Atorrantes. Categorías marxistas para una nueva interpretación de una figura popular a fines del siglo XIX en Buenos Aires (El Obrero, 1890-1892).

The use of the term atorrante began to be spread among locals after 1880 and, a decade later, was already consolidated in the urban vocabulary: in popular language, the press and police narrative but also in the works of important intellectual referents. Because of the wide belief that Argentina was a country of job opportunities, the situations of absence of paid work used to be interpreted as voluntary marginality. The atorrante, who was associated with a young man, healthy and foreign, that is, the potential worker, synthesized that idea. In that same context, a sector of socialist with a marxist perspective, centered around the newspaper El Obrero, sought to impose a different interpretation of the atorrante. This article analyzes the way in wich the place occupied by the "without work" was considered from that publication -particularly those identified as atorrantes- in the Argentine social structure and the role they could play in a working class formation. The aim of the article is to analyse the use of marxist categories in order of resignify that stigmatized figure and include it in the worker's sector to which they aspired to represent. This allows us to reflect on some of the less studied forms adopted by the fight for the constitution of a worker identity in this embryonic stage. In particular, the dispute over the definition of workers' problems and the demarcation of the limits of the category of "worker" (and its reverse side). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]