Quemando el Parquet: Cabecitas Negras, Urban Legends and abjection. The Construction of Regional Identity in an Argentine Working Class Community

In the late 1930s a new wave of migrants left the parajes of the departments of Loreto and Atamisqui for the packing houses of Berisso driven out of their homes by an epic drought that lasted almost two years. They arrived in a working class community that was one of Argentina’s largest meat packing centers, whose two packing houses would at the height of the Second World War employ almost 20,000 workers. The social and cultural landscape of this community was one dominated by European immigrants who had been arriving since the beginning of the century from all over Europe and the old Ottoman Empire. They found work in the frigoríficos and created and nurtured a dense network of cultural associations known locally as the “colectividades”. This network would continue to dominate Berisso’s social and cultural space. It is the complex interaction between these new migrants – the santiagueños – and the established community which is addressed in this paper.