Overview

In late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Buenos Aires, elites attempted to tackle growing poverty and social problems with a suite of social, educational, and medical reforms, hoping to make the city and larger nation more ""modern"" and ""progressive"" on the world stage. Known as the ""social question,"" this turn-of-the-century preoccupation with the future of the city and nation was undergirded by a larger set of social Darwinist beliefs about the biological and racial inferiority of immigrants and the working class, linking them to higher susceptibility to alcoholism, sexual deviancy, insanity, and disease. In Vida Zoo-cial, Ashley Elizabeth Kerr argues that the Buenos Aires Zoo and its many animal species were an important tool in attempts to remake Argentinian society. Elites used the zoo's physical spaces, programming, and visual and literary representations of its animals to try to educate and ""improve"" the masses, especially immigrants and the poor, but stopped short of supporting more radical social transformations. Drawing upon extensive archival research from the zoo's archive, including correspondence, municipal reports, receipts, and employment records, as well as a range of literary and popular culture sources, Kerr records these efforts, which included enlisting lionesses as object lessons in proper motherhood and elephants as model immigrants. Although some projects were successful, Kerr also documents the many ways others went awry when the zoo's animals and the humans who came to see them failed to cooperate. Vida Zoo-cial is not only a story about how the poor and working class resisted elite efforts for social reform founded upon racialized beliefs and pseudoscience, but also one that challenges readers to rethink the relationship between humans and non-humans.

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9780826508072

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Reviews

""Vida Zoo-cial is a creative and compelling social, cultural, and urban history of a central institution in modern Buenos Aires. Kerr describes and documents the historical significance of the zoo and its resonance with larger themes in turn-of-the-century Argentina, including public health campaigns; labor conditions and class relations; immigration and racial questions; gender expectations; family structures and heteronormativity; and nationalism and political conflict."" --Julia Rodriguez, author of Civilizing Argentina: Science, Medicine, and the Modern State

""A timely and engaging study of Latin America's oldest zoo. Kerr shows how the Jardín Zoológico de Buenos Aires Zoo mediated national conversations about hygiene, labor, immigration, and motherhood--and how its educational goals were subverted by pooping hippos, striking elephant seals, promiscuous rheas, and suicidal orangutans."" --Helen Cowie, author of Animals in World History ""Deeply researched, powerfully argued, and engaging from beginning to end--Ashley Elizabeth Kerr offers us a much-needed study of a Latin American zoo and its animals. Vida Zoo-cial will not only become required reading for anyone interested in zoo history, but it will prove enlightening to all scholars of modern Latin America."" --Daniel Vandersommers, author of Entangled Encounters at the National Zoo: Stories from the Animal Archive ""Kerr's deeply researched and well-crafted book interprets the Buenos Aires Zoo as a mirror of the most pressing political debates in Argentine society around 1900. The zoo animals served as proxies to prompt discussions on immigration, 'racial mixing, ' hygiene, social order, crime, and gender. Highly original!"" --Oliver Hochadel, co-editor of Urban Histories of Science: Making Knowledge in the City, 1820-1940 ""Kerr's pioneering research redirects zoo studies toward the Global South. Rejecting tidy imperial models, she demonstrates how the Buenos Aires Zoo was an institution rooted in Argentine society and an important crucible of the modern urban zoo."" --Susan Nance, author of Rodeo: An Animal History ""Vida Zoo-cial is a creative and compelling social, cultural, and urban history of a central institution in modern Buenos Aires. Kerr describes and documents the historical significance of the zoo and its resonance with larger themes in turn-of-the-century Argentina, including public health campaigns; labor conditions and class relations; immigration and racial questions; gender expectations; family structures and heteronormativity; and nationalism and political conflict."" --Julia Rodriguez, author of Civilizing Argentina: Science, Medicine, and the Modern State

Author Information

Ashley Elizabeth Kerr is an associate professor of Spanish and Latin American studies at the University of Idaho.

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