Milonguitas En Buenos Aires (1910-1940): Tango, Ascenso Social Y Tuberculosis

During the first three decades of the 20th century, in the fervor of urban change that transformed Buenos Aires into a metropolis, poetry, cinema, theater, and the lyrics of the tango repeatedly portrayed the path of muchachas de barrio who, by taking to nightlife and the downtown cabarets, placed their stakes on a society where social ascent — limited yet real — was part of the urban experience. For the most part written by men, the lyrics speak of these journeys in a tone of censure, and tuberculosis is cast as a form of punishment for these young women who dared to question their place in the domestic world and the world of the barrio. The tango thus offers its audience not only a highly moralizing account but also paints an image of an illness that seems unique to women although it in fact affected male and female alike

Eugenics In Buenos Aires: Discourses, Practices, And Historiography

Since the early 1990s, a series of studies underscored the overwhelming presence of positive eugenics in modern Argentina. These works emphasized the marginal role which discourse on eugenics took on violent methods for selection. In recent years, this point of view has shifted, emphasizing the conceptual viscosity of eugenics as well as the presence of negative eugenic discourses. This paper discusses these historiographic trends, and also dwells on the narratives that those perspectives articulated in relation to the question of sterilization and regulation of marriage of those who had tuberculosis in Buenos Aires during the first half of the twentieth century. This example stresses the need to examine discourse as well as practices in understanding and making sense of the past