South Asian Migration and The Making of A White Argentina

Undesirable Britons:
South Asian Migration and the Making

of a White Argentina
Benjamin Bryce
Abstract This article examines the history of South Asian immigration to Argentina before the First World
War. The arrival of a relatively small group of Sikh laborers in 1912, alongside other Japanese and Chinese
immigrants in the preceding decade, sparked a huge reaction from Argentine politicians and immigration
bureaucrats. They restricted entry, pushed for labor market exclusion, and engaged in diplomatic exchanges
with British imperial authorities. In their view, mass migration not only had the power to make a white,
European nation but also threatened to undermine that same project. This article argues that the dominant
vision of Argentina as a white nation was built on not only transatlantic immigration but also Asian exclusion.
Drawing on archival research in Buenos Aires and London, it casts new light on both Argentine nationalism
and the language of racial hierarchies mobilized in discussions of immigration.
I n late July 1912, violence broke out in the northwestern Argentine province
of Jujuy. A group of “twenty or thirty Spaniards” armed with revolvers,
knives, and sticks attacked twelve Sikh men recently hired by the Argentine
Hardwoods and Lands Company in the town of Yuto. One man was shot
through the chest and in the chin, and three others received cuts and bruises
from knives and sticks. Reginald Tower, the British minister plenipotentiary in
Buenos Aires (1910–19), informed his superiors in London that “a report had
been circulated that the Sikhs were cannibals, and was too readily believed by
men in the Company’s employ”; this mob had also accused the laborers of
stealing a Spanish baby. In Tower’s view, the Sikhs “appear to have caused
I wish to acknowledge financial support from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research
Council of Canada and from the Office of Research at the University of Northern British
Columbia (UNBC). I also thank the interlibrary loan staffs at both the University of British
Columbia and UNBC. Three blind reviewers as well as David Atkinson, Alejandra
Bronfman, Anna Casas Aguilar, Reshaad Durgahee, Laura Ishiguro, Jeffrey Lesser, Nicholas
Melling, David Sheinin, and the British Columbia Latin American history group all provided
excellent comments on previous versions of this manuscript. Martı́n Marimón helped me
track down some difficult-to-access documents in Buenos Aires, and Reshaad Durgahee
generously shared British materials with me. Ryan McKenney provided all sorts of insightful
thoughts in our readings course on Asian migration in the Americas. A special thanks to Sean
Mannion for his copyediting.
Hispanic American Historical Review 99:2

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248 HAHR / May / Bryce
jealousy by the good work they have done, being more capable of doing
unskilled labour than the general class available for a similar purpose in the
Province.”1 In the end, 14 “Spanish and native peons” were arrested, and the
ringleaders were brought to court.2 Within seven weeks of the incident, Tower
happily reported that “the Sikhs are all at work, some fifteen to twenty addi-
tional men of the same race having been engaged in the saw mill. All the injured
men have recovered, even he whose life was in danger.”3
The violence in Jujuy grew out of a series of events that had developed over
the previous six months. Since January 1912, approximately 500 people from
the Punjab region of British-controlled India had arrived in Buenos Aires via
ports in Italy, and by the end of the year 612 would come.4 They were lured by
reports in Punjabi newspapers about high wages, the possibility of acquiring
land, and the supposed openness of Argentina to immigration from anywhere in
the world. Yet upon arrival, this small group, which came during the year with
the highest number of immigrants in the country’s history, faced varying
degrees of hostility from Argentine officials, politicians, and workers.5 To many
Argentines of European heritage, South Asian migrants’ unexpected arrival in
1912—along with other small groups of Japanese and Chinese in the early
twentieth century—threatened to undermine what they thought of as the
country’s already delicate balance between Europeanness, on the one hand,
and the presence of indigenous peoples, mestizos, and Afro-Argentines, on the
other.6 In their discussions and actions, Argentine officials, politicians, and
newspaper editors made little, if any, distinction between “Asians” (asiáticos)
from Japan, China, and India. These immigrants challenged the very reason for
opening the country to immigration in the first place.
British diplomats in Buenos Aires and Rosario initially tried to defend the
rights of these Punjabi laborers as British subjects. The diplomats and some
affluent leaders of British community institutions in Buenos Aires nevertheless
quickly became concerned about how colonial subjects would affect British
1. Reginald Tower to Edward Grey, Buenos Aires, 2 Aug. 1912, The National Archives,
Kew (hereafter cited as TNA), Foreign Office (hereafter cited as FO) 369/439. On Tower,
see “Tower, Sir Reginald (Thomas),” Who’s Who 2018 and Who Was Who, accessed 21
June 2017, https://doi.org/10.1093/ww/9780199540884.013.U218253.
2. Hugh Baisford to Edward Grey, Buenos Aires, 13 Aug. 1912, TNA, FO 369/439.
3. Reginald Tower to Edward Grey, Buenos Aires, 19 Sept. 1912, TNA, FO 369/439.
4. Reginald Tower to Edward Grey, Buenos Aires, 27 June 1912, TNA, FO 369/439;
Dirección General de Inmigración, Ministerio de Agricultura, Inmigración en el año 1912, 2.
5. In 1912, 323,403 people immigrated to Argentina. Memoria de la Dirección General
de Inmigración correspondiente a los años 1914–1915, 49.
6. Alberto and Elena, “Introduction,” 8.

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Undesirable Britons 249
interests in Argentina and began to collaborate with Argentine officials to pre-

vent future immigration. This abandonment of non-European peoples was
part of a broader British approach to imperial subjecthood in the Americas in
the early twentieth century. Lara Putnam notes that British officials turned a
blind eye as various countries in the circum-Caribbean (Panama, Nicaragua,
Colombia, Costa Rica, and Cuba) and the United States enacted race-based
bans on entry or employment of West Indians in the interwar period.7
Argentine officials objected to the arrival of British subjects despite Argentina’s
strong economic ties with the United Kingdom, and the British government’s
relatively quick response was surely the result of the desire of both Britain and
Argentina to maintain good diplomatic and economic relations. On the eve of
the First World War, Argentina was one of the most important sites of British
overseas investment.8 Argentina also imported more goods from the United
Kingdom and exported more goods to there than to anywhere else.9 British-
owned companies dominated certain sectors in the Argentine economy; for
example, 70 percent of the country’s railways were run by British-owned
companies.10
This article argues that the dominant vision of Argentina as a white and
European nation was built not only on transatlantic immigration but also on
Asian exclusion. Argentina was the second most common destination in the
Americas for European immigrants (after the United States) and simulta-
neously one of the least common for Asian immigrants between 1880 and 1930.
That history is not only explained by drawing on the logic of Argentines of
the period who asserted their country was and would be European. It also
resulted from active efforts at the border, in the labor market, and in diplomatic
exchanges to prevent Asian immigration. In seeking to justify certain cases of
exclusion and to discourage all future immigration from India, Argentine
officials further staked out their vision of a white Argentina. Yet as Gastón
Gordillo has pointed out, that vision was a whiteness “under siege,” an aspi-
ration rather than a demographic fact.11 As others have shown, in the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries anthropologists, folklorists, and
nationalist writers fostered the idea of a white country by applying broad and
7. Putnam, “Citizenship from the Margins,” 177; Putnam, Radical Moves, 90.
8. Platt, “Canada and Argentina”; Adelman, Frontier Development, 4.
9. Thirty-one percent of all foreign imports to Argentina came from the United
Kingdom, and 25 percent of all Argentine exports went the other way. Newton, German
Buenos Aires, 15.
10. Knight, “Britain and Latin America,” 135; Markham, “Challenge to ‘Informal’
Empire,” 452.
11. Gordillo, “Savage Outside,” 243.

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ambiguous labels such as criollo or morocho to indigenous, Afro-Argentine, and

mixed-race groups, and census takers refused to use racial categories to discuss
the inhabitants of the country.12
Some recent studies on migration in the Americas, relying heavily on leg-
islation, demonstrate the relative openness of Argentina compared to the exclu-
sionary stances of other countries.13 David Scott FitzGerald and David Cook-
Martı́n have argued that other than irregularly enforced bans on “gitanos, which
could mean ‘gypsies,’ beggars, or Roma,” Argentine immigration legislation did
not discriminate based on race or country of origin.14 However, as this article
shows, the Argentine state had informal mechanisms to exclude specific groups.
Indeed, Argentine immigration policy was more exclusionary than its offi-
cial language suggested.15 The lack of formal restrictions did not prevent the
Argentine government from stopping South Asian migration in 1912, and
diplomatic efforts played a much larger role than immigration laws in stanching
this new influx of migrant workers. By highlighting the behind-the-scenes
efforts to limit South Asian immigration, this article offers to the recent his-
toriographic focus on legislation a methodological challenge, rooted not only in
research in multiple sites but also in different kinds of archival materials.
Several scholars of Argentina have highlighted the hierarchical and racial-
ized views that a broad group of influential politicians, officials, and intellec-
tuals held about northern, southern, and eastern European immigrants.16 What
has been overlooked, however, is that fears over immigration from East and
South Asia were also part of elite Argentine ideas about race, immigration, and
belonging. Asian immigration challenged Argentine officials to state more
explicitly their vision of a white nation. In many ways, one could presume that a
country actively seeking European immigrants and whose elites imagined the
nation as white would respond negatively to South Asian immigration. It is,
nevertheless, important to understand when and how that exclusion took place
and what tensions and contradictions emerged. Understanding the place of Asian
12. Chamosa, “Indigenous or Criollo,” 71–72, 98; Karush, “Blackness in Argentina,”

215, 245; Andrews, Afro-Argentines of Buenos Aires; Otero, Estadı́stica y nación, 352–58.
13. FitzGerald and Cook-Martı́n, Culling the Masses; Acosta, National versus the
Foreigner; Lee, “ ‘Yellow Peril.’ ”
14. FitzGerald and Cook-Martı́n, Culling the Masses, 299.
15. The only other formal grounds for exclusion were health, physical capability, age,
morality, and, later, political ideology. Memoria de la Dirección General de Inmigración
correspondiente a los años 1914–1915, 24–25.
16. Moya, Cousins and Strangers; Baily, Immigrants in the Lands of Promise; Rodriguez,
Civilizing Argentina; McGee Deutsch, Crossing Borders; Nouwen, Oy, My Buenos Aires;
Brodsky, Sephardi, Jewish, Argentine; Hyland, More Argentine Than You.

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exclusion during a period ofmassive European immigration casts further light on

the ideological construction of a white, homogeneous nation as well as the very
nature of the country’s cultural pluralism.
Argentina has been remarkably absent in the growing body of scholarship
about Asian migration and exclusion in the Americas and the Pacific world, a
striking omission considering the importance of the country in global migra-
tory circuits. Between 1880 and 1930, Argentina received more European immi-
grants than Canada and more than Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa
combined. In the same period Argentina received more immigrants than any
other country in Latin America, yet Brazil, Peru, Cuba, and Mexico as well as
Trinidad and Tobago, Suriname, Guyana, Guadeloupe, and Jamaica all
admitted more migrants—whether free migrants or indentured laborers—
from East and South Asia.17
The historiography on Argentina has taken for granted the country’s low
numbers of South and East Asian immigrants, fewer than 2,000 people between
1902 and 1913, and focused overwhelmingly on the approximately 5.8 million
Europeans to enter the country between 1881 and 1930. Nevertheless, the
sharp contrast between those two figures shows that compared to most coun-
tries in the Americas, which all fostered European immigration and worried
about Asian arrivals, Argentina was particularly effective in turning nineteenth-
century liberal dreams of large-scale European immigration into a reality.18
What has rarely—if ever—been recognized in that historiography, however, is
that Argentine politicians, officials, and intellectuals were also very effective at
shielding their country from Asian immigration. These Argentines resembled
groups in the United States and Canada who also threw up barriers to Asian
immigrants.19
At the same time, Argentine governing elites stand out among their peers
elsewhere in Latin America, who for significant periods of time focused on the
economic benefits of Asian labor and were more ambivalent about its supposed
dangers.20 Peruvian and Cuban elites actively fostered Chinese immigration in
the second half of the nineteenth century, though they also passed restrictive
policies around the same time as Argentina (in 1909 in Peru and in the 1930s in
17. Moya and McKeown, World Migration, 7–8, 17; Harper and Constantine, Migration
and Empire, 148–79; Vertovec, Hindu Trinidad, 4.
18. Moya, “Continent of Immigrants,” 3.
19. Delgado, Making the Chinese Mexican; Chang, Pacific Connections; Lee, “ ‘Yellow
Peril’ ”; Roy, Oriental Question.
20. Lesser, Immigration, Ethnicity, and National Identity; Lesser, Negotiating National
Identity; McKeown, Chinese Migrant Networks; Young, Alien Nation.

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Cuba). Mexico was relatively open to Chinese migrants until the 1920s, when it
restricted foreign laborers and expelled most Chinese living in its northern
states.21 In Brazil, government officials and intellectuals saw more benefits than
problems in Japanese migrants, who along with their descendants, as Jeffrey
Lesser has shown, “were able to expand the narrow national paradigm of a
‘white’ or ‘European’ Brazil while others insisted, with some success, that
‘whiteness’ was not a necessary component of Brazilian citizenship.”22
Undesirable British Subjects
The 59 Sikh men who arrived in Buenos Aires aboard the Italian steamer Savoia
on January 28, 1912, were met with hostility from the Argentine government
and were not allowed to disembark for four days.23 Although small groups of
migrants from India, Japan, and China had already arrived in Buenos Aires over
the preceding decade, the Argentine minister of foreign affairs Ernesto Bosch,
minister of agriculture Adolfo Mugica, and director general of immigration
Manuel Cigorraga all seemed surprised by the first Sikh arrivals.24 These
migrants provoked a debate between Argentine and British officials, and these
migrants’ experience shone a bright light on the hollowness of Argentina’s
official (and constitutional) openness to immigration from—in the words of
prominent Argentine intellectual Manuel Ugarte—“the four corners of the
earth.”25 The British minister plenipotentiary in Buenos Aires, Reginald Tower,
summed up the Argentine response, writing, “It is quite evident that the Sikhs
are unwelcome guests in this country.”26 In mid-February, Tower learned that
another 40 were already en route; similarly sized groups arrived in Buenos
Aires every three or four weeks until August.27 After some initial confronta-
tions over the rights of British subjects to stay in the Hotel of Immigrants—a
21. Young, Alien Nation, 17, 99, 217.

22. Lesser, Negotiating National Identity, 168.
23. Reginald Tower to Ernesto Bosch, Buenos Aires, 30 Jan. 1912, TNA, FO 369/
439.
24. Adolfo Mugica to Ernesto Bosch, 1 Feb. 1912, TNA, FO 369/439. (This is a
copy translated at the legation; the original is not archived at TNA. In British records,
Mugica’s name is spelled Mujica.) Along with the 612 South Asians who came to
Argentina in 1912 and the 31 who arrived in 1910, 759 Japanese, 290 Chinese, and 130
Persians entered between 1902 and 1913. Dirección General de Inmigración, Ministerio de
Agricultura, Inmigración en el año 1910, 2; Memoria de la Dirección General de Inmigración
correspondiente al año 1913, 54; Higa, “Desarrollo histórico,” 480–83.
25. Ugarte, El porvenir, 96.
26. Reginald Tower to Edward Grey, 9 Feb. 1912, TNA, FO 369/439.
27. Reginald Tower to Edward Grey, 15 Feb. 1912, TNA, FO 369/439.

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state-funded institution that provided new arrivals free lodging and food for
five days, access to work placement opportunities, telegraph and mail services to
facilitate employment, and medical care so as to ensure their success in the
country—Tower, the British Foreign Office, and the India Office acquiesced to
Argentine demands and tried to help local officials stop further immigration.28
They saw the growing tensions that the Argentine ambiguity about both open
borders and efforts to exclude South Asians was creating.
The first Sikh arrivals received brief attention in La Nación. Noting the
intervention of the British minister plenipotentiary over the issue “of not
granting a group of Hindu immigrants entry to the country because they do
not comply with the respective laws allowing only European immigration,” the
newspaper reported that “they have been permitted to enter, under the express
condition that this does not create a precedent for another occasion.”29 The
British minister plenipotentiary had actually intervened over the men’s admis-
sibility to the Hotel of Immigrants, and the Argentine state had not in fact
formally excluded non-Europeans. Yet how La Nación delivered the news reveals
to some extent the racial ideologies prevalent among its readers. The paper
asserted that the country’s doors were only open to European immigrants and
reassured the public that these South Asians were not the beginning of a new
trend.
Days after this first arrival, Caras y Caretas, a popular weekly magazine, also
took note of the South Asians in Buenos Aires. It published a photo of 14 of
the Sikh men, all wearing Western clothing and turbans, along with three
European or Argentine men—probably members of the crew—on the deck of
the SS Savoia (figure 1). The crewmen were positioned higher than the Sikhs
and looked at the photographer, but few Sikhs did the same. The editors told
readers that the men had come “to do rural work, called by compatriots at the
head of businesses owned by English capital.”30 In describing these South Asians
as the “compatriots” of wealthy British investors and owners, the editors assumed
that an invitation from European foreigners was the only logical explanation
for South Asians’ arrival. This coverage created an acceptable narrative for the
Argentine public, which had little interest in admitting non-European migrants.
When these first Sikh men were finally allowed off the boat in early Feb-
ruary, they were brought to the town of San Martı́n, just outside the city limits
28. Alsina, La inmigración, 167–69.

29. “Noticias diplomáticas: Inmigración hindú,” La Nación (Buenos Aires), 2 Feb.
1912, p. 10.
30. “Inmigrantes de la India inglesa,” Caras y Caretas (Buenos Aires), 3 Feb. 1912, p. 81.

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Figure 1. ‘‘Inmigrantes de la India inglesa,’’ Caras y Caretas (Buenos Aires), 3 Feb. 1912,
p. 81.
of Buenos Aires, rather than to the Hotel of Immigrants, located at the port on
the edge of downtown, for the customary five nights of lodging.31 To justify his
decision to deny access to the hotel, Cigorraga claimed that “only persons
coming from Europe were allowed privileges under the Immigration Law in
force and on that account Sikhs were not entitled to the benefits of that law.”32
He also added that while he regretted not being able to extend those benefits to
“the said Hindoos of the Sikh tribe,” they could indeed work in the country.33
Cigorraga’s stance on the Hotel of Immigrants struck a balance between official
openness to immigration from anywhere in the world and discouraging immi-
gration from Asia by creating barriers to success, revealing to some extent an
immigration policy not spelled out in legislation. In July 1912, after months of
closing doors on these South Asians, Bosch told Tower that “it was so evident
that they could not find employment in this country that the only solution
appeared to be that the Indian Government should repatriate all those now in
Argentina.”34 In light of the Argentine government’s responsibility for this
group’s failure to achieve economic success, Bosch’s suggestion was a convo-
luted way to avoid formal exclusion based on country of origin.
Before the Argentine position shifted to pushing for full-scale repatriation,
Tower sought to find flexibility in the country’s officially open policies. He took
up Cigorraga’s refusal to admit these British subjects to the Hotel of Immi-
grants with Foreign Minister Bosch. Both Bosch and Mugica, the minister
of agriculture who was in charge of matters of immigration and settlement
and who oversaw the director general of immigration, told Tower that they
31. Mugica to Bosch, 1 Feb. 1912, TNA, FO 369/439.

32. Reginald Tower to Edward Grey, Buenos Aires, 3 Feb. 1912, TNA, FO 369/439.
33. Manuel Cigorraga to G. Rule, 29 Jan. 1912, TNA, FO 369/439.
34. Reginald Tower to Edward Grey, Buenos Aires, 4 July 1912, TNA, FO 369/439.

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supported Cigorraga; they based their response on what the constitution did
and did not say. Since Article 25 of the Constitution of 1853 explicitly sought to
encourage European immigration, they reasoned that this justified denying the
Sikhs the minor public support provided by the Hotel of Immigrants.35 The
1876 Law of Immigration and Colonization gave teeth to Article 25 and out-
lined how the state would encourage European immigration. The law called on
the government to station immigration agents in Europe, to provide free infor-
mation to anyone interested in immigrating, to pay for some passages, to lodge
and feed immigrants for their first five days in the country, and to help work-
ers find employment.36 In dealing with the British challenge, Mugica wrote
to Bosch that all immigration legislation was built on that core article of the
constitution, “which charges the Federal Government with the duty offostering
European Immigration.” In his view, “the provisions of the said Law must
therefore be interpreted in conjunction with the fundamental injunction upon
which they were based, [all] the more so when that injunction concerns ques-
tions of vital importance connected with the future of our national popula-
tion.”37 At the heart of that line of reasoning was an idea of maintaining a white
Argentina.
In his correspondence with London, Tower disagreed with the Argentines’
rationale for excluding British colonial subjects from the Hotel of Immigrants,
since the constitutional article that Bosch, Mugica, and Cigorraga quoted also
bound the state to “not restrict or limit entry nor levy any tax against for-
eigners who come to Argentine territory with the objective of working the land,
improving the industries, and introducing and teaching sciences and arts.”38
The preamble to the Argentine constitution—which Tower brought up in his
complaints to London—also declared that the state would work for the benefit
of “ourselves, our posterity, and all the men of the world who want to inhabit
Argentine soil.”39 Tower brought up this apparent contradiction with Bosch,
writing that Article 25 “does not appear in any way to restrict immigrants to
European origin, as was stated in the letter from the Director.”40 Bosch’s
35. Tower to Grey, 3 Feb. 1912, TNA, FO 369/439.

36. Ley de inmigración, 4, 6, 7, 11, 16, 17.
37. Mugica to Bosch, 1 Feb. 1912, TNA, FO 369/439.
38. Tower to Grey, 3 Feb. 1912, TNA, FO 369/439. For the actual constitutional text,
see “Constitución de la Nación Argentina (1853),” Wikisource, accessed 29 June 2018,
https://es.wikisource.org/wiki/Constituci%C3%B3n_de_la_Naci%C3%B3n
_Argentina_(1853).
39. “Constitución de la Nación Argentina (1853).”
40. Tower to Bosch, Buenos Aires, 30 Jan. 1912, TNA, FO 369/439.

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selective use of the constitution provides a telling example of the malleability of

such legislation, of how constitutions can be mobilized to meet the interests of
those in power, and of how legislation itself does not fully illustrate the reality
on the ground.
Tower also tried to draw on the 1825 Treaty of Amity, Commerce, and
Navigation between Great Britain and the United Provinces of the Rı́o de la
Plata, which stipulated—according to Tower—that “the inhabitants of the two
countries respectively shall have liberty, freely and securely to come with their
ships and cargoes to all such places, ports and rivers in the territories afore-
said.”41 By mid-February 1912, the British Foreign Office told Tower to stand
down from his position, writing that “our Treaty Rights only oblige them to
accept our immigrants, not to house and feed them.”42 Tower, perplexed by the
Argentines’ use of the constitution in order to exclude non-Europeans, was in
fact similarly selective in order to advance his position. He drew on the 1825
treaty but failed to mention that the article that he quoted explicitly referred to
“all the territories of his Britannic majesty in Europe” and therefore did not
include colonial subjects.43 The British treaty with the United States, signed in
1815, similarly applied only to Britain’s European territories and similarly gave
the British government little diplomatic recourse against the exclusion of South
Asian migrants in the early twentieth century.44
On two occasions in 1912, Argentine immigration agents stationed in
Montevideo (the last port of call for some ships before reaching Buenos Aires)
blocked Indian arrivals. In June, Tower wrote to London that “a case has been
reported here from Montevideo, whereby six Sikhs, on their arrival from India,
were refused passage to Buenos Aires. They were ordered to return as far as
Santos in Brazil.”45 The ship’s captain, who had sailed from Genoa, reported
that he was threatened with a heavy fine. A second incident took place in
July. Consul General Atlee reported to London from Valparaı́so, Chile, that
“five destitute Indians, natives of Punjab . . . were brought to Valparaı́so by the
Captain of the S/S ‘Oravia’ ”; they “came from India with the object of working
in the Argentine Republic as Agricultural labourers.” Much like in the first
incident a month earlier, the ship’s captain reported that “the Argentine Agent
in Montevideo refused to allow these men to proceed to Argentina as emigrants,
and the local authorities in Montevideo also refused their disembarkation.” As
41. Tower to Bosch, Buenos Aires, 30 Jan. 1912, TNA, FO 369/439.

42. Consular minutes, London, Feb. 1912, TNA, FO 369/439.
43. “Treaty of Amity,” 153.
44. Atkinson, Burden of White Supremacy, 100.
45. Reginald Tower to Edward Grey, 2 July 1912, TNA, FO 369/439.

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Atlee continued, “The Captain’s only course was to take them on to the nearest
place to their port of destination,” in Chile.46 Uruguay, a country also greatly
affected by European immigration in this period, appeared to try to deflect
any potential South Asian immigrants in a similar ad hoc manner rather than
through formal legislation.
In the time between these two cases of formal exclusion, Cigorraga sent
a letter to every shipping company represented in the Argentine capital. He
urged them to refuse passage to any Asians seeking to immigrate to Argentina,
although he did not outline a penalty for noncompliance. He labeled the recent
South Asian immigrants “useless for work” and believed that “the Eurasian
cross is highly objectionable for this Republic, and that their presence is in every
way undesirable.” As Cigorraga declared, “They belong to a conquered race,
indolent and weak. Their pretended religious beliefs [and] real idolatry are on
par with their moral corruption. No absurdity can be imagined in matters of
religion which is not incorporated by the Indians and other Asiatics, Malays
and Negroes.”47 Thomas Bell, the editor of the English-language daily Buenos
Aires Herald, shot back at Cigorraga that “the poor deluded Indians are starving,
and the Department of Immigration is patriotically circularising the shipping
agents, quoting examples that do not apply, and uttering platitudes.”48 The
importance of Cigorraga’s pressure on shipping companies should not be
overlooked. The threat of forcing captains to return Asian passengers to their
ports of departure posed a clear financial danger to companies. He informally
transferred the act of exclusion from the port of arrival (Buenos Aires) to the
port of departure (Genoa, Santos, or elsewhere).
South Asian immigration put Argentine legislators and bureaucrats in
an unexpected position. They insisted on their right to exclude even as the
British minister plenipotentiary challenged them on the rights of British sub-
jects and other non-European peoples under Argentine law. Cigorraga and
Bosch asserted that they had the right to discourage Asian immigration because
they desired European immigration. They created formal barriers at the Hotel
of Immigrants and for shipping companies and turned back small numbers
of South Asian laborers. At the same time, the logic that Cigorraga and Bosch
used with the British minister plenipotentiary reveals an important aspect of
Argentine racial ideologies about immigration and making a European country
at the time of the 1910 centennial of independence.
46. Acting Consul General Atlee to secretary of state for foreign affairs, 12 Aug. 1912,
TNA, FO 369/439.
47. Reginald Tower to Edward Grey, 25 June 1912, TNA, FO 369/439.
48. “Our ‘Poor Indians,’ ” Buenos Aires Herald (Buenos Aires), 25 June 1912, p. 4.

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Making a White Argentina
The framing of South Asian immigrants as undesirable was part of a broader

anxiety about the European character of Argentina. The idea that the nation
was European and white—which had become dominant by the turn of the
twentieth century, particularly in elite circles in Buenos Aires — was built in
opposition to various racialized groups.49 Yet Argentina’s whiteness was not just
the official line or part of national identity; it led to a range of negative expe-
riences for real people. The boundaries of whiteness were also policed by
various figures, whether immigrant rioters in Jujuy, government officials in
Buenos Aires, or Argentine immigration agents in Montevideo. Nevertheless,
the growing calls for Asian exclusion differed from the policies and actions
toward indigenous and mestizo peoples and those of African heritage. New
immigrant groups that state officials and public figures labeled undesirable
posed a particular dilemma. For many in Argentina, an influx of Asian laborers
threatened to negate the supposed demographic benefits of European immi-
gration. Since the mid-nineteenth century, Argentine intellectuals presented
immigration as the means to improve the nation; European immigrants would
mix with the preexisting population and transform the national body.50
Discussion increased in Argentina about race-based immigration policies
and restrictions around the time of the 1910 centennial, part and parcel of
broader concerns about a growing lack of national cohesion caused mainly by
European immigration.51 Juan Alsina, the director general of immigration until
1911, worried in a 1910 book that the growing numbers of eastern European,
Ottoman, and Asian immigrants were “dissimilar from the base population
of the republic.” He highlighted the benefits of selecting immigrants based
on country of origin in order to maintain “the homogeneity of the Argentine
49. Alberto and Elena, “Introduction,” 2; Funes, Salvar la nación, 181.

50. David Scott FitzGerald and David Cook-Martı́n highlight that “the eugenicist
language of selection and improvement easily translated into immigration policy.”
FitzGerald and Cook-Martı́n, Culling the Masses, 16. As Nancy Leys Stepan has
demonstrated, Argentines and other Latin Americans based their ideas regarding eugenics on
Lamarckian notions of heredity, whereas US, British, and German eugenics embraced
Mendelian ideas. Larmarckian eugenicists believed that the national body could be
transformed over time through mixing with Europeans and thus diluting undesirable
traits. Conversely, Mendelian eugenicists sought to deter certain groups from reproducing so
that they would slowly disappear and more desirable groups could proliferate. Stepan,
“Hour of Eugenics.” See also Soloway, “ ‘Perfect Contraceptive’ ”; Ladd-Taylor, “Saving
Babies”; Stern, “ ‘Hour of Eugenics.’ ”
51. Bryce, To Belong in Buenos Aires, 79; Quijada, “De Perón a Alberdi,” 877.

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population.” He also offered the following caution: “Racial diversity, of such

profound difference, American indigenous, black, Asian, and European, coex-
isting in one nation, creates grave social problems. Let us conserve the
homogeneity of our republic.”52 While Alsina categorized a broad group of
people as undesirable, he and other observers of the time heaped the most scorn
on the imagined threat of increased immigration from Asia. His concerns about
“eastern Europeans” in one sentence were negated in the next when he grouped
these migrants together with all other Europeans and in relation to “American
indigenous, black, [and] Asian.” Mónica Quijada has argued that mid-
nineteenth-century discussions of the need to foster English, German, French,
Swiss, and Swedish immigration in fact laid out a form of ethnic selection.53
However, those discussions of preferred groups did not lead to any calls for
exclusion.
As Stefan Rinke notes, in the 1910s and 1920s a growing discourse about
the national race (raza) “combined with the typical contemporary racist feel-
ing of superiority vis-à-vis supposedly ‘inferior’ peoples such as the Asians” and
led “to demands for sealing off the border to supposedly ‘useless’ immigra-
tion, which commentators in Argentina, for instance, ascribed to war invalids,
Africans, Chinese, and Indians.”54 As Rinke highlights, concerns about immi-
gration from Africa and Asia occupied a noteworthy space in these conver-
sations. The actual numerical impact of arrivals from these continents—
particularly when compared with the millions of Europeans who had arrived
in recent decades—was of little importance. The potential threat influenced
policy discussions and decisions, and it played a role in the evolving conceptions
of race and national belonging.
Concerns about Asian immigration surfaced during the Argentine con-
gressional debates about the Law of Social Defense (Law 7029) in 1910, which
sought to suppress all anarchist activities in the country and to close borders
to anarchist migrants. The final legislation focused only on anarchists, but the
original proposal and congressional debate blended concerns about all possible
external threats to the nation. Specifically, Article 1 of Carlos Meyer Pellegrini
and Lucas Ayarragaray’s draft legislation (presented the day after the anarchist
bombing of the Colón Theater) incorporated all the previous grounds for
exclusion from the country (health, physical disability, morality, and unwill-
ingness to work) but additionally proposed banning convicted criminals,
52. Alsina, La inmigración, 209, 203, 206.

53. Quijada, “De Perón a Alberdi,” 872.
54. Rinke, Latin America, 229.

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anarchists, and polygamists.55 When Congressman Gaspar Ferrer challenged

Ayarragaray about the need to exclude polygamists in light of preexisting laws
about marriage as well as the constitution’s promise of freedom of religion,
Ayarragaray retorted,
We should reject that immigration that is “undesirable” [no deseable],

as the North Americans say. . . . The word “polygamy,” which appears
in the immigration law, I took from US legislation. . . . It does not
only refer to those who have several wives. It is a euphemism in US
law that I have adopted in part in order to exclude a certain class of
exotic, Asiatic immigration, from which we must defend ourselves.
I would also be willing to accept an article that excluded [specifically]
the yellow immigration that we are under threat of receiving. . . . We
do not need yellow immigration but rather European fathers and
mothers, of the white race, to superiorize [superiorizar] the hybrid
and mestizo elements that make up the base population of this
country and that are possibly of yellow origin.56
Ayarragaray, like Juan Alsina, borrowed freely from US ideas, but he was also
building on Argentine ideas about race, particularly in regard to mestizaje.
Indeed, Argentine concerns about Asian immigration engaged with the trans-
national circulation of ideas about the perceived need to defend newly imagined
white settler societies. Yet as David Atkinson demonstrates, local responses
to Asian immigration were deeply contingent. White activists in Australasia,
North America, and southern Africa, as he observes, “shared similar concep-
tions of the dangers and inadequacies inherent to Asian immigrants, but in each
case a specific constellation of political, economic, geographic, and diplomatic
considerations had shaped and conditioned the contours of distinctive restric-
tion regimes.”57
In 1916, conservative congressman Rodolfo Moreno proposed a law spe-
cifically about the status of foreign residents, which included grounds for
exclusion. In addition to adding categories for “professional beggars” and
“gypsies,” he proposed an article that sought to ban the entry of “immigrants of
the black, Chinese, or Indian race.”58 Moreno wanted to resolve what he saw
as a contradiction in the constitution that charged the state with encouraging
55. Diario de sesiones de la Cámara de Diputados, 27 June 1910, p. 310 (meeting 18).
56. Diario de sesiones de la Cámara de Diputados, 27 June 1910, p. 323–24, 326–27 (quote).
57. Atkinson, Burden of White Supremacy, 106–7.
58. “Residencia de extranjeros: Proyecto de ley,” 28 Aug. 1916, Diario de sesiones de la
Cámara de Diputados, vol. 2, 1916, p. 1650.

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European immigration but also stated that the state could not limit the entry of
anybody who came with the objective of “working the land, improving the
industries, and introducing and teaching sciences and arts.”59 In the existing
Law of Residence “we have not taken issues of race into account and [not con-
sidered] prohibiting certain exotic immigration.” He concluded that “we, there-
fore, need to begin as I propose by blocking the entry to our country of immigrants
of inferior races.” Similar to Ayarragaray, Moreno saw exclusionary legislation in
the United States, Australia, and Canada as worthy of imitation and was also
drawn to the English-language concept of “undesirables.”60 In the end, the leg-
islation did not pass; it was sent to committee on constitutional matters and did
not emerge. Moreno attempted to reintroduce his bill in 1918, but to no avail.61
Argentine-British Solutions
Argentine and British officials were eager to find the cause of the increased
migration from the Punjab region to the Southern Cone in order to discourage
future arrivals. The British minister plenipotentiary Tower, affluent Anglo-
Argentines, and the India Office also worked to repatriate some of the laborers
who had arrived over the course of 1912. In so doing, British immigrants and
Anglo-Argentines also supported the project of making a white Argentina. In
April 1912, Tower wrote to London that “I have a shrewd suspicion that some
Agency must be at work to bring the Sikhs to this Republic, but, when I have
questioned them, they always reply that they have been attracted by the glowing
accounts of wages here.”62
Tower determined that a Mr. M. A. Farı́as in Buenos Aires was “instru-
mental in bringing the Sikhs to this country” by spreading information about
high wages, the availability of land, and an openness to Indian immigration.63
59. “Residencia de extranjeros,” 1652; “Constitución de la Nación Argentina (1853).”

60. “Residencia de extranjeros,” 1659, 1660–63.
61. “Argentina: Proposed Legislation to Prevent the Entry of Undesirable Aliens;
Question of the Exclusion of British Indian Immigrants” (W. J. Garnett to Arthur James
Balfour), 11 June 1918, British Library, London (hereafter cited as BL), IOR/L/PJ/6/
1539, file 3083.
62. “Immigration of Sikhs into Argentina” (Reginald Tower to Edward Grey),
Buenos Aires, 12 Apr. 1912, BL, IOR/L/PJ/6/1179, file 2662.
63. R. Ritchie to India Office, 22 June 1912, TNA, FO 369/439. In British
diplomatic correspondence Tower refers to this person as “Faria,” but I use the form of the
name with which Farı́as himself signed his articles in Buenos Aires newspapers. See, for
example, “Correspondence: The Sikh Immigrants,” Standard (Buenos Aires), 28 June 1912,
p. 13; M. A. Farı́as, “Indian Immigration in Argentina,” Buenos Aires Herald (Buenos Aires),
9 Apr. 1912, p. 7.

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The Tribune, a newspaper based in Lahore, a major city in the Punjab region,
published letters from a “correspondent in Buenos Aires”—likely Farı́as—who
described the “advantage of emigration of free Indians to Argentina.”64 Tower
also reported about a newspaper in India that quoted Farı́as telling potential
emigrants that “the openings for labour are excellent here and that the Sikhs
who have come were immediately provided with work by the Central Argentine
Railway Company.”65 The Standard, one of two English-language daily news-
papers in Buenos Aires, republished Farı́as’s article from the Indian newspaper
and described the invitation to South Asian laborers as “vicious and mischievous
trash.”66 Farı́as was a sort of immigration booster who saw immigration from
Asia as the inevitable destiny of Argentina and the Americas. In mid-1912,
Farı́as wrote in the Standard that “the tidal waves of racial union are the part of a
great world-movement and any artificial barriers raised against them will be
simply accumulating the rising waters behind frail dykes.”67
Tower complained that Farı́as claimed that “there is a demand for agri-
cultural labourers with a daily wage of . . . £1, with board, and that for such
work the Indian Farm manager who arrives with his family is very favourably
situated.”68 A group of South Asian men similarly told an employee at the
British consulate in Rosario that they had chosen Argentina because they had
learned that they could “secure £1 sterling per day with permanent employ-
ment.”69 The wages that Farı́as claimed were available were not entirely out of
line with the high wages that had been attracting millions of European laborers
to the country for decades. In 1912 wages were close to 300 pesos (approxi-
mately £26) per month with a six-day work week for skilled industrial workers
in Buenos Aires, though agricultural laborers would have made less money.70
Had he advertised these wages in a European country, Farı́as would not have
been denounced for spreading misinformation.
Farı́as’s claims were not as misguided as the British minister plenipoten-
tiary and the Standard asserted. The Argentine constitution explicitly stated
64. Ritchie to India Office, 22 June 1912, TNA, FO 369/439.

65. Reginald Tower to Edward Grey, 13 June 1912, TNA, FO 369/439.
66. A. G. Hales, “The Men of India: What Is Being Done,” Standard (Buenos Aires), 4
July 1912, p. 13.
67. Farı́as, “Correspondence,” 13.
68. Tower to Grey, 13 June 1912, TNA, FO 369/439.
69. M. Mallet to Edward Grey, 17 June 1912, TNA, FO 369/439.
70. At the time £1 was equal to 11.45 pesos. According to Ronald Newton,
agricultural workers received 6–7 pesos per day in 1919, while office workers in Buenos
Aires could receive as much as 300 pesos per month. Newton, German Buenos Aires,
134–35.

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that workers from anywhere in the world could freely immigrate to the country,
and Farı́as could not have fully anticipated the government’s reaction to small
numbers of South Asian arrivals. In fact, he also claimed in the Standard that
in 1911 he had received from Eleodoro Lobos, then minister of agriculture,
“direct official assurance that the Hindus are welcome to this Republic.”71 If
true, the change between 1911 and 1912 highlights how malleable the politics
of exclusion could be. In 1911 Farı́as’s offer to recruit a highly esteemed eth-
noreligious group of British subjects appealed to the minister of agriculture in
Roque Sáenz Peña’s government, but once that abstract idea became a tangible
reality in 1912, the same government’s new minister of agriculture, Mugica, had
second thoughts.72
Farı́as was not the only source of information for Sikh migrants about
Argentina’s economic benefits. Some followed family members. One of the six
men turned back in Montevideo in June 1912 reported that he already had a son
in Argentina, and two others in the group had brothers in the country.73 As
Totaram Sanadhya reports in his memoir, 46 Punjabis in Fiji tried to make their
way to Argentina in March 1912. The leader of the group, Armah Singh, reveals
how he learned about their destination: “I heard about the Argentine in my own
country. I came to Fiji because I thought it was the same as the Argentine. I don’t
know where the Argentine is.”74 According to John Dunham Kelly, who edited
Sanadhya’s memoirs, the migrants were aware of warnings from the secretary of
state for India about “little hope for employment in the Argentine. But the
Punjabis were apparently willing to take the risk.”75
Several Punjabis gave similar explanations of their decisions to go to
Argentina in letters to the India Office. For example, Vaser Singh wrote, “Having
heard that good employment could be had in the Argentine, I went out there, to
do which I sold my land and property [in India] to pay my expenses, which cost
me 20£ to go there. I remained there one month, but could see no way ofgetting
employment, so I took passage to London which cost me 8£.”76 Hardit Singh
made a similar appeal for help to the India Office once in London, writing,
71. Farı́as, “Correspondence,” 13.

72. On the special status of Sikhs in the eyes of the British, see Streets, Martial Races.
73. D. E. Thomas, “Stranded in Montevideo: Desolate Hindoos,” Standard (Buenos
Aires), 4 July 1912, p. 13.
74. Sanadhya, My Twenty-One Years, 185–87, 189. They did not sail until December
1912, and they did so via Wellington, New Zealand.
75. Sanadhya, 189.
76. Vaser Singh to secretary of state for India, 29 July 1912, BL, IOR/L/PJ/6/1183,
Repatriation of Destitute Sikhs from Argentina, file 3066.

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“Having heard by advertisement that a man earn one sovereign a day at Buenos
Ayres I go there and live three months at there. But no work for me, and am
spend the whole money whom am got [that I had] at India and am spend the
whole estate in which my possession at India.”77 By April 1912, concern began
to mount at the British legation in Buenos Aires both about the potential for
South Asian immigration to increase and about the Argentine desire to reject
these migrants. The British minister plenipotentiary liaised with the Foreign
Office and the India Office in London, and together they arranged to publish in
the Tribune of Lahore and in the official government publication, the Gazette of
India, announcements and official letters by the Argentine ministers Bosch and
Mugica discussing the undesirability of Indian immigration to Argentina.78
The Gazette ofIndia informed that “the British Minister at Buenos Aires reports
the arrival at that place of a number of Indians for whom it will be impossible to
find employment. Intending emigrants are accordingly warned of the risk they
incur in proceeding to the Argentine Republic.”79
In August 1912, the governments of India and the Punjab took further
steps. A. C. McWatters, a British official, pledged to search for “any agents
in India who are promoting this emigration” and to take action “to check the
agents, if any, should they be found to be inducing persons to emigrate to the
[Argentine] Republic by false representations.” McWatters added that “pass-
ports should not be issued to emigrants to Argentina unless they have assured
prospects of employment.”80 C. Banks, the protector of emigrants in Calcutta,
reported that it was difficult to prevent emigration because shipping compa-
nies operating in India were not required to report the embarkation of Indian
passengers not bound for British colonies.81 The migrants had traveled to
Buenos Aires via Italy on Italian steamers and as a result were not subject to state
control.
It is worth noting that the British government took a similar approach in
deterring South Asian emigration to the United States. In the hopes of stifling
77. Hardit Singh to king, 22 July 1912, BL, IOR/L/PJ/6/1183, Repatriation of

Destitute Sikhs from Argentina, file 3066.
78. Ritchie to India Office, 22 June 1912, TNA, FO 369/439; R. Ritchie to
undersecretary of state, Foreign Office, 4 Sept. 1912, TNA, FO 369/439.
79. “Extract from the Gazette ofIndia, 27 Apr. 1912,” Department of Commerce and
Industry, India Office, Notifications, Emigration, Simla, 26 Apr. 1912, TNA, FO 369/439.
80. “Emigration of Indians (Sikhs from the Punjab) to the Argentine Republic,” 15
Aug. 1912, BL, Bengal Proceedings, India Office Records, P/8924, no. 6213-56, p. 3.
81. “Emigration of Indians (Sikhs from the Punjab) to the Argentine Republic,” 20
Sept. 1912, BL, Bengal Proceedings, India Office Records, P/8924, no. 4363, p. 4.

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interest, the India Office announced that “industrial conditions in the United
States are unfavourable to British Indian immigrants.”82 The Foreign Office
also suggested that the government of India stop issuing passports for South
Asians to travel to the United States.83 British willingness to support Argentina
in its efforts to make a white settler society was the result of multiple factors.
Britain’s economic interests in Argentina surely motivated Foreign Office offi-
cials to find a resolution, and concerns about the embarrassment of having
British subjects excluded by a lesser country—in the eyes of the British—likely
also played a role. By preventing Sikhs from immigrating to Argentina rather
than defending them as British subjects once they arrived, the British govern-
ment also limited how apparent the second-class legal status of colonial sub-
jects was.
In the short term, imperial authorities were of little help to Argentine
exclusionists. Over time, however, limiting access to passports and Argentine
pressure on shipping companies did prove effective. The First World War
helped, and new flows of South Asian migration in the 1920s were noticeably
smaller; according to Argentine records, only 111 “Hindúes” arrived between
1921 and 1924. In the same period, 1,253 Japanese and 71 Chinese arrived.84
Overall immigration to the country assumed its prewar tenor, and 894,940
people came to Argentina in those same four years.85 Considering this overall
increase and the rise in Japanese arrivals, Argentina clearly had not lost its
prewar appeal. It was a combination of diplomatic strategies to deter new arriv-
als from South Asia and free migrants’ agency in choosing more welcoming
destinations (in the Caribbean, East Africa, Malaysia, Mauritius, or Fiji) that
largely gave Argentine exclusionists their desired outcome.
Several studies have shown how North American efforts to prevent Chi-
nese immigration failed.86 Yet strong British imperial support did lead to rel-
atively effective control of South Asian immigration to the United States and
Canada. These state efforts were also aided by the lack of preexisting migrant
networks between India and the Americas and far fewer shipping lines linking
South Asia to the Americas. As a result, Canada and the United States were
relatively successful in slowing South Asian immigration. In 1908, the Canadian
82. Undersecretary of state, India Office, to undersecretary of state, Foreign Office, 7

Feb. 1908, TNA, FO 371/565, no. 4453, quoted in Atkinson, Burden of White Supremacy,
101.
83. Atkinson, Burden of White Supremacy, 101.
84. Memoria de la Dirección General de Inmigración correspondiente a los años 1914–1915,
15; Resumen estadı́stico, 82.
85. Resumen estadı́stico, 83.
86. Young, Alien Nation; Mar, Brokering Belonging; Chang, Pacific Connections.

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government enacted a regulation that required all immigrants to come to the

country directly on a “continuous journey” from their country of origin, which
at that time was impossible for potential migrants in India. As a result, immi-
gration from that country fell sharply. In 1909, only five Indians officially
entered Canada; between 1909 and 1913, only 106.87 In direct response to the
Canadian policy, which would have shifted the flow of South Asians toward the
United States, that country’s government also ramped up its policies of exclu-
sion. As Seema Sohi writes, the US commissioner general of immigration, Dan-
iel Keefe, stated that beginning in 1909, it was “the general policy of the
Immigration Service to exclude Hindus.” In 1911, only 517 of the 1,379 Indians
to arrive at the country’s border gained entry, and over the subsequent five
years, fewer than 600 Indians were admitted to the United States.88
In Buenos Aires, affluent Anglo-Argentines became involved in efforts
to block Indian immigration, and their actions and ideas cast light on a hybrid
space between British imperial interests and Argentine visions of the nation.
Starting in late June 1912, a group of 135 “destitute Sikhs” ran into particularly
difficult times. English speakers in the capital city soon began a fundraiser to
repatriate these workers, collecting approximately 4,000 pesos.89 In their calls
for support, Anglo-Argentines emphasized both imperial obligations and the
difference between Britons and colonial subjects. The editor of the Standard,
who took a firm stance against South Asian immigration, wrote that “we are
glad to think that these dusky subjects of the British Empire may be enabled to
return to their own land bearing in mind that it was the Britishers in a foreign
country who came to their assistance in the hour of their necessity. . . . But we
must strongly protest against further contingents of Hindus being brought to
these shores.”90 A. Boyle, a school principal who temporarily lodged three Sikhs
in need—motivated by his previous service with Sikh soldiers in India and his
belief that “a finer race does not exist on God’s earth”—called on others in
Buenos Aires to aid in repatriating “our fellow subjects, instead of leaving them
here to be a scorn and a bye word against the British race for their callous-
ness.”91 A. G. Hales added that “if you let these men starve and shiver it is your
87. Sohi, Echoes of Mutiny, 28.

88. Sohi, “Race, Surveillance, and Indian Anticolonialism,” 426.
89. Reginald Tower to Edward Grey, 3 Oct. 1912, TNA, FO 369/439; Reginald
Tower to Edward Grey, 2 July 1912, TNA, FO 369/439; A. G. Hales, “Sinful Sermons: For
Sunday Reading,” Standard (Buenos Aires), 23 June 1912, p. 10; “Indian Relief Fund:
Supplementary Account,” Standard (Buenos Aires), 8 Aug. 1912, p. 13.
90. “Editor’s Table: Hindu Immigrants,” Standard (Buenos Aires), 6 July 1912, p. 3.
91. A. Boyle, “The Indian Immigrants: An Appeal for Help,” Standard (Buenos Aires),
30 June 1912, p. 12.

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affair, only do not be so ready to vaunt in the future your British lineage, for
these men are Britishers, you made them so, and keep them so by force of
arms.”92
The fundraiser was not as successful as organizers had hoped. To travel as
far as Italy cost between 85 and 98 pesos per person, and Tower—who managed
the funds—noted “that only a small number of the men are likely to benefit
from the generosity of private donors.”93 Tower ultimately decided that “the
sum collected was too small for any real use towards repatriating the men.”
Indeed, the 4,000 pesos would have covered the travel costs ofonly 47 of the 135
destitute men. As a result, Tower decided to use the money to pay for temporary
room and board in Buenos Aires and to send the men “up country in search of
work.”94 In their financial calculations, the organizers of the fundraisers had
only considered the cost to travel as far as a Mediterranean port, not all the way
back to India. Therefore, it appears that the British fundraisers wanted to pass
what they saw as a social problem in Buenos Aires on to others in Europe rather
than to genuinely help the South Asian immigrants who ran into unexpected
trouble in their destination of choice.
The goal of protecting British and community interests rather than helping
the South Asians was even more apparent in Tower’s adamance about sending
the men back to Genoa or Marseille on Italian or French steamers, rather than
to Liverpool aboard British vessels. Indeed, the legal status of Indians as British
subjects meant that a community-led deportation from Buenos Aires to the
United Kingdom rather than back to India would have put the British gov-
ernment in a difficult situation. By the end of July, the India Office worried
about precisely that, and Lionel Abrahams, an official in the India Office,
instructed Tower “to take such steps as may be possible to prevent Indian
immigrants in the Argentine Republic from coming or being sent to England,
and to make it known that they should return direct to India as the British
Government can neither assist them to proceed from England to other coun-
tries in search of employment, nor give them grants of land in India or else-
where.”95 In the end, the only British records of repatriation to India from
Buenos Aires in 1912 concern a group of 15; sure enough, they traveled via
Marseille, not the United Kingdom.96 It is worth noting that at least 53 Pun-
jabis paid for their own travel from Buenos Aires to the United Kingdom in
92. Hales, “Sinful Sermons,” 10.

93. Tower to Grey, 2 July 1912, TNA, FO 369/439.
94. Tower to Grey, 3 Oct. 1912, TNA, FO 369/439.
95. Lionel Abrahams to Reginald Tower, 24 July 1912, TNA, FO 369/439.
96. A. Law to India Office, 22 July 1912, TNA, FO 369/439.

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mid-1912 after spending a few months unsuccessfully looking for work in

Argentina. They were lodged temporarily at the Strangers’ Home for Asiatics in
London before the India Office—eager to keep colonial subjects out of British
society—decided to pay for their voyage to India.97
Discussions about South Asians’ mistreatment in Argentina and their pos-
sible travel to British ports emerged against the backdrop of concerns about
anticolonial movements in India. British officials in this period increasingly
worried that the mistreatment or rejection of British subjects from South Asia
in British dominions or the United States would call into question the benefits
of British subjecthood and therefore British colonial rule in India.98 As Seema
Sohi highlights, Indian migrants in the United States and Canada—of whom
Sikhs were the overwhelming majority—“linked racial discrimination abroad
to colonial subjugation at home.” They saw their struggles against exclusion in
North America “as part of a broader movement against colonialism and white
supremacy—two forces of subjugation that they viewed as inseparable.”99
Abrahams and the India Office worried that the Argentine response could lead
to the arrival of hundreds of mistreated migrant workers in England, which in
turn would further fuel the anticolonial fire.
The Foreign Office and the India Office accepted Argentina’s vision of
desirable and undesirable immigrants, at the expense of imperial concerns over
the supposed benefits of British subjecthood. The minister plenipotentiary in
Buenos Aires and his superiors in London saw the problem that Argentine
exclusion—at the borders and in the labor market—was creating. As a result,
the two governments collaborated to stop future South Asian emigration before
it began.
Conclusion
The early twentieth-century idea that Argentina should be populated by

European peoples depended not only on sustained transatlantic immigration
but also on concerted efforts to prevent immigration from South and East Asia.
The increase in South Asian immigration in 1912 and the immediate efforts to
thwart it both drew from and helped solidify a dominant idea about what the
97. N. A. Lash to undersecretary of state, Judicial and Public Department, India Office,
5 Aug. 1912, BL, IOR/L/PJ/6/1183, Repatriation of Destitute Sikhs from Argentina, file
3066; Judicial and Public Department, India Office, J & P 3066/1912, 18 Aug. 1912, BL,
IOR/L/PJ/6/1183, Repatriation of Destitute Sikhs from Argentina, file 3066.
98. Atkinson, Burden of White Supremacy; Sohi, Echoes of Mutiny; Sohi, “Race,
Surveillance, and Indian Anticolonialism”; Banerjee, Becoming Imperial Citizens.
99. Sohi, Echoes of Mutiny, 5–6.

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Argentine nation was and should be. The arrival of migrants whom politicians
and bureaucrats labeled undesirable, either explicitly with their words or
implicitly with their actions, brought to the fore important strands of racial
thinking embedded in Argentine nationalism around the 1910 centennial. By
this time, the mid-nineteenth-century dreams of using European immigra-
tion to stamp out the mestizo, indigenous, and colonial legacies imprinted
on the country’s people, economy, and politics had become—in the view of
most Buenos Aires elites and intellectuals—a fait accompli. In this context,
the arrival of immigrants from India, Japan, and China, and the threat of
more to come in the future, posed a particular dilemma. The very act of gov-
erning by populating threatened to undermine the mid-nineteenth-century
project that Alberdi and other liberals had so enthusiastically wished on the
nation.100
Understanding the Argentine response to South Asians also broadens the
recent research on Asian exclusion in the United States and the British empire.
The places in the Americas that attracted the most Europeans also attracted
people from South and East Asia, and it was the concerted efforts to restrict
Asians that prevented greater balance between the two flows. Argentina should
not be overlooked in this historiography simply because so few Asians suc-
cessfully started new lives in the country. Exclusion was the goal ofgovernment
officials, politicians, and organized labor in the United States, Canada, Aus-
tralia, and New Zealand, and white nationalists in all those countries were
relatively successful. That Argentine nationalists were slightly more successful
or slightly less threatened than their counterparts in North America and Aus-
tralasia should not be accepted as reason enough to focus only on the English-
speaking world.
The belief that Argentina was a white, European nation fundamentally
shaped the response to Asian immigration in the early twentieth century. When
small numbers of South Asian migrants arrived, Argentine officials and immi-
gration boosters rose to defend national borders and a supposed national race.
While the governments of the United States and Canada—despite tensions—
collaborated in making their policies regarding first Chinese and then Japanese
and South Asian immigration, Argentina and Brazil, which together attracted
over 10 million European laborers in the same period, were much further apart
in their response to Asian immigration. Despite debates over the value and
100. The constitution was based mainly on Juan Bautista Alberdi’s 1852 Bases y puntos de
partida para la organización polı́tica de la República Argentina, in which he famously wrote that
“to govern is to populate” and described “immigration as a means to progress.” Alberdi,
Bases y puntos, 89–96, 218.

by UBC LIBRARY user
benefits of Japanese and Chinese immigration, Brazil largely welcomed non-

European immigrants from various parts of Asia.101 Argentina was surely aided
in deterring Asian migration by the existence of a neighboring country seeking
international labor migrants and open to non-Europeans.
The arrival of Asian immigrants in Buenos Aires and the existence of
indigenous communities and millions of mixed-race people all threatened the
elite vision of a white nation. Over the course of the twentieth century, the
persisting racial diversity of Argentina (partially) eroded the idea that it was
exclusively a European country. Yet for several decades, the goal of mass immi-
gration from Europe supported the vision of a white Argentina, and anxious
politicians and bureaucrats saw the potential beginning of large-scale immi-
gration from Asia as a threat to the nation. As in North America, politicians and
officials in Argentina worried about the negative effect that Asians would have
on their apparently white society. Yet Argentina stood out compared to many
other countries in Latin America. Brazil and Cuba both received millions of
European immigrants between 1880 and 1930 but also hundreds of thousands
of Asians. In Argentina, however, transatlantic immigration was seen as inti-
mately connected to the exclusion of others.
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Benjamin Bryce is an assistant professor in the Department of History at the University of

Northern British Columbia and received his PhD from York University in 2013. He is the author of To
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South Asian Migration and The Making of A White Argentina

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Undesirable Britons:

South Asian Migration and the Making

Hispanic American Historical Review 99:2

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interests in Argentina and began to collaborate with Argentine officials to pre-

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ambiguous labels such as criollo or morocho to indigenous, Afro-Argentine, and

12. Chamosa, “Indigenous or Criollo,” 71–72, 98; Karush, “Blackness in Argentina,”

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exclusion during a period ofmassive European immigration casts further light on

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Undesirable British Subjects

21. Young, Alien Nation, 17, 99, 217.

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28. Alsina, La inmigración, 167–69.

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31. Mugica to Bosch, 1 Feb. 1912, TNA, FO 369/439.

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35. Tower to Grey, 3 Feb. 1912, TNA, FO 369/439.

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selective use of the constitution provides a telling example of the malleability of

41. Tower to Bosch, Buenos Aires, 30 Jan. 1912, TNA, FO 369/439.

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Making a White Argentina

The framing of South Asian immigrants as undesirable was part of a broader

49. Alberto and Elena, “Introduction,” 2; Funes, Salvar la nación, 181.

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population.” He also offered the following caution: “Racial diversity, of such

52. Alsina, La inmigración, 209, 203, 206.

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anarchists, and polygamists.55 When Congressman Gaspar Ferrer challenged

We should reject that immigration that is “undesirable” [no deseable],

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59. “Residencia de extranjeros,” 1652; “Constitución de la Nación Argentina (1853).”

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64. Ritchie to India Office, 22 June 1912, TNA, FO 369/439.

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71. Farı́as, “Correspondence,” 13.

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77. Hardit Singh to king, 22 July 1912, BL, IOR/L/PJ/6/1183, Repatriation of

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82. Undersecretary of state, India Office, to undersecretary of state, Foreign Office, 7

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government enacted a regulation that required all immigrants to come to the

87. Sohi, Echoes of Mutiny, 28.

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92. Hales, “Sinful Sermons,” 10.

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mid-1912 after spending a few months unsuccessfully looking for work in

The early twentieth-century idea that Argentina should be populated by

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benefits of Japanese and Chinese immigration, Brazil largely welcomed non-

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Banerjee, Sukanya. Becoming Imperial Citizens: Indians in the Late-Victorian Empire.

Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/hahr/article-pdf/99/2/247/567201/247bryce.pdf

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Resumen estadı́stico del movimiento migratorio en la República Argentina, años 1857–1924.

Benjamin Bryce is an assistant professor in the Department of History at the University of

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