A Review of The Creation of Modern Buenos Aires. Football, Civic Associations, Barrios, and Politics, 1912-1943

Every time I travel back to Buenos Aires, my hometown, I immediately text my dad, “Can you get tickets to go to La Bombonera?” La Bombonera is Boca Juniors’ stadium, and Boca is our football team—just as it was my grandfather’s and as it is my nephew’s. When I was younger, before moving to the United States to pursue my Ph.D., I used to go on Sundays with friends to la popular—the standing terraces, akin to those in old British stadiums. Now, when I return, we need to get seats, as my father no longer wants to stand for three hours, and my nephew is still too young for the chaos of la popular. Despite these changes, the ritual remains, and it is one of the highlights of my visits.

The Creation of Modern Buenos Aires. Football, Civic Associations, Barrios, and Politics, 1912-1943 by Joel Horowitz (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2024, 204 pages)

In fact, Buenos Aires’ neighborhoods have been crucial to the creation of local identities. Porteños often identified with their barrios, where various civic associations fostered a sense of belonging. However, this was not always the case—and more importantly, neighborhoods have lost part of that identity as gentrification has spread throughout the city. To explore the emergence of barrio identities and their connections to local politics, Joel Horowitz recently published The Creation of Modern Buenos Aires: Football, Civic Associations, Barrios, and Politics, 1912–1943. The book highlights the role that civic associations played in shaping the social and cultural identities of Buenos Aires’s barrios while also serving as a key component of the city’s political landscape.

In 1912, the passing of the Sáenz Peña Law transformed Argentine politics by making voting “universal” (though only for men until 1947), secret and mandatory. While the late 19th century saw the rise of political “war machines” that sought to control who accessed voting stations and how they voted, the new law radically reshaped the role of politicians and political parties. Forced to compete, politicians had to devise strategies to persuade people to vote for them. In Buenos Aires, one such strategy, as Horowitz argues, involved participating in or supporting local civic associations. Although these associations were typically organized by local neighbors, they often faced financial hardship, making ties with politicians a crucial way to secure economic resources. In turn, civic associations reinforced barrio identities by fostering a sense of belonging among neighbors.

The Creation of Modern Buenos Aires spans the period between the passing of the Sáenz Peña Law and the 1943 military coup, which would later give rise to Peronism and once again transform Argentine politics. During these years, the city of Buenos Aires underwent three major transformations. First, the city expanded: its population grew, and people began moving beyond the traditionally populated areas in the eastern part of the city, near the Río de la Plata. This expansion was facilitated by the development of public transportation, which allowed greater mobility across the city.

Second, the city’s demographic growth was fueled by a massive wave of European immigrants seeking new opportunities in Argentina and, specifically, in Buenos Aires. By 1914, almost half (49%) of the city’s population was foreign-born. This influx of immigrants was later complemented by internal migration. Combined, these movements caused Buenos Aires to grow from slightly over 1.3 million residents in 1910 to 2.7 million by 1940.

Finally, the third transformation occurred at the national level but had significant local implications: the introduction of the eight-hour workday and the half-day Saturday gave workers more leisure time to fill. In this context of urban expansion, cultural diversity brought by immigrants, and increased free time, civic associations became crucial hubs, offering people a sense of belonging tied to the barrio they lived in.

Horowitz examines four types of civic associations: football clubs, popular libraries, sociedades de fomento (development societies) and universidades populares (popular universities). Each provides specific insight into two key aspects that Horowitz focuses on: the nature of participation and the impact these associations had on their neighborhoods, as well as how politicians sought to support, participate in or secure financial streams for these local institutions in their quest to build patronage networks that could help them win elections.

The case of football clubs is perhaps the most striking—not only because they were the most popular civic associations, but also because the connections between football and politics were deeply intertwined throughout the 20th century in Argentina. As football’s popularity grew and clubs gained more members, local politicians sought to associate themselves with the clubs to bolster their public image. They often leveraged their political connections with the city government to secure favors for the clubs, such as granting public land for new stadiums. Club elections frequently involved opposing factions linked to different local political parties.

In the case of popular libraries and universidades populares, financial hardship created opportunities for politicians to intervene. Access to public funding or the procurement of books earned these politicians the goodwill of the civic associations’ leaders, who were often highly influential in their neighborhoods. Similarly, the sociedades de fomento took on local issues such as street paving and lighting, but their lack of sufficient funding forced their leaders to turn to politicians to get things done, making these associations another point of connection between politics and neighborhood life.

This is a well-documented book. Horowitz draws on a wide range of primary sources, including magazines, newspapers, records from civic associations and governmental archives. These diverse materials allow him to revisit a topic that was extensively explored in the 1990s and early 2000s by authors such as Hilda Sábato, Luis Alberto Romero, Leandro Gutiérrez, and Luciano De Privitellio, among others. However, Horowitz adopts a more critical stance on the democratic benefits often associated with the expansion of civic associations. Arguing that the transformative effects of these institutions depend on the societies in which they developed, he asserts that “civic associations did not function as schools for democracy.”

It is worth noting that the book does not explore in depth how people experienced the growth of these civic associations. This is partially because Horowitz focuses primarily on the leaders and their connections with politicians, leaving the users and members of the associations less visible in the narrative. Incorporating personal diaries or testimonies from “less prominent” individuals could have enriched this history of civic associations and the roles they played in shaping modern Buenos Aires.

In sum, the book provides an insightful perspective on the barrio identities of Argentina’s capital and their connections with local political networks. Historians and social scientists interested in urban history, local politics, democracy, and the expansion of suffrage will undoubtedly find the book engaging. For porteños like myself, it is an enjoyable read that sheds light on our own history and explains why certain rituals, like going to La Bombonera, persist over time despite generational changes.

Pablo Pryluka is a modern Latin American and global historian interested in the intersection of economic, social, and environmental history. He is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Weatherhead Research Cluster on Global History at Harvard University, where he is working on his book manuscript “Developing Consumers: A History of Wants and Needs in Postwar South America.” He received his Ph.D. in History from Princeton University (2024).

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