La trama profunda: Historia y vida en José Luis Romero

Book Reviews / National Period 625 La trama profunda: Historia y vida en José Luis Romero. By omar acha. Buenos Aires: El Cielo por Asalto, 2005. Photographs. Notes. Bibliography. 193 pp. Paper. José Luis Romero (1909 – 77) was central in the establishment of the Argentine historical profession in the second half of the twentieth century. His vast and seminal work in Latin American and medieval European history conceives of history as a process and affirms the historian’s role as spiritual guide and public intellectual. Omar Acha examines the complexity of Romero’s trajectory within the context of Argentina’s intellectual and political life in the postwar period. Implicitly, this study also touches upon the most important issues on Argentina’s historiographic agenda today. Acha begins with the paradigmatic life, as a historian and as an intellectual, of one of the most important personalities in a crucial period of Argentine history, including the failure of the oligarchic/conservative political project in the 1930s, the rise and fall of Peronism, and its continued influence on Argentina’s society, politics, and especially culture after 1955. Romero’s work and political involvement was shaped through constant dialogue with his intellectual predecessors, whose work greatly contributed to the configuration of a national narrative. Romero was also influenced by his preoccupation with the popular classes and the unsuccessful bourgeois project of the early twentieth century. His remarkable intellectual profile developed through a number of important experiences, including his contributions to the well-known periodical Imago Mundi (1953 – 56), his central role in the transformation of the University of Buenos Aires, his involvement in the Centro de Historia Social created in 1958, and his militancy in the Socialist Party. Key to his political vision was a critique of bourgeois culture and ideas about the relationship between revolutionary change and new ethical principles in the twentieth century, which Karl Marx had not developed. According to Romero, the historian should play a guiding role in this revolution. The emergence of Peronism and the erratic behavior of the masses strengthened Romero’s convictions and led him to join the Socialist Party. Clearly, Acha notes the profound significance of Peronism, both culturally and politically, and how Romero’s work should be examined in this context. Acha also examines the profound meaning of the vida histórica — the “historical life” — a central concept through which Romero articulated the relationship among his philosophical, epistemological, and political ideas. In Romero’s view, the articulation of the past, the present, and the future can be seen in the transformations of sociohistorical configurations. This concept of the historical life led Romero to analyze several aspects of those transformations through his work on the crisis of bourgeois society in Europe, the interaction of space, politics, and society in Latin America, and especially the configuration of the political ideas in Argentina — a trajectory that eventually led him to express his optimistic belief in Argentina’s future. It is worth noting that the concept of the historical life works as a methodological guide to Acha. Instead of merely writing a biography or a work of intellectual history, Acha tries to construct a complex narrative that places Romero’s multifaceted life and historical production within the sociohistorical crisis that history as a discipline could 626 HAHR / August not resolve during the 1930s. Acha convincingly demonstrates how this crisis induced Romero to ask fundamental questions about the crisis of bourgeois values and to think that he had the right to guide the destiny of the nation and the masses. His convictions were reinforced by the emergence of Peronism. Even if Romero’s work extended its influence over Argentina’s historical narrative for the last 60 years, Acha’s is the first work to meticulously and exhaustively examine the whole of Romero’s oeuvre. It is a significant contribution to Argentinean historiography as well as Latin American historiography as a whole. It suggests that the questions that Romero raised can still be legitimate. Specifically, it invites us to insert, or reinsert, the historical profession in a political context and to reaffirm the role of the historian as intellectual while at the same time preserving consistency and reliability. In other words, the author tries to raise those very questions that Romero raised and seems to interrogate the reader in relation with his or her own time. Acha does that even if his own answers are different from Romero’s, because he takes into account historical change during the last 20 years and the increasing specialization of the historical profession, and because he voices his own disbelief in elitist solutions. paula halperin, University of Maryland doi 10.1215/00182168-2006-036 Elecciones en la ciudad 1864 – 2003. Vol. 1, 1864 – 1910. By darío cantón and jorge raúl jorrat. Buenos Aires: Instituto Histórico de la Ciudad de Buenos Aires, 2005. Map. Tables. Figures. Appendixes. Notes. Bibliography. 505 pp. Paper. It is unlikely that anyone other than a fanatical aficionado of Argentine elections or a more than usually conscientious reviewer will go through this heavy, oversized volume page by page, but for the indefinite future it is sure to remain a standard reference in its field. Though designated “Tomo I,” it is actually the second volume of the series to appear. The first volume, dedicated to the 1912 – 73 period, appeared in 2001. Hence, one oddity of this “Tomo I” is that it contains addenda and errata relating to Tomo II, a volume never reviewed in the HAHR. However, the two are broadly similar in contents, offering discussion by the authors themselves, statistical tables, lists of elections and much else, reproduction of pertinent legal provisions, and reprinted excerpts from such contemporaneous sources as newspapers and congressional debates, as well as from later writings. The authors’ own original research consists primarily of a meticulous burrowing through archival and newspaper collections for the various civic registers carried out at different times and for tables of election results. They managed to augment and make use of a number of sources previously known but considered too unreliable or incomplete. In the process, they were able to push their beginning date back to 1864 rather than 1892, which had been the originally announced starting date for the series. The resulting display of statistical expertise is impressive and surely beyond the full understanding of some readers (including myself); the conclusions drawn from the data are nevertheless clearly stated and convincingly coherent.