Emerging El Dorado | An Evening with Eduardo Elena
About this Event
🎟 This event is FREE and open to the public and books will be available for purchase the night of the event! An RSVP grants general entry, but seating is not guaranteed, so please try and show up early. Please RSVP only if you intend to join us. Can't make the event?
About The Book
The scramble for distant riches has featured centrally in the history of the Global South—from the first forays of European imperialists to the recent fascination with emerging markets. In the mid-nineteenth century, fortune hunters turned their attention to Argentina, transforming it into a front line of an expanding West. While accounts of this period often emphasize impersonal economic flows, Emerging El Dorado demonstrates that this chase for wealth has a far more multifaceted, dynamic, and human history. In Argentina, it encouraged explosive growth across several fronts—financial, commercial, demographic, and territorial. Capitalist routines of accumulation coexisted with get-rich-quick ventures, land grabs, and fraudulent schemes. Eduardo Elena's study profiles the promoters in Argentina and Europe who convinced others that this truly was a "rising country." At the same time, the book investigates the experiences of the groups who helped propel expansion, such as migrant families and overseas investors, and those like mixed-race paisanos/as and Indigenous peoples who were deemed obstacles. By exploring these overlapping social worlds, Emerging El Dorado sheds new light on the roots of our present-day growth dilemmas.
About The Author
Eduardo Elena specializes in the history of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Latin America, with a particular interest in the societies of the South Atlantic region. Born in Montevideo, Uruguay, he grew up in the United States and was educated at the University of Virginia (B.A.) and Princeton University (M.A., Ph.D.).
Professor Elena teaches undergraduate- and graduate-level courses on Latin America, the Americas, and the wider world from a variety of perspectives. In addition to introductory surveys, his regular offerings include classes on capitalism, global consumption, the Cold War in the Americas, travel and tourism, and Latin American political and social history.
Elena’s most recent book is (University of California Press, forthcoming 2026). Spanning an arc from the 1850s to the early 1900s, it profiles the promoters in Argentina and Europe (especially Britain) who convinced others that this was a “rising country.” At the same time, the book showcases the experiences of those swept along in the scramble (like migrant families and overseas investors) and those who defended other ways of living (like paisanos and Indigenous peoples). Engaging with the scholarship on informal empire, internal colonialism, and finance capitalism, this study provides a new perspective on our fascination with growth in the Global South. An essay related to this project, “Spinsters, Gamblers, and Friedrich Engels,” appeared in Hispanic American Historical Review.
His first book, Dignifying Argentina: Peronism, Citizenship, and Mass Consumption (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2011), reconsiders the mid-twentieth-century moment, a time of intense struggle over social rights and living standards. This study shows how Peronist authorities sought to channel the consumer aspirations of working-class Argentinians, but not without generating frictions among allies and opposition from other sectors. Dignifying Argentina was awarded the 2013 Book Prize in the Social Sciences by the Southern Cone Studies Section of the Latin American Studies Association. A Spanish-language translation of the book will be published by EDUNTREF.
Elena’s research on the politics of race and populism was published in Rethinking Race in Modern Argentina (Cambridge University Press, 2016), a volume of essays that he co-edited with Paulina Alberto (Harvard University). This interdisciplinary collection moves from the early twentieth century through the present and reevaluates assumptions about the country’s status as a Latin American outlier. Elena has published additional essays on race, national comparison, and Third World movements in other edited volumes.
He served as guest editor for a January 2023 special issue of the journal Historia Crítica (Bogotá, Colombia) titled “Nuevas miradas sobre el problema del costo de vida en América Latina, siglo **”
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