Oscar Chamosa contends that the Argentine folklore movement played a significant role in the configuration of Argentine national identity. In order to show how that configuration was accomplished he delves into the political, ideological, and conceptual currents that converged in its development. His study covers half a century. It begins by addressing the work of the early precursors who undertook the first fieldwork expeditions in the early-twentieth century and gets to the 1950s when the movement reached its full splendor.
Chamosa considers romantic nationalism and criollismo—a literary movement that evolved in the last decades of the nineteenth century and celebrated gaucho life—as the intellectual foundation that, with the mediation of multiple actors during the following years, led to the development of the Argentine folklore movement. Therefore, he analyzes the relationship between all the players that came together in the advancement of the field: the members of the sugar industrial elites of the Argentine northwest who sponsored the collection and classification of materials; the scholars who collected musical and poetic expressions in the rural areas; the public sector that promoted folklore through the organization of festivals, remembrance days, and museums; the artists who recreated such expressions for urban audiences; and the popular media that disseminated them. The author sheds light on the articulation among all of these actors and contextualizes their interrelationship in the country’s social history. Hence, he takes into consideration the transformations in Argentina’s productive and demographic structures brought about by industrialization, and the different migrations—mainly the immigration of a large contingent of Europeans and the settlement of rural workers in the big cities—that brought about the consequent constitution of Argentina as an urban and cosmopolitan society.
The author makes evident the remarkable continuity of the movement in spite of the changes in the national government administrations. The period covered by the book, from 1900 to 1955, saw the Radical Party government in the first decades of the century, the advent of a nationalist regime in the early 1940s, the rise of Perón to office in 1946, and a coup that overthrew him in 1955. Chamosa addresses chronologically both the succeeding stages and the highlights in the movement’s development. He thus focuses on the work and projects of certain people and institutions that converged in the recasting of rural workers’ culture into a symbol of national identity. In one of the chapters he analyzes a foundational project: the National Folklore Survey of 1921 administered by the National Board of Education. The survey was the decade’s most important endeavor in the field. It aimed at collecting vestiges of criollo culture in order to restore a sense of national unity based on this culture as against the perceived threat of the European immigrants. The survey consisted in intensive data-collection of materials classified in four categories: beliefs and customs, narratives and sayings, art, and popular knowledge.
In order to see the threads that constitute the movement, Chamosa follows the trajectory of some of its most prominent figures, those who established the groundwork for much of what was developed at that time and in the years to come. Individuals such as Juan Alfonso Carrizo, Isabel Aretz, and Augusto Raúl Cortazar were influential not only in Argentina but also in other Latin American countries as well. These scholars set the conceptual framework that would characterize certain expressive traditions as “folklore.” The author devotes an individual chapter to the work of Juan Alfonso Carrizo. He examines Carrizo’s relationship with the sugar businessmen who sponsored his work. Chamosa explains how this relationship accounts for Carrizo’s contention that Spanish and Christian traditions survived in the Argentine northwest and how this relationship advanced the industrialists’ idea of the whiteness (non-indigenous status) of sugarcane workers.
Chamosa also addresses the role of artists such as Andrés Chazarreta and Atahualpa Yupanqui, who, inspired by the folklore expressions, developed aesthetics of their own. In the case of these artists, the role of the emergent mass media in the dissemination of expressions with folk roots stands out. A very illuminating chapter is the one that analyzes the national staging of criollo culture. Chamosa shows how the staging of folk musicians in theaters, their participation in the music industry, and very notably their broadcasting in radio stations had a primordial role in the dissemination of expressions that had been constructed as “folklore” by academic scholars. He points to the development of chain broadcasting, particularly to the interconnection of small provincial stations with the leading broadcasters in Buenos Aires, as the means that allowed for a widespread dissemination of folk music all over the country.
This book tackles a very important part of the history of Argentine folklore studies, one that is relevant to the history of Latin American folklore studies altogether. It offers a detailed and nuanced examination of how a movement with a strong influence in diverse spheres such as the media, the entertainment industry, and the educational system had a lasting impact on Argentine culture as a whole.
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[Review length: 825 words • Review posted on June 9, 2011]