Mapping Dollar Transactions: Usdollar Uses and Meanings in Argentine Economy

“The dollar is programmed in the Argentine DNA,” is a maxim heard in both cafes and press conferences.

For several decades, the economic discourse in Argentina of both experts and laymen reaffirm the use of the dollar as a “fatal” currency. Its widespread use as both a way to save, a method of exchange and even as an imaginary money is accepted by the most diverse social groups and economic sectors today.

The use of the dollar varies across Latin America—from the dollarization of the economies of Panama and Ecuador to varied uses of the U.S. currency in the daily economy. It is at times the currency of choice for savings, for migrants sending funds home to their countries of origin, and for illegal transactions, among many others. The same occurs in many peripheral economies across the world. However, political, academic and journalist accounts often highlight the exceptional nature of the dollar in Argentina.

In this paper, we plan to construct a social history of how the use of the dollar was naturalized in Argentina and then map the uses and meanings of the currency in the Argentine economy. Empirical data from both archives and interviews conducted in the cities of Buenos Aires and Santa Fe (Argentina) in 2014 will be used to support our arguments.

The archive work consisted in analyzing press accounts during critical moments of the Argentine economy (1970-2010), analyzing how the dollar became a “public issue” through the interventions of economic experts, government officials, journalists and politicians. We will show how the dollar was thus constructed as either a fatal or natural currency.

The interviews will serve to evoke personal memories, allowing us to reconstruct the expectations, dreams, calculations people associate with the uses of the dollar at the level of life histories.

Finally, we will focus on mapping groups of agents, types of activities and transactions that are more prone to using the dollar as the natural currency of exchange, account unit and/or savings.

By setting forth a social history of the dollar as a public issue, the analysis of personal memories and the conditions that lead certain groups and agents to use the U.S. currency, we will provide a conceptual and methodological understanding of the processes that allow this currency to be naturalized and examine the inverse process (how is the use of a currency denaturalized?)