Multiplying Labour,Multiplying Resistance: Class Composition in Buenos Aires’ Clandestine Textile Workshops

Buenos Aires’ talleres clandestinos (clandestine textile workshops) are powerful sites of accumulation and resistance; a complex and communitarian migrant economy. The economy’s complexity is, however, masked by its spatiality, clandestinity, and the promotion of culturalist analyses that ignore intra-collective class differentials. This paper considers the “autonomy of migration” approach through the lens of “class composition” to explore the talleres’ contours. Witnessed in the talleres is a clear “multiplication of labour”, yet approaching this multiplication compositionally highlights the multiple examples of resistance and refusal immanent to the workshop economy. But this dialectic of control and resistance transcends the workplace, with the talleres one node in a wider, socially reproductive borderscape. By developing a framework that neither condemns nor celebrates economic structures like the talleres, but instead unpacks their antagonistic nature, the paper highlights the benefits of (a) analysing the autonomy of migration approach compositionally, and (b) further geographical engagement with autonomist thinking.     

Watching the city: the politics of space in Pizza,birra, faso

In this article, I discuss the representation of Buenos Aires in Pizza, birra, faso. Paying attention to some of the film’s salient aspects vis-a-vis its portrayal of urban space, my analysis has as its ultimate goal to reveal the ways in which the film engages in a political critique that might seem absent if studied solely from a narrative point of view. In this sense, Pizza, birra, faso is a paradigmatic example of the ways in which many of the films of New Argentine Cinema engaged with their political context differently to films of the post-dictatorship generation. To unearth this political content, I will argue, it is necessary to study these films as films, and not merely as texts.     

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.     

The Disciples of Christ in Antebellum Indiana: Geographical Indicator of the Border South

The Disciples of Christ originated in the Ohio River Valley of the border South in the early 19th century. Based on the distribution of the Disciples in Indiana in 1845 and 1860, it is apparent the group settled largely in that portion of the state which was border South in heritage. This belies the model which argues that central Indiana was an area of great cultural mixture, and supports the alternative model which proposes that north-central Indiana remained an extension of Pennsylvania-Midland culture, with little southern influence.     

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.     

The Conventillo,the Department Store,and the Cabaret: Navigating Urban Space and Social Class in Argentine Silent Cinema, 1916–1929

This article examines an understudied film genre that some Argentine early film periodicals labeled cinedrama porteño. Porteño cinedramas portrayed a bleak Buenos Aires, a dark metropolis of massive immigration and accelerated urbanization in which opulence was reserved for the few and misery was all around, particularly in immigrant neighborhoods. Centering on ‘fallen women’ and well-dressed wastrels, the genre foregrounded social instability by confronting emerging and established social actors in several locations, including tenement housing, department stores, and cabarets and garçonnières. Based on surviving film fragments, this article argues that porteño cinedramas rendered visible varying degrees of sociocultural proximity and separation in urban space. In doing so, the genre traced sociocultural cartographies and identitary strategies to confer narrative and visual saliency to mobile subjects, most noticeably urban outcasts. Porteño cinedramas warned against the dangers of upward mobility while at the same time denouncing gender and class inequality in Buenos Aires. Films discussed include Hasta después de muerta (Eduardo Martínez de la Pera and Ernesto Gunche, 1916), La chica de la Calle Florida (José A. Ferreyra, 1922), and La borrachera del tango (Edmo Cominetti, 1928).