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 1 An Imperfect Abundance In 1928 the newspaper El Mundo hired Roberto Arlt to write a series of observations about life in Buenos Aires. This was a promising arrangement: the newspaper oVered a new tabloid layout aimed at popular audiences, and Arlt was an iconoclastic novelist who had worked as a store clerk, machinist, and jack-of-alltrades before earning his living as a journalist.His column,“Aguafuertes porteñas” (aguafuerte meaning “etching” and a porteña/o being a resident of the port city Buenos Aires), provided everything from mock scholarly analyses of slang terms to vignettes of unusual urban scenes. High on Arlt’s list of fascinations was the commercial pulse of the metropolis. Foreign visitors often marveled at the modernity and elegance of Argentina’s capital (the “Paris of South America,” according to the prevailing cliché). Arlt’s “etchings,” however, revealed a grittier side of life. One newspaper column about Corrientes Avenue, a major city artery, oVered a walking tour beginning at the urban fringes and then moving closer downtown. Along the way the reader encountered a commercialized landscape: Wrst,blocks of warehouses,workshops,and factories whose employees assembled everything from electric fans to plumbing Wxtures; then down-and-out storerooms where traveling salesmen came to resupply their stock of cheap wares; next, the Jewish quarter, with its dense knot of retail shops (“cloth merchants,perfumists,electricians,boot polishers, cooperatives”) and a few “Turkish” businesses on the side streets; and Wnally, the most famed blocks of Corrientes, dotted with cafés and restaurants and lit up by the marquees of the theaters and cinema palaces beloved by nightowls.1 Above all, Arlt’s chronicles examined the psychology of the inhabitants of this mercantile environment. They documented the social types who embraced An Imperfect Abundance i  the era’s competitive, proWt-driven spirit: the neighborhood grocer who schemed to undermine his rival or the café owner who let customers ogle his attractive wife because it was good for business.Greater sympathy was aVorded to those city residents compelled to sell their labor to survive, such as the tired washerwomen walking the streets with baskets of laundry on their hips.His writings did not romanticize the virtues of the poor; rather, they probed the commercial appetites that shaped the dreams of these “ordinary” city residents both big (shopping sprees after winning the lottery) and pitifully small (saving up to buy a half-kilo of fruitcake for Christmas). With his world-weary irony, Arlt questioned the dominant faith that these conditions constituted signs of progreso, a term he once summed up as the achievement of commuting on a packed subway car,working all day under electric lights, returning home to a stiXing apartment, and buying a pair of Ximsy shoes every three months, a suit, every six.2 Arlt was one of this era’s most insightful cultural observers,and his renown as a writer has only increased over the decades. But he was not alone in drawing attention to questions of acquisition. During the 1930s scores of commentators assessed how getting and spending inXuenced social relations. While most lacked both fame and a novelist’s acuity in probing individual motivations, they focused on issues of collective, if not explicitly political, concern. Like Arlt, these critics looked beyond the aZuent districts of Argentina’s “Paris” to its less celebrated barrios and suburbs (and, more rarely, to the nation’s rural expanses), where the cracks in the façade of national progress were hard to ignore.They narrowed their vision on laboring populations exposed to the capriciousness of their country’s market economy. In particular, discussion revolved around the social category of the familiaobrera—that is,the working-class family—and the predicament of households pinched between meager incomes and material needs. The awareness that life could be cruel or that a gaping divide separated rich from poor was nothing new,of course.What troubled observers was the unpredictability of modern times: all it took was a sudden accident,layoV,or other mundane twist of fate to send most families hurtling into indigence. The impressive economic advances and technological innovations on display in Buenos Aires only sharpened the contrast with the misery that existed alongside them. Whereas Arlt styled himself a chronicler of metropolitan types,other contemporaries adopted the mantle of would-be reformers who would shed light on the causes of dislocation and devise practical strategies for amelioration. In targeting various facets of life, their muckraking reports oVer unexpected insights...

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