NATIONAL IDENTITY, NATIONHOOD,

AND IMMIGRATION IN ARGENTINA: 1810-19301

Jeane DeLaney

In recent years, some of the most interesting literature on immigration has

focused on the relationship between national identity and attitudes toward
immigrants in the host society.2 How members of the receiving country
construe nationhood—how they imagine what nations are and what holds them
together—shapes how they understand the role of immigrants in the national
community. By establishing the criteria for membership, the definition of a
nation’s identity inevitably defines who can belong to the national community,
on what terms, and what meanings are attached to belonging. Such questions
lie at the very heart of how different societies receive immigrants and treat
minority communities within their boundaries.

William Rogers Brubaker’s recent comparative study Citizenship and

Nationhood in France and Germany is particularly helpful in elucidating the links
between national self-understanding and attitudes toward the immigrant.
Contrasting France’s traditionally open citizenship policies with Germany’s
highly restrictive naturalization laws, Brubaker traces the roots of these
differences to distinctive understandings of the nation. Within the French
tradition, according to Brubaker, the nation is understood in predominantly
political terms. That is, it is conceived as an association of citizens who
voluntarily embrace a common political creed and participate in a wider French
culture. "Frenchness," he notes, "is acquired, not inherited."3 In Germany, in
contrast, the nation is conceived as an ethnocultural community, bound by
blood ties rather than by common political traditions. At a certain level,
Germanness is based on descent rather than voluntary participation, and is
inherited rather than acquired. Both models of nationhood invest immigrants
with certain roles. The French model views immigrants as individuals who will,
almost inevitably, accept French political and cultural traditions and seek to
become naturalized. In Germany, in contrast, immigrants of non-Germanic
descent are not expected to seek naturalization, since their ancestry bars them
from membership in the larger ethnocultural body.

While the histories of both the French and German ideals of nationhood have
proved more complicated than this dichotomous schema suggests, Brubaker’s
models provide historians with a useful tool for understanding the links between
national identity and views of the immigrant. This essay draws upon his insights
in examining the relationship between changing ideas about nationhood and
changes in attitude toward the immigrant in Argentina during the period 1810–
1930.4 It charts a shift, occurring at the turn of the century, not only in the way
significant numbers of Argentines began to think about the content of their own
national culture and traditions, but also in their more general understanding of
what it meant to be a nation. During much of the nineteenth century, educated
Argentines—inspired by France’s example—had understood their nation to be a
political association open to all who embraced a common political creed and
worked for the welfare of the nation. By the opening decades of the twentieth
century, however, a significant group of young intellectuals, known in Argentine
historiography as cultural nationalists, began to espouse a vision of the nation
that more closely resembled the ethnocultural conception of nationality common
to Germany.

Although the members of this movement were limited to a small core of young
intellectuals, cultural nationalists proved influential because they most forcefully
articulated ideas that were already gaining currency among educated
Argentines. In such diverse publications as the mainstream paper La Nación
and cultural journals such as Ideas, Nosotros, Hebe, Sagitario, Estudios,
Renacimiento, Verbum, Valoraciones, Revista argentina de ciencias politicas,
El monitor de la educación, and Revista de filosofía, contributors warned of the
dangers of cosmopolitanism and discussed the need to defend la raza
argentina from the threat posed by massive European immigration. Fears about
the loss of national identity and the idea that Argentines formed a distinctive
ethnocultural group threatened by foreign influences were constant and
pervasive themes of the cultural debates of the period.

This shift in how growing numbers of educated Argentines understood

nationality inevitably brought with it new attitudes toward the immigrant. At first
blush, the implications seem obvious. When nationality is conflated with
ethnicity, all voluntaristic elements disappear, and membership in the national
community is a question of descent rather than assent or territorial residence.
Within this understanding of nationhood, people cannot choose or acquire their
nationality: one either is or is not an Italian, Spaniard, or Croat. Individuals who
reside within national borders, but who belong to other ethnic groups, can
perhaps be tolerated, but can never be full-fledged members of the nation.

The Argentine case, however, represents an interesting contrast. Instead of

serving as a means of excluding the immigrant from the national community,
Argentine cultural nationalism had a strong integrationist thrust. In Argentina,
the emergence of an ethnocultural understanding of nationhood coincided with,
and indeed was in large part precipitated by, a massive influx of European
immigrants. While deploring the newcomers as a threat to the collective
Argentine race or personality, cultural nationalists and their sympathizers
accepted, albeit at timed begrudgingly, that immigration was inevitable and
believed that the incoming masses should be assimilated or "Argentinized" as
completely as possible. For these individuals—and herein lies much of their
message’s appeal—cultural nationalism represented a means of integrating the
immigrant into the national community without disrupting existing political
practices or social hierarchies. What cultural nationalism offered Argentines was
a nation-building project based on the evolution of a putative Argentine race,
rather than on political participation and the civic incorporation of immigrants.5

The essay is organized as follows. The first part looks at nineteenth- century
understandings of nationality in Argentina. Focusing on the thought of
prominent intellectuals and political leaders, it examines how the view of
Argentina as a political association meshed with Romantic notions of national
character to shape the nation’s notoriously liberal immigration and naturalization
policies. Section II traces the emergence of early twentieth-century cultural
nationalism, looking at ways in which massive immigration and the waning
interest in democratic ideals transformed traditional views of the immigrant. This
section also discusses how cultural nationalists attempted to square ethnic
understandings of Argentine nationality with the very real need to incorporate
the immigrant, and considers the political implications of the ethnocultural vision
of Argentine nationhood. A final section extends the discussion of cultural
nationalism’s political implications by looking at the ideas of the movement’s
harshest critics: the leaders of the Argentine Socialist Party. Articulating an
alternative vision of the nation—one that harkened back to nineteenth-century
understandings—Argentine socialists challenged both the assumptions
underlying cultural nationalism and what they viewed as the movement’s
inherently anti-democratic thrust.

NATIONHOOD AND IMMIGRATION IN THE NINETEENTH

CENTURY

If the leaders of Argentina’s independence movement could somehow have

been transported to the early twentieth century, they undoubtedly would have
been bewildered by the manifestos of their descendants. The cultural
nationalists’ view of the Argentine nation as a unique ethnocultural community
was strikingly at odds with the ideas that informed the 1810 revolutionary
project. Inspired by the example of the French Revolution, Argentine
revolutionaries believed modern nations were first and foremost political
associations, created by individuals who were joined by a shared political vision,
rather than a common language, religion, or other ethnic traits.6 In breaking
with Spain, they invoked not the claims of any pre-existing "historicocultural
nation" suppressed by a colonial power, but the right to establish a new nation
based on the principles of equality, liberty, and popular sovereignty.7 As
revolutionary leader Mariano Moreno optimistically proclaimed, "The world has
seldom seen a setting like ours in which a constitution can be modeled that will
give happiness to the people."8

Integral to the idea of Argentina as a political entity was the concept of volitional
allegiance. While membership in the national community was, for practical
reasons, granted to all individuals born within the national territory, it was also
open to those who demonstrated loyalty to the nation and its principles.9
Despite the revolutionaries’ understandable suspicion of native Spaniards, the
idea that being an Argentine was a choice or act of will rather than a set of
ascriptive traits was well accepted. From the earliest years of the Republic,
foreign-born males were encouraged—and indeed pressured—to declare their
allegiance to the new nation. Naturalization requirements were minimal, and
these newly minted citizens enjoyed the same rights as the native-born.10

Early immigration policy further reflected the founders’ vision of Argentineness

as a matter of choice rather than an immutable condition. An official decree,
published in 1812, offered the government’s

immediate protection to individuals and their families from all nations who wish
to establish their domicile in the territory of the State, assuring them the full
enjoyment of the rights of man in society, insofar as they do not disturb the
public tranquillity and they respect the laws of the country.11

Indeed, Argentina’s early leadership did more than simply open the nation to
immigrants. Anxious to settle the vast interior, these leaders believed increasing
the population was one of the new nation’s most urgent tasks and actively
sought to attract European immigrants.12

Yet the vision of Argentina as a nation comprised of individuals "from all

nations" who could—and were expected to—naturalize, was not free of
ambiguities. Despite the universalism implicit in this understanding of
nationality, the idea that nations possess distinctive characters and that their
people have different propensities quickly seeped into discourse about
immigration. In his 1818 diplomatic mission to Europe, independence leader
Bernardino Rivadavia described immigration as the

most efficient, and perhaps the only, means of destroying the degrading
Spanish habits and the fatal gradation of castes, in order to create a
homogenous, industrious and moral population, [which is] the only solid base
for Equality, Liberty and consequently, the Prosperity of a nation.13

The most desirable immigrant, he and his fellow revolutionaries argued, came
from Protestant Europe, for they believed the people of these countries
possessed the qualities necessary for constructing a prosperous, democratic
nation guided by Enlightenment principles.14

The idea of national character and the belief that members of different nations
were stamped with distinctive characteristics gained force in later decades, as
the following generation of Argentines grappled with, and attempted to explain,
the failure of Enlightenment ideas to take hold. In 1829, universal suffrage
brought to power the infamous caudillo Juan Manuel de Rosas, who established
one of Latin America’s most enduring and brutal dictatorships. Seeking to
understand Rosas’ continued popularity among the lower classes, progressive
intellectuals—many of whom spent the Rosas years in exile—drew inspiration
from German Romanticism with its emphasis on immutable national character
and distinctive national destinies.15 As Domingo F. Sarmiento, one of the
foremost members of this generation put it, "We ... began to learn something of
national inclinations, customs, and races, and of historical antecedents."16

The liberal project had sputtered, these thinkers argued, because revolutionary
leaders had underestimated the continued strength of the Spanish colonial
legacy.17 Criticizing their predecessors’ belief that they could create a new
nation ex nihlo, members of the Generation of 1837 argued that the Argentine
people, the raw material of the nation, had in a sense already existed before the
war of independence, having been formed (or deformed) during the long years
of colonial rule. Unfortunately for progressives, the character of this people was
fundamentally Spanish: prone to violence, despotism, and religious fanaticism,
and thus resistant to the Enlightenment ideals the founding fathers had so
cherished. Argentine geography, Sarmiento believed, had only exacerbated
these negative tendencies. The harsh conditions of the vast, empty pampas,
combined with Spanish proclivities, had created a national type and a style of
life whose principal characteristics were impulsiveness, violence, and sloth.18

What might be called the discovery of an Argentine race or character rooted in

history and shaped by geography, religion, and even language had several
implications.19 First, according to the members of this generation, expunging
the Hispanic legacy entailed much more than simply imposing liberal
democratic institutions on a backward society. It required, instead, a
hardheaded assessment of the Argentine character and a willingness to
abandon abstract principles in favor of more realistic policies.20 Romantic
notions about national character thus provided Argentine intellectuals with a
way to justify a retreat from the goal of participatory democracy.21 The belief
that the Argentine people were fundamentally unsuited to be participating
citizens led intellectuals such as Juan Bautista Alberdi to argue for an
evolutionary model of Argentine politics. According to Alberdi, whose famous
Bases y puntos de partida para la organización política de la República
Argentina [Bases and Points of Departure for the Political Organization of the
Argentine Republic] provided a blueprint for the Argentine Constitution of 1853,
Argentina must first pass through what he called the "possible republic": a
period characterized by limited suffrage and rule by a progressive but
essentially authoritarian state. Only later, once Argentina developed social and
economic structures comparable to those of Western Europe, would the
possible republic give way to the "true republic," i.e., a fully functioning
democracy.22

But while their analysis of Argentine ills drew heavily from Romantic concepts of
national character, how members of this generation understood what modern
nations were, or should be, remained firmly rooted in the French tradition. In
direct contrast to the Romantic view of nations as ethnocultural communities
existing prior to and independently of political institutions, these thinkers held
fast to the conviction that true nations must, as much as possible, approximate
the model of nationhood that had emerged from the French Revolution.23 In
other words, the modern nation was, in their view, a political association based
on citizenship rather than an ethnocultural community based on putative ethnic
traits. Thus constructing the Argentine nation, they believed, was not a matter of
fortifying Argentine culture, religion, language, or traditions, or of cultivating a
mythic past—far from it. Rather, since this past was seen as an obstacle to
nation building, creating the nation consisted of instilling in the Argentine people
a common set of political beliefs that would bind them together.24

What, then, was the role of immigration in this project to transform Argentina
into a modern nation of citizens? Quite simply, the Generation of 1837 saw
European immigration as the cornerstone upon which the new Argentina would
be built. Like Rivadavia before them, these intellectuals viewed Northern
European immigration as the remedy for Argentina’s economic and political ills.
Accordingly, Alberdi believed, the government should encourage the
immigration of Anglo-Saxons in order to "fit the population to the political system
we have proclaimed." Anglo-Saxons, he proclaimed, "are identified with the
steamship, with commerce, and with liberty, and it will be impossible to
establish these things among us without the active cooperation of that
progressive and cultivated race." Spanish immigrants, in contrast, were
unwelcome and would only compound Argentina’s difficulties. Stridently anti-
Spanish, Alberdi argued that Spaniards were "incapable of establishing a
republic," either here in America or there in Spain.25

It is worth remembering here that the term "race" as used in this context was
cultural and historical, rather than biological.26 Spaniards and Britons were
different, these individuals believed, not because of inherited or genetic qualities
(scientific racism had yet to have an impact in Argentina), but because they
belonged to different cultural, linguistic, and religious traditions. While birth
determined key aspects of the individual’s personality—the individual was
inevitably shaped by the national group into which he or she was born—
nineteenth-century intellectuals remained optimistic that native Argentines could
acquire, through simple contact or more formal education, the desired Anglo-
Saxon traits. Thus liberal reformers such as Alberdi and Sarmiento desired
Anglo-Saxon immigration not to improve the genetic stock of the national
population, but to help transform the work habits and customs of this native
population.27

The related beliefs that Argentina should strive to construct a nation of citizens
based upon Republican principles and that Northern European immigration
would play a key role in bringing about this transformation did not last. The
closing decades of the nineteenth century witnessed two transitions, one
demographic and the other political, that changed both how educated
Argentines viewed the immigrant and how they understood the Argentine
nation. The first change, somewhat paradoxically, was the onset of massive
immigration. Despite the pro-immigration attitudes of the Generation of 1837,
(which came to power after the defeat of Rosas in 1852), few Europeans found
Argentina an attractive destination. After 1880, however, circumstances
changed. New political stability, technological advances, the end of the Indian
wars, and surging European demand for imported food combined to unleash an
export boom of remarkable intensity and duration. With this new prosperity,
what had been a modest trickle of immigrants became a cascade. Between
1857, when immigration statistics were first recorded, and 1916, over 2.5 million
immigrants permanently settled in Argentina.28 Significantly, however, the vast
majority of these immigrants came not from the Protestant nations of Northern
Europe, but from Italy and Spain.

Contrary to the Generation of 1837’s expectations, native Argentines received

these immigrants with great ambivalence and even hostility. Indeed, this period
witnessed a growing wave of anti-immigrant sentiment that intensified with the
turn of the century. As will be discussed below, the reasons for this hostility
varied, but what is important to note here is that most fin-de-siècle critics of
immigration were unconcerned by the fact that these newcomers were not the
Northern Europeans mid-nineteenth-century reformers had desired.29
The second important transition of the period informing this loss of enthusiasm
for Northern European immigrants was the weakening of the democratic ideal.
By the end of the century, very few Argentine leaders promoted the notion that
Argentines should strive to construct a nation of citizens along the lines of the
French Republican model.30 Inspired by European positivism, Argentine
political elites embraced the ideal of "scientific politics," meaning that national
leaders should eschew abstract political principles in order to develop, through
observation and experimentation, policies and institutions in tune with the
peculiarities of their societies.31 In practice, this meant the establishment of a
political system that was democratic in name only. From 1880 to 1916,
Argentina was ruled by the authoritarian Autonomous National Party or P.A.N.,
a party that controlled elections through patronage, intimidation, and fraud, and
dedicated itself to the twin goals of "order and progress."

Argentina under the P.A.N. sounds much like Alberdi’s possible republic, and
indeed in Argentina the segue from mid-nineteenth-century liberalism to fin-de-
siècle positivism was unusually smooth. As Noé Jitrik has noted, the positivist
Generation of 1880 was the "organic realization" of the previous generation.32
There were, however, some important differences. Unlike the Generation of
1837’s view that the Argentine national character would eventually evolve to the
point where leaders could establish a state based on Republican principles, the
positivist vision of Argentina’s future was drained of democratic possibilities.
Arguing that the state should administer rather than govern, positivist-inspired
leaders such as P.A.N. founder Julio Roca envisioned a state run by an
enlightened elite whose citizens would contribute to the general welfare but
without challenging established political practices.

The anti-democratic character of the Argentine state seems not to have

bothered most immigrants. The popular stereotype of the immigrant as coming
to "hacer la América" (i.e., coming for the sole purpose of making a fortune),
was to a large extent accurate. Economically, immigrants proved quite
successful, inserting themselves in a position above the unskilled Argentine
masses but below the traditional landed elite. There, they formed both the core
of Argentina’s urban working class and the emerging middle or entrepreneurial
class.33 But while active in the economic sphere, few immigrants demonstrated
any inclination to integrate politically. Naturalization rates were extremely low:
during this period, only two to three percent of all immigrants to Argentina
became citizens.34

The withering of the democratic ideal under the positivist regime, coupled with
the immigrants’ reluctance to naturalize, explains why Argentine political leaders
no longer viewed the immigrant as the essential element in the project of
transforming Argentina into a nation of participating citizens. But since
immigrants’ tendency to shun formal political participation dovetailed so well
with the P.A.N.’s authoritarian vision, what accounts for the wave of anti-
immigrant sentiment sweeping Argentina at the turn of the century? What type
of menace did immigrants represent?

One fear frequently expressed in the anti-immigrant literature of the period was
that of social upheaval.35 Immigrants formed the core of Argentina’s new urban
working class and played key roles in the anarchist and syndicalist movements
that began to organize by the 1890s. An alarmed national elite blamed this new
militancy on foreign agitators whose "imported ideologies" had no place in
Argentina. Legislative efforts to remedy the situation resulted in the infamous
Residence Law of 1902 and the 1910 Law of Social Defense, which allowed the
executive branch to deport undesirable foreigners.

Another source of anti-immigrant sentiment was concern over the presumed

problem of racial degeneration, which itself was tied to anxiety over the social
question.36 In Argentina, as in the rest of Latin American, the final decades of
the nineteenth century witnessed a growing interest in racialist theories as a
way of understanding the continent’s backwardness vis-à-vis Europe. Scientific
racism had special poignancy in countries such as Mexico and Brazil, with large
indigenous and African American populations, but Argentine intellectuals and
leaders across the political spectrum also embraced the goal of social reform
through racial improvement. Immigration policy, many believed, would be the
key means of achieving that goal.37

Fears about immigrants as avatars of radical, foreign ideologies and as carriers

of racially inferior genes were a large part of the anti-immigrant sentiment
sweeping Argentina during the turn of the century. But another element—and
from my reading of the evidence, the most important one—fueling this new anti-
immigrant sentiment was the fear that the immigrant was undermining Argentine
nationality.

THE RISE OF CULTURAL NATIONALISM AND THE IDEA OF AN

ARGENTINE RACE

As noted above, one of the central preoccupations among elites of this period
was the threat of excessive cosmopolitanism and the weakening of Argentine
nationality due to massive immigration. In voicing these concerns, critics of the
immigrant often used the language of scientific racism, but with a very different
understanding of race. Writer Arturo O’Connor provides a good example. In an
essay published in Ideas, a literary magazine widely identified with the new
generation of cultural nationalists, O’Connor mourns the loss of "the Argentine
race," which was "disappearing under the influx of immigrants." "Race," he
continues, "is nationality," and determines (or carries along with it) our
distinctive "political evolution, sociability, religion, philosophy, science, art,
morality, history and traditions."38 O’Connor goes on to describe how alien
values of materialism have replaced the traditional spirituality of the Argentine
people. In a similar vein, Manuel Gálvez, one of key proponents of Argentine
cultural nationalism and a co-founder of Ideas, urged his fellow Argentines to
return to their Spanish roots in their struggle against cosmopolitanism. Calling
Spain the "ancestral dwelling [solar] of the race," Gálvez proclaimed it time to
"feel ourselves [to be] Americans and in the ultimate term, Spaniards, given that
this is the race to which we belong."39

Even intellectuals who believed that Gálvez and others exaggerated the threat
of cosmopolitanism often adopted the idiom of cultural nationalism. In his review
of El solar de la raza in the progressive literary journal Nosotros, Alvaro Melián
Lafinur noted approvingly the new tendency among writers to promote ideals
that would unify Argentines and promote a collective sense of an Argentine
nationality. These efforts stemmed, he continued, from the very real need to
"define our character and to affirm ourselves as a racial entity."40

The term "race" in this context clearly carried a very different meaning than that
intended by turn-of-the-century adherents of scientific racism. Cultural
nationalists, like their nineteenth-century predecessors, understood race to be
cultural and historical rather than biological. For these individuals the term
denoted a people bound together by common historical memory, language,
shared mental and emotional traits, and—in the case of Gálvez—religion, and
had nothing to do with the emerging science of genetics and heredity. Ricardo
Rojas, who along with Gálvez is considered one of the founding fathers of
Argentine cultural nationalism, made this difference explicit when he
proclaimed:

I use the term ‘race’ not in the sense used by materialistic anthropologists, but
in the old, romantic sense [having to do with] collective personality, historical
group, cultural consciousness. Given this idealistic criterion, racial entities defy
objective definitions [and can only be grasped] ... through intuition.41

The distance between the nineteenth-century vision of the immigrant as a

source of democratic values and the early twentieth-century view of the
immigrant as an agent of national dissolution was great indeed. But clearly what
had changed was not simply the assessment of the immigrant, but the
underlying understanding of what nations were and what held them together. As
noted above, nineteenth-century leaders, while believing that the peoples of
different nations possessed distinctive cultural traits and propensities, did not
see culture, language, religion, or common ancestry as the very basis of
nationhood. European immigrants were welcomed precisely because they
supposedly embodied the qualities deemed necessary to construct a modern
nation, i.e., a nation of participating citizens bound by their common belief in a
political creed. The Romantic vision of the nation embraced by early twentieth-
century Argentine cultural nationalists, in contrast, was completely devoid of any
reference to political institutions or practices.42 These thinkers considered the
nation to be a prepolitical essence, or in the words of Gálvez, to possess a
"historic personality" or psychological structure based on an "irreducible
nucleus."43 Rojas espoused the same view when he noted that the older
countries of Europe, such as Germany, France, Italy, and England, each
possessed a "spiritual nucleus" that was the consequence of a "homogeneous
race" emerging from the "remote past." These nations, he believed, "preexisted
spiritually" in the sense that the "people [pueblo] had formed before the
[political] nation had been established."44 As will be discussed below, this
detachment of nationality from political institutions or practices would have
important implications for how early twentieth-century Argentines viewed the
immigrant.
From where did this new way of imagining the nation come? Highly influential,
of course, were European intellectual currents. As noted earlier, the Romantic
understanding of the nation as an ethnocultural community was first elaborated
in early nineteenth-century Germany. It was not until the closing decades of the
century, however, that this vision of nationhood swept the rest of Europe.
Blending with elements of Darwinism,45 German idealism helped produce what
Eric Hobsbawm has described as the second great wave of nationalism.46
Latin American intellectuals proved receptive to these currents. Romantic
idealism, in the words of David Brading, "seeped into the Hispanic world in the
1880s, gathered force at the turn of the century, and flowed at high tide after the
First World War."47 In Argentina, intellectuals cited as influences French writers
Hipolyte-Adolphe Taine, Ernest Renan, Maurice Barrés, Charles Maurras, and
León Daudet, as well as Germans J.G. Fichte, Friedrich Schiller, J. W. Goethe,
and Friedrich Nietzsche. Very often, however, the ideas of these thinkers came
to Argentines filtered through the writings of the Spanish Generation of 1898,
Angel Ganivet, Miguel Unamuno, and Ramiro de Maeztu, whose writings
expressed the need to recover Spain’s unique traditions and to bring about the
rebirth of the national soul.48

The new idealism and the concern with national character appeared in
Argentina (and in Hispanic America as a whole) under the guise of the literary
movement known as modernismo. Spearheaded by Nicaraguan poet Rubén
Darío and Uruguayan essayist José Enrique Rodó, both of whom visited
Argentina for extended periods, this movement knitted together a rejection of
positivism and materialism with the Romantic quest for Latin American cultural
autonomy and authenticity.49 In his extraordinarily influential essay Ariel,
published in 1900, Rodó proclaimed the primacy of intuition over the senses
and juxtaposed the supposedly idealistic, aesthetically-inclined Latin race with
the utilitarianism and materialism he believed characterized the Anglo-Saxon
race of the United States. Rodó’s celebration of the Latin spirit, and his belief
that ethnicity provided the basis of solidarity and identity, is made clear in his
statement that "we Latin Americans have an inheritance, a great ethnic tradition
to maintain." A decade later he went on to identify the "idea and sentiment of
the race" with the "communal sense of ancestry."50

While outside intellectual currents clearly inspired early twentieth-century

Argentine intellectuals to reimagine what it meant to be a nation, it is also true
that concrete circumstances helped nourish this new understanding of
nationality. The mere presence of so many immigrants, most speaking foreign
tongues, wearing unusual clothes, eating different foods, and engaging in all
sorts of novel (and threatening) behavior such as labor organizing, brought
large numbers of native Argentines face-to-face with the "other," encouraging
them to think about national differences in terms of ethnicity. Modernity itself
played a part, as native Argentines often blamed the immigrant for what were in
fact changes more generally associated with modernization.51 Complaints
about the new materialism, excessive individualism, and the loss of traditional
Argentine virtues such as honesty, desinterés [selflessness], and spirituality
abounded. Against the inevitable centrifugal forces of modernity and the
increasing complexity of everyday life, the ideal of the nation as a cohesive,
homogenous community bound together by history, shared values, and
traditions exercised enormous appeal.

Another source of the ethnocultural vision of the nation’s appeal was the
increasing anxiety over the weakening of old social and political hierarchies.
Elites of the period frequently complained that the lower classes were no longer
sufficiently deferential. In many ways, everyday experience and personal
anecdote reinforced the more abstract fear that working-class militancy had
gotten out of hand. Contributing to this fear about the impending collapse of the
old order was the desire, by a faction of the elite, to push the stalled project of
democratization forward. As early as 1890, a segment of the elite, led first by
Leandro Alem and later by his nephew Hipólito Yrigoyen, rejected the P.A.N.’s
fraudulent practices and called for honest elections. Organized as the Unión
Cívica Radical (U.C.R.), this party constantly agitated for reforms.52 Finally in
1914, President Roque Sáenz Pena, himself a member of the P.A.N., bowed to
pressure and sponsored legislation that made voting both secret and mandatory
for all Argentine citizens. The reforms were effective. In 1916, the U.C.R. gained
control of the presidency which it held until a military coup in 1930.

For those Argentines who feared democratization and doubted the U.C.R.’s
ability to maintain order, the ethnocultural vision of nationality was
understandably attractive for two related reasons. First, in contrast to the
French model of nationhood, which conceives of the nation as a political
association formed by individuals who share equally in the rights and
obligations of citizenship, the ideal of the nation as an ethnocultural community
can easily tolerate internal hierarchies. As M. Rainer Lepsius has argued, the
model of the ethnocultural nation "is not the basis of pressure for an equal life
situation ... [since] the idea of historical uniqueness of a people is completely
consistent with the differential qualifications of members of the people."53 Put
another way, because the very identity of nations modeled along the lines of
post- Revolutionary France rests, in part, on the ideal of equality, these nations
must to some degree promote egalitarianism. But for nations whose identity
rests on their supposedly unique ethnic characteristics, there is no reason why
social and political hierarchies cannot remain intact.

Second, within the ethnocultural understanding of nationhood, the rights of the

individual are seen as secondary to those of the collective. The nation,
according to this model, is not formed by the conscious acts of individuals, but
instead emerges organically over time, unaided by human agency. As such, it
stands above the individual, enjoying a higher status. When the interests of
individuals conflict with those of the nation, the rights of the former are easily
subordinated to the collective interests of the nation.54 Thus Manuel Gálvez,
who feared that Argentina’s Catholic character was being undermined by
Protestant organizations such as the Salvation Army, urged that "apostles of
foreign religions" be expelled, despite constitutional guarantees to the contrary.
"The Constitution," he proclaimed, "is unquestionably a respectable document,
but nationality should take precedence over the Constitution; the salvation of
the nation requires the violation of the Constitution."55
Gálvez’s intemperate comments, besides highlighting some of the political
implications of the ethnocultural understanding of nationality, bring us to the
obvious problem of the immigrant. If, during the early decades of the twentieth
century, growing numbers of native Argentines began to understand their nation
as a unique ethnocultural community and saw Argentines as forming a
distinctive race, what role did they envision for the millions of immigrants
flooding onto their shores? Could the immigrant become a member of the
Argentine race, and if so, how was this to be accomplished?

Common sense tells us that in societies formed by immigration, ethnicity cannot

possibly provide the basis of national identity. Countries such as the United
States must by necessity define nationality in political terms. That is,
membership in the national community cannot depend on the individual’s
origins or ethnic qualities, but on his or her willingness to embrace a political
creed and the principles of citizenship. In situations where ethnicity does form
the basis of a nation’s identity and large-scale immigration occurs, the
immigrant population—as is the case in Germany—does not enjoy full
membership in the national community. But Argentina, where the idea of the
nation as a ethnocultural community gained force at precisely the moment when
the country was experiencing massive immigration, represents a unique case.
As argued above, in Argentina the ethnocultural vision of the nation, rather than
providing a rationale for marginalizing the immigrant (as occurred in Germany),
served as a means to integrate the foreigner.

How was this possible? The key lay in the widely accepted view that in
Argentina a new race was forming, one that would represent an amalgam of the
diverse racial groups that currently coexisted within national borders. Although
some pessimists such as Arturo O’Connor saw the immigrant as the destroyer
of the putative Argentine race, much more common was the more optimistic
view that the newcomers would be a part of a new, emerging race.

Let us listen to the voices of the period. "What we are seeing now," according to
Dr. Salvador Debenedetti, a professor at the University of Buenos Aires,

... is the soul of the future race, characterized by common aspirations, and
shaping itself [plasmandose] slowly and locally under the influence of the social
medium and the environment. Such manifestations are clear symptoms of a
nationality [already] defined or about to become defined....56

Juan Mas y Pi, a well-known writer and critic, proclaimed that "Argentina has
been, and continues to be, a country of great ethnic confusion, [an] enormous
conglomerate of all the races and castes...." From this "confused
conglomeration," he believed, "a great race ... would inevitably emerge."57 And
in the words of the poet Almafuerte:

The future great soul ... will appear ... when the mind of the new race in
gestation has formed, when the beautiful blond beast that Nietzsche speaks of
has been formed formed from this current Babel, [that will occur] thanks to the
fusion of the bloodlines, the atavisms, the degenerations, the histories, the
diverse origins that now clash ... and repel each other.... [The present situation]
is a frightful hurley-burley that will endure for ... generations until it constitutes
an organism [with a] clearly drawn body [and an] obvious, characteristic
race....58

The emerging raza argentina, then, would include rather than exclude the
immigrant.

DEFINING THE ARGENTINE RACE

The idea of Argentina as a race-in-formation had widespread appeal because it

provided a framework for visualizing how to integrate the immigrant into the
national community. But these optimistic proclamations, inclusive though they
might be, tell us nothing about what role the immigrant would have in shaping
this new race. Like the term "nation" itself, the idea of Argentines as a race-in-
formation was an empty screen upon which any number of images could be
projected. Far from having a definitive shape or character, this notion formed an
arena of contestation in which some of the liveliest intellects of the period would
clashed.

How individual thinkers defined the putatively emerging race and what qualities
they privileged—shared descent, language, religion, personality traits—varied
enormously. How would this race form? Would it be a spontaneous process
occurring naturally over time? Or would it be guided by a native elite who would
determine what was and was not authentically Argentine? At stake here, of
course, was the question of who in Argentina would wield cultural authority.
Also, what was the role of descent? Could the foreign-born become real
Argentines, or could only their offspring born on national soil become real
Argentines? How acquirable were the traits that marked one as a true
Argentine? Were these traits acquirable by all or limited only to those of a
certain ancestry?

A brief comparison of how Rojas and Gálvez approached these questions is

illustrative. Of the two thinkers, the latter had the more restrictive notion of the
developing Argentine race. According to Gálvez, the Argentine race was
fundamentally Latin, and within the greater racial grouping of Latins, Spanish.
Echoing Rodó, Gálvez argued that Latins constituted a unique race, sharing the
special traits of spirituality, warmth, and creativity that other races lacked.59 In
contrast to the Uruguayan thinker, however, Gálvez believed the special
characteristics of Latins were inextricably bound to Catholicism, arguing that
"[r]eligion, like language, is one of the essential fundamentals in which resides
nationality."60

In keeping with his vision of Argentina as a fundamentally Hispanic nation

whose identity was intimately bound to Catholicism, it is not surprising that
Gálvez believed immigrants from Latin countries (and especially Spain) were
most desirable. Noting approvingly that the great majority of Argentina’s
immigrants came from Spain and Italy, Gálvez argued that these newcomers
brought with them the "providential and invisible mission to conserve the
qualities of latinidad in the mixture of peoples [that had come to Argentina] and
to guarantee, in the amalgam of so many metals, the pure gold of latinidad."61
Despite the massive influx of immigrants from all parts, Argentina was and
would remain a Latin, and especially a Hispanic, nation.

Gálvez’s vision of the emerging Argentine race, whose character is preserved

because of the sheer number of Latins entering the country, seems to privilege
heredity or common descent as the basis of nationality.62 Yet elsewhere he
appears to indicate that the qualities distinguishing one people from another can
both be acquired and lost. He complains, for example, that immigrants (and
here he fails to distinguish between Latin and non-Latin immigrants) had come
to Argentina only in search of wealth, thereby introducing natives to a "new
concept of life" and "infecting" them with the vice of materialism.63

The obverse side of this fear that Argentines could become denationalized by
contact with alien values is that immigrants could themselves be transformed
and thus nationalized. Despite his suggestion, noted above, that individuals who
promoted the spread of Protestantism should be deported, Gálvez does at
times indicate that it is indeed possible for the immigrant—even the non-Latin,
non-Catholic immigrant—to become a true Argentine. This occurred, he
believed, through a mysterious process of transubstantiation when the foreigner
"submerges" his soul in the "vastness of the national soul, and his heart pulses
to the rhythm of the national sentiment" [se templa en al pauta del sentimiento
nacional].64 Gálvez’s deep friendship with fellow writer Alberto Gerchunoff, a
Russian-born Jew, is also revealing. Lauding his friend as one of the great
"attractions" of his generation and Gerchunoff’s book, Los gauchos judios [The
Jewish Gauchos], as "one of the most beautiful of our narrative literature,"
Gálvez apparently believed that even foreign-born Jews could become real
Argentines.65

By comparison, Rojas’s vision of the emerging Argentine race was more

expansive. Whereas Gálvez defined the Argentine race as essentially Hispanic
and one whose special character was intimately bound to Catholicism, Rojas
argued that Spain had provided only one element, albeit an important one, in
the emerging new Argentine race.66 One of the few thinkers of the period to
acknowledge the pre-Columbian past, Rojas believed the evolving Argentine
race would result from the fertile coupling of both indigenous and European
elements.67 This new civilization, which Rojas termed "Eurindia," would be
completely unique and of "transcendental importance for humanity."68

When describing how this felicitous blend of the foreign and the native would
occur, Rojas’ thought takes on a decidedly mystical cast. Each nation’s territory,
he believed, possessed spiritual forces that, emanating from the soil, stamped
the territory’s inhabitants with a particular set of mental characteristics and thus
gave the nation its distinctive personality or character.69 In Argentina, Rojas
argued, these telluric forces also had a unifying function, serving to transform or
nationalize the millions of foreigners who continued to pour onto national
shores. The rural interior, then, would serve as the "crucible" of the national
race, "molding men into a race, and transforming this race until it was a true
nationality."70

Whatever we may think of Rojas’ fanciful vision (which raised the eyebrows of
more than a few of his contemporaries), it is important to appreciate his mystical
musings for what they are: an attempt to reconcile the contradictions between
the ethnocultural understanding of nationality he embraced and the realities of
early twentieth-century Argentina. By arguing that the telluric forces of the
Argentine soil would impose a common mental or spiritual matrix on the
newcomers, Rojas is able to stretch the parameters of the ethnic vision of
nationality to make it capacious enough to accommodate the immigrant. Thus,
while he agreed with other cultural nationalists that the current wave of
immigrants had taxed the country’s capacity to absorb or transform them, Rojas
continued to argue that the "cosmopolitan immigration" was a "key part of the
ethnic development of our nationality."71

It would be erroneous, however, to conclude that Rojas’ more inclusive vision of

the emerging Argentine race provided the immigrant with a greater role in
shaping the character of that race. Closer inspection of his understanding of the
raza argentina reveals that his view is more similar to Gálvez’s than this brief
comparison suggests. While Rojas believed that the emerging Argentine race
would be a mixture of diverse European and native elements, it is clear he also
believed the foreigners’ contribution to this developing national personality
should be tightly supervised.

Rojas’ well-known activities in the realm of education amply reflect this

conviction. In his 1909 work, La restauración nacionalista (a project financed by
the Ministry of Education), Rojas proclaimed the need to transform the nation’s
schools into the "hearth of citizenship."72 Chastising past governments for
blindly following foreign educational models, Rojas called for a complete
reorganization of the national school curriculum. This new curriculum should
focus on Argentine history, the Spanish language, Argentine literature,
Argentine geography, and moral instruction, and should seek to inculcate in all
immigrant children a love for the nation and an understanding of Argentine
traditions. The public schools, Rojas believed, should be instrumental in the
effort to "define the national conscience" and bring about a "real and fecund
patriotism."73 In other words, the emergence of the new Argentine race, while
gradual, would not and should not be allowed to occur naturally. Rather, to
safeguard authentic Argentine values and traditions, the artistic and intellectual
elite, i.e., individuals such as Rojas, should direct and shape the personality of
this emerging race.74

Differences over the content of the emerging national race or personality are
also evident in the growing debate over the national language. Central to the
Romantic understanding of the nation was the belief that language was an
integral part of nationality, a view widely embraced by early twentieth-century
Argentine intellectuals.75 Language within the Romatic tradition served to
identify and unify members of the national "race" or community, to differentiate
them from nonmembers, and to express and record the historical memory of the
community. But while many intellectuals of the period embraced the
identification of language and nationality, it posed certain problems. To be a real
nation did Argentina need its own national language, or was Spanish the true
national language? The dilemma for cultural nationalists and their sympathizers
was not merely theoretical, for many feared that Argentine Spanish was indeed
changing. During the early years of the century, two distinct jergas or jargons,
both associated with the working-class immigrant population, emerged in
Buenos Aires. Lunfardo, an urban street slang with heavy Italian influence, and
cocoliche, a kind of gaucho-talk associated with popular theater that featured
dramatic comedies about rural life, were very much in vogue among the
immigrant working class. While a few intellectuals applauded these new jargons
as evidence that Argentina was at last developing its own language (and thus
its own distinctive national personality), others ardently defended pure
Spanish.76

Sparking the language/nationality controversy was the 1900 publication of

visiting Frenchman Luciano Abeille’s Idioma nacional de los argentinos. Abeille,
clearly steeped in the ethnocultural nationalism sweeping Europe, saw
language as the expression of the national soul and argued that nations lacking
their own language were incomplete.77 Fortunately, he proclaimed approvingly,
Argentina was in the process of developing a distinctive language. "In the
Argentine Republic," Abeille argued, "a new race is forming. Consequently the
Spanish language will evolve until it forms a new language."78 Criticizing
Argentine schools for teaching "pure Castilian" devoid of local phrases or
neologisms, he warned that this effort to inhibit the evolution of Argentina’s
national language would "perturb the national soul that is reflected in that
language."79

Abeille’s book provoked an immediate response. Ernesto Quesada, a prominent

intellectual famous for his monumental tomes on history and culture, soundly
rejected Abeille’s argument that a new Argentine language was developing,
while at the same time embracing the French writer’s premise that language
was constitutive of nationality. Calling language the "depository of the [national]
spirit, race and genius," he argued that Argentina’s educated classes had a duty
to preserve Spanish in its pure form, which was genuinely Argentine.80 Writing
later but expressing the same sentiment, playwright Enrique García Velloso
argued, "we are never more Argentine than when we speak and write Spanish
correctly."81

Gálvez and Rojas, not surprisingly, weighed in on behalf of the purists. Ever the
Hispanicist, Gálvez impatiently dismissed the idea that Argentina would, or
should, develop its own language. "The enmity against pure Spanish," he
contended, "is something which [is] more a defensive attitude stemming from
youthful ignorance than a true sentiment." Lunfardo, he maintained, was a weak
and unstable dialect destined to fade. More importantly, it was the educated
upper class, especially writers and teachers, who set the standards for the
national language. Since these individuals spoke pure Spanish, the rest of the
nation should, too.82

Rojas agreed, and decried the "alarming problems" cosmopolitanism posed for
Argentine Spanish.83 Attacking Abeille’s theories as "unscientific and
encouraging the most barbaric and vain inclinations of creole (i.e., native)
jingoism,"84 Rojas argued that the Spanish language represented the
"synthesis of our national personality and race [and was part of] the collective
memory of tradition and culture."85 Accordingly, he believed Argentines should
strive to keep their Spanish as pure as possible.86 At the same time, however,
Rojas was careful to reject the view that all immigrants represented a threat to
Argentine Spanish. In his response to an encuesta or survey on the language
question published in the progressive newspaper Crítica, he noted that children
of immigrants easily learned to speak Spanish correctly. Indeed, he went on to
argue, many fine writers were first-generation Argentines.87

Yet the growing debate over language did produce some dissenting voices, as
several intellectuals concerned about cultivating what was original and authentic
in Argentine culture embraced Abeille’s work. Responding directly to Quesada’s
attack on the French writer, elite writer Francisco Soto y Calvo chastised his
fellow intellectuals for their rigidity. In the past, Soto y Calvo maintained, the
great majority of Argentine writers had produced works that "could just as well
have been written in Paris as in Buenos Aires."88 Such similarities meant not
that Argentines were on par with the rest of the world, but that they were mere
imitators, and pale ones at that. The incorporation of popular expressions into
the emerging national literature would lend it originality and color. While
acknowledging that lunfardo did not fully express the Argentine spirit, Soto y
Calvo argued that this jargon represented an important stage in the
development of a new national language. Regarding the evolution of this
language, he proclaimed that Argentine writers should welcome these
modifications instead of combating them. "We complain," he wrote, "about how
we are forming a nation without character, [yet] we are wasting ... [the very
qualities] which could give us that character." This new jargon, Soto y Calvo
continued, "is more genuinely Argentine, and as such gives us more honor,
than that which we [the elite writers] bring from abroad and learn like parrots."89

Also supporting Abeille’s thesis was a respondent to the Crítica survey, writing
under the English pseudonym "Last Reason" and identified only as a master of
creole theater. Embracing the ethnolinguistic nationalism then in vogue, "Last
Reason" maintained that the formation of a distinctive language was central to
the nation’s emerging identity. Without this new language, the writer contended,
"Buenos Aires would be merely a cosmopolitan, European city that lacked its
own personality." What now seemed a crude slang, he believed, would form the
basis of a new and ultimately rich national language. Attacking the elitism of
"doctors"90 who worried about the vulgarity of this new language, he
proclaimed:

[So you think] the language we use is barbaric and phonetically incorrect? I
agree ... the kid is so ugly it’s difficult to kiss him. Nonetheless, the baby is
ours.... But take note: one day the kid will grow and be beautiful, he will be a
man.... [O]ne day he will enter into the history of nations through the front door,
speaking in a loud voice a language which is beautiful, graphic, musical and
vibrant.... [T]his language will be the product of that rude and bastard dialect
which today burns the lips of the doctors.... [T]omorrow it will be the powerful
clarion that shouts to the decrepit and worm-eaten nations, the coming of a
great and glorious nation.91

Elite playwright and novelist José Antonio Saldías also supported the notion of
a new language. Co-founder of Crítica, Saldías argued that such a language
was becoming more and more necessary due to the greater diffusion of new
expressions into everyday speech. Moreover, like "Last Reason," he believed
the people themselves would produce it. "The national language," he claimed,
"like theater, like industry and all that is authentically ours, is rapidly forming
with the irrepressible contribution of popular [i.e., immigrant] expression."
Accusing those Argentines who opposed the formation of a national language of
being overly rigid, Saldías believed this new language would develop despite
their disapproval. "The people themselves," he argued, "needing to express
themselves fully and spontaneously, will, little by little, create and enrich this
new language."92

Abeille’s defenders represent an interesting twist to the early twentieth-century

debates over the Argentine national character. Like the advocates of pure
Spanish, they accepted the Romantic ideal of the nation as a distinctive people
evolving over time, marked by a common set of mental and emotional qualities,
and whose language somehow expressed or reflected the national soul. But
clearly this latter vision of the Argentine race or nation had a more popular, pro-
immigrant tincture. In contrast to purists such as Gálvez and Rojas—who,
despite their talk of Argentines as an emerging race—believed immigrants must
conform to a pre-existing Argentine identity, intellectuals such as Soto y Calvo,
Saldías, and "Last Reason" argued the immigrant would help shape the
character of the new race. In their view, Argentine identity was still fluid, and it
would be the contribution of working-class immigrants that would provide the
Argentine personality with its distinctive qualities.

The vision of Argentines as an emerging race, then, was in many ways a

neutral construct, lending itself to a variety of ways of imagining the Argentine
nation and the role of the immigrant within it. Regardless of whether it reflected
elitist or populist tendencies, it provided a way of envisioning the integration of
the immigrant into the national community. But despite this virtue, the limitations
of this vision should not be overlooked. What is absent, of course, is any
reference to the political integration of the immigrant. Missing from these
debates over the immigrants’ role in the emerging Argentine race is any
expression of concern over the newcomers’ failure to naturalize.

The peculiarity of this understanding of the process of Argentinization, and the

vision of the nation that gave rise to it, is clear when we compare how the
Argentine Socialist Party (PS) viewed the problem of the immigrant. In contrast
to cultural nationalists who remained indifferent to the idea of transforming
immigrants into participating citizens, the socialists were energetic advocates of
naturalization. The need to enlarge their electoral base was undoubtedly an
important motive, but so was their belief that nationality entailed some sort of
participation in, and contribution to, the political and economic destiny of the
nation.

Founded in 1894, the party sought to establish itself as the representative of

Argentina’s growing working class. Headed by Juan B. Justo, a first-generation
Argentine and a physician drawn to socialism through his work with the poor,
the PS pursued a reformist rather than a revolutionary strategy. While
advocating the eventual socialization of the Argentine economy, Justo was also
a committed democrat and believed that socialism could be achieved in
Argentina through gradual legislative reform. Under his leadership, socialist
candidates vigorously sought elective office, and by 1916 the PS had become
Argentina’s second-most powerful political party.

Socialists attacked the cultural nationalists both for the content of their ideas
and their motives. Justo, for example, rejected as "mystical" the very idea that
nations were "rigorously delimited entities," with distinctive personalities and
destinies.93 While acknowledging that nations were indeed distinctive due to
their different degrees of development, the PS embraced the Enlightenment
notion that human beings were fundamentally similar and equal. Nations
should, Justo argued, be evaluated and ranked not according to inherent
qualities such as race or ethnicity, but according to the

vital energy of the population as indicated by the rate of population growth, the
infant mortality rate ... the literacy rate, in the level of freedom of thought, in the
extension of political rights of the inhabitants and the level participation in the
electoral process.94

Attacking the motives of the cultural nationalists, fellow socialist Augusto Bunge
ridiculed the notion of racial or ethnic differences as a "sophistry dreamed up by
poets and politicians." In an obvious reference to Rojas, Bunge argued that
those who sought a "national restoration" were members of the conservative
class who wished simply to perpetuate the status quo.95

Argentine socialists’ ideas about nation and nationality clearly harkened back to
the political understanding of nationality espoused by Rivadavia and other
members of the revolutionary generation of 1810. For the socialists, the nation
was above all a political association: membership in the national community had
nothing to do with an individual’s ethnic characteristics, language, or even
length of residence in Argentina, but rather one’s willingness to participate in the
political system and to contribute to the general well-being and greatness of the
nation. This identification of citizenship and Argentineness, and the voluntaristic
nature of nationality, comes through clearly in Bunge’s claim that the naturalized
citizen who was loyal to his adoptive nation was more completely Argentine
than the corrupt, native-born politician who stole from the public till or the
decadent society matron whose only concern was to spend her husband’s
fortune on Parisian fashions.96

CONCLUSION
The Socialist Party’s insistence that immigrants should become naturalized
citizens and the cultural nationalists’ belief that the immigrant would—in some
fashion—form part of an emerging Argentine race, represent very different
responses to the challenges massive immigration posed. Proponents of both
approaches recognized the need to integrate the newcomers and to make them
members of the national community. For socialist leaders, it was the political
arena that would provide the basis of national cohesion. Seeking to revive the
ideals of Argentina’s revolutionary generation, socialist leaders viewed nations
as human creations: the result of conscious acts by like-minded individuals who
together form a political association based on the supposedly universal values
of equality, liberty, and popular sovereignty. These shared political beliefs and a
common sense of enterprise—not language, religion, or other ethnic traits—
would bind the members of the nation together.97 Accordingly, anyone who
embraced these ideals and publicly pledged loyalty to the nation could become
a true Argentine. By the same token, becoming an Argentine was inseparable
from becoming a citizen.

For cultural nationalists and their supporters, in contrast, integrating the

immigrant into the national community was a lengthier and murkier process.
Because these individuals defined the nation as an ethnocultural community
and equated nationality with a bundle of cultural or ethnic characteristics
(defined differently by different individuals, and which might or might not be
acquirable), becoming an Argentine had nothing to do with obtaining formal
citizenship or embracing a political creed. Rather, Argentinization entailed a
process more akin to a spiritual transformation by which the immigrant became
—through some mystical process—bound to the nation.

It is worth asking why so many prominent intellectuals of the period completely

ignored the naturalization issue and why they had so little faith in the political
arena as a source of national cohesion. For some intellectuals such as Manuel
Gálvez, whose authoritarian tendencies have already been noted, the idea of
popular sovereignty and uniform citizenship rights, integral to the vision of the
nation as an association of citizens, offended their belief in a natural hierarchy.
Additionally, such individuals also saw civil equality and democratic institutions
as being ill-suited to protect the higher interests of the nation. (Recall, for
example, Gálvez’s insistence that Protestant preachers should be deported
despite constitutional guarantees to the contrary.) Not surprisingly, Gálvez
supported Argentina’s first military coup, led by an ultra-nationalist military
faction in 1930, that ended Argentina’s experiment with democracy.98

But it would be false to portray all intellectuals who embraced the ethnocultural
understanding of nationality as anti-democratic. Although their reaction is not
known, it is doubtful that individuals such as Soto y Calvo, "Last Reason," and
Saldías sympathized with the 1930 coup. And Ricardo Rojas, despite his
obvious elitism, remained a supporter of democratic institutions. An implacable
critic of the military coup and the fraudulent government that followed, Rojas
endured two years of internal exile in Tierra del Fuego (Argentina’s equivalent
of Siberia) for his beliefs.99
The question remains: Why then, did Rojas and others with democratic
inclinations not see formal citizenship as an essential component of
Argentineness? Why did they not see a common political life and uniform
citizenship rights as a basis of national solidarity and cohesion, or view bringing
the immigrant into the political process as a way to strengthen the nation? Part
of the answer must lie in the fact that early twentieth-century Argentines had
had very little experience living in a functioning democracy. Despite the ideals of
nineteenth-century leaders and the 1914 electoral reforms, democracy had very
shallow roots in Argentina, and the notion of citizenship was extraordinarily
weak.100 Politics had always served to divide rather than unite the nation, with
factional disputes all too often resolved with bullets rather than ballots. Given
this history, it was not surprising that few intellectuals would see the political
sphere as a source of cohesion, nor that many would turn to cultural nationalism
as a way of integrating a nation newly shaken by the centrifugal forces of rapid
modernization and massive immigration.

There is, of course, a certain irony in Argentina’s enduring preoccupation with

immigration. In a century or so, the immigrant passed from the status of nation-
builder to that of a potential threat to the national soul, as well as a potential
element in the emerging national race. In many ways the immigrant was the
quintessential Other: his place and putative role in Argentina had less to do with
whatever qualities he might possess or bring to his adoptive nation, than with
the projections, anxieties, and desires of the Argentines themselves, and with
their understanding of what their nation was or should become.

NOTES

1 A much earlier version of this essay was presented at the 1995 meetings of
the American Historical Association in Chicago under the title "What does it
Mean to be Argentine? Nation, Nationality and Immigration in Argentina." I wish
to thank Douglas Klusmeyer, Sophie Pirie, Dietham Prowe, Anne Rodrick, and
Bruce Thompson for their helpful comments, both substantive and stylistic, on
subsequent drafts. This essay is dedicated to the memory of Frederick Bowser,
friend and mentor.

2 In addition to William Rogers Brubaker’s Citizenship and Nationhood in

France and Germany (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1992) discussed in this essay,
see Kay Hailbronner, "Citizenship and Nationhood in Germany," Immigration
and the Politics of Citizenship in Europe and North America, ed. William Rogers
Brubaker (New York: UP of America, 1989) 67-79; Douglas B. Klusmeyer,
"Aliens, Immigrants, and Citizens: The Politics of Inclusion in the Federal
Republic of Germany," Daedalus 122.3 (1993): 81-114.

3 Brubaker 109.

4 This is the period during which Argentine intellectuals and political leaders
were centrally concerned with immigration and its role in the nation building
process. I have chosen 1930 as the end point because in Argentina, massive
immigration ended with the onset of the Great Depression. While immigration
did not halt altogether, the economic crisis of the 1930s meant that Argentina
would no longer be a principle destination of European emigrants, and from that
time on ceased to be a topic of sustained official and public debate.

5 To date, most scholarly treatments of this period have emphasized the

xenophobic nature of Argentine cultural nationalism, arguing that the early
twentieth-century movement represented an attempt by elites to control and
distance themselves from the masses. See for example Carl Solberg,
Immigration and Nationalism in Argentina and Chile (Austin: U. Texas P, 1970);
Richard Slatta, "The Gaucho in Argentina’s Quest for Identity," Canadian
Review of Studies in Nationalism 12 (1985):98-122; and David Viñas, "‘Niños’ y
"criados favoritos’: De Amalia a Beatriz Guido a través de La gran aldea," in his
Literatura argentina y realidad política, (Buenos Aires: Centro Editor de América
Latina, 1982) 78-112, esp. 93-106. While not discounting the Argentine elite’s
fear of social upheaval and its distaste for the working class immigrant, this line
of interpretation tells only part of the story. As will be developed below, cultural
nationalism was not so much an attempt to reject the immigrant as it was a
means of integrating the newcomer into the national community, but on terms
that marginalized him politically. This, it seems to me, is the fundamental
paradox of Argentine cultural nationalism.

6 Hans Vogel, "New Citizens for a New Nation: Naturalization in Early

Independent Argentina," Hispanic American Historical Review 71.1 (1991): 108.
The influence of the French Revolution on nineteenth-century Argentine political
thought is treated exhaustively by various authors in Imagen y recepción de la
Revolución Francesa en la Argentina (Buenos Aires: Grupo Editor
Latinoamericano, 1990). On the idea of the nation as a political entity or
association of citizens, see also Michael Reikenberg, "El concepto de la nación
en la región del Plata (1810-1831)," Entrepasados 3.4-5 (1993): 89-102.

7 José Carlos Chiaramonte, "Formas de identidad en el Rio de la Plata luego

de 1810," Boletín del Instituto de Historia Argentina y Americana Dr. E.
Ravignani 3rd series, number 1, semester 1 (1989): 83. See also Benedict
Anderson’s comments on the Latin American independence movements in his
Imagined Communities (London: Verso, 1991) 67, 81.

8 José Luis Romero, A History of Argentine Political Thought, trans. Thomas

McGann, 2nd ed. (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1968) 71.

9 Vogel 108. The idea of volitional allegiance was apparently well accepted, as
evidenced by an essay penned by an "adoptive son of the new nation" and
published in the highly regarded Gaceta de Buenos Aires. According to the
unnamed author, place of birth had little to do with one’s loyalties: "the word
patricio [patriot] does not mean creole [i.e., native-born]: all those who make up
this community regard it as their patria [fatherland]." Those individuals who
"observe the laws and customs, respect its government, and serve it with their
persons, fortunes and talents are patricios. Those born here are patricios by
nature, those settled here from abroad are patriots by adoption." Gaceta de
Buenos Aires 17 Sep. 1810. Cited in Vogel 111.

10 Vogel 108-17.

11 Jorge Carlos Mitre, "La inmigración en la Argentina y la identidad nacional,"

Historia 7.26 (Jun.-Aug. 1987): 43-44. Mitre cites the original quotation, which
appeared in La Gaceta Ministerial on 4 Sep. 1812.

12 Tulio Halperin Donghi, "Para qué la inmigración? Ideología y política

inmigratoria y aceleración del proceso modernizador: El caso Argentino (1810-
1914)," Jahrbuch Für Geschichte Von Staat, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft
Lateinamerikas (Band 13, Bohlau Verlag, Koln, Wien, 1976) 443.

13 Quoted in Halperin, "Para qué?" 443.

14 Halperin, "Para qué?" 443.

15 As Jorge Myers has noted, the ideas of Romantic thinker Johann Gottlieb
Herder were disseminated in Argentina during this period principally through
French translations (Jorge E. Myers, "‘Revoluciones inacabadas’: Hacia una
noción de ‘revolución’ en el imaginario histórico de la nueva generación
argentina: Alberdi y Echeverría, 1837-1850," Imagen y recepción de la
Revolución Francesa en la Argentina [Buenos Aires: Grupo Editor
Latinoamericano, 1990] 251). For more discussion of the impact of German
Romanticism on Argentine thought in the first half of the nineteenth century, see
Fermin Chavez, Historicismo e Iluminismo en la cultura argentina (Buenos
Aires: Editora del País S.A., 1977) especially 43-61; and Eduardo Segovia
Guerrero, La historiografía argentina del romanticismo, diss. Universidad
Complutense de Madrid, 1980.

16 Charles Hale, "Political and Social Ideas in Latin America, 1870-1930,"

Cambridge History of Latin America, ed. Leslie Bethell, vol. 4 (Cambridge:
Cambridge UP, 1986) 373.

17 In the words of Esteban Echeverría, one of the most prominent members of

this generation: "We are no longer oppressed by the arms of Spain, but her
traditions cast dark shadows among us" (quoted in Romero 139).

18 Domingo R. Sarmiento, Facundo, 8th ed. (Buenos Aires: Editorial Losada,

1963) 28. As Halperin has put it "The colonial legacy was for Sarmiento
something more than a bundle of habits, intellectual tendencies or ideological
prejudices: it was an entire style of life, molded as much by great open spaces
of the American pampa as by the Hispanic and pre-Hispanic heritage; in the
language of Sarmiento, it was the fruit of ‘colonization and the peculiarities of
the terrain’" (Halperin, "Para qué?" 444).

19 In true Romantic fashion, members of the Generation of 1837 believed the

Spanish language was inextricably bound to the Spanish character they
deplored and urged their countrymen to develop distinctively American spellings
and pronunciations that would serve as the basis for a new national language.
Some, such as Juan Bautista Alberdi, urged Argentines to think in French,
which would enable them to think more "rapidly and directly" than was possible
in Spanish (quoted in Myers 256). For more on the Generation of 1837 and
language, see David Viñas, "La mirada a Europa: Del viaje colonial al viaje
estético," Literatura argentina y realidad política, 2nd ed. (Buenos Aires: Centro
Editor de América Latina) 13-77, especially 18-19.

20 Romero 149.

21 This retreat must, of course, also be seen as part of the generalized

European reaction against the philosophy of natural rights and the excesses of
the French Revolution. On this point, see Hale 375 and Tulio Halperin Donghl,
Proyecto y construcción de una nación: Argentina, 1846-1880 (Caracas,
Venezuela: Biblioteca Ayucucho, 1980) 45.

22 Halperin, Una nación para el desierto argentino (Buenos Aires: Centro Editor
de América Latina, 1982) 39-41. Echeverría echoed Alberdi’s belief that
Argentina must pass through a stage of restricted democracy. While
proclaiming that "Democracy is ... the only regime that suits us," he also
cautioned that the time was not yet right for unrestricted suffrage (quoted in
Myers 258).

23 Even Alberdi, probably the least democratic member of this generation,

continued to maintain that the Argentine Revolution "in its ideas was no more
than a phase of the great French Revolution" (Hale 369).

24 According to Echeverría, liberal reformers should concentrate on promoting

the symbols of "liberty," "equality," "fraternity," "progress," and "association,"
forging them into a coherent doctrine to become the basis of a unified, national
system of belief (quoted in Myers 258).

25 Quoted in Romero 143-44.

26 On this point see Halperin, "Para qué?" 463-64. For a useful general
discussion of ideas about race in the nineteenth century, see Nancy Stepan,
The Hour of Eugenics: Race, Gender and Nation in Latin America (Ithaca:
Cornell UP, 1991).

27 These newcomers, these reformers believed, would somehow "infect" the

native population with the values and attitudes necessary for economic
development and liberal democracy. Alberdi expressed a common sentiment
when he proclaimed that "each [non-Spanish] European who immigrates brings
us more civilization in his habits ... than the best philosophy book." If Latin
American leaders wanted "the habits of order and industry" to prevail, they had
to attract people who possessed these traits. The qualities, he believed, were
contagious [pegajosos]: "beside European industry, soon American industry will
form" (quoted in Gladys Onega’s La inmigración en la literatura argentina
(1880-1910), 2nd ed. (Buenos Aires: Centro Editor de América Latina, 1982)
29-30.
28 Carl Solberg, Immigration and Nationalism in Argentina and Chile, 1890-
1914 (Austin: U of Texas P, 1970) 35.

29 Indeed, as will be discussed below, many Argentines expressed relief that

most immigrants came from Spain and Italy. Latins, they believed, could more
easily be assimilated into the national population.

30 This is not to argue that all Argentines relinquished the ideal of Argentina as
a nation of citizens. Key exceptions were Sarmiento and political leader Juan A.
Alsina. And, as noted below, a faction of the elite resisted the P.A.N. and
attempted to push the democratic project forward.

31 Positivism, developed by French philosopher Auguste Comte, enjoyed

enormous prestige throughout late nineteenth-century Latin America and
proved extremely influential in Argentina. In the Latin American context,
positivism became a heterodox and protean set of ideas adapted to the needs
of local situations, unified principally by an all-encompassing faith in the
scientific method. While Comte himself did not develop a theory of politics, the
idea of "scientific politics" gained common currency among elites throughout
Latin America. For an excellent synthetic treatment of Latin American
positivism, see Hale’s "Political and Social Ideas" 382-96.

32 Noé Jitrik, El mundo del Ochenta (Buenos Aires: Centro Editor de América
Latina, 1982) 20. The similarities between the ideas of the Generation of 1837
and later positivist thinkers led philosopher Alejandro Korn to argue in 1927 that
Argentine positivism was of "autochthonous origin." (Hale, note 38.)

33 Torcuato S. Di Tella, "El impacto inmigratorio sobre el sistema político

argentino," Estudios migratorios latinoamericanos 4.2 (Aug. 1989): 212-13. Di
Tella estimates that immigrants made up between 60 to 70% of these two
classes.

34 Di Tella 212. Scholars have disagreed over the reasons for this low
naturalization. See, for example, Halperin ("Para qué?" 464-65), Oscár Cornblit,
Ezequiel Gallo (h.); Afredo O’Connell (Cornblit et al., "La generación del 80 y su
proyecto," Argentina, sociedad de masas, eds. Torcuato Di Tella, Gino
Germani, and Jorge Graciarena, 3rd ed., [Buenos Aires: EUDEBA, Buenos
Aires, 1966] 48-51). Torcuato Di Tella (Di Tella "El impacto" 214); and Hilda
Sabato, "Citizenship, Political Participation and the Formation of the Public
Sphere in Buenos Aires, 1850s-1880s," Past and Present 136 (Aug. 1992):
139-63.

35 See for example, Zenón Bustos, "La Revolución que nos amenaza," Revista
de filosofía 5.9, 1st semester (1919) 145-56; Manuel Carlés (founder of
Argentine Patriotic League) interview, Buenos Aires Herald, 2 May 1919 n.p.,
and Definición de la Liga Patriótica (Guía del buen sentido social) (Buenos
Aires: privately published pamphlet, 1920); E. de. Cires, "La inmigración in
Buenos Aires," Revista Argentina de Ciencias Politicas 2.24 (24 Sep. 1912):
735-46. This view of cultural nationalism as an elite response to fears of social
upheaval predominates in the historiography dealing with this period.
36 See for example, Francisco Stach, "La defensa social y la inmigración,"
Boletín Mensual del Museo Social Argentino 5.55-56 (Jul.-Aug. 1916): 360-89;
Lucas Ayarragaray, "Política Inmigratoria," 9th Congreso Nacionalista (Buenos
Aires: Imprenta Ventriglia, 1928) 469-79.

37 Influenced by the ideas of Gustav Le Bon, Herbert Spencer’s Social

Darwinism, and Italian criminologists, proponents of racial improvement often
pointed to social unrest, crime, disease, and delinquency as evidence of racial
degeneration, noting the "correlation between immigration and criminality as
proof of the connection between race and crime" (Eduardo Zimmermann,
"Racial Ideas and Social Reform: Argentina, 1890-1916," Hispanic American
Historical Review 72.1 [Feb. 1992]: 36). Urging tighter controls over
immigration, reformers hoped to halt the further influx of inferior genetic stock.
For a good introduction to the topic of racial improvement in Latin America, see
The Idea of Race in Latin America, 1870-1940, ed. Richard Graham (Austin: U
of Texas P, 1990); Nancy Stepan, "The Hour of Eugenics": Latin America and
the Movement for Racial Improvement, 1918-1940. For Argentina specifically,
see Zimmermann 23-46, and Diego Armus, "Mirando a los Italianos: Algunos
imagenes esbozadas por la elite en tiempos de la inmigración masiva," La
inmigración Italiano en la Argentina, eds. Fernando Devoto and Gianfausto
Rosoli (Buenos Aires: Editorial Biblos, 1985) 95-104.

38 Arturo Reynal O’Connor, "Los poetas argentinos," Ideas 3. 4-5 (Jul. 1904):
259. This essay later appeared as the preface to O’Connor’s book, Los poetas
argentinos (Buenos Aires: Imprenta José Tragant, 1904).

39 Manuel Gálvez, El Solar de la Raza (Buenos Aires: Editorial Tor, 1936) 37.

40 Alvaro Melián Lafinur, rev. of El solar de la raza, by Manuel Gálvez,

Nosotros (Nov. 1913): 202. See also Lafinur’s comments about French
nationalist C. Maurras in the special Sunday supplement of La Nación, devoted
to the theme of Latinidad (4 Jul. 1926).

41 Ricardo Rojas, Silbarios de la decoración americana (Buenos Aires: Editorial

Losada, 1930) 151.

42 This tendency to ignore political institutions reflects, of course, the cultural

nationalists’ view of the nation as an ethnic rather than a political entity. As John
Hutchinson has noted, for cultural nationalists, "the state is, at best, accidental,
and is frequently regarded with suspicion..."(John Hutchinson, "Moral
Innovators and the Politics of Regeneration: The Distinctive Role of Cultural
Nationalists in Nation Building," Ethnicity and Nationalism, ed. Anthony Smith
[New York: E.J. Brill, 1992] 103). This is not to say, however, that this vision of
nationhood had no political implications. On the contrary, when a nation’s self-
understanding is detached from political institutions that guarantee citizens’ civil
liberties and their right to participate in the business of government, and when
the interests of the nation are seen as taking precedence over those of
individuals, gross violations of the most basic human rights can result.
Twentieth-century Germany, of course provides a tragic example (M. Rainer
Lepsius, "The Nation and Nationalism in Germany," Social Research 52:1
[Spring 1985]: 49-50). In the case of Argentina, as will be discussed below,
Manuel Gálvez’s belief that the collective interests of the nation should
supersede those of the individual led him to support the overthrow of a
democratically elected government by a nationalistic, fascist-type military
faction. Further discussion of the political implications of the ethnocultural vision
follows.

43 Quoted in David Rock’s Authoritarian Argentina: The Nationalist Movement,

Its History and Its Impact (Berkeley: U of California P, 1993) 48.

44 Ricardo Rojas, La restauración nacionalista, 3rd ed. (Buenos Aires: A. Peña

Lillo, 1971) 136. First published in 1909.

45 For a discussion of the relationship between ethnocultural nationalism,

Darwinism, and scientific racism, see Eric Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism
since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990) 107-
8. For a very illuminating discussion of the relationship between scientific and
ethnocultural understandings of race in the Latin American context, see Hale
379-407.

46 Hobsbawm 102. The first great wave was, of course, eighteenth-century

political nationalism associated with the French Revolution. So strong were
these late nineteenth-century currents of ethnocultural nationalism that even the
French were not immune. See Brubaker 98.

47 David A. Brading, Prophecy and Myth in Mexican History (Cambridge:

Centre for Latin American Studies, U of Cambridge P, 1984) 73.

48 On the European roots of Argentine cultural nationalism, see David Rock

"Antecedents of the Argentine Right," The Argentine Right: Its History and
Intellectual Origins, 1910 to the Present, eds. Sandra McGee Deutsch and
Ronald Dolkart (Wilmington: Scholarly Resources Books, 1993) 1-34. See also
pages 74-75 of Carlos Altamirano and Beatriz Sarlo, "La Argentina del
centenario: Campo intellectual, vida literaria y temas ideológicos," Ensayos
Argentinos 69-105. For contemporary comments on German Romanticism in
early twentieth-century Argentina, see Roberto Vischer, "El sentimentalismo
estético," Verbum 8.24 (Aug. 1914): 55-61.

49 In Europe, of course, the idea of national character was also part of anti-
positivist reaction. On this point see Mihály Szegedy-Maszák, "The Idea of
National Character: A Romantic Heritage," Concepts of National Identity: An
Interdisciplinary Dialogue, ed. Peter Boerner (Baden-Baden: Nomos
Verlagsgesellschaft, 1985) 45-61.

50 Quoted in Hale 416.

51 On this point, see my article "Making Sense of Modernity: Changing

Attitudes toward the Immigrant and the Gaucho in Turn-of-the-Century
Argentina," Comparative Studies in Society and History 38.3 (1996): 434-59.
52 Committed democrats, Yrigoyen and his followers insisted that Argentina
was ready for honest elections and a more open, participatory system. In this
regard they resembled the Socialist Party, which will be discussed below. A
significant difference, however, is that the Radicals rarely expressed interest in
courting immigrant support or encouraging naturalization. The obvious question,
of course, is what vision of nationality underlay the Radicals’ political program?
Did they see nations as being primarily political associations based on
citizenship and the universal values of equality and liberty? Or did they conceive
of nations more as ethnocultural communities? Space constraints prevent a full
exploration of the U.C.R.’s understanding of nationhood, but much of language
of Radicalism strongly resembled that of cultural nationalists. See for example
Radical activist and theorist Joaquín Castellanos’ collection of essays published
as Acción y Pensamiento (Buenos Aires: J.A. Pellegrini, 1917), where he writes
that the "yearnings" of the Radical movement [agrupación] were in sync with
and would help bring to fruition the "complementary labors of the nationality...
[these labors being] directed from the depths of history by the living instinct of
the race" [anhelos que tienden a cumplir los labores complementarias de la
nacionalidad, dirigidos desde el fondo de la historia por el instinto vidente de la
raza] (78). Yrigoyen himself was a fervent follower of the German Karl Christian
Krause, an early nineteenth-century disciple of Kant. For more on the Radical
vision of nationality, see as well Alberto M. Etkin, Bosquejo del al historia y
doctrina de la UCR (Buenos Aires: El Ateneo, 1928). It is also worth noting that
both Gálvez and Rojas eventually became strong supporters of Radicalism. On
this point, see David Rock, "Intellectual Precursors of Conservative Argentine
Nationalism," Hispanic American Historical Review 67.2 (1987): 296.

53 Lepsius 57.

54 In Lepsius’s words: "In contrast [to the model of the nation as an association
of participating citizens], the idea of the folk nation requires no dramatization of
individual civil rights as the constitutive criterion of the membership of an
individual in a nation. The properties through which a people becomes a nation
concern a collectivity. The folk is conceived as a prepolitical essence; the
individual is subsumed under this collectivity.... The nation does not develop as
a politically constituted solidarity association of citizens. On the contrary, it
appears as a prepolitical essence which has a higher status than the individual"
(49). This vision of the nation as standing above the individual and the idea that
national or collective interests take precedence over those of the individual
dovetailed with the Spanish corporatist political traditions and Catholic social
theory, both of which enjoyed increasing popularity among certain sectors of the
Argentine elite during this period. On this point see Rock, "Intellectual
Precursors."

55 Manuel Gálvez, El diario de Gabriel Quiroga: Opiniones sobre la vida

argentina (Buenos Aires: Arnoldo Möen, 1910) 68.

56 Salvador Debenedetti, "Sobre la formación de una raza argentina," Revista

de Filosofía 1, 2nd semester (1915): 416-17.

57 Juan Mas y Pi, "El arte en la Argentina," Renacimiento 2.6 (Jan. 1911): 307.
58 Almafuerte (Pedro B. Palacios), "Discurso a la juventud," Hebe 1 (1918): 18.

59 See for example Galvez’s disparaging remarks about Switzerland, which he

believed lacked "spirit, grace and talent, and was like one of those people,
honest but vulgar, of an ordered life, who eat, work and make love at fixed
hours, incapable of committing a crime or dishonesty, certainly, but also
incapable of dreaming or creating" (Solar 56).

60 Gálvez, Diario 67.

61 Gálvez, Solar 58-59.

62 Gálvez’s tendency to attribute personality traits to heredity comes through

elsewhere. In his discussion of the Argentine aristocracy (which he claims was
distinguished by its delicacy of feeling rather than its wealth), he argues that the
formation of an aristocracy is a "process of [biological] selection." See "El
espíritu de la aristocracia," published in a collection of essays under the same
title, (Buenos Aires: Agencia General de Libreria y Publicaciones, 1924) 10.

63 Gálvez, Solar 14.

64 Gálvez, Diario 68.

65 Manuel Gálvez, Amigos y maestros de mi juventud: Recuerdos de una vida

literaria, 2nd ed., vol. 1 of 4 vols. (Buenos Aires: Hachette, 1961) 44, 46.

66 Indeed, Rojas was at times extremely critical of Spanish traditions. See for
example, his discussion of the importance of non-Spanish European influences
in Argentina, without which "our education would have remained [centered] in
anagoge and the catechism, our politics in demagoguery and despotism, and
our economy in routine and monopoly" (Ricardo Rojas, Eurindia, 2nd ed., vol. 5
of his Obras Completas (Buenos Aires: Juan Roldán, 1924) 197.

67 Rojas, Eurindia 170.

68 Ricardo Rojas, "Los gauchescos," La literatura Argentina: Ensayo filósofico

sobre la evolución de la cultura en el Plata, 2nd ed., vol. 1 of 4 vols. (Buenos
Aires: Juan Roldán y C., 1924) 510. (This edition of Los gauchescos is
published as vols. 8 and 9 of Rojas’s Obras Completas.)

69 Rojas, Eurindia 161, 169.

70 Rojas, Los gauchescos 58, 74.

71 Rojas, Eurindia 134.

72 Rojas, Restauración 135.

73 Rojas, Restauración 48. These proposals (similar to those enacted in France

after 1880) suggest that Rojas believed it possible for the state to teach
immigrant children to be Argentines, and that Argentineness was acquirable,
that is, more a matter of conscious choice that an immutable state of being. Yet
despite his appeals for educational reforms geared toward instilling patriotism in
the school-age population, Rojas never strayed far from the Romantic vision of
nationality. For him, becoming an Argentine was always much more than simply
embracing a political creed, gaining knowledge of Argentine culture and
traditions, or speaking Spanish. Even in La restauración nacionalista, where he
outlined his educational proposals, he suggests that civic instruction had its
limits. The true nationalizing force, he seemed to believe, was the telluric power
of the Argentine territory. The immigrant, he argued, could never become a true
Argentine, since he was "like the original immigrant of the colonial period; he
returns to his native country or dies in ours; he is insignificant [es algo que
pasa]. What will endure is the child of the immigrant and the descendants of his
children ... for these have the common matrix imposed on them by the
American environment" (Restauración 136-37).

74 This idea of the artist as the midwife of the new Argentina was a recurring
theme during this period. See, for example, Carlos Altamirano and Beatriz
Sarlo, "La Argentina del centenario: Campo intellectual, vida literaria y temas
ideológicos," Ensayos argentinos: De Sarmiento a la vanguardia (Buenos Aires:
Centro Editor de América Latina, 1983) 69-105.

75 For a full discussion of the linguistic component of the ethnocultural vision of

the nation, see Hobsbawm 101-30.

76 The definitive history of the early twentieth-century language debate in

Argentina has yet to be written. For a useful introduction to the topic, along with
relevant texts from the period, see Alfredo V. E. Rubione, En torno al criollismo:
Textos y polémica (Buenos Aires: Centro Editor de América Latina, 1983).

77 Luciano Abeille, Idioma nacional de los argentinos (Paris: Librairie Emile

Bouillon, 1900) 5.

78 Abeille 35.

79 Abeille 424.

80 Ernesto Quesada, "El criollismo," Estudios, vol. 3 (Jun.-Jul. 1902): 251-453.

81 Enrique García Velloso. Response to Crítica opinion survey "Llegarémos a

Tener un Idioma Propio?" Crítica 21 Jun. 1927.

82 Gálvez. Response to Crítica opinion survey "Llegarémos a Tener un Idioma

Propio?" Crítica 20 Jun. 1927.

83 Ricardo Rojas, "Discurso del Decano Ricardo Rojas, Inaugaración del

Instituto de Filología," Verbum 17.61 (Sep. 1923): 36.

84 Rojas, Los gauchescos 866-67.

85 Ricardo Rojas, Alocución dirigido a los bachilleres del Colegio Nacional de
Buenos Aires (12 Aug. 1928) 13. Pamphlet, privately published, n.p. Located in
archives of Museo Ricardo Rojas, Buenos Aires.

86 There is, to be sure, a certain defensive quality about many of Rojas’s

writings on the language question. In Eurindia, for example, he argues that
while the literature of each nation will develop a distinctive content, this does not
mean that the each nation will develop a unique language (74-78). Yet
elsewhere in the same work, where he compares language to "docile clay upon
which the poet or the people [pueblo] imprint the movements of their soul" (46),
he seems to suggest that language does indeed reflect the uniqueness of a
people. It’s unclear whether Rojas ever resolved the contradictions in his
position; the fact that his personal copy of Abeille’s book (located in the Ricardo
Rojas Museum) is heavily underlined and full of marginal notes suggests he
struggled with the language issue.

87 Rojas. Response to Crítica opinion survey "Llegarémos a Tener un Idioma

Propio?" Crítica 13 Jun. 1927.

88 Francisco Soto y Calvo, "De la falta de carácter en la literatura argentina,"

Estudios 2, vol. 4 (1903): 300.

89 Soto y Calvo 303.

90 Here "Last Reason" specifically mentions Rojas. Response to Crítica opinion

survey "Llegarémos a Tener un Idioma Propio?" Crítica 16 Jun. 1927.

91 "Last Reason."

92 José Antonio Saldías. Response to Crítica opinion survey "Llegarémos a

Tener un Idioma Propio?" Crítica 12 Jun. 1927.

93 Quoted in Adolfo Dickmann, "El Socialismo y el Principio de Nacionalidad,"

Nacionalismo y Socialismo (Buenos Aires: n.p., 1933) 29. It should be noted
that while Justo attacked idea of race promoted by cultural nationalists, he
himself used their terminology. See for example, his comment that "the
Argentine race, the old, autochthonous race, is fatally condemned to disappear"
(quoted in Dickmann 29). It is also interesting to note that prominent members
of the Socialist Party also subscribed to some of the tenets of scientific racism
then widely accepted in Argentina. For a discussion, see Zimmermann.

94 Juan B. Justo, "Cimentar la paz," La Vanguardia 9 Dec. 1918.

95 Augusto Bunge, El ideal argentino y el socialismo (Buenos Aires: Libreria La

Vanguardia, 1918) 41.

96 Bunge 53. Perhaps the most impassioned statement of the idea that
Argentineness was based not on descent or ethnicity but on a common political
creed came from socialist leader Enrique Dickmann. Dickmann, a Russian-born
Jew who immigrated to Argentina at the age of sixteen, became one of the first
members of the party to be elected to Congress. In a somewhat melodramatic
speech to that body, Dickmann related his reactions to a festival he had
attended at his children’s elementary school in Buenos Aires. Viewing the
scores of youngsters assembled for the ceremony, Dickmann said, he was
struck by the diversity of the student body. Before him stood "blondes,
brunettes, whites, a few blacks, one or two mulattos, children of all races ... and
all nations." His initial reaction, he told his fellow members of Congress, was
one of concern over the excessive cosmopolitanism of Argentine society and
the difficulty of creating a unified nation from such disparate elements. These
fears, however, were dispelled when the children rose together to sing the
national anthem. So moved was he, Dickmann confessed to his colleagues, that
"I felt a real and democratic unction. My eyes filled with tears, my heart
compressed with happiness [as I] reflected that up to now the cry of liberty
contained in our anthem has been but a vague aspiration, a far-off ideal, that
now is being realized by the new political forces and the new Argentine
democracy.... [T]his cry of liberty will be real the day [we achieve] true political
liberty for the people, authentic economic liberty for the working class and the
freedom of conscience for all the men of the world who wish to inhabit the
blessed and fertile soil of Argentina!" (quoted in Dickmann 50).

97 It should be noted here that the Socialist Party was not immune to Romantic
influences. Indeed, one of the most divisive events during this period was the
1913 crisis precipitated by a proposed duel between two prominent party
members, Alfredo Palacios and Manuel Ugarte. Ugarte, an intellectual
internationally known for his promotion of the idea of a pan-American Hispanic
race, challenged Palacios to a duel over a perceived insult. Palacios accepted.
Although the duel was never fought, the rest of the party leadership was
incensed, since PS statutes expressly prohibited dueling. After much debate,
the executive committee voted to expel Ugarte, citing his "Latin American
obsession" and his excessive "patriotic atavism." (Minutes of Meeting of
Circunscripción 20a of Socialist Party, published in La Nación, Nov. 11-12 and
reprinted in Manuel Ugarte y el Partido Socialista: Documentos recopilado por
un argentino (Buenos Aires: Union Editorial Hispano-Americana, 1914) 95-97.
Palacios, a dashing figure, famous for his sweeping mustache, wide-brim hats,
and romantic exploits, was only censored. He suffered expulsion two years
later, however, when he accepted another challenge for a duel. At that time
serving as a representative of his party in the Argentine National Congress, he
was forced to resign when his party expelled him. In a emotional resignation
speech, he professed his continued support for socialist ideals, but explained
that as a man of Hispanic descent, he was simply unable to "tear from my soul"
his sense of traditional Spanish honor [perjucio caballeresco], because "I am of
the race, because I have it in my ... [Argentine] and Spanish blood!" (Diario de
Sesiones, vol. 1 [12 Jul. 1915]: 662.

98 Only a few years later, however, Galvez seemed somewhat ambivalent

about the coup that had deposed the aging President Yrigoyen. Indeed, in 1933
he published a highly laudatory biography of the Radical leader.

99 The question of the relationship between the ethnocultural understanding of

nationhood and anti-democratic, authoritarian states is a tricky one. As noted
earlier, Lepsius has argued that the nation conceived as an ethnocultural
community (i.e., the folk nation) is "constitutionally indifferent" (49). In contrast
to the political understanding of nationhood that emerged from the French
Revolution, the ethnocultural vision of the nation can lend itself to "the most
different internal orders and constitutions imaginable [which] can be justified
through the sovereignty of the ‘people’ [or folk]" (49-50). Thus people who are
drawn to such a vision of the nation can (and do) exhibit a wide variety of
political inclinations. Such was the case in Argentine, where the two founding
fathers of cultural nationalism, Gálvez and Rojas, followed very different political
paths: in the late 1920s and early ’30s, Gálvez flirted with fascism while Rojas
suffered internal exile for his democratic views.

100 See note 44, especially the discussion of Hilda Sabato’s "Citizenship,
Political Participation and the Formation of the Public Sphere in Buenos Aires,
1850-1880s."

http://www.stanford.edu/group/SHR/5-2/delaney.html

Volume 5.2 1997

ISSN 1048-3721
This page was last updated on 03/15/99