“A historical museum of dirt, apathy and ruins”: an analysis of discourses about the “historical zone” of Buenos Aires (1979-1982)

Abstract

This article analyzes, from a materialist perspective of discourse, the barely studied case of the U-24 district, a historical preservation area created in 1979 in the neighborhoods of San Telmo and Montserrat (Buenos Aires, Argentina). It focuses on the controversy due to the criticism it aroused in 1981 from sectors with real estate interests, which led to the reduction of 50% of its surface in 1982. The analysis of discursive processes found in a corpus of 60 documents allow us to go deeper into the contradictory coexistence of this preservation policy with a set of other urban policies that favored demolitions and the expulsion of popular sectors under the imperatives of modernization and hierarchization of the city, in times of civil-military dictatorship. The study is based on the creation of five montages of discursive sequences that restore complexity about this case. It concludes that U-24 allows us to see how the crisis of the time of modernization is announced –associated with the monumental discourse– and
how the heritage discourse (which constitutes a device for discursive objectification of the time/space relationship that would be consolidated in the following decade, after democratic recovery begins to take hold.