Latin America specialists might be forgiven for feeling exhausted by the subject of crime. Lurid depictions of drug-fuelled mayhem often dominate news reports and popular entertainment, further reinforcing dystopian stereotypes about the region's societies. Thankfully, Lila Caimari's While the City Sleeps is just the book needed to encourage more creative ways of analysing crime. This outstanding study examines the emergence of new forms of criminal behaviour and police practices in 1920s and 1930s Buenos Aires, what was then Latin America's largest city. It considers how urban groups – most notably, journalists and middle-class residents – shaped discussions of criminality and how these various actors framed the problem of order during a time of rapid modernisation. While the City Sleeps crackles with imagination, while managing to engage with multiple historiographies and to remain grounded in research from police archives, municipal sources and periodicals. This book is social and cultural history of the highest quality from one of Argentina's most talented historians. It deserves a wide readership among all those interested in the study of crime, mass communication and cities.
Caimari uses crime journalism as a point of entry into a wider exploration of a changing metropolitan world. As she notes, interwar Buenos Aires was not an especially dangerous place by Latin American standards or by those of other world regions (according to statistical estimates, crime levels were below those of Berlin and Paris and far lower than those of major US cities). Nevertheless, this period witnessed the appearance of new narratives and images of crime in Buenos Aires, disseminated through the popular press, radio and film, and consumed avidly by urban audiences. In particular, media producers and their publics shared a ‘voyeuristic’ fascination with the dramatic armed robberies of banks carried out by ‘pistoleros’. Whereas newspaper coverage a generation earlier fixated on criminal psychology, the interwar journalists lavished attention on the step-by-step performance of crime, going so far as to recreate scenes of armed robberies for their readers. Transnational influences played a part in this fascination, especially reports of the exploits of US gangsters like Al Capone and those depicted in Hollywood crime films. But as Caimari perceptively argues, ‘what lay behind the changes occurring in the crime section of newspapers represented much more than a shift within the journalistic field: it was a reflection of new criminal practices, new forms of violence, and new state technologies to detect disorder’ (p. 2). The pistolero phenomenon was also a response by criminals to new material conditions, including the greater availability of mass-produced firearms and automobiles in Buenos Aires. In becoming a familiar criminal type, the pistolero provided a means for ordinary residents to address the anxieties of urban life, such as increasing anonymity and the physical and moral dangers of accelerated spatial mobility.
The second half of While the City Sleeps focuses on the police and its ways of seeing and ordering the city. Rather than presenting the police as a monolithic agent of repression, Caimari considers its struggle to put fantasies of modern surveillance into practice as well as the daily experiences and worldviews of officers on the beat. Propelled by ideas of greater professionalisation and new instruments of policing (such as the radio, patrol car and burglar alarm), the city's police force stepped up campaigns to detect disorder. As the author shows, concern with monitoring major transportation arteries and controlling points of access into the city helped to establish an opposition between Buenos Aires and its supposedly lawless suburbs – an outlook that persists in present-day conceptions of a crime-ridden conurbano in Argentina. Yet even as these ideals of a professional, technologically adept and mobile police became widespread, rank-and-file cops imagined their social roles in alternative ways. Drawing on police magazines and other publications, Caimari sheds light on the ways that officers of primarily working-class background expressed anti-elitist frustrations with having to defend the interests of property-holders and offered surprisingly sympathetic opinions of labour protestors. Mirroring the ways that the mainstream press celebrated the nostalgic figure of the vigilante (the neighbourhood watchman), ordinary officers fashioned a contrasting model of the people's police based on ideals of service, sacrifice and advancing the common good.
In challenging easy assumptions about actors such as the police and connecting modes of cultural expression to spatial changes and demographic trends, this marvellous book encourages fresh thinking about crime's wider historical significance. Despite recounting the exploits of cops and robbers, the author largely avoids romanticising criminality in what is already a highly mythologised era in Buenos Aires’ history. Instead, Caimari's study blazes new trails for historians to follow as in, for instance, regarding the possible role of the police in facilitating the 17 October 1945 demonstrations during the early days of Peronism. Among the most important contributions of While the City Sleeps is its analysis of the roots of law-and-order social conservatism in Argentina. It makes a convincing case for how and why the longings of popular-sector city residents for safety resonated with the conceptions of order articulated by the police and press. As with the issue of the opposition between city and suburb, one can detect echoes of this popular anti-liberalism in current debates about crime in Argentina, although the author only hints at these comparisons.
Readers should note that this book is an English-language version of a work originally published in Spanish in 2012. The translation by Lisa Ubelaker Andrade and Richard Shindell is excellent, and this high-quality edition is full of useful images (magazine covers, caricatures and photographs), charts of crime statistics and city maps. The book's length and accessible tone make it suitable for course adoption, while its intellectual sophistication and rigorous treatment of sources will appeal to academic audiences.
