Abstract
Argentina’s biopolitical institutions like the National Department of Hygiene purported to safeguard citizens’ bodies against a wide range of microbial threats, which they usually associated with foreigners, the working classes, strikers, protesters, and anarchists. Carlos Mauricio Pacheco’s El diablo en el conventillo, Los disfrazados, and Barracas, and Armando Discépolo’s La fragua challenge this notion by placing working-class homes of diverse backgrounds at the center of the society that must be defended. They reframe rebellion and protest movements as necessary responses to local ecologies, and suggest that social justice will be achieved through cross-cultural alliances grounded in working-class solidarity. Moreover, while hygienic principles relied on the belief that individuals and their environments could and should be subjected to the discipline of a rational-scientific ordering of society, these works destabilize this notion by signaling ephemeral zones that escape or evade this control, rendering the logic of biopolitics unstable at best.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
Biopolitics was not confined to the merely discursive realm in the nineteenth-century liberal project. Buenos Aires became a hygienic city through the construction of running water systems, sewers, and a new port away from the fetid waters of the Riachuelo. In fact, in 1890 more than 70% of the nation’s external debt had gone to finance these health-oriented reforms (Salessi 1995, p. 21). By the 1890s when hygienists shifted their focus from internal dangers posed by pre-modern infrastructure to potential diseases entering through the port, the State extended its hygienic discipline through police units for each of the following areas: water, local and international sanitation, industry, mortuary, and domestic animals. These police units were different sections under the National Department of Hygiene. This system was so effective that it became an international model at the time. Consequently, a web of vigilance stretched from ships to floating pesthouses, coasts, cities, neighborhoods, schools, barracks, factories , shops, businesses, and private homes (1995, pp. 102–4).
- 2.
- 3.
For the historical events surrounding the law’s passage, see Chap. 6.
- 4.
See also Chap. 2.
- 5.
In this essay Armus analyzes anarchist discourses on tuberculosis to shed light on different perspectives on such “social plagues” in the period. Interestingly, he argues that though tuberculosis was seen as a direct result of the capitalist system and the accompanying social conditions, anarchists relied on hygienic measures such as abstinence from alcohol and sexual excesses like masturbation to improve those conditions in addition to improved living and working conditions. Hygienic language, then, was a language that both the State and its enemies spoke.
- 6.
Música criolla makes explicit reference to the social question and the Law of Residence. The two main patriarchs , don Juan and don Costa, complain that strikers disrupt the country’s peace simply because they are “never satisfied,” but they acknowledge that they are striking for undeniable, concrete reasons, bearing witness to the injustices that exist and that make such action necessary. While they do not participate in a strike or identify as anarchists, these criollos comprehend the need for drastic change to create the conditions of possibility for a better, more just life (Pacheco and Pico 1980).
- 7.
See Chap. 2’s discussion of Los inquilinos [The Tenants].
- 8.
Malatesta is named after Errico Malatesta, a famous Italian anarchist who spent time in Buenos Aires organizing workers.
Works Cited
Armus, Diego. 1996. Salud y anarquismo. La tuberculosis en el discursos libertario argentino, 1890–1940. In Política, médicos y enfermedades: Lecturas de la historia de la salud en la Argentina, ed. Mirta Zaida Lobato, 91–116. Buenos Aires: Biblos.
Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1968. Rabelais and His World. Trans. Helene Iswolsky. Cambridge: M.I.T. Press.
Butler, Judith. 2015. Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Cané, Miguel. 1899. Expulsión de extranjeros (apuntes). Buenos Aires: Imprenta de J. Sarrailh.
Discépolo, Armando. 1987 [1912]. La fragua. In Obra dramática de Armando Discépolo, ed. Osvaldo Pellettieri, vol. 2, 183–249. Buenos Aires: Editorial Universitaria de Buenos Aires.
Foucault, Michel. 1977. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Pantheon Books.
———. 2003. Society Must be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–76. Ed. Mauro Bertani and Alessandro Fontana and Trans. David Macey. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
———. 2008. The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–79. Ed. Michel Senellart and Trans. Graham Burchell. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Gálvez, Manuel. 1989 [1922]. Historia de arrabal. Buenos Aires: Centro Editor de América Latina.
Karush, Matthew B., and Oscar Chamosa, eds. 2010. The New Cultural History of Peronism: Power and Identity in Mid-Twentieth-Century Argentina. Durham: Duke University Press.
Laclau, Ernesto, and Chantal Moufe. 1985. Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. New York: Verso.
Mallea, Edward. 1937. Historia de una pasión argentina. Buenos Aires: Sur.
Nixon, Rob. 2011. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Harvard: Harvard University Press.
Ordaz, Luis, ed. 1958. Siete sainetes porteños. Buenos Aires: Losange.
Pacheco, Carlos Mauricio. 1958 [1918]. Barracas. In Siete sainetes porteños, ed. Luis Ordaz, 155–179. Buenos Aires: Losange.
———. 1976 [1916]. El diablo en el conventillo. In Antología del género chico criollo, ed. Susana Marcó, Abel Posadas, Marta Speroni, and Griselda Vignolo, 99–113. Buenos Aires: Editorial Universitaria de Buenos Aires.
———. 1977 [1906]. Los disfrazados. In Teatro rioplatense (1886–1930), ed. Jorge Raúl Lafforgue, 155–177. Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho.
Pacheco, Carlos Mauricio, and Pedro E. Pico. 1980 [1906]. Música criolla. In El teatro argentino: 6. El sainete, ed. Abel Posadas, Marta Speroni, and Griselda Vignolo, 65–97. Buenos Aires: Centro Editor de América Latina.
Recalde, Héctor. 1992. Transformaciones dentro del discurso higienista. In Reformadores sociales en Argentina, 1900–1940: Discurso, ciencia y control social, ed. Ricardo Donato Salvatore and Dora Barrancos, 40–45. Buenos Aires: Centro de Investigaciones Sociales.
Rock, David. 2001. Antecedentes de la derecha argentina. In La derecha argentina: Nacionalistas, neoliberales, militares y clericales, ed. David Rock, et al. and trans. Mario Ranaletti, 23–70. Buenos Aires: Javier Vergara.
Salessi, Jorge. 1995. Médicos maleantes y maricas: Higiene, criminología y homosexualidad en la construcción de la nación argentina (Buenos Aires, 1871–1914). Rosario: Beatriz Viterbo.
Stallybrass, Peter, and Allon White. 1986. The Politics and Poetics of Transgression. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Viñas, David. 1967. Argentina: Ejército y oligarquía. La Habana, Cuba: Casa de las Américas.
Zimmermann, Eduardo A. 1995. Los liberales reformistas: La cuestión social en la Argentina, 1890–1916. Buenos Aires: Editorial Sudamericana.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2018 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Garrett, V.L. (2018). Performing Protest. 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_7
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-92697-1_7
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-92696-4
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-92697-1
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)