he could personify for the camera the image of the barbaric Amerindian ready to fight that was popular amongst the Porteño elite at the time. In Masotta, ‘El atlas invisible’, pp. 5–6; Marta Penhos, ‘La fotografía del siglo XIX en la construcción de una imagen pública de los indios’, in El arte entre lo público y lo privado. VI jornadas de teoría e historia del arte (Buenos Aires: Centro Argentino de Investigadores de Artes, 1995), pp. 109–25 (p. 111). On postcards see Masotta, Indios en las primeras postales fotográficas argentinas del s.xx (Buenos Aires: La Marca Editorial, 2007). 18 An interesting counterpart to Huellas is provided by the documentary Damiana Kryygi (2014) by Alejandro Fernández Mouján. The film tells the story of an indigenous Aché girl from Paraguay who, after surviving the massacre of her family by rural settlers in 1896, was kept as a slave maid by the colonists, eventually becoming an object of scientific study for anthropologists from the Museum of Natural Science of La Plata. Shortly before her death of tuberculosis, aged fourteen, the Museum’s Head of Anthropology, Robert ­Lehmann-­Nitsche, took a few photographs for a study he was carrying out on indigenous people from the Gran Chaco region. It is one of these pictures that acts as the catalyst for the film: the girl’s face clearly expresses her discomfort as she is forced to stand naked, the object of the violence of anthropometric photography. Fernández Mouján’s film not only explores the girl’s life but also shows the efforts of contemporary activists, academics and the Aché community to recover her remains. However, Damiana Kryygi can also be considered a reflection on the role and legacies of

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the photographic camera as a technology of racism during the turn of the twentieth century. Furthermore, the film also delves into the ethical implications of its own engagement with the image. See Katrin Koel-­ ­ Abt and Andreas Winkelmann, ‘The Identification and Restitution of Human Remains from an Aché Girl Named “Damiana”: An Interdisciplinary Approach’, Annals of ­Anatomy-­Anatomischer Anzeiger 195:5 (2013), 393–400; and Aguiló, ‘Visuality, Coloniality and Modernism in the Gran Chaco: Assessing Grete Stern’s Indigenous Photographs’, Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies: Travesia (2015), 223–42. 19 Gail ­Ching-­Liang Low, ‘White Skins/Black Masks: The Pleasures and Politics of Imperialism’, New Formations, 9 (1989), 83–103 (p. 93). 20 Fabio Cleto, ‘Introduction: Queering the Camp’, in Cleto (ed.), Camp: Queer Aesthetics and the Performing Subject (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1999), pp. 1–43 (p. 30). 21 Andrew Ross, ‘Uses of Camp’, in Camp: Queer Aesthetics and the Performing Subject, pp. 308–39 (p. 321). 22 Dyer, White, p. 3. 23 Quoted in Schneider, Appropriation as Practice, p. 99. 24 Masotta, ‘Imágenes recientes de La conquista del desierto: Problemas de la memoria en la impugnación de un mito de origen’, Runa, 26 (2006), 225–45 (p. 228). 25 Andermann, The Optic of the State: Visuality and Power in Argentina and Brazil (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2007), p. 172. 26 Andermann, The Optic of the State, p. 173. 27 The expression nota de color can be translated as ‘soft news’, although it literally means ‘a colourful note’. Peña added negro, thus making a clear racist attack on D’Elía. 28 El parquímetro (Radio Metro, 27 March 2008). Audio available at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fTK9ww7yrSc (accessed 5 June 2016). 29 Armony, ‘Lo que nos enseñó D’Elía’, La Nación, 5 April 2008. http:// www.lanacion.com.ar/1001407-­lo-­que-­nos-­enseno-­d-­elia (accessed 5 June 2016); Frigerio, ‘Luis D’Elía y los negros: identificaciones raciales y de clase en los sectores populares’, Claroscuro: Revista del Centro de Estudios sobre Diversidad Cultural, 8:8 (2009), pp. 13–43. 30 Dirección General de Educación, Provincia de Buenos Aires, Política y Ciudadanía: http://abc.gov.ar/lainstitucion/organismos/consejogeneral/ disenioscurriculares/secundaria/quinto/materias%20comunes/5politicay ciudadania.pdf (accessed 6 June 2016). 31 The aftermath of the crisis, paradoxically, allowed alternative interpretations of Luna’s artwork: in 2008, a conflict between the government and agricultural sectors over export taxes led to a nationwide lockout by the latter (which included motorway blockades) and widespread protests both in favour of and against the protest that involved vast

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32 33 34

35

36

37

38

39

40 41

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sectors of civil society. In this context, La conquista del desierto could be read not as a potentially progressive artwork but rather as a conservative one: with the horseback figures as farming associations and, especially, the landowning sector, advancing towards and challenging the spectator. That one of the piquetero organisations featured in Luna’s image supported the farmers adds credence to this alternative reading of the image, shaped by ­post-­crisis events. See Guano, ‘A Color …’ for an analysis of how the tent was framed, by the middle class, according to ideas of race and whiteness. See Rafaela Carras, Pensamientos, prácticas y acciones del GAC (Buenos Aires: Tinta Limón, 2009). Suzanne Lacy, ‘Cultural Pilgrimages and Metaphoric Journeys’, in Mapping the Terrain:  New Genre Public Art (Seattle: Bay Press, 1996), pp. 19–47. For a discussion on arte light see Ramona, 87 (2008); Juan Ignacio Vallejos, ‘Dónde empiezan y cuándo terminan los 90? Los noventa: sobre fusiones y confusiones entre arte y política’, Ramona, 51 (2007), 56–78; Giunta, Poscrisis, pp. 65–8. See Rodrigo Alonso, ‘Ansía y devoción. Una mirada al arte argentino reciente’, Fundación Proa: http://www.roalonso.net/es/pdf/curaduria/ ansia_texto.pdf (accessed 7 August 2016). Barry Schwartz, ‘The Social Context of Commemoration: A Study in Collective Memory’, Social Forces 61:2 (1982), 374–402; Maoz Azaryahu, ‘From Remains to Relics: Authentic Monuments in the Israeli Landscape’, History and Memory, 5:2 (1993), 82–103. On ­counter-­monumentality, see Quentin Stevens, Karen A. Franck and Ruth Fazakerley, ‘­Counter-­monuments: The A ­ nti-­monumental and the Dialogic’, The Journal of Architecture, 17:6 (2012), 951–72. David Viñas was one of the first to propose this analogy in his 1982 seminal study of the Conquest of the Desert. See Indios, ejército y frontera (Buenos Aires: Santiago Arcos Editor, 2003), p. 18. See Ramón M. Minieri, Ese ajeno sur (Viedma: Fondo Editorial Rionegrino, 2006). The conflict between the Mapuche and Benetton continued, nonetheless, along with other disputes between Amerindian communities and other private landowners in Patagonia. See Patricia Agosto and Briones, ‘Luchas y resistencias Mapuche por los bienes de la naturaleza’, OSAL, 3:22 (2007), 295–300, and Ana Ramos, ‘Disputas metaculturales en la antesala de un juicio. El caso “Benetton contra mapuche’’’, in Historia, poder y discursos, comp. by Guillermo Wilde and Pablo Javier Schamber (Buenos Aires: SB, 2005), pp. 103–32. The most ­well-­known case is that of Lonko Purrán Community. See Agosto and Briones, ‘Luchas y resistencias’.

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43 ‘Proyecto de Ley de la Comisión ­Anti-­monumento a Roca’: http://hemisphericinstitute.org/journal/3.1/eng/artist_presentation/callejero/ rocacuadernofinal.pdf (accessed 3 January 2017).

6: Cumbia villera and the new racialised marginality   1 Andrea Wolff, Verónica Salerno and Paola Ramírez Barahona, ‘Pautas de evaluación para los contenidos de la cumbia villera’, Publicaciones Digitales COMFER (2001): http://www.comfer.gov.ar/documentos/pdf/ villera.pdf (accessed 24 April 2016).   2 Lucas Colonna, ‘Según el Gobierno, la cumbia villera incide en la inseguridad’, La Nación, 4 August 2004: http://www.lanacion.com.ar/-­ segun-­el-­gobierno-­la-­cumbia-­villera-­incide-­en-­la-­inseguridad (accessed 3 July 2016).   3 Academic work on cumbia villera has been produced from the perspective of various disciplines. Works conducted from a social sciences perspective include: Cumbia: Raza, nación, etnia y género en Latinoamérica, comp. by Pablo Semán and Pablo Silva (Buenos Aires: Editorial Gorla, 2010); Semán and Silva (eds), Youth Identities and Argentine Popular Music (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012); Malvina Silba and Carolina Spataro, ‘Cumbia Nena. Letras, relatos y baile según las bailanteras’, in Resistencias y mediaciones, comp. by Pablo Alabarces and María Graciela Rodríguez (Buenos Aires: Paidós, 2008), pp. 89–112; Daniel Míguez, ‘Estilos musicales y estamentos sociales. Cumbia, villa y transgresión en la periferia de Buenos Aires’, in Míguez and Semán (eds), Entre cumbias, santos y piquetes. Las culturas populares en la Argentina reciente (Buenos Aires: Biblos, 2006), pp. 33–54. Other works adopt a more political approach. These include the cases of Andrew ­Graham-­Yooll, ‘Cumbia Villera: The Sound of the Slums – Argentina’s Rappers Tell it like It Is’, Index on Censorship, 34:3 (2005), 174–83; Héctor D. Fernández L’Hoeste, ‘All Cumbias, The Cumbia: The Latin Americanization of a Tropical Genre’, in Sandhya Shukla and Heidi Tinsman (eds), Imagining Our Americas: Towards a Transnational Frame (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), pp.  338–64. Ethnomusicologists have also published on cumbia villera. See Alejandra Cragnolini, ‘Articulaciones entre violencia social, significante sonoro y subjetividad: la cumbia “villera’’’, Revista Transcultural de Música trans, 10 (2006): http://www.sibetrans.com/trans/trans10/cragnolini.htm (accessed 02 May 2016); and Manuel Massone and Mariano De Filippis, ‘“Las palmas de todos los negros arriba …” Origen, influencias y análisis musical de la cumbia villera’, Revista Latinoamericana de Estudios del Discurso, 6:2 (2006), 21–44.

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  4 See Semán, ‘Vida, apogeo y tormentos del “rock chabón”’, VERSIÓN, 16 (2005), 241–55 (p. 244).   5 The only rock bands that generated significant public debate during the 1990s and the crisis were Patricio Rey y sus Redonditos de Ricota and Callejeros. In both cases, the controversies were related to tragic events that happened during concerts: the police killed a young man during a show by Los Redondos, in 1991, and some acts of vandalism happened at concerts in 1997 and 1998. In 2004, a fire started by a flare – the use of flares was a common practice by Argentinian rock audiences – resulted in the death of 194 people during a Callejeros gig.  6 Wade, Music, Race and Nation: Música Tropical in Colombia (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), pp. 10–11.   7 On cumbia’s transnationalisation see Wade, Music, Race and Nation, p. 173–6, and Fernández L’Hoeste, ‘All Cumbias, The Cumbia’, pp. 339–40.   8 Sergio Pujol, ‘Los caminos de la cumbia’, Revista Todavía, 13 (2006): http://www.revistatodavia.com.ar/todavia24/13.pujolnota.html (accessed 13 May 2016).   9 Fernando Barragán Sandi, ‘La cumbia villera, testimonio del joven urbano marginal (censura y premiación)’, Anais do V Congresso Latinoamericano da Associação Internacional para o Estudo da Música Popular, Rio de Janeiro (2005): http://www.hist.puc.cl/iaspm/rio/ Anais2004%20%28PDF%29/Resumos/ResFernandoBarragan.htm (accessed 25 April 2016). 10 Pujol, ‘Los caminos de la cumbia’ (accessed 22 May 2016). 11 ­De-­industrialisation policies and the increase in migration to ­mid-­size cities are mentioned as reasons for the fall in migration to Buenos Aires in this period. See Jorge Rodríguez and Gustavo Busso, Migración interna y desarrollo en América Latina entre 1980 y 2005. Un estudio comparativo con perspectiva regional basado en siete países (Santiago de Chile: Libros de la Cepal, 2009), pp. 60–3, and Rosalía Cortés and Fernando Groisman, ‘Migraciones, mercado de trabajo y pobreza en el Gran Buenos Aires’, Revista de la Cepal, 82 (2004), 173–91. 12 Cragnolini, ‘Reflexiones acerca del circuito de promoción de la música de la “bailanta” y de su influencia en la creación y recreación de estilos’, in Irma Ruiz, Elisabeth Roig and Cragnolini (eds), Actas de las IX Jornadas Argentinas de Musicología y VII Conferencia Anual de la A.A.M. (Buenos Aires: Instituto Nacional de Musicología ‘Carlos Vega’, 1994). 13 Cragnolini, ‘Articulaciones’ (accessed 2 May 2016). 14 Esteban De Gori, ‘Notas sociológicas sobre la Cumbia Villera. Aproximaciones a una lectura y a un lenguaje del drama social urbano’, Convergencia. Revista de Ciencias Sociales, 12:38 (2005), 353–72.

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16 17

18

19 20 21

22 23

24

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The two main solo performers of la movida tropical during the 1990s, Rodrigo and Gilda, also followed this model of theatrically presented songs about sensuality, romance, infidelities and unrequited and forbidden love. The premature deaths of both artists put an end to their careers just when they were starting to receive recognition from mainstream audiences. Gabriela Almi, ‘La bailanta, un negocio que produce millones’, Clarín, 8 February 1999: http://edant.clarin.com/diario/1999/02/08/e-03001d. htm (accessed 28 January 2016); Massone and De Filippis, ‘“Las palmas de todos los negros arriba …”’, p. 25. Massone and De Filippis, ‘“Las palmas de todos los negros arriba …”’, pp. 30–8; Laboratorio de Industrias Culturales, Click, 1:2 (2006), p. 1. Laboratorio de Industrias Culturales, Click, 1:2 (2006), p. 1; Ernesto Martelli, ‘La bailanta, un negocio difícil que mueve muchos millones’, Clarín, 25 June 2000: http://edant.clarin.com/diario/2000/06/25/s-05401. htm (accessed 2 June 2011). Colonna, ‘El sonido tropical’ (accessed 23 May 2016). It is important to note that, between 2000 and 2002, local production represented between 47 per cent and 50 per cent of the total number of CDs released in Argentina. Martelli, ‘La bailanta’ (accessed 2 June 2016). Daniel Riera, ‘El ritmo de la villa’, Rolling Stone, July 2001: http://www. rollingstone.com.ar/583428 (accessed 25 April 2016). Hernán Iglesias, ‘La cumbia combativa encandila a los bonaerenses’, El País, 25 April 2001: http://www.udel.edu/leipzig/270500/ela250401. htm (accessed 24 April 2016); Colonna, ‘El sonido tropical’ (accessed 23 May 2016). Eloísa Martín, ‘La cumbia villera y el fin de la cultura del trabajo’, in Cumbia: Raza, nación, etnia y género, pp. 211–46 (p. 215). Alabarces, ‘Posludio: Música popular, identidad, resistencia y tanto ruido (para tan poca furia)’, Revista Transcultural de Música trans, 12 (2008): http://www.redalyc.org/pdf/822/82201207.pdf (accessed 23 August 2016); Svampa, La sociedad excluyente, p. 181. Auyero, ‘The “hyper-”villa’, pp. 98–9. The only exception was the dictatorship period, in which the villero population was severely repressed and, in some cases, relocated to the periphery of Buenos Aires as part of ­so-­called ‘eradication policies’. See Oscar Oszlak, Merecer la ciudad. Los pobres y el derecho al espacio urbano (Buenos Aires: Estudios Cedes, Editorial Humanitas, 1991). Juan Pegoraro, ‘Notas sobre los jóvenes portadores de la violencia juvenil en el marco de las sociedades ­pos-­industriales’, Sociologías, 8 (2002), 276–316; Gabriel Kessler, ‘Trabajo, privación, delito y experiencia urbana en las periferias de Buenos Aires’, Revista de Ciencias Sociales, ­DS-­FCS, 25:31 (2012), 37–58; Marina Medan, ‘Sociabilidad

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juvenil masculina y riesgo. Discrepancias y acuerdos entre un programa de prevención del delito juvenil y sus beneficiarios’, Ultima Década, 35 (2011), 61–87. 26 Rubén Citara, ‘El plan penitenciario bonaerense’, Revista del Servicio Penitenciario Bonaerense, 8 (1995), 56–69 (p. 58). 27 Esteban Rodríguez, ‘Circuitos carcelarios: el encarcelamiento ­masivo-­selectivo, preventivo y rotativo en la Argentina’, Question, 1:36 (2012), 81–96 (p. 81). Kessler discusses different explanations for the diminution of the average age of prison population. See Kessler, ‘Las transformaciones en el delito juvenil en Argentina y su interpelación a las políticas públicas’, in Barbara Potthast, Juliana S ­ tröbele-­Gregor and Dörte Wollrad (eds), Ciudadanía vivida, (in)seguridades e interculturalidad (Buenos Aires: FES/Adlaf/Nueva Sociedad, 2008), pp. 231–45. 28 Wacquant, ‘Crafting the Neoliberal State’, p. 207. 29 John Horton, Stuart Hall, Charles Critcher, Tony Jefferson, John Clarke and Brian Roberts, Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order (London: Macmillan, 1978); Stanley Cohen, Folk Devils and Moral Panics: The Creation of the Mods and Rockers (London: Routledge, 2011), p. 1. 30 Florencia Saintout, ‘La criminalización de los jóvenes en la TV: los pibes chorros’, Signo y Pensamiento, 21:41 (2002), 99–106 (p. 102). 31 María Florencia Gentile, ‘Los procedimientos discursivos para la construcción mediática de la figura del joven pobre y delincuente. El “caso Jonathan”’, Última Década, 34 (2011), 93–119 (p. 104); Gabriel Cocimano, ‘De la épica del bandidismo a la tragedia del pandillismo: clase, poder y violencia en América Latina’, Culturas Populares, 3 (2006): http://www.culturaspopulares.org/textos3/articulos/cocimano.pdf (accessed 19 August). 32 Yerba Brava, ‘Discriminado’, Cumbia villera (Leader Music, 2000, CD LM 605457 5454 2 7). Composed by Marcelo Daniel Moya and Edgar Fabián Gamarra. 33 Cristian Alarcón, Cuando me muera quiero que me toquen cumbia. Vida de pibes chorros (Buenos Aires: Verticales de bolsillo, 2003). 34 CORREPI, ‘Recopilación de casos de personas asesinadas por el aparato represivo del estado 1983/2012’, 2012 (p. 9). 35 María del Carmen Verdú, Represión en democracia. De la ‘primavera alfonsinista’ al ‘gobierno de los derechos humanos’ (Buenos Aires: Ediciones Herramienta, 2009), p. 16. 36 Michel Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the College de France, 1975–76, ed. by Mauro Bertani and Alessandro Fontana, trans. by David Macey (New York: Picador, 2003), pp. 239–64. 37 Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended”, p. 256. 38 Barcelona, 124 (14 April 2009).

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39 Martín Appiolaza, ‘El desarme enfocado desde la comunicación. La experiencia del Plan Canje de Armas (Mendoza, Argentina)’, Dimensiones de la Violencia, Programa de las Naciones Unidas para el Desarrollo (2002), 123–42 (p. 134). 40 Micael Herschmann, O funk e o ­hip-­hop invadem a cena (Rio de Janeiro: Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, 2006), p. 67. 41 See Carlos Rodríguez, ‘De la cumbia villera a la toma de rehenes en directo por tevé’, Página/12, 24 June 2001: http://www.pagina12.com. ar/2001/01–06/01–06–23/pag12.htm (accessed 2 July 2016). 42 Flor de Piedra, ‘Cumbia cabeza’, La vanda más loca (Leader Music, 1999, CD LM 605457 5412 2 1). Composed by Pablo Lescano. 43 Hermano Vianna, O mundo funk carioca (Rio de Janeiro: Zahar, 1988), p. 109; George Yúdice, The Expediency of Culture: Uses of Culture in the Global Era (Durham, NC/London: Duke University Press, 2003), p. 127. 44 Adriana Carvalho Lopes and Adriana Facina, ‘Cidade do funk: expressões da diáspora negra nas favelas cariocas’, Revista do Arquivo Geral da Cidade do Rio de Janeiro, 6 (2012), 193–206 (p. 195). 45 La Renga, ‘Negra es mi alma, negro es mi corazón’, Bailando en una pata (Interdisco/Polygram, 1995, CD 528 587–2 ). Composed by Gustavo Fabián ‘Chizzo’ Nápoli. 46 Sarah Ahmed, Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in ­Post-­Coloniality (London/New York: Routledge, 2000), p. 44. 47 Iglesias, ‘La cumbia combativa encandila a los bonaerenses’: http:// www.udel.edu/leipzig/270500/ela250401.htm (accessed 4 May 2016). 48 Quoted in Chris Moss, ‘The people will be heard’, The Guardian, 4 October 2002: http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2002/oct/04/artsfeatures (accessed 5 May 2016). 49 Santiago Rial Ungaro, ‘El milagro argentino’, Página/12, 5 May 2002: http://www.pagina12.com.ar/diario/suplementos/radar/9–181–2002– 05–11.html (accessed 6 May 2016). 50 Quoted in Riera, ‘El ritmo de la villa’ (accessed 6 May 2016). 51 Quoted in ‘De gira con Lescano’, Argentinos por su nombre (Canal 13, 14 December 2008), 00:22:34. 52 Quoted in ‘De gira con Lescano’, 00:37:43. 53 See, for example, David E. Kirkland and Austin Jackson, ‘“We Real Cool”:  Toward a Theory of Black Masculine Literacies’, Reading Research Quarterly, 44:3 (2009), 278–97 (pp. 278–9). 54 El Empuje, ‘Nos están buscando’, Estamos más allá (Garra Records, 2007, CDPC303). Composed by Sergio ‘Fideo’ Galván. 55 Damas Gratis, ‘Quieren bajarme’, Operación damas Gratis (Genoma Records, 2002, CD80393). Composed by Pablo Lescano. 56 Quoted in ‘Cumbia villera: protesta y descontrol’, Secretos verdaderos (América TV, 13 January 2004), 00:08:33.

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57 Quoted in Cragnolini, ‘Reflexiones’ (accessed 14 February 2016). 58 Los Pibes Chorros, ‘Negro soy’, Cría cuervos (Magenta, 2003, CD 779806733155–9). Composed by Dalebe and Ariel Salinas. 59 Cragnolini, ‘Articulaciones’ (accessed 27 May 2016). 60 Fabián Flores and Adrián Outeda, ‘100% negro cumbiero. Una aproximación al proceso de construcción de las identidades entre los jóvenes urbano marginales’, Ciudad Virtual de Antropología y Arqueología: http://www.naya.org.ar/congreso2002/ponencias/fabian_flores_adrian_ outeda.htm (accessed 13 February 2016). 61 Rosalía Cortes, ‘Mercado de trabajo, pobreza y género. El caso argentino, 1994–2002’, in María Elena Valenzuela (ed.), Mujeres, pobreza y mercado de trabajo. Argentina y Paraguay (Santiago de Chile: Organización Internacional del Trabajo, 2003), pp. 67–104 (pp. 79–101). 62 Silva and Semán, ‘Cumbia villera: una narrativa de mujeres activadas’, in Cumbia: Raza, nación, etnia y género, pp. 31–102. 63 Silba and Spataro, ‘Cumbia Nena’, p. 103.

Afterword   1   2   3  4

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Index

19 and 20 December, see crisis: 19 and 20 December 1910s 44, 167 see also turn of the twentieth century 1920s 7, 142 1930s 8, 42, 145 1940s 8, 46, 48, 74, 144–5 1950s 10, 48, 64, 74, 144–5 1960s 10, 15, 38, 47, 56, 64, 133, 142, 144, 147, 157 1970s 9, 15, 28, 49, 56–7, 67, 142, 144–5, 157 1980s 9, 17, 53, 57, 107, 145, 154 1990s 20, 33, 53, 96, 118, 146, 150, 163 art 111, 117–18, 126, 133 cumbia 145–6, 156–7, 165 film 88, 91 literature 52–3, 55–7, 73 multiculturalism 17–18, 49, 57, 101 neoliberalism 6, 11, 20, 30–3, 35–6, 63, 73, 80, 115–16, 126, 137–8, 150, 163, 170 politics 6, 33, 35, 96, 126 racism 21, 85, 91, 117 villas miseria 15–16, 149, 154 see also turn of the twenty-first century 2000s 6, 20, 52, 54, 56–7, 110, 115, 123, 131, 139, 147, 166, 168 see also turn of the twenty-first century

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Adamovsky, Ezequiel 47, 166 affect 13–14, 21, 61, 93, 159 ‘Africanisation’ 1–3, 10–11 see also darkening; whiteness: instability of Afro-Argentinians, see Afro– descendants Afro-Brazilians 14 Afro-descendants activism 17, 168 and cumbia 143–4, 60 ‘extinction’ of 7, 43 in Argentina 7, 40, 41, 43–4, 46–7, 167, 171 in literature 69–70 see also blackness Afro-Dominicans 68–70, 76–81 see also Dominican Republic Aguilar, Gonzalo 88–9 Aguinis, Marcos 3, 10 Ahmed, Sarah 156 Aira, César 20–1, 51, 54–7, 88 and realism 54–6, 63–6 see also La Villa Alabarces, Pablo 148 Alarcón, Cristian 152 Alberdi, Juan Bautista 41, 44 Alfonsín, Raúl 5, 27–8 Alianza (political party) 5, 33 Alonso, Lisandro 89 Alsogaray, María Julia 31 Altamirano, Carlos 58 alterity, see otherness Álvarez, Carlos Chacho 33–4 Amerindians, see indigenous people

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Andean 13, 21–2, 51, 57–8, 62, 94, 104 Andermann, Jens 87, 119, 125–6 Andrews, George Reid 43 Angeloz, Eduardo 28 anti-monument 135–8 anti-Peronism, see Peronism anti-Semitism 45 Archetti, Eduardo 84 Argentina decline 3, 4, 10, 96, 121, 139 founding myths 11, 22, 110, 123–5, 129 history 38–50 post-crisis 166–70 see also national identity Argentina Arde 133 Argentinazo, see crisis: 19 and 20 December Argentinian poetry of the 1990s 56 Argentinianness 45, 66, 95, 99, 118, 168–70, 172 see also national identity assemblies (of neighbours) 6, 5 ‘Asterix, el encargado’ 21, 51, 57–62, 64, 72, 82 see also Casas, Fabián autoethnography 70 autofiction 57, 68–70 Auyero, Javier 16, 149 Babuscio, Jack 121 barbarism 22, 74, 115, 125 see also civilisation Barilaro, Javier 53 Barrio Charrúa 58–9, 62, 100, 103–4 Bayer, Osvaldo 138 becoming Other 21, 51–2, 61 see also passing (racial) Bejerman, Gabriela 53 Benetton Group 135, 137–8 see also land conflict Bernasconi, Violeta, see GAC bicentennial 140–1, 167 Bioy Casares, Adolfo 74

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blackening (of Argentina), see darkening; ‘Africanisation’; ‘Latin Americanisation’ blackness in Argentina 40–1, 43, 45 and cumbia 144, 156, 159–60, 163 see also Afro-descendants Blanco, Florencia 109 Blanes, Juan Manuel 22, 123–4, 130–1 Boca Juniors 85, 101 Boedo (neighbourhood) 53, 57 bolitas 85, 94–6, 98 see also Bolivian immigration Bolivia (film) 86, 90–100, 102, 104, 107–8, 117, 162 see also Caetano, Israel Adrián Bolivian immigration 11, 13–15, 21–2 57–62 festivities, see Virgin of Copacabana Festival in Buenos Aires 86, 92, 100–2, 106–8; see also Barrio Charrúa in film, see Bolivia; Copacabana in literature 54, 57–64, 78, 84–5 see also racialisation: of Bolivians Bollig, Ben 75 Bonelli, Florencia 54 border / frontier, see frontera / frontería Borges, Jorge Luis 58, 66, 70, 74 Bossi, Lorena, see GAC Brazil 1, 7, 14, 19, 36, 148, 150, 154–5, 166 Brexit 19 Briones, Claudia 166 Brizuela, Leopoldo 54 Brubaker, Rogers 39 Buenos Aires blackness in 40–1, 43, 74–6 crime 149, 152 demographics 16, 40, 42, 44, 62–3 internal migration 8, 145 ‘Latin Americanisation’ of 12, 14, 16, 18–19, 51, 57–8, 73, 80, 100

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Index 227 multiculturalism 18–19, 51, 101–3 neoliberalism 16, 82, 101, 116–17 protests 34, 132, 135–6, 168–9 public events 18–19, 22, 59, 73, 100–1, 103, 141, 167 race 8, 21–2, 63, 67–9, 73–4, 82, 86, 97–8 shantytowns, see villas miserias social class 67, 69 white / Europeanised 16, 51, 58, 61, 63, 107 Bustillo, Alejandro 133 Bustos Domecq, H., see ‘La fiesta del Monstruo’; anti-Peronism cabecita negra 9, 46–7, 74–5, 128, 167 see also Peronism Caetano, Israel Adrián 21–2, 86, 91–9 Cambaceres, Eugenio 45 camp 111, 121–2 Campero, Agustín 89 Cané, Miguel 45 Canessa, Andrew 117 capitalism 15, 26, 41–2, 102, 104, 124–9, 137–8 Caribbean 23, 69, 81, 144, 160 cartoneros 51, 53, 62–3, 83 Carvalho Lopes, Adriana 155 ‘Casa tomada’ 74 see also Peronism; Cortázar Casas, Fabián 20–1, 51, 53–62, 70, 88 caudillo 41, 115 Cavallo, Domingo 29, 33 centennial 167 Chaco (region) 41–2, 120 Chaile, Gabriel 110 Chambers, Ian 78 Chamosa, Oscar 43 chetos 161–2 chicha (music) 147, 158 cholas 117 Chile 4–5, 7, 14 Cidade de Deus (film) 105

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Ciudad Abierta 101–2 civilisation 2, 8, 10–11, 16, 30, 41, 170 see also barbarism Clarín 85 Cleto, Fabio 121 Cohen, Stanley 150 communitas 60–1 Conquest of the Desert 22, 41–3, 49, 109, commemoration of 124, 129, 133–5, 138–9 Constitución (neighbourhood) 67, 71 continuity (historical) 20, 23, 40, 48–9, 74, 120, 128, 137, 151 Convertibility (peso-dollar peg) 29, 115, 129, 145 Cooper, Frederic 39 Copacabana (film) 22, 59, 86, 90, 100–8, 171 see also Rejtman, Martín Copi 67 Cornejo Polar, Antonio 78–80 Corral, Mariana, see GAC corralito 34 Cortázar, Julio 61, 74 Coscia, Jorge 167 Cragnolini, Alejandra 162–3 criollo 40, 43, 48, 167 crisis 19 and 20 December 5, 20, 35, 172 crime 141, 149–54 racism 11–15, 83 , 85–6, 88, 91, 142 whiteness 2–4, 6, 9–11, 24, 35, 78, 80, 166 economic aspects 3, 5, 32–6, 63, 73, 88, 91, 100, 108, 126 impact on cultural production 4, 52–3, 86–7, 109–10, 147 political aspects 33–6, 150 crisol de razas 44, 99 Cucurto 20–1, 51–7, 67–83, 88, 128 blackness 75–7, 83 cumbia 21, 67, 68, 71–3, 76, 80–1 Peronism 73–6

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sex 21, 70, 73, 75–6, 80–2 autofiction 68–70 ‘Cosas de negros’ 68, 71–3 Cosas de negros 69 ‘De cómo son hechos los Arco Iris y por qué se van’ 77 El curandero del amor 68–70, 80 ‘Hasta quitarle Panamá a los yanquis’ 80 ‘Las aventuras del Sr Maíz´ 68–9, 76, 81 La máquina de hacer paraguayitos 68 ‘Noches vacías’ 72, 80 Zelarayán 77–8 cultural nationalism 45 cumbia music 1990s boom 144 history in Argentina 144–5 nightclub 53, 68, 72, 80, 91, 145–6, 151, 154, 162 romántica 146, 158 traditional (Colombian) 143–4, 158 cumbia villera as subculture 143, 163–5 authenticity in 148, 156–61 boom 146–8 class antagonisms 161–2 controversies around 141–2, 151, 154 drugs 148, 155 gender 149, 160, 162–5 origins 146–8 poetics 142, 155, 158, 161, 165–6 race 23, 142–3, 151, 154–6, 158, 161–2 territoriality 151–2, 154–5 Curianco, Atilio 138 D’Elía, Luis 127–8 darkening (of Argentina) 3, 46 see also ‘Africanisation’; ‘Latin Americanisation´ Darwin, Charles 119 De Filippis, Mariano 146

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De Gori, Esteban 146 De la Rúa, Fernando 5, 33–4 Delacroix, Jonathan 109 dedifferentiation 6 democracy 2, 5, 27, 34, 142 direct democracy 6, 35 Di Nucci, Sergio 54 dictatorship, see Proceso de Reorganización Nacional difference nationality 4, 6, 47 ethnicity 17, 60 race 10, 14, 19, 38–9, 45–6, 49, 60, 62, 69, 77–8, 80, 101, 120, 172 see also otherness; racialisation ‘Discriminado’ (Yerba Brava song) 151–4, 159 Dominican Republic 11, 21, 67, 72–4, 81 see also Afro-Dominicans Duhalde, Eduardo 12, 35–6 Dyer, Richard 48, 121 Echeverría, Esteban 76 El abrazo partido 98–100 ‘El matadero’ (Echeverría) 76–7 Elena, Eduardo 47 Eloísa Cartonera 53, 56, 68 Emecé 56, 68, 70 Estrellas (film) 89 Etcétera (art collective), see Internacional Errorista ethics 22, 24, 88 ethnicity 17–19, 38, 40, 43–5, 47, 49, 102, 118, 150 ethnography and cumbia villera 163–4 in cinema 88, 103, 107 in literature 53–4, 57, 67 eugenics 44–5 exceptionalism, see middle class: and national exceptionalism exoticisation, see middle class: fascinantion with the Other; multiculturalism; racialisation; stereotypes extractivism 138, 168–9

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Index 229 Fabian, Johannes 58 Facina, Adriana 155 Fanon, Frantz 156 farándula 30–1, 115 see also fashion fashion 109–22 femininity 40, 45, 76, 80, 97, 115–22, 163–4 see also gender Fernández de Kirchner, Cristina 131, 166–70, 172 see also Kirchnerismo Fernández L’Hoeste, Héctor 143 Fernández, Alberto 141 fiesta menemista 30, 73, 145, 158 Flor de Piedra 147, 155, 158 Flores (neighbourhood) 55, 62–64 Flores, Fabián 163 Fogwill 56 football 56, 84–5, 94 Foucault, Michel 4, 152–3 FREPASO 5, 19 Frigerio, Alejandro 14 frontera / frontería 81–2 funk carioca 148, 154–5 GAC (Grupo de Arte Callejero) 23–4, 110, 131–40, 171 Gambarotta, Martín 53 Gamerro, Carlos 75 García Canclini, Néstor 79 Garguin, Enrique 47 Gachassin, Diego 97 gauchesca 70 gaucho 45 gender 30, 40, 46 and race 23, 39, 45, 76, 97, 115–22, 146 and cumbia villera 142, 149, 160, 162–5 and the body 115–16, 139 Germani, Gino 48 Goldberg, David Theo 11 Gómez, Antonio 102 Gordillo, Gastón 13, 42 Gorelik, Adrián 57 Grimson, Alejandro 11, 85, 101 Guano, Emanuela 11, 15, 49, 63–4

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Hadad, Daniel 13 Hall, Stuart 150 Halperín Donghi,Tulio 10 Halter, Marilyn 102 Herbstein, Gaby 22, 109–22, 139 Herschmann, Michael 154 heterogeneity (Cornejo Polar) 79–80 Hirsch, Silvia 42 Historias breves (film) 91 homogeneity 7, 9, 46, 48, 80, 108, 120, 143, 167, 171–2 homosexuality 97, 121, 163 Huellas (calendar) 22, 109, 111–22, 171 hyperinflation 28–9, 31, 33, 35 Ibarra, Aníbal 19, 101 identity class 6, 17, 27, 57, 94, 128, 149, 162 national, see national identity politics of 24, 160; see also indigenous people: activism; Afro-descendants: activism Porteño 57, 64 racial 65, 69–70, 78, 107, 128, 142; see also racialisation; otherness; difference theories of 39 villero 142, 148–9, 151, 158, 160, 163–5; see also cumbia villera: as subculture; negro villero ILO Convention 169 18, 49 immigrants Asian 13–14, 77–8, 99 Dominican 67, 73, 76, 81 European (Eastern) 98 European (Western) 41–2, 44–5; see also whitening ‘invasion’ of 11, 13, 21, 73, 98 Middle–Eastern 116 South American 11–15, 73–4, 92, 169–70; see also Afro-Brazilians; Bolivian immigration; Chile; Paraguay; Peru

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Import-substitution industrialisation (ISI) 25–6 INADI 18 INCAA 87, 91 Incardona, Juan Diego 53 indigenismo 120 indigenous people activism 9, 17–18, 135, 137–9 ancestral territories, see land and multiculturalism 19, 51, 61, 67, 73, 101; see also ILO Convention 169 and photography 120 conflict 137–9, 168–9 extinction 7, 42, 119–20, 125 forced assimilation 43–7, 124 genocide 23, 109, 134, 137, 139; see also Roca; Conquest of the Desert in the nineteenth century 7, 41–4, 139 see also Mapuches; Qom Indoamericano Park (conflict) 169 Internacional Errorista 133 Jagoe, Eva–Lynn 119 Jameson, Frederic 6 Jewish in Argentina 45, 99 Joseph, Galen 11 Kirchner, Néstor 6, 36, 137, 141, 166–70, 172 Kirchnerismo 167–70, 172 see also Kirchner, Néstor; Fernández de Kirchner, Cristina Klinger, Diana Irene 68, 70 Ko, Teresa 13 Kohan, Martín 72 Kusnetzoff, Andy 159 La conquista del desierto (artwork) 22, 110, 124–31, 140, 171 see also Luna, Leonel ‘La fiesta del Monstruo’ 74, 76–7 see also Peronism; Borges, Jorge Luis

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‘La noche boca arriba’ 61 see also Cortázar, Julio La Nación 1, 12 La Primera de la Semana 12 labour and migration 12, 41, 98, 104 and neoliberalism 3, 12, 16, 26–7, 32–3, 35, 37, 63, 126, 132 and race 41, 94, 124, 126 and villero youth 146, 149, 154, 163–4 see also piqueteros Lafranchini, Romina 91 Laguna, Fernanda 53 Laiseca, Alberto 68 Lamborghini, Osvaldo 68 land capture 22, 41–2, 119–20, 124–5, 135–7; see also Conquest of the Desert conflict 137–9, 168–9 ‘Latin Americanisation’ 2–3, 10–11, 16, 72 see also darkening; whiteness: instability of La Villa (novel) 21, 51–7, 62, 77, 82 see also Aira, César Lenton, Diana 47 Lescano, Pablo 141, 147–8, 154, 156–9, 165 Levey, Cara 6 Lewis, Colin M. 35 Liotta, Patrick 109 Lista, Ramón 119 Literal (journal) 68 Los Kjarkas 94 Los lemmings y otros 57 see also Casas, Fabián Low, Gail 121 Luna, Leonel 110, 123–31, 136–7, 139 see also La conquista del desierto machismo, see sexism Macri, Mauricio 101, 166, 169–70

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Index 231 Mapuches 122, 137–9 Maradona, Diego Armando 84, 94 Maravilla, Ricky 145 Margulis, Mario 15, 85, 142 Martel, Julián 45 Martínez de Hoz, José Alfredo 137 Martínez Estrada, Ezequiel 74 Martínez Sarasola, Carlos 118 masculinity 30–1, 76, 97, 116, 146, 149, 160, 162–5 see also gender; sexism Masotta, Carlos 124 Massone, Manuel 146 mediatisation of society 31, 115, 153–4 melting pot, see crisol de razas Memmi, Albert 65 Menem, Carlos 5, 27–34, 49, 129, 132, 137, 145, 170 and race 115–16 see also Menemismo; fiesta menemista Menemismo 31, 33, 115, 132, 143, 145, 148–9, 158, 164 see also Menem; fiesta menemista Merlo, Lorena, see GAC mestizaje 1, 6–8, 45, 80, 166 mestizo 7, 40–1, 43, 46, 74, 78, 81, 97, 117, 128, 156, 160, 167 Meyers, Moe 121 middle class and art 111–12 and cumbia 144, 158–63 and film 92–8 and national identity 9–11, 21, 23–4, 47–8, 99, 170 and neoliberalism 11, 16, 30, 34, 94, 99–100 and whiteness 9–11, 21, 23–4, 35, 47–9, 51, 170 fascination with the Other 57, 62, 66, 77, 102–8, 119; see also neoliberal multiculturalism in literature 51, 56–7, 62–7, 69, 71–5, 77 politicisation 5, 34–5, 96 racism 3, 8, 15, 21, 73, 85, 92–7, 116, 128, 153

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migrancy 78–80, 82 Miguez, Daniel 143 military junta, see Proceso modernity 10, 119, 125 monuments 13, 23, 110, 133 Morales, Bruno, see Di Nucci, Sergio Moraña, Mabel 82 Moreno, Francisco 119 morocho 59–60, 72, 80, 166–7 see also non-whiteness Moyano, Carlos María 119 multiculturalism and neoliberalism 9, 14, 17–19, 21, 62, 101–3, 107, 138 in Argentina 18–19, 49, 51, 101–3, 122, 138, 169 in Latin America 17 música tropical 144–7, 157, 164 Nahuelquir, Rosa 138 nation-building 22, 40, 44, 49, 54, 99, 135–6 nationhood, see national identity nationness, see national identity national identity alternative forms of 128, 137, 167 and art 109, 111, 118, 124, 128, 130–1, 133, 136–7 and domination 46–7, 67, 133, 136 and neoliberalism 6, 9, 20, 30 and non-whiteness 8, 45, 48, 75, 125, 130, 171 and the crisis 3, 10–11, 20, 24, 114, 118–19, 122, 165, 171–2 and the middle class 9–11, 21, 23–4, 47–8, 99, 170 and whitennes 3–4, 6–10, 47–8, 50, 64 negro 9, 15, 46–7, 69–70, 75, 83, 90, 93, 115–16, 117, 127–9, 153, 155–6, 171 and cumbia 142–5, 151–7, 159–63 and immigration 15, 85–6, 93, 96

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negro villero 15, 23, 151–7, 160, 162–3 neobarroso 81–2 neoliberalism 4, 6, 20 and dictatorship 5–6, 25–7, 30, 137 and economic crisis 6, 32–6, 73, 88, 91, 100, 108, 126 and national identity 6, 9, 20, 30 in Menem’s years 5–6, 28–32, 96, 100, 126, 114, 138, 145, 158, 165 multiculturalism 9, 14, 17–19, 21, 62, 101–3, 107, 138 racism 6, 9, 11–13, 49, 72, 76, 83, 85–6, 88, 91, 142 reforms 4–5, 12, 26, 28–32, 49, 73, 126–7, 132, 138, 158 resistance against 33–5, 127, 129, 132; see also piqueteros New Argentinian Cinema 86–9, 90–1, 100 new genre public art 132–3 Nichols, Bill 103 nineteenth century 7, 10, 22–3, 39, 40–3, 45, 49, 98, 109, 115, 119–20, 123, 126, 128, 130, 135 art 109, 123 literature 54–5, 74, 76, 98 race 7, 39, 40, 45, 54–5, 74, 76, 119–20, 128, 130, 137–9, 152 see also nation-building non–whiteness cumbia 157 cumbia villera 142–3, 151, 154–6, 158, 161–2 gender 97, 115, 117 indigeneity 120–1, 125, 130 Latin American immigration 11, 15, 21, 45, 61, 64, 66–7, 71, 85, 93, 97, 98 national identity 8, 45, 48, 75, 125, 130, 171 Peronism 8, 46–7, 49, 115 poverty 2–3, 10

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social class 47, 78, 115 and villeros 15, 21, 154–6, 158, 162 and whiteness 21, 61, 66, 72, 78, 80, 125, 152, 171 in literature 64, 66–7, 68–9, 71, 76 Noriega, Gustavo 95 Objectivism (poetry) 56 Ocupación militar del Río Negro (artwork) 22, 123–6, 128–31 see also Blanes; Roca Oeyen, Annelies 66 Once (neighbourhood) 67 orality 31, 53, 56 Ortiz, Fernando 79 Other, see otherness otherness (racial) indigeneity 22, 117–18, 122 villeros 15, 51–2, 16, 65, 83, 142, 149, 150–1, 154, 165 external 15–16, 21, 51–2, 60, 69, 71–2, 82, 91, 93–4, 104, 109 internal 46–7, 69, 71–2, 74, 85, 145; see also negros, cabecita negra see also difference; racialisation; middle class: fascination with the Other Outeda, Adrián 163 Page, Joanna 88, 100 Página/12 2 Palmeiro, Cecilia 56 Pampa (region) 22, 42 Paraguay 43, 72–3 immigration 11, 13–15, 21, 73–4, 81, 92–8 passing (racial) 121–2 Patagonia (region) 14, 22, 42, 119, 132, 137–9 Peña, Fernando 127–8 Perlongher, Néstor 56, 68, 81 Perón, Eva 115, 131 Perón, Juan Domingo 47, 49, 74, 136

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Index 233 Peronism 5–6, 29–31, 33–5, 96, 128, 131, 136, 145 and race 8–9, 46–7, 49, 167 anti-Peronism 9, 46, 74–5 Peru 144, 158, 161 immigration 11, 13–15, 18–9, 21, 63–4, 69, 74, 86, 93, 98–9, 117, 169 peso 1–2, 129, 131 see also Convertibility photography 22, 107, 120 see also Huellas pibe chorro 150–4 Piglia, Ricardo 76 Pincén (cacique) 120 Pink Tide 36 piqueteros 5, 33–6, 126–30, 132–3, 136, 150 and race 36, 128–30 Pizza, birra, faso (film) 91 Podalsky, Laura 64 poetry 56, 68, 81, 104 Poole, Deborah 120 Porteños and neoliberalism 16, 93–6 and otherness 16, 51, 60, 64–6, 72, 102–5 racism 8, 21–2, 46, 64, 74–5, 93–6 see also Buenos Aires Pozzo, Antonio 120 Pratt, Mary Louise 70 precariat 15, 33, 67, 71–2, 86, 96, 128, 162, 164 primitivism 54, 58, 61, 67, 75, 82, 102, 120, 139, 144 see also stereotypes privatisation 5, 16, 28–9, 30–2, 132, 138 see also neoliberal reforms Proceso de Reorganización Nacional and neoliberalism 5–6, 25–7, 30 and whiteness 49, 137 in cultural production 53, 87–8, 132, 137 Pujol, Sergio 144

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¡que se vayan todos! 34 see also crisis: 19 and 20 December Qom (Toba) 169 Quiroga, Facundo 115 race and the body 31, 59, 69, 115, 121, 139, 156; see also phenotype Anglo-Saxon 44–5 Hispanic 45, 166 Latin 45 phenotype 13, 38, 44, 46, 64, 66, 69, 90, 117, 156, 158, 160 theories 38–9 racialisation 171–2 Bolivians 21–2, 85–6, 92–4, 97–8, 102–5, 108 immigrants 11–15, 63–5, 67–9, 72, 77–8, 82, 86, 170 indigenous people 120, 139 the working class 36, 46–8, 57, 74, 86, 116, 127, 145, 154, 161 villeros 9, 15–16, 22, 54, 67, 142–3, 148–56, 161–3, 165 racism and biopower 152–3 and gender 76–7, 93–4, 97, 117 and the state 12–14, 23, 43, 45, 65, 89, 107–8, 110, 137, 150, 152–3, 169 denial of 3–8, 45, 49 migration 11–12, 86, 92–5; see also racialisation: of immigrants scientific racism 6, 38, 41 Radical Party, see Unión Cívica Radical Rama, Ángel 79 Ramos Mejía, José 44 Rapado (film) 100 see also Rejtman, Martín Ratier, Hugo 15, 142 realism art 124, 130 film 83, 86, 88, 91, 95, 104 literature 21, 51–6, 63–6

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234

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Rejtman, Martín 59, 86, 90 Repsol 135, 137–8 RES 110 Ríos, Antonio 145 River Plate 85, 101 Roca, Julio Argentino 22, 123–5, 130–1 momument 23, 110, 133–9 see also Conquest of the Desert; anti-monument rock barrial, see rock chabón rock chabón 142, 156 Rodríguez Sá, Adolfo 35 Romano, Rubén 109 Romero, José Luis 48 Rosas, Juan Manuel 41, 74 Ross, Andrew 121 Rossetti, Dalia, see Laguna, Fernanda ‘Sábado de gloria’, see Martínez Estrada Saccomano, Guillermo 54 San Lorenzo de Almagro 57, 59 Santoro, Daniel 110 Sarlo, Beatriz 2, 53, 58 Sarmiento, Domingo Faustino 41, 44, 115, 141, 165 Schettini, Ariel 70 Schneider, Arnd 111, 113 Scorer, James 67, 96, 100 Sebreli, Juan José 75 sex 30–1, 115 and race 45, 97, 115, 117, 122, 139, 144, 146, 163–5 sexism 31, 81, 97, 117–8, 163–5 shantytowns, see villas Silba, Malvina 164 Sociedad Rural Argentina 135, 137 space and race 13, 46, 74, 15–16, 19, 21, 23, 39, 58, 63, 66–7, 71, 73, 78, 81 in cumbia villera 151–2, 154–5 in film 92, 99, 104–5, 107 liminal 8, 78–82 public 46, 74, 63, 110, 133

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see also villas miseria; Buenos Aires; land Spataro, Carolina 164 spectatorship in art 117–18, 121–4, 127, 129–30, 139 in cinema 22, 87, 91, 103–4, 107 Speranza, Graciela 53 Stagnaro, Bruno 91 state terrorism 26, 137 see also Proceso de Reorganización Nacional stereotypes blacks 75–7, 82–3, 159, 163 immigrants 12, 51, 61, 65–7, 69, 77, 82–3, 93, 104–5 indigenous people 121, 139 the middle class 51, 65, 73, 103, 153 villeros 15, 61, 65–7, 69, 77, 82–3 Strafacce, Ricardo 54 Svampa, Maristella 74, 148, 168 Sweeney, Carole 61 Taller Popular de Serigrafía (TPS) 133 tango 57, 142 territoriality, see space Theroux, Paul 2 tinku 21, 51, 58–9, 61–2 Tragic Week (1919) 45 see also anti-Semitism trigueño 43 Trigo, Abril 78, 80–1 Trump, Donald 19 turn of the twentieth century 7, 43, 116 see also nineteenth century; 1910s turn of the twenty-first century 5–6, 10, 12, 20, 27, 30, 52, 62, 67, 88, 114, 121, 143, 150, 166 see also 1990s; 2000s Turner, Victor 60 unemployment, see labour Unión Cívica Radical (UCR) 5, 27–8 Uruguay 7, 124

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Index 235 Vega, Santiago, see Cucurto Vianna, Hermano 155 Villa 1-11-14 (shantytown) 62 Villalón, Roberta 36 villas miserias 9, 15–16, 23, 58, 61– 2, 66–7, 90, 105, 107, 160 and cumbia, see cumbia villera villero 15–16, 64–6, 83, 90, 142 youth, see cumbia villera 142 Virgin of Copacabana Festival 22, 59, 100–2 Vitagliano, Miguel 66 Vladimir en Buenos Aires (film) 97 Wacquant, Loïc 4, 15, 39, 149 Wade, Peter 38–9, 144 Weber, Max 94 Weismantel, Mary 117 whiteness and beauty 115–6 and Buenos Aires, see Buenos Aires and cultural production 16, 20–1, 23–4, and economic crisis 3–4, 6, 9–11, 24, 35, 78, 80 and mestizaje 6–8 and non–whiteness 21, 61, 66, 72, 78, 80, 90, 125, 152, 171 and the middle class 10, 23–4, 27, 35–6, 47–8, 51, 63

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as norm/normative 11, 45, 63, 103, 122, 128, 154, 161 de-naturalisation/critique of 11, 108, 109, 121–2, 129–30, 139, 142–3, 166, 170, 172–3 European migration 6–8, 41–2, 44; see also whitening instability of 2–4, 8, 10–11, 48, 78, 82; see also darkening national exceptionalism 6–7, 9–11, 16, 30, 35, 48–9, 54, 78, 82 national identity 1, 3–4, 6–9, 13–15, 30, 41, 45–50, 65–6, 127–8, 170 neoliberalism 30, 49, 73 Peronism 46–7, 49 readership 51, 56, 65–7 spectatorship (visual arts) 22, 104, 107, 117–18, 121–4, 127–30 whitening 6–8, 42–5, 54 Williams, Raymond 61 Yerba Brava 148, 151–4, 158 YPF 132, 135, 138 Yúdice, George 155 Zelarayán, Ricardo 68 Zorrilla, José Luis 133 Zorzón, María 109

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