Here David Viñas traces a "subterranean" history of popular rebellions in Argentina. His introduction of the project gives three points of departure: a polemical questioning of Argentine historiography, a didactic component, and an extension of the hypotheses presented from a literary perspective in his previous books on Argentine literature and national politics.

In terms of historiography, he wants to question the two "mainstream" interpretative tendencies: those that part from the liberal-progressive standpoint, and those that part from the national-populist one. As he sees it, they're two sides of the same bourgeois coin. What he wants to accomplish in this book is a genealogy of resistance to the consolidation of bourgeois hegemony in Argentine political life, from the repression of the montoneros in the 1860s, to the 1909 assassination of Buenos Aires chief of police Ramón Lorenzo Falcón by the young anarchist immigrant Simón Radowitzky. The book is dedicated to the memory of Radowitzky.

So, the protagonists of this alternative history are those who resisted integration into the liberal-bourgeois nation-state, which Viñas furthermore relates to the processes of colonization occurring throughout the world during the years he focuses on. His main hypothesis is that there's continuity between the montoneros and the anarchists: once the traditional protagonists of Argentine history (Mitre, Sarmiento, Roca, et al.) had quashed a series of rebellions in the provinces and consolidated their control over the national space (between 1860 and 1880), the stage for popular rebellions moved to the city, where the working-class immigrant masses, many of them inspired by radical political ideas, continued the tradition of rebellion against bourgeois political oppression.

I appreciate Viñas's clear presentation of his objectives, and the straightforward style in which he develops his argument. This is an excellent companion to other books that study this period, such as Nicolas Shumway's The Invention of Argentina. Both Shumway and Viñas tend to wear their hearts on their sleeves, and one thing that Viñas will do for you is turn the tables, converting peripheral characters such as Ricardo López Jordán into the protagonists of a series of moments in Argentine history that, when studied together, evidence a tradition of (often violent) resistance to the "powers that be." David Viñas is an important voice in the Argentine tradition of cultural criticism. I'm concerned to familiarize myself with his perspective so that I can figure out where I agree with him and where I don't. This book was a good place to start, and I look forward to reading his books on the national literary tradition. ( )