Cocoliche's Romp

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Cocoliche’s Romp

Fun with Nationalism at Argentina’s Carnival

Micol Seigel

Carnival, Buenos Aires, around : The vast Great Hall of the daily newspaper La Prensa has been transformed. Workday clamor has been re- placed by the excited buzz of a thousand conversations: exclaiming over costumes, gossiping about dances and parties, arguing, flirting. The five tiers of balconies overlooking the main floor are crammed with over a thousand men, women, and children of Buenos Aires society, dressed to the nines or costumed elaborately. One tier houses the judges who will award the coveted La Prensa medals. Next to them, staff reporters dutifully jot down notes to fill the next day’s edition. Starting well after dark the main floor begins to fill with spectators, who also line the street outside. The contests begin. Hour after hour the societies, choruses, orchestras, carriages, criollo groups, with gauchos (roughly, Argentine cowboy figures), and cocoliches (clownish parodies of immigrants who fancied themselves gauchos) in tow, and as many as , masked and costumed individuals parade through the Hall, reciting odes to La Prensa, singing the national anthem or melodies from their countries of origin, performing choreographed marches, patriotic skits, lascivious dances, and as- tonishing feats of horseback acrobatics. The societies have rehearsed for months in anticipation of this week. A har- ried official checks each group’s registration and hurries them along, insisting that ambitious programs be cut short. People grumble and some ignore his ad- monitions, but most understand, as the line to enter the hall takes up block after block on the Avenida de Mayo. Many groups will not be allowed in before the Hall is obliged to turn them away, around : A.M., in order to allow a little rest before the next day’s festivities—and enough time to get out the paper. The police, sometimes arrogant, sometimes violent, work overtime to contain the “human wave” in front of the Hall, some of whom respond with taunts and jeers. Electric lights strung especially for carnival lend bril- liance to the scene. Despite the police prohibition against an official course along the Avenida de Mayo, spectators are jammed along the sides of the streets and occupy every single table in every cafe, flirting with bourgeois women throwing confetti and paper streamers from the balconies above. The

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. & . Top: Italian immigrants wearing masks of foreign nations during carnival, ; below, masks are removed to reveal the immigrants’ identities. (Photos from Spini and Vaggi :)

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groups perform for them as they wait. The immigrant members of a centro criollo (a criollo group or club) act out a pantomime, a battle between gauchos and “Indians.” The delighted crowd cheers as the last Indian kills the last gaucho, whose son then kills the last Indian; only the son, neither gaucho nor In- dian, survives. Close on his heels prances a gleeful cocoliche, burlesquing the immigrants’ gaucho performances. The reverent catcalls echo longest for him. (La Prensa  February :;  February :;  February :). This centro criollo’s performance, considered in the context of the city-wide festivities, begins to hint at some of the ways Buenos Aires carnival in the first years of the th century provided a stage on which porteños (inhabitants of this capital city) spectacularized their relationships to the Argentine nation. In a period of massive European immigration and immigrant assimilation; amid a tide of rising restrictionist sentiment against working-class, trade unionist, and anarchist immigrants; at a moment when the violent marginalization of indigenous and Afro-Argentines appeared largely accomplished, carnival extended a site for the negotiation and contestation of shifting national boundaries. Immigrant carnival celebrations appear to historical observers only via a series of mediations, for even the views of turn-of-the-century carnival audiences were mediated by the press and the social sectors it represented. From the earliest stages of creative production, performers worked knowing they had to please not only their class and national peers, but elite audiences as well—the judges, for example, or carnival-goers in wealthy neighborhoods. Observers not present at the party, regardless of their position in the century, had to accept seeing these performances—already stamped by the efforts involved in appealing to elite contingents—filtered again through the frames of elite interpretations in the press. La Prensa’s ostensibly objective reporting re- staged the immigrant performances, reinforcing and distributing the version it preferred for Argentina. It exemplified the th-century version of the critical nation-building role Benedict Anderson ([] ) ascribed to the Latin American press. Anderson wrote of the press’s construction of a community of readers in the early th century; in the early th century, when bourgeois modernizers were exceptionally self-conscious regarding the stewardship of their national identities, the press took on the role of inventing and distributing a narrative of national identity. La Prensa embraced this role with an unusual degree of enthusiasm and ideological consistency. The largest Buenos Aires daily of the time and principal primary source for this article, La Prensa not only won the struggle to represent carnival for poster- ity, it also shaped carnival performance in its day. Its Grand Hall dominated the prestigious Avenida de Mayo and inspired performers to compete for the sought-after prizes it awarded. Then again, its efforts to contain popular carnival excesses also acknowledged deft and clever adversaries, and preserved their irreverent expressions for readers then and since. La Prensa’s coverage, along with records left by police attempts to discipline the crowd, cannot help but reveal some of the ways immigrant carnival performances staked political and social claims. Taking up the tools at hand, they imitated, revered, and ridiculed social elements high and low: bourgeois society, Argentine nationalism, workers outside capitalism (gauchos), indigenous peoples, and Afro-Argentines. The irrup- tions of immigrants’ marvelous parodic antics into the space carnival allowed for popular expression, despite elite attempts to contain them, suggests some of the ideological struggles waged year-long. They are also relevant to contemporary observers, for their performances and the limits they encountered set the perimeters for the “whiteness” at the core of the racist, misogynist nationalism whose legacy would stamp Argentine politics and history throughout the th-century. If we attend closely to their performances, perhaps they will also model a way to exceed and displace that legacy.

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Centros criollos such as the one that staged the genocidal pantomime above were staples of the carnival scene, along with bands, orchestras, dance groups, and many other performers. According to Enrique Puccia, an author of an early in-depth discussion of Argentine carnival, these “creole clubs” prolifer- ated and peaked during the decade before the Centennial,  to  (Puccia :; see also Martin ; Cazón ). From my counts of the coverage in La Prensa, it seems that in the carnivals between  and  there were probably over  active centros criollos, with  to  performing each year. Their members, frequently immigrants, banded together to perform ostensibly “authentic” Argentine history, acrobatics, and music—to “further the gaucho tradition,” as La Prensa explained ( March :;  February :). They dressed as gauchos, rode horseback, and performed “the gauchesque”: acrobatic riding feats, dichos criollos (criollo sayings), poetry read or sung in gaucho slang and meter, and so on. La Prensa described their offer- ings as “[t]he patriarchal customs of the inhabitants of our vast plains. Their simple sayings, deliberate and picaresque, their sadnesses and happinesses, magisterially highlighted by writers like Del Campo, Gutierrez, Ascasubi, Obligado, Hernandez, and others,” cloaking the centros’ uproarious, baccha- nalian antics in high literary tradition (La Prensa  February :). This body of literature, known collectively as literatura gauchesca, constituted the elite-produced end of what Adolfo Prieto calls “el discurso criollista” or criollismo, an ideology of national identity centered around the icon of the gaucho as an emblem of white racial mixture on Argentine soil (Prieto :). Held up to personify Argentina’s romantic pioneer past, the gaucho was the quintessential symbol of Argentine nationalism by the end of the th century. This figure’s prototypes, th-century horseback renegades from the emerging capitalist order, had mostly survived on the stolen cattle of early capitalist ranchers. In the period of their activity, Argentine intellectuals and travelers had depicted the gaucho as a detestable figure, the personification of barbarity, savagery, filth, criminality, excessive sexuality, hedonism, and lazi- ness (see, for example, Nichols ). The fencing of the plains, the penetra- tion of the railroad into the interior, and the consolidation of the estancia (ranch) system forced gauchos to become peons, working for wages. As the spread of capitalism transformed gauchos into wage-laborers, the figure of the gaucho began to be romanticized in memory and its extinction nostalgically mourned. Nostalgic praise and contempt fit hand-in-hand as a modernizing elite attempted to mold the gaucho-as-icon into an “ideological weapon” (in the words of Richard Slatta), to contain the threat material gauchos posed to their hopes for “progress” (Slatta :). They lionized the figure of the assimilating gaucho while deploring the plains cattle-rustler who escaped the rancher’s labor control or the military’s forceful recruitment during the mid-century wars of independence (a coercion reformulated as gaucho patriotism by nationalists in later generations). In the centros criollos’ antics we can see how the European immigrants who poured into Argentina around the turn of the century sought to wrap themselves in the mantle of this cultural icon; it seemed to provide opportunities for integration into the Argentine body politic unavailable in the conventional political sphere. If it was obvious to everyone at the time, as Maristella Svampa claims, that “if someone wrote ‘gaucho,’ they were thinking in opposition to ‘gringo’” (then a derogatory term for foreigners, particularly Italians; North Americans were “yanquis”), then immigrant appropriations of their alter egos worked to collapse the divide between foreigners and natives, and to derail the biologistic logic of contemporary racial “science” (Svampa :). Embrac-

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ing criollismo, immigrants could stake the strongest possible claim to belonging in their chosen new home, a community imagined around the memory of the gaucho. As Prieto argues, criollismo “could signify an immediate and visible form of assimilation, the credential of citizenship with which [immigrants] could arm themselves” (:–). If immigrants could beguile elite audiences into enjoying and accepting their gaucho performances, perhaps it would assist their struggles for political and economic participation in the increasingly anti-immigrant atmosphere of the early s. Porteño audiences did indeed find the centros criollos’ performances be- guiling, if we believe the delirious enthusiasm reported in La Prensa’s pages. According to the paper, audience enthusiasm was directly related to their per- ception of the performances’ “authentic” reproduction of national traditions. El Fogón (the Campfire)’s five horseback youths received “deserved, ample applause from the numerous gathering” when they “saluted the public with verses of the most genuine criollo.” Los Gauchos Serranos (gauchos from the mountains, or the Serrano region) won accolades for performing “with all the faithfulness of someone who has really lived the life of the gaucho in the ex- tensions of our pampa and knows all the details.” The crowd took great pleasure in Eduriges Caro, “a perfumed breeze from the Argentine pampas,” who “gives the impression he has studied the legendary gaucho from the time of Martin Fierro with real talent [sic], so that his tradition will not die.” La Prensa and the audience it observed thrilled over the groups who “demonstrated their perfect knowledge of the lost customs of the Argentine countryside” (La Prensa  February :–;  February :). Yet the surnames of the centros’ participants, the neighborhoods represented, asides in the press coverage, and secondary sources all suggest that the centros were largely made up of immigrants. Did the audiences love the centros’ representations of Argentine customs despite or because they were so obviously deliberate performances? Immigrants’ carnival strategies ranged from these “authentic” gaucho performances to the presentations of carnival societies organized within immigrant mutual aid societies, who made the appropriation of Argentine nationality explicit. For example, a popular tactic among these groups was to dress a young female member as the Republic of Argentina herself. In the carnival following the  passage of the Ley de Residencia, an anti-immigrant “Residential Law,” the heavily Italian Marinos Leales (Loyal Sailors) sent a clear plea for peace with this costume, dressing one young girl as the Argen- tine Republic and another as Italy. In the same carnival the Unión Artesanos de Quilmes also dressed a young Italo-Argentine girl as Argentina. These well-coached little girls carried the flag, sang the national anthem, and recited patriotic poetry—the State’s tools of choice in the project of inculcating patriotism (La Prensa  February :–; Bertoni ). Many of the carnival societies performing this kind of nationalism operated under the auspices of immigrant mutual aid organizations. Their members tended to be the more upwardly mobile working-class and solidly middle-class young men and intact immigrant families, not the most recent or most marginal stragglers (on class in Italian societies, see Nascimbene ; in their Spanish counterparts, Fernandez ). In a sense, the girls costumed as Argentina were designated community prostheses by bourgeois-minded society leaders, who used them to signal acceptance of State authority. This tactic recognized or catered to the State’s increasing presence at fiestas after the s, made tan- gible through rules governing flag displays, the national anthem, watchful state officials, and so on (Bertoni ). Through this symbolic traffic in their young women, these immigrants addressed themselves to elite porteño men (symboli- cally as well as concretely, to the La Prensa judges and society audience filling the Great Hall), literally performing their desire for assimilation.

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. A centros criollos called Gauchos pampeanos. These performances’ support of bourgeois porteño nationalism, however, was These immigrant groups far from seamless. The Marinos Leales’ second little girl, after all, was still would pantomime elaborate dressed as Italy, reminding audiences of the Italian state, present via her relo- battles between gauchos cated subjects and sometimes deeply resented by non-Italian porteños. In addi- and “Indians” in La tion, these dual representations reveal a strategic, fluid view of identity as both Prensa’s Great Hall. “original” and mimetic, but certainly not biological. Other groups extended this (Photo from Puccia paradoxical insistence on both original nationality and the validity of their copy :) of authentic Argentine patriotism. Orfeon Gallego Primitivo (Original Spanish Choral Society) performed a tango about Argentina entitled “Bendita Tierra” (Blessed Land), singing “here I live/ better than there,” but only after dancing their zarzuela (a Spanish dance; La Prensa  February :). Many societies dressed themselves in the “typical” clothing of foreigners, often from their country of origin. Union Suisse wore characteristic Swiss costumes; the youths in Orfeon Gallego Primitivo dressed as Santiago students; Habitantes del Olimpo (Inhabitants of Olympus) as fishermen from the beaches of Sorrento, Juventud de Flores (Youth of Flores) as Florentine gentlemen, Los Vascos de Guipúzcoa (Guipúzcoa Basques) as Basques, and so on (La Prensa  February :;  February :–;  February :;  February :). Their performances matched their costumes: the Sorrentinos sang Verdi and Italian opera, the Basques performed Basque songs, and the Spaniards sang Spanish melodies or danced jigs, zarzuelas, and other Spanish dances. This was the kind of faithfulness to original nationality that disappointed elite hopes for seamless assimilation. Yet their foreign loyatlies were faithful to Argentine nationalism on another level, for this form of play preserved nationality as a meaningful category, agreeing that its cultural trappings were evidence of something real. Like immigrants who dressed as gauchos, these immigrants found in carnival an opportunity to cajole acceptance from their xenophobic audience, using both their own terms and those set by the porteño elite, recon- ciled by the overarching framework of the value of nationality.

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Gaucho costumes, as performances of marginality, seemed to offer relatively more opportunity to disrupt nationalist discourse. Although many, as we have seen, were reassuringly nationalist in their “authenticity,” immigrant gauchos were invariably making claims about immigrant patriotism and the appropri- ateness of their inclusion in the national body. This in itself was an oppositional project given the growing restrictionist consensus among the elite, and many carnival gauchos took their opposition even further, with enchanting burlesques of nationality itself. How, for example, could “Argentineness” be a stable category if the burlesque character known as the gaucho Pizarro, son of the “gallego Gumersindo El Ingles” (the Spaniard Gumersindo the English- man), qualified as Argentine? And his neighboring clown, the ridiculous figure of a “gallego-vasco-argentino” (Spaniard-Basque-Argentine), “mounted on an ass”—was he mocking one individual, or the elite desire for an assimila- tive melting pot (La Prensa  February :)?

Cocoliche Among the most brilliantly disobedient characters—and an even more bla- tant sign of the presence, even predominance, of immigrants as carnival gauchos and carnival participants in general—was the omnipresent cocoliche. Cocoliche was a figure developed by restrictionists to mock immigrants’ appropriations of the gauchesque. He may have appeared first in the play version of popular writer Eduardo Gutierrez’s  novel, Juan Moreira, as a bumbling Italian immigrant, and cousin to the confused and ridiculous “papolitano” found in both Moreira and in José Hernandez’s gaucho classic, the epic Martin Fierro (). Immigrants seized and transformed this negative stereotype. They began to costume themselves as cocoliches beginning sometime in the late th century, turning an insult used to ridicule them and their ignorance of “native” customs into one of the most beloved national carnival figures—to some, the “heroe de la jornada” (hero of the day) by the turn of the century (La Prensa  March :). By the early th century, carnival cocoliches were clowns. Above all, their role was to enliven the performances of the groups they accompanied. Al- though many unaffiliated individuals dressed as cocoliches, they appeared most reliably as mascots to centros criollos. Most every centro had its cocoliche, a prestigious and central position by , when presidents or leaders often played that role for their group. Los Perdidos de la Pampa was presided over by E. Mallerup, their cocoliche; Rezagos de la Pampa by leader/cocoliche Socrates Figoli. Reporting on the  procession, La Prensa frequently mentioned the excellent cocoliches horsing around with their centros. In the group El Chañar, the performers were “all very congratulated, especially the cocoliche”; with Descendientes del Ombú de la Pampa (Descendents of the Plains Ombú [tree]), “the cocoliche’s interruptions were always applauded” (La Prensa  February :; for cocoliches among the individual masks see La Prensa  February :;  February :; and throughout its carnival coverage). Cocoliches were figures that overstepped, in multiple ways, the closely bounded categories elites yearned to impose on turn-of-the-century social relations. Besides their most obvious burlesques on the sanctity of “nation,” they gleefully troubled gender. Although men played the role of cocoliche, and though the figure was invariably male, the cocoliche’s image was subject to a series of representational feminizations, which the performers—unpardonably!— enjoyed and enhanced for laughs. Unlike their fellow immigrants to rural Argentina, who could claim themselves to be genuine gauchos (as, for example, in Gertchunoff ), immigrants in Buenos Aires were represented as new to the urban environment, torn from the fortifying “strenuous life” in the country-

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side (regardless of their actual pre-migration occupations), and therefore particularly vulnerable to the neurasthenic claustrophobia of the industrializing city (Bederman ). Cocoliche, a bumbling hick dazzled by his new surroundings, reproduced precisely this country-to-city migration narrative. When carnival performers embraced this feminized persona, and even wilfully emasculated themselves by playing the fool, they cast aspersions on the virility of the symbol they burlesqued (the gaucho) as well as its referent (the Argentine patria itself ). Cocoliche’s version of the Argentine national symbol was a drag version, blas- phemously perverted. Yet just as blasphemy is ultimately faithful to the sacred, the cocoliche’s drag preserved the importance of gender as a structuring social category, even as it scattered its boundaries. Cocoliche y su familia (Cocoliche and his family, an independent costumed group judged worthy of special mention in La Prensa), for example, consisted of “a creolized napolitano and four gauchitos (little gauchos),” reversing the conventional narrative of seniority: in this version, the immigrant fathered (on his own, and so also gave birth to) the native. Another mismatched kin group, a cyborg medley of clown, cocoliche, and burrito (little ass) who “form[ed] a whole family, according to them” (La Prensa  February :), demonstrated again cocoliches’ pleasure in absurd, alternative family arrangements. Cocoliche embodied a sexually licentious, ambi-gendered mother-father figure with proliferating progeny, taking over the nation through uncontrollable reproduction. Undermining the bourgeois family structure with these images of sexual and gender dysphoria, cocoliches burlesqued the gaucho’s relentless masculinity. Nineteenth-century criollismo invariably represented the gaucho as male, identifying him with such icons of masculinity as weapons and horses. He would as soon go without his knife or his horse as without trousers, some said, or without legs. Gauchesque literature reinforced the contrast between the virile plains gaucho and the feminized citified foreigner by using feminine articles to refer to other countries, and feminized foreign characters. Martin Fierro, for example, meets and defeats an effete “papolitano” in literary criollismo’s proto- typical gaucho-immigrant encounter (Ludmer ). As a body of work, literary criollismo repeatedly portrayed confrontations between gauchos and immigrants, rehearsing the fundamental incompatibility of emasculated foreigners and virile natives. It helped popularize the “common sense” of this incompatibility, constituting rhetorical bedrock for the restrictionist, misogynist nationalism emerging in this period. Because literary criollismo was not limited to elites, but was a mass-consumed genre, its discursive production was invalu- able in generating the popular, right-wing nationalism that has characterized th-century Argentine politics. Carnival criollismo operated along similar lines, its popular cultural fora providing a site for ideological negotiations by non-elites. When they performed their feminized copy of a copy of a gaucho, cocoliches worked to neutralize the gaucho’s gender-based marginalization of immigrants from Argentina’s imagined national community. Embracing the contradictions, immigrants playing cocoliche simultaneously neutralized the gaucho’s masculinity, and borrowed his glorious virility for their pleasure, as sexual swagger during carnival and political capital thereafter. If their borrowed swagger returned to reinforce the misogynistic gender conventions at the heart of Argentine nationalism, at least it positioned them within the guarded gates of the nation’s body politic. Not the misled dupes their leftist contempararies saw in their failure to em- brace a class-based identity, these carnival performers’ informed choices deftly negotiated nationalism’s pleasurable seductions and punishing limits. In another sideswipe at bourgeois propriety, including gender conventions, cocoliches disrupted proper speech, offering funny accents and garbled gram- mar for comic value. Italian and Spanish were similar enough in the gendered

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structure of nouns that Italian cocoliches didn’t actually switch gender in language, but cocoliches of other nationalities did, particularly Basques. One joker with an absurdly long name confused male and female gender “as Basques speaking Spanish do,” while another group of Basques tore up the audience with their hilarious accents, presumably including gender misassignment (La Prensa  February :). These figures mixed up categories of difference, swirling together gender, nationality, and sexuality in a corrosive mixture. Clowning around clothed in oversized, colorful rags, distorting “proper” Span- ish with ludicrous accents and incorrect gender assignments, cocoliches disrupted their centros’ “authentic” criollo performances. In the irreverent jester figure of the carnival cocoliche, elite hierarchies met the absurd, bowing in willing, temporary submission to the pleasure of the joke. La Prensa enjoyed cocoliches, as did the high-society audience that crowded the paper’s Great Hall, but they invented explanations for their pleasure that gave wide berth to the adversarial political arguments in cocoliches’ performances. The paper doggedly worked to fit cocoliches into the elite vision of easily integrated immigration. One article described them as obedi- ently assimilating mixtures of foreigner and native, “absorbed” without protest into the national body: “[The cocoliche] dates from the time when immigration took flight in our country. Half countryman, half foreigner, he has the odd ability to resemble neither” (La Prensa  February :). Excluding the cocoliche from both “foreigner” and “countryman,” La Prensa rallied to protect the integrity of these categories. Its efforts and suc- cesses existed alongside the cocoliche’s elision of clean categories of social difference. Contrary to the paper’s protestations, the cocoliche was not outside either category, but insistently inside both—both immigrant and native, both male and female, both senile and infantile, both same and Other, both marginal and entirely central. If the gaucho was indeed an “ideological weapon” for Argentina’s modernizing elite, the weapon slipped from elite hands when immigrants transformed the gaucho into the cocoliche. The potentially bloody result of this slip represents the cocoliche’s potential—perhaps still largely unrealized—to provide alternative visions of the mutability of identity and the possibility of change. Immigrant gauchos’ arguments with restrictionist nationalism could be particularly explicit when they were conceived by members of the significant immigrant Left. A striking example of a political argument packaged as carnival performance was the long duo sung by two Italian-surnamed gauchos, Mssrs. Figoli and Sprudieri of Rezagos de la Pampa (Laggards of the Plains). Figoli and Sprudieri sang of the class-based connection they saw uniting the pariahs of the pampa (gauchos) with their urban counterparts, the immigrant working poor. Their clever tactical choice was to package their radicalism as praise of La Prensa. One of the characteristics uniting humble people everywhere, they sang, was their love for that newspaper. They also praised La Prensa for per- suading foreigners to act on behalf of Argentina’s national interests; the paper “entusiasta el italiano, exhortó al patriotismo” (inspired the Italian, exhorting [Argentine] patriotism), marshalling as valiant soldiers those “gringos tan queridos/se portaron lindamente” (beloved gringos/[who] behaved so beauti- fully) as soldiers in Argentina’s army. It compelled Argentine patriotism from Spanish immigrants by uniting the souls of the nations of Spain and Argentina, “madre e hija” (mother and daughter) through the diplomatic tact of its edito- rials on foreign policy (La Prensa  February :). Appealing to La Prensa’s ample vanity, Figoli and Sprudieri cajoled their audience into enjoying praise of foreigners’ important contributions to the formation and defense of the Argentine nation. The implications of the text they snuck into the

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. Cocoliche, . The cocoliche was a figure developed by Argentine restrictionists to mock immigrants’ appropriations of the gauchesque. (Photo from Spini and Vaggi :)

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Great Hall upset the derogatory implication of the term “gringo,” intervened in the nationalist discourse that distanced immigrants by labeling them unpa- triotic latecomers, and postulated a radical socialist or trade unionist class solidarity between urban and rural oppressed.

Competitive Whiteness Figoli and Sprudieri were unusual. The implications of the comparison between immigrants and the working poor in the city and dispossessed plains inhabitants were terrifying for most urban residents. Living in the shadow of the gauchos’ and indigenous people’s recent genocidal treatment at the hands of the modernizing state, most immigrants understandably seized the discursive space available to distance themselves from these violently dispossessed groups. This distance became ever more critical as immigrants’ racial status was increasingly thrown into question in tandem with the rising tide of restrictionism. Sarmiento, Alberdi, and the “generation of the ’s” had hoped to follow the U.S. down its (imagined) Anglo-Saxon path to prosperous modernity. Great was their disappointment that Argentina attracted mostly Mediterra- nean, Southern, and Eastern Europeans:  percent of Argentina’s immigrants were natives of either Italy or Spain (Prieto :–). The porteño elite considered Spaniards evolutionarily degenerate, sometimes citing the ravages of the inquisition, sometimes blaming their supposed intermarriage with, al- ternately, Native Americans, Jews, Arabs, and Africans (Helg :). By the s, when mistrust of unruly new immigrants began to replace resentment against representatives of the former colonial master, the racial hierarchy shifted to condemn Italians even more than Spaniards (Moya ). Author and politician Miguel Cané (who in  proposed a law for the expulsion of foreigners) called Italians “more savage than the savages of the plains,” invoking the well-worn association of Indians and barbarism to defame “uncivi- lized” new immigrants. With the contributions of discriminatory economic conditions, by the s Italians were associated with racial degeneration and poverty and were widely vilified (Cané in Devoto :–). Immigrants answered this restrictionism, articulated in the language of race, by positioning themselves well within the parameters of criollismo’s hybrid whiteness. Centros criollos’ and individual celebrants’ embracing of the gaucho already contained much of this ideological negotiation, a self-positioning further enhanced by the roles their carnival performances assigned to the nation’s primary racial Others, indigenous- and Afro-Argentines (Viñas ; Ludmer ). If the gaucho lifestyle had to disappear—according to the logic of bourgeois capitalism—individual gauchos (if they cooperated) could assimilate into modern Argentine society, or live on through their children. Not so for indigenous- and Afro-Argentines. Criollismo reflected, and provided the ideological rationale for, their violent marginalization. By  military campaigns in the interior had completed an unusually thorough (for Latin America) genocide of Argentina’s indigenous population, leaving only decimated and demoralized groups far distant from Buenos Aires who could no longer threaten the modernizing project of working the land for profit. Argentine descendents of African slaves underwent a subtler “disappearance” over the course of the th century, chronicled in municipal censuses: from  percent in , Afro-Argentines fell to less than  percent of the  population. This decrease was not simply a result of the hardships of extreme poverty, heavy recruitment for military service, sexual imbalance left over from urban-rural labor patterns during slavery, and assimilation, as many writers have claimed (Goldberg ; Natale ; Rodriguez Molas , ; Guzmán ; Ortiz Oderigo ; Villanueva ). It is also a sign of

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the heavy ideological investment in “whiteness” which fostered redefinitions of the categories of race (Andrews :,  [table .]). By the end of the th century Euro-Argentines had a great psychological stake in the supposed absence of racially marked bodies. Realizing that the Argentine people would not be the Anglo-Saxon ideal the mid-century elite had hoped, their turn-of- the-century counterparts salvaged a new concept—whiteness—obscuring their disappointment with smug insistence on the superiority of the new Argentine mixture. The  Census exulted: “The question of race, so important in the U.S., does not exist in Argentina, where the population will soon be com- pletely unified into a new and handsome white race [...]” (in Natale :, n. ). Here was explicit recognition of the newness of whiteness as a racial category, a rare degree of ideological self-consciousness, even if the active process of construction was less visible. With a gleeful audience of bourgeois porteños framing their efforts, immigrants worked to include their cohorts in the momentous new category. Through parody and ridicule of indigenous and Afro-Argentines, their carnival performances highlighted the perimeters of whiteness, making visible that which the state had already disappeared. Their performances, framed by enthusiastic audience encouragement, constitute the popular, performative arm of Argentina’s th-century genocidal policies. In concert with this elite framing, they rewrote national memory, obscuring, marginalizing, and further ste- reotyping those communities previously identified with those performative practices. The process of this construction is unusually visible in immigrant carnival performances. Centros criollos often featured members dressed as “Indians” alongside their gauchos, a likely pairing of the country’s two ostensibly extinct plains inhabitants. Recall the gaucho Pizarro, who identified himself as Spanish, English, and Argentine all at once: he went marauding with a whole band of “Indians” that carnival night. The  members of Los Despreciados (the Scorned) costumed themselves in  in the “peculiar dress of the ancient savage Indi- ans,” feathered and with the other “necessary elements for their life of struggle and the customs of the desert” (La Prensa  February :). Their mismatched repertoire (they sang a romantic serenade by an Italian composer) suggests that they were Italian immigrants. What did immigrants intend to communicate with their “Indian” costumes, and how were they interpreted by bourgeois porteños? On the one hand, dressing as Indians allowed otherwise orderly citizens a rationale for violent rowdiness, an outlet for whatever frustrations were pent- up over a well-behaved year. Enrique Puccia claims that revelers thus disguised took their costumes all too seriously, launching into inter-tribal warfare (brawls) upon meeting similarly dressed groups, which prompted police regulation and limited the number of Indian costumes (:). Perhaps police regulation is better explained by the emotions these performances inspired in the municipal authorities and elites, who were uneasy over the shadow of indigenous presence and the excuse for violent disrespect “Indian” costumes allowed. La Prensa’s characterization of Los Despreciados’ costumes as “ancient” suggests that their enjoyment of the group did not spring from its “maintenance” of a cherished national custom, as did their pleasure in carnival gauchos. Rather, La Prensa could enjoy Indian performances when the centro offered images of Indians as exotic, remote creatures. A successful performance underscored the performers’ distance from the characters performed, rather than their commonality, as was the case with the representation of the gaucho. The striking carnival pantomime that began this essay threw the immigrant’s relationship with both gaucho and Indian into sharp relief. Re- member that in that battle staged between gauchos and Indians, the last Indian

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killed the last gaucho, whose son then killed the last Indian. Of the three characters, the son alone survived (La Prensa  February :). One could hardly ask for a more striking representation of indigenous extinction as a basis for the emergence of a new, non-Indian race out of the previous ones’ smoky ashes. Acting out “successful” confrontations with Indians could “smooth over unresolved ambiguities inherent in the attempt to both exoticize and ex- tinguish Native-American culture” (Martin :). For immigrants, these costumes and pantomimes had the added advantage of distance from the group from which elite and bourgeois Argentines were most concerned with distinguishing themselves. Inviting elite audiences to join them in mocking the Indians they caricatured, immigrants addressed restrictionists like Cané, who had accused Italians of being “more savage than the savages of the plains.” Not so, immigrants cajoled with their humorous presentations; in this crucial dichotomy of civilization and barbary, we too are different from indios, and therefore like you. If the racial position immigrants courted during carnival required distancing themselves from Argentina’s indigenous, it involved a more complicated stance towards Afro-Argentines. Carnival in Argentina derived in part from African pageants known as candombes, syncretized with Iberian (and other) traditions (Chasteen a). Nineteenth-century carnival societies were mod- eled after African fraternal organizations, which Afro-Argentines reorganized in Argentina after their forced migrations. Bands in which Afro-Argentines performed the music and dance of their home regions in Africa dominated carnival at least until the s (Binayan Carmona ; Puccia ; Robert :). By the turn of the century, when Euro-Argentines decided that Afri- can elements had disappeared from their population, they also agreed that Af- rican participation in carnival had likewise evaporated, an assumption most historians accept and reproduce. Puccia, for example, claims in his study of carnival that groups integrated by morenos (roughly, Black people) “tended to disappear” at the end of the th century (:). Yet images of blackness, if not identifiable Black people, continued to be omnipresent in the carnivals of the early s. In line with carnival’s introduction into Argentina as a procession of Afri- can regional dances, dance continued to be the primary point of entry for Af- rican elements in the carnivals of the early s. Most popular were candombes, habaneras (dances from, or simply invoking, Havana and Afro-Cu- ban culture), and tangos, which in their “bordello era” (–) were still closely associated with Afro-Argentines (Guy :). These dances were extremely popular during the carnivals I examined, along with dances un- named but described as “lascivious” or “vigorous,” adjectives that clearly dis- tinguished them from the sedate European imports then danced by bourgeois porteños. In addition to dances, groups with names like Negros Orientales (Oriental Blacks, referring to the country’s eastern region), Lucero Africano (Bright African Star, or perhaps African Venus), and El Cimarrón (the Fugi- tive) invoked images of Africans. La Prensa’s sketches of revelers drawn no- ticeably Black, such as a group of Black men in striped suits carrying festive poles in , show that Euro-Argentines still perceived a Black presence at carnival (La Prensa  February ). Whether that presence was in the form of identifiably Afro-Argentine people or more white-identified performers in blackface is enormously difficult to surmise, given the consensus among would-be-modernizers during the period (and historians since) on the supposed disappearance of Afro-Argen- tines, which makes observers more likely to notice and discuss blackface than Black people. Students of carnival have noted the importance of blackface groups in the mid-th century, often made up from the most elite social reg-

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isters (Martin ; Bilbao ). While the social status of turn-of-the-century blackface revelers may not have been so exalted, their presence was still significant. La Prensa’s illustrator etched a European-looking woman in blackface in , carrying a large object (perhaps a basket, or a watermelon); the paper described a group of eight men wearing masks of negros candomberos; a photograph from a pictorial tour of La Boca—the peripheral, poor, immigrant neighborhood—shows a carnival society masked as jet-black “moors” with rings in their noses (see plate ; La Prensa  February ;  March :). Like this Italian mutual aid society captured on film, many invoca- tions of blackness were performances by immigrants—or, at least, inhabitants of immigrant neighborhoods. Los Farristas (the Partiers) were from La Boca; they played an original habanera with lascivious, punny lyrics, which La Prensa pointedly described as being less than correctísimo. Lucero Africano, as well as Perla del Plata (Pearl of the [River] Plate), a group that danced a “moorish” dance, were also from La Boca. “Cocoliche y su familia,” the cocoliche parent with four gauchito children, danced a “malambo,” an African dance or a spoof on a name for one (La Prensa  February : and  February :). These frequent immigrant performances of blackness drew on a -year-old tradition of Euro-Argentine appropriation of African carnival celebrations. The widow of the Afro-Argentine carnival society leader Regalado explained this phenomenon to the popular magazine Caras y Caretas at the beginning of the century in a remarkable statement about the function of blackness during carnival:

—In  before the big [yellow fever] plague the young swells (los mozos bien) began to dress up as Blacks, imitating even our way of speaking [...] and we had no other recourse but to shut ourselves up in our houses, because we were poor and it shamed us [...]. —But weren’t you an organized society who even had a king? —Believe it! My husband the deceased King was the last and that’s why I still maintain the meeting room [...] just as he kept it. [...] We women went in front, dancing, accompanied by the boys and thus we traversed the main streets, dancing candombe [...]. Afterwards, sir, there wasn’t a single gringo left in the city who didn’t dress up as Venguela [probably from Benguela, an African “nation,” generalized here to mean simply African] and dance with morisquetas [unmasked funny faces], which was truly ridiculous. (Binayan Carmona :; Chasteen b)

Regalado’s narrative recalled a moment of carnival when Afro-Argentine performance was so quintessentially carnivalesque that Euro-Argentine celebrants could think of no better way to participate than through imitation. Declawed by the fiction (enforced by violent marginalization) that there would be no embodied Black subjects to contest white dominance, blackness could be invoked for the carnivalesque properties of African dance: sexuality, bodily excess, abandon. Yet pleasure in these connotations of blackness existed alongside continued discomfort, visible particularly in elite efforts to circumscribe vestiges of the African celebration. Bourgeois audiences were far more comfortable with some presentations of Afro-Argentine dances than with others. La Prensa was highly pleased when Juventud Liberal (Liberal Youth), changed from a group of candomberos into a musical group given to great “correctness” in their execution; it noted their transformation and praised them warmly (La Prensa  February :–). All it could say the following night about the defiantly named Somos los que Somos (We Are Who We Are), clowns who performed habanera, was that

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they were “well-received” (La Prensa  February :). An acceptable Af- rican dance was one performed by Perla del Plata. They dressed as montenegrinos (people from Montenegro) and danced with “great precision and elegance” a “moorish dance,” which La Prensa understood to be “from the epoch in which the Republic of Genova, owner [sic] of a great portion of Greece and the coasts of Africa, held this dance in high regard” (La Prensa  February :–). La Prensa’s descriptions reveal elite efforts to circumscribe the public sexuality and overt blackness of Afro-Argentine dance. By the turn of the century Argentina had a long tradition of prohibitions against African dances, dating back to a  ban on “dances where blacks are accustomed to play the drums,” which was expanded to a variety of African-influenced dances in the th century (Chasteen a:; Puccia :). La Prensa’s providing the “moorish” dance with a geneology of imperialism contained it within a Euro- pean framework, managing the threat of Black presence or racial liminality otherwise present. Characterizing Afro-Argentine dance as “precise” or “correct” sanitized its excessive sexuality. Since it is clear in the broader audience’s reception that Somos los que Somos did not simply give a poor performance, La Prensa’s omission of approval shows their discomfort with the group’s chal- lenge, evident in their name, to the bourgeois desire to mold immigrants and misfits (e.g., gauchos, racial Others, indios) into a tidy modern nation, homogenous and unified. Immigrants dancing African dances or putting on blackface, then, were complicated. On the one hand, they absorbed and reinscribed elite assump- tions, as Regalado’s widow complained. Drawing on the sexual and festive connotations of blackness for a titillating respite from the strictures of morality and contemporary gender conventions, they reproduced racist stereotypes. Carnival provided immigrants an opportunity to parody blackness and distance themselves from Afro-Argentines, as from indigenous “savagery.” On the other hand, the meanings of immigrant blackface do not end with racism, as Eric Lott has so cogently argued in his analysis of blackface minstrelsy in the U.S.-blackface performances were invariably ambiguous, producing and simultaneously dissolving “improbably threatening or startlingly sympathetic racial meanings” (:). White working-class performances of blackness were sometimes read as “real” blackness, underlining the precariousness with which th-century whites inhabited whiteness and the proximity of the white and Black working classes (). In Buenos Aires, the mostly working- class immigrants who populated La Boca related to Blacks as neighbors, for many Afro-Argentines also lived in this malaria-infested, flood-threatened, peripheral neighborhood (Andrews ; Natale ). Perhaps carnival blackface provided opportunities for expressions of immigrant Afro-Argentine solidarity, or perhaps the performers identified themselves as Afro-Argentine (exceedingly difficult to glean from the historical record), and intended their performance to express a proud racial identity. La Prensa applied its bourgeois vision of modernization and progress by nar- rating a particular version of the history of carnival and its relationship to Eu- ropean immigrants. Expressing the kind of self-promoting, Whiggish, social Darwinist nostalgia that resigned itself easily to the disappearance of gauchos (or Afro-Argentines, Indians, or anybody else), an article entitled “Carnival: Its Evolution and Perfection,” explained, “that which doesn’t advance, re- treats,” and will disappear (La Prensa  February :). La Prensa’s insistence that carnival represented progressive evolution was itself a means of coercion, aiming to produce the behavior it described. In a telling compli- ment, La Prensa praised the working-class orchestra of the Orfeon Gallego

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. & . Left: “El Patron” (Spanish Choral Society), whose -plus members “have found sufficient ho- (The Boss) with two mogeneity that they will be appreciated” (La Prensa  February :). This cocoliches, ; right: a was a practical program for immigrant assimilation: internalize high cultural children’s group in some values, play down difference. La Prensa found the key to making carnival fit combination of clown and this modernizing trajectory: high culture. Music “awakens a broader sensibil- blackface makeup, . ity in the working class”; it socializes “the modest workingmen who, ani- (Photos from Spini and mated with the desire to possess the noble musical art, sacrifice hours of rest, Vaggi :) after arduous daily tasks.” As an added bonus, in elite eyes, perhaps these tired workingmen would have no energy left for union activism. This “civilizing” of the workingman—in La Prensa’s words, “the musical advancement of all social classes”—had nothing to do with social mobility. It respected social class boundaries, blanketing class conflict with a fiction of cultural sameness and cooperation. La Prensa yearned to make carnival, like everything else, fit the trajectory whose end point was the modern nation, inhabited by the ideal white race. The paper offered various versions of the history of carnival’s evolution, most of which praised immigrant carnival societies for reforming the festival from its earlier grotesque and frivolous character (La Prensa  Feb :;  Feb :;  Feb :). Now, La Prensa glowed, the societies professed “elevated artistic ideals”—“es de felicitarse” (we should congratulate ourselves; La Prensa  Feb :). In a salute to carnival’s “social triumph,” the paper explained:

We salute in the carnival societies the dawn of a new day, precursor of a state of civilization which will in a time not remote be the pride of its members and the [object of] admiration of strangers; we have been pleased to [...] enjoy the conquest attained by the national and foreign population that fertilizes our soil, and that in its role as a promoter of Ar- gentine civilization will experience the ineffable satisfaction of legitimate pride. (La Prensa  February :)

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Identifying the immigrant carnival societies as heirs to Afro-Argentine comparsas (carnival groups) and candomberos, La Prensa happily described immigrants’ Oedipal displacement of Afro-Argentines in the national body. Plea- sure in the extinction of Afro-Argentines at the hands of immigrants is evident in the enthusiastic nostalgia for Blacks’ childish, ingenuous celebration— “what vigorous natures were those [long ago]!” the paper eulogized content- edly in its history of a century of Argentine carnivals (La Prensa  February :). Like the  Census-taker’s smug optimism over Argentina’s “new and handsome white race,” La Prensa gloated over the disappearance of Afro- Argentines at carnival, while blessing immigrants, the supposed instruments of their disappearance. A carnival joke illustrated popular conceptions of the ostensible whitening power of immigrant blood. A lovely negra costumed as a rose at a carnival party declaimed on national character. “These Italians are very capricious,” she explained. “My comadre Carlota has four tanitos (slang for “little Italians”) by one of these gringos [...]” (Puccia :). The rose was not the teller, but the subject of this joke at her expense. The humor in her criollo jargon derived in part from the ridiculous juxtaposition of two seemingly incompatible identities, Black and criollo. The shared joke, along with the children’s identities, work to reassure the reader of Argentina’s steady progress towards whiteness through racial mixture. Her presumably Black friend had little Italian children; her blackness was diffused by the immigrant father, who provided the nation with criollo Italian, and therefore “white,” offspring. Puccia offers the body of the (at least culturally) mulata as a conduit to creolization, to sweeten through sexualization the process of assimilation. In some ways like the little Italian girl-children dressed as Argentina and Italy, a disenfranchised woman served as currency in a transaction between immigrant and bourgeois men (see Taylor ). The Afro-Argentine woman and her Italian partner had a relationship similar to that of the Indian and the gaucho: despite their shared positions at one point, only the latter of each pair could survive in Argentine society, and even then only through their children. The cocoliche was the only one allowed to survive on his own terms—for they were terms ultimately within the ideological and material limits of turn-of-the-century bourgeois modernization. Cocoliche was the ultimate realization of this fusion, as La Prensa made explicit, celebrating cocoliche’s ability to displace his predecessors with a familiar mixture of wishful thinking and gloating. Cocoliche, the paper claimed, “is the symbol of the fusion of the races that are absorbed by national customs, with less fury than that used by the government in absorbing the few pesos the [ fiscal] crisis left in contributors’ pockets’ (La Prensa  February :).

Policing and Its Discontents As is by now abundantly clear, La Prensa’s whitewashing was more than im- partial observation. Its active ideological intervention constituted a discursive component of the policing of carnival, and of immigrant and working-class behavior year-round. In this project, it had material help in the form of the state. In tandem with La Prensa’s struggle to present carnival as evidence of Argentina’s progressive civilization, municipal police worked to contain as- pects of the celebration that hinted otherwise. Carnival was policed through such methods as requiring permits for each course contingent upon courses being lit with electric lights, a requirement that fell heaviest on poor neighborhoods, including La Boca. Brilliantly helmeted, cuirassed police kept order in every street entrance, and at least in , remained in all restaurants and cafes that stayed open all night. Police dictated the routes processions had to

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take, hurrying them along when they dallied in one location, and enforced as best they could the prohibitions against “water games” and throwing rotten vegetables or garbage from rooftops. The persistence of these prohibitions, first issued in , reveals carnival’s uncontainable unruliness, a very different impression than the picture of order and civility conveyed by La Prensa’s coverage (La Prensa  February :;  February :–, ;  February :–; Robert :). La Prensa repeatedly insisted that the festival proceeded in spotless order, despite the audible grumbling, reported on its own pages, of celebrants chaf- ing under too-tight supervision. In , despite a police blotter that included a large number of crimes against property and injuries, and the cryptic com- plaint that the decision to keep policemen all night in restaurants and cafes that stayed open was “an unnecessary police service” that might encourage police to “end up performing a role that doesn’t correspond to them,” La Prensa could rejoice that “the agents of the security guard [...] kept order, which happily has not been interrupted by a single disagreeable note” (La Prensa  February :–;  February :, ). Reporting on several “Police Employees Wounded” in , La Prensa explained that people turned on the police not because they disliked them—since the police “enjoy the very best public opinion”—but because such was the inevitable outcome when third parties intervened in brawls. The editor urged the populace to treat the police better (La Prensa  February :). Even through the screen of La Prensa’s confidence in the police’s reputa- tion, it is clear that celebrants were taking advantage of the violently festive . Candomberos in space to land a couple of solid knocks on the chins of resented authorities. blackface at the turn of the The competing paper La Nación listed a long series of injuries and fights in-     th century. Many invoca- curred during carnival in (La Nación February ). But La Prensa, tions of blackness were per- communicating the violence only between the lines, revealed its writers’ sym- formances by immigrants, or pathies for “legitimate” authority and distaste for the excesses of the working at least, inhabitants of im- classes. Insisting that the biggest day of carnival proceeded with “perfect and migrant neighborhoods. (Photo from Puccia :)

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the most harmonious order,” La Prensa protested too much; as its own reporting shows, carnival was a moment of lawlessness that overflowed the ideological production (La Prensa’s wishful reporting) and material restraints (physical policing) rallied to contain it (La Prensa  February :). If carnival was policed rigorously citywide, it was policed even more so in La Boca. Each year La Boca’s celebrations started early, at : instead of : P.M., and ended by :, much earlier than the rest of the city’s. The timing of La Boca’s course, most likely dictated by the terms of municipal police permits, is similar to La Prensa’s scheduling the youth societies’ performances in their Great Hall first, which they did in order to allow parents to preserve their children’s bedtime. Children and La Boca residents were both subject to the ostensible benevolence of patriarchal discipline. In another example of policing through permit control, in , although La Boca celebrants planned six courses, two were canceled at the last minute; given the maze of bureau- cratic procedure and level of material resources required to secure a permit, one understands why (La Prensa  February :;  February :–). Despite these strictures, carnival in La Boca seems to have been unusually jubilant: La Prensa reported more enthusiasm than in any other part of the city, with a greater degree of participation (La Prensa  February :–;  February :). Over  percent of the population was costumed in La Boca (a high percentage relative to the rest of the city, La Prensa implied), the level of female participation was higher than elsewhere (La Prensa  February :), and, as I suggested above, there also seems to have been a higher degree of Afro-Argentine influence there. Yet La Prensa’s description of La Boca’s carnival as more intense than anywhere else must be taken with a grain of salt, factoring in elite discomfort with the more subversive performances enacted by the neighborhood’s marginal subjects as well as stereotypes conflating the working class, racial difference, and bodily excess. A Bakhtinian view of carnival as a form of folk culture parallel to and in dialogue with high cultural forms would suspect carnival to be more intense in this poor neighborhood (Bakhtin :–; Stallybrass and White :). Yet the concept of a “folk” doesn’t quite capture conditions like those in turn-of-the-century La Boca, where recent immigrants struggling to assimilate (and succeeding) lived alongside the “native” underclass, immigrant “failures,” poor Afro- Argentines, sex workers, and voluntary bohemians. La Boca’s folk were far from monolithic, though bourgeois porteños from wealthier neighborhoods might conflate them all as the “dangerous classes,” and support extra state controls on their carnival play.

The End At the end of the s, when elite cultural production and policing failed to contain the proliferating meanings of criollismo, bourgeois porteños drew on other elements available in nationalist ideology. Dredging up shallowly buried anti-Semitic distaste for the “difference” of Jewish immigrants, and mobilizing fear over the strength of immigrant and Jewish ties to the political opposition, elite cultural production around the  Centennial whipped public sentiment into a nationalist frenzy, catalyzing what amounted to state- sanctioned popular violence against carnivalesque dissent, particularly targeting immigrants and labor activists. Violence against immigrants and workers in the s closed the window of opportunity for public manifestations of dissent, and carnival subsided (Prieto :–). While carnival later in the century may have revived and again offered an arena for oppositional play, it no longer centered on the gaucho or criollismo; as Prieto reports (with a characteristically Argentine vi-

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sion of heavy-handed elite hegemony), “the operation of the intellectual siege laid on the various unruly disobediences of popular criollismo advanced inexo- rably, in the effort to cut the channels of communication that nourished the collective imagination” (:). When carnival folded, Buenos Aires lost the public forum in which immigrant cocoliches staged their political arguments. Cocoliches reveal the political potential of popular cultural forms, but their ultimate effects provide little cause for rejoicing. Despite their slippery disobedience, the arguments cocoliches advanced had been complicit in re- producing the racist, misogynist nationalism that had inspired the parody in the first place (by denigrating immigrants). Cocoliche’s performance simply moved one group—European, and particularly Italian immigrants—from the margins to the core of the nation’s collective self-imagination. It also provided a medium for the transmission of that destructive ideology to the hearts and minds of lower- and working-class Argentines. Perhaps in a different political environment, one with a less heavy-handed state, cocoliche could have real- ized some of the potential in his irreverant national drag. A hypothetical situa- tion, however, renders that potential largely moot. Cocoliche’s gift, instead, is his caution against premature celebration of even as winsome and queer a character as he, who seemed to contain the seeds of his own subversion, but bequeathed a far more ambiguous legacy.

Notes . The author wishes to thank Niria N.G. de Vaggi at the Archivo Vaggi in Buenos Aires and CLAS (NYU’s Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies). . To translate criollismo and criollo as “creolism” or “creole” misleadingly distances the terms from their specific historical context in turn-of-the-century Argentine nationalism, and so throughout the rest of the text, I will leave them untranslated. Readers interested in criollismo would usefully consult Prieto , including his definition of the term on p. . . In using nationalism as Benedict Anderson defines it ([] ), as fealty to the concept of an imagined community, I am sidestepping the definition most widely accepted in Argentina, where nationalism means adherents of the Nationalist party. For a discussion of these competing definitions in an Argentine context, see Devoto and Barbero (). For a classic discussion of N/nationalism in th-century Argentine history, see Romero (); also helpful is Rock (). . Prieto argues that works of written criollismo were consumed by a new kind of reader, born in the second half of the s amid the currents of immigration, literacy campaigns, urban growth, and industrialization, and that they peaked during the same period carnival criollismo did, –. Of the huge volume of written criollismo, much has not survived, especially the fragile hojas sueltas (printed single pages) and folletínes (little booklets). The best collection is preserved in Roberto Lehmann-Nitsche’s “Biblioteca Criolla” in Berlin, indexed in Prieto (:–). For a dozen examples and an extended discussion of the collection, see Latour de Botas (–; –; –). Other well-known works of literatura gauchesca include Florencio Sanchez’s sainetes (short plays), Barranca Abajo, M’Hijo el Dotor, or La Gringa (Sanchez  and ), or (later) Alberto Gertchunoff, Los gauchos judios (Gertchunoff [] ). I am barely touching on this written criollismo, much of which was produced and/ or consumed by nonelite audiences, and was therefore a site for the kind of negotiation I find in carnival, all year long. For example, Eduardo Gutierrez’s novels (particularly Juan Moreira), adapted to the circus theatre by Gutierrez and actor/clown José Podestá, were enormously popular criollo forms, disdained by many among the bourgeois elite. Elite distaste for popular gauchos is expressed clearly in Ernesto Quesada’s El ‘criollismo’ en la literatura Argentina (Quesada [] ), and is also visible in the well-known exchange between Gutierrez and author-politician Miguel Cané, in which Gutierrez extracted from Cané a promise never to read his popular books, so unsuitable and of- fensive did he know Cané would find them (quoted in Dubatti ). Dubatti shows that Juan Moreira, Martin Fierro, and other gaucho works were read by urban, rural, pro- vincial, foreign, and porteño (from Buenos Aires) readers alike, making it impossible to

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distinguish cleanly between “high” and “popular” gauchesque literature. This is, however, a distinction many observers have tried to maintain. Nicholas Shumway, for example, defines two kinds of gauchesque popular culture: upper-class, which was similar to minstrelsy in its derogatory caricature, and populist. Shumway laments the fact that the populist forms did not set the country’s political tone, which he believes might have led to the development of a more democratic society (Shumway :–). I try to impart a less adulatory view of nonelite gauchismo and its ideological faults, as well as a more complex view of minstrelsy, in this paper. . Domingo F. Sarmiento’s foundational Facundo: Civilizacion y Barbarie (Sarmiento ; in English, Sarmiento ) presented the gaucho as the negative side of what became the quintessentially Argentine dichotomy between civilization and barbary, using the figure of the gaucho to encourage European immigration. On the importance of this dichotomy to Argentine politics, see Svampa (). Later, Sarmiento would change his mind (see Rock :). . Most recent observers place this transition in the last third of the th century, but some have placed it as early as the independence wars in the early part of that century. Peter Winn claims that by the s ranchers had successfully turned gauchos into peons as orderly agricultural production on the estancia displaced the illegal trade in hides (:–). Richard Slatta also believes gauchos had disappeared by the last third of the th century, but reports the findings of the other observers mentioned (:). Adolfo Bioy Casares has commented perceptively that extinction was the gaucho’s most enduring characteristic—like the U.S. cowboy, far longer-lived in myth than in the flesh (in Slatta :–). Rural agricultural workers continued to claim to be gauchos in the period after immigration soared, such as Alberto Gertchunoff’s famous “Gauchos Judíos” (Jewish Gauchos), whom well-intentioned Argentines always recom- mended to me when they heard I was interested in immigrants and gauchos. Immi- grants’ claiming gaucho identity was more a measure of the power the icon offered to “Argentinize” foreigners, than a sign that th-century workers actually lived as precapitalist, extralegal nomads. . An early forum for this romanticization was gauchesque literature and poetry. Bartolomé Hidalgo, considered the first poeta gauchesco, began to write in the s (see Hidalgo ). As early as  the Gazeta de Buenos Aires reported that the former insult, “gaucho,” was by then considered “ilustre y glorioso” (quoted in Ludmer : fn ). John Lynch () resolves the tension between praise and contempt by distinguishing sharply between public and private uses of the icon. Landholders offered the “good” gaucho, he argues, a model of “native” virtue, as coercive propaganda when confronting resistant workers. In private conversations within their class, they continued to sling “gaucho” as an insult, meaning slacker, delinquent. This explanation leaves in place an awkward and untenable public/private distinction; I prefer a focus on the gaucho’s place in an ideology of nationalism and “progress.” . Ludmer () argues that in the parallel appropriations of the gaucho’s body by the military and his voice by high culture, a modernizing elite consolidated its hegemony. Ludmer sees in this one-two punch the ideological work of culture backed up by violence, together working to integrate precapitalist dissenters into an orderly, civilized state. This picture of neat containment ignores, first, agency and contestation on the part of the former gauchos (and is consistent with other Argentine scholars’ overestima- tion of the seamlessness of elite hegemony, an understandable emphasis given the state’s heavy hand there historically). Granted, the modernizing elite may have made it impossible for people to undermine capitalism by living as if the plains and its cattle could not be owned, as gauchos had. Yet even if they were no longer “true” gauchos in the earlier sense, the rural poor still lived their lives, struggling for self-determination and survival as do people anywhere. Their struggles may be documented elsewhere. Sec- ond, Ludmer’s view passes over the value of the gaucho as icon for the urban poor in the post–“true” gaucho period. Success in the suppression of gaucho anticapitalism in the plains made the remembered gaucho a patriotic icon of enormous stature, and a potent ideological tool, to be sure, but like any sharp tool, it could be taken up against its makers. The urban, especially immigrant, poor found much to their advantage in the focus on the gaucho, as this article attempts to show. . The classic discussion of Argentine anti-immigrant sentiment is Halperin Donghi (); another thorough treatment is Solberg (); a comparative study of Argentina and the

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U.S. can be found in Clementi (); for a literary analysis of the construction of the anti-immigrant consensus, see Svampa (); on the earlier, pro-immigration consensus of Sarmiento and Alberdi, see Alberdi ([] ). Statistics on immigration, drawn from the , , and  Censuses, in Sagastizábal (:, –, , ). . Prieto, for example, notes “the preference of numerous foreigners for the Moreira diguise” (:), referring to the eponymous hero of Eduardo Gutierrez’s well- known novel, and related how mid-century Italian immigrants and merchants had given their turn-of-the-century paisanos a headstart; Italian publishers frequently printed criollist popular literature in Italy, illustrated with images of people in European dress and venue. It offered Italians a handle on criollismo before they even arrived on the banks of the Río del Plata (:). . Bertoni’s excellent article relates the astonishingly explicit discussions of the struggle for immigrant hearts and minds in the Argentine legislature in the s: Lawmakers proposed rules mandating the singing of the national anthem and the saluting of the flag, setting a fine of  pesos for resisters; President Roca passed laws regulating the place- ment of the Argentine flag in  (when flown with other flags, for example, it should always be central); in  the Consejo Nacional de Education (National Council on Education) established patriotic celebrations in schools, where children’s batallions were celebrated as a venerable patriotic tradition, even though they had been introduced, based on the French model, as recently as / (Bertoni :–; ; ). . Fernandez finds Spanish mutual aid organizations led by a paternalistic, liberal positivist, homogenous elite, who denigrated the “dead weight” of their poor immigrant brethren and failed to integrate the masses into their membership on a representative scale. He claims that Italian societies were even less successful at integrating lower-class country- men. On the Left’s side, the vibrant class-based movements active around this time (anarchist, socialist, trade unionist, and communist) drew their membership primarily from people who did not participate in the mutual aid organizations or their carnival societies. Leftists in this period often saw nationality as a fictitious category (a bourgeois farce), arguing that the working class had no nationality, a stance visible in La Vanguardia’s anti-carnival, anti-“Italianismo” pieces (La Vanguardia  January :;  January :;  February :, ;  February :;  March :; and  March :–). Jose C. Moya thinks this stance contributed to the weakening of (foreign) national identity and assimilation (Moya :). The lines of division were far from clean, however. Many people inhabited the overlap, such as Figoli and his kin, (performers discussed in the text below), and the anarchist writers Prieto finds drawing on criollismo (Prieto :). . The phenomenon of women “acting out” nation continues forward to the division of Argentina and Uruguay, and the Malvinas War (see Taylor ); for theoretical discussions, see Rubin () and Sedgwick (). . For example, the Italian government’s attempt to intervene in internal Argentine affairs in  caused a national crisis (Bertoni :). . The Orfeon’s choice of a tango, another central Argentine popular cultural icon after the introduction of the Spanish sainete (short play) in , is also a mark of their inte- grationist project, but a more ambiguous one. By  the tango had not entirely left behind its associations with the dangerous lower classes, especially prostitutes and Afro- Argentines (Guy : on sainetes; – on the history of tango). . On immigrant maintenance of original nationality, see, for example, Favero () or Gandolfo (). Immigrants themselves were often ambivalent. Italian immigrants could boast, for example, that Italians assimilated quickly and express pride in Italian participation in the Argentine army, and at the same time complain about the loss of Italian language among Italo-Argentine children, revealing unresolved, tension-filled dual loyalties (A.I.M.I ). . “Papolitano” is a pun about someone from Naples who is faithful to the Pope—in other words, an Italian Catholic immigrant. Scholarship on the cocoliche is not extensive: Ana Cara Walker () offers a rather celebratory analysis of cocoliche in theatre and written criollismo; Maristella Svampa mentions him in passing as a sign of immigrant inva- sion of Buenos Aires and the deformation of the Spanish language, and later, as a hybrid cultural form (Svampa :, ); José Podesta () gives his version of the invention of cocoliche as a character in his traveling circus/theatre (see also Castagnino ).

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. “El chañar” may be a word in Guaraní or another indigenous language, or it may mean “the clued-in,” from chañar, to be up on something, or a derivative of chan, mountain guide. . On another gender-disruptive subculture that probably intersected with the groups of immigrants who performed as cocoliches, see Salessi and O’Connor . . The most famous source for mythical description of the gaucho is Sarmiento (); see also Nichols (:). The castration anxiety is so explicit as to appear absurd to our post-Freudian sensibilities, but this was another time. . In her sophisticated literary analysis of the importance of Martin Fierro to Argentine national definitions, Doris Sommer also contends that Martin Fierro “excludes women and the citified (feminized) men associated with foreigners” (:). . As Josephina Ludmer argues (: I), by changing the sex and gender/genre of foreigners, the Argentine defined himself as male. . The effects of carnivalesque disruptions have received a great deal of academic atten- tion since Bakhtin (). See Stallybrass and White (); Eco (); and Burke (), for a discussion of carnival as “a time of institutionalized disorder, a set of rituals of reversal” containing the rebellions they seem to suggest; and Davis’s disagreement with Burke (). On American carnivals, see Beezley, et al. (); and Kinser for a useful recognition that people at carnivalesque play are actively constructing as well as reflecting the social relations they inhabit (:). I am less concerned with whether carnival itself is liberatory or quiescent, for the question seems much more complicated. Carnival is my focus because in grappling with social categories, carnivalesque play throws into high relief the complex constructions of and negotiations over social relations in the period in question. . I disagree with Nora Mazziotti, who argues that the cocoliche “expressed the process of transculturation, the desire to identify with the new chosen land, the need to imitate one of the models this society offered” (:). This was the role of the gaucho much more than the cocoliche. . On Left movements, see Falcón (:); on the association of Italians and anarchists, see Ostuni (); on radical Jewish immigrants, see Bilsky (). . Recall that “gringos” applied to foreigners during this period, especially Italians. . Jose C. Moya () also charts the replacement of Hispanophobia with Yankeephobia during the U.S.’s intervention in Cuba’s war with Spain, after which Spanish immigration was encouraged. Moya argues that this “Hispanismo” was both a form of elite social control and a source of self-esteem for Spanish masses. . On the periodization of the racial hierarchy, see Armus (); on negative stereotypes of Eastern European Jews, the other immigrant group whose numbers jumped after , see Mosse (:), and Guy (). Statistics on Jewish immigration can be found in Bilsky (:). Exemplary restrictionists include Stach () and Ordoñez (). . David Viñas argues that the “problems” of the gaucho and the indio are the two nuclei around which the Argentine republic established itself—“they are the first ‘desaparecidos’ of this original generative matrix.” According to Viñas, the third nucleus is the Euro- pean immigrant; together these are the three victims of the system after , who oc- cupied the historical role of the slave between  and  (:, ). . This kind of wishful thinking in political rhetoric, fortified by state violence and cultural production, established the fiction of a racism-free Argentina, a fiction that persists to this day. The now-infamous Argentine arrogance evident in this quote reflected relief, exposing the terrified anxiety with which Euro-Argentines witnessed and carried out the destruction and exclusion of their racial others in their construction of whiteness. . Despite reliable evidence on this point, some scholars continue to insist that carnival was solely a European import. Sandra Cazón () exemplifies the historical effacement of Afro-Argentines by assigning carnival a Greek, Roman, and European pagan genealogy. . The rowdiness of the niños bien (elite young men) was notorious in a variety of circum- stances, from this mockery to their enthusiastic participation in the prohibited, vandal- istic juegos de agua (water games; Robert :). . Anti-Semitic and anti-labor violence in this period included that which followed a Russian Jewish anarchist’s assassination of Buenos Aires chief of police Ramón Falcón in  (see Rock :–); attacks during the  Centennial, and the  “Semana Tragica” violence against Jews (see Bilsky ). . La Vanguardia, the socialist paper, also documented an increase in police repression of their public gatherings (La Vanguardia  January :, ;  January ). Argen-

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tine historians tend to portray elite hegemony as far-reaching and fairly seamless, not surprising considering the history of iron-fisted military rulers (see, for example, note , above, on Ludmer ; Svampa :, n. ; Sabato ).

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Buenos Aires Newspapers: La Nación La Prensa La Vanguardia

Micol Seigel is a PhD candidate in the American Studies program at New York Uni- versity. She spent last year as a FLAS and Rockefeller fellow in Brazil researching her dissertation, tentatively entitled, “Beyond Compare,” which follows transnational routes of racial construction, largely in popular culture, between Brazil and the U.S. in the s.

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