Countermemory and politics in Argentina: Local demonstrations during Kirchnerism

Abstract

This article examines a counter-memorial intervention developed to question the figure of General Julio A. Roca within the framework of the demonumentalization campaigns that, inherited from the proposal originally launched by historian Osvaldo Bayer, were widespread in Argentina during the Kirchner years. The approach, which is nourished by the perspectives that view the work of memory in connection with politics, dialogues with antecedents that problematize the uses of the past under this juncture of recent history. It also historicizes a situated appropriation through a set of practices on the local scale: Río Cuarto, in the province of Córdoba. To this end, the actors, practices and discourses recorded on the occasion of proposing a set of public interventions and debates to change the name of the central square of the aforementioned city are identified and semanticized, including some voices in agreement with the hegemonic memory policy towards the Bicentennial of 2010 and others that, on the contrary, continued to be based on the historical common sense of the region, linked to the legitimization of the civilizing process undertaken by the advance of the national State at the end of the 19th century, and the sociocultural and economic order derived from there.