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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Vida Zoo-Cial: The Buenos Aires Zoo and the Making of Argentine Society, 1875-1924

Vida Zoo-Cial: The Buenos Aires Zoo and the Making of Argentine Society, 1875-1924

Kerr, Ashley Elizabeth

Paperback

General SociologySouth American HistoryZoology

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ISBN10: 0826508065
ISBN13: 9780826508065
Publisher: Vanderbilt University Press
Published: Nov 15 2025
Pages: 266
Weight: 0.70
Height: 0.71 Width: 6.01 Depth: 8.91
Language: English

Premio al Mejor Libro en Humanidades, Latin American Studies Association, Nineteenth-Century Section, 2026

In late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Buenos Aires, elites attempted to tackle growing poverty and social problems with a suite of social, educational, and medical reforms, hoping to make the city and larger nation more modern and progressive on the world stage. Known as the social question, this turn-of-the-century preoccupation with the future of the city and nation was undergirded by a larger set of social Darwinist beliefs about the biological and racial inferiority of immigrants and the working class, linking them to higher susceptibility to alcoholism, sexual deviancy, insanity, and disease.

In Vida Zoo-cial, Ashley Elizabeth Kerr argues that the Buenos Aires Zoo and its many animal species were an important tool in attempts to remake Argentinian society. Elites used the zoo's physical spaces, programming, and visual and literary representations of its animals to try to educate and improve the masses, especially immigrants and the poor, but stopped short of supporting more radical social transformations. Drawing upon extensive archival research from the zoo's archive, including correspondence, municipal reports, receipts, and employment records, as well as a range of literary and popular culture sources, Kerr records these efforts, which included enlisting lionesses as object lessons in proper motherhood and elephants as model immigrants. Although some projects were successful, Kerr also documents the many ways others went awry when the zoo's animals and the humans who came to see them failed to cooperate.

Vida Zoo-cial is not only a story about how the poor and working class resisted elite efforts for social reform founded upon racialized beliefs and pseudoscience, but also one that challenges readers to rethink the relationship between humans and non-humans.

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