The Argentine Folklore Movement: Sugar Elites, Criollo Workers, and the Politics of Cultural Nationalism, 1900–1955 (review)

In 1945, Antonio Tormo was a very popular folklore singer, in vogue in the Argentine provinces but with little access to the cosmopolitan audience and media of Buenos Aires. Five years later, he released the song “El rancho e’ la Cambicha” (Cambicha’s Ranch), which became an immediate hit, selling an astounding five million copies at a time when the country’s population was 16 million, and breaking the all-time record for national music sales. Tormo, known as “The Singer of Our Things” or “The Criollo Voice of Emotions,” immediately came to represent not only the voice of Argentine folklore, but also the face of the Peronist culture that had invaded the urban centres from the interior and had expanded its presence throughout the entire country. By the time Oscar Chamosa finishes telling the sensational story of Tormo, he has described in detail the history of Argentine folklore during the first half of the 20th century. His book places the folklore movement at the center of the configuration of Argentine national identity. And in doing so, the author describes a much vaster and interwoven history, that of Argentine nationalism as an ideology, its relationship with scientific and educational projects on national culture, the conservative elites and the peasants from the interior, the emerging urban working classes, the evolution of popular culture in parallel with technological changes, and the disruptive arrival of Colonel Juan Perón to power at the head of the largest labour movement in Latin America. The author argues that these forces converged in shaping the singular experiment of modern Argentina, a society integrated in a way that “move[d] Buenos Aires a little farther away from Paris and a little closer to Chivilcoy, Tucumán, and Salta.”

Chamosa’s thorough research of Argentine folklore focuses mostly on Tucumán, a small province in the northwest of Argentina where the sugar industry flourished since the beginning of the 20thcentury. His is not a random selection: the book argues that population from the Northwest came to represent a notion of an “authentic” Argentina that replaced the gaucho of the 19th century. In what the author describes as the “politics of cultural nationalism,” he shows the disparate forces that coincide in this transformation.

Combining intellectual history with social and cultural analysis of a wide range of documents, the author identifies “romantic nationalism” and the literary movement celebrating gaucho life known as “criollismo” as the trends at the heart of the folklore movement. The nationalist component of folklore made it fruitful to the 19th century politics of state consolidation and produced a discourse that became a way to acquaint local elites with the notion that Argentine nationality was embedded in a rural culture. But this soon changed, as “argentinidad” came to refer to an increasingly complex society. In 1921, nationalist members of the Radical government – many of whom would plot against it in the 1930 military coup that overthrew President Hipólito Yrigoyen – promoted one of the most interesting actions of state-sponsored nationalism: the National Folklore Survey conducted by the National Board of Education. Teachers were sent to assemble a massive amount of information about everything local. In the Calchaquíes Valley, they collected information on Inca rituals, indigenous medicine and witchcraft. Nationalists and positivists looked down on these features as expressions of backwardness. But for folklorists, the findings confirmed the communities’ folk character and the need to preserve it. The survey also found early signs of a changing society. Some reported about people reluctant to disclose their beliefs for fear of being mocked –not by the teachers, but by the people of the Valley themselves. Others reported on the popularity of Carlos Gardel, the great tango singer from Buenos Aires.

Chamosa focuses on the data collected in the Calchaquí Valley that included the increasingly powerful sugar industry of Tucumán. The sugar elites are at the centre of...