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.

Ashley Elizabeth Kerr is an associate professor of Spanish and Latin American studies at the University of Idaho.

Introduction | Vida Zoo‑cial: The Social Life of the Zoo
Chapter One | A Learned and Hygienic Excursion: Public Health, Medicine, and the Zoo
Interlude
Chapter Two | Aristocratic Apes and Proletarian Llamas: Social Class and Labor at the Zoo
Interlude
Chapter Three | Guanacos or Bengal Tigers? Zoo Collections, Acclimatization, and the Defense of the Raza Latina
Interlude
Chapter Four | The National Family Goes to the Zoo: Reproduction, Motherhood, and Feminist Ostriches
Interlude
Conclusion | A Center for the Irradiation of Culture and Ideas: The Buenos Aires Zoo as Municipal, National, and International Institution
Notes
Bibliography
Index