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.
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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.
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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
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