Decolonizing travesti space in Buenos Aires: race,sexuality, and sideways relationality

Scholars of space usually neglect the history of travesti populations in Latin America. It is misrepresented not only by disciplinary blind spots but also by global narratives concerned with rehabilitating queer subjects within homonormative projects. Analyzing neoliberal narratives that delink conflicts about racialization and sexuality in Argentina, this article makes room to decolonize the study of travesti experience and embodiment in Buenos Aires's red zone. It examines a network of racialized travestis and their spatial practices, including their migration from the Andean northwest to the sex-work circuits of Buenos Aires. Finally, this article introduces the notion of sideways relationality to account for the cultural and spatial labor that racialized travestis perform at the oppositional margins of homonormative reflexivity.     

Estancias of Buenos Aires Province,Argentina: Rural Heritage,Sustainable Development and Tourism

Rural settlements growing crops and rearing animals are known as estancias in several South American countries. They played a prevailing role in the political and economic history of Argentina, particularly during the second half of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century. At present, many estancias are developing alternative activities, as recreation and tourism, in order to be able to subsist. The main problem lies in the fact that a non‐sustainable activity, frequently focused on the greatest economic yield, leads to the destruction of the heritage, instead of achieving its long‐term conservation. The purpose of this paper is to develop and verify a suitable model for the planning, execution and management of recreational and tourist activities in these rural settlements. As regards the scope of the concept of sustainable development, this methodology aims at achieving a balance between the recreational and tourist operation and the conservation of the rich heritage concerned.     

Poor,ill, and sometimes abandoned: tubercular children in Buenos Aires, 1880-1920

Ill children with chronic diseases, such as tuberculosis, have faced difficult lives. Poverty proved a factor in their susceptibility to disease, their abandonment, and their treatment. When public health policies in Buenos Aires shifted from ignoring children to viewing them as victims who needed protection, government agencies, charitable organizations, public schools, and hospitals developed special programs that emphasized both prevention and cure of childhood tuberculosis. Argentine physicians and hygienists supported programs that were similar to those in Europe and the United States. Despite efforts, from 1880 to 1920, diagnosis of tuberculosis remained problematic, health professionals failed to prevent tuberculosis in children, and physicians were unable to cure the disease.     

Against the Grid: The Cultural Emergence of Villas Miseria in Buenos Aires

This article traces how poverty emerged culturally in mid-century Buenos Aires. It does so by examining two contrasting models: (1) the state’s, revealed in the plans it prepared for the eradication of villas miseria (the local term for slums), (2) that of a corpus of cultural objects depicting slums between 1957 and 1963. My basic claim is that the politically motivated conceptual erasure of the slum informed its aesthetic representation. In particular, I look at Bernardo Verbitsky’s novel Villa Miseria también es América (1957), and Antonio Berni’s series of multimedia collages focused on the fictional character of Juanito Laguna (1958–1978). As my essay shows, each of these works responds to the state plans to eradicate slums. Each takes up the state’s idea of the slum as a tabula rasa, a blank slate, but inserts into this plane an excess of materiality. By looking at the shared forms of these objects, I describe how culture came to place the slum within the city’s regular grid, interrupting the linearity imagined by the state. Such a gesture will ultimately have the consequence of turning poverty into something absolutely consumable.     

Negotiating Place and Value: Geographies of Waste and Scavenging in Buenos Aires

Abstract: This article focuses on debates over the place and value of waste and waste scavengers in Buenos Aires during and following the economic crisis of 2002 in order to consider how waste functions as a fundamental category for organizing social space. I argue that conceptualizations of waste as both zero value and “matter out of place” need to be combined with a recognition of the commodity potential of waste in order to better understand how waste works to constitute social structures and space. I demonstrate that while the displacement of waste and waste scavengers associated with the crisis opened a space for the transformation of established social relations, in ongoing negotiations, waste continues to be defined as that which belongs elsewhere and is of no value, reinforcing the marginalization of garbage scavengers.     

The critical intimacies of walking in the Abasto Shopping mall,Buenos Aires,Argentina

In recent years, scholars have focused on how affective life becomes implicated in biopolitical interventions in a variety of spaces, including spaces of consumption. Less has been said about how the emotional domain also becomes a space of biopolitics. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork at a mall in Buenos Aires, this paper attends to this link and outlines a methodology that generates insight into the layers of intimacy that help shape these social and political spaces. What I am calling images of critical intimacy point to how these biopolitical spaces may be operating today and also what their limits appear to be.     

Territorialising Movement Parties: The Case of Nuevo Encuentro in Buenos Aires

How and why do political parties, seemingly focused on electoral politics, also mobilise within contentious arenas? Drawing on qualitative research with a centre-left Argentine party called Nuevo Encuentro (NE) in the city of Buenos Aires this paper demonstrates the importance of a geographical reading of “movement parties” for responding to this question. Specifically, the paper analyses NE’s territorialisation, understood as a strategy for organisation building via the political appropriation of space, typically by opening branches and mobilising activists in neighbourhoods. Between 2007 and 2019 NE’s strategy of territorialisation mobilised across multiple scales—the neighbourhood, city and national—yet in so doing its organisation became overstretched and struggled to engage across both contentious and electoral arenas. Through an analysis of NE’s territorialisation, grounded in the historical and geographical context of contemporary Argentina, the paper provides an original attempt to spatialise the concept of movement party.     

The Archaeology of the Battle of Vuelta de Obligado,Buenos Aires Province,Argentina

Abstract

This paper presents the results of research carried out for more than a decade at Vuelta de Obligado, San Pedro, north-east of Buenos Aires province. The objectives were to understand the dynamics of the strategy followed on the 1845 battlefield by the two groups who fought (Anglo-French and Argentine), and to assess the impact of formation processes on the results produced. This has been achieved through the use of several sources of information: the archaeological record, written documents, Argentine and European plans and sketches, as well as data provided by the current population.     

A Lineal City in the Pampas: Politics,Materialization and Revolution in Wladimiro Acosta's Vision for Buenos Aires

Abstract: Critics of modern architectural utopias have referred to the notions of construction and politics as irreconcilable elements of an unsurpassable antinomy. By studying Wladimiro Acosta's attempt to interrupt the unfolding of the capitalist urban process in Buenos Aires through an integral revision of the Spanish block, I explore the political potential embedded in the instance of materialization and highlight construction's involvement in the transformation of the prevailing forms of urban appearance. I argue that Acosta's proposal for a lineal city contains important theoretical and architectural reflections on how to conceive construction as a constitutive element of urban politics. In a contemporary urban scenario, where the production of the city's material and infrastructural landscape seems increasingly detached from democratic control, revisiting historical examples that position the notions of construction and emancipation as part of a single political prism may prove to be indispensable.     

Zooarchaeology for the City: An Urban Case, La Boca, Buenos Aires City, circa 1860

Zooarchaeological works in the city lack of a specific theoretical and methodological framework to understand its faunal assemblages. The different analyses were done in most cases following procedures that had been developed for hunter-gatherer contexts. In this paper, we evaluate some questions related to this issue, encompassed in the acquisition mode and the characteristics of the archaeological record. Finally, an example from two sites in La Boca, Buenos Aires city, Argentina is given in order to understand some of these questions.     

Public Health and Private Charity in Northeast China, 1905-1945

Medical charity in northeast China evolved through the confluence of three processes： the foundation of state medicine, the legal and political transformation of private charities, and the militarized competition for influence between China and Japan. Following the plague of 1910, a series of Chinese regimes began building medical infrastructure in areas under their control, but their ultimate inability to establish a comprehensive public health program left private charities to fill the gaps. In contrast, the Japanese administered concessions in Kant6 and along the South Manchuria Railway instituted a farsighted and multivaleneed medical policy. The Japanese model did not merely tolerate medical charities, it reserved for them a very specific role in the larger strategic framework of healthcare provision. Under the client state of ＂Manzhouguo,＂ the Japanese model further evolved to channel medical voluntarism into a hybrid state-charitable sector.     

Taphonomic Analysis of Micromammal Remains from Striped Owl (Pseudoscops clamator) Pellets in Northeastern Buenos Aires Province,Argentina: Implications for Archaeological Sites Formation

The main objective of this study was to determine the taxonomic and taphonomic characteristics of the micromammal remains recovered from pellets of Pseudoscops clamator (striped owl), collected at three localities in northeastern Buenos Aires Province, Argentina (Punta Lara Natural Reserve, 34°49'02,6''S, 58°03'03,9''W; Costanera Sur Ecological Reserve, 34°36'6,44" S, 58°21'33,22" W; Los Robles Park, 34°40'22,03''S, 58°52'18,88''W). The main taphonomic variables (e.g. evidence of digestive action, breakage patterns and relative abundance of skeletal elements) suggest that this owl mainly produces intermediate to moderate modification. On the other hand, P. clamator preyed mainly upon large‐sized (>150 g) micromammals (e.g. Lutreolina crassicaudata, Cavia aperea, Holochilus brasiliensis and Rattus sp.), and to a lesser degree on medium‐ (50–150 g) and small‐sized species (<50 g) (e.g. Scapteromys aquaticus, Calomys sp., Oligoryzomys flavescens, Akodon azarae and Mus musculus). Fossil assemblages with a dominance of large‐sized micromammals are commonly associated with humans as agents of accumulation. However, this study demonstrates that this owl produces assemblages with abundant large‐sized micromammals, which introduces an equifinality problem. In that sense, digestive corrosion marks, breakage patterns and the relative abundance of skeletal remains are the main attributes to differentiate P. clamator from humans, as agents of accumulation. Finally, our results might serve as an analytical model for the taphonomic interpretation of the fossil record of micromammals from paleontological and archaeological sites, which fall within the distributional range and habitat of P. clamator. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Erotic Attachment,Identity Formation and the Body Politic: The Woman‐as‐nation in Canadian Graphic Satire, 1867–1914

Using depictions of ‘Miss Canada’ in editorial cartoons and political campaign posters published in English Canada between 1867 and 1914 as a case study, this article argues that the repetitive deployment of feminised and eroticised images of the nation summoned particular gender, sexual and political identities into being and entangled viewers’ psychic investments in masculine, heterosexual and nationalist subjectivities. It also considers how Miss Canada's normative representation as white conflated racial whiteness and Canadian‐ness, and how images hailed viewers into racial subjectivities that were leashed to national identity. Rather than querying how or why the woman‐as‐nation trope elicited nationalist sentiment in an already‐constituted subject, this analysis examines how imagery provoked viewers’ identification with subject positions that were co‐constituted with nationalism. Impassioned and even violent nationalism becomes more comprehensible when we consider that the woman‐as‐nation was capable of producing attachments to national identity that, for some, were inseparable from and tantamount to psychic investments in gender, sexual and racial identities. While Canadian scholars have recognised that Miss Canada was a significant popular culture icon during the long nineteenth century and acknowledged this icon's embeddedness in gender, sexual and national discourses, studies have tended to describe Miss Canada's role in consolidating hegemonic ideologies and power relations and underestimate visual culture's constitutive capacities. The extent of Miss Canada's hetero‐erotic coding has also largely escaped historians’ notice. Although a few scholars have explored visual culture's role in Canadian national identity formation during this era, this study makes a unique contribution by foregrounding the productive work of popular imagery in co‐constituting and entwining national and sexual subjectivities.