La Joven Moderna in Interwar Argentina: Gender, Nation, and Popular Culture by Tossounian, Cecilia. Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2020

SILVANA A. PALERMO

HISPANIC AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW, THE

Duke University Press

Lugar: Durham, NC; Año: 2021 vol. 101 p. 371 - 373

0018-2168

For their very same nature, national symbols aspire to be timeless and hardly controversial. In the case of Argentina, whose fertile grasslands transformed the country into the breadbasket of the world in the late nineteenth century, the ?gaucho?, a nomadic horseman, familiar with rural labors and the loneliness of the pampas emerged as the emblem of nationhood. A booming body of scholarly work has demonstrated that, far from being a topic inscribed in a longstanding tradition, such stylized image of the gaucho was invented precisely at the time that the rural landscape was moving to commercial agriculture and modern cattle production and local elites confronted the challenge of making a nation out of a multinational society marked by thousands of European immigrants. In that boisterous era, writers and intellectuals enshrined the gaucho as the main character of renowned novels and popular dramas alike. Thus, by the early twentieth century, this masculine folk hero turned into the official symbol of the nation, both at home and abroad. Cecilia Tossounian invites to rethink this engrained construct by taking gender as a concept of historical analysis. Her book poses a seemingly simple but challenging question: Could this young nation be represented by a female figure? Her carefully researched study demonstrates that the joven moderna, the modern young girl whose visual and written descriptions flurried in the weekly magazines, penny novels and who starred the many movies of the nascent local film industry in the 1920s and 1930s, deserves an equal standing in this republic?s pantheon of tradition as the gaucho accomplished