This book examines the prolific and widely-attended popular theater boom of the género chico criollo in the context of Argentina's modernization. Victoria Lynn Garrett examines how selected plays mediated the impact of economic liberalism, technological changes, new competing and contradictory gender roles, intense labor union activity, and the foreign/nativist dichotomy. Popular theaters served as spaces for cultural agency by portraying conventional and innovative performances of daily life. This dramatic corpus was a critical mass cultural medium that allowed audiences to evaluate the dominant fictions of liberal modernity, to critique Argentina's purportedly democratic culture, and to imagine alternative performances of everyday life in accordance with their realities. Through a fresh look at the relationship among politics, economics, popular culture, and performance in Argentina's modernization period, the book uncovers largely overlooked articulations of popular-class identities and desires for greater inclusion that would drive social and political struggles to this day.

Victoria Lynn Garrett is Visiting Assistant Professor of Spanish at the College of Charleston, USA, where she specializes in Performance and Visual Studies, primarily in Argentina and Mexico. She and Pablo García Loaeza are co-authors of The Improbable Conquest: Letters from the Río de la Plata, 1537-1556. Her work has appeared in Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies, Hispania, Romance Quarterly, and other edited volumes.