Transformations And Crisis Of Liberalism In Argentina 1930 1955

In this original study, Jorge A. Nállim chronicles the decline of liberalism in Argentina during the volatile period between two military coups—the 1930 overthrow of Hipólito Yrigoyen and the deposing of Juan Perón in 1955. While historians have primarily focused on liberalism in economic or political contexts, Nállim instead documents a wide range of locations where liberalism was claimed and ultimately marginalized in the pursuit of individual agendas. While critics have positioned the rhetoric of liberalism during this period as one of decadence or irrelevance, Nállim instead shows it to be a vital and complex factor in the metamorphosis of modern history in Argentina and Latin America as well.

This volume considers the confluence of World History and historical materialism, with the following guiding question in mind: given developments in the field of historical materialism concerned with the intersection of race, gender, labour, and class, why is it that within the field of World History, historical materialism has been marginalized, precisely as World History orients toward transnational socio-cultural phenomenon, micro-studies, or global histories of networks? Answering this question requires thinking, in an inter-related manner, about both the development of World History as a discipline, and the place of economic determinism in historical materialism. This book takes the position that historical materialism (as applied to the field of World History) needs to be more open to the methodological diversity of the materialist tradition and to refuse narrowly deterministic frameworks that have led to marginalization of materialist cultural analysis in studies of global capitalism. At the same time, World History needs to be more self-critical of the methodological diversity it has welcomed through a largely inclusionary framework that allows the material to be considered separately from cultural, social, and intellectual dimensions of global processes.

Making Citizens in Argentina charts the evolving meanings of citizenship in Argentina from the 1880s to the 1980s. Against the backdrop of immigration, science, race, sport, populist rule, and dictatorship, the contributors analyze the power of the Argentine state and other social actors to set the boundaries of citizenship. They also address how Argentines contested the meanings of citizenship over time, and demonstrate how citizenship came to represent a great deal more than nationality or voting rights. In Argentina, it defined a person’s relationships with, and expectations of, the state. Citizenship conditioned the rights and duties of Argentines and foreign nationals living in the country. Through the language of citizenship, Argentines explained to one another who belonged and who did not. In the cultural, moral, and social requirements of citizenship, groups with power often marginalized populations whose societal status was more tenuous. Making Citizens in Argentina also demonstrates how workers, politicians, elites, indigenous peoples, and others staked their own claims to citizenship.

In A History of Argentina, originally published in Spanish in 2020, Ezequiel Adamovsky presents over five hundred years of Argentine economic, political, social, and cultural history. Adamovsky highlights the experiences of women, Indigenous communities, and other groups that have traditionally been left out of the historical archive. He focuses on harmful aspects of Spanish colonization such as gender subjugation, the violence enacted in the name of the Catholic Church, the role of the economy as it shifted from the encomienda system into modern industrialization, and the devastating effects of slavery, violence, and disease brought to the region by Spanish colonizers. Adamovsky also discusses Argentina’s independence and territorial consolidation, the first democratic elections in 1916, military coups, Peronism, democratization and the neoliberal reforms of the 1980s, and many other facets of Argentine life up to the 2019 presidential election. Concise, accessible, and comprehensive, A History of Argentina is an essential guide to this nation.

Throughout the early twentieth century, waves of migration brought working-class people to the outskirts of Buenos Aires. This prompted a dilemma: Where should these restive populations be situated relative to the city’s spatial politics? Might housing serve as a tool to discipline their behavior? Enter Antonio Bonet, a Catalan architect inspired by the transatlantic modernist and surrealist movements. Ana María León follows Bonet's decades-long, state-backed quest to house Buenos Aires's diverse and fractious population. Working with totalitarian and populist regimes, Bonet developed three large-scale housing plans, each scuttled as a new government took over. Yet these incomplete plans—Bonet's dreams—teach us much about the relationship between modernism and state power. Modernity for the Masses finds in Bonet's projects the disconnect between modern architecture’s discourse of emancipation and the reality of its rationalizing control. Although he and his patrons constantly glorified the people and depicted them in housing plans, Bonet never consulted them. Instead he succumbed to official and elite fears of the people's latent political power. In careful readings of Bonet's work, León discovers the progressive erasure of surrealism's psychological sensitivity, replaced with an impulse, realized in modernist design, to contain the increasingly empowered population.

Latin American Dictatorships in the Era of Fascism focuses on the reverse-wave of dictatorships that emerged in Latin America during the 1930s and the transnational dissemination of authoritarian institutions in the era of fascism. António Costa Pinto revisits the study of authoritarian alternatives to liberal democracy in 1930s Latin America from the perspective of the diffusion of corporatism in the world of inter-war dictatorships. The book explores what drove the horizontal spread of corporatism in Latin America, the processes and direction of transnational diffusion, and how social and political corporatism became a central set of new institutions utilized by dictatorships during this era. These issues are studied through a transnational and comparative research design to reveal the extent of Latin America’s participation during the corporatist wave which by 1942 had significantly reduced the number of democratic regimes in the world. This book is essential reading for students studying Latin American history, 1930s dictatorships and authoritarianism, and the spread of corporatism.

In 1946 Juan Perón launched a populist challenge to the United States, recruiting an army of labor activists to serve as worker attachés at every Argentine embassy. By 1955, over five hundred would serve, representing the largest presence of blue-collar workers in the foreign service of any country in history. A meatpacking union leader taught striking workers in Chicago about rising salaries under Perón. A railroad motorist joined the revolution in Bolivia. A baker showed Soviet workers the daily caloric intake of their Argentine counterparts. As Ambassadors of the Working Class shows, the attachés' struggle against US diplomats in Latin America turned the region into a Cold War battlefield for the hearts of the working classes. In this context, Ernesto Semán reveals, for example, how the attachés' brand of transnational populism offered Fidel Castro and Che Guevara their last chance at mass politics before their embrace of revolutionary violence. Fiercely opposed by Washington, the attachés’ project foundered, but not before US policymakers used their opposition to Peronism to rehearse arguments against the New Deal's legacies.

Argentina celebrated a century of independence from Spain in 1910, and the republic was the tenth most important trading nation in the global economy. Although it had the promise of growth and industrial development at the time, crises, mismanagement, and unrealized potential associated with authoritarianism, populism, and military coups (culminating in thousands of “disappearances” over a period of unparalleled state terror) prevented that from happening. By 2001, Argentina announced that it would not service its foreign debt, triggering the largest default in world financial history. Since then, the country has sought to recapture the potential and promise of the past, and its place in the world while escaping from what appeared to be an interminable cycle of expansion, crises, conflict, and institutional collapse. Historical Dictionary of Argentina contains a chronology, an introduction, appendixes, an extensive bibliography, and more than 800 cross-referenced entries on the country’s important personalities and aspects of its politics, economy, foreign relations, religion, and culture. This book is an excellent resource for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about Argentina.