Dona Maria's Story: Life History, Memory, and Political Identity (review)

The doña in the title is María Roldan, a labor and Peronist party activist from Berisso, a town fifty miles from Buenos Aires. In the prologue to the book the author sketches this local context. Founded in 1873 as a center for beef salting, the town shifted its economic base to meat-packing two decades later, when refrigeration made saladeros obsolete. Given the continuing bovine presence, the shift may seem slight, but meat-packing brought two momentous changes: a full-blown factory system, and foreign ownership. The Chicago-based Swift and Armour companies came to dominate the local economy until their shutdown in the 1970s. In part due to these economic processes, Berisso became a magnet for Southern and Eastern European immigrants (who made up about half of the population by 1930) and a bastion of union and Peronist militancy (we are not told much about labor activism before Perón).

The second part of the book contains Doña María’s testimony—or rather, the portion (out of thirty hours of interviews) that James chose to include. Some readers may find the implications of this editing worrisome. If the author’s aim were to analyze the form of the story (and at times this seems his major concern), this would indeed pose a problem, particularly because he also condensed and rearranged parts of the narrative. If the goal is to illuminate the sociocultural universe of Doña María and many of her fellow Berissenses (and this also forms part of the author’s desiderata), then the editing does not present a serious impediment. The material (complete with the repetitions and contradictions of quotidian conversations) is rich enough for that task and the editing probably simply made it more readable.

More problematic is the relationship between the author’s thematic agenda and that of the subject. Doña María can go on for hours (or pages) about her union and political activism with James able, or willing, to insert only occasional one-liners. But when the conversation turns to gender issues the roles almost reverse, with James now prodding an uncharacteristically laconic Doña María. There may be nothing wrong—from the scholarly, if not ethical standpoint—with pushing recalcitrant interviewees into areas that they would rather avoid if evasion is indeed at play. But one runs the risk of imposing, or at least prioritizing, concepts that may seem alien or not particularly significant to the way others organize their worldview. This problem appears again, in reverse, when James acknowledges that “if Berissenses have a ‘story they tell themselves about themselves,’ it is that of the immigrant” (pg. 228) but pays little attention to it.

The third part of the book contains four loosely-tied “interpretive essays” in which James ponders about the possibilities and challenges of oral history and the role of gender and class in the shaping of Doña María’s narrative. At its best, this offers a refreshingly honest reflection on the nature of the methodology and of the historian’s craft in general. At its worst, it degenerates into a self-indulgent confessional that seems to push Doña María out of center stage. Echoing Derrida, James decries the pedestrian empiricism that privileges written over oral sources (a disingenuous protestation insofar as few historians today would defend such a hierarchy). He also slights a form of “naïve realism” that envisions oral interviews as a source of unmediated historical facts about the otherwise voiceless majority. To his credit, he tackles current concerns about authority and power inequalities in ethnographic work while avoiding the paralyzing effect that such ruminations have often exercised on many cultural anthropologists. This considerate intellectual confidence allows him to problematize the story of a woman who, in part because of her moral standing and in part because she died soon after the interviews, seems...