| Reviews / Comptes Rendus | Labour/Le Travail, 57

Reviews / Comptes Rendus

Lindsay DuBois, The Politics of the Past in an Argentine Working-Class Neighbourhood (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 2005)

HOW BEST to preserve the memory of the country's recent, painful past has been a main preoccupation of Argentines. In a speech delivered on 24 March 2004 on the occasion of the government's return to the city of Buenos Aires of one of the most infamous detention sites, the Escuela Mecánica de la Armada [ESMA], President Néstor Kirchner stated, "Vengo a a pedir perdón en nombre del Estado" (I come to ask for forgiveness in the name of the state). An estimated 5,000 people were detained in ESMA during the brutal dictatorship that lasted from 1976 to 1983 and the place has now been enshrined as a space of remembrance and of the promotion of human rights. What to remember and how in this symbolic site is a different matter altogether. Memory in Argentina turns out to be a highly contentious issue. Lindsay DuBois's book complicates the issue further by addressing memory from a rather neglected dimension, that of working-class people and their experiences. Relying on an ethnographic study with people in a working-class neighbourhood in Buenos Aires, DuBois's study reveals that memory, when engaged from the bottom up, is characterized by a sense of timing which differs markedly from the periodizations proposed by officials and academics.

Argentina's military dictatorship which ruled from 1976 to 1983 used unprecedented levels of brutality to introduce radical political and socio-economic changes in the country. The regime, which called itself the Process of National Reorganization, did succeed in transforming Argentine society, as DuBois notes, by "ripping apart the social fabric, forcing people to turn inward, to abandon social ties, and seek personal and economic survival in a game with a new set of rules." (85) The presidency of Carlos Saúl Menem (1989–1999), the populist Peronist who replaced Raúl Alfonsín elected in 1983 — whose economic strategy failed to stem the legacy of severe economic crisis the country had been saddled with by the outgoing regime — entrenched a costly neoliberal restructuring. What Menem styled as the "popular market economy" intensified processes of de-industrialization and rising unemployment, and shrank the social state. The outcome has been dramatic changes in the country's social structure and distribution of wealth, with increasing numbers of people sliding precipitously into the ranks of the "new" poor or into indigence. DuBois sets out to explore the lasting impact of the long-standing transformation of Argentina for people who have lived through it in a working-class housing project called José Ingenieros, located in a suburb of Buenos Aires. In the course of doing so, she offers some fascinating insights into the conundrum that has puzzled many: why have so many who have lost so much in these traumatic decades acquiesced so willingly? In her words, "how did a militant Peronist working class become a Peronist working class without work, supporting a neoliberal Peronist presidency"?

José Ingenieros, built in the early 1970s as part of a massive project of housing improvement, has, in fact, a complicated history. Some residents were legally assigned their homes, while others invaded the unfinished buildings in 1973 in an organized toma or occupation and eventually gained legal status to their apartments. Dubois, who lived in the neighbourhood from July 1991 to December 1992, relies on a rich ethnographic study and in-depth interviews with a number of key people to tell a fascinating story of remembering and forgetting. Her study illustrates the everyday and intimate aspects, experiences, and implications of processes which are global in scope. Its most creative dimension are two talleres de la memoria, or history/memory workshops, DuBois helped organize, and from which she draws important insights about identity, politics, and memory in the second half of the book. She uses the approach of popular memory to untangle the complex ways in which people in the neighbourhood relate to the past. The story she unfolds for us illustrates how the past of the dictatorship, as seen from the bottom up by working-class people in Argentina, needs to be anchored in both an older past linked to the organization of the neighbourhood in which so many of them played active parts, and also in the period after 1983. However, her findings also refine the conventional understanding of popular memory as "shared" common-sense history, for what is shared among neighbours is not an agreed-upon memory of the past but one that is disputed in some key dimensions. In her words, "In a rush to give voice to the voiceless, we sometimes imply a kind of coherence which may not be present, and which potentially misrepresents and silences the complexity and contradictions inherent in social memories." (209) Lindsay Dubois's study, then, offers a caution about popular memories taken to be about giving voice to the voiceless, where the subaltern voices have tended to be seen as coherent and consensual.

Not everyone in José Ingenieros, it turns out, remembers the dictatorship as a period of fear of brutality; some even deny that state violence and disappearances marked the lives of their neighbours. Working-class memory, then, is not one seamless, homogeneous whole, but is criss-crossed by tensions and conflict, manifested in what is remembered and what is forgotten. By this, Dubois does not suggest "that there is a group of forgetters and another of rememberers." As she puts it, "for one thing, to remember some things is to forget others." (176) Not only does what neighbours remember, or not, matter, but also how they remember. For many, for example, there is no clear break, no before and after the dictatorship, as there is for government officials and academics. Police abuses continue in Argentina, as elsewhere in Latin America, but now with a new target: the figure of the delinquent has taken the place of that of subversives. José Ingenieros, it turns out, has been targeted by the police as a place of crime and drugs and neighbours are divided on the issue. The dominant discourse has decontextualized crime so that making a connection between crime and the economic crisis is not possible, and what is emphasized instead is crime as an individual moral defect, and this justifies state intervention through police force. Another, very material, institutional continuity with the past is the exercise of state force. The police forces and prisons, Dubois points out, "continued to be staffed by personnel who were present during the dictatorship, and their treatment of prisoners has been similarly brutal." (181) Furthermore, fear, that critical dimension of life under the dictatorship, continues to be present in the lives of the neighours but it means different things to different people: some neighbours are fearful of crime and criminals while fear of police brutality is what others, especially young people, experience and articulate. Efforts to organize the neighbours in José Ingenieros to deal with crime locally have run aground. Similarly, efforts to find solutions to the severe problems of sanitation and health facing the neighbourhood have proved to be difficult. Conflicting experiences and interpretations of the past, politically motivated suspicions and divisions, and generalized distrust of others, are at the root of these difficulties, and lead DuBois to argue: "In addition to a culture of fear ... the recent history of Argentina has engendered a culture of cynicism. Perhaps a cause, but also a result, of such cynicism is the continued adherence to the patronage game — in this case, a Peronist patronage game. If you cannot trust anyone, go with someone who can give you something you need." (201) Here, then, is a powerful answer to the conundrum about why a beaten Peronist working class supported, or at least acquiesced to, the ruthless neoliberal agenda of Peronist Carlos Menem. Dominant discourses about the past which present the organizing of the early 1970s as an unmitigated disaster, and about the present which is meant to have delivered rights and responsibilities to individuals as part and parcel of democratization, have made it nearly impossible for people in José Ingenieros to make positive, collective use of their past. What this study makes painfully visible is that from the vantage point of people who have lived through the powerful transformative project of the past nearly 30 years, to call Argentina a democracy because the right institutions are in place is far from accurate.

One unanswered question that looms large for DuBois is the role of gender in local responses to the reorganization of the nation. In fact, it is only in the last chapter that DuBois reflects on the implications of this very gendered story she has told us, and only in a small paragraph at that. In all fairness, the author herself warns us at the start about this shortcoming of the book. Women, however, made up a good number of the author's informants, and they were the overwhelming majority of both history/memory workshops she organized in the neighbourhood. Furthermore, what is fascinating in her account is that today's dogged attempts to revive older forms of solidarity and organization in José Ingenieros are being spearheaded by women for the most part. Given this, one would want to know, for example, what specific forms women's relations to the Peronist past take, and what are the cultural-political legacies of those memories and experiences of political activism. In addition to the general observations the author makes about why women organize in greater numbers at the level of the community, there are surely more specific claims to be made about women's experience of Peronism, and about the practical-political forms it took. Finally, even the discussion of the ways in which popular memories differ from official accounts would benefit from a gendered lens. After all, the way in which women organize events and dates through what the author calls "family times" is central for her claim about how the sequence of events is organized differently from below. We are left to wonder about the kind of organizing of everyday/experiential time used by men to order events, for example, and about the complexities this adds to the issues of periodization and time as experienced/represented from below. A gender-sensitive lens would have allowed us to see further layers of complexity in the process of popular remembering and forgetting, and would enrich the author's concern with capturing the past-present continuum in people's experiences and representations of long-lasting transformations in Argentina. It is a pity, then, that the looming presence of women merits so little analytical attention in the pages of this otherwise fine book. These observations notwithstanding, the book tells a fascinating story that will be of interest to Latin Americanists, and makes an important and necessary contribution both to the study of contemporary working-class politics, and to the expanding field of memory studies.


Veronica Schild University of Western Ontario

Content in the History Cooperative database is intended for personal, noncommercial use only. You may not reproduce, publish, distribute, transmit, participate in the transfer or sale of, modify, create derivative works from, display, or in any way exploit the History Cooperative database in whole or in part without the written permission of the copyright holder.