Staging Frontiers: The Making of Modern Popular Culture in Argentina and Uruguay. By William Garrett Acree, Jr

At the end of the nineteenth century, among the most popular entertainments in the cities and towns of the Río de la Plata region of South America were “creole dramas” that narrated the exploits of courageous gaucho heroes forced into lives of violent criminality by an oppressive state. In his engaging analysis of this genre, its origins and its impact, William Acree has decisively expanded our understanding of a key moment in the cultural history of Argentina and Uruguay.

Acree is hardly the first scholar to examine the popular culture that emerged around the figure of the gaucho. Adolfo Prieto’s pioneering 1988 study of the chapbook literature of late-nineteenth-century Argentina established the cultural and political significance of what he called criollista discourse. Acree accepts the broad outlines of Prieto’s analysis: by celebrating rural, anti-modern heroes at a moment of rapid modernization, gaucho stories provided recent migrants to the cities with a comforting nostalgia, gave immigrants the means to assimilate into their new nation, and enabled elites to craft a self-serving cultural nationalism. However, by moving the focus from literature to theatre and by adopting a transnational frame, Acree has generated a series of powerful insights and pushed the study of criollismo in productive, new directions.

Acree’s transnational focus emerges even before his consideration of the creole drama. In a brilliant chapter, he explores the impact of “hemispheric travelers,” European and North American performers whose regional tours constructed a circuit that stretched from Rio de Janeiro to Montevideo, Buenos Aires, and a series of smaller towns in both Argentina and Uruguay. Throughout the nineteenth century, actors, opera singers, magicians, and purveyors of the bizarre connected local audiences to global cultural trends. Circus troupes, such as the North American Carlo Brothers, achieved enormous popularity in the region partly by appealing to a longstanding local interest in equestrian displays. In 1884, the Carlo brothers hired a Uruguayan circus family named the Podestás and mounted a pantomime version of Juan Moreira, Eduardo Gutiérrez’s popular true-crime, serial novel. Soon enhanced by written dialogue, Juan Moreira launched a craze; for the next decade, creole dramas on circus stages and, later, in proper theatres, dominated the rapidly expanding world of commercial entertainment. In this way, Acree demonstrates how an explicitly nativist and nationalist genre emerged from a profoundly transnational cultural milieu. Not only was the genre catalyzed by collaboration and cross-fertilization between Europeans, North Americans and locals, but it also developed without any regard for the border that separated Argentina and Uruguay.

National borders were not the only lines crossed by the creole dramas. Throughout the book, Acree attends to the way the plays blurred social divisions. They were enactments of the rural – often incorporating actual horseplay, barbecues, and sheep shearing – staged for urban audiences. They were dramatizations of native culture performed by the children of immigrants, as in the case of the Podestás, of Genoese extraction. They attracted an immigrant audience even though they expressed explicit anti-immigrant sentiments, celebrating gauchos like Moreira, who took revenge after being victimized by an unscrupulous Italian shop owner. Likewise, Acree insists on the genre’s cross-class appeal. Even though many intellectuals attacked the plays for their immorality and vulgarity, both the rich and the poor took pleasure in the performances. Among Acree’s most important interventions is his careful examination of the “creole societies” that emerged as an outgrowth of the theatrical boom. Often led by prominent citizens, such as Elías Regules, the Dean of Montevideo’s School of Medicine, these organizations brought men of all classes together to “play gaucho” by dressing up, riding horses and engaging in rural activities in the heart of the city. These clubs, according to Acree, helped produce an aggressively masculine political culture and a conservative vision of national identity rooted in the idea that the virile, conflictive frontier had produced a distinctive form of ethnicity, a “gaucho race.”

In the final chapter of the book, Acree charts the downfall of the genre. In the early years of the twentieth century, stories of gaucho heroes lost their prominence within a growing menu of entertainment options. The creole dramas had built an enormous audience for theater, which was now drawn to new types of plays, in particular to sainetes, one-act pieces exploring the everyday lives of the urban working class. Nevertheless, even beyond their role in inaugurating national theatrical traditions, the legacy of the creole dramas was profound. Gaucho stories and rural, creole culture would soon reappear, playing prominent roles in all of the new, mass cultural media: film, phonograph records, and radio. As a result, the gaucho and his milieu would continue to exert a powerful pull on national imaginaries.

As part of the University of New Mexico Press’s Diálogos Series, Staging Frontiers is aimed at a broad audience, and Acree’s prose is accessible and lively. Perhaps as a result, though, his engagement with the voluminous historiography on criollismo is not as explicit as specialists might prefer. The book leaves several tantalizing questions unresolved. For example, Acree is no doubt right to treat the creole dramas as a phenomenon of the Río de la Plata, but he might have offered a comparative assessment of the way it influenced politics and national identity formation in Argentina and Uruguay. More important, Acree’s account of the way creole dramas brought people together across class lines is in tension with the interpretation of scholars who have emphasized a distinction between elite and popular forms of criollismo. For these scholars, criollismo was an idiom through which poor and working-class citizens often expressed their own, counterhegemonic visions of the nation. By addressing this interpretation, Acree might have enriched his account of the class resonances of the creole dramas. Nevertheless, Acree has written an innovative and important work of cultural history; it will be a welcome addition to syllabi in both undergraduate and graduate courses.