“Vida Zoo-cial” was a section of the Revista del Jardín Zoológico de Buenos Aires, a monthly scientific journal focused on natural sciences and, of course, the comings and goings of life at the Buenos Aires Zoo. Ashley Kerr uses the name of this column, a fun little vignette of animal life in an otherwise more academic medium, as an entry point to examine how the zoo in the Argentine capital, a self-proclaimed scientific institution, discussed social issues beyond its walls between the 1880s and the 1920s. Vida Zoo-cial furthers our understanding of how Argentine political, social, and scientific elites discussed the social question and sought to address it.
The book is divided into four chapters, four interludes, an introduction, and a conclusion. The interludes offer a thematic focus that pushes against the questions examined in the preceding chapter. The first chapter examines how the Buenos Aires Zoo offered a space for learning moral practices through a “hygienic excursion” to the zoo (21). A stroll at the zoo offered the fresh air that many city-dwellers needed to escape the cramped living conditions of their residences. Schools also opted to make a visit to the zoo an opportunity for recreation, in addition to its instructional benefits. Perhaps most interesting in this chapter is how research at the zoo served to discuss criminal behavior as a medical issue. The first interlude following this chapter describes how the zoo dealt with animal excretion, an activity that certainly undermined the hygienic vision, both material and symbolic, that zoo directors had for their institution.
Kerr’s second chapter studies the “ubiquitous trope of the aristocratic zoo animal” as a window onto class conflict in the city. The zoo and the park that contained it were designed with the hopes that shared open spaces would appease class conflict. Kerr turns her attention to columns spotting prominent citizens, poetry, and news reports, for example, to examine what it meant to be a good, modern citizen of Buenos Aires, according to zoo directors, and how this translated to the physical space of the park. For instance, the weekly Caras y Caretas published a visual vignette of a man lamenting that the zoo animals ate better than him (63). The interlude that follows discusses what animal labor, and labor refusal, looked like in the zoo.
Chapter 3 delves into how the zoo offered imagery to discuss immigration. Immigration confronted Argentine political elites with important questions about who was coming, from where, what immigrants did after arrival, and how they integrated into society. Kerr studies how zoo officials discussed native versus exotic fauna, often taking pride in those brought from other parts of the country but also discussing assimilation and cosmopolitanism through species that were imported from abroad. The interlude that follows this chapter discusses death in the zoo, focusing especially on sadness and nostalgia.
The last chapter surveys how public-facing zoo publications, such as guidebooks, grappled with questions of gender. If Argentine scientific elites sought to address the social question, they needed to define what desirable role women would play in a healthy society. Through its publications, the zoo promoted heterosexual partnerships, nuclear families, and motherhood by commenting on animal behavior. The last interlude confronts these expectations around women and the family, with the not-so-private reality of animal copulation.
One of Kerr’s most exciting contributions is her archival work. She spent her sabbatical patiently combing through a messy, partially inventoried repository at the zoo, an experience that many Latinamericanists might be familiar with. Working at a time when the zoo had ceased to function, Kerr has rescued part of its history and probably reignited historical interest in this institution.
In the spirit of critical engagement, sometimes it is difficult to disentangle what remained aspirational from what became fact, especially when Kerr examines the work of the zoo’s first two directors, Eduardo Holmberg and Clemente Onelli. Similarly, it is unclear how the zoo was linked to other scientific institutions of the city, like the Veterinary School of the University of Buenos Aires or the Botanical Garden. Aside from a minor factual error regarding the percentages of foreign-born people in some provinces, Kerr’s new monograph offers a fresh approach to the study of the social question in turn-of-the-century Buenos Aires, introducing thrilling new sources and opening the field for further research.
