This is both a valuable and a disappointing addition to the many books analyzing the border provinces in the Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata. As the author puts it, “el tema de este trabajo es lo acontecido en la región cuyo centro está en Soriano . . . una encrucijada en se mezclaron y enfrentaron los grupos sociales, razas e interes mas diversos . . . [un] campo de experimentación social, económica y política” (p. 5). Thus he follows the research path marked so ably by Nicolás Sánchez Albornoz.
The work consists of original documents laced together by Lockhart’s comments and introductions. The author worked in the National Archives of both Argentina and Uruguay and the Archivo del Juzgado Letrado de Mercedes, where he sifted well the sources which dealt with Soriano during the challenging years from 1766 until 1811. To preserve the flavor of the time, however, he has elected to ignore standard techniques of citation. Often important documents are identified only by statements such as: “The Viceroy then asked....” This reviewer doubts that appropriate footnotes would have diluted the sense and the zest of the work, while their absence does weaken the value of the study for other scholars.
Unfortunately La vida cotidiana also lacks a bibliography, an index, a table of contents, chapter divisions, and a map. The last deficiency is particularly galling, for Lockhart suggests that the disputes about the best location for the municipalidad serve as a way to understand the patterns of the time. As this is but the first of a multi-volume study, many of the deficiencies may yet be corrected. Nevertheless one additional failing of the study must be noted—it even lacks a proper title! The subject of this work is not everyday life, but rather public life. The evidence which the author draws generally from court records and letters of complaint by dissatisfied officials suggests that Soriano must have been the Peyton Place of the Plata. Perhaps, however, the picture of a society dominated by rapine, robbery, debauchery, and depravity unduly slights the life of the common man of the area.
Such weaknesses, however, should not obscure the value of the study. Lockhart has created an effective sense of a society growing restless under distant control. Thus he shows us something of the themes which stimulated the Platine drift towards independence and then facilitated the development of caudillismo—i.e., he analyzes not Belgrano, Benavídez, or Artigas, but rather the society from which they came. In this sense La vida cotidiana supplements well the recent and valuable studies of caudillismo as put forth by Editorial Plus Ultra and others.
