El sainete porteño and Argentine Reality: The Tenant Strike of 1907

El saínete porteño and Argentine Reality: The Tenant Strike of 1907 Donald S. Castro California State Polytechnic University The purpose of this exploratory essay is to investigate how popular culture can be used as a source for research in social history. Popular culture can be defined essentially as mass culture. While this is not a precise definition, there seems to be no more definite definition available. The editors of and contributors to the Journal of Popular Culture and to Studies in Latin American Popular Culture have sought more precise definitions but without much success. In this study, the popular cultural form will be the saínete porteño [jocular short play of Buenos Aires] and the particular work will be Los inquilinos [The Tenants] written in 1907 by the Argentine Nemesio Trejo (1862-1916). Perhaps the description and definition ofwhat the saíneteporteño was will aid in the clarification of what "popular culture" is. While the origin of the Spanish word saínete is obscure, by the eighteenth century it came to have as one of its accepted definitions a "short comic theatrical piece" (Carella 10). In Argentina the saínete fused elements from the Spanish light opera [zarzuela] and the comic popular theater of late nineteenth-century Spain (género chico, literally small genus or class, e.g., small theater—"low brow" versus "high brow" theater). The Argentine saineteros [writers in the saínete genre] sought to create a hybrid cultural form that was inspired by the everyday life experiences ofthe common people but that used the form of theatric production acceptable to those who would be the paying audience—the emerging middle and lower-middle classes of Buenos Aires in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Their most popular day for theater attendance was Sunday afternoon, and saínete theaters offered as many as seven functions starting at 3:00 p.m. Regular weekday presentations were in the evening starting at 8:30 p.m. and had four functions per evening (or as called in Spanish teatro por sección). Each function was a different play, which placed a tremendous burden on the creative talents of the sainetero (Posadas iii). There were at least ten major saínete theaters and numerous minor ones functioning in Buenos Aires during the "Golden Age" of the saínete porteño (1890-1930). It is estimated by the author that these theaters represented a combined seating capacity of over 3,000 seats, 51 52Rocky Mountain Review so that it is not difficult to say that the saínete was a "popular" cultural form. Other theatrical companies went on tour on a regular schedule to La Plata, provincial capital ofBuenos Aires province, and to Rosario, the principal city in the province of Santa Fe, carrying with them the saínete. Ticket cost per function in the early 1900s was about one peso. In contrast, for productions in the elite porteño theaters such as the Colón, tickets for comparable platea [orchestra] seats cost over four times as much (Gallo 93). Nevertheless, given the lack of discretionary funds available to the working classes, even the relative inexpensiveness ofsaínete functions still made these a popular culture form for the lower-middle and middle classes. In many ways thejocular play during its heyday had the same impact on Buenos Aires nightlife that the Broadway musical had on New York. The locale ofthe saínete was Buenos Aires (with few exceptions such as La gringa by Florencio Sánchez, written in 1904) with its ethnic and cultural mix of immigrants and native Argentines (creóles), and its different social classes. The characters in the saínete were based on all the types found in the poorer classes, and the themes ofthe plays were found in how these people lived, what their daily lives were like in the tenement houses of Buenos Aires [conventillo], in the streets of the city, or in essence what is called in Spanish la vida coditiana [the daily routine oflife]. The saínete porteño themes are so thoroughly Argentine and current (most plays took place in época actual, e.g., actual time) that one author has...