The Buenos Aires Reader is a welcome addition to the Duke Reader Series on Latin America. These publications introduce Latin America’s rich cultural, ethnic, and social diversity to an English-speaking public. Diego Armus, an Argentine historian who lives and teaches in the United States, and Lisa Ubelaker Andrade, a scholar from the U.S. who teaches in Buenos Aires, combine their expertise and “insider–outsider” perspectives on Argentina’s capital city to curate a selection of primary source documents (song lyrics, literary passages, vignettes from news and magazine articles, drawings, caricatures, photographs, and other ephemera) that highlight the complexity of this dynamic port city. In doing so, they expand knowledge about Buenos Aires, in particular, and break stereotypes around urban life in Latin America, more generally.
Armus and Ubelaker Andrade eschew chronological organization, presenting instead thematic “layers” that serve to create unique meanings of the city and questions about its complexity through juxtaposition of sources. The volume’s first part, “The Living City,” includes topics such as shopping, epidemics, green spaces, housing, and the growth and dismantling of the city’s informal working-class neighborhoods, known as villas miserias. Part II, “Taking to the Street,” evokes the many uses and meanings of the city’s historic center, the Plaza de Mayo, including political protest and street festivals, symbolizing the intersection of public space with the city’s inhabitants. Pain and pleasure coexist in the capital city’s power center. Other sections of the volume include, “Eating in Buenos Aires,” “Hinchas, Cracks, and Potreros in the City of Soccer,” “Reading, Watching, and Listening in Buenos Aires,” “The City at Night,” and “Written Cities.” The Buenos Aires Reader also contains a helpful introduction to the city over a span of 500 years, a bibliography, and a suggested list of films.
If the volume’s themes feel a bit choppy at times—most selections are truncated pieces of their larger whole—at other moments, the juxtapositions offer evocative connections. For example, Part III, “Eating in Buenos Aires,” focuses not only on the well-known cuisine of the city, such as yerba mate tea, asado (traditional barbeque), and facturas (pastries), but also centers agricultural commodities as a cornerstone of the nation’s economy. This section underscores the gendered dynamics of food preparation and the social spaces of eating and drinking as well. Making asado has historically been a masculine endeavor that takes place outside. As women entered the workforce in the 1960s, innovation in “fast,” or easy-to-prepare food, arose from the female experience of working outside the home and preparing meals inside of it. The inclusion of writer Victoria Ocampo’s anecdote from 1955 offers a stunning detail: Ocampo had never gone to a café herself, as the cafés frequented by the Argentine intelligentsia were public spaces coded for men until the 1960s. Including selections on the impact of immigration on tastes and culinary dishes, this chapter shows how cuisine is indelibly connected to Buenos Aires’ social and cultural traditions as well as to the national economy.
In addition to food, the collection examines the customs and habits of the urban middle and working classes, the city’s cultural production of literature and tango, and the rise and fall of the Cold War’s civic-military dictatorship. Sources—many translated specifically for this volume—draw from popular culture, adding fascinating new detail to these topics. For example, Mercedes Sosa’s concert in 1982 signals the beginning of the end of the dictatorship; the television show, La Familia Falcón (1965), sponsored by the Ford Motor Company, hints at the impact that foreign sponsorship had on local entertainment, and accounts about the world of soccer stress its formation as an authentic product of working-class barrios.
Notably, the volume’s translations are almost exclusively done by women. Ubelaker Andrade has diligently worked to bring sources that detail Argentine life, heretofore only available in Spanish, to an English-language audience. Many other translations have been done by Robin Myers, who recently won a National Book Award for her translation of the Argentine author Gabriela Cabezón Cámara’s novel, We Are Green and Trembling (2025).
Overall, The Buenos Aires Reader is a creative, expansive, and innovative collection of primary source materials. As a professor of history, I see a number of distinctive research topics emerging from it. The reader’s strength lies in the diversity of sources that showcase Buenos Aires’ vibrant social history, in the number of new translations, and the often-poetic, curatorial organization of its themes.
