Urban negotiations: Buenos Aires and the articulation of hegemonic discourses in the 1950s and 1960s
Description
In the late 1950s and 1960s, Buenos Aires was the site of social conflict in both material and symbolic terms. After Peron's ouster, different groups carried out their struggle for power by reorganizing the material city, by altering urban practices, and by representing Buenos Aires in particular ways in literature and film. There were new types of buildings and new trends in urban development. Lifestyles were more quickly paced. Writers focused on alienated middle-class protagonists wandering the city streets as did a new generation of filmmakers called the Nueva Ola. In this shifting urban landscape, residual and emergent discourses represented the city in distinct ways Certain sectors tried to reassert classic liberal ideology. In texts about Buenos Aires, authors and filmmakers criticized the alienating nature of contemporary urban life while expressing nostalgia for lost humanist principles. Blaming the supposed deterioration of Buenos Aires on the Peronist administration, oligarchic and middleclass sectors attempted to bolster certain spatial configurations that protected them from the working-classes. A concern for maintaining the public/private divide could be seen in both literature and film as well as the practices of the middle classes, particularly in the construction of high-rise apartment buildings and the increased use of automobiles over public transportation At the same time, new types of magazines and new publishing houses were reworking the patterns of cultural production and consumption and circulating their goods to ever wider sectors of the urban population. Incorporating trends in the business world, the new cultural institutions advocated timely consumerism and equated democracy with consumption. The increasingly prevalent and explicit treatment of sex and sexuality in literature, films, and magazines was the ultimate sign of the breakdown of the traditional notions of the private. While experiencing a backlash in the form of government censorship, the new articulations of the social meaning of the city and urban life were the basis of a new hegemonic formation