Janey Program in Latin American Studies

Between 1870 and 1920, millions of Europeans crossed the Atlantic and settled in the port-cities of Buenos Aires and New York to start a new life, with a significant number of them settling in socially stigmatized, economically pauperized and politically disenfranchised “tenement houses.” My research has a three-fold aim: (1) to explore the way the tenement dwellers – mostly immigrants – and various reformers construed each other as morally deficient and competent subjects, respectively, with the former taking on the role of pedagogues to the latter and providing them, through home visits and civic manuals and lessons, proper standards of conduct; (2) to analyze the way tenement dwellers made sense of their own ethical practices and interactions with their neighbors; and, (3) to explain how material “things” constituted and were constitutive of their ethical practices. While my research puts forward an historical-ethnographic account of the ethical practices of tenement dwellers at the turn of the century in Buenos Aires and New York City, the main objective of this research is to initiate a conversation between recent anthropological literature, which is focused on the study ethical practices, and sociological scholarship, which remains mainly concerned with moral rules and normative codes. This research relies on historical-ethnographic evidence gathered mainly from primary sources and, to a lesser extent, from secondary sources.