Performing Everyday Life in Argentine Popular Theater, 1890–1934

This book examines the prolific and widely-attended popular theater boom of the género chico criollo in the context of Argentina’s modernization. Victoria Lynn Garrett examines how selected plays mediated the impact of economic liberalism, technological changes, new competing and contradictory gender roles, intense labor union activity, and the foreign/nativist dichotomy. Popular theaters served as spaces for cultural agency by portraying conventional and innovative performances of daily life. This dramatic corpus was a critical mass cultural medium that allowed audiences to evaluate the dominant fictions of liberal modernity, to critique Argentina’s purportedly democratic culture, and to imagine alternative performances of everyday life in accordance with their realities. Through a fresh look at the relationship among politics, economics, popular culture, and performance in Argentina’s modernization period, the book uncovers largely overlooked articulations of popular-classidentities and desires for greater inclusion that would drive social and political struggles to this day.

“Victoria Lynn Garrett’s book seeks to complicate the relationship between the workings of power and popular culture by re-examining both the textual and performative dimensions of Argentine popular theater, and its capacity (at times transgressive) to (re)constitute civil society.” (Ana C. Cara, Professor of Hispanic Studies, Oberlin College, USA)

“Garrett expertly combines perspectives on theater, history, and the masses in a way that has not been done before, to advance a nuanced analysis of the national transformation that took place in Argentina between 1880 and 1930. She excels in identifying the unique potential of plays written during this period to effect change, influence collective attitudes, and consolidate solidarity across class, social, and ethnic boundaries while at the same time recognizing the limitations of this potential.” (Brenda Werth, Associate Professor and Department Chair, World Languages and Cultures, American University, USA)

“As Angel Rama once noticed, the performance of popular culture in early twentieth century Argentina implied a dazzling spectacle of bodies and identities effortlessly traversing the realms of theater, urban experiences, a passion for narratives, political mobilization, and everyday life. This poignant development of a popular culture able to build its own tools for a critical relationship with modernity constitutes one of cultural phenomena most worth studying in modern Latin America. Victoria Garrett’s book accomplishes the rare feat of recapitulating the milestones of this cultural development while bringing its problems, actors and main-articulations under the lenses of the most up-to-date and cutting scholarship. This compelling scholarship, wherein Donna Guy’s Sex and Danger in Buenos Aires meets Angel Rama’s Los gauchipolíticos rioplantenses, not only illuminates one of the most interesting periods in Latin American history, but could also serve as a model for the study of how culture interacts withall spheres of contemporary life.” (Horacio Legrás, Associate Professor, Spanish and Portuguese, University of California, Irvine, USA)

Victoria Lynn Garrett is Visiting Assistant Professor of Spanish at the College of Charleston, USA, where she specializes in Performance and Visual Studies, primarily in Argentina and Mexico. She and Pablo García Loaeza are co-authors of The Improbable Conquest: Letters from the Río de la Plata, 1537-1556. Her work has appeared in Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies, Hispania, Romance Quarterly, and other edited volumes.