Lunfardo, Popular Culture, and the Process of Creation of a National Cultural Identity in Argentina

As Argentina is born as a modern nation-state in the second half of the 19th century, the question of what its cultural identity is becomes prominent in Argentine society. At the elite and the popular levels of society, different discourses and cultural practices negotiate the formation of that new cultural identity. Lunfardo is a linguistic repertoire central both for these new forms of popular culture, and as a foil for a different model of national culture by the elites, and thus opposed by them in their initial analyses of it. This paper aims to elucidate some of the dynamics around the discourse on Lunfardo at both the elite and popular level in those decades, early within the process of creation of a national cultural identity in Argentina.