Identity and Nationalism in Modern Argentina: Defending the True Nation

IDENTITY AND NATIONALISM IN MODERN ARGENTINA

IDENTITY AND

NATIONALISM IN

MODERN ARGENTINA

DEFENDING THE TRUE NATION

JEANE DELANEY

University of Notre Dame Press

Notre Dame, Indiana

University of Notre Dame Press

Notre Dame, Indiana 46556

undpress.nd.edu

Copyright © 2020 by the University of Notre Dame

All Rights Reserved

Published in the United States of America

Library of Congress Control Number: 2020937069

ISBN: 978-0-268-10789-5 (Hardback)

ISBN: 978-0-268-10790-1 (Paperback)

ISBN: 978-0-268-10792-5 (WebPDF)

ISBN: 978-0-268-10791-8 (Epub)

This e-Book was converted from the original source file by a third-party vendor. Readers who notice any formatting, textual, or readability issues are encouraged to contact the publisher at undpress@nd.edu

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Introduction

PART ONE

Debating the Nation

Introduction to Part One

ONE

Nation and Nationality in the Nineteenth Century

TWO

National Identity in the Age of Mass Immigration: The Romantic

Turn and the Ideal of the Argentine Race

THREE

Sources of Romantic Nationalism in Early

Twentieth-Century Argentina

FOUR

Romantic Influences and the Argentine Radicals

FIVE

Defining the Essence of Argentinidad: Debating Ethnicity and

Language, 1900–1930

PART TWO

Identity and Nationalism in the Post-1930 Era

Introduction to Part Two

SIX

The Rise of the Nationalist Right and the Ideal of the Catholic Nation

SEVEN

Anti-imperialism, FORJA, and the Defense of the True

Argentina

EIGHT

Essentialism in the Era of Perón

NINE

Resistance and Revisionism: Argentina’s Two Nationalisms after Perón

TEN

From Revisionism to Revolution and Repression

Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This project has been picked up and laid aside more times than I care to admit, and its journey has been a long one. In the course of research, writing, and conceptualizing (and reconceptualizing) its central arguments, I have incurred many debts, both professional and personal. Several scholars read and provided useful feedback on portions of the manuscript, including Michael Goebel, Sandra McGee Deutsch, Nicola Foote, and David Rock. Diego Armus, who generously read the entire manuscript, offered many suggestions that helped me navigate the tricky issue of early twentieth-century racial discourses. While I’ve not been able to follow all of their advice, this work is immeasurably better for their feedback. I also owe a debt of gratitude to Douglas Klusmeyer, who introduced me to the vast literature on European nationalism and helped me make connections between Argentine and European thought that I would otherwise have missed. Finally, I would like to mention Charles A. Hale and Oscár Terán, both now deceased, who gave generous guidance and encouragement at crucial moments.

Segments of this work have been presented at many conferences, where audience comments helped me clarify and expand my arguments. Of particular importance was the National Endowment for the Humanities conference on New World nationalism organized by Don Doyle and Marco Antonio Pamplona, where a range of scholars focusing on different aspects of nationalism in the Americas came together for fruitful discussion and debate. This work has also benefited from feedback from friends and colleagues at St. Olaf, who read and responded to portions of the manuscript. Worthy of special mention are Gwen Barnes-Karol, Dolores Peters, and Eric Fure-Slocum, whose advice and friendship helped me bring this project to fruition. Research for this project took place over a number of years, and was aided by a number of individuals, who offered ongoing assistance. In Argentina, I wish to thank in particular Lucía Gadano, Magdalena La Porta, and Guillermo Salvías. Closer to home is the dedicated interlibrary loan staff of the St. Olaf library, who tenaciously chased down all sorts of hard-to-access materials.

I feel fortunate that this manuscript found a home at the University of Notre Dame Press. Early on, Stephen Little played an invaluable role in bringing this manuscript to the press’s attention. Eli Bortz did more than anyone else to usher it through the review process, and graciously offered editorial advice on several chapters. Working with copy editor Ann Donahue has been a pleasure, as she has sought to improve my prose, correct my punctuation (especially misplaced commas!), and iron out the complexities of citing some of my more obscure Spanish-language sources.

Last, but certainly not least, comes my family. I have been blessed to be part of a large extended family that is both far-flung and tight-knit, and whose support has always sustained me. But it is to my immediate family, my husband, Jeff, and daughter, Mariah, that most thanks are due. They have lived with this project for much too long, and I deeply appreciate their love, support, and infinite patience. It is to them that this book is dedicated.

Introduction

Nationalism has played an exceptionally powerful role in Argentina’s turbulent history and continues to be a potent political force. Even the most casual student of Argentine politics during the last decade could not help but be struck by the nationalist stance of former president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, who frequently insisted that Las Malvinas son argentinas and characterized Argentina’s foreign creditors as vultures and extortionists.¹ Many of Kirchner’s stances and policies lived up to her rhetoric, including her close ties to the late Hugo Chávez, the expropriation of Spanish-owned shares of the national oil company YPF, and her decree establishing a new Secretariat of National Thought. A Peronist, Kirchner drew from a tradition within Argentine nationalism that was first articulated by the nationalist group FORJA (Fuerza de Orientación Radical de la Joven Argentina) in the 1930s.² Founded by Arturo Jauretche (whom Kirchner revered as one of Argentina’s most important intellectuals), FORJA promoted a strand of nationalism that celebrated the masses as the embodiment of the real Argentina and attacked the country’s traditional liberal elite as cosmopolitan vendepatrias (sellers of the fatherland). Left-wing and socially inclusive, this strand of nationalism played a key role in shaping the political ideas of Juan Perón in the 1940s and continues to resonate in Argentina today.

Yet as Argentines are well aware, another form of nationalism has played an arguably even greater role in their country’s political life. First emerging in the late 1920s, this right-wing strand of nationalism had as its core mission the defense of Argentina’s supposedly authentic Hispanic and Catholic character. During the 1930s, this nationalism became increasingly antiliberal, as it drew inspiration from European fascism and found support from the most reactionary elements of the Argentine Catholic Church. Argentina’s right-wing nationalists successfully sought to extend their influence within the armed forces and enthusiastically supported the military coups of 1930, 1943, 1955, 1966, and 1976. The latest transition to civilian rule in 1983 failed to extinguish right-wing nationalist sentiment entirely. Although successive civilian governments have largely purged the officer corps of right-wing nationalists, these ideas have been kept alive by an array of civilian groups such as La Juventud Nacional del Partido Popular de Reconstrucción, Movimiento Bastión, and Movimiento por la Identidad Nacional, as well as by scores of personal websites and blogs.

The continued survival of both right- and left-wing forms of antiliberal nationalism raises questions about the long-term prospects for democracy and political pluralism in Argentina. To be sure, many factors have contributed to the weakness of the country’s democratic institutions. Among the most important has been the country’s economic dependency. Although Argentina has long led Latin America in per capita income, its dependent position within the global economy has produced deep income inequality and stubbornly high rates of poverty, creating conditions that have made it difficult for democracy to thrive. Liberal leadership failures and an interventionist military have also played a role. While long espousing faith in democratic rule, the traditional political class has at crucial moments in the country’s history rigged elections and supported military coups to regain power. More broadly, as historian Jorge Nállim has argued, this elite has failed to link political liberalism with the popular ideals of equality, democracy, and social justice.³

But any attempt to understand the weakness of Argentina’s democratic institutions must also take into account the impact of nationalism and, more specifically, the country’s unique experience with its two forms of nationalism. In contrast to other Latin American cases, in which nationalism was either more uniformly right wing (e.g., early twentieth-century Chile and Brazil) or left-wing (e.g. present-day Venezuela, Ecuador, and Bolivia), or where state-promoted nationalism served as a unifying force (Mexico after 1920 and Cuba after 1959), Argentina produced two very different strands of nationalism, whose leaders had long and active careers, and whose ideas had an impact far beyond nationalist circles. This fact has been a key reason why nationalism in Argentina has proved to be uniquely destabilizing, as ideologues from both strands have attacked Argentina’s liberal political institutions and, at times, each other.

At no point was the clash between Argentina’s two nationalisms more dramatic than in the late 1960s and the 1970s. During these years, Argentina witnessed the emergence of a variety of Peronist guerrilla organizations, which sought to mesh Marxism with a left-wing, socially inclusive form of nationalism. One of the most violent, and by far the most influential, was the Montoneros, a group that captured the imagination of a generation of young middle-class Argentines. The Montoneros took their name from the rural militias of the nineteenth century, and its founders cast themselves as the latest protagonists, or heirs, of a historical struggle to defend the real Argentina of the masses against exploitation by foreign capitalists and their domestic allies.⁴ But what the Montonero leadership saw as patriotism, others viewed as treason. Right-wing factions within Peronism itself denounced the guerrillas as Marxist-inspired infiltrators, who were seeking to hijack the movement. Similarly, nationalist military officers believed the guerrillas to be under the influence of exotic ideologies that posed a threat not simply to the established order but to the nation itself. The reign of terror these military men unleashed was unprecedented in twentieth-century Argentine history and led to the kidnapping, torture, and killing of more than twenty-five thousand citizens, many of whom had no connection to the guerrillas. The purpose of this Dirty War, as it came to be called, went far beyond containing the guerrilla threat. Rather, as the regime repeatedly proclaimed, its mission was to wipe out all antinational ideas and influences in order to defend the true Argentina.

The intense violence of these years—and the simultaneous claims made by all sides that they represented the true nation—obscures the fact that, beginning in the 1930s, left- and right-wing nationalists openly admired each other’s books, occasionally published in each other’s journals, and even enjoyed cordial personal relations. While these interactions and collaborations never solidified into any kind of alliance, the fact remains that Argentina’s two types of nationalists were in many ways kindred spirits, who shared many of the same assumptions about why the country had failed to flourish. In the aftermath of the 1955 coup that ousted Juan Perón, these similarities produced a complex political landscape, in which individuals who began their political careers identifying with one strand of nationalism often swerved toward the other. Indeed, such were the enduring affinities between these nationalist strands that most of the founders of the Montoneros actually began as activists in right-wing nationalist groups, such as Círculo de Plata and Tacuara. For these individuals, as Argentine scholar Hugo Vezzetti has argued, the transition from the right to the left entailed neither a rupture nor a conversion but is best understood as a kind of leftward slippage that left core beliefs and values intact. According to Vezzetti, even as they transitioned to left-wing radicalism, the Montonero leaders retained a firm nucleus of convictions based on the original nationalist, antiliberal mold.⁵ Also striking, as historian Sandra McGee Deutsch has reported, even in the midst of the violence, young guerrillas continued to read the works of prominent right-wing nationalists.⁶

Why did the line between Argentina’s two nationalisms prove so permeable? What kind of bridge could exist between two ideological movements, whose leaders had, by the late 1960s, become such bitter enemies? Just as important, how did these two nationalist strands work in tandem to undermine Argentina’s liberal traditions? The similarities and shared roots of Argentina’s two nationalisms, as well as their broader impact on Argentine political life, form the subject of this book. To tackle these issues, this study shifts the focus away from nationalism per se—understood here to be a set of political ideas articulated by ideologues concerned with the defense of their country’s cultural, economic, and political sovereignty—to examine instead how nationalist leaders from the 1930s onward conceptualized or imagined Argentina and the discursive constructions they used to describe the nation and its problems. I take as my starting point the premise that to fully understand any nationalist movement requires understanding the vision of nationhood that animates it.⁷ Nations, as numerous scholars have noted, can be imagined in very different ways, and how individuals or specific groups define their nation largely determines what they see as worth defending.⁸ In addition, how an individual imagines, writes, or talks about his or her nation is inextricably intertwined with a whole range of beliefs that are central to any nationalist program. Questions pertaining to who can belong to the nation (and especially whether immigrants or minority groups can be accepted as full-fledged members of the national community), whether foreign cultural influences are perceived as threatening or benign, and whether domestic ethnic or religious diversity is viewed as a threat to national unity are inseparable from how individuals conceptualize their nation and what they see as the basis of their collective identity.

This work argues that, despite their very different political programs, Argentina’s right- and left-wing nationalists shared a vision of the Argentine nation that had roots in, and thus bore the lasting imprint of, ethno-cultural forms of national identity associated with the Romantic nationalism of nineteenth-century Europe.⁹ This is not to argue that Argentine nationalists should be considered Romantic thinkers or, even less, should be identified as such. Rather, my claim is that these nationalists operated within a conceptual matrix rooted in understandings of nationality and history that were inspired by the ideas of Romantic nationalism, ideas that had gained currency in early twentieth-century Argentina during an era of mass immigration. While historically contingent and ideologically plurivocal, the assumptions central to this conceptual framework proved remarkably persistent and structured how post-1930 nationalist intellectuals from across the political spectrum imagined argentinidad.

Within the Romantic vision, nations are understood to be organic ethno-cultural communities, whose existence predates the creation of the state and whose members possess intrinsic mental and emotional traits that distinguish them from other nationalities. The supposedly homogenous collective character of the people, rather than their shared political values or loyalties, forms the basis of the nation’s identity and serves to bind members together. Moreover, because the nation’s identity is believed to be based on the intrinsic qualities of the people that endure across the generations, nationality is understood to be an inherent state of being that can neither be acquired nor shed. Argentina’s nationalists embraced an essentialist vision of national identity that strongly echoed the Romantic understanding of nations, although with variations and modifications over time.¹⁰ While disagreeing vehemently about the qualities that defined true Argentines, both right- and left-wing nationalists saw the nation as a bounded, homogenous community that existed independently of the state, whose members shared a set of distinctive traits that marked them as Argentines. According to nationalists, it was Argentines’ intrinsic collective character or essence—rather than their conscious embrace of, or loyalty to, the nation’s political values and institutions—that defined the true Argentina.

The nationalists’ vision of the nation as an enduring homogenous community rooted in history contrasted sharply with how the country’s founding generation had understood the nation they sought to create. The liberal leaders of Argentina’s independence movement had defined their nation primarily in civic terms¹¹—that is, they understood their nation to be a man-made association of citizens that had broken with Spain, not in the name of a preformed ethno-cultural community, but for the purpose of establishing a new nation on the basis of a new political project.¹² In contrast to twentieth-century nationalists, who drew a sharp distinction between the nation (defined in ethno-cultural terms) and the institutions of the state, nineteenth-century liberals believed that the creation of the state and the nation were inseparable processes. In other words, they believed that, in organizing the state and establishing its institutions, they were creating the nation.

This is not to say that in imagining this new nation, these elites discounted the importance of forming a common culture and a racially homogenous population. Indeed, central to the nineteenth-century liberal vision of the Argentine nation were the intertwined notions of racial whiteness and cultural Europeanness, qualities that elites sought to bolster by encouraging European immigration.¹³ At first glance, this emphasis on white identity suggests an ethnic vision of argentinidad that reserved membership in the national community for individuals of European ancestry, and whose primary ties were those of blood. Yet as multiple scholars have noted, while Argentine elites continued to prize whiteness as a marker of civilization and refinement, in practice the category of whiteness proved to be extremely elastic.¹⁴ Moreover, this elasticity worked in tandem with the two other beliefs central to early nineteenth-century understandings of the Argentine nation: that membership in the national community was first and foremost a matter of political loyalty, and that the desired cultural traits associated with white Europeans were acquirable rather than innate. This voluntarist understanding of national belonging meant that all native-born individuals who were loyal to the state were understood to be Argentines, regardless of their race. Similarly, while European immigrants were certainly preferred, all newcomers—again regardless of ancestry or race—were seen as potential Argentines.¹⁵

EL SER NACIONAL AND THE MYTH OF THE TWO ARGENTINAS

In exploring the ethno-cultural vision of Argentine identity at the core of twentieth-century nationalist thought, I focus on two related tropes that were central to the discourses of both right and left nationalists and that continue to have currency in present-day Argentina. The first is the notion of el ser nacional, a term that appeared repeatedly in the speeches and writings of the leaders of both strands. Variously translated as the national being or the national soul, nationalists understood el ser nacional to be an enduring cultural essence that made Argentines unique and served as the basis of their collective national character. Although a few mentions of el ser nacional can be found in Argentine political writings before the 1930s, it was in this decade that the term gained widespread currency and indeed became ubiquitous in nationalist discourses. The second trope, related to the notion of el ser nacional, is that of the two Argentinas. According to both right- and left-wing nationalists, there existed two very different Argentinas: one true and authentic, the other false and artificial. The true Argentina, of course, was an organic community, whose members possessed a unitary collective character rooted in el ser nacional. The false Argentina, nationalists argued, was that constructed by liberals. According to both right- and left-wing nationalists, Argentine liberals had always ignored the realities of the authentic Argentina and sought instead to create a new nation on the basis of borrowed values and institutions from liberal Europe. The result, nationalists argued, was an artificial liberal state that had nothing to do with the true Argentina and that indeed threatened its very essence. Like the concept of el ser nacional, the trope of the two Argentinas proved to be extraordinarily enduring, and by the 1960s had become a common sense way of understanding the nation and its problems.¹⁶ Indeed, so seductive was this notion that variations of it have been adopted by some non-Argentines as well.¹⁷

This belief in the existence of the two Argentinas and the conviction that the true nation possessed a unitary ser or essence that defined its collective character were enduring elements of both right- and left-wing nationalist thought. Both tropes, of course, were inventions or intellectual constructs. Clearly, there is no such thing as a unitary ser nacional to which all true members of the national community are psychologically or spiritually connected. Similarly fantastical is the notion that the country’s liberals somehow created a false Argentina at odds with the supposedly true Argentina (as is the related claim that anyone who embraces liberal values could not be a real Argentine). Emphasizing the invented or imagined nature of these constructs does not, of course, detract from their significance, for, as anthropologist Allan Hanson has noted in another context, Inventions are precisely the stuff that cultural reality is made of.¹⁸ Unquestionably for Argentina’s right- and left-wing nationalists, el ser nacional and the two Argentinas were tangible realities. Accordingly, these facts helped structure how they understood their country’s history, perceived its problems, and imagined solutions. These constructs also provided ideologues of both nationalist strands with a set of guiding myths and historical narratives that were remarkably similar.

Yet what served to unify these two strands of nationalism also acted as a wedge to drive them apart. My focus on the nationalists’ shared embrace of an essentialist vision of Argentine identity can also provide insight into the profound differences that divided them. Although both right- and left-wing nationalists believed in an enduring ser nacional and in the existence of a real Argentina at odds with the false liberal state, how they imagined the content of this supposed ser nacional and the true Argentina differed dramatically. It is in these differences that we can find some of the sources of their often mutual hostility and the reasons behind their failure to unite against the liberal state and the imperialist powers they believed this state served.

This nationalist right’s vision of the true Argentina was straightforward enough. Although they became highly factionalized as the twentieth century wore on, right-wing nationalists shared the assumption that Argentines were by definition Hispanic (or Latin, in some versions) and above all Catholic. For these nationalists, the real or authentic Argentina possessed an ethnic core that was Catholic and Spanish, or Latin, and any individuals or influences that threatened to dilute its purity were causes for concern. The nationalist left, in contrast, had a less tidy understanding of el ser nacional, one that was more socially inclusive in that it made room for non-Catholics and non-Hispanics/Latins.¹⁹ First promoted in the 1930s by FORJA, this vision of the true Argentina held that while el ser nacional contained elements of the Spanish legacy, it had incorporated other influences and other peoples. As a result, these nationalists understood Argentina’s ser nacional to be something newer, more original, and distinctively Argentine. Just as importantly, the nationalist left insisted that the true ser nacional was most evident in the life and culture of el pueblo or the common people. In its view, the Argentine masses—even those born of recent immigrants—formed a unitary, culturally homogeneous folk community that most purely embodied Argentina’s supposedly authentic national qualities.

INTELLECTUAL ROOTS

From where did the essentialist notion of el ser nacional and the related (and equally) essentialist belief in a true, enduring Argentina come? Any attempt to understand the power and resonance these constructs held for Argentine nationalists inevitably leads to the problem of how, why, and when—in a country with a long-standing liberal tradition—such a way of conceptualizing Argentine identity came to enjoy such currency. Clearly, the right- and left-wing nationalists’ shared obsession with el ser nacional and their belief in the existence of a true Argentine nation at odds with the liberal state did not suddenly materialize from thin air in the 1930s. Accordingly, I seek to understand how and why this occurred by asking the following: Why did so many twentieth-century intellectuals and opinion makers come to accept as fact the existence of an Argentine ser nacional? Why, in a country born liberal, did such an influential group of political actors come to believe in the existence of a real or true Argentina that existed apart from (and indeed was threatened by) the liberal state?²⁰ What events, both in terms of concrete occurrences and new intellectual formations, sparked this new way of thinking and talking about Argentine identity? These questions, of course, lie at the very heart of larger problems in intellectual history—that is, why broad intellectual shifts occur, how new conceptual paradigms and orientations emerge, and what circumstances make it possible for certain ideas to be thinkable at particular historical moments.²¹

The answers to these questions, as suggested above, can be found in the tumultuous decades of the early twentieth century. During these years, massive immigration and new intellectual currents from Europe led many Argentines to question traditional notions of Argentine identity. Between 1880 and 1930, the country’s robust export economy made it a favored destination for Europeans seeking opportunity, and within the span of a few decades millions of immigrants poured onto Argentine shores. Although the Argentine state had long encouraged immigration, the sheer number of newcomers sparked fears that Argentine society was in danger of being overwhelmed, leading many native intellectuals to call for the defense of the nation’s culture and traditions against the incoming tide. At the epicenter of this movement was a new generation of intellectuals, who have since become known as the cultural nationalists. This group of thinkers, I argue, played a central role in undermining the traditional civic vision of the Argentine nation, and helped spark a paradigmatic shift in how significant numbers of Argentines began to understand their nation’s identity.

Early twentieth-century Argentina was ripe for such a shift. As British historian Eric Hobsbawm has noted, the experience of rapid immigration and the crowding of cities with new social groups were key factors that led to the rise of ethno-cultural nationalism in late nineteenth-century Europe.²² Facing similar circumstances, and drawing from Romantic nationalist intellectual currents from Europe (especially Spain), the cultural nationalists began to promote the notion that Argentines formed—or should form—a unitary raza, or race, whose distinctive qualities must be defended and nurtured. According to Ricardo Rojas, one of the movement’s key intellectuals, the peoples of each nation formed—or at least should form—a homogenous race that possessed its own collective soul and a racial memory.²³ In Argentina’s case, he believed that the national race had largely solidified during the nineteenth century, when mystical forces emanating from the Argentine soil had fused together the indigenous and European races to create a unique racial type.²⁴ Thus for Rojas, Argentina already possessed a distinctive racial profile—a kind of ethnic sponge that could absorb the millions of immigrants arriving on the nation’s shores without losing its basic form. Fellow cultural nationalist Manuel Gálvez concurred with Rojas’s assessment that Argentines formed a distinctive race, but he disagreed about its content. In his view, the Argentine nation was defined by its Catholic faith and Hispanic heritage, and thus its race was at root Spanish. Declaring Spain to be the crucible of the race,²⁵ he lauded the mother country for its deep Catholic spirituality and indifference to the lure of materialism and urged his countrymen to return to their Spanish origins.²⁶

In writing about this presumed Argentine race, the cultural nationalists used the term to denote the shared qualities of an enduring ethno-cultural community rather than to describe people of a particular phenotype. Rojas made this explicit when he insisted that he employed the word race not as a scientist would but in the old, romantic sense [having to do with] collective personality, historical group, cultural consciousness.²⁷ It is important to note, however, that the line between Rojas’s and Gálvez’s historical cultural definition of race and biological understandings of race was often fuzzy, an ambiguity fueled by the simultaneous circulation of other notions of race that reflected the emerging discipline of genetics, social Darwinism, neo-Lamarckian notions of the inheritability of acquired characteristics, eugenics, and Italian theories of criminology.²⁸ And, as Sandra McGee Deutsch has observed, although early twentieth-century Argentines typically spoke about race in cultural terms, the cultural traits that defined this supposed race were seen as innate rather than acquirable.²⁹ Thus despite their disavowal of biological notions of race, the Argentine race envisioned by Rojas and his fellow cultural nationalists was understood to be a bounded ethnic community, whose members shared fixed psychological traits that were transmittable from one generation to the other.³⁰

While the cultural nationalists were among the most prominent champions of the idea of an Argentine race, theirs were not lone voices launched into a void. Rather, as will be developed in chapter 2, these individuals employed language, ideas, and images that resonated with, just as they helped shape, contemporary understandings of Argentine nationality.³¹ Indeed, by the early 1920s, the idea that Argentines formed, or should form, a distinctive national race, which in turn belonged to a larger racial family, became widely accepted among those Argentines who wrestled with the myriad consequences of mass immigration.

What was the connection between the early twentieth-century idea of the Argentine race (however it was understood) and the later notion of el ser nacional that figured so prominently in post-1930 nationalist discourses? I argue that the growing belief that Argentines formed (or would form) a bounded ethnic community and that a unified national type was developing fundamentally reset the conceptual parameters within which future debates over Argentine identity would unfold. In proclaiming the existence (or emergence) of a distinctive, unitary Argentine race, the cultural nationalists and like-minded intellectuals undermined the traditional nineteenth-century view that being an Argentine was first and foremost a question of allegiance to the Argentine state, its constitution, and the political values this document enshrined. And although the break with Argentina’s liberal past was never complete, the spread of the essentialist notion of an Argentine race among early twentieth-century intellectuals and opinion makers made possible or thinkable the later (and equally essentialist) notion of el ser nacional. Indeed, I believe there is a direct continuity between the two terms in that during the 1930s this phrase came to replace the term race, when the latter came to have a more strictly biological or genetic meaning.³² In other words, after 1930 or so the concept of el ser nacional provided a way of talking and writing about the supposedly intrinsic, collective, and unitary character of the Argentine people, without straying into increasingly messy questions of bloodlines and phenotypes.

The concept of path dependence is useful here in thinking about intellectual continuities between the pre- and post-1930 periods. First developed by economic historians to understand the persistence of seemingly obsolete technologies, path dependence holds that in certain instances, contingent historical circumstances, such as random events and decisions made by key historical actors, have produced technological innovations that eventually become locked-in, and thus foreclose the development of other, more efficient technologies.³³ More recently, historical sociologists and historians have adopted the concept of path dependence to explore the persistence of institutions, practices, and ideas that emerge during so-called critical junctures, defined as moments of crisis or change during which traditional practices and understandings are in flux.³⁴ These critical junctures serve as genetic moments that produce new ways of thinking or new forms of social organization that respond to the crisis at hand.³⁵ Once they take hold, these ideas, practices and institutions persist and continue to drive ways of thinking and behaving long after the disappearance of the conditions that prevailed when they emerged.

Applying this concept to the case of Argentina, I see the early twentieth century as a critical juncture, during which mass immigration and rapid modernization shook the foundations of the traditional social, cultural, and political order. As Argentine intellectuals grappled with these challenges, and more specifically with the problem of how to incorporate immigrants into the nation while at the same time protecting a national culture they believed to be under siege, they seized on a set of ideas that happened to be available at that particular moment and that made sense to them: varieties of the ethno-cultural nationalism then circulating in Europe, and especially Spain. Once the idea of an Argentine race came to be embraced by a substantial segment of the nation’s intellectual elite, it achieved a certain stickiness and served to channel subsequent discussions about Argentine identity along similarly unitary and essentialist lines, even after the initial triggers (mass immigration and rapid modernization) came to an end in the late 1920s. In other words, during the early decades of the twentieth century, the growing acceptance of the idea that Argentines formed a distinct race or ethno-cultural community produced new ways of thinking and talking about argentinidad; this sent subsequent discussions of the nation and its problems along conceptual pathways that reinforced certain understandings of Argentine identity while at the same time closing off—or at least making less likely—alternative ways of imagining the nation.³⁶

Just as the concept of path dependence can help explain continuities between the early twentieth-century embrace of the idea of the Argentine race and the later notion of el ser nacional, it can also shed light on connections between different formulations of this imagined race and later versions of the (equally) imagined Argentine ser. As noted, cultural nationalists Gálvez and Rojas promoted different interpretations of the supposed Argentine race, but both agreed that Argentina already possessed a well-developed ethnic profile that would remain unaltered by mass immigration. Other intellectuals of the period, however, adopted a much more dynamic and inclusive vision of the supposed Argentine race. While still embracing the cultural nationalists’ essentialist concept of a unitary national race, such figures as the politician Horacio Oyhanarte and elite writer Francisco Soto y Calvo argued that the national race was still in its infancy. Accordingly, they believed that Argentine ethnicity would be fundamentally reshaped by the millions of immigrants that continued to flood Argentine shores. The ultimate result, in their view, would be a completely different racial type that would be both new and completely Argentine. Thus as Argentines struggled with the challenges of mass immigration, the idea of an Argentine race served as an empty screen on which a number of images could be projected. In the starkly different visions of this supposed race that were articulated during this period, I argue, we can see the outlines of the competing versions of el ser nacional—one Catholic and elitist, the other popular and inclusive—that were so central to the thought of Argentina’s later nationalists.

HISTORIOGRAPHICAL CONTEXTS

This work seeks to contribute to current scholarship in a number of areas. First, my emphasis on the importance of massive immigration in helping to produce a broad shift in understandings of Argentine identity takes inspiration from Lilia Ana Bertoni’s 2001 Patriotas, cosmopolitas y nacionalistas: la construcción de la nacionalidad argentina a fines del siglo XIX (Patriots, cosmopolitans and nationalists: the construction of Argentine nationality at the end of the nineteenth century). This work examines Argentine reactions to immigration during the 1870–1900 period, arguing that the arrival of millions of immigrants during these years undermined the traditional understanding of Argentina as a civic community and helped spark the spread of an essentialized notion of argentinidad as an inherent state of being or feeling. My work, which clearly owes much to Bertoni’s, seeks to build on her insights by extending the story into the twentieth century. In doing so, I accomplish three things. First, I offer new insight into the intellectual influences that shaped early twentieth-century ideas about the nation, a topic that lies beyond Bertoni’s chronological coverage. Second, my focus on the early twentieth-century debates over the nature of the imagined Argentine race challenges Bertoni’s conclusion that the emerging ethno-cultural vision of argentinidad was inevitably xenophobic and elitist. Instead, I demonstrate that, although the increasing numbers of Argentines did indeed embrace essentialized, ethno-cultural understandings of their nation’s identity, at least some variants of this vision were inclusive in that immigrants were seen as important contributors to an emerging Argentine race. Finally, because my study includes the post-1930 period, I am able to explore the long-term political consequences of the process that Bertoni first identified.

Another area of scholarship to which this study contributes is early twentieth-century cultural nationalism. Sometimes referred to as Argentina’s first nationalism, this intellectual movement has attracted substantial scholarly attention. The predominant interpretation of cultural nationalism, promoted most forcefully by Enrique Zuleta Álvarez and David Rock, characterizes this phenomenon as a reactionary response to the political and social challenges posed by mass immigration.³⁷ Because of what they see as cultural nationalism’s inherent antipopular, xenophobic thrust, these scholars have portrayed this movement as the direct precursor to the later right-wing variant of Argentine nationalism. My aim here is not to reject this argument entirely; certainly, most cultural nationalists were indeed anxious about the impact of immigration, and it is noteworthy that novelist Manuel Gálvez, one of the movement’s cofounders, briefly embraced fascism in the 1930s. Yet the fact that fellow cultural nationalist Ricardo Rojas became a vociferous critic of right-wing nationalism indicates that the relationship between this movement and later forms of nationalism was more complex than current scholarship suggests.

In reassessing cultural nationalism, my work argues that its most important legacy stemmed not from the reactionary politics of a few of its proponents but from the fact that collectively these intellectuals promoted ideas about argentinidad that encouraged their compatriots to see their nation in ethno-cultural terms.³⁸ During this critical juncture in Argentine intellectual history, the growing acceptance of these ideas by a broad segment of the cultural and political elite fundamentally reoriented subsequent discussions of Argentine identity along essentialist lines and laid the conceptual groundwork for the later notion of el ser nacional. Just as importantly, the above-noted fact that the early twentieth-century Argentines imagined content of the supposed Argentine race in dramatically different ways—ranging from the narrow vision of this race as Catholic and Hispanic promoted by Gálvez to the more socially inclusive vision promoted by Oyhanarte and Soto y Calvo—meant that later notions of el ser nacional would be similarly divergent, and would be embraced by individuals from across the political spectrum. Thus, I argue, the early twentieth-century cultural nationalists should be seen as helping to create a reservoir of concepts, constructs, and images from which both right- and left-wing nationalists of the post-1930 period drew.

My work also seeks to further our understanding of the broader phenomenon of Argentine nationalism by addressing what I see as a glaring gap in the scholarly literature,—that is, the very limited attention paid to the interconnections between right- and left-wing forms of Argentine nationalism. Because of its importance in shaping Argentina’s political history, post-1930 nationalism is a much studied topic. To date, the majority of this literature has focused on the right-wing variant of Argentine nationalism. This emphasis was established early on by Marysa Navarro Gerassi, whose foundational Los nacionalistas (1968) devoted only two pages to left-wing nationalism.³⁹ Enrique Zuleta Álvarez’s multivolume treatment El nacionalismo argentino followed suit,⁴⁰ and more recent scholarship, such as works by María Inés Barbero and Fernando Devoto, Cristián Buchrucker, David Rock, Sandra McGee Deutsch, Daniel Lvovich, Luis Fernando Beraza, and Federico Finchelstein, have continued this trend.⁴¹

Compared to the literature on the nationalist right, scholarship on Argentina’s nationalist left is less abundant, although recent decades have witnessed growing interest in the topic as Argentines have tried to make sense of the turbulent 1960s and ’70s.⁴² Given this impulse, it is understandable that most scholars have been concerned with the post-1955 period. The resulting scholarship has two focal points. The first is the rise of the so-called New Left, a movement that emerged after the ouster of Juan Perón in 1955, when key members of the traditional left (i.e., the different factions associated with the Socialist and Communist Parties) came to reassess their traditional antipathy toward Perón and to advocate for a new, radicalized form of Peronism that sought to blend nationalism with Marxism.⁴³ The second emphasis has been the Peronist guerrilla movements of the 1960s and ’70s, with particular attention paid to the Montoneros.⁴⁴

Despite this rich and ever-growing literature, and the fact that numerous scholars have noted the affinities between Argentina’s two nationalist strands, there are remarkably few works that have examined both right- and left-wing nationalism with the aim of illuminating their underlying similarities and points of contact.⁴⁵ A partial exception is David Rock’s Authoritarian Argentina. Although centrally concerned with right-wing nationalism, Rock argues that, during the 1930s, the leaders of Argentina’s two forms of nationalism competed with each other for leadership of the Nationalist movement at large, and in doing so began to coopt each other’s slogans, approaches, and ideas.⁴⁶ Writing of the 1960s and 1970s, he notes that the radicalized segments of the Argentine Catholic Church provided an ideological bridge between the two strands of nationalism, leading some young right-wing nationalists to cross over to the left.⁴⁷ More generally, Rock has argued that, during these years, right-wing nationalist ideas became suddenly all-pervasive [as they became] soaked up by groups that were mortal enemies ostensibly occupying the opposition ends of the political spectrum.⁴⁸ Indeed, so powerful was the impact of the nationalist right on the left, he believes, that the latter took from the right its myths and icons, its ideological outlook and its propaganda techniques.⁴⁹

Another important scholar who has sought to draw connections between Argentina’s two strands of nationalism is political scientist Alberto Spektorowski. Spektorowski has gone beyond Rock’s rather vague notion of ideological cross fertilization to provide a more systematic exploration of the similarities between Argentina’s right- and left-wing forms of nationalism during the 1930s.⁵⁰ Focusing on the first half of the twentieth century, Spektorowski’s work examines the rise of the nationalist right and left, and argues that leaders of both strands challenged the traditional liberal elite by promoting a kind of antiliberal integral nationalism aimed at changing the very definition of democracy.⁵¹ In highlighting their similarities, Spektorowski—rightly, I believe—rejects the standard view of right-wing nationalists as backward-looking reactionaries, arguing instead that by the end of the 1930s significant elements of this tendency had come to embrace the nationalist left’s goals of social justice, cultural authenticity and industrial development.⁵² In doing so, he argues, Argentina’s nationalist right created a new type of nationalism that was both authoritarian and popular, which laid the ideological groundwork for the rise of Juan Perón in the 1940s.⁵³

Like Spektorowski and Rock, I am interested in both the striking similarities between Argentina’s right- and left-wing nationalists and the ways in which their ideas, writings, and rhetoric helped undermine support for liberal democracy. While building on their insights, my work takes a different approach by placing nationalists’ conceptions of Argentine identity at the center of the analysis. By focusing on nationalists’ shared obsession with an imagined ser nacional and the trope of the supposedly true Argentina, my work illuminates the ideas and assumptions that provided the conceptual underpinnings of their thought. It argues, moreover, that this shared conceptual substrate framed how right- and left-wing nationalists understood the threats facing Argentina, and thus served as a kind of intellectual bridge that helps explain their enduring affinities. In other words, Argentina’s right- and left-wing nationalists got each other at a fundamental conceptual level. At the same time, however, because they defined the character of the true Argentina in such radically different ways, these nationalists—despite their shared anti-imperialism and hatred of liberalism—were unable to unite behind a common program.

This focus on how Argentine nationalists imagined, wrote, and talked about national identity aligns with the most recent effort to tackle the complex relationship between the country’s two forms of nationalism. Michael Goebel’s Argentina’s Partisan Past: Nationalism and the Politics of History (2011) examines right- and left-wing nationalists’ shared hostility toward the official version of Argentine history that celebrated the liberal leaders of the nineteenth century. Using historical revisionism as his guiding thread, Goebel explores the evolving relationship between Argentina’s two strands of nationalism, from the Peronist period through the 1990s. In doing so, he links the nationalists’ historical revisionism to their promotion of essentialized understandings of Argentine identity, and notes that both right- and left-wing nationalist thinkers justified their claims about the past by appealing to the supposed essence of the Argentine nation.⁵⁴ He suggests, as well, that the traditional liberal-nationalist dichotomy [within Argentine political and intellectual history] should be recharted as an opposition between civic and ethno cultural modes of defining a community of co-nationals.⁵⁵

My approach has much in common with Goebel’s, and our analyses draw from some of the same theoretical literature on civic versus ethnic forms of national identity. Our studies differ, however, in focus and scope. While certainly agreeing with Goebel about the importance of essentialized notions of Argentine identity to the project of historical revisionism, my work is chiefly concerned with the former. Thus, although the theme of historical revisionism enters into the analysis (especially in the final chapters), my primary interest is in how the related tropes of el ser nacional and the two Argentinas structured nationalist thought, not simply about the past, but about a wide range of issues that preoccupied both right- and left-wing nationalist ideologues. My work also contrasts with Goebel’s in its emphasis on the origins of essentialist understandings of Argentine identity, and in the way in which it links early twentieth-century debates over argentinidad to later nationalist thought.

Finally, and on the most general level, this work contributes to the broader field of nationalism studies by examining a country from a region that has received scant attention from European and US specialists.⁵⁶ In doing so, I note the ways in which Argentina’s early twentieth-century version of ethno-cultural nationalism resembled European varieties, while at the same time highlighting its unique aspects.⁵⁷ In particular, I focus on the central dilemma facing Argentina’s early twentieth-century promoters of ethno-cultural nationalism: namely, the enduring conviction that Argentina remained a vastly underpopulated country that needed immigrants both as laborers and as permanent settlers. Given this reality, those who believed in the existence of a unique Argentine race were forced to define it in such a way as to include rather than exclude the immigrant. They often did so by arguing that the Argentine ethnicity was still forming, and that immigrants, or at least their children, would become part of this new national race. I believe this effort to square an ethnic notion of national identity with the need to integrate the foreign born makes the Argentine case unique. Moreover, the capaciousness of this notion of the Argentine race, and the fact that the debates over its content produced wildly different interpretations about what role the immigrant would play, meant that this construct could accommodate radically different political viewpoints. Indeed it was perhaps the very inclusiveness of this construct that was the source of its broad appeal, and allowed it to gain acceptance among individuals who might otherwise have championed the competing vision of Argentina as a civic nation.⁵⁸

BROADER SIGNIFICANCE FOR ARGENTINE POLITICS

By focusing on the essentialist understandings of identity at the heart of Argentina’s two nationalisms, this study seeks to shed new light on their underlying similarities and shared origins. Certainly, the fact that the leading intellectuals of Argentina’s two nationalist strains were hostile to both political and economic liberalism is well known. What has not been sufficiently explored, however, are the strikingly similar ways in which these individuals framed their attacks on liberalism, and how these conceptual framings provided the rationale for delegitimizing liberal values and the Argentines who promoted them. Armed with an essentialist belief in the existence of an enduring community rooted in el ser nacional (however they defined its content), Argentine nationalists saw liberalism not simply as a flawed ideology but as an alien philosophy at odds with the supposed authentic character of the true Argentina. Worse still, they believed, liberalism had been imposed on the nation by a deracinated elite acting on behalf of foreigner capitalists. These elites, nationalists believed, had sold out their country after being mentally colonized by their imperial masters, thereby becoming "descastados" (stripped of their ethnicity). They were, in other words, no longer Argentines. Hostile to liberalism in all its forms, both right- and left-wing nationalists believed that the country could prosper economically only by jettisoning liberal democracy and by developing political institutions that were consonant with the supposed authentic character of the Argentine people.

But what influence did these essentialist understandings of national identity have on the political attitudes of the broader public? Did the writings and utterances of a relatively small group of intellectuals shape the ways in which ordinary Argentines understood their nation and affect their view of democracy? Any attempt to provide a definitive answer to these questions would require an altogether different kind of study, one with a much narrower temporal focus that employed different kinds of sources. Given my goal of charting connections between early twentieth-century debates over immigration, the shift from civil to ethno-cultural understandings of the nation, and Argentina’s two nationalisms, such depth is impossible. This broad chronological scope means that any claims about the impact of nationalist thought on public opinion must be suggestive rather than conclusive.

This having been said, there are grounds for some tentative observations. To begin, when considering the effect of nationalist discourses on