Detecting Disorder

Keeping order in the city is the oldest of police duties. In the 1820s, the Policía de Buenos Aires adopted the image of a watchful eye as their emblem, placing the symbol on their medallions, badges, and letterhead. This institution “never slept.” Watching the city by day, watching it by night, the police attempted to give the appearance of being the ubiquitous eyes of authority. This chapter focuses on the crisis and subsequent resurrection of this ideal during the first decades of the twentieth century. It traces this history into the 1930s, when the police began using the new technologies—radios and patrol cars—that fundamentally altered methods of perceiving and collecting information on urban life.

Introduction

This introductory chapter begins with the author's account of the origins of the present volume, which can be traced back to her interest in a late nineteenth-century set of concepts, images, and metaphors that grew up around the figure of the modern criminal. It then discusses the population growth in Buenos Aires, which jumped from about 1.5 to 2.5 million in the two decades between the world wars and the corresponding urban expansion. This sets the stage for a description of the book's purpose, namely to explore the many dimensions of porteño life in the early decades of the twentieth century: its vital network of neighborhood associations, its literacy campaigns, its grassroots politics, its many reformist projects, and so forth.

While the City Sleeps

This chapter explores the public opinion strategies adopted by Buenos Aires police in the context of a deep crisis of consensus in the 1920s and 1930s regarding their right to use force. In so doing, it tackles a question transcending this case: how can police forces act as the guardians of a social order they themselves might perceive as unjust, and still earn the respect of those who suffer from its injustice? The answer lies within the process of the symbolic construction of an idealized police officer, one able to remain connected with those he claims to protect. In this case, the connection between the police and the people was woven using fiction, mass media, and other key elements of popular culture.

Pistoleros

This chapter looks at the material evolution of illegal practices in the city of Buenos Aires. This emphasis suggests a hypothesis: that the motor of change can be found in interactions between technological modernization, the expansion of consumer culture, and the rise of a performative dimension of crime. New criminal practices emerged within the context of different local practices and traditions, but their performative quality allowed them to be superficially grouped together and homogenized under a single conceptual mantle. The data indicates that the feeling that violence in public places was on the rise was a perception rooted in reality, although the principal culprits were the new cars rather than the new crime. The rise of “new” crime was closely linked to the transformation of urban transport.

The Places of Disorder

This chapter delves into the construction of a symbolic opposition between Buenos Aires and its suburbs. Like the city's outskirts themselves, the contrast was born of large-scale demographic and urban changes that were reinforced by a diverse body of documents—expert analysis, fictional narratives, mass media articles, and classified reports. Within this corpus, the analysis focuses on one strand of meaning: that which organized the symbolic location of legality and illegality, safety and danger, order and disorder. Unlike other works on the urban imaginary, here technical, artistic, and literary writings will take a backseat to more widely disseminated discourses: police press releases about security in Buenos Aires, and the stories and images that circulated in both the popular and the “serious” press.

Order and the City

This chapter considers accounts of the situation in Buenos Aires in the wake of the 1930 global economic crisis on Buenos Aires. Historians have painted divergent pictures of porteño society and the political and economic turbulence that played out. There are two distinct (and rather disconnected) methods of periodization that yield two very different narratives. The first perspective views 1930 as a year of structural change, the passage between a relatively worry-free decade and one of unprecedented drama and complexity. The second narrative, largely centered in the city of Buenos Aires, works around the notion of an “interwar” period. In this view, the period from 1920 to 1945 is bookended by two major transformations: the rise of the demographic and agro-exportation boom on the one hand, and Peronism on the other.

Languages of Crime

This chapter describes a period in which the most important national media outlets in Argentina began to alter the established language they used to describe crime, a moment when journalists, photographers, and illustrators began to deploy a wider set of resources to represent homicides, robberies, and kidnappings in the Buenos Aires press. The themes and methods of crime stories evolved and incorporated a new protagonist, the pistolero. Reporting popularized this figure to such a degree that it became difficult to separate the social phenomenon of “pistolerismo” from the advancements in the very graphic media that brought him to life: the expansion of their ability to reproduce images, the indulgent heterogeneity of their sources, and their commercial logic. The key to understanding the rise of the pistolero's visibility resides in the affinity between the new languages of mass entertainment and certain criminal practices.