Wandering Paysanos: State Order and Subaltern Experience in Buenos Aires During the Rosas Era by Ricardo D. Salvatore (review)

192 The LatinAmericanist Fall 2005 WanderingPaysanos: State Order and Subaltern Experience in Buenos Aires During the Rosas Era. By Ricardo D. Salvatore. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003, p. 523, $59.95. In WanderingPaysanos,Ricardo Salvatore has given us an entirely new way to understand the Rosas Era (1829-1 852) in Argentine history. Most previous interpretations of this period focused on the caudillo nature of Rosas’s rule over Buenos Aires and the other Argentine provinces. Indeed, Rosas himself is one of the prime examples of nineteenth-centurycaudillismo in most textbooks. Salvatore focuses instead on the deliberate expansion of the provincial state under Rosas and its collision with a class of rural, male, mobilepeones and peasants who called themselves “puysunos.”In the processhe touchesseveralmajor areasof social life in the post-independence Buenos Aires province: life in and around the ranches and slaughter houses, life in the courthouses and prisons, life (and death) in the barracks and on the battlefields of wartime. Salvatore,a Professor of Modem History at the Universidad Torcuatode Tella in Buenos Aires, is extremely careful to point out that the collision between freedom-seekingpaysanos and order-seekingstate authoritiesproduced complex results. Salvatoreseesthe Rosista regime primarilyas an experiment in state building. The opening chapters of the book describe the pampa of Buenos Aires province as a contested terrain of fragmented small-holdings and unpatrolled borders. It was a region not easily controlled by the state (even a state as obsessed with restoring order to the countryside as the Rosista state). Indeed, given the dynamic expansion of the province’s export economy in the era and the constant demand for agricultural labor and military conscripts, the mobile paysanos often found themselves in positions of strength relative to the ranch owners and village vecinos or “neighbors” who dominated local politics. According to Salvatore, this situation complicated the implementation of Rosas’s personal vision of order and required the deployment of a vast array of state institutions to bring the paysanos under control-from the federalist armies and militias to the offices of the localjudges and magistrates.This is what Salvatoremeans by state.order. In its wide ranging attempt to bring the countryside under its control, the Rosista regime came directly into contact with the paysanos. In many cases these interactions produced documentation in the form ofjliaciones(records)and clasijicaciones(classifications ).Salvatoreused these state-generatedinvestigationfiles Book Reviews 193 (541of themto beexact) asthe evidenciarybackboneof hisbook, along with more traditional reports issued by rural judges and military officers. Building on James C. Scott’s work on peasantstate relations in Southeast Asia, he calls his method of reading these incredibly rich but problematic documents a “double interrogation ,’’which means looking at them from both the state’sand the paysanos’ perspectives. When he looked at these files from the perspective of the state, he found an intense desire (bordering on obsession) with discipline and order. State agents involved in the “classification”of wayward paysanos recorded everything aboutthem in these files,includingeven minutedetails abouttheir clothing (the subject of one of the book’s many fascinating chapters ). In this way,the agentsof the Rosista stateturned the country peons and itinerant peasants into “subaltern” subjects, subjects onto whom the state would attempt to project its vision of order. But the statewas not the only factor present in these primary sources. Equally important to Salvatore is the way the paysanos responded to the Rosista state’s attempts to impose order and “talked back” to the state, even from positions of vulnerability and weakness. When he “interrogated” the investigation files from the paysano perspective, Salvatorefound that the paysanos, like other groups studied from the “subalternist perspective,” found myriad ways to negotiate with and contest the rulings of the agents of the state. One way they did so was by appropriating Rosismo’s “radicalegalitarian”language,which was a product of the democratizingpolitical ethos of a regime that granted universal male suffrage and required universal male enlistment in the federalist militia. Other ways the paysanos, as subaltern subjects, managed to modify and moderate the state’s disciplinary project were by exploiting the state’s desperate need for their labor, and by recognizing their crucial role in defending the federalist homeland. Service in...