The unhappy experience. Racialized plebs and violence in Buenos Aires in 1820.

Abstract

At the end of 1820, Martin Rodríguez began to govern the province of Buenos Aires. This government introduced a series of reforms in order to obtain a better administrative structure and organize a society convulsed by the revolution. The military reform of 1821, the vagrant and beggar law and the disciplining of the workforce were some of the transformations. These changes allow us to think about the reactions of the Buenos Aires plebs and ask ourselves: can violence as a form of response be interpreted as a political position against the leading sectors of the city? We start from what is proposed by the philosopher Elsa Dorlin, who argues that the violent response, the explosive self-defense, responds to another semiology that has nothing to do with sacrifice, but with the effusive and immediate response, in the revenge of the counterattack, which does not calculate purposes, but it has immediacy. This is understood as a policy of affirmation and representation of oneself, in this way the dignity and pride of the oppressed are restored (Dorlin, 2018: 172,173). Which allows us to argue that violence was used as a form of resistance against the transformations imposed from above.