Joel Horowitz’s excellent and persuasive book explores four types of civic associations that, they argue, transformed the city of Buenos Aires at the beginning of the twentieth century. Citizens and migrants founded and used these associations to forge identities, support one another, and lobby municipal and national authorities for local and collective improvement. The book draws on a rich and intimate understanding of the Argentinian historiography, and makes careful and well-observed contributions to discussions of populism, state-building, and clientelism.
The four associations to which the author dedicates a chapter each, are football (soccer) clubs, popular libraries, development societies, and popular universities. The latter three are all subjects that receive welcome attention here, putting archival flesh on the bones of institutions that most historians recognize as important but few have studied, contextualized, or connected. That only football clubs translate readily into English (bibliotecas populares, sociedades de fomento, and universidades populares all having locally specific meanings well beyond the literal) indicates something of the uniqueness of these institutions to their historical, social, and cultural contexts, to which Horowitz alludes when talking about the sometimes exceptional nature of Argentine democracy, clientelism, and citizenship. That football clubs come first, and that an image from River Plate magazine adorns the front cover, perhaps reflects the considerable recent historiographical interest in the origins of the popular football culture that created Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) men’s World Cup winners in 1978, 1986, and 2022. The material on football clubs draws extensively on this research, and employs a wealth of original data from club magazines and archives, and the contemporary press, to make detailed and precise arguments about the working of clubs and their links to politics. It provides an excellent account of the way in which football, politics, and barrio identity developed in sharply interconnected ways in the early 1900s, with lasting consequences for all three. In football clubs rapid urban development found an excellent way of harnessing what was thought to be the excess energy of workers and boys, and the fields, cafes, and clubhouses that sprang up around them became a crucial early site of sociability. The regulations for running these clubs, and the symbiotic relationships they developed with politicians and people who wished to be politicians, shaped important popular understandings of the public values and meanings of sport.
The chapter on development societies, for example, is stacked with great examples of the links between politics, economic interests, and citizens’ desires. Real estate development was never far from the surface when decisions were being taken. As Horowitz archly observes, “a politician who helped a development society could be rewarded with loyalty and potentially campaign aid or at least with favorable publicity” (108–9). However, this was not a failsafe mechanism for winning support: “for historians, spotting aspiring politicians is difficult since we can only notice them if they become successful” (109).
Drawing on precious surviving archival sources of attendance registers and curricula, the chapter on universidades populares provides a fascinating account of what potential students wanted from their new educational institutions and how those institutions tried to provide it. Although most of the examples in the book draw on the experiences, actions, and archives of men, the Universidad Popular de Flores Intendente Torcuato de Alvear operated in the evenings in a public school’s buildings, and its student body was overwhelmingly female (132–4). Its governing body was stacked with serving cabinet ministers, economic magnates, and Regina P. de Alvear, the president’s wife. Its stated aim was to provide “useful instruction” to the broad socioeconomic demographic from which the registers show that it drew its students, including those of language study, music, dressmaking, weaving, and typing. The overwhelming majority of these students lived within easy walking distance (as shown by the author in a detailed mapping reconstruction from the attendance data), demonstrating how and why the universidad popular became “very much a barrio institution” (134).
Many influential and charismatic figures slip in and out of the pages of the book, and some of them, such as socialist barrio activist Fernando Ghio, La Boca football administrator Reinaldo Elena, educationalist Remigio Iriondo, and doctor Luis Boffi, are profiled in the second chapter on political capital. Their voices, however, are seldom directly heard in the pages that follow, and their lives outside of the association are seldom seen. Instead, the book places in the foreground the way institutions worked for individuals, rather than the other way around. Drawing effectively on sometimes dry archival remains, the author has made an important contribution to our understanding of a spectacularly transformational period, the consequences of which continue to shape the world today.
