The politics of the past in an Argentine working-class neighbourhood / Lindsay DuBois.

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

DuBois traces how state repression and community militancy are remembered in a neighborhood in Buenos Aires and how the tangled and ambiguous legacies of the past continued to shape ordinary people's lives years after the collapse of the military regime.

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CHOICE Review

DuBois (social anthropology, Dalhousie Univ.) tackles how residents of a Buenos Aires neighborhood view the political turmoil of the past and how those remembrances impact the present in her focused attempt to understand how nationwide political events are experienced and remembered at a local level. During the early 1970s, the neighborhood experienced a flurry of political and community activism. Repression after the military coup of 1976 and economic problems of the late eighties and nineties led to a decline in community organizations. DuBois primarily addresses the contrast between the activist past and the passive present. The first of the book's two main sections reviews national political history with frequent reference to the impact and perceptions of these changes on the neighborhood. The second, more revealing part attempts to get a sample of the residents to comment on the neighborhood's history. How the author's informants reorder and revise past events is consistent with their current acceptance of the neoliberal policies of the current regime. Of most interest to those interested in local perceptions of the past and late-20th-century Argentine history. ^BSumming Up: Recommended. Graduate students and above. K. F. Rambo University of Oklahoma