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0822330865 New book -"Meticulously researched in official correspondence, military records, judicial archives, political poetry, and other popular narratives, Wandering Paysanos
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contributes importantly to interdisciplinary discussions of modern state formation and rural political and social consciousness. Few students of the Latin American past can match Salvatore in combining skillful analysis of political, social, and economic relations with an ability to deconstruct and interpret texts. This volume redeems the promise of Latin American subaltern studies."?Gilbert M. Joseph, Yale University A pioneering examination of the experiences of peasants and peons, or paysanos, in the Buenos Aires province during Juan Manuel de Rosas?s regime (1829?1852), Wandering Paysanos is one of the first studies to consider Argentina?s history from a subalternist perspective. The distinguished Argentine historian Ricardo D. Salvatore situates the paysanos as mobile job seekers within an expanding, competitive economy as he ...
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More About This Textbook
Overview
A pioneering examination of the experiences of peasants and peons, or paysanos, in the Buenos Aires province during Juan Manuel de Rosas’s regime (1829–1852), Wandering Paysanos is one of the first studies to consider Argentina’s history from a subalternist perspective. The distinguished Argentine historian Ricardo D. Salvatore situates the paysanos as mobile job seekers within an expanding, competitive economy as he highlights the points of contention between the peasants and the state: questions of military service, patriotism, crime, and punishment. He argues that only through a reconstruction of the different subjectivities of paysanos—as workers, citizens, soldiers, and family members—can a new understanding of postindependence Argentina be achieved.
Drawing extensively on judicial and military records, Salvatore reveals the state’s files on individual prisoners and recruits to be surprisingly full of personal stories directly solicited from paysanos. While consistently attentive to the fragmented and mediated nature of these archival sources, he chronicles how peons and peasants spoke to power figures—judges, police officers, and military chiefs—about issues central to their lives and to the emerging nation. They described their families and their wanderings across the countryside in search of salaried work, memories and impressions of the civil wars, and involvement with the Federalist armies. Their lamentations about unpaid labor, disrespectful government officials, the meaning of poverty, and the dignity of work provide vital insights into the contested nature of the formation of the Argentine Confederation. Wandering Paysanos discloses a complex world until now obscured—that of rural Argentine subalterns confronting the state.
Editorial Reviews
From the Publisher
“In the best tradition of subaltern studies, Ricardo Salvatore goes to the military records, court cases, and police files that most reveal the testimony of the popular classes. His book represents the most complete and nuanced analysis of the lives of peons, migrants, itinerants, and common soldiers—including their dress, family relationships, interaction with the Rosista state, and demands for liberty in the job market. Wandering Paysanos is both theoretically sophisticated and richly documented.”—Jonathan C. Brown, University of Texas"Meticulously researched in official correspondence, military records, judicial archives, political poetry, and other popular narratives, Wandering Paysanos contributes importantly to interdisciplinary discussions of modern state formation and rural political and social consciousness. Few students of the Latin American past can match Salvatore in combining skillful analysis of political, social, and economic relations with an ability to deconstruct and interpret texts. This volume redeems the promise of Latin American subaltern studies."—Gilbert M. Joseph, Yale University
Product Details
Meet the Author
Ricardo D. Salvatore is Professor of Modern History at Universidad Torcuato di Tella in Buenos Aires. He is coeditor of Crime and Punishment in Latin America: Law and Society since Late Colonial Times and Close Encounters of Empire: Writing the Cultural History of U.S.–Latin American Relations, both published by Duke University Press.
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Wandering paysanos
State order and subaltern experience in Buenos Aires during the Rosas eraBy Ricardo Donato Salvatore
Duke University Press
ISBN: 0-8223-3086-5
Chapter One
The Ways of the MarketThe export bonanza of the postindependence period affected subaltern groups in significant ways. Due to the rise in employment opportunities, state expenditures, and availability of consumer goods, subaltern groups (in particular, itinerant peons, artisans, and peasants) began to relate to markets more frequently and intensely than before. The gradual liberalization of the economy, combined with better enforcement of property rights, brought forth a rapid incorporation of subaltern groups as consumers and producers. Yet, subalterns' economic transactions have remained elusive to historians. A rhetoric of otherness that stresses the noneconomic proclivities of subalterns and a historical narrative that presents the economy as a field dominated by a few cattle ranchers and merchants have obscured our comprehension of subalterns' engagement with market society. Literary and historical representations have placed the peasant, the laborer, and the artisan outside the realm of markets (and within the fields of coercion and nature). They have been posed as either victims of economic modernization and state building or the carriers of natural propensities that conspire against productive labor and economic progress. Tied to powerful ranchers by fear ofrecruitment, immobilized by debt peonage and passport laws, bypassed or cheated in the distribution of new state lands, peons and peasants have been constructed as passive subjects rather than participants in the making of Rio de la Plata's market society and culture.
In this chapter, I attempt to restore subaltern experience to the history of the postindependence economy. That is, I inquire about the presence of subalterns in the marketplace, about their reactions to government market regulations, about the dissemination of market rationale and economic ideology. The restitution of subalterns as participants in the formation of a market society must start with a reconsideration of the nature of postindependence market culture and society. During this period, the market economy was a much more porous and open social space than we are accustomed to think. In Buenos Aires and surrounding towns, markets for basic goods (such as cattle and grain) became more competitive. In the main marketplaces of the city, quite visible subalterns offered elite observers the vision of a disorderly, plebeian sociability. Advertisements show the lack of demarcation between "high" and "low" taste in matters of consumption. Factional politics gave subalterns opportunities to become producers or merchants, while the provincial state granted veterans, poor women and working provincianos certain protection against the risk of absolute poverty. Market spectacles displaying the logic of bidding and competition (public auctions and raffles) engaged subalterns as either viewers or participants.
What was the place of subalterns in the marketplaces of the postindependence period? Were they victims of impersonal forces beyond their control? What possibilities and new forms of engagement resulted from government regulation of markets? How did federalist politics affect the economic opportunities opened to subalterns? To answer these questions we must take a long journey. The narration moves from a description of colorful produce markets to the discussion of "popular liberalism." First, I describe the economy that subalterns faced: the sites of transactions; the movement of goods, people, and animals; the information involved; and the density of interactions. Next, I discuss "market spectacles," public rituals displaying and valorizing price competition, acquisitiveness, and other positivities associated with markets. Next, I locate subaltern economic interventions within the political realities of the period, focusing in particular on public policies regarding market transactions, consumption, and property rights. Finally, I examine the conflicting perspectives of capitalists and peons concerning the regulation of the abasto de carne (meat provision) to the city.
This chapter focuses on three dimensions of markets: (1) as sites of social interaction and spectacle; (2) as spaces for government regulation and state welfare policies; and (3) as a discursive configuration or "ideology." In each of these dimensions, fragments of subaltern experience and discourse help us to reconsider the nature of the postindependence economy, as well as the participation of subalterns in the building of a market society in Buenos Aires province.
Marketplaces, Consumption, and Spectacle
At one level, the market is a space for social interaction. It is a terrain of practice on which actors seek to complete economic transactions (sales and purchases) and, in so doing, engage in other types of exchanges: sharing political information, initiating or consolidating social relationships, and participating in recreational activities. On a different level, the market is a spectacle where audiences witness how prices are fixed and assets change hands. In this sense, the market presents itself as a composite of signs about the diffusion of commodity relations and, simultaneously, as a set of performances about market competition.
During the period 1820-1860, marketplaces were depicted as sites of lively sociability, saturated with subaltern culture. As producers and consumers, subalterns were key participants and spectators in these marketplaces. Their consumption was so important to the city's economy that regulating meat and grain markets constituted a crucial task of government. The intensity of market interactions disseminated an economic rationale among subalterns. By the 1830s and 1840s, subalterns seem to have embraced market culture with few reservations or objections. Fragments of evidence show them captivated by the availability of cheap imports and a greater variety of goods, immersed in the intense sociability of marketplaces, and fascinated with the possibility of acquiring goods by lottery.
Sites of Social Interaction
The city of Buenos Aires, the center of attraction for both foreigners and internal migrants, had been a commercial entrepot since the late colonial period (Brown 1976; 1979, chaps. 1-2). After the revolution, stimulated by the expansion of the export economy, its thriving marketplaces became sites of animated social interaction. At the square in front of the Fortaleza people could find retailers of meat, vegetables, fish, and articles of local manufacture (Richelet 1928, 12). The Recova surrounding the plaza hosted the shops of artisans as well as the retail and wholesale outlets of foreign merchants. At key points of the city, three mercados (south, central, and north) equipped with slaughtering facilities supplied the city with meat, wheat, and other farm produce. In addition, a vast number of pulperias (reaching six hundred by mid-century) provided the daily necessities of the population: beverages, bread, flour, salt, tinder, charcoal, and a variety of other items (see Mayo 1997c).
Travelers saw city markets stocked with all sorts of fresh provisions. In 1852 Sir Woodbine Parish claimed that "few markets in the world [were] more plentiful and cheaply supplied than that of Buenos Ayres" (121). To Colonel Anthony King (1846, 324), poultry, fish, game, beef, and other products were abundant and cheap in Buenos Aires, in contrast to similar markets in Europe. Although there was less variety in vegetables in the city, travelers concluded that the River Plate was a land of easy living, a territory propitious for indolent behavior.
In addition to the colorful produce markets, travelers often pointed out the variety and generalized acceptance of European commodities among the "natives" (textiles in particular), a positive development they credited to the liberalization of trade brought about by independence. Even Campbell Scarlett (ca. 1836), who saw Buenos Aires as lacking the excitement and civility of European cities, found stores well supplied with European commodities (1957, 41). In European and North American narratives of South America, plentiful marketplaces condensed the expectations for economic and social progress associated with the abolition of colonial commercial restrictions (see Salvatore 1996d).
From 1850 onward, travelers noticed the presence of foreigners dominating the import-export business and the wholesale and retail trades (Arrieta 1944, 101). Their shops added touches of European refinement and civility to a market space saturated with the presence of mixed-race, vociferous, and untidy subalterns. Travelers recognized that the elite had its own spaces for socializing-the tertulias and cafes-but they were captivated by the vitality and picturesque quality of marketplaces, the sites for the social interaction of subaltern subjects. It was difficult for travelers who visited the city during the administrations of Rivadavia, Dorrego, Balcarce, and Rosas to associate marketplaces with luxury, elegance, and good manners. For the markets they saw, whether taverns, cattle markets, or cloth shops, were still infused with popular tastes and sociability. Colorful markets also stood for racial and social confusion. The main market scene (the plaza) captured in Vidal's lithographs prior to 1820, showed the interaction of multiple characters: Indian traders, shawl-covered ladies, black servants, mestizo peons, friars, clergymen, and military officers. The power of this visual message, reproduced in various narratives, served to present the marketplace as a confusingly active and democratic space.
But the noisy and disorderly presence of racialized subalterns added a preoccupying feature to marketplaces. Haigh celebrated and, at the same time, bemoaned the activity and noise he found at the market at Plaza de la Victoria, for here the wheels of commerce, activated by European mercantile capital, had the distinctive mark of the subaltern: "Numerous carts of a horrible form, with squealing wheels of enormous circumference-though not all round-, with no type of adornment, driven by mestizos de indio, almost as brutal as the animals they drive, blacks and mulattos, Indian porters loaded with bundles and boxes of merchandize, or with talegos of strong currency (pesos fuertes)" (qtd. in Baudizzone 1941, 75). These racialized subalterns shared the market space in an animated interaction. This was the sign of an undifferentiated, almost anarchic public space. Contemporary narratives leave no doubt about the importance of black labor to the economic life of the city. All the porters were black, commented Brabazon (1981). Many African workers worked independently; others, still in bondage, sold pastries or cigarettes on street corners (17-18).
On the outskirts of the city, public cattle markets and slaughtering plants appeared as the territory of the plebe, spaces impregnated with reproachable sociability, manners, and language. Open disgust was the common reaction. Various visitors shared Charles Mansfield's impression (1852) that the stench of rotten meat coming from the slaughterhouses enveloped the whole city, impregnating its air with a constant source of pestilence (in Arrieta 1944, 37). The invasion of this unclean and barbarous culture was nowhere more explicit than in the distribution of beef: from dirty oxcarts racially mixed peones-vendedores (peon-sellers) sold large chunks of meat covered with dried blood and dirt (in Baudizzone 1941, 74).
A series of scenes of production, appropriation, and consumption configured the territory of a "popular economy." The familiar scene of black washerwomen banging their clothes against the rocks of the riverbank presents us with one aspect of poor families' subsistence strategies. Similarly, the repeated narration of black women picking up tripe and bones among the waste of the slaughterhouse speaks of common forms of direct appropriation among the subaltern classes (see, e.g., Hinchliff 1863, 73). All the materiality of commodities points to the centrality of the native laborer in this popular economy. The partridges that travelers saw piled up in the plaza, the otter skins (nutria) and the ostrich feathers peddled in taverns, and the inexpensive and fresh fish they praised were produced by independent fishermen, poachers, and hunters who belonged to a culture and people that travelers characterized as gaucho. The movement of big wheeled oxcarts, the frenetic and brutal scenes of the slaughterhouse, and the stench produced by rotting meat, boiling grease, and tanning leather were markers of workers' activities. They showed the necessary connection between export production and plebeian (peon/paysano) culture. Peons, poachers, sellers, drivers, and porters enjoyed great visibility in travel narratives because they were essential for generating the prosperity of the export sector. Evidence drawn from judicial and police sources helps to extend to rural areas this panoramic view of subaltern economic interventions. We find here women selling empanadas (meat pies) during the branding season, bread peddlers competing with established bakeries, and traveling pulperos installing their stands near the peons' tents or ranchos (thatched huts). Despite Rosas's repeated prohibitions, peasants continued to hunt otters, ostriches, viscachas, and other small animals and send them to the market. Several individual stories assert the entrepreneurial drive of subalterns in an expanding economy. This fragmentary evidence points to the market as a privileged site of working-class reproduction.
Despite the dramatic political and social transformations of the postindependence period, marketplaces continued to act as centers of interaction and communication among subalterns from different origins and conditions. The Rosas era brought greater regulation to these spaces, a certain degree of spatial differentiation, and an enormous expansion of its volume of trade. Cattle markets in particular benefited from the demise of the old monopoly system, and new regulations and better enforcement brought greater security to cattle traders and consumers. In the consumption of cloth there were small but significant changes. Since the mid-1840s, as the presence of immigrant retailers and customers grew, market scenes varied somewhat in the direction of greater differentiation and variety. The downtown commercial area became more European, as mixed-raced subalterns were displaced to peripheral cattle and produce markets in the south and north of the city. But the political culture of Rosismo, with its emphasis on similar dress and its critique of European fashion, helped to delay this process and to cushion its impact.
Market Dissemination
A cursory look at Buenos Aires newspapers at the time of Rosas's first administration presents us with the image of an active commercial society, not yet closed to the interventions of subaltern subjects. By 1829, the Gaceta Mercantil featured, alongside notices of the arrivals of foreign vessels and the opening of public auctions, a series of advertisements indicative of the economic transactions of artisans, clerks, servants, and peasants. Through these ads we can infer that the boundaries demarcating elite from plebeian culture-the lines dividing the tastes of the "gente decente" from that of the working classes-were not yet set. Black maids competing with the ladies of the house in elegance and fashion, peasants trying on the new boots imported from Europe, federalist soldiers proudly wearing their red jackets made of British cloth speak of the blurring of the frontiers of distinction and appearance that once regulated social interaction.
(Continues...)
Table of Contents