This collection of essays demonstrates the advances made by the new political history in Argentina. By broadening conventional understandings of what constitutes the ‘political’, researchers have shifted attention away from contests among ruling elites towards a much richer set of problems concerning citizenship, representation and the public sphere. Argentine historians have been at the forefront of this trend in Latin American studies, as witnessed by the path-breaking work of Hilda Sábato and others. The volume under consideration here adds to this literature, not primarily by introducing new interpretative paradigms, but rather by applying existing tools to shed light on early twentieth-century historical trends. These case studies will no doubt appeal to Argentina specialists and those interested in the evolution of republican politics in Latin America during this era.
The volume's chapters can be grouped into three pairs of essays, with each set addressing a different facet of the new political history. Sandra Gayol's piece on Bartolomé Mitre's funeral in 1906 and María Inés Tato's study on street rallies in Buenos Aires during the First World War share a common focus on politics as ritual. Stepping outside the familiar arena of electoral contests, these essays tease meaning out of public demonstrations of loyalty that accompanied widening popular participation in civic life. The authors investigate how rituals allowed the social majority to take part in Argentine politics in various ways, ranging from offering patriotic tributes to a fallen architect of state-building to mass movements staking out rival positions regarding the European war. A second pair of essays by Martín O. Castro and Gardenia Vidal examines the efforts of Catholic activists to challenge the perceived shortcomings of secular liberalism. These works follow in the footsteps of recent studies that have stressed the Catholic Church's increasing political influence in the interwar period. Castro's and Vidal's essays show, somewhat unintentionally, the limits of this project: for Catholic intellectuals involved in discussions of public education policy, nationalist concerns with incorporating ‘unruly’ immigrants often trumped righteous anger at state secularism; and Catholic attempts to create círculos obreros in Córdoba city attracted relatively few adherents, especially when compared to other forms of working-class civil society. The final pair of essays surveys debates surrounding industrialisation as a focal point of national progress. Once again, this is a topic that has attracted considerable attention, but the authors offer contributions that will add nuance to accounts by Fernando Rocchi and other scholars. Natacha Bacolla's chapter on the influential journal Revista de Economía Argentina and Claudio Belini's piece on the evolution of pro-industrialisation arguments highlight the pivotal role of social scientists such as Alejandro Bunge in reworking policy-making priorities.
The volume also includes an essay by María Silva Fleitas on the intense rivalry within the Radical Party in the province of Jujuy during the 1920s. Although this essay is something of an outlier (its focus on intra-party contests places it closer to the ‘traditional’ political history), it is among the strongest works in this collection. Felitas' study represents a welcome departure from the main geographical focus of Argentine political studies (Buenos Aires and the Littoral), and it exposes tensions inherent in the Radical Party's modes of representation, which were rooted both in conservative elitism and the more ‘populist’ positions of provincial firebrands like Miguel A. Tanco. The latter styled himself as a supporter of the humble-born – ‘el único y verdadero amigo del que usa apargata y ojota’ (p. 145) – while his critics saw his mild reformism as unleashing the spectre of Bolshevik revolution in the province (thereby earning him the moniker ‘Tancoff’). Prefiguring in certain respects the confrontations of the Peronist era, these clashes within the Radical Party exemplify the frictions that accompanied experiments with popular republicanism, a central problem considered by other chapters in this volume as well.
Despite their diverse areas of historical analysis, the essays in this collection all share a similar evidentiary base, namely periodicals and journals. The reliance on these materials reflects in part the political importance of the printed word in the era. The press not only reported on ideological and partisan contests, but also constituted a major arena of mass political contention. In addition, one suspects that the authors were restricted in their research by the impoverished state of archival holdings. Periodicals are among the few accessible sources from the period that survived the turmoil of the past century. The contributors to Del Centenario al peronismo have drawn significant insights from these materials, but at times the dependence on press coverage frustrates the goals of the new political history. For instance, key questions of how subaltern actors engaged with the openings offered by republican citizenship are under-examined in many of the essays, as political leaders and intellectuals remain the protagonists of historical analysis. Within these limitations, the contributors to this useful volume have expanded our knowledge of political practices in Argentina and the crisis of the nation's liberal order in the early twentieth century.
