Abstract
The paradoxes of liberal modernity placed pressure on traditional family and gender roles. Exemplary tales such as Martín Coronado’s La piedra del escándalo and Nicolás Granada’s ¡Al campo! attempted to contain the entry of women into the public sphere, whether through work or consumerism. I argue that popular theater, in turn, made visible a more complex understanding of gender by focusing on how the material conditions of poor women made it impossible for them to fulfill an essentially bourgeois model. Carlos Mauricio Pacheco’s and Pedro E. Pico’s Música criolla and Florencio Sánchez’s La pobre gente, Barranca abajo, and Nuestro hijos explore various reasons why women pursued unconventional paths, highlighting the devastating impact on the family of a liberal capitalist logic that only produces crime, corruption, and misery in the families portrayed.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
Lucía Miranda was a Spanish woman purportedly captured by the Tinbúes in the early sixteenth century. Her legend was a source for a gamut of literary and visual versions that are studied extensively by Rotker.
- 3.
Ruggiero affirms that “[m]aternity was much more than a familial pleasure or a biological strategy to maintain the population; it was a woman’s ‘highest mission’” (53).
- 4.
In Chapters 3 and 4 of Sex and Danger she points out the rare exceptions who addressed men’s role in sexual deviance: Drs. Paulina Luisi, Ángel M. Giménez, José Ingenieros, and Alicia Moreau de Justo.
- 5.
Dr. Francisco de Veyga’s 1905 essay “De la regeneración como ley opuesta a la degeneración mórbida” [“On Regeneration As the Opposite Law to Morbid Degeneration”] paints a clear picture of the current state of affairs in the field of biological sciences: the concept of degeneration dominates, especially in the areas of psychiatry, criminal anthropology, and pathology, despite the fact that in his view, the conclusions arrived at are questionable at best. While the notion that hereditary characteristics are the principle cause of morbid degeneration predominates, he counters that environmental influences are the culprit (de Veyga 1905, p. 33), suggesting that perhaps non-hereditary degeneration is more common than hereditary degeneration (1905, p. 37). His essay both highlights the importance of the fear of degeneration as a driving force behind scientific investigations and indicates that both hereditary and environmental conditions were potential causes of the resultant sterile end of the race. For an in-depth study of how professionals conceptualized and responded to physical, moral, foreign, contagions in Argentina around the turn of the century, see Ruggiero (2004, pp. 84–99).
- 6.
As Eduardo Zimmerman points out, despite the different goals of groups contributing to this social construction, there was a surprising amount of overlap between the responses of the political elite—and its organic intellectuals—and socialists and anarchists (1995). His assertion is also supported by the work of Armus and Barrancos (1990), Salessi (1995), Lobato (1996), and Barrancos (1996).
- 7.
This is typical of how scientific knowledge was produced at the time in the Americas. As historians Marcos Cueto and Steven Palmer argue, “[t]he invocation of hygiene in Latin America was complex, mixed up with influences taken from Social Darwinism, evolutionism, and positivism, and for many of its supporters it was seen as complementary to medical treatment” (2014, p. 68). Likewise, historian Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra points to a myriad of factors that led to the favoring of interdisciplinary approaches to science in the Americas, including imperial and theological tensions within Europe, colonial Baroque legacies, and the coexistence of European, African, and indigenous healing practices in the region (2001).
- 8.
Such tales of perdition were repeated obsessively in tangos, naturalist novels, and serial novels. See Bergero (2008, pp. 115–43).
- 9.
See Bergero (2008, pp. 156, 183–7).
- 10.
This alarming phenomenon is also treated in Pacheco’s 1916 sainete El diablo en el conventillo [The Devil in the Tenement], which is analyzed in Chap. 7: working-class women courted by patoteros (wealthy young men who gratuitously upset the order of the working-class neighborhood for their own entertainment) (Marcó et al. 1974, p. 94)—are introduced to a world of luxury heretofore unknown, which leaves them discontented with their own world. Bergero explains that this often led to a dispute over sexual territory expressed in tangos: “The proletarian woman who goes up to the garçonnière is yet another extension of the elites’ symbolic capital and the class struggle: she is the elites’ ‘booty of war.’ What the speaker in the tango disputes is the sexual territory. It has clearly been confiscated by upper-class males” (Bergero 2008, p. 321). Noemí Ulla affirms that in the tango these “fallen” proletariat women referred to as “flor de fango” or “piba del barrio” faced a calamitous fate if they did not repent and return to the barrio (Ulla 1982, pp. 36–41).
- 11.
Isabel follows the infamous footsteps of the women of the tango and melodramatic poetry who abandon their working-class neighborhoods for the lights of the center. This stereotype was best known as la costurerita que dio aquel mal paso (the seamstress who took a misstep), immortalized in Evaristo Carriego’s poem of the same title. See Armus (2005).
- 12.
In addition to legal and civil restrictions for deviants, morality was carefully policed through legal institutions like patria potestas , which granted fathers and husbands responsibility for as well as absolute power over their wives and children. According to Guy, this was “the legal and social mechanism used by male heads of family to keep family members in line” (Guy 2000, p. 121). Although it was primarily concerned with restricting property rights, men also used patria potestas to justify punishing their wives and daughters whose deviance from the maternal imperative and other transgressions posed a threat to traditional moral codes, even when this punishment went so far as to include an “honor killing.”
- 13.
According to the notes by Marta Speroni and Griselda Vignolo, the reference is to Gabino Ezeiza (1847–1916), who is considered the last of the Buenos Aires payadores, or popular rural singer-songwriter known for improvising verses competitively (Posadas et al. 1980, p. 161).
- 14.
For a detailed contextualization of the author within the publishing and theatrical scene, see Rita Gnutzmann’s introduction to the critical edition of Barranca abajo (1997). She traces his participation in a variety of anarchist venues and his close friendships with prominent socialists like Ingenieros. Viñas takes up Sánchez’s ideological position from a somewhat different angle, positioning him, along with figures such as Ingenieros and Juan B. Justo, as a left-wing liberal populist who complimented the more conservative populists’ attention to the gaucho and the popular classes in an attempt to save liberalism by making concessions to the “delinquent public” (2004, pp. 77–82).
- 15.
This fascination, part of the culture of danger Foucault discusses in his The Birth of Biopolitics (2008), was made particularly famous when author Roberto Arlt both wrote police chronicles in 1927 for the newspaper Crítica and mocked in his fiction the reading public’s sordid fascination with danger and the editor’s exploitation of its market value. At the end of Los lanzallamas [The Flamethrowers], for example, the protagonist’s suicide is immediately framed in terms of its market value: it will be consumed en masse in the form of newspaper sales. The conversation between a newspaper’s head of sales and secretary is telling:Verse
Verse —Erdosain killed himself? The Secretary wraps him in a quick smile. —Yes The other tosses around fragments of ideas for a second and finishes his ruminations with these words. —Lovely. Tomorrow we run off fifty thousand more copies. (Arlt 2000, p. 595)
- 16.
See Ruggiero’s second chapter for a historical account of abuses and legal disputes surrounding the Foundling Home and other institutions such as the Beneficent Society, where contradictions surrounding women’s free will and social responsibility came to light.
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Garrett, V.L. (2018). Modern Families and Degeneration. 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_4
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