Abstract
This chapter situates the género chico criollo as the preeminent form of entertainment in Buenos Aires during the period of Argentina’s modernization. I argue that popular theater was crucial for mediating the public and private, relating the everyday lives of the characters to broader socio-economic and political trends in liberal modernity. Moreover, the plays provided audiences with the language and actions necessary to symbolically renegotiate their place in the nation. This chapter engages studies of Argentine popular culture and criollismo, current theorizations of everyday life as a central space for subverting power, and scholarship on how theatricality undermines the “naturalness” of dominant cultural scripts. Through the performance of diverse stories of everyday life, the plays created a critical space for the development of cultural agency in which new cultural scripts were evaluated.
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Notes
- 1.
Conventillos or inquilinatos were one-room substandard apartments formed out of the homes of the wealthy when they abandoned the city center for other neighborhoods following an epidemic of yellow fever in 1871. Many immigrants and other working-class families lived in the Argentine capital.
- 2.
- 3.
For example, Beatriz Sarlo points out the essentially conformist messages of the popular sentimental novels she studies (1985, pp. 117–8).
- 4.
The terms criollo, criollismo, criollista, and género chico criollo are discussed below.
- 5.
Chamosa (2010) traces how this culture would eventually be co-opted under the first presidency of Juan Perón (1946–1955), expanding to cut across classes and to grant cultural authenticity to all social classes.
- 6.
McCleary (2002) reports that between 1890 and 1904, the average theater attendance per capita remained steady at 2.3 per year. During the years 1905–1914, an economic boom allowed an increase in leisure time and attendance to increase to 5.06 in 1910 and to 4.11 in 1923 (see especially her Table 2.2 on p. 58).
- 7.
For a more detailed breakdown of the number and location of theaters throughout this period, see McCleary (2002, pp. 42–56); for a breakdown and discussion of ticket sales, see pp. 56–61. It is important to note that her study attests to the fact that movie-going complimented rather than replaced theater-going: “theater rates of attendance actually increased during the first few years that movies entered the capital” (2002, p. 60). For an excellent cultural history of radio and cinema, see Karush (2012).
- 8.
As McCleary argues throughout her study, popular theaters are best understood as part of commercial culture: theaters were subject to market pressures, regulated for public safety, and guided by logistical concerns such as syncing performance hours with public transportation schedules, but rarely were they censored for content (2002).
- 9.
Legrás reads this appropriation as evidence of the power of popular culture, highlighting that it was co-opted around the 1910 Centennial celebrations of independence in order to neutralize what the previous generation of elites could not hold back, especially its anarchic and popular articulatory power (2003, p. 35).
- 10.
In his chronicle of the multitudes of “bad” characters and language in turn-of-the-century sainetes , Casadevall notes with dismay that like a contagious plague, these models of bad behavior and speech “contaminated” real life by fostering in the audience a fascination with delinquency (1957, pp. 23, 189–90). These “types” included: malevos (semi-urban bad guys), minas (flirty, seductive, beautiful young women), biabistas (thieves who assault their victims to rob them), escruchantes (thieves who break into homes to rob them), punguistas (pick-pockets), escamoteadores (swindlers), cuenteros (swindlers who scam while letting other swindlers believe they are swindling the cuentero), contrabandistas (smugglers), milonguitas (poor girls who are seduced by men and money to trade their “honor” for luxury items like furs and silks), toxicómanos (drug addicts), and patoteros (rich kids who commit random acts of delinquency for their own entertainment). Also important are the compadrito and the cafishio, canfinflero, or ruffián (pimps), who have been amply addressed by Borges and Bullrich (2000), and Matamoro (1982), respectively.
- 11.
See Chasteen (1995).
- 12.
The first Colón Theater opened in 1857, and it was rebuilt and opened in 1908. For more information, see J. L. Romero (1983).
- 13.
The novel and theater versions of Juan Moreira are further analyzed in Chap. 6.
- 14.
For more information, see Ludmer (1996).
- 15.
Quotations are faithful to the originals, preserving their spelling, punctuation, colloquialisms, orality, and lunfardo . I preserve the original language for primary texts analyzed so that the reader can appreciate their richness and complexity. All translations are mine unless otherwise cited. For a detailed study of orality in the género chico criollo , see Schäffauer (1999).
- 16.
For a more detailed account of the criollo circus and the adaptations of Juan Moreira to circus and drama, see Seibel (1993).
- 17.
Prieto remarks that in spite of the anti-social characteristics of the popular “gaucho malo” type like Juan Moreira, his popularity paved the way for the literary elite’s usurpation and transformation of the figure for nationalist purposes. Three nationalist writers were principally responsible for the idealization of the gaucho, which they conflated with the Creole, in order to “Argentinize” the immigrant masses: Ricardo Rojas, Leopoldo Lugones, and Manuel Gálvez (Slatta 1994, p. 155). Susana Rotker affirms that the ethnic gaucho, who was a mestizo, became a “social type” for writers who consistently erased his historical identity (Rotker 2002, pp. 44–5). Argentine criollista literature, then, typically involved multiple revisions of history to create an image of the rural lifestyle suited to nationalist cultural politics. For a detailed discussion of the gaucho’s representations’ changing significance in Argentine culture, see Slatta (1994); for more background on the different meanings and uses of Cocoliche’s figure, see Cara-Walker (1987).
- 18.
This Constitution was based on Alberdi’s 1852 text Bases y Puntos de Partida para la Organización Política de la República Argentina [Bases and Points of Departure for the Political Organization of the Argentine Republic] (1915).
- 19.
See Botana (1984) Part II, especially pp. 338–408.
- 20.
For an in-depth study of this conflict, see Viñas (2003).
- 21.
While the modern Republic of Argentina existed since 1862, presidents still struggled to subdue some regional caudillos and to vie for territory with the indigenous until General Roca definitively conquered the indigenous in his 1879 Desert Campaign and he put down a revolution launched by Buenos Aires’s governor. Thus, 1880 generally marks the year of national consolidation under Roca’s leadership. He successfully federalized Buenos Aires, thereby establishing it as the capital of the nation and consolidating centralized rule. See Viñas (1967) and Rock (1987).
- 22.
Botana defines the conservative order in this way: “order” alludes to a constitutionally legitimized monopoly of violence, and “conservative” describes the regime’s attempt to maintain governmental hegemony by controlling secession in the face of opposition (1994, p. ii).
- 23.
Botana analyzes the ways in which the oligarchy maintained its monopoly on power, including tight control of succession by the president and his small group of electors, federal interventions, nepotism, voter fraud, and violence. He explains that the Conservative Order achieved this paradoxical restrictive republic by separating the role of inhabitant from that of citizen. Inhabitants enjoyed universal civil liberties, but only citizens—privileged actors in the restrictive republic—could participate in politics (1994, p. xiv). This paradox is explored in depth in the section titled “Libertad política para pocos y libertad civil para todos” (“Political Freedom for the Few and Civil Liberties for All”) (1994, pp. 50–4). See also Rock (1975), especially p. 26.
- 24.
See Chap. 6 for an overview of these political struggles.
- 25.
Legrás notes the singular importance of theater as an educational tool that represented and constituted “the [Argentine] people” (2003, p. 21). See also Legrás (2002, pp. 54–9). Throughout the recently consolidated Latin American nations at the turn of the twentieth century, popular integration and the ability to symbolically reproduce a national community were crucial steps necessary for modernization (Williams 2002, pp. 4–5).
- 26.
Drawing upon Prieto’s study, Legrás explains that when Cocoliche appears on stage claiming to be “Creole to the core,” his claim was made true through his mere presence in the circus ring. Legrás notes that Ernesto Quesada, the lettered literary censor, included Cocoliche literature within the popular criollista literature that he denounced. Legrás argues that “popular” and criollista overlapped around the turn of the century, such that criollista libraries were not nativist in terms of their content but rather represented a popular alliance among different ethnic groups (2003, pp. 31–2).
- 27.
Susana Marcó et al. (1974) argue that these plays, specifically the sainete , were always concerned with registering the immediate. They examine how the plays functioned as mass media that expressed an ascending middle class’s values and norms, fostered solidarity, fomented the acquisition of identity, and educated through entertainment. Similarly, Nora Mazziotti (1990) reads the sainete as a realist radiography of the domestic lives of the popular sectors that provides the audience with a direct elaboration of its imaginary and the quotidian. It allowed the public to identify themselves on the stage and to explore their own reality through what was happening there. In summary, these critics value this genre because its representation of the quotidian from the perspective of the popular sectors provides excellent insight into the way different social and political issues were experienced, responded to, and mediated by these groups in Buenos Aires. These critics justify this reading because the mode of production of these works was such that the actors, directors, writers, and public were all typically from the popular sectors; as such, they do not contain the top-down perspective typically encountered in other works dealing with popular themes.
- 28.
- 29.
Lunfardo was first known as the technical language of thieves, but as it was divulgated in theater and in tangos, it also came to be associated with pimps and the bordello. For a detailed account of the history and social significance of lunfardo , see Donald S. Castro (1991). He describes how the first studies of lunfardo , written by criminologists who sought to prevent crime by understanding criminals’ language, associated Italians with criminality. These early studies distinguished between the lunfardo (thief) and the pimp. However, the language of the tango, which was associated with the bordello and influenced by words from female exploitation, was confused by the upper classes with lunfardo . From 1917 on (when Carlos Gardel performed Pascual Contursi’s “Mi noche triste” (“My Sad Night”), the first sung tango with lyrics), lunfardo was known as the poetic language of the tango. In this way, art both reflected and created this linguistic reality. Likewise, sainetes invented words that became known as lunfardo .
- 30.
While Viñas leaves the term “fluencia social,” which I translate as “social coherence,” undefined, in this context I understand it to mean the way in which language can make sense of the social, or the way common-sense notions are taken at face value.
- 31.
Reguillo’s and Taylor’s conceptualizations of the relationship between theatrical performance and everyday life build on the work of Richard Schechner, performance studies pioneer, whose concept of restored behavior reveals how daily life is composed of twice-behaved behaviors (1985, pp. 35–116).
- 32.
- 33.
Performance is particularly effective at making visible what resists discourse, or that which cannot be synthesized in cultural narratives. It works with verbal but also visual systems of representation to engage directly with how spectators read the codes and signs of the social, and how their responses are codified. In this way, performance is especially remarkable for examining how the margins of society—the poor men, women, and children who protagonize these plays—destabilize the conventions of daily life, thus disrupting the process of hegemony and making space for new possibilities.
- 34.
Matthew Karush (2012) credits cinema and tango with the formation of the deeply divided culture of class in Argentina that allowed populism to triumph. He acknowledges cinema’s and radio’s thematic debt to the popular circus and theater, but he does not acknowledge that the culture of class he describes was already becoming constituted in popular theater. In my view, theater was a fundamental precursor that shaped a strong popular class identity, one that nourished the development of populism in later decades.
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Garrett, V.L. (2018). Performing Everyday Life. In: Performing Everyday Life in Argentine Popular Theater, 1890–1934. New Directions in Latino American Cultures. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-92697-1_1
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