The Argentine Babel: Space, politics, and culture in the growth of Buenos Aires, 1856-1890.

Abstract

This study employs a focus upon urban space to explore social relations in Buenos Aires during the city's emergence as Latin America's principal commercial capital. Drawing upon archival, graphic, and literary sources, it examines the social forces--land speculation, changing work and household relations, and public urban renewal campaigns--which fundamentally reordered Buenos Aires's physical landscape and simultaneously transformed the social hierarchies that connected city residents. The commercial boom of the latter nineteenth century introduced sweeping changes to Buenos Aires's demographics, politics, and commercial life: a massive influx of European immigration and investment, Argentina's first experiment in liberal municipal government, the city's first major housing and public health crisis, and the first attempts at government-directed urban beautification. The dissertation demonstrates that social relations of property and rent shaped the city's new social hierarchies in tandem with the changing social relations of work. Buenos Aires's merchant-ranching elite was best placed to take advantage of the new opportunities offered by a booming demand for living and working space. While the productive land uses promoted by developers and entrepreneurs encroached upon a preexisting landscape of common access, real estate speculation drove up property and rent values, dividing the city's population ever more sharply into categories of propertied and propertyless. The competing pressures for city resources--including housing and access to the rent-free space of the street--amounted to an ongoing negotiation between residents over their right to a shared landscape. The social tensions of capitalist city-building also provoked new cultural anxieties. Argentina's liberal leaders viewed Buenos Aires's landscape as a gauge for their nation's progress. As a reaction to the signs of social breakdown they read in the cityscape, in the 1870s and 1880s they enacted new policies of slum clearance and urban reform, creating such famous landmarks as the Plaza de Mayo. Yet, as the dissertation demonstrates, such reform efforts actually contributed to the city's social polarization by masking the city's environmental ills without confronting the social relations of property which underlay them.