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CULTURE OF CLASS

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

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

Chapter One

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

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

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

This chapter will situate the emergence of Argentina's new mass cultural technologies and commodities within the context of the rapidly changing economic, political, and social conditions in Buenos Aires. Although the radio and cinema reached a massive audience throughout the country, both media targeted the capital city first and foremost. And in the rapidly growing barrios of Buenos Aires, class...