When South Americans first laid eyes on British immigrants playing the game that they called football (and residents of the United States came to call soccer), they were, historian David Goldblatt writes, “genuinely bemused.” A Brazilian observer described a scrum of English men hoofing “something that looks like a bull’s bladder” about as “a bunch of maniacs” who seemed to simultaneously be filled with “great satisfaction” and “sorrow when this kind of yellowish bladder enters a rectangle formed by wooden posts.”[1]

Porteños, as Buenos Aires residents are known, initially shared similar impressions. Argentine journalist Juan José de Soiza Reilly recalled his father’s reaction to similar scenes of towheaded British boys knocking a ball around in Buenos Aires: “Crazy people … Crazy English.”

Yet, by the late twentieth century, Diego Maradona— undeniably an international soccer legend—nearly single-handedly defeated the British in one of the most famous games ever at the 1986 World Cup as the Argentine national team steamed toward their second World Cup championship. Argentina’s first World Cup triumph occurred in 1978 when the team hosted and bested a supremely talented Dutch side at Estadio Monumental in Buenos Aires; the despotic military junta running Argentina at the time deployed the tournament and the national team’s victory as a symbol of its steady hand at the helm even as it imprisoned, tortured and murdered thousands of political dissidents. Eventually, Argentina returned to a more democratic path, even if troubled by political scandal and economic depressions. Today Lionel Messi, arguably the world’s greatest football player, continues this tradition as Argentina prepares for this summer’s Copa Mundial in Russia. Obviously the sport has come to occupy a central place in the Argentine identity, and Buenos Aires played a critical role in such developments.

First introduced by British workers in the 1860s, the emergence of football in Argentina in the 1880s provides a useful window and inflection point regarding the longer history of the nation’s capital, Buenos Aires. Soccer’s place in Argentina was secured by larger economic and political forces, namely immigration, a growing international economy, and industrialization; its burgeoning popularity in the late nineteenth century is emblematic of shifts in Buenos Aires’ own economic, political, and social history.

Early Buenos Aires

Founded under orders of the Spanish crown by Pedro de Mendoza in 1536, Buenos Aires would remain a sleepy port town for two centuries. However, due to its location at the mouth of the Rio de la Plata, geography ensured that the city would play a large economic role in the region. By the late sixteenth century, the city had developed an economy based on the trade of contraband, largely with the city of Potosí. As historian Eul-Soo Pang noted in a 1983 review essay for the Journal of Urban History, such “illicit commercial intercourse gave rise to other economic activities in the River Plate region and was still functioning in 1860.” Agricultural products also flowed down from Las Pampas to the city. From “food stuffs to manufactured goods,” by the late 1700s the dependency on contraband as a trading asset expanded; Buenos Aires slowly displaced Lima, Peru as a popular entrepôt in this regard. Chosen as the seat of the viceroy of the Rio de la Plata, which included modern day Argentina, Bolivia, Paraguay, and Uraguay, in 1776, Buenos Aires’s economic and political power only grew. By the 1790s, the port city handled sixty ships annually and had emerged as an important South American trading post.[2]

With the decimation of indigenous groups by disease and colonial conquest, Buenos Aires needed workers. As a result, Colonial Spain introduced slavery to the city beginning in 1587. While many would be sent elsewhere, such as Peru, Chile, and Bolivia, numerous other enslaved people remained in city. When Buenos Aires emerged as the “commercial and political center of the Platine region,” it experienced a “rapid population growth,” notes historian Lyman Johnson. Greater number of bureaucrats, along with an expanded military and naval presence, increased demand for “goods and services” and thereby attracted laborers to the city and lead to an even larger dependence on enslaved people for unskilled labor. Over time Buenos Aires’ enslaved population also competed with European immigrant craftsmen.

During the viceregal period, black and mulatto enslaved people made up roughly one third of the urban population and were deeply integrated into the Buenos Aires economy. “Only at the highest levels of the urban occupational hierarchy were [blacks] and mulattos effectively excluded from full participation in the colonial period,” Johnson argues.[3] Between 1776 and 1810, 1,482 manumissions were recorded by notaries in the city; approximately sixty percent of these had been purchased by the individual freed person or his or her family, thereby creating a substantial free black and mulatto population.

Near the end of the eighteenth century, African descendants of enslaved people occupied a critical place in “the guild system and other levels of corporate identity.” This established in Buenos Aires a racially and ethnically mixed public sphere. “Port cities such as Buenos Aires,” writes historian Erika Edwards, “had a unique milieu in which slaves, free people of color, whites, sailors, artisans, and merchants interacted on a daily basis.”[4]

In a burst of Argentine nationalism, Buenos Aires declared its independence from Spain in 1810. Six years later the provinces followed, and Buenos Aires was named capital of the United Provinces of Rio de la Plata. The British, who had trade interests in the region, soon rushed in to secure their investments; some 55 British mercantile houses operated in Buenos Aires by 1820. The British conducted two unsuccessful invasions of Buenos Aires in 1806 and 1807, but some observers in Britain, in this case the BBC, maintain these failed military adventures sparked an increased sense of nationalism among Argentines, and specifically, porteños.

Regardless the validity of such arguments, Britons maintained an enduring economic force. Still, in the early years of independence foreign commercial interests, though influential, did not yet dominate the Argentine economy. Great numbers of Northern Spanish merchants who had settled in Argentina established strong commercial ties within Latin America and Europe. Indeed, Buenos Aires would eventually be home to “the third largest urban concentration of Spaniards other than Madrid and Barcelona,” notes Anton Rosenthal. Many settled in downtown Buenos Aires.[5]

The British invasion did lead to a loosening of slavery. Many enslaved people had fought valiantly against the British, and so in 1813 the Free Womb Act was passed to grant freedom to children born to enslaved mothers. Later the 1853 Constitution of Argentina abolished slavery, but it was not until 1861 when Buenos Aires formally joined the Confederation that the institution was fully eliminated. Despite rapid economic and demographic growth, the city’s black population shrunk from 15,000 Afro-Argentines out of a population of 63,000 in 1838 to 8,000 out of a total population of 433,000 in 1887.[6]

During the 1820s, the economy diversified and the demand for raw materials due to the spread of industrialization made for a healthy business in exports. In the first half of the nineteenth century, Buenos Aires’ merchant class, many with connections to Northern Spain, wielded political and economic clout. Wholesalers in particular dominated and stood as equals with “high colonial bureaucrats, military officers, and judges.”[7]

However, in the second of half of the century, the rise of the wheat and cattle industries shifted economic dominance to land owners. Under Spanish rule, the economy of Buenos Aires funneled mineral extraction to the Crown; with independence, the city provided grain and meat from the Argentine interior to Europe.[8] One need not shed many tears for the once dominant merchant class, because as historian Susan Soclow points out, “The sons of eighteenth century comerciantes became the estanciero-merchants of the nineteenth century.”[9] In 1862, the Bank of London and River Plate opened in the city; within a year, British merchant houses accounted for over 1/3 of the nearly 74 individual and partnered firms of eight nations working in Buenos Aires.[10] British merchants dominated by deploying the skills they developed as colonial businessmen and officials while also exploiting the nation’s naval power, thereby furthering Anglo roots in Buenos Aires.

British capital helped to shape the city’s standing nationally. The Baring Brothers invested heavily in the Argentine central railway; they funded both the Great Southern and the Central rail lines. As the hub of the two east-west lines, and because no north-south lines were constructed during the 1800s, Buenos Aires secured its status as the commercial and bureaucratic capital of Argentina. In 1880, when Buenos Aires was formally named the capital of Argentina, British influence in the national economy seemed legion. “It almost seems that the English have the preference in everything pertaining to the business and business interests of the country,” the U.S. consul wrote to Washington, “they are in everything, except politics, as intimately as though it were a British colony.”[11]

By 1880, 40,000 Britons lived in Buenos Aires and in addition to capital and trade they brought something else.[12] “[S]occer became an export as typically British as Manchester cloth, railroads, loans from Barings, or the doctrine of free trade,” writes Eduardo Gallendo. “It arrived on the feet of sailors who played by the dikes of Buenos Aires and Montevideo, while Her Majesty’s ships unloaded blankets, boots, and flour, and took on wool, hides, and wheat to make more blankets, boots, and flour on the other side of the world.”

Under the influence of “football evangelist” and Scottish schoolteacher Alexander Watson Hutton, football became ensconced in elite English and Argentine schools all over the city. In the first decade of the twentieth century two of the nation’s leading football clubs opened, River Plate (1901) and Boca Juniors (1905), both established by “immigrants in and around the docks of Buenos Aires,” writes Goldblatt.[13] Sport, like carnival, enabled immigrants to claim a sense of place in the new nation, particularly as the city boomed with a more decentralized version of industrialization consisting of family-run workshops and factories in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.[14]

Having eliminated indigenous peoples and discriminated against its shrinking black population, Argentine leaders and writers advocated for European immigration. “Argentina, like the United States, is a settler-colonial country,” points out historian James Shrader in an email to The Metropole. Argentine leaders wanted to think of themselves as bringing civilization to a benighted land occupied by inferior races “so its pro-immigration policy was meant as a means to populate an imagined empty land and civilize the front, expropriating it from barbarous unproductive peoples.” Historians like Laura Podalsky, Shrader notes, have made compelling arguments that the image of Buenos Aires as the Paris of South America was very much an “ideological project” meant to convey modernity and civilization.

Ultimately, the new arrivals competed with the diminishing Afro-Argentine population for both work and housing. From 1880 to 1914, Argentina absorbed four million European immigrants with roughly 60 percent settling in Buenos Aires. Nearly two million of the four million new arrivals from Europe hailed from Italy. In addition, from 1936 to 1947, one million Argentines migrated to cities as industrialization continued a pace. By 1947, 3 million people lived in the nation’s capital.[15] Unlike many U.S. cities, ethnic enclaves and ghettos never took shape in a systematic way, though mutual aid societies, immigrant associations and similar institutions played a key role in the lives of newly arrived porteños.

Of course, culture in the Argentine capital unfolded in numerous ways besides football, and like sport, other avenues of cultural expression intersected with issues of class and immigration. For example, in 1896 Buenos Aires established a thriving electric street car system. Across Latin America, the streetcar embodied modernity, lent cities a European flavor, and served as an arbiter of respectability. Even dockworkers dressed up when taking the streetcar to work, only to change into “grubby overalls” once arriving at their place of employment. The streetcar, to paraphrase the American poet Walt Whitman, contained multitudes. “The trolley provided a mobile balcony from which passengers could observe changes in urban fashion and street behavior, the array of consumer goods displayed in shop windows, and the increasingly frequent strikes generated by the imposition of industrial work regimens,” writes Rosenthal. For many, the streetcar operated as a “mobile salon,” enabling residents to traverse the city while reading the newspaper and observing daily life. One Buenos Aires magazine suggested that the inability of pedestrians to deal with trolleys paralleled the struggle to adapt to modern times: “[m]etaphorically speaking, being run over and crushed by a streetcar means to be incapable of keeping up with modernity.”

Then again, for all the trappings of modernity, plenty of observers believed the streetcar represented something far from civilized; in Buenos Aires critics labeled the trolleys “cockroaches.” Overcrowded conditions created chaos, leading another magazine to ask, “Why do we travel on the Trolley?” Foreign ownership of the system did not endear the trolley to many residents, either. Based in London, the Anglo-Argentine Tramway Company dominated not only Buenos Aires, but much of Latin America. “The manufacture and control of the new technology by foreign companies established a distance and a dependency which Latin American cities wrestled with for decades,” Rosenthal points out. Indeed, streetcar workers could exploit this ambivalence in labor disputes. They expressed solidarity with other laborers by depicting trolleys as conveyors of “ruthless exploitation and dehumanization.”[16]

While the streetcar gained prominence as a mode of transportation, symbol of modernity, and a site of public gathering, another Buenos Aires tradition faded from public view. Once a “popular unrestrained street celebration during the colonial era” writes historian Kristen McCleary, in the early twentieth century carnival became increasingly commercialized and regulated. If electric streetcars symbolized civilization, to its critics carnival suggested barbarism. After all, Buenos Aires was meant to be the “Paris of South America”; city planners even tried to replicate the wide-open avenues of Haussmann’s French capital. Public officials argued that carnival threatened to “unleash urban disorder” and undermined public hygiene and safety while also interfering with the city’s economy. Between 1880 and 1910, police surveillance and municipal regulation of the event increased markedly.

The celebration of carnival and other religiously affiliated festivals had originally been promoted because Spanish and Portuguese slave owners saw it as a means to acculturate persons of African descent into the society’s dominant mores. While slavery might not have played as large a role in Argentina as compared with Brazil, it clearly exerted a significant influence on Buenos Aires. Even with declining numbers, during the second half of the nineteenth century, Afro-Argentines enjoyed a very vocal public sphere including some 15 weekly newspapers.[17] Religious celebrations more generally “provided a social space in which local African traditions could also be incorporated, resulting in a syncretic mixture of African and Christian rituals,” writes McCleary. Though she notes that periodic repression of Afro-Argentine practices did also occur during the first half of the eighteenth century, the festival routinely featured African cultural expressions. However, as immigration expanded, the black population diminished, and the nation’s desire to depict itself as European deepened, “continental” figures and themes wove themselves into the event, whereas previously it had functioned more as synergetic expression of African and European culture. Over time, the state more generally and systematically repressed African cultural expressions; their diminishing presence in carnival serves as just one example. Such developments worked to erase blackness in the Buenos Aires public sphere.

Much as with football, the influx of European immigrants helped to further this shift. For European newcomers, carnival offered a similar opportunity to immigrants and the rising middle and upper classes—a space in which to make “manifest and [consolidate] their social status.” However, municipal regulations hamstrung public festivities and carnival increasing took place in interior spaces such as theaters and social clubs. The ever-growing commercial nature of the celebrations represented the larger turn toward the consumerist aspects of leisure.[18]

Post-World War II Buenos Aires: From Streetcars and Carnival to the Home

Much as with concerns about carnival, municipal leaders, socialists, and the Catholic Church began to focus on housing articulating concerns about hygiene, morality, and political radicalism. European immigration had contributed to a crisis in housing. In response, the passage of the Irigoyan Law of 1905 enabled the city government to build public housing. These early efforts delivered very modest numbers of single-family homes. The creation of the National Commission of Low Cost Houses (CNCB) in 1915 expanded efforts; the CNCB constructed, both single family homes and multifamily units, the former for sale, the latter for rent. The two most prominent housing forms prior to such reforms, were multi room homes known as casa chorizos and large tenement like structures referred to as conventillos. Through the 1920s and 1930s, these efforts amounted to modest numbers of completed homes and units, just under 1,100 over the course of 30 years, however, during the 1940s housing construction came to be seen not only as a means to create new homes but also as a tool for job creation. The “california style” of single family homes emerged as the favored mode of housing construction.[19]

Following World War II, a greater acceptance of government intervention arose such that when Juan Peron assumed power from 1946 -1955, his populist message managed to channel contradictory political impulses and ideologies. On the one hand, the Peronist government built single families homes that promoted homeownership and conservative Catholic values, which were seen as upholding traditional, gender roles, the nuclear family and the sanctity of marriage. On the other, the Peronist administration also erected worker’s neighborhoods that adhered to the Central European workers’ model “constructed on open pavilions” notes historian Rosa Aboy, with each block inhabited by different families sharing access, hallways, and the outside areas with the idea of emphasizing social equality and interaction between classes. For the former see communities like 1° de Marzo and Juan Peron; for the latter, Las Perales serves as one example.

Modernist architects, many having worked for the Municipal Office of Architecture or having collaborated with Le Corbusier on his urban plan for the city, designed the new communities and housing as part of the administration. In many of the neighborhoods designed according to the European model, residents mostly rented though in 1948 legislation passed that enabled for the purchase of individual units by renters over a 30 year period. Whichever design prevailed, these newer homes featured better infrastructure with running water, sanitation systems, gas connections and hot water in both bathrooms and kitchens; a clear improvement over earlier public housing efforts. “When we moved here it was a palace to us,” noted one resident of Las Perales years later. In total, from 1946-1955, eight new communities arose consisting of over 5,000 new houses.[20]

Post-Peron Argentina

A 1955 military coup would oust Peron, an ironic turn of events considering Peron’s own rise to power had been aided by similar events. He would return to power in the early 1970s before dying in office in 1974, succeeded by a brutal military dictatorship. Some historians have argued that Peron himself had contributed to the authoritarian regime that followed him but so too did internal divisions within Argentina. An expert on Cold War era Argentina, Shrader agrees. Such arguments miss “a fundamental point–rather than being an historical aberration,” he argues. “Peron was very much a continuation of an authoritarian trend that cut across political ideologies and parties, and stretched back to the founding of the country itself in the nineteenth century.  Authoritariranism was not the sole domain of ‘caudillos,’ but also liberal thinkers and statesmen, like Domingo Sarmiento, Juan Alberdi, and Bartolome Mitre.”

If anything, notes Shrader both Peron and the junta sought to divide Argentines into rival camps. The military dictatorship rose to power on the fault line of a society struggling with violence of both right wing paramilitaries and left wing communist guerillas. “If anything, one could look at the ways in which Peronism and the Junta divided the population into Argentines and non-Argentines (the latter seen as traitors because of their political affiliation), but the roots of that go back too,” he asserts.

Argentina would host the 1978 World Cup, a moment in time now seen to be “the apogee of both its power and cruelty,” writes journalist Wright Thompson. The dictatorship tortured and murdered thousands of Argentines. During the June 25, 1978 final, political prisoners could hear fans celebrating the nation’s victory in their cells. Some 30,000 people disappeared – referred to as los desaparecidos—“the disappeared” – during what has become known as “The Dirty War.”

For many Argentines, the ’78 competition provided “a measure of psychic relief to a population that had created the dictatorship with its fear.” However, in the decades that have passed, many Argentines choose to remember the 1986 championship, rather than its 1978 victory. Rumors persist that the junta, with the aid of regime supporter Henry Kissinger, arranged to fix the match with Peru. Peru allowed six goals against Argentina, as the fourth goal hit the back of the net, a bomb exploded at the home of a government official who had been critical of expenditures toward the competition. At a thirtieth anniversary celebration, that also doubled as a memorial to all those who perished under the military junta, held at Estadio Monumental in 2008, “wide swaths of empty seats swallowing groups of people” predominated; only 19 players of the 22 from the 1978 roster attended. For survivors, the 1978 World Cup and every one after, dredges up nothing but pain. “Survivors live in a city of scars,” noted Thompson.

Yet, some historians question Wright’s argument. “While the dictatorship is now in disrepute, human rights isn’t the real reason,”  Shrader suggested.  “1986 is celebrated more because of Maradona.  Pure and simple.” Maradona gave Argentina its “own Pele” and he ascended to popularity “when the country’s democracy was fragile, divisions lingered, and wounds were still very much fresh.”

The 1982 Falkland Islands controversy with Britain helped to bring an end to the junta’s rule. The combination of a failing economy, an ill advised attempt to wrest the Falkand and Marina Islands from Britain, and U.S. pressure for the regime to stand down (after supporting it for years) conspired to pry them from power. A more democratic government followed. While things have not been easy for the South American power or porteños, conditions improved.

Even with political drama and economic instability, Buenos Aires, has always and will always be a dynamic, compelling city. “No matter how soap-opera-like its politics, or exaggerated its inflation, Argentina’s capital never loses its charm,” New York Times travel writer Nell McShane Wulfhart reflected in 2015. Between its ever evolving restaurants and art spaces, “its century-old cafes and gorgeous tree-lined streets”, and “gimmicky yet ineffably cool speakeasies”, the city exudes a chic, cosmopolitan sensibility. When La Albiceleste, or in English, the white and sky blue as the national team is sometimes referred, take to the fields in Russia, porteños will occupy these same restaurants and speakeasies as they dream of the 2018 World Cup ending in joy so that they might spill into the night street and celebrate in one of South America’s greatest cities.

As always, the bibliography provided below is only our cursory attempt to sketch out a reading list for interested readers. Regrettably, it does not include Spanish language histories. We hope that you’ll make your own suggestions in the comments or tweet at us @UrbanHistoryA. The editors would like to extend special thanks to Anton Rosenthal, Daniel Alex Richter, and especially, Kristen McCleary for their help with organizing our May Metropolis of the Month and its bibliography.

Bibliography

—–. Business Imperialism 1840-1930: An Inquiry on British Experience in Latin America. Ed. D.C.M. Platt. (Claredon Press, 1977).

—–. Memories of Buenos Aires: Signs of State Terrorism in Argentina. Ed. Max Page.  (University of Massachusetts Press, 2013).

Rosa Aboy. “’The Right to a Home’: Public Housing in Post-World War II Buenos Aires.” Journal of Urban History 33.3 (March 2007): 495-518.

Jeremy Adelman. Republic of Capital: Buenos Aires and the Legal Transformation of the Atlantic World. (Stanford University Press, 1999).

George Reid Andrew. “Race Versus Class Association: The Afro-Argentines of Buenos Aires, 1850-1900.” Journal of Latin American Studies 11.1 (May 1979): 19-39.

Javier Auyero. Poor People’s Politics: Peronist Survival Networks and the Legacy of Evita. (Duke University Press, 2001).

Adriana Bergero. Intersecting Tango: Cultural Geographies of Buenos Aires, 1900-1930. (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2008).

Jonathan C. Brown. A Socioeconomic History of Argentina, 1776-1860. (Cambridge University Press, 1979).

Lila Caimari. While the City Sleeps: A History of Pistoleros, Policemen and the Crime Beat in Buenos Aires before Perón. (University of California Press, 2016).

Marcela Cerrutti and Alejandro Grimson. “Neoliberal Reforms and Protest in Buenos Aires” in Neoliberalism, Interrupted. Eds. Mark Goodale and Nancy Postero. (Stanford University Press, 2013).

Christine Ehrick. Radio and the Gendered Soundscape: Women and Broadcasting in Argentina and Uruguay, 1930-1950. (Cambridge University Press, 2016).

David William Foster. Buenos Aires: Perspectives on the City and Cultural Production. (University Press of Florida, 1998).

Adrián Gorelik. “A Metropolis in the Pampas: Buenos Aires 1890-1940.” In Cruelty and Utopia: Cities and Landscapes in Latin America. Ed. Jean-Francois Lejeune.  (Princeton Architectural Press, 2006)

Donna Guy. Sex and Danger in Buenos Aires. (University of Nebraska Press, 1990).

Andreas Huyssen, Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory. (Stanford University Press, 2003)

Gabriela Ippolito-O’Donnell. The Right to the City: Popular Contention in Contemporary Buenos Aires. (University of Notre Dame Press, 2011).

Daniel James. Doña Maria’s Story: Life, History, Memory, and Political Identity. (Duke University Press, 2000).

Lyman L. Johnson. “Manumission in Buenos Aires, 1776-1810.” The Hispanic American Historical Review 59.2 (May 1979): 258-279.

Lyman L. Johnson. Workshop of Revolution: Plebian Buenos Aires and the Atlantic World, 1776-1810. (Duke University Press, 2011).

Lyman L. Johnson and Zephyr Frank. “Cities and Wealth in the South Atlantic: Buenos Aires and Rio de Janeiro before 1860.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 48.3 (July 2006): 634-668.

Temma Kaplan. Taking Back the Streets: Women, Youth, and Direct Democracy. (University of California Press, 2004).

Kristen McCleary. “Mass, Popular, and Elite Culture? The Spanish Zarzuela in Buenos Aires, 1890-1900.” Studies in Latin American Popular Culture Vol. 21 (2002): 1-27.

Kristen McCleary. “Papás, malevos, and patotas: ‘Character’izing Masculinity on the Stages and in the Audiences of Buenos Aires, 1880-1920.” In Muy Machos: Modern Argentine Masculinities. Ed. Carolina Rocha (London: Intellect Books), 2013

Kristen McCleary, “Ethnic identity and elite idyll: a comparison of carnival in Buenos Aires, Argentina and Montevideo, Uruguay, 1900-1920.” Social Identities 16.4 (July 2010): 497 – 517.

Jessica Stites More and Daniel Alex Richter. “Immigrant Cosmopolitanism: The Political Culture of Argentine Early Sound Cinema of the 1930s.” In Latin America and Caribbean Studies 9.1 (2014): 65-88.

Jose. C. Moya. Cousins and Strangers: Spanish Immigrants in Buenos Aires, 1850-1930. (University of California Press, 2001).

Laura Podalsky. Specular City: Transforming Culture, Consumption and Space in Buenos Aires, 1955-1973. (Temple University Press, 2004).

Vera Blinn Reber. British Mercantile Houses in Buenos Aires 1810-1880. (Harvard University Press, 1979.

Anton Rosenthal. “The Streetcar in the Urban Imaginary of Latin America.” Journal of Urban History 42.1: 162-179.

Charles Sargent. The Spatial Evolution of Buenos Aires: 1870-1930. (Arizona State University Center for Latin Studies, 1974).

Beatriz Sarlo. “Cultural Landscapes: Buenos Aires from Integration to Fracture.” In Other Cities, Other Worlds: Urban Imaginaries in a Globalizing Age. Ed. Andreas Huyssen. (Duke University Press, 2008).

Jason Scobie. Buenos Aires: From Plaza to Suburb, 1870-1910. (Oxford University Press, 1971).

Susan M. Socolow. The Merchants of Buenos Aires 1778-1810: Family and Commerce. (Cambridge University Press, 1978).

James Scorer. City in Common: Culture and Community in Buenos Aires. (SUNY Press, 2016).

Brigitte Sion. Memorials in Berlin and Buenos Aires: Balancing Memory, Architecture, and Tourism. (Lexington Books, 2015).

Juan Suriano. Paradoxes of Utopia: Anarchist Culture and Politics in Buenos Aires 1890-1910. (AK Press, 2010).

Fiction/Film

Tomás Eloy Martínez. The Tango Singer (Bloomsbury, 2004).

Nine Queens. Director Fabián Bielinsky, 2000.

Featured Image (at top): Buenos Aires, between 1908 and 1919, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress

[1] David Goldblatt, The Ball is Round: A Global History of Football, Riverhead Books, 2006, 126-127.

[2] Eul-Soo Pang, “Buenos Aires and the Argentine Economy in World Perspective, 1776 – 1930,” Journal of Urban History 9.3 (May 1983): 366-67.

[3] Lyman L. Johnson, “Manumission in Buenos Aires, 1776-1810,” The Hispanic American Historical Review 59.2 (May 1979): 259-260.

[4] Erika Edwards, “Urban History, the Slave Trade, and the Atlantic World 1500-1900,” Journal of Urban History 42.2 (2016): 447.

[5] Anton Rosenthal, “Urban Networks, Global Processes, and the Construction of Public Life in Nineteenth Century Buenos Aires,” Journal of Urban History 29.6 (September 2003): 760.

[6] George Reid Andrew, “Race Versus Class Association: The Afro-Argentines of Buenos Aires, 1850-1900,” Journal of Latin American Studies 11.1 (May 1979): 21.

[7] Eul-Soo Pang, “Buenos Aires and the Argentine Economy in World Perspective, 1776 – 1930,” 368.

[8] Rosenthal, “Urban Networks, Global Processes, and the Construction of Public Life in Nineteenth Century Buenos Aires,” 764.

[9] Susan Socolow, The Merchants of Buenos Aires 1778-1810: Family and Commerce, Cambridge University Press, 1978, 177.

[10] Eul-Soo Pang, “Buenos Aires and the Argentine Economy in World Perspective, 1776 – 1930,” 370.

[11] Goldblatt, The Ball is Round, 126; Eul-Soo Pang, Buenos Aires and the Argentine Economy in World Perspective, 1776 – 1930, 370.

[12] Goldblatt, The Ball is Round, 126.

[13] Goldblatt, The Ball is Round, 127, 130.

[14] Rosenthal, “Urban Networks, Global Processes, and the Construction of Public Life in Nineteenth Century Buenos Aires,” 764.

[15] Rosa Aboy, “’The Right to a Home’: Public Housing in Post-World War II Buenos Aires,” Journal of Urban History 33.3 (March 2007): 494-495

[16] Anton Rosenthal, “The Streetcar in the Urban Imaginary of Latin America,” Journal of Urban History 42.1: 162-163, 165, 167, 172.

[17] Reid Andrew, “Race Versus Class Association: The Afro-Argentines of Buenos Aires, 1850-1900,” 22.

[18] Kristin McCleary, “Ethnic identity and elite idyll: a comparison of carnival in Buenos Aires, Argentina and Montevideo, Uruguay, 1900-1920,” Social Identities 16.4 (July 2010): 501-502, 504-506, 513.

[19] Rosa Aboy, “’The Right to a Home’: Public Housing in Post-World War II Buenos Aires,” 497, 499, 500-502.

[20] Rosa Aboy, “’The Right to a Home’: Public Housing in Post-World War II Buenos Aires,” 503-506, 509.