Argentina’s twentieth century commenced with a series of intense political protests. Diverse social sectors and labor unions took to the streets demanding that their purportedly modern, democratic nation provide the rights and benefits associated with liberal democracy. This struggle exceeded the political sphere. A symbolic battle was waged in popular media, such as circus performances and carnivals, gaucho literature and serial novels, tango and folk music, magazines and newspapers, and especially theater. The cultural realm was crucial for the popular sectors to envision how their quotidian concerns fit within the national political agenda. It was through cultural production and consumption that they repositioned themselves politically and vied for recognition.
One of the most iconic strikes of this period was that of a tenant strike, in which some 100,000 renters living in the conventillos (tenements)1 of Buenos Aires protested skyrocketing rent prices and the rapidly rising cost of living in an overcrowded city. Refusing to pay their rents for almost three months, they demanded significant changes in their living conditions and lease terms. In October of 1907—when this strike was entering its dramatic third and final month—the most important popular playwright of the time, Nemesio Trejo, used these current events as the setting for his play Los inquilinos [The Tenants] (1964). The negligible temporal distance between the events and the play was a crucial aspect of the mediating pact between popular theater and its audience at that time. The play stages a comical but cathartic confrontation in which the tenants of a fictional conventillo decide to join the strike. Diverse voices are included, with characters debating each other regarding the merits of different courses of action, and a musical group traveling throughout the neighborhood singing a tango that vindicates the strikers. Their landlord, who finds no legal grounds for eviction, attempts to circumvent the law by fraudulently declaring the house infested with plague and yellow fever so that the homes must be vacated immediately. Though the corrupt hygiene inspector complies, the accompanying police officer refuses to participate in such a cynical abuse of power. The latter’s identification with the tenants’ suffering allows the audience to imagine the value of this struggle and to recognize the possibility of an affective and political relationship with a just state.
Los inquilinos, which is examined further in Chap. 2, is a prime example of how popular culture can attempt to shape the course of current events through performance, providing the audience with the language and actions necessary to symbolically renegotiate their place in the nation. By dramatizing resistance to specific injustices, the play made certain options for political and social actions visible for the popular sectors. Los inquilinos is part of a boom in popular theater that exposed similar abuses of power and hardships that manifested in the realm of everyday life. My research on Trejo’s and the impressive body of his peers’ plays recovers a multiplicity of perspectives on the complex interactions and struggles that occurred around the turn of the twentieth century.
In studying this period, critics have signaled the patent imprint of scientific discourse in Latin American and especially Argentine literature, and have written extensively on literature such as naturalist novels that supported and propagated said scientific discourse.2 The research for Performing Everyday Life was initially inspired by this scholarship because of my interest in how cultural production of the turn of the twentieth century laid the foundation for social imaginaries that shape Argentina’s history to this day. But my concern lies not just with addressing the perspectives of cultural and political elites but also with discovering how dominant ideologies were met, negotiated, or dispensed with altogether within popular culture. To this end, I turned to the most important popular cultural form of the time, the género chico criollo (Creole short plays, referred to interchangeably as popular theater), to examine the relationship between the performance of everyday life and the socio-political transformations of modernization. I consider, as Diana Taylor does, that theater always constitutes a real intervention in reality that has the power to transform it: “‘Theater’… participates in the shaping, transmitting, and at times challenging of group fantasies and desires. Therein lies the danger and the hope” (Taylor 1997, p. 227). Seeking to account for diverse popular voices that intervened in the cultural battle for interpretive control of society, this book traces how popular theater made just such an intervention by contesting the seriousness and inexorability of hegemonic discourses, as well as parodying the “truths” of liberal modernity in virtually every aspect of everyday life.
1.1 Popular Sectors, Popular Culture
Without reducing the relationship between hegemonic and popular culture to a simple dichotomy, Performing Everyday Life seeks to complicate the relationship between the workings of power and popular culture. While cultural critics have signaled the difficulty of establishing an adequate definition of “popular culture,” which would neither simply mean commercial mass culture nor everything “of the people” (Hall 1981, pp. 231–2), they do provide a useful theoretical framework for its analysis. Stuart Hall, who has explored different uses of the “popular,” opts for a definition that includes and goes beyond the two mentioned above: “what is essential to the definition of popular culture is the relations which define ‘popular culture’ in a continuing tension (relationship, influence and antagonism) to the dominant culture” (1981, p. 235). As Hall explains, popular culture is always contradictory, “not wholly corrupt or wholly authentic”; thus, there will always be instances of coincidence with and divergence from the discourse of power in popular culture (1981, p. 233). This view, he concludes, considers the process by which these tensions are articulated: “The people versus the power-bloc: this, rather than ‘class-against-class’, is the central line of contradiction around which the terrain of culture is polarised” (1981, p. 238). Additionally, I find it important to note, as Jesús Martín-Barbero has signaled, that popular culture must include “not only what is produced by the masses but also what is consumed, what feeds them,” and that the popular is not limited to a pre-modern, rural culture (1993, p. 38), as the term is often used. He also asserts that it would be erroneous to define popular culture in terms of resistance to a repressive dominant culture (1993, p. 74). In accordance with this estimation, in the case of Argentine popular theater one discovers varying gradations of resistance to different facets of the dominant culture alongside many instances that reproduce regressive discourses, as well as elements that cannot be defined in terms of resistance or repression. In fact, it is important to keep in mind that not all popular culture is transgressive at all in its message.3 Instead of thinking in terms of resistance, then, this theatrical production is better viewed as a site of multiple resignifications, each of which allows us to envision the possible ways in which the popular sectors received, filtered, reorganized, and integrated what they received from the hegemonic culture with what came from their own experiences.
In the Argentine context, Leandro H. Gutiérrez and Luis Alberto Romero address the difficulty of defining the popular sectors with any specificity due to its generality and the heterogeneity of the people included (1995, p. 10), but they suggest a descriptive characterization that includes all those who ...