Spectacles of Modernity

Spectacles of Modernity: TransnationalImagination and Local Hegemonies in

Neoliberal Buenos AiresEmanuela Guano

Georgia State University

For the first-time visitor, a walk around Buenos Aires can be a bit like entering aparallel universe. Argentina's capital is located deep within South America, farfrom most major cities11 hours by plane from Chicago, U.S.A., and 14.5 hoursfrom London, England. But it feels much closer. The city's streets are filled withcell phone toting locals decked in the latest U.S. and European fashions. Gleamingskyscrapers tower over grand, Parisian-style boulevards, where sleek, expensivecars cruise through town.

Janice Somerville Chambers, The Rotarian, January 2000

In his short story "El Aleph," the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges narratesthat there is, in Buenos Aires, a basement from where one can "observe all theplaces in the world, viewing them from every angle" (1971:166). The Aleph is,indeed, hidden in Buenos Airesa city where imagining the world means per-ceiving it with the apparent immediacy of one's everyday experience. BuenosAires is a seductive city and it is difficult to resist its cosmopolitan charm. Ifyou walk through the imposing avenidas (avenues), if you linger in the elegantplazas designed a century ago by French architects, or if you sit in an outdoorcafe as you observe the crowds of fashion-conscious passersby, you will betempted to concede this city's "European" reputation. The sight of the corpo-rate skyline, the shopping malls, and the profusion of North American fast-food restaurants might well persuade you that you never left the United States.Yet beware: The transnationalism that pervades the cityscape of Buenos Airesis not politically innocent.

In his study of the social production of space, Lefebvre (1991) suggestedthat the cityscape is simultaneously a locus, a medium, and a tool of hegem-ony. A fine blend of persuasion and coercion is always at work in the organiza-tion of a city's architectural setting. Lefebvre's attention to the "representationof space" alerts us to that dimension of space that is conceptually intrinsic to amode of production and planned to fit the vision and the requirements of theelites. This dominant dimension of space strives to produce and reproduce social

Cultural Anthropology 17(2): 181-209. Copyright 2002, American Anlhropological Association.

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relations by molding what Lefebvre defined as "representational space" and"spatial practice"space as it is respectively perceived and used by its publics.Here I suggest that the new cityscape of Buenos Aires is a locus, a medium,and a tool of the hegemonic attempt to mold porteho citizenship into the cast ofneoliberalism.1 Not an epiphany of the "global homogenization" and the"Americanization" many fear, this reterritorialization of the metropole in Bue-nos Aires is rather the product of very much a local hegemonic imagination onethat utilizes the discourse of "modernization" to legitimize inequality.

Transnational Modernity, Old and NewIn this article I take up Appadurai's (1996) exhortation to explore how lo-

cality is produced along and against global flows. Yet I argue that it is not onlyglobalization's much celebrated flows but also its fixities embedded in variousscales and orders of structures that provide the subject matter for the emer-gence of locality.2 This is why, whenever possible, I refrain from using thecatch-all term globalizationa word that, as Bauman (1998:1) put it, is com-ing dangerously close to "turning into a shibboleth, a magic incantation, apasskey meant to unlock the gates to all present and future mysteries." Follow-ing Hannerz's (1996:6) suggestion, I opt instead for the much humbler termtransnationalism. For one, the more specific scope of transnationalism allowsfor a focused analysis of the circulation of images from the metropole to Bue-nos Aires, as well as within porteno society itself. In addition, the choice oftransnationalism allows me to overcome the relatively narrow temporal framethat is usually set for globalization, thus furnishing an appropriate semantictool for the exploration of historical continuities in the porteno politics of im-porting modernity.

As Orlove et al. (1997) have aptly shown, the political use of metropolitancommodities, images, and styles in Latin America could hardly be branded as aproduct of globalization. Rather, its origin should be traced back to the severalpostcolonial modernization projectsno less capitalist in naturethat pre-ceded the onset of globalization by a hundred years. Just as in much of LatinAmerica, the idea of importing metropolitan modernity in Buenos Aires has itsillustrious antecedent in the reterritorialization of Europe enacted by the eliteof the late 19th and early 20th centuries. "European" Buenos Aires is the his-torical and ideological product of what the porteno ruling class planned as themodernization of Argentina. An economic, political, cultural, racial, and socialproject, this first modernization project (Tulchin 1998) aimed to insert thecountry into the international capitalist market at the turn of the century (Burns1980). What Argentina had to sell on the international market was mostly pro-duce. In return, Argentina offered its yearning for European luxury items,manufactured goods, and technology. The localization of transnational dynam-icsand especially the conspicuous consumption of European cul-tureplayed a pivotal role in legitimizing the elite of Buenos Aires as "mod-ern." Between 1880 and 1910, a porteno bourgeoisie, which was not onlybecoming increasingly rich through its commerce with European countries but

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was also devoted to the cult of things European, called in Italian and French ar-chitects to have their mansions built according to European taste (Scobie 1974:129-132). The result, a Buenos Aires that came to be branded as the "Paris ofLatin America," bore evidence to the adhesion of the urban Argentine elite tothe transnational capitalist market, which was at that time dominated byEurope. At the same time, Buenos Aires' surprisingly European cityscape fa-vored social and spatial practices that were both founded upon, as well as ac-tively producing, the self-representation of affluent portenos as European intaste, culture, and manners. Through its consumption of imported goods andimages, the porteno elite strove to establish itself as a "civilized" enclave sur-rounded by the disenfranchised masses of gauchos, indigena, Afro-Argentines,and immigrant workers (Svampa 1992).

This first modernization project was destined to end with the Great De-pression of 1930. Though dormant throughout the years of Peronism and partof the subsequent military regimes, the trope of transnational modernity cameback with a vengeance at the end of the 20th century.3 In the early 1990s, Presi-dent Carlos Menem's neoliberal government initiated a second modernizationproject to bring Argentina back to the international free marketthis time as asatellite in the orbit of the United States (Tulchin 1998).

Between 1989 and 1999, Menem's neoliberal government locked Argen-tina into an unequal economic and political relationship with the United States.Inspired by the doctrines of conservative Harvard economists, Menem's muchvaunted "modernization" brought about the privatization of public services,the dollarization of the local economy, and the drastic opening of the domesticmarket to foreign, predominantly North American, imports and capitalallmaneuvers that resulted in the post-Fordization of an economy that had neverbeen fully Fordist in the first place. At first welcomed by a population still ail-ing from the 1989 hyperinflation, Argentina's neoliberal turn spelled furthertrouble not just for the lower classes, but also for a middle class that in the1980s had composed about 70 percent of the porteno population (Minujin andKessler 1995:21). A decade of neoliberal reforms rearranged the society ofBuenos Aires into a contour that resembled an asymmetrical hourglass (Gibson1998). At the top of this imaginary hourglass was the tiny and extremelywealthy elite that had not only profited from the privatization spree but hadalso successfully converted to the import business. The bottom of the hour-glass was formed by the increasingly unemployed working class and by thequickly expanding ranks of the poor. As Instituto Nacional de Estadisticas yCensos (INDEC) statistics show, in 1999 about 80 percent of the porteno popu-lation found itself living below the poverty line (i.e., earning less than the1,030 pesos needed to support a family of four).4

The situation of the middle classes was also polarized. Whereas a smallsegment of the upper middle class found its niche in the new service economyat the managerial-professional level, the middle and lower middle classes ofBuenos Aires were sinking into poverty. Under Menem's presidency, thesemiddle classes lost not only many of their traditional sources of white-collar


employment but also the access to public services that had characterized thePeronist welfare state. Yet, the ideological position of the middle and lowermiddle classes vis-a-vis Menem's regime could be best described as ambivalent.

As a historical product of the late-19th- and eariy-20th-century project ofwhitening (thus supposedly "modernizing") the Argentine workforce by fos-tering a massive European immigration (Germani 1964; Rock 1985; Solberg1970), throughout the 20th century much of the porteno middle classes proudlycultivated their ancestral Europeanness. Constructed in racial and culturalterms, this Europeanness posited middle-class portenos as displaced from amore "civilized," more "modern" elsewhere to which they essentially be-longed. With their emphasis on the consumption of imported goods and life-styles, the neoliberal reforms of the 1990s did not simply produce but werefounded upon what was in fact a preexisting narrative of the self and its rela-tion to an elsewhereits exclusion from and desire for a First World to whichmost of the middle classes of Buenos Aires felt an entitlement.

Even though they overtly resented neoliberalism for causing their fallfrom grace, many middle-class portenos were enthralled by Menem's pledgeof bringing Argentina up to First World standards. What they found most ap-pealing was the neoliberal promise of replacing the old protectionism and bu-reaucratic inefficiency of the Peronist state with expanded opportunities for ac-cess to a wealth of imported goods and private services (Phyllis 1998:xvii).5One of the arenas where this discourse of modernization gained currency wasin the redesign of the cityscape of Buenos Aires itself.

The Spatial Politics of Neoliberalism and Its Publics

Canclini recently pointed out how, in cosmopolitan Latin American cul-ture, North American referents have displaced European ones: "What Paris,Madrid, or London signified in another era is today represented for the elitesby New York and for middle-class consumers by Miami or Los Angeles" (2000:211). Buenos Aires is no exception to this trend. Starting in 1989, NorthAmerican fast-food chains proliferated all over the urban territory, while virtu-ally every street corner was forced to accommodate a Blockbuster store. Soonthe first Wal-Mart superstores were built in the outskirts. Yet mass consumptionwas not the only theme running through the neoliberal cityscape. Followingthe pattern noted by Sassen (1991), a new Buenos Aires materialized to cater tothe small upper middle class and, above all, the upper class that were reapingthe fruits of neoliberalism. Gated neighborhoods and country clubs became afrequent sight in the suburbs, whereas in downtown Buenos Aires corporatecapital started disseminating new spatial typologies exemplified by malls and"citadels."6 The urban everyday life of portenos became yet another arena inwhich to imagine, represent, and perceive the influence of the United States onArgentina's neoliberal social, political, and economic course. The "Paris ofSouth America," people in Buenos Aires soon began telling each other, was be-coming a "North American" city. A 1998 editorial in Clarin, the most popularporteno newspaper, warned its readers: The "European" openness of Buenos

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Aires was being superceded by an urban model borrowed from the UnitedStates.7 It is not without discomfort that progressive portenos started talkingabout the Los Angelinization" of Buenos Aires (Sarlo 1994: 14), a neologismby which they referred to the trend toward the spatial segregation that wenthand in hand with social polarization.8 Throughout the 1990s, the soaring pov-erty of the villas miseria (the urban slums) carved increasingly large patternsof social fear and avoidance into the everyday life of better-off portenos. Fol-lowing the process of criminalization of the poor that has been effectively de-scribed by Caldeira (1996), much of the porteno elite and whatever was left ofthe impoverished middle class began to seek sanctuary in a segregated organi-zation of space that offered a "safe" separation between classesone thatguaranteed that the growing population of the slums would not interfere withtheir everyday life. As its "Parisian" centralized unity was becoming increas-ingly challenged, the Buenos Aires of neoiiberaiism was turning into a city ofclusters, enclaves, and citadels. It was becoming a city where a significant partof the everyday practices of the population was increasingly being containedwithin the safe walls of barrios cerrados (gated neighborhoods), shoppingmalls, and country clubsself-sufficient spatial formations that turn their backon their surroundings (Caldeira 1996), shattering the apparent continuity of themodern urban experience.

Yet this increased spatial segregation was not the only quality portenospinpointed as characteristic of the new Buenos Aires. The other striking fea-ture of the city's transformation was a spectacularism tinged with its own lo-cally generated transnational imaginaries. If many portenos perceived the newBuenos Aires as a "Los Angeles" of fortified enclaves with its coercive geogra-phies of surveillance and social fear, they also saw it as a city of spectaculardistinction that could be proudly (or, occasionally, sarcastically) compared to a"Manhattan" of citadels and corporate skyscrapers or a "Miami" whose shop-ping cathedrals cater almost exclusively to the local jet set.

Despite its transnationalspecifically North Americanreferents, thiscityscape would not have been conceivable without the local agency of theporteno upper class. Ong has pointed out that, rather than being merely reac-tive to direct metropolitan influences, representations of modernity in develop-mental states are constituted through different sets of relations between thestate itself, its population, and global capital; and these representations are spe-cifically constructed by "political and social elites who appropriate 'Western'knowledges and re-present them as truth claims about their own countries"(1999:35). As had been true for "Parisian" Buenos Aires, the transnationalimagination that has become a matter of everyday urban experience in the neo-liberal city has been largely promoted by an upper class whose North Ameri-can transnationaiism has a political and financial horizon as well as being astrategy for self-representation.10 The North American "imagineering" (Ruthe-iser 1996) of neoliberal Buenos Aires both arose from and reproduced a repre-sentation of modernization that strove to legitimize the asymmetrical eco-nomic, political, and cultural relationship between Argentina and the United


Statesa relationship that the bourgeoisie had established to its own exclusiveadvantage.

Public Space and Private PlacesThe shift in the spatial organization of Buenos Aires was the concretiza-

tion of a new regime, whereby, as Holston (1989:103) has suggested, the con-trol over urban space functioned as an embodiment of the very same "conceptof the public defined in relation to the private" that shapes citizenship. Simi-larly, Paoli and da Silva Telles (1998:78) have argued that in all of LatinAmerica the neoliberal erosion of social rights tends to take on the form of anattack on the res publica, whereby the disappearance of public space is alignedon the same ideological front as the privatization of public institutions andservices. In the Buenos Aires of the 1990s, not only were more and more of theupscale residential areas becoming enclosed and gated, but even public areassuch as parks, beaches, and historical sites were increasingly privatized: eitherbought by individuals for their personal use or, more often, acquired by corpo-rations that converted them into shopping malls and commercial real estate, theenjoyment of which was limited to specific social groups.

This increasing privatization of public space in Buenos Aires did not gounquestioned. In 1997 Antonio Cartana, the socialist ombudsman of BuenosAires, published La ciudad de todos (Everybody's City), a pamphlet denounc-ing the shoppinizacion of public spaces transforming Buenos Aires into whathe saw as a "captive city" of "citizens turned consumers." Cartana was cer-tainly not alone in his concern. During the late 1990s, residents of Buenos Ai-res City and of the Greater Buenos Aires area often erupted into street proteststo oppose the transformation of a public sitewhether a park, a school, or aclinicinto a Wal-Mart or some other superstore." During the last years ofMenem's presidency, tension about the control of things public rose steadily;and urban space in Buenos Airesa city where fldnerie and street life hadbeen a proudly cultivated passionbecame an apt incarnation of the threat-ened res publica. Controlled by the opposition (i.e., the Radical Party), theBuenos Aires City Government knew this all too well when it advertised its ac-complishments. Periodically, city government propaganda reminded portenosthat, under the lead of the Radical Party, cementified parks had been restoredto public use; luxurious restaurants illegally built by Menem's associates onthe public beach were bulldozed; monuments and sites belonging to the publicpatrimony were victoriously defended against shoppinizacion attempts. Bypublicizing its spatial and urban policies, the Radical Party presented itself asthe paladin of citizens' rightsthe rights of the "public"against the abusesand unfair privileges of the rapacious neoliberal clase emergente (Alvarez etal. 1998:22).

Part of this opposition to the privatization of urban space was due to thesinister resonance that many progressive portenos detected between the spatialpolitics of neoliberalism and Argentina's recent past of military repression.Santiago Colas (1994:127), Oscar Landi (1987:48), and Diana Taylor (1997)

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have all pointed out how the prevalence of the private over the public under thejunta was meant to prevent the mobilization of a collective public opposition.This legacy was never completely dispelled by Menem's "infected" govern-ment, often accused of maintaining shady ties with the former dictators (Isla1999). During the military dictatorship, fear was what coerced Argentines backinto the privacy of their homes in their illusory search for security. Under Me-nem's presidency, however, it was not fear (or not just fear) but rather the at-tractiveness of the newly enclosed spaces that persuaded many portenos towithdraw, at least in part, from the public urban sphere.

Zygmunt Bauman (1994) has argued that the late-capitalist city creates asharp polarization of public and private space as a false alternative for an in-creasingly captive flaneur. As public space becomes the urban jungle of dan-ger, decay, and fear, the flaneur can only resort to private spaces (malls, themeparks, and citadels) to carry out his practice. However, through their Disney-fied landscapes of meaning that seduce, capture, and discipline the gaze, theseurban sanctuaries appropriate the signifying playfulness and the freedom that(supposedly) characterized modern flanerie. The postmodern flaneur, Baumanconcluded, is then at risk of becoming a passive gaper whose practice and ex-perience are controlled from above. It would, of course, be farfetched to cate-gorize the elegant downtown of Buenos Aires as a jungle of fear and decay, norhas modernist flanerie disappeared from the life of middle-class portenos. Andyet, throughout the 1990s, open, centralized, and "Parisian" Buenos Airesfaced an erosion brought about by these new spatial formations. Malls, cita-dels, and theme parks became the sites where the synergy of spectacle and seg-regation the spectacle of a transnational and elitist consumption and a segre-gation that separated these places from the rapidly expanding slumsstrove toinscribe the ideology of neoiiberaiism into the everyday life of portenos.

In what follows I explore three of the most popular loci of "North Ameri-can" Buenos Aires: the Puerto Madero waterfront, the luxurious downtownshopping malls, and the Tren de la Costa tourist railway. My object is to showhow, by implementing the strategies of segregation and spectacularization thatBauman sees as essential of postmodernity, these spatial formations strive toexert a compelling control on how the porteno flaneurs and flaneuses experi-ence the "North American" city. Hence, I argue that Puerto Madero, the malls,and the Tren are not simply stages for the self-congratulatory dramatization bythe upper class of its own economic prowess and its status-building taste fortransnational consumption. In fact, even though they explicitly exclude the"dangerous" lower class, these enclosed spectacles address yet another audi-ence: the middle-class publica somewhat marginal public yet a necessaryone. Drastically affected by neoliberal policies and reforms but still politicallyundecided, the porteno middle and lower middle class form a large socialgroup that has to be persuaded into accepting the dominant ideology.12 Theself-contained spectacles of the neoliberal city cater to these increasingly im-poverished flaneurs and flaneuses with a simulacrum of inclusion. It is for them


that "North American" Buenos Aires strives to provide a strongly controlled,strictly structured, and irresistibly persuasive visual and spatial experience.

Puerto Madero, or Manhattan on the Rio de la Plata

In neoliberal Buenos Aires, the late-capitalist treatment of history feeds asui generis master narrative. Argentine history as told from the neoliberalviewpoint is based on a selective memory where the comings and goings ofmetropolitan capitalismits "European" onset in the 19th century and its"North American" comeback in the 1990sare told as a triumphal projectwhose teleology may have suffered a few setbacks but is nonetheless back onits track to "progress." In a city that has been a palimpsest for dominant narra-tives of modernization, since it entered the sphere of influence of cosmopolitancapitalism in the late 19th century, the ruins of past "Europeanization" at-tempts are currently being recontextualized into representations of the "NorthAmerican" future. Puerto Madero, which portenos promptly dubbed as "theManhattan of Buenos Aires," is an excellent example.

Like other waterfronts in globalizing cities around the world, Puerto Mad-ero underwent the cycle of early capitalist genesis, decay, and subsequenttransformation into a landscape of consumption at the hands of late-capitalistentrepreneurship (Beauregard and Haila 2000). Puerto Madero was originallybuilt in the early-20th century. In the 1920s it was abandoned due to competi-tion from the more advanced Puerto Nuevo and it quickly declined (Keeling1996:92). However, in the early 1990s, Puerto Madero happened to attract theinterest of developers. Someone realized that such cheap land so close todowntown Buenos Aires could be recycled productively and that the faint his-torical aura of the old port could exert some charm. In 1991, the city govern-ment held a National Ideas Contest to elicit feasibility studies for the old port(Keeling 1996:92). By 1992, the first warehouse in Puerto Madero to be re-stored was used in that year's Exhibition of the Americas. The success of theexhibition struck the imagination of investors. In no time the old warehouseswere transformed into offices and lofts, which were sold in even less time forastronomic figures. An irresistible Puerto Madero fever spread to the city'swealthiest companies and businesses and property prices escalated rapidly. In1992 President Menem created the Corporacion Antiguo Puerto Madero SAthat was controlled exclusively by private investors under Menem's jurisdic-tion. Puerto Madero quickly carved a private island in the public urban tissueof "Parisian" Buenos Aires.

What architects found particularly appealing was the peculiar look of thewarehouses. Though built at a time when, under the pressure of European capital,Argentina was developing a moderate level of industrialization, these build-ings strove to hide their industrial purpose behind facades that imitated civicarchitecture (Manteola 1994:52). It is all the more ironic that, a century later,the architects of the new Puerto Madero project opted for the construction ofan "industrial revolution" ambiance that was meant to appeal to the taste of theelite of a post-Fordist society. Yet the reinvention of a sanitized industrial past

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was not the only aestheticized ideology at work in the renewal of Puerto Mad-ero. For the architects who created what they called the Puerto Madero "masterplan" (using the English phrase), the explicit goal was that of producing the il-lusion of geographical travel. Glimpses and views from the metropolitan capi-tals of the late 20th century provided the idea for their blueprints: The archi-tects' sources of inspiration were Paris and especially New York; their stylisticreferent was the modernist Le Corbusier. This is how a participant in thePuerto Madero project, architect Patricia Arturi, described the lifestyle and thespace-time experience that the new Puerto Madero is meant to inspire:

In summer days, when the sunshine hits [Puerto Madero's] old bricks, its inhabi-tants cast their gaze on the water, and those who sit on the shore sip champagne.Then, [Puerto Madero] can, if one sees it through these eyes, look like a timelessparadise on earth. [1994:44-45]

As a "timeless paradise," Puerto Madero is certainly not a place anchoredto its past as the former river port of Buenos Airesa place whose natural ele-ment, even in its heyday, was more likely to be seaweed than French cham-pagne. Instead, the new Puerto Madero, in its metamorphosis into a site ofluxurious northern hemisphere consumption, obliterates the need for temporalnostalgia with the cannibalistic treatment of history that Jameson (1984) de-fined as the logic of late capitalism. As a Puerto Madero architect later ob-served, the only nostalgia in the new waterfront of Buenos Aires is the longingfor a future that is another country (Pasinato 1994:38). Puerto Madero's nostalgiais the nostalgia for New York and for how champagne would taste over there.

The very metaphor of the rebirth of Puerto Madero as it was presented bythe neoliberal propaganda of the time was persuasively seductive. Puerto Mad-ero offers to the senses the miraculous conversion of a once-thriving but long-since abandoned place into a brand-new location of First World modernity. Assupporters of Menem's government were quick to point out, the first attempt atthe revitalization of Puerto Madero, which took place in 1986 under the presi-dency of Alfonsin, had sunk at the hands of an incompetent public manage-ment. What Alfonsin's sluggish state bureaucracy had been unable to accom-plishso went the neoliberal propagandahad been achieved a few yearslater through Menem's privatization policies. Needless to say, Puerto Maderobecame an apt showcase of the neoliberal Argentina that, after so many yearsof political and economic crisis, claimed to be coming back to life, like a phoe-nix, from the ashes of a most promising past. How would porteno flaneusesand flaneurs resist the fascination of Puerto Madero's display of a First Worldaffluence that only few enjoy, but that, as President Menem kept promising,would one day trickle down to the whole population? The sensory proof of thissuccess was, and still is, out there for everybody to look at, walk through,touch, and smell. Who would deny this evidence of a triumphant success?

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Seeing and Being Seen in Puerto Madero

Mitchell (1995) has suggested that the spatial tormations of late capital-ism have a theatrical quality that is meant to mold and control the emergence oftheir publics. If Puerto Madero is a theater, the show it features is certainly oneof conspicuous consumption and extravagant lifestyles. Il is the frivotdad (fri-volity) that, as the Argentine critics of the 1989-99 neoliberal government al-lege, characterized the years of Menem s presidency. The public to whichPuerto Madero caters is, first of all, the clase emergente of those businesspeo-ple who, through their close connections to Menem s government, managed toprofit enormously from the privatization process. They are the owners of theluxurious lofts and the expensive offices in the former warehouses. However,this flashy fardndula (coterie) of politicians and entrepreneurs with their con-stant accompaniment of show-biz stars, top models, and soccer stars is not theonly public to be addressed by, and constituted through, the transnationalimaginary on display in Puerto Madero.

Every weekend, a crowd of fashionably dressed young middle-classportenos can be seen strolling along Puerto Madero's diques (docks). The own-ership of property in Puerto Madero is definitely out of the range of this mar-ginal public. However, whenever they can afford it, these middle-class crowdspatronize Puerto Madero s bars. They may not sip French champagne, but per-haps they dream of doing so as they sample more modest drinks. As they ad-mire the spectacle of transnational modernity surrounding them, they makesure they are seen as a part of it, too. As Wilson (1991:68) observed, it is "only

Figure 1Old and new modernities in Puerto Madero.

T R A N S N A T I O N A L IMAGINATION IN BUENOS AIRES 191

by becoming part of the spectacle (that] you can truly exist in the city." Thevisual performance that grants you existence as a legitimate public in PuertoMadero has a well-defined scriptone that speaks of compliance through con-sumption.

When, during a 1997 focus group on Puerto Madero, I raised the questionof whether frivolity is really a prominent feature of Argentine neoliberalism,Susana, a thirty-year-old woman who works in her parents' travel agency,agreed. But she was also quick to add: "So what? What's wrong with spendingmoney on yourself if you can afford to do it?" Susana was a Puerto Madero afi-cionada. A real fashion victim (at the time of our focus group she was sportingValeria Mazza's long blond hairdo, a tiny Versace miniskirt,13 platform shoes,and black wrap-up shades), Susana used to hang out in Puerto Madero everyweekend. She liked the place, she said, because it is "muy fashion" (verytrendy). She regularly met there with a group of friends, some of whom alsoparticipated in the focus group, for example, Jose, a well-groomed Techint en-gineer in his early thirties, who said he enjoyed Puerto Madero's upscale ambi-ance. In Puerto Madero, Jose boasted, he once got a chance to flirt from afarwith Zulemita, the president's daughter. Ana Maria also participated in the dis-cussion. A former secretary who had been unemployed for a good six months,Ana Maria had just found a job at a leather store. "All I do is stand at the doorand call in customers," she explained. They would not pay her a salary, shesaid, but she earned a commission on each customer she drew into the store."Not exactly a dream job," she conceded "but that's the best you get thesedays." (After the meeting, Ana Maria confessed that she had the uncomfortablefeeling of falling behind her friends' lifestyle.)

On one point Susana and her friends agreed: There are different ways of"seeing and being seen" in Puerto Madero, and having the right looks is a re-quirement for being part of this (somewhat peripheral) crowd. As Susana, Jose,and Ana Maria pointed out, learning what to wear is not too difficult: Fashionmagazines, TV programs, foreign movies, soap operas like Ricos y famosos(The Rich and the Famous), and, especially, the downtown shopping malls of-fer guidance on how to be fashion (the English term has become part of the lo-cal Spanish vocabulary). And for those who find that trendy clothing by itselfdoes not do the trick, imported cosmetics, extreme dieting, and, for thewealthiest, plastic surgery will offer additional help in reproducing the manda-tory alto, rubio, y de ojos azules (tall, blond, and blue-eyed) looks of top mod-els or TV actors.

With their fashion self-performance, Susana, Jose, and Ana Maria at-tempted to participate in an "economy of appearances" of the modernity pro-posed by neoliberalism (Tsing 2000)or better, to dance to its tune. As Hallhas argued, the performativity of identity should not be confused with volition,choice, and intentionality (1996:1314). Performativity should be read "not asthe act by which a subject brings into being what she/he names but rather asthat reiterative power of discourse to produce the phenomena that it regulatesand constrains" (Butler cited in Hall 1996:14-15). The modernity that many

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middle-class Puerto Madero aficionados "choose" to consume and perform asconstitutive of their identity is made available to them through a landscape ofmeanings that is ordered and organized from above (Hebdige 1979:14-15). Itis a hegemonic modernity that inscribes itself into the desires and the self-representations of a fairly docile public, one whose experiential horizons anddesires comply with the dominant discourse on consumption as the tool for so-cial inclusion and participation.

The Shopping Malls or the Modernity of the Market

Consumption in the Buenos Aires of neoiiberaiism is a matter of identi-ties. Consumption is what brings about the emergence of these urban publicsand provides them with a sense of belonging together that materializes throughshared tastes and lifestyles (Comaroff and Comaroff 2000).l4 The desire for in-clusion in these circles of consumption both feeds and is fed by, consent toneoliberal ideology. The prime mover of this transformation of citizens intoconsumers is the mercado libre (the free market)the transnational, yet essen-tially Occidental entity that neoiiberaiism injects into everyday experience(Carrier 1997). In Buenos Aires, the most sensual and charming incarnation ofthe free market is the flood of imported commodities that have swamped Ar-gentina since the early 1990s, parading ever since their promise of a "new" and"modern" nation in the local shopping mallsthose places where importedluxuries are displayed for everybody to look at, if not to purchase.

Called shoppings in local parlanceno castellano word seemed appropri-ate for such foreign entitiesthe shopping malls of Buenos Aires are a brand-new element in the local cityscape. In fact, the first shopping was built in Bue-nos Aires to reap the fruits of the ley de convertibilidad issued by the neolib-eral government in 1991: the controversial law of convertibility whereby theArgentine peso was pegged to the U.S. dollar. This convertibility fostered apolitics of importation that made a wealth of highly desirable First World, andespecially North American, goods available in Buenos Aires. For a middleclass that had become quickly inebriated by the unprecedented economic sta-bility, the early 1990s experienced a shopping binge of technology and luxuryimports. The "hyperconsumption" (Isla et al. 1999) of those years went hand inhand with the proliferation of shoppings in the porteno cityscape.

What struck portenos' imagination about the malls was their novelty asself-enclosed, streamlined, and sanitized structures single-mindedly devoted toconsumption. As such, the malls were obviously at odds with the openness ofthe modern Buenos Aires of the turn of the century. However, in a paradoxicalhomage to the centralized organization of "Parisian" Buenos Aires, the mostupscale among the porteno malls diverged from their North American subur-ban prototype by emerging in or around the city's microcentro (downtown).15In addition, some of these malls were ingeniously carved out of industrialstructures built in the early 20th century, thus reinforcing the narrative of capi-talist continuity and the discourse of urban renewal proposed by the Puerto


Madero corporation. The glitzy Patio Bullrich, for example, utilized a formerslaughterhouse, and the 1998-built Abasto was installed in an old produce market.16

With their North American glamour and their impressive opulence, thedowntown shoppings immediately engaged in an unequal competition with thebusinesses of central porteno streets. Inevitably the stores failed to keep upwith the malls and many of them slid into bankruptcy. Almost simultaneously,the feisty atmosphere of the early 1990s with its binge of consumption and itsdreams of modernization was dampened. The flip side of the neoliberal importpolicy was that many Argentine industries were run out of business, thus caus-ing one of the highest unemployment rates in the recent history of Argentina.17In the years that followed the onset of neoliberalism, the same middle class thathad prematurely celebrated its insertion into the First World of consumptionlost about 40 percent of its income and now found itself struggling to makeends meet (Minujin and Kessler 1995). However, even as shopping became anincreasingly forbidden activity for the local middle class, the malls did not losemomentum. Rather, they continued to be favorite locations of paseo (leisureactivities) for the porteno flaneuses and flaneurs. The shopping craze of theearly nineties gave way to a game of desire and gazes: one where the visual andspatial experience of a vicarious consumption kept stimulating both the desireof the middle class for inclusion in (and its fears of exclusion from) the FirstWorld of modernity that has reterritorialized the cityscape of Buenos Aires.

Museums of Modernity

Harris (1990) observed that, just like museums, malls are places where in-stitutional powers try to influence public knowledge and taste. As repre-sentations of the imaginary First World of modernity and progress that, accord-ing to the neoliberal propaganda, would soon materialize in Argentina, theshopping malls became locations where a dominant representation of spacemolds social practice, thus suggesting dominated ways to envision local identi-ties in their relationship to transnational economic and cultural forces. Severalof my interviewees pointed out that malls are no longer places for shopping,but rather for strolling and looking. The malls of Buenos Aires resemble whatBenjamin described as "museums of the New" (in Buck-Morss 1989): placesto visit with the disposition to learn what is trendy in New York, London, andParis. They are places where one can experiencesee, smell, feelan importedmodernity that is irresistibly pretheoretical and synaesthetic (Appadurai 1996).

Take, for example, Andres and Maria: a porteno couple in their sixties. Heis a first-generation Italian immigrant and an ex-bookkeeper. Maria used to bea high-school teacher. Now they are both retired. After their frequent Sundaystrolls they almost invariably head for coffee and croissants in Alto Palermo,Galena Pacifico, or Patio Bullrich. They never buy anything, but they enjoythe ambiance: the glossy surfaces, the lights, the animation. "Buenos Aires isreally changing," they say. "Finally," they add, "Buenos Aires is becoming amodern city." Beatriz is another example of how many portenos read and usethe downtown malls. An accountant in her late forties who freelances from

r)4 CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY

home after she lost her job (to supplement her freelance income, she also buyswholesale lingerie that she then sells to friends and acquaintances), Beatrizgoes to the mall almost every weekend. She does not buy anything because shecannot afford to, with the possible exception of a hamburger at McDonald's forher son. But she enjoys window shopping: In the mall, she says, she finds outabout the latest trends in fashion and cosmetics. To her, a trip to the mall is likereading one of those fashion magazines replete with European and NorthAmerican designer clothes. But the mall is more fun, Beatriz adds, "becauseyou get to walk right through the displays: You do not just see them, but youget to feel them and even try them on." Like so many others, Andres, Maria,and Beatriz are enticed by the sanitized, glitzy, and above all transnationalquality of the experience the porteno shoppings offer to their visitors. Whetherthey are strolling in the Alto Palermo or the Paseo Alcorta malls in the elegantPalermo neighborhood, the majestic Patio Bullrich in Retiro, or the lavishlyfrescoed Galena Pacifico, the mall environment seems to beam them to a worldapartaway from what they perceive as the sometimes unsettling and threat-ening chaos of an open street increasingly becoming appropriated by the poor.

For porteno malls are not just about spectacle; they are about segregation,too. Their success is inextricably connected to fear of a public space that themiddle classes have come to associate more and more with the "dangerous"lower class. Several of my interviewees pointed out that there are no robberiesand no purse snatchings in the shopping. Others mentioned that they feel com-fortable in the mall because no panhandlers ever make it past the security at thedoor. Neither do the cirujas: the homeless and the slum dwellers who make aliving by carefully dissecting and searching trash bags for anything that can beeaten, worn, or sold. Once inside the mall, middle-class portenos find sanctu-ary from what they perceive as the anomic "Third World at home" (Koptiuch1996) of their everyday life. However, just as with Bauman's flaneur-turned-gaper, they are also trapped in a place that allows little room for alternativepractices and readings. Some portenos may not mind; others do.

Other Things to Do with Shopping Centers

Many portenos like the shoppings enough to visit them regularly. How-ever, not everyone in Buenos Aires is as fond of the malls. Contrary to Mor-ris's (1993) dismissal of what she brands as a "gynophobic" and high-brow"allegory of modernity as a fallen state" concocted by the "old critiques of con-sumption," in Buenos Aires the perception of the mall as a locus of hegemonicmodernity emerges not from the writings of a Frankfurt school critic, but fromthe practice and discourse of those who use or (in some cases) refuse to usethese places. The aversion many progressive portenos feel toward the shop-pings is invariably connected to a more or less explicitly articulated intuitionof the mall as a site of reproduction of local and global structures of domina-tion. Marcelo, a left-leaning porteno shopkeeper in his late thirties, phrased hisfeeling of social-spatial claustrophobia in the neoliberal Buenos Aires that hesaw growing around himself:

TRANSNATIONAL IMAGINATION IN BUKNOS AIRI-S M>5

They are trying to implement the Yankee lifestyle: People will be locked up all thetime, moving from the secluded space of their homes to the secluded space of theircar, and from the secluded space of their office to the secluded space of the mall.They are trying to . . . impose the Yankee model of individualism, whereby theonly thing you can do is to produce and consume, consume and produce.

Marcelo and his wife (a high school teacher who works three jobs to make endsmeet) proudly declared that they and their teenage children have never set footin a mall and never wouldand, as far as 1 know, they never have.

Occasionally the range of practices that index the perception of malls aslocations of global and local hegemonies can take on an extreme form. On Oc-tober 16, 1997, a street protest was staged on the occasion of U.S. PresidentBill Clinton's visit to Buenos Aires. A heterogeneous group of university stu-dents, white- and blue-collar workers, and left-wing militants affiliated withvarious organizations gathered in the very central Avenida Santa Fe. Their goalwas to issue a public condemnation of what they saw as the unholy alliance ofthe imperialist United States with the corrupt local government. Even though itstarted on a peaceful note, the protest soon turned to more violent means. Agroup of demonstrators armed with Molotov cocktails set the Avenida Santa Feon fire. North American banks were torched, as were U.S. fast-food restau-rants. The rioters subsequently announced that they were going to destroy theAlto Palermo shopping mall but were stopped short of carrying out their planby the police.

Most often, however, the political anxiety over the malls emerged in themore nuanced form of rumors (Coombe 1997). As the porteno middle andlower middle class had little choice but to limit themselves to window shop-ping in malls whose prices were way above their reach, suspicion and specula-tion flared up. The rumors circulating in Buenos Aires in the late 1990s werethat the local malls were all about lavado de dinero (money laundering). Theshoppings were all thought to belong to the drug lords who allegedly stood be-hind the neoliberal party and Menem's government. This would explain why,on any given day, the shops in the malls would have no customers whatsoever;yet their windows were constantly replete with trendy merchandise. If nobody(meaning the middle class that constituted the bulk of mall-goers) could affordto buy anything, how thenportefios would askcould the malls manage tostay in business?

Fenster (1999:93-95) defined conspiracy theories as attempts to representthe totality of social relations as well as semiotic excesses that may intuit struc-tures of domination but fail to shed light on the real nature of existing politicalprocesses. This is certainly the case with the rumors about porteno malls.These rumors originated from and were perpetuated by a social group the ur-ban middle classthat saw itself as both enticed by and excluded from the im-agery of consumption that was displayed inside the mall. The porteno conspir-acy theory thus transformed the "shoppings" into locations where an intuitiveunderstanding of the threatening interface between foreign economic powersand the local government was resignified into an imaginative explanation for


an otherwise "inexplicable" riddle: The absent customers were middle-classconsumers. Why was modernity happening without them?

Trapping the Flaneur

In her Escenas de la vida posmoderna, portena cultural studies scholarBeatriz Sarlo (1994) identified some of the spatial qualities that may contributeto the mall-phobia of progressive portenos. As they transform a relativelyopen-ended urban space into a strictly controlled place, Sarlo argued, the mallsof Buenos Aires strive to exert an irresistible command over the practice and,more specifically, over the scopic and kinetic experience of their visitors."Time and space capsules" that trap and mystify their flaneurs: This is howSarlo (1994:16) described the shoppings. As I have already pointed out,Sarlo's discomfort with malls is hardly unique. However, for the U.S.-basedreader of this articlemost likely one who is familiar with the enclosed spatialtypology of North American shopping mallsunderstanding the reasons forSarlo's claustrophobia requires an exercise in estrangement. It requires ques-tioning the political, economic, but also spatial structures that are dramaticallychanging the everyday practices of portenos. Above all, it requires taking anyfeeling of familiarity with the landscape of the malls of Buenos Aires as a sig-nal for the workings of transnational imagineering.

Picture yourself as a high-street flaneur or flaneuse strolling inside one ofthese downtown malls. In the Galena Pacifico and the Patio Bullrich malls, amaze of escalators seem to lead you exclusively upward, trapping you in a vir-tually endless shopping experience. Most of these malls have no windows,probably because windows would attract gazes that should instead be tightlyfocused on the shops. The glass panels that wrap the outer structure of thePaseo Alcorta mall allow for a transparency that goes only in one direction:You can look inside the mall from outside, but not vice versa. Those few win-dows that are left unshielded open exclusively onto a vacant landscape of rail-way tracks domesticated with the gigantic floral insignia of the mall itself. Theworld outside does not pour in through these windows. Rather, the inside spillsout to trap the gaze of the mall-goer even beyond the physical boundaries ofthe mall itself. Yet the spatial/visual constriction that porteno malls exert overthe flaneur's practice is not the only strategy that attempts to mold his or hersense of place.

Once caught inside a microcosm that strives to keep your sensory and ki-netic experience in check, the best you can do is to focus on the spectacle thathas been organized for the sole sake of your seduction. Where is it leading you?What are the representations that are trying to shape your experience of thisplace? Allow yourself to become caught up by the intersecting flows of visi-tors: groups of teenagers hanging out in the food court, women window shop-ping alone or in pairs, couples going for a weekend movie. Keep strollingamong the bushes of silk flowers; cruise around the small concrete fountainsdotting the floor at regular intervals. As your attention starts focusing on yoursurroundings, you (as an English-speaking visitor) will eventually become

TRANSNATIONAL IMAGINATION IN BUENOS AIRHS 197

aware of why the signs intended to lure customers into the shops seem so fa-miliar to you. Almost all of them are in English: Midway, J. L. Cook (sportinga confederate flag as its logo), Sail, Mistral, Tack's Drugstore, Motor Oil Jun-ior, Concept, Blue Spirit, Legacy, and Route 66. Some of these stores will goas far as to advertise, still in English, that they are having a "SALE," or a "50%OFF" promotion. Inevitably, portenos read malls as the locations of a globali-zation that is largely dominated by the United States. During the 1998 carnivalseason, the radical theater group Catalinas Sur entertained its audiences withthis sarcastic "rap del shopping":

Hoy nos vamos para el shoppingCon un ticket a comprarUn compact disc, family game,Y hasta una seven-upRollers para patinar,Un skate para volar,Hasta un sandwich nos daran.En McDonald, ya veras.En el drugstore compraremosUnos walkman y un cassetteUn shampoo y un par de jeans.;Hay de todo para elegir!

Today we go to the mallTo buy with a couponA compact disc, a family game.And even a Seven UpRollerblades to skate around,A roller skate to fly,They will even give us a sandwich,At McDonald's, you'll see.In the drugstore we shall buyA walkman and a tapeA shampoo and a pair of jeans.You can choose from a lot of things!

With their caricature of yanqui (North American) looks (baggy jeans,baseball caps, and Nike sneakers), the Catalinas Sur rappers pointed out thatnot only does the future on display in malls have geographical implications,but experiencing itconsuming its spectaclerequires a basic knowledge ofAmerican English. However, it would be a mistake to take the exotic labels atface value. Several shops are actually foreign franchises, yet quite a few ofthem are Argentine owned and Argentine based (even though the goods theysell under their English-sounding brand names are mostly made in China orTaiwan). What is sold in Buenos Aires's malls is not just foreign goods but,even more importantly, the idea of consuming foreign goods. What is dis-played in the malls is the free market with its tantalizing promise of participa-tion in the privileged Western modernity to be found in the northern hemi-spherestill so distant from the south of the world.18

Displaying Elitist Consumptions

If a walk through the mall allows portenos an imaginary emplacement in aNorth American space, it also offers them a certain socioeconomic mobility viaan imaginary journey to the extravagant domains of the Argentine upper class.A peculiarity of shopping malls in Buenos Aires is that from time to time theirshop windows become stages for thematic displays, featuring a luxurious life-style accessible only to a few. In Fall 1998, for example. Drugstore, a clothingstore in Paseo Alcorta, organized its four large windows into a staging of "aday in the life" of Argentina's most famous internationally known fashionmodels. In a setting that reproduced a dressing room, the display featured a


potlatch of expensive foreign goods. Pricey French cosmetics littered the floor,while empty bottles of imported champagne rolled among piles of NorthAmerican cigarette packs. The table was scattered with U.S. fashion maga-zines, along with nonprescription drugs available only in North Americanpharmacies. Easily identifiable as an impersonation of model Valeria Mazza, asilk-clad blond mannequin stood in a corner in the act of walking out of herdressing room. By turning her half-bare back toward the spectators, "Valeria"reinforced the message of exclusion. The display obviously reproduced an ex-ceptional (and exceptionally transnational) lifestyle that was way above thereach of most mall visitors. The audience was directly addressed by this dis-play as subjects whose desiring gaze was conditioned by their very exclusionfrom its world of goodsa message that intensifies desire but also, one cannothelp but wonder, might inspire angry protest. The window display kept attract-ing large crowds of onlookers and a few of them ventured inside the store to tryon imported clothes.

Spectacles of this sort pose a question: Who is the real protagonist of themall's putative travel to the First World? Certainly not the middle class, whoseparticipation in the politics of consumption of neoliberalism consists princi-pally in its spectatership. Rather, this protagonist (real or imaginary) is againan elite that commands the largest share of the country's wealth and monopo-lizes public attention through their frivolous extravagance. Not only can thiselite afford to purchase and consume expensive imported goodsBhabha's"symbols of the elsewhere" (cited in Clifford 1997:42)but it also presumesto do so with a studied exhibitionism. In his Structural Change of the PublicSphere, Habermas (1989) argued that, in feudal Europe, the aristocracy dis-played its insignia to co-opt the public sphere, thus reinforcing its own authorityby picturing itself as the visible incarnation of power and the nation. As a sub-jugated audience deprived of any means of participating in public visibility,commoners did not get any chance to constitute themselves as a political col-lectivity. A similar manipulation of the visual public sphere takes place in themalls of Buenos Aires, the symbolic economy of which references a trans-national lifestyle practiced by only the top five percent of Argentina's population.The images on display in the malls of Buenos Aires keep telling their audi-ences a hegemonic story of national inclusion into global modernity by con-stantly reminding them not only where the center of the world is but also whois entitled to inhabit it fully.

Disneyland in Buenos Aires: The Tren de la Costa

Puerto Madero and the shoppings share much of what Bauman pinpointedas the Disneyfied quality of the postmodern city. Yet there is a site in BuenosAires whose web of elitist and transnational imageries seems to have been de-signed to maximize the captivity of ailing middle-class flaneriethe Tren dela Costathe tiny railway that carts foreign and native tourists along the northshore of the Rio de la Plata.

TRANSNATIONAL IMAGINATION IN BUENOS AIRI-S 199

Just like Puerto Madero and several of the downtown malls, the Tren de laCosta sustains a narrative of urban resurrection connecting the fortunes of late-20th-eentury North American global capitalism with the accomplishments ofits European cosmopolitan antecedent. Here tooaccording to this hegemonicnarrativethe modernizing thrust of the neoliberal reform is resurrecting thelost splendor of Buenos Aires as a "European" city (i.e., the first attempt tograft the signs of "progress" from elsewhere). Created by the British at the turnof the century, when the prosperity Argentina then enjoyed was largely con-trolled by European capital, the ramal Delta-Mitre (a 15.5 kilometer long rail-way winding along the north shore of the Rio de la Plata) connects the VicenteLopez, San Isidro, San Fernando, and Tigre suburban municipalities. The Brit-ish-Argentine railways were nationalized in 1947 as part of Peron's patriotic,autarkic, and anti-foreign agenda (Rock 1985:278). As supporters of neoliber-alism would later point out, the gigantic Peronist state bureaucracy could nothandle the task, and Peron's nationalization of the railway system caused it tofall into disarray. This was also the destiny of the ramal Delta-Mitre, whichwas abandoned, apparently for good, in 1961. Yet, in 1990 it became the focusof a project of development that, in harmony with Argentina's new economicand political climate, was to be privately financed and managed by a corpora-tion with no intervention by the state. The same neoliberal trope of urban re-newal at the hands of private entrepreneurship that had animated the PuertoMadero project and the downtown malls inspired the logo of the Trenabright sun that rises over the whole Tren de la Costa concern: stations, cars,maps and brochures, malls, restaurants, mini-golf courses, and the uniforms ofthe professionally friendly personnel (Shakespear 1995).

The purpose of the newly founded Corporacion del Tren de la Costa wasto create a tourist attraction for both foreign visitors and the local population.The train was never meant to cater to the population's daily transportationneeds. Rather, it was designed to be used by a festive crowd in a holiday moodand that is exactly what happened.

Captive Flanerie

Mitre, the initial station of the Tren de la Costa, welcomes the passengerswith a brand-new, bright-green, modernist structure that is furnished with allthe fast-food restaurants and gadget stores you would expect to find in a shop-ping mall. At the time of my fieldwork in 1997-98, Walt Disney movies werethe dominant theme of the station. This presence of Disney here appearedblissfully unaware of an earlier moment, in the politically tormented SouthernCone of the 1970s, when Argentine-born Ariel Dorfman and Chilean-basedArmand Mattelart wrote Para leer al Pato Donald (How to Read DonaldDuck), unveiling Disney productions as vehicles for North American imperial-ist, patriarchal, and racist ideologies. From the walls of the Mitre station, char-acters from the latest Disney movies conjured the innocuous aura of an enter-tainment park in the eyes of a majority of passengers composed of those who,by the 1990s, were too young to have read Dorfman and those who were too


busy with their lives to even remember whether they ever did. If you walkedpast the Disney imagery to approach the platform, you would find the train it-self to be surprisingly smallalmost too small to be taken seriously. The carsvery new, squeaky clean, with doors that open at the gentle push of a but-tonwere decorated with colorful charts indicating each railway station withthe suggestive, playful, and a bit condescending visual language that oftencharacterizes tourist maps. Current Latin and North American pop musicplayed softly, allowing for cozy conversations. When asked what they foundmost enjoyable about the Tren, my interviewees invariably pointed to the dif-ference between the Tren de la Costa and the trains they used in their everydaycommutes. This difference, as I could not help noticing myself, is striking in-deed, and it is produced by the physical space of the train itself, as well as by thebehavior and looks of its passengers in the role they take up as the train's public.

In the Tren, each passenger is comfortably seated. Nobody is forced tostand as often happens in the crowded urban railway lines. No torn seats, dirtycurtains, or defective windows are there to remind the passengers of their dailycommutes in "ordinary" trains. In the Tren de la Costa, no panhandlers impor-tune the passengers with their pleas for charity. No vendors use the Tren topeddle their cheap goods (crayons, scissors, plastic watches, small toys) bychanting their litanies to an indifferent and occasionally slightly irritated pub-lic. Soccer hooligans, those vociferous and aggressive packs of lower-classyoung males who terrify "respectable" portenos, are not allowed on board. TheTren feels very safe, because its passengers undergo a prior "natural" selectionthrough the high price of the ticket, plus a further screening by the security per-sonnel at the gate. Once in the train, the passengers find themselves in the com-pany of families with children, elegantly dressed adults, or small groups ofteenagers sporting either the latest fashion accessory or private school uni-forms. All of them focus on enjoying their ride: the air-conditioning, the mu-sic, the courteous personnel, the elegant and sanitized environment. Nobodysleeps in this train. Nobody reads. The passengers chat amiably and watch outof the windows.

Hardly anybody in Buenos Aires uses the Tren to commute: The expen-sive fares and the residential route ensures that the train does not become partof one's everyday life. Rather, the Tren remains confined to the special occa-sion: the weekend trip, the holiday excursion, occasional sightseeing with afriend or relative visiting from abroad. What the Tren's passengers are likely tohave in common, however, is that they are not going anywhere specifically:For them, sitting in the train, hanging out in this or that station-cum-shoppingmall is a purpose in itself. What these people are enjoying, what attracts themto the train, is the ambiance. It is the scenography that has been laid out forthem to read with a captive gaze.

The landscape that rushes past the eyes of the passengers as the trainwinds along the shore of the Rio de la Plata is the spectacle of an upscale urbandevelopment that has swallowed up each available expanse of the shorelineand returned it (or rather retained it) in the form of yacht clubs, country clubs.

TRANSNATIONAL IMAGINATION IN BUKNOS AIRI-S 201

and majestic villas. It is by no means a coincidence that Vicente Lopez, SanIsidro, San Fernando, and Tigre are the wealthiest areas of the Greater BuenosAires area (Keeling 1996:50). Even though pockets of self-help housing can befound even in these posh suburbs, no slum disrupts the upscale spectacle dis-played along the rails of the Tren. Akin to those toy trains that cart touristsaround in theme parks, the Tren de la Costa shows its passengers only whatthey are supposed to see. On its way to Tigre, the Tren stops at a handful of sta-tions built in an art-nouveau style that seems inspired by turn-of-the-centuryBritish postcards. These stations, as mentioned earlier, were actually built bythe British railway company in the early 1900s. However, each of them hasbeen restored in such a way as to accommodate shopping malls, miniature golfcourses, and restaurants. When tired of sitting in the train, you can choose todisembark at any station for a whiff of historical flavor artfully mixed with thelure of shopping.

Isolated as it is from the social and spatial context provided by the rest ofthe citythe city most of its passengers come fromthe Tren de la Costa hasthe heterotopic quality of "juxtaposing in a single real place several spaces,several sites that are themselves incompatible" (Foucault 1998:241). A jet-setlifestyle visible from afar, a clean and safe environment, evocations of foreignentertainment parks and high-tech modernity, and a diffused nostalgia are allcarefully organized components of the Tren's landscape. The visual and spatialsphere constructed around the Tren is a text that condenses representations ofall that is desirable in the dominant discourse but nonetheless remains out ofthe economic and social reach of most portenos. However, what really mattersis that whatever is out of reach is not out of sight: Framed by the Tren's win-dow, the seductive spectacle of elitist lifestylesvillas, boats, country clubsparades like a movie in front of the eyes of the passengers. The prefabricatedexperience of the Tren is an encounter with differencethe supposedly "good"difference that a display of someone else's affluence can make, the differencethat sets the standards of what is desirable for those who are nonetheless ex-cluded from its direct realization. What the passenger sees when she looks outof the window is a modernity that is elsewhere (still Buenos Aires, yet not partof her ordinary experience of the city) and that belongs to somebody else. Yetwhat she also sees in the window is her own gaze reflected on the glass, tempo-rarily framed by all the accoutrements of a consumable modernity.

Auge (1995:79) has argued that what the experience of being in a non-placea category including "all the air, rail and motorway routes, the mobilecabins called 'means of transport' (aircraft, trains and road vehicles), the air-ports and railway stations"brings about is not so much the knowledge of aplace as the recognition of another image of oneself, whereby the gaze of thetraveler "dissolves into the landscape and becomes the object of a secondary,unattributable gazethe same one" (1995:93). The experience of the travelerin the Tren de la Costa is not just that of seeing, but it is also that of seeing her-self seeing. What this passenger is expected to end up with is not geographicalknowledge, but rather a self-representation as a traveler dashing through, and


in a temporary and illusionary association with, the landscape of a desirableother. What the seduction of the Tren is all about, then, is positioning oneself;it is all about taking up the prescribed identity the passengers find for them-selves in the images lined up in front of their eyes. As in Puerto Madero or themalls, a dominant representation of space in the Tren also strives to mold theexperience of flaneurs and flaneuses; its spectacle attempts to lure them whilekeeping them at a distance; it promises without granting.

Conclusion

As the medium of everydayness from which one cannot withdraw, urbanexperience has a "natural" immediacy or, as Lefebvre (1991) put it, an opacitythat is hard to resist. In neoliberal Buenos Aires, the reterritorialization of tran-snational modernity is constructed as a self-evident fact: A fact that naturalizesthe authority of the upper class and legitimizes its political choices, while set-ting the standards for what is "good" and "desirable" in the everyday life ofthis city's publics. Puerto Madero, the malls, and the Tren de la Costa all enactsimilar strategies of spectacle and segregation in their attempt to structure theurban experience, yet each of these sites makes a specific contribution to theproduction of the neoliberal subject.

Seeing and being seen is the constitutive practice in Puerto Madero, wherecaptive performativity is the dominant modality for participating in the neolib-eral economy of appearance. In the Tren de la Costa, the immobile passengersees herself dashing through a physically inaccessible landscape, a journey thatmay induce her to imagine a temporary connection with the spectacle that takesplace under her eyes. This suggests another mode of participation in the neolib-eral spectacle that is not based on active self-performance, but on the contem-plative experience of seeing oneself seeing. The downtown malls are neitherabout being seen, nor about seeing oneself seeing. They are about the sensoryexperience of modernity in a "safe" environment that is in direct competitionwith the "dangerous" high street. Due to their symbolic quality as the embodi-ment of the free market, in their blatant spatial segregation and their effect onthe Buenos Aires' economy, the malls trigger a variety of responses rangingfrom desire to political anxiety and even violence that are largely absent fromthe experience of Puerto Madero and the Tren.

What Puerto Madero, the Tren, and the malls have in common is that theyare all sites where transnational modernity is out there to be seen, smelled, andtouched in a pretheoretical and sensory experience that lends itself to acts ofimaginary consumption. In his Passagenwerk, Benjamin emphasized how,through their displays of commodities, the urban spectacles of capitalism hold"the crowd enthralled even when personal possession [is] far beyond theirreach" (Buck-Morss 1989:81). The seduction of such phantasmagorias is thepromise of a progress that benefits only a few but expects to enchant all. Simi-larly, the phantasmagorias of neoliberal Buenos Aires regale their spectatorswith the glimpse of a progress whose narrative is woven out of dreams and prom-ises. Their master narrative spreads glamorous allegories of reterritorialized


modernity over the rifts that are widening between social classes. As referentsand texts of the neoliberal account of Argentina's "modernization," PuertoMadero, the malls, and the Tren de la Costa all reproduce the same century-oldtale whereby the future is always another country. In so doing, they perpetuatea story of transnational modernity whereby the privilege of the few strives tobecome the pride of all.

CodaAs this article is about to go to press in early January 2002, the Argentine

Congress has just appointed a new national presidentthe fifth in two weeks.Fernando de la Rua, leader of the Alianza coalition and president of Argentinasince January 2000, resigned on December 20, 2001 amidst lootings and massprotests. Faced with the daunting task of healing the Argentine economy,President de la Rua had failed.

Though the current turmoil is a legacy of the last two centuries of Argen-tine history, the most immediate causes of Argentina's bankruptcy are to befound in the neoliberal course that, although initiated by Videla's 1976-81junta, became the dominant political and economic paradigm under Menem's1989-99 presidency. The uncontrollable foreign debt, the peso-dollar convert-ibility, and the corruption that characterized Menem's regime had left thecountry in shambles. I cannot help recalling how, still in 1998, many of myfriends kept arguing that Menem would make sure his successor would face theimpossible task of governing a bankrupted Argentina. Menem, they alleged,was planning to make a triumphal comeback in the 2003 electionor perhapsearlierby presenting himself as the savior of a country on its knees. Oncemore he would follow the script he had successfully enacted in 1989, when hehad replaced President Alfonsin who had been driven out of his office by hy-perinflation. In light of recent events, I am tempted to believe that my friends'bleak prediction was no conspiracy theory but may indeed contain more than agrain of truth.

Although President de la Rua had won the 1999 presidential elections asthe leader of the Alianza opposition coalition and the champion of the urbanmiddle classes against Menemist abuses, he did not dare go as far as to reversehis predecessor's neoliberal policies. Part of the reason for de la Rua's politicalchoices was the ambivalence of the porteno middle class toward neoliberalismthat I have described in this article. Though in principle opposed to Menem'sregime, much of de la Rua's electorate needed to be reassured that thepeso-dollar convertibility would not be abolished. Not only had the convert-ibility lowered the risk of inflation, but it had also encouraged many middle-class Argentines to contract large debts in dollars: For them, a devaluation ofthe peso would be disastrous.

The consequences of this history continue to unfold today: In November2001, de la Rua's Minister of Finance Domingo Cavallo (the same who, tenyears earlier, had pegged the peso to the dollar) put a ceiling of 250 pesos perweek on cash withdrawals. The already languishing economy collapsed, and


the informal labor market that had been the only resource for millions of Ar-gentines vanished. Driven by hunger, many started looting grocery stores.Storeowners (and, though more rarely, police officers) tried to stop them andcasualties ensued. The middle classes of Buenos Aires also took to the plazas:Banging pots and pans (cacerolazos), they vented their anger and their mistrustof the political class. Cavallo resigned and within a few days de la Rua fol-lowed suit. In the following two weeks the Congress selected four more presi-dents, each of whom stayed in office for a term ranging from a few hours to afew days. On January 2, 2002, Eduardo Duhalde took office as the latest presi-dent of Argentina.

Duhalde is a Peronist leader with a demagogic streak. Although his propa-gandistic activities in the slums of Buenos Aires may have earned him somesupport among the lower classes, his populist rhetoric alienates the portenomiddle classes (Guano in press). Moreover, Duhalde's brand of Peronism haslittle currency in the neoliberal wing of his own party led by Carlos Menem.President Duhalde is currently preparing a Law of Economic Emergency thatentails the end of peso-dollar convertibility, a controlled devaluation of thepeso, and the de-dollarization of debts and contracts. One can only hope thatDuhalde's plans for stability may succeed in dispelling not only the threat ofanarchy but also (and especially) the ghosts of authoritarianism that keep ris-ing from what is a still recent chapter of Argentina's history.

January 3, 2002

Notes

1. Porteiio is the adjective that categorizes things and people from the city of Bue-nos Aires.

2. For the notion of "scales" in the global economy see Smith (1992).3. Peron's emphasis on import substitution was sustained through a populist-na-

tionalist rhetoric of patriotismnot modernitythat entailed an explicit condemnationof the cosmopolitanism of the elite of Buenos Aires and the notions of progress it upheld.On the Peronist valorization of "barbarism" against "civilization" see Svampa (1992).

4. As INDEC statistics recently pointed out. in 1999 about 90 percent of BuenosAires s residents lost an average of ten percent of their income. On the other side, therichest ten percent accumulated an additional five percent. At the same time, the com-bined rate of unemployment and underemployment was calculated to be 35 percent.

5. On the one hand, the urban middle class blamed its decline squarely on Menem* spresidency, which it criticized fiercely. On the other hand, however, the stability of theArgentine currency that Menem had brought about by pegging the peso to the U.S. dollarforced the heavily indebted middle class into a situation of political dependency on Me-nem' s government and its economic reforms. When campaigning again for the 1995presidential election, Menem had the strongest card to play: "Do you remember the hy-perinflation?" his posters kept asking porteno passersby from all city walls. A vote forhim. Menem claimed, was a vote for "stability and continuity" (Calvert 1998). The elec-torate got the messageespecially the porteno middle class that was too heavily in-debted in U.S. dollars not to dread the end of the convertibility promised by theopposition parties. Many portenos later confessed to voting for Menem in fear that the

TRANSNATIONAL IMAGINATION IN BUKNOS AIRES 205

dc-dollarization of the economy pursued by the opposition parties would leave themearning a devalued currency but paying off their credit card debts in U.S. dollars.

6. Marcuse and van Kempen (2000) use "citadel" as a synonym for "segregated en-claves."

7. See Dione Sabattini, "Barrios cerrados versus ciudades abiertas. Que tipo devida elegir," in Clarin, Monday. February 23, 1998.

8. As Berman 1986 pointed out, and as the politics of "Parisian" Buenos Airesshows, the uncritical idealization of the democratic potential of the "open" city is neitherrisk-free nor politically innocent.

9. For an ethnography of life in the slums of neoliberal Buenos Aires, see Auyero 2000.10. For the neoliberal elites, the frequent travel between Buenos Aires and the

United States has replaced the European Grand Tour of their early-20th-century ances-tors as a status-building strategy. To this purpose, many jet-set portenos own a secondhome in Miami or New York.

11. Most of these superstores are actually foreign, which reinforces the national-istic connotation in the struggle for the control of public collective spaces.

12. Menem's defeat in the 1999 presidential election marked by no means the endof neoliberalism in Argentina. In fact, the newly elected Alianza (the alliance of the tra-ditionally middle-class Union Civica Radical and the left-of-center Frepaso) continuedthe neoliberal course under the patronage of the International Monetary Fund and evenrestored Cavallo to his former position as the Finance Minister.

13. In the Buenos Aires of the 1990s, Versace clothes became extremely popularamong the urban upper class, signifying as a marker of participation in the extravagantconsumption politics fostered by neoliberalism.

14. Slater (1997:88) argued that lifestyle groupings are fleeting "elective commu-nities," moving at whim between constellations of consumption choices. Mapping life-styles on the basis of class clearly entails the risk of creating monolithic entities.However, the study of the politics of consumption in a polarized society like the one inBuenos Aires necessarily leads us to raise the question of who can afford to shop at whimat what Slater calls the "supermarket of style."

15. Also known as shoppings, the malls located in the Greater Buenos Aires usu-ally develop around a discount superstore of some sort, and even though they attractlarge crowds, they do not enjoy the fashion status of downtown malls.

16. The Abasto mall was actually part of the project of gentrification of the Abastoneighborhood, an area of Buenos Aires that, in the late 1990s, had become on object ofcontention between gentrifiers and squatters and was consequently branded by most middle-class portenos as "rough." The mall, in the plans of the developers, was meant to attract"good" middle-class foot traffic, thus improving the reputation and the visibility of theneighborhood. Unfortunately, the developers failed to realize that, given its self-containedstructure and its large parking decks, the only traffic the Abasto mall was going to engen-der would be automobiles, a development that would hardly benefit the surroundings.

17. In July 1999, INDEC brought to public attention the fact that the unemploy-ment rate in Argentina had reached 14.5 percent, and anticipated a further increment of3.5 percent by October of the same year. These statistics did not include the percentageof the underemployed (calculated at about 15 percent) and those who had given up seek-ing employment (five percent of the total population).

18. The presence in the malls of Argentine-owned and Argentine-named franchiseslike Vitamina and Chocolate reinforces the impression of a local, bottom-up participation


in transnational modernity that complements the perception of the mall as a top-downreterritorialized transnational space.

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