Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

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

2012; Duke University Press; Volume: 92; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00182168-1471085

1527-1900

Pablo Vila,

Argentine historical studies

Oscar Chamosa has written a fascinating book about a phenomenon barely touched upon by Argentine historiography: the development of the folklore movement in the country during the first part of the twentieth century. Chamosa offers us a complex and many times paradoxical picture, solidly grounded in documentary evidence (archives, personal interviews, and the like), of estranged fellows working together (for quite different reasons) to promote Argentine folklore among their countrymen. Chamosa aptly shows how the sugar oligarchs of the northwest were the main sponsor of the folklore movement that romanticized criollos (the same mestizo peasants they exploited day after day in their sugar mills) as the epitome of the Argentine soul. An important part of such a sponsorship was the active support the landed aristocracy gave to the most prominent academic folklorists of the period, Juan Alfonso Carrizo, Isabel Aretz, Carlos Vega, and Augusto Cortazar, who were involved in a very ambitious “folklore project.” Paradoxically, Chamosa also demonstrates how many of the folk composers and singers who participated in the landowner-sponsored movement (Atahualpa Yupanqui notable among them) adhered to reformist and revolutionary ideologies and denounced the exploitation to which those mestizo peasants were subjected. To complete the picture, Chamosa shows how “national and provincial governments accompanied the academic folklore project with subsidies and institutional support. On the public side, government agencies and associations promoted folklore through the organization of festivals, remembrance days, and museums . . . . The arts and popular media participated in public folklore by incorporating folk themes in their production” (p. 3).Among the many strengths of Chamosa’s book, one that I understand as crucial is his ability to show the ideological, political, and personal connections between the nationalists of the first part of the century and the folklorist movement of the thirties and forties. According to Chamosa, “the main actors in the folklore movement drew inspiration from nationalist discourse . . . . [A]ccumulating a mass of knowledge about criollo local culture and creating a genre that could be adapted to both education and entertainment, research folklorists and artists established a visual, aural, and choreographic aesthetic language for nationalism” (p. 7).Chamosa’s captivating book opens up new research avenues for a period and a topic that deserve much more academic attention than it has received until now. For instance, in my own research on the topic I found that one of Yupanqui’s first records was not a commercial one made for any of the recording labels of the period but a noncommercial special issue recorded by one of the most important yerba mate producers in order to promote its products. Considering that the yerba mate barons were also important political and economic actors in the first part of the twentieth century, it could be interesting to see if they played a role similar to that of the sugar barons in the advancement of folklore. Chamosa demonstrates quite persuasively that the artistic folk movement’s impetus was not provided solely by support of the internal mestizo immigrants, yet the role of the Left (and in particular the Communist Party) has to be scrutinized as well to fully understand why, in less than ten years, the artistic folk movement flourished as it did in the 1940s and 1950s. We have to remember that at the time, the international Communist movement was actively promoting the different folk traditions of the countries in which it had some kind of influence, the United States included. In the case of Argentina, Atahualpa Yupanqui is the most prominent actor in this endeavor, but there were many other popular musicians involved and, in successive decades, some of the most important composers and singers of the folklore movement were affiliated with the Communist Party (Horacio Guarany, Mercedes Sosa, Armando Tejada Gómez, César Isella, and the like).I highly recommend Chamosa’s book to many different audiences, from the general public to students and specialists. Written in a clear and jargon-free style, the book illuminates an intriguing period of Argentine history that still has repercussions nowadays, considering that Argentina is ruled by the same Peronist party that highly encouraged the development of the folk movement that Chamosa so aptly describes.