The "underworld" in Buenos Aires. Between the criminological essay and the marginalized literature

Abstract

This work will focus on the two ways on which the “underworld” has gotten into the Argentinian literature at the beginning of the last century. On the one hand, there are scientific studies (or almost scientific) related to this subject, which archetype could be La mala vida en Buenos Aires (1908) from Eusebio Gómez, that contains a great number of racial, social and sexual prejudices. On the other hand, there is a diverse group of marginalized literature, produced on the first 15 years of the 20th century, that account for the modus vivendi in the underworld of Buenos Aires, like the novel La muerte del Pibe Oscar from Luis C. Villamayor (partially published in 1913 and completed in 1926), the “Novísimo diccionario lunfardo” (1913-1915) from the Crítica newspaper, the pamphlets from the Biblioteca Criolla, the cheeky milongas, the brothel poems and some lyrics from the old tango. It is necessary to connect this corpus, dispersed and little known, with the first group of texts in order to obtain a more precise outlook on the subject.