Context Podcast Digital Collection

Johanna Bringhurst: Hello everyone, and welcome to context. This program is brought to you by the Idaho Humanities Council with funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities. The views expressed here today do not necessarily represent those of the IHC or the NEH. My name is Johanna Bringhurst. And joining us today is Ashley. Ashley Kerr is an associate professor of Spanish and Latin American studies at the University of Idaho.

As an undergraduate, Kerr spent a year living in Chile. After graduation, she taught English in Argentine Patagonia as a Fulbright English teaching assistant. She has also taught abroad in Valencia, Spain, Montevideo, Uruguay, and sailed around the Atlantic as a faculty member on Semester at Sea at the University of Idaho. She teaches upper level courses on Latin American culture, literature, and film.

Her research focuses on race and gender in Argentina and Uruguay.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Her first book, sex, Schools and Citizens, Gender and Racial Science in Argentina, was named the 2020 Best Book by the 19th Century Studies Section of the Latin American Studies Association. Ashley, thank you for joining me today to talk about the research you have done on the Buenos Aires Zoo and how it was used to shape society at the turn of the last century.

Dr. Ashley Kerr: Thank you, Johanna, and thank you to everyone that's listening. I like your turn of the last century. That's debating in my head when I say turn of the century. Do people know which turn I'm talking about?

Johanna Bringhurst: I don't think they do. Now we have to specify. I'm talking about 1900, which is what we're focusing on today. So I'm really curious to learn how did you become interested in Latin America?

and then decided to be a Latin American Studies major because I wouldn't have to pick any particular department. I could take classes in every department as long as it had to do with Latin America. So I did that. I studied abroad in Chile, like you mentioned, and really loved it and wanted to find ways to go back.

Johanna Bringhurst: I love that story. You can follow your heart through school and end up where you should be.

Dr. Ashley Kerr: Well, and now I end up talking about animals, which is basically biology anyway, so I've really come full circle.

Johanna Bringhurst: Yeah, we will be very by biology heavy today. you have written about the Buenos Aires Zoo, and I'm really curious how you got into that history.

Dr. Ashley Kerr: So the zoo in Buenos Aires, I came about in two different ways, really, that came together. So the first is that I had been to Buenos Aires many times and I had visited the zoo. and it's right in the sort of the center of, major part of town. And everybody has a story about when they went to the zoo as a kid or, or things they remember from that.

So that was always in the back of my mind. And then my first book, which you mentioned, Sex, Girls and Citizens, is about early Argentine anthropology and its relationship to indigenous people. And one of the anthropologists whose work I was looking at was an Italian who had moved to Argentina, named Clemento Onelli, and only went on to become the second director of the Buenos Aires Zoo, where, as another, one of the scientists I had looked at briefly was the first director of the zoo.

And so I sort of was interested in these two figures. And then Covid hit and I was sitting there going, what am I going to do for my next project? And because it was Covid and I couldn't go anywhere, I was searching through online databases, just reading old magazines. And I discovered that in Caritas, which was one of the most popular weekly magazines in the early 20th century, there were articles about the zoo and its animals.

Every single issue, and some of them were factual articles like this is What the Zoo Animals Eat, A Day in the Life of the Director. But there were also cartoons using some of the animals. There would be poems about them. When a baby elephant died, there was a eulogy for her that was printed in this magazine. and so I kind of started thinking about this and wondering, okay, what can I do with this zoo?

And she said, actually, we have two rooms filled with boxes. We have no idea what's in the boxes. The boxes have no order. They haven't been cleaned. So you'll want to wear a mask and gloves. But I am happy to give you the run of those boxes. You can open anything up you want as long as you put it back when you're done.

and so I spent 3 or 4 months going through these boxes, and she gave me the space. And it's really interesting. I was in a room that was right next to the zoo's kitchens, where they made the food for the animals, and it had big glass windows, and I could see the free range, the free range roaming animals outside.

So there'd be peacocks coming by or Patagonian maras, which are kind of like a rabbit or a hare. As I'm sitting here going through these boxes that had documents from 1900, and also every receipt that was ever printed in 1990. you know, I've just been putting that all together now, in writing this book.

Johanna Bringhurst: Wow, that sounds like a historian's dream come true.

Dr. Ashley Kerr: So much fun. I had the best time just going through. You never knew what you were going to find. and in the location that I was in, it was great. You know, my daughter, who was seven at the time, would tell everybody, my mommy works at the zoo. Only half true.

Johanna Bringhurst: Yeah, well, lucky her. So the zoo has a really interesting history around its founding. Can you tell us more?

And so he created this very big park, in 1887 or, sorry, 1888, the zoo became an independent institution. And these dates are sort of interesting because if we think about zoos in the US, sort of as our comparative reference, the Philadelphia Zoo, which is the first zoo in the United States, is founded in 1874. So the year before the Buenos Aires Zoo starts to exist.

So scientists studying the animals at the time, there were really no veterinarians. So human doctors would come and do experiments on the animals and vice versa. and then by the time the second director takes over around 1904, there's also a push to make the zoo more fun to attract people. So they install a Ferris wheel, they have a miniature train.

you can take a ride on a camel or a pony or a llama. and they start to have more of these, these elements incorporated. And the zoo becomes so popular because of the programming, because of the animals, and because of all of these stories about the zoo that are being published, that by 1911, it's the most visited zoo in the world.

So there are more visitors and absolute numbers to the Buenos Aires Zoo than there are to New York, than there are to Paris, to London. and that number is about 1.5 million people, which was more than the population of the city at the time. So obviously some of those are people going multiple times those visits, but it just tells you the importance, right, that this space had and how fast it really rose to become.

sort of a central part of social, cultural life in the city.

Johanna Bringhurst: Absolutely. So at this same time period, the early 1900s, Argentines were arguing about social problems as well. They were broadly titled like Question Social. What were the issues that they were talking about and thinking about?

Dr. Ashley Kerr: Oh, so the zoo in Argentina is sort of born and develops at a very interesting period of time in Argentine history. so by the late 19th century, Argentina has been independent for 70, 80 years. they've just undergone a series of civil wars and infighting to try to establish what the country is going to look like, who the capital or where the capital is going to be.

And so they don't have any sort of laws or restrictions on who can come. They send different agents over to Europe to try to recruit people to emigrate to Argentina. And that's starting to bear fruit at this time. so we are seeing a huge increase in the number of foreigners between 1881 and 1930, 5.8 million people emigrated to Argentina.

So this is a huge.

Johanna Bringhurst: Wow.

Dr. Ashley Kerr: Yeah. And in, in Buenos Aires, in the capital, which is a port city, the percentage of foreigners is extremely high during the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century. So we're seeing that, Argentina is economically developing, beginning to integrate into the world market as a provider of raw materials and particularly agriculture. so if you've ever heard about Argentine beef, right, being some very, very good steak that is somewhat, starting from this period of time.

So all of this sounds really great on the surface. you know, you've got new people, you've got new energy, you've got new economic developments. But this influx of people and this influx of change also caused a lot of anxiety. I think as people, we don't like change. I know I don't like change very much. And all of a sudden the people in charge were looking around going,

They, often attributed to immigrants in the working class or susceptibility to alcoholism, to insanity and to other problems. and then they also saw that there was a rise in, or there was a rise in, movements like anarchism, which really did come with Spanish and Italian immigrants for the most part. but they saw this as causing more social disorder.

So these ruling elites who are from the same families that had been in power for many, many years, looked around and went, this is not good. What do we do? And their answer, of course, is not like, oh, maybe we need to think our about our social structure and how we're paying people, but rather like they're clearly things that are biologically and culturally wrong with all of these people.

We need to find ways to fix that.

Johanna Bringhurst: And we should be fair to that. This was happening all over the world, not just in Argentina, but in the United States, in many cities in Europe.

Dr. Ashley Kerr: Somehow.

Johanna Bringhurst: Yeah, yeah, this wasn't unique to Argentina, but they had their own, groups who were looking at those problems and trying to figure out how to solve them. so what were some of the different schools of thought about this?

Dr. Ashley Kerr: Yeah. So again, like you said, this is happening all over the world at the time period. And in fact, the Argentines are reading the the textbooks and the pamphlets that are published around the world and sending out their own as well. so there are many, many schools of thought at the time. Obviously, different groups have different affinities.

there was a significant anarchist population, an anarchist press that basically said the solution is to burn it all down. Right. the Socialist Party grows to power here, and is looking at organizing labor, and particularly saying, hey, the way to take care of these social problems is to ensure that workers are paid more, have rights, and work in better conditions.

Right? So that's one way to approach it. Different ethnic collectives formed their own sort of mutual aid societies, worked together. Education is, a big factor at this time period. Argentina instituted secular education at the end of the 19th century. Mandatory elementary education at the very beginning of the 20th century. So there's a lot of focus on education reform as a way of moving the country forward.

There's sort of a large scale locking up of those deemed criminally insane, or otherwise unhealthy. And so a lot of things that are looking to try to better society but are often infringing on individual rights right now, of course, not everything they did was was quite like that. They also encouraged things like handwashing as a way to, to to lessen the amount of disease.

Johanna Bringhurst: You argue that some of the city's elites believed that the zoo could be used to shape society. Why the zoo?

Dr. Ashley Kerr: What, you don't automatically think of zoos if you're thinking about trying to take care of, you know, social problems.

Johanna Bringhurst: Maybe I should be, but no.

Dr. Ashley Kerr: Well, let me convince you on why you could think about it, or at least why people did think that way. at least in Argentina. And I think this is actually something as well that you could probably make an argument for in zoos around the world. but it's not one that is frequently made, I think, largely because zoos in Europe, in the US, which are most of the zoos that have been studied, are often viewed in connection to imperialism.

So if you get animals from other countries, you can show your power over them and things like that. And that's not the case in Argentina. And that's really where I started with this project. I was like, well, if it's not an Imperial zoo, what is it doing? And yes, like you said, I think it's they're using it to shape society.

And your question of why is a good one? it's actually, I think, pretty easy in some ways to answer the number of people that go to the zoo. Right? I mean, if I'm talking about 1.5 million visitors in 1911, that's far more visitors than to any other cultural institute in the country at the time. And in fact, absolutely.

Yeah. I found a cartoon, a political cartoon from the time period that has two, senators talking to each other, and the one says, you know, if we want to fix up this country, we should look around and nobody goes to libraries, or museums and everybody goes to the zoo. So we really ought to just shutter the libraries and the museums and put all of our money into making the zoo bigger.

Right. And I think that cartoon is sort of emblematic of this. The other thing is, not only is the zoo incredibly popular in terms of numbers, the population that goes to the zoo really encompasses all of Argentine society. So museums are another place that are frequently used at the end of the 19th century to try to shape people, their identity, their relationship to the nation.

But museums are often only accessible to a particular sector of the population. Right? a sector of a population that has the free time to go to a museum, has the money to pay the admission if there is one, and often that is literate in order to be able to read the displays and things like that. Most of that's not applicable to the zoo.

So the zoo is open seven days a week, so people that work during the week can go on the weekends. It's open relatively long hours, usually from dawn to dusk. Right. there was an admission cost to the winner Saturday Zoo, but it was $0.10, which was relatively affordable. It was free one Sunday a month. Schoolchildren, veterans were always free.

and so lots of people could go to the zoo and they could target, particularly immigrants, the working class children who are our future. and so it really brought together this absolute numbers factor, but also the fact that it was the very people that those in charge thought that they had to change who were going to the zoo.

Johanna Bringhurst: So how did this zoo shape the debate around immigration?

and the way that people thought about those immigrants was very different. there were the stereotypes of the southern European as being lazy, taking the siesta. Spain, actually, I don't know if you've ever heard the expression that Africa begins at the Pyrenees. It's this idea that, you know, Spain and Portugal are actually North African countries because of their history.

And so these were questions that were people were asking. And I argue that the zoo was a great place to talk about them for a couple of different reasons. So the first is the argument that goes on behind the scenes at all zoos, which is what's the proper ratio of exotic foreign animals to local species. Right. And this comes down to a question of what's the purpose of zoos?

Also baby animals. So, Argentina, the Buenos Aires Zoo was the first zoo in the world to have, an elephant born in captivity that survived. And this was in 1904. her name was Victoria Fua. The Fua was from her her parents name and the Victoria was victory. And then her last name was Portainer, which means someone of the port city of Buenos Aires.

What makes it an animal, a citizen or not? A citizen? and so I think these are all ways of sort of exploring these questions for humans. For instance, in Argentina at the time, anyone born in the Argentine territory was Argentine. So children of immigrants were Argentines and therefore were not necessarily a problem. And I think that they're talking about elephants in the same way to sort of process these ideas.

they also did experiments with, you know, can you bring, a Highlander cow from Scotland and move it to Argentina? Will it adapt? Well it won't, which they then used to talk about. Like, can human beings physically adapt and biologically adapt to new climates or not? and then I think you can talk about the zoo as a sort of a place of patriotism of, you know, this is our zoo.

These are our animals. There's a great anecdote I found in a paper about how, there was apparently a man who would sit outside the zoo gates and when the schoolchildren would come on their field trips, he would start just like giving speeches about these Argentine founding fathers and national heroes. And this image, just to me, really illustrates that the zoo was a place where you could have these diverse groups of children coming in, but they were being educated and, you know, being an Argentine, both in terms of the history and we control this land, we control these animals.

This is, you know, this is our culture. This is something Argentine.

Johanna Bringhurst: That's so wonderful, actually, to hear all of the different ways that people are looking at animals and thinking about the animals, it sounds them like journalists and publish areas and media were a big part of that group that was trained to kind of use the zoo as a way to explore these issues. Yeah. Is that right?

And I actually have a note where one of the publishers was like, we want more stuff from you, particularly notes about the zoo. and I think, you know, that's what people wanted to read. the other thing.

Johanna Bringhurst: Also popular, was popular to the public.

Dr. Ashley Kerr: Absolutely. All of these stories, they would have like when a foreign monkey would come visit. So, chimpanzees. Right. So you would get some famous European chimpanzees that would come and they would pretend to have interviews with them. And so there's an interview with this man, this chimpanzee named Consul, and they're like, so what do you think of Buenos Aires?

Right. And he's like, yeah, you know, it's not bad. I like this, I like that. But really everybody lives in these enclosed houses, which is terrible for their health. And he's talking about hygiene and the importance of, ventilation. Right through this visiting chimpanzee who is they're pretending to interview.

Johanna Bringhurst: And thinking of like a crocodile with a toothbrush. Also for, kids today, one of the how the role of women in society. Is that something that was addressed through the zoo?

Dr. Ashley Kerr: Absolutely. and I think that was one of the areas that I first started noticing when I was working on this project. in part because I think as a mother, it's something that I'm frequently attuned to, but also the fact that we think of the zoos as being places for children a lot of times, and in terms of gender, if we go back to this question, social, we mentioned this idea of resolving all of these social problems, really, no matter what group people identified with.

And so did.

Johanna Bringhurst: This.

Dr. Ashley Kerr: Oh, sorry. Go ahead. Okay.

Johanna Bringhurst: Did they see women as a partner in this effort? Or they wanted to determine the policies and then have women implement them.

Dr. Ashley Kerr: Depended on the group? Okay. You have to. It was very, very different. for instance, you you know, you might have, socialists advocating for better working conditions for women and a shorter working day so that they could spend time at home with their children. So they're saying, hey, women can work and be part of this. But we also need to protect this motherhood side, whereas other groups might have a different approach.

So in terms of the zoo, what I found has been very interesting, and it really ranges from these metaphorical uses of the animals to very hands on concrete policies to improve mother child health. so in terms of the more metaphorical in all of these zoo stories that we've been talking about, they almost always are. And in the zoo guidebooks, because I also have access to most of the zoo guidebooks from this time period.

they talk about the animals in terms of stable heterosexual family pairings that are designed for reproduction, which of course is the ideal for building the nation at the time. And so they'll always talk about, you know, the mom camel and the dad camel and the baby camel. And the way that they talk about it is interesting because the phrase legítimamente casado so legitimately married, comes up frequently, and it's like, what does it mean to be legitimately married if you're a monkey, right?

Or an elephant? and I think it's just reinforcing this overarching importance on we want stable marriages. We want people, reproducing so that we can build the population of the nation. Argentina is a very large country. It had a lot of space to, to fill in essentially. and then they contra past this with certain species of monkeys that live in common cages.

So they're not living in family unions. And they talk about how these are very promiscuous monkeys. They're poorly behaved, they're beating their wives, they're sleeping around.

Johanna Bringhurst: Oh my.

Dr. Ashley Kerr: Word. Much this like judgmental view of how you should be living and how you shouldn't through zoo animals. And of course, these have nothing to do. Usually these representations with how animals actually live, right? and the other things that I've seen too are the idea of good mothers and bad mothers. So, for instance, in the Zoo Guide for many years, it describes the lionesses that they have and one of the lionesses is an exemplary mother.

And it describes what she does. And one is a very bad mother who deserves to have her babies taken away.

Johanna Bringhurst: Oh dear.

Johanna Bringhurst: Oh my goodness.

Dr. Ashley Kerr: Right. So we're incorporating hippos into our shaming of of women now, right. For, just.

Johanna Bringhurst: Makes me so sad to hear that that kind of shaming over breastfeeding was happening.

Dr. Ashley Kerr: And, and even back in the day.

Johanna Bringhurst: Even back then these days.

So there is also this it's not just, hey, this hippo is shaming you, but also here, come to the zoo and we will teach you and provide you with the things that you need in order to be a better mother.

Johanna Bringhurst: Support you in the role.

Dr. Ashley Kerr: Yeah, within sort of a limited idea.

Johanna Bringhurst: Of sort of a very limited scope of support.

Dr. Ashley Kerr: Yeah.

Johanna Bringhurst: During this time, there was also a lot of unrest and controversy about labor. how was the zoo involved in labor movements and those to be?

Dr. Ashley Kerr: Yeah. so this is the area, I would say, of the book that is, to me the most complex and at times contradictory, largely because I think the labor movement in general and in Argentina in particular, was pretty complex and contradictory at the time. So one thing I noticed in, looking at zoo design, in reading the guidebooks and reading these stories about the zoo is how the zoo animals are largely depicted as aristocrats.

so they all live in things like at the Bear Palace. Right. and they're described as, as royalty. there's a column that appears in the zoo's journal regularly that describes it's essentially the society pages of the zoo, and it'll talk about, you know, such and such animal. Welcome to their new baby. And it was celebrated with a 5:00 tea.

these animals have gone off to their summer homes, things like that. And so this aspect of it. Right. And they're contrasted with the animals that work at the zoo, which are like the cart horses that have to carry the you pull the, the carts of food for the different animals. He also, the one zoo director writes repeatedly about how his upper class animals don't like poor people that come to the zoo.

and that there was, for instance, a gibbon that roamed around and would try to he would behave with children and well-dressed visitors. But he would try to bite the poor workers that were at the zoo. And also was most vicious with alcoholics, is what he wrote. So to me, that's a juxtaposition of in terms of labor and social class.

but then there's also the fact that really behind the scenes, these aren't aristocrats, these are zoo animals that are in caged, that don't have a lot of enrichment, don't have any sort of freedom. Zoo conditions were not great at this time, largely because of financial restraints. And so I think there was actually a lot more in common between these animals and the workers and the poor visitors than maybe is is popularly shown.

but these animals also are used in representations to talk about labor and labor rights and things like that. so this aristocratic zoo is often used in the newspapers and in these magazines to critique society and advocate for better human conditions. And the way they do this is by frequently talking about how the animals at the zoo live better than the poor in the city.

And in this cartoon, they have a man who stares up at the lion cage and looks really dismayed, and he reads out that, you know, they're giving them ten kilos of beef on Mondays, you know, 11 of veal on Tuesdays. And he says, well, until we resolve this crisis, I'm going to request a room in this hotel. And so there's this idea, like, you're better off living in a lion cage than living on your own in this city.

at the same time. And this is where I start to kind of go in circles, is this one director was extremely anti-communist and used animal representation to demonstrate that. So he seems to have been very kind to his own workers. and he even participates in some of the public universities created by the Socialist Party. But he uses, for instance, birds, to, to basically say that communists are terrible.

he talks about how sparrows come in and steal the other birds nests at the zoo, and he says that they're like taking over for the good people, and using their spaces. And this is a demonstration of how communism is actually a parasitic relationship. and so, yeah, there's just all of this back and forth, the other little, sort of anecdote that I'll mention relating to labor is that the zoo directors actually complain quite frequently because the zoo is right next to sort of a broad avenue.

And when I say it is, that was often used as a site for protesting. And so when workers would go and protest on this site, they would set off fireworks or they'd have drums and it would scare these animals. and there were several cases of deer who got so frightened, for instance, that they ran into the bars of their cage and got so injured that they died.

And the vast majority of them are immigrants who are illiterate. and it ranges from they had a lot of child labor at the zoo all the way up to people who it would be, in the records we'd see, like, they were asking for, for leave one day, and then the next day there'd be a note being like, actually, that person died.

And so they're working all the way up until their 80s or until they're so old that they basically just die as soon as they leave the space. so that's been interesting to see, too, because I think we don't often think of the workers at the zoo as an integral part of it. but obviously without the human workers, there's no zoo.

Johanna Bringhurst: Absolutely. So it sounds like the zoo really was central in a lot of these debates, and not with one narrative or one point of view, but it's really complicated and messy and nuanced.

Dr. Ashley Kerr: You've got it. you know, I frequently joke with people that there's no issue or moment in Argentine history at this time that I can't connect to the zoo. Somehow. I think I could find you an example of almost anything happening at the zoo or the zoo being used to talk about almost anything. And you're right. you know, one of the parts that I'm working on now is these are all of the plans that the zoo elite had.

But the truth of the matter is, just because they want people to interpret the zoo animals in a particular way or behave in a certain way at the zoo, people don't do that. Even at the zoo today, people are trying to feed the animals, right? They can't even get them not to do that. And so I'm looking at the ways that, yes, some of these populations, these poor workers, even anarchists, how do they use the zoo and stories about the zoo for their own purposes, as well as how do the animals react to this?

Right. It's all very well and good to say I'm going to make an exemplary mother out of this lion, but we have very little control over lion behavior. So, like what happens when your exemplary animal actually kills her baby or what happens when you're talking about all of these, animals living in heterosexual pairings and you've got species like ostriches and emus who famously exist in homosexual pairs as well.

and so I think that's the kind of final little interesting bit of the story is. Yeah, you can try to do all of this, but there was constantly pushback from people and animals, both intentional and not so intentional, that really complicated this this story and complicated these projects.

Johanna Bringhurst: So what are the next steps for you with this amazing research that you've done?

and and, you know, why did it matter? Actually, at one point, they were they were giving thousands of eggs to city hospitals a year from all of their animals.

Johanna Bringhurst: Amazing.

Dr. Ashley Kerr: Yeah, it's pretty cool. So. So, yeah, I want to just keep digging deeper with all of this, but I think, you know, the number of zoo stories I can tell and that the archive will tell and other people will tell. It's probably endless. and, you know, it doesn't end even in this time period. I was thinking about this as I was preparing for for this talk.

You you know, one of the things I found was that in zoo guides that have vaccination information for smallpox pox vaccination and it would be like, you can get vaccinated at this site on this day, or you should get vaccinated because three people in Buenos Aires die a day from smallpox. And I was thinking about that, and I was like, wait a second.

And how do we as individuals interact with animals and with zoo spaces when we go.

Johanna Bringhurst: Oh, definitely, I am, as you are talking as thinking about all of the stories I tell my children about our dog to try to like, you know, get them to see something my way.

Dr. Ashley Kerr: So help.

Johanna Bringhurst: Bring them back on. And so, yeah, you totally open my eyes. Ashley, thank you so much. It's been so great to talk to you, and we wish you so much luck in finishing your book and all the stories that you have to share ahead.

Dr. Ashley Kerr: thank you so much. This was really a pleasure. I appreciate it. Thank you. Bye.