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Abstract
This essay explores the interplay of race, gender, and class in early twentieth-century Argentina when major forces such as immigration, urbanisation, and modernisation reshaped women’s work both in the factory and the home. My analysis focuses on Mil fórmulas de cocina “La Negra”, a cookbook published between 1917 and 1940 by the meatpacking plant Compañía Sansinena de Carnes Congeladas, which features photographs from the factory and its workers in between the recipes. First, I refer to the history of the meatpacking plant and its modernisation campaign. I compare the case of “La Negra” to other stereotypes of Blackness in branding in order to explore the relationship between the company’s industrial project and the figure of the Afro-Argentine woman. Second, I examine the cookbook’s texts and images by tracing a parallel between the meatpacking plant’s female workers and the middle-class homemakers who buy and read these cookbooks. In so doing, I argue that La Negra’s cookbooks were a crucial instrument in reinforcing an ideology of domesticity that linked national progress to whiteness and middle-class identity.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Graciela Montaldo, Ana Paulina Lee, Ronald Briggs, and Fernando Degiovanni, for reading an early draft of this essay and giving me valuable comments. I am also grateful to the anonymous readers, whose detailed feedback and suggestions helped me frame this project and strengthen my arguments. Special thanks to Alexandra Vialla Méndez for proofreading the manuscript.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Correction Statement
This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.
Notes
1 See Milanesio (Citation2010). The author has studied the shift between this period, where the Argentine beef industry depended on international markets, and the Peronist administration, that prioritized internal beef consumption over the British market.
2 Other food scholars have mentioned La Negra’s cookbook. See Caldo (Citation2013) and Pite (Citation2012).
3 On cookbooks as political artifacts, see Appadurai (Citation1981) and Ferguson (Citation2020).
4 All translations are by Anayvelyse Allen-Mossman.
5 As understood by Social Reproduction Theory. Under this framework, there are two separate but interdependent spaces: spaces for production of value and spaces for reproduction of labour power. As explained by Tithi Bhattacharya, “social reproduction theorists perceive the relation between labor dispensed to produce commodities and labor dispensed to produce people as part of the systemic totality of capitalism. The framework thus seeks to make visible labor and work that are analytically hidden by classical economists and politically denied by policy makers” (Citation2017, 2).
6 For a history of the first years of Argentina’s industrialization and the role of women in the factory workforce during the Export Boom Years, see Rocchi (Citation2006).
7 On the mechanization of the meat industry and its inherent contradictions, see Giedion (Citation1975).
8 For studies interested in the association between Black bodies and food in American culture, see Kern-Foxworth (Citation1994), Witt (Citation1999), and Tompkins (Citation2007).
9 As defined by Kimberle Crenshaw, the concept of intersectionality denotes the various ways in which race and gender interact to shape violence against women of colour. These experiences cannot be understood within the traditional boundaries of race or gender discrimination but at the intersection of both categories (1991, 1244).
10 See Kutzinski (Citation1993). The author has examined the construction of the female mulata as a sexual commodity in nineteenth-century Cuban culture.
11 On the convergence between hygienism and eugenism in the meat industry of Buenos Aires, see López-Durán and Moore (Citation2018).
12 In early December 1917, meat processing workers in Avellaneda (La Blanca and La Negra) joined the mobilization of workers that had begun in the plants in Berisso (Swift and Armour) and Zárate (Hall de Zárate and Smithfield). Among the demands presented to the company were the eight-hour workday, overtime pay, raises, the provision of uniforms, free medical care for victims of accidents, and “greater respect” from the employer. Faced with the rejection of their demands, the Sociedad de Resistencia de los Frigoríficos [Meat Processing Plant Resistance Society] organized a general strike which other unions like the Federación Obrera Marítima [Federation of Maritime Workers] and the Federación Ferrocarrilera [Railway Workers Federation] joined (Lobato Citation2001, 168–171).
13 As Ezequiel Adamovsky points out, the emergence of the middle class as a social category in Argentina did not come hand in hand with a unified “middle class” identity. Historians trace the phenomenon back to the mid-nineteenth century along with important demographic shifts, an increase in salaried labour, and the formation of a true “consumer society”. Nevertheless, “the notion that there is an existent ‘Argentine middle class’ – was only introduced into the national culture beginning in 1919 and was done so through the political sphere” (Adamovsky 2016, 11).
14 I have been able to trace 18 editions of the book from 1917 to 1935 and then an apparently last edition from 1940 (which I refer to at the end of this essay). Although I am comparing multiple editions (1924, 1930, 1935, and 1940), for the purpose of this essay I will quote from the 7th edition published in 1924 (unless noted). When there is a difference worth mentioning between these editions, I highlight it in the article.
15 The book was published under the Amorrortu imprint, founded in Buenos Aires in 1916 by the Basque immigrant Sebastián de Amorrortu. Its catalog primarily included reference books like medical manuals, scholarly texts, encyclopedias, dictionaries, and telephone books. The new edition of 1940 was published by Guillermo Kraft, known for introducing many technical advances in the Argentine graphic industry, such as the steam-powered lithographic machine and the first linotype.
16 SIAM, founded by the Italian immigrant Torcuato di Tella in the 1910s, started producing commercial refrigerators in Argentina in the 1930s. However, the expansion in production and commercialization began only in the 1950s. The “Siam fridge” was one of the most affordable in the market and was considered both a technological conquest and a symbol of working-class prosperity (Milanesio Citation2013, 23–25).
17 For a history of the emergence of domestic science in late-nineteenth century America and its relation to the commercial food industry, see Shapiro (Citation2001).
18 As many feminist scholars have examined, products like instant cake mixes and canned food did not reduce the homemaker’s time in the kitchen. By considering domestic work in a chain, the time saved in cooking was later spent in an elaborate presentation of the dishes, disguising their industrial nature (Marling Citation1994, 225–228). For analyses on how “time-saving appliances” elevated cleaning and cooking standards as well as the time spent in the kitchen, see Schwartz Cowan (Citation1983) and Pérez (Citation2012), who has examined this process in Argentina.
19 Silvia Federici notes that the concept of “social factory” was introduced by Mario Tronti in his 1966 book Operai e Capitale. In its origins under the Italian operaismo, the concept describes a certain stage of capitalist development where the distinction between society and factory collapses, “so that society becomes a factory and social relations directly become relations of production” (2013, 7). The concept became central among feminist theorists of social reproduction, who interrogated the Marxist theory to make visible the role of women and unwaged domestic work in maintaining workers and non-workers.
20 For a cultural and political history of the “maternalization of women” in Argentina, see Nari (Citation2004). The author shows how in Buenos Aires, between the 1890s and 1940s, maternity transforms into a topic of public and political debate just as the threat of a new feminine factory workforce emerged.
21 Oscar Terán links the emergence of the positivist essay in Argentina with the massive influx of immigrants that arrived in the 1880s. The author points out that by 1914, 30% of the population was foreign-born. Thus, “the figure of the immigrant must have been so obviously impossible to ignore in daily life in Argentina” (Citation1987, 15–16).
22 For a cultural history of the place of the disease in late nineteenth-century Argentine culture, see Nouzeilles (Citation2000). For a history of the development of criminology in Argentina, see García Ferrari (Citation2010).
23 On the meat processing plants established in Berisso, the industrial zone of the city of La Plata, Mirta Zaida Lobato points out that from the inception of these industries until the 1930s, most of the workers came from Europe or Asia Minor. During the 1930s and the beginning of the 1940s, the number of foreigners decreased, but only around the middle of the twentieth century did workers’ nationalization become visible, with a greater presence of workers born in other provinces (2001, 109–118).
24 I use Bazin’s terms here. For the author, the particularity and fascination with photography resides in its “power of credibility”. As a “trace” of the real, photography is originated, in its analogic form, through automatic contact between the light emanated from the model and the photographic support (Citation1990, 27–29). This phenomenological perspective marks an historical and aesthetic period, spanning the end of the nineteenth century until the first half of the twentieth, in which photography is understood as a “vera icon” of modernity or, in the words of Hans Belting, as “the modern medium of the image, par excellence” (Citation2011, 264).
25 Sylvia Molloy defines the pose as a “decisive gesture in Spanish America’s cultural politics at the end of the nineteenth century” (Citation2012, 42). For Molloy, the pose is a social, political, and cultural practice of falsification and simulation that characterizes a nineteenth-century cultural way of being. In a broad sense, the pose relates to how subjects, cultures, and nations “exhibit” themselves during the nineteenth century, using visibility and its artifices as a platform for constructing an identity.
26 Although in its reconstruction of Black history in Argentina, George Reid Andrews does not reference Black women’s labour in slaughterhouses, what he describes about the disappearance of Black washerwomen is representative of what occurred in plants like La Negra, where white immigrant workers predominated in the 1920s: “At as late a date as 1873, a photograph of the washerwomen at the banks of the river showed that one was Black and the other white; in 1899, a magazine article described the disappearance of Black washerwomen, who had turned in their posts to the ‘fierce Italian women, restrained and tireless’” (1989, 216).
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Begoña Alberdi
Begoña Alberdi is currently a Core Lecturer in Literature Humanities at Columbia University. She received her PhD from the Latin American and Iberian Cultures Department at Columbia University and her Bachelor’s and Master’s degree from the Pontificia Universidad Católica (Chile). Her research interests include women’s and gender studies, labour history, food studies, history of technology, and media studies.