Contentious Lives: Two Argentine Women, Two Protests, and the Quest for Recognition (review)

278 Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies Contentious Lives: Two Argentine Women, Two Protests, and the Quest for Recognition Duke University Press, 2003 By Javier Auyero I want to approach this book—which is fundamentally identified as an example of sociological research—not as a sociologist, but as a cultural studies scholar. That is, I want to make it clear I have no professional capability of analyzing the sociopolitical issues presented here in terms of the specific historical events, Auyero's selection of these women as figures of those events (or, in a synergetic relationship, those events as important because of these rwo actors in them, and the importance of these two actors because of the importance of the events described), the analytical protocols by which Auyero assesses individual participation in social events, nor the importance of this monograph as an example of a particular line oflegitimate work in contemporary Latin American sociology. What I do want to consider as an examination of this volume is the way in which it can serve the interesrs of cultural studies. My personal take on cultural studies remains committed to the primacy of the bracketed text to which we can attribute some measure of interpretive cultural production (or cultural production for the purposes of interpreting lived humane experience), as is characteristic of students of culture in general, in the process by which one moves from bracketed production to the horizons of experience with which interpretive texts engage in a semiotic dialogue. Nonetheless, I am also interested in a broad array of "real life" accounts of lived human experience and what the discursive strategies are for the presentation of those accounts. Auyero's study focuses on two middle-class Argentine women, each from provinces far-removed from the cachet of the Buenos Aires capital (Laura, from Neuquén to the far south; Nana, from Santiago del Estero in the central north). Designating these women as middle-class is less a crucial identification than it is an index of their belonging ro a sector that is supposed to be what "First-World Argentina" is all about (Carlos Menem, rhe president at the time, in the decade of the 1990s, promoted this triumphalist vision of the country ro which he gave an illusory and ultimately disastrous neoliberalist economy policy), but that knows what it is to teeter on the edge of sinking below the poverty line. As provincial women, both are icons of the way in which the economic and social development of Argentina in the late twentieth century meant the precipitous impoverishment of the provinces, such that, as many have observed, Latin American really begins beyond the boundary of the federal capital. These women are also exemplars of the importance of protest by women/feminist protest in Argentina, which can be traced variously to the role of women in major historical events ofthat nation's history, the very early entrance of women in the twentieth century into the professions and other forms of middle-class public employment, empowerment of women by Eva Duarte de Perón (whether one likes it or not, a respect for some of what Evita stood for is all that is left today of Peronismo as a sociopolitical force, rather than just the name of a political party), the voice of women in opposition to the masculinist military dictatorship , and die energetic participation of women in the populist outcries to the sharp recent decline in Argentine economic life. The cultural interest of Auyero's careful recreation of Laura's and Nanas successful populist political interventions lies not just in the need to tell women's lives—Argentine cultural production continues to do a very good job ofthat—but to move the focus on women outside of Buenos Aires, which always gets the majority of the attention, as though life there could only be of a localist interest or, when it is told, marked by an extrametropolitan exoticism. But there is nothing exotic about Laura and Nana. Auyero's account makes use of interviews with them, of their own written documents, of journalistic and media coverage, and of "street narratives" about them told by random individuals . One is almost tempted to say...