It has become a given that scholars engaging with the history of Argentina will confront the question, ‘Is Argentina Latin American?’ To some extent, this is understandable. With a majority of its population descended from Spanish and Italian immigrants and a cosmopolitan capital that is famous for its Parisian-style boulevards and cafés, the country has earned a reputation for fashioning itself as European. Oscar Chamosa's new monograph, The Argentine Folklore Movement: Sugar Elites, Criollo Workers, and the Politics of Cultural Nationalism, 1900–1955, is the latest addition in a new and rapidly growing historiography that challenges the notion of Argentina's whiteness by critically examining notions of race, regionalism and culture. Chamosa's work is both engaging and important because it addresses this debate in a novel manner: tracing the development of north-western folklore culture as a response to European immigration and the apparent loss of Argentine values and customs. As the author argues, actors of varying ideological stripes, from Tucumán's self-serving sugar elites to idealistic anthropologists, employed folklore to unite European Buenos Aires with the older criollo interior. In doing so, he writes, they created an alternative to tango that cut across social, regional, class and racial boundaries to become one of the most important markers of national identity to this day.

The Argentine Folklore Movement is divided into seven chapters. It begins with the desire of early twentieth-century Catholic nationalist intellectuals to locate a binding national identity amid the rise of mass politics, the popularity of seedy porteño tango music, and the worrying existence of a perceived divide between immigrant Buenos Aires and the vanishing criollo interior. Ultimately, this resulted in a national folklore survey in 1921 to rescue what these elites interpreted as ‘dying’ cultures in the face of relentless modernisation (this survey's outcome informed Ariel De La Fuente's work on nineteenth-century gaucho resistance and memory in La Rioja province, Children of Facundo, published in 2000). The study then examines attempts by Tucumán's sugar magnates to position their north-western province as the cradle of national identity, and, bizarrely, as a region inhabited by Spanish-descended whites whose industry deserved national protection. Chapters 4 and 5 detail the efforts of anthropologists Juan Alfonso Carrizo and Isabel Aretz and famed folklorist Atahualpa Yupanqui to capture folklore's essence and define its function within society. Carrizo, because he enjoyed the patronage of the mill owner Ernesto Padilla, partially censored his compilation of provincial songs, thus offering a more romantic interpretation. Yupanqui, on the other hand, became noted for his socially conscious lyrics, which attempted to capture the sugar industry's brutal exploitation of cane cutters and peasants. Finally, the author analyses how folklore emerged upon the national stage through radio and institutional sponsorship during the Depression (Argentina's ‘Infamous Decade’), and the triumph of mass politics in the post-war period. As Chamosa argues, the 1940s Peronist government championed folklore as emblematic of its own broad cultural nationalism and as an acknowledgement of the decisive support it received from mestizo internal migrants in Buenos Aires’ industrial belt and sugar workers in Tucumán (the only two places where General Juan Domingo Perón won the 1946 election by a landslide). By the time Peronism had surfaced as a truly seismic political and social rupture, folklore had become entwined with argentinidad among all sectors, even those anti-Peronists who casually used racial epithets to denounce Perón's followers.

Most noteworthy about The Argentine Folklore Movement is its analysis of race. As mentioned, the social construction of race in twentieth-century Argentine historiography has suffered from critical neglect. Until recently, scholars traditionally paid more attention to class identity. This is understandable, given that class is the dominant paradigm in a country where many citizens are descended from southern and central European immigrants. Yet this neglect bolstered the image of Argentina as a homogeneous, white nation and ignored actors, populations and regions with indigenous, mestizo and African heritage. The compilation The New Cultural History of Peronism, edited by Chamosa and Matthew Karush (Duke University Press, 2010), was a welcome break, as several essays challenged not only conceptions of Peronism, but also that movement's relationship to race.

In his own monograph, Chamosa explores the contradictory motives of the folklore movement, which in many instances attempted to ‘rescue’ the culture of the north-west while simultaneously denying the very racial identity of its inhabitants. The anthropologist Carrizo, whom the sugar mill owners contracted to collect these folk songs, believed that one could trace the roots of Tucumán's culture to sixteenth-century Spain, thus ignoring the indigenous, mestizo and African origins of folklore and deceptively arguing that Tucumanos were European in racial makeup. As Chamosa argues, this was convenient for the sugar elite, who employed their Australian counterparts’ successful ‘white industry’ argument to defend their sugar business from attempts to scale back tariffs and introduce cheaper imports. Although the social critic and folklorist Yupanqui criticised this blatant misrepresentation, it survived into the Peronist years. Even when indigenous and mestizo Argentines did appear in the official narrative (those of African heritage remained excluded), they did so as docile museum pieces representing a nearly lost past. The Argentine Folklore movement is, therefore, crucial for illustrating how Argentines have historically whitewashed their own nation and denied historical agency and even existence to non-white segments of the population, particularly those from the interior.

If there is a critique to be made of this work, it is the absence of the Left and its position toward folklore and mestizo-criollo culture, save for a brief examination of Yupanqui as a Communist Party member. This is crucial, because it would have helped explain the ‘old’ Left's racially tinged resistance to Peronism, which viewed Perón's mestizo supporters as easy prey for a fascist demagogue due to their backward culture and miserable living conditions. Furthermore, it would also have illustrated the significant break that occurred in the 1960s, when the ‘New’ Left embraced folklore and the interior to reconfigure Argentina's place within a third world revolution and transform Tucumán into a crucible for new, radical methods of liberation. In the author's defence, this omission was an unfortunate editorial decision rather than his own choice, since his 2003 PhD dissertation examined anarchist and socialist attitudes towards mestizo-criollo culture.

The Argentine Folklore Movement is a solid accomplishment that will enhance our knowledge of a key component of Argentine culture and identity. Well-researched and original, it should appeal to historians interested in cultural history, race and Peronism.