Wandering Paysanos: State Order and Subaltern Experience in Buenos Aires during the Rosas Era (review)

Salvatore has been a leading researcher of Argentina's nineteenth- century rural workforce and the dimensions of social control that defined the interplay between state authorities and the rural population. This book, which represents the culmination of several years of investigation, reinforces Salvatore's standing as a leading observer of the relationship between state and rural citizenry during the nation's formative stages. Its archival depth and nuanced arguments give it unusual strength. (The richness of the data helps to blunt the worst effects of the occasional redundancy and the periodic use of infelicitous language.) Although at times admittedly speculative, some of the speculation provides opportunities to consider salutary alternatives to established interpretations regarding the social and political roles played by the rural population of Buenos Aires.

Salvatore's principal aim is to bring attention to the poor paysanos, primarily the peasants and mobile gauchos who provided much of the military and labor needs of the state throughout most of the nineteenth century. The book concentrates on the lengthy dictatorship of Juan Manuel de Rosas (1829–1852), followed by a review of the changes experienced in the immediate post-Rosas era of the 1850s. The book's richest primary-source materials come from filiaciones, the records meticulously kept by the rosista judicial and military authorities, based on their investigations of deserters, vagrants, and suspected delinquents. The meticulously transcribed interviews provide a documentary vantage point from which the voices of the captured, their kin, and friends can be heard.

Salvatore finds a "defiant agency" among these subalterns, not the silence and presumed obsequiousness found in the traditional historiography. Salvatore makes much of their brazenness in light of their unfavorable circumstances, noting their evident freedom to espouse ideals of patriotism while demanding the individual rights bestowed to them as Argentine citizens. In fairness, however, and without taking away from the book's significant findings, Salvatore does not give sufficient play to other literature that has discovered raised voices among the oppressed; his presentation of a virtually unchallenged view of the traditional notions of nineteenth-century power relations needs attenuation.¹ Nonetheless, Salvatore advances this discussion in significant ways with a dense fabric of evidence and argumentation.

The contradictions and continuities that characterize the first half of the nineteenth century are reflected throughout this work. Salvatore notes that although the authoritarian tenets of Rosas' regime reflected his preference for a hierarchical order of leadership and obedience, it also represented itself as the legitimate inheritor of the republican ethos engendered by the May Revolution that led to independence. Thus did republicanism's rhetoric coexist with authoritarian practices.

The intricate machinery used by the rosista state to monitor subalterns' behavior and penalize their infractions was mitigated by three fundamental conditions: the pervasive quality of the market economy, the high geographical mobility of the workforce, and the scarcity of labor. The conspicuous, coervice power of the law was effective only in inverse proportion to economic well-being. Market expansion provided sought-after laborers with considerable bargaining powers and forced recruitment was stymied by their mobility, as landowners competed for labor in a free-wage market.

Among Salvatore's many nuanced points is the notion that the subalterns' participation in the wars that wracked the country gave them a sense of national affinity, the result of a broader knowledge of Argentina, and an awareness of the commonalities among its people. This awareness made them more schooled in the language of the law and republican rights, giving them unusual versatility and breadth in their arguments against the authorities and in their articulated expectations of fair treatment.

In a chapter that covers the period following the fall of Rosas, Salvatore offers a sophisticated analysis that challenges the accepted idea that the state suppressed gauchos through forceful acts of military recruitment, dispatch to the deadly frontier, and other measures aimed at their immiseration. Although state officials and social critics...