Criollismo as Parody: Visual Constructions of a Hybrid National Identity in Argentina's Popular Theatre

The modernization of Argentina (1890-1930) witnessed massive social transformations that were portrayed in an admirable way in the popular theater of that time (the rural circo and urban género chico criollos), that helped consolidate a regional (criollo) identity through particular performance styles and languages. The criollista aesthetics and its counter-hegemonic cultural discourse was massively produced and consumed by rural peasants and urban working class sectors. Many Italian immigrants identified with the counter-hegemonic nature of criollismo and consequently imitated criollo costumes and demeanors in order to assimilate with the subaltern sectors of the receiving society. Emblematic of this hybrid identity in transition was the stock character of Neapolitan Cocoliche that emerged during the urbanization of the circo criollo, when audiences started to become ethnically diversified, and required of the troupe that it provide a mirror to the many immigrants who attended the functions. Cocoliche appeared as a parody of the Italians who dressed up as gauchos and spoke broken Spanish. The term remained as a reference to that mixture of Italian and Spanish that the popular theatre used so profusely as a comic device in hundreds of sainetes.

This paper studies the visual representations of Cocoliche as a performative construction of a hybrid identity during the nation building era, particularly looking at the counter-hegemonic aspect of this representation, as it brings together cultural elements that the Porteño elite were interested in discarding (ie., the outlaw nature of the gaucho hero, the broken Spanish and the carnivalesque persona of Cocoliche, that alluded to the peasant and illiterate origins of the Italian immigrants that were arriving to Argentina). As a hybrid paradigm, Cocoliche enacts the cultural conflicts of that society in transition, and becomes a referent for many of the “inversions” (gender, sexual, racial, class) that characterized those dynamic decades.