The Normalization of Economic Life: Representations of the Economy in Golden-Age Buenos Aires, 1890-1913

This essay examines the cultural impact of the market transition in Buenos Aires during the so-called golden age (ca. 1890-1913), when Argentina experienced a process of export-led growth, centered on agriculture and livestock. The international mobility of labor and capital resources, in a context of an expanding frontier, facilitated rapid and important gains in productivity. By the turn of the century, a model of accumulation based on mass immigration, foreign capital, and the redistribution and use of land taken from indigenous peoples was firmly established. Important changes in technology (breed selection and threshing machines) and social relations (tenancy and sharecropping) modified the landscape of the pampas. The city experienced more directly the turmoil of "progress," receiving massive inflows of immigrants from Europe and rapidly absorbing modern means of transportation and distribution. Soon, a large consumer market developed, underscoring the modernity of the city's economy.

Some scholars view this period as a turning point in the history of Argentina. Social and urban historians have noted two fundamental changes: the revolution of wheat that transformed the social landscape of the pampas; and the modernization of the city that ultimately allowed some improvement in the living conditions of immigrant workers. Labor historians found in this period a deepening of class confrontations: the transition from artisan-based and ethnically divided working-class communities to a politically active and organized working-class movement under socialist and anarchist leadership. The very success of capital accumulation made the disparities in the distribution of income and wealth all the more evident, facilitating the diffusion of radical ideologies. Anarchist-dominated labor unions, mutual-aid societies, socialist cultural centers, and renewed activism within the workshops signaled the emergence of class politics.

Economic historians have emphasized the success of a model of growth based upon the export of primary commodities produced with the help of international capital and European immigrants. However, it is important to remark that this was also a period of monetary and financial normalization. The renegotiation of the foreign debt, the stabilization of the currency, and the greater overseeing of banks and speculative investments produced a certain degree of stability in the economy. Monetary stability was crucial to the expansion of exports that followed. The transition from a financially and monetarily unstable economy (1885-92) to one governed by stable prices and a strong currency (1893-1913) left indelible marks on the memory of contemporaries. The golden age was as much a story of monetary stabilization as one centered in the rapid incorporation of European immigrants, capital, and technology.

My interest lies in the examination of the critical reception of these economic changes by workers' advocates, experts, publicists, and the public. ¹ In other words, instead of focusing on the actual evolution of production, prices, investment, consumption, or distribution, I analyze the economy as a cultural process. This perspective necessarily finds its object of investigation in the terrain of discourse, communicative interactions, and representations. ² Public reactions to economic policies or to the general evolution of the economy can be found in novels and memoirs about economic life, in social practices and prejudices built around money and merchants, in everyday conversation about economic topics, in the rhetoric and tone of social protests, and in publicists' representations of policymakers. ³

Texts and images indicate the structure of feelings associated with a given market transition and the extent and intensity of public reactions to new economic policies. This experience cannot be reduced to any single set of sensations, practices, or forms, because it involves different social actors, all endowed with capacities to represent and attribute meaning to their own activities. A market society produces an abundance of representations about what people do in the marketplace. The multiplicity and diversity of these representations present important problems to the researcher, but this does not make...