Sistema Regional de Información
en línea para Revistas Científicas de América Latina,
el Caribe, España y Portugal

The reflection on the archives that allow building historical knowledge about the last military dictatorship  in Argentina opens a wide range of problems and potential inquiries. This article presents the first  advances obtained in the exploration and analysis of the documentary collection that makes up the file  of the Information Service of the Argentine Prefecture for the so-called “North Atlantic Zone”. For this, an  approach to the so-called “Information Collection Plan”” of the Argentine Navy and, specifically, an analytical  reading of a series of reports prepared during the years 1975 and 1976 are proposed, while identifying a  moment of innovation in the Routine forms of force registration due to the imperatives of the so-called “fight  against subversion”. The paper seeks to offer a set of initial questions about the registration, monitoring and  intelligence practices of an internal security force sparsely explored today.

This article will present the characteristics of the documentary series consisting of Memos and Radiograms of  the Argentine Federal Police based in Córdoba. Between the years 1974-1982, a large amount of information  was produced on Army and Police procedures in everything related to what is considered subversion, as  well as data on the progress of the local economy and on the institutional functioning of the province. The  records are evidence of the infiltration that the intelligence had in many areas, since for the most part they  are prepared based on their self resources, mentioning that the data was obtained from whistleblower who  carried out auscultations. This documentary series will be critically analyzed reflecting on its context of  production and political intent, recognizing some methodological caveats that are useful for the historian’s  work.

In this article, we will make a reflection on the sanction of the women’s suffrage law at the municipal level  in San Juan -first and for a long time the only province where women have been granted this possibility  since the 19th century-, although we will question several of those that are considered its foundational  facts. In the first section, some of the lines of research that set out to think about the issue of suffrage in  Argentina will be covered, linking it, for the nineteenth century, with processes of political modernization. In  the second section, the historiographic debates regarding the municipal vote in San Juan will be addressed,  in particular, regarding heuristics and the identification of gaps due to lack of documentation. We will try,  through “reasoning based on known facts” -as Fernando Cardoso would say in his classic study- fill in the  gaps and share some findings that contribute to thinking and complexing the issue or, at least, indicate  which gaps should be filled. 

The article proposes is to present the Leonardo Dimase’s documentary fund hosted in the Centro de Estudios e  Investigaciones Laborales (CEIL) of the Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas (CONICET).  We start with a biographical tour of Dimase and his professional background. Then, we describe the  characteristics of the fund and its contributions to the study of labor, unionism, politics and other aspects of  the argentinian and international history. This will let us to inform a key resource to research in those fields,  and the own work of Dimase as a journalist, as well as his most notorious production, the monthly newsletter  called Informes Laborales.

Custodied in the National General Archive of Montevideo, the “Juan Ernesto Pivel Devoto Collection” contains,  among other documentary series, a practically unexplored epistolary. This is a considerable amount of letters  sent to the illustrious Uruguayan historian by foreign intellectuals and academic corporations. The purpose  of this article is to show the potential usefulness of the corpus for research on the process of shaping the  historiographic fields of the Rio de la Plata region between the 1930s and the 1950s and 60s.

This article seeks to announce the preservation and ordering work developed at Universidad de la Patagonia  (Trelew) around the criminal police records from the province of Chubut (Argentina), mostly referred to the  past twentieth century. In regard, we seek to describe its features and institutional course, in order to glimpse  the potential of those documents for scientific research.

This dossier is the result of an invitation from the Archivo del Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores y Culto (AMREC) to participate in a debate about our work in this repository (our research topics or problems, what materials of AMREC we used, how was our daily practice there) and what impact did it have in our work plans (what data did we find in those sources, did they transform our initial concerns, did they give us new answers to old questions). After this meeting, we invited other colleagues who had gone through a similar process to write down their experiences so that we could recognize differences and similarities in the historiographic work.

Taking on the challenge proposed by the invitation of the coordinators of this dossier, this essay aims to highlight the particular characteristics of the research agenda that I am currently developing. With the limits that an exercise in reviewing one's own tasks and the explanation of methodological decisions can have –rationalized, sometimes, ex post–, it is intended to account for the challenges that are generated when trying to dialogue with consolidated historiographic traditions in Argentina, such as those that account for the State building and the construction of national identity. At the same time, historiographical lines on transnational identities –Latin Americanism, Pan Americanism, Spanish Americanism– are reviewed in the heat of the study of the trajectories of actors who carried out diplomatic functions. Finally, it reflects on the possibilities that arise by the work with sources generated in the spaces of diplomacy in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Sources from the Archive of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Worship, the General Archive of the Nation, the National Historical Museum, various personal files and edited sources have been reviewed. Key words: diplomatic life, State building, national identity, latin americanism, pan Americanism