IDENTITY AND NATIONALISM IN MODERN ARGENTINA D E F E N D I N G T H E T R U E N AT I O N
JEANE DEL ANE Y
University of Notre Dame Press Notre Dame, Indiana
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University of Notre Dame Press Notre Dame, Indiana 46556 undpress.nd.edu Copyright Š 2020 by the University of Notre Dame All Rights Reserved Published in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
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CONTENTS
Acknowledgments vii Introduction 1 part one
Debating the Nation
Introduction to Part One 29 One Nation and Nationality in the Nineteenth Century 31 Two National Identity in the Age of Mass Immigration: The Romantic Turn and the Ideal of the Argentine Race 53 Three Sources of Romantic Nationalism in Early Twentieth-Century Argentina 76 Four Romantic Influences and the Argentine Radicals 95 Five Defining the Essence of Argentinidad: Debating Ethnicity and Language, 1900–1930 112
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vi C ontents
part two
Identity and Nationalism in the Post-1930 Era Introduction to Part Two 129
Six The Rise of the Nationalist Right and the Ideal of the Catholic Nation 133 Seven Anti-imperialism, FORJA, and the Defense of the True Argentina 164 eight Essentialism in the Era of Perón 192 Nine Resistance and Revisionism: Argentina’s Two Nationalisms after Perón 212 ten From Revisionism to Revolution and Repression 242 Conclusion 277 Notes 290 Bibliography 397 Index 436
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Introduction
Nationalism has played an exceptionally powerful role in Argentina’s turbulent history and continues to be a potent political force. Even the most casual student of Argentine politics during the last decade could not help but be struck by the nationalist stance of former president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, who frequently insisted that “Las Malvinas son argentinas” and characterized Argentina’s foreign creditors as “vultures” and “extortionists.”1 Many of Kirchner’s stances and policies lived up to her rhetoric, including her close ties to the late Hugo Chávez, the expropriation of Spanish-owned shares of the national oil company YPF, and her decree establishing a new Secretariat of National Thought. A Peronist, Kirchner drew from a tradition within Argentine nationalism that was first articulated by the nationalist group FORJA (Fuerza de Orientación Radical de la Joven Argentina) in the 1930s.2 Arturo Jauretche (whom Kirchner revered as one of Argentina’s most important intellectuals) founded FORJA, whose leaders promoted a strand of nationalism that celebrated the masses as the embodiment of the “real” Argentina and attacked the country’s traditional liberal elite as cosmopolitan vendepatrias (sellers of the fatherland). Left-wing and socially inclusive, this strand of nationalism played a key role in shaping the 1
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2 IDENTITY AND NATIONALISM IN MODERN ARGENTINA
olitical ideas of Juan Perón in the 1940s and continues to resonate in p Argentina today. Yet as Argentines are well aware, another form of nationalism has played an arguably even greater role in their country’s political life. First emerging in the late 1920s, this right-wing strand of nationalism had as its core mission the defense of Argentina’s supposedly authentic Hispanic and Catholic character. During the 1930s, this nationalism became increasingly antiliberal, as it drew inspiration from European fascism and found support from the most reactionary elements of the Argentine Catholic Church. Argentina’s right-wing nationalists successfully sought to extend their influence within the armed forces and enthusiastically supported the military coups of 1930, 1943, 1966, and 1976. The latest transition to civilian rule in 1983 failed to extinguish right-wing nationalist sentiment entirely. Although successive civilian governments have largely purged the officer corps of right-wing nationalists, these ideas have been kept alive by an array of civilian groups such as La Juventud Nacional del Partido Popular de Reconstrucción, Movimiento Bastión, and Movimiento por la Identidad Nacional, as well as by scores of personal websites and blogs. The continued survival of both right- and left-wing forms of antiliberal nationalism raises questions about the long-term prospects for democracy and political pluralism in Argentina. To be sure, many factors have contributed to the weakness of the country’s democratic institutions. Among the most important has been the country’s economic dependency. Although Argentina has long led Latin America in per capita income, its dependent position within the global economy has produced deep income inequality and stubbornly high rates of poverty, creating conditions that have made it difficult for democracy to thrive. Liberal leadership failures and an interventionist military have also played a role. While long espousing faith in democratic rule, the traditional political class has at crucial moments in the country’s history rigged elections and supported military coups to regain power. More broadly, as historian Jorge Nállim has argued, this elite has failed to link political liberalism with the popular ideals of equality, democracy, and social justice.3 But any attempt to understand the weakness of Argentina’s democratic institutions must also take into account the impact of nationalism and, more specifically, the country’s unique experience with its two forms
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Introduction 3
of nationalism. In contrast to other Latin American cases, in which nationalism was either more uniformly right wing (e.g., early twentieth- century Chile and Brazil) or left-wing (e.g. present-day Venezuela, Ecuador, and Bolivia), or where state-promoted nationalism served as a unifying force (Mexico after 1920 and Cuba after 1959), Argentina produced two very different strands of nationalism, whose leaders had long and active careers, and whose ideas had an impact far beyond nationalist circles. This fact has been a key reason why nationalism in Argentina has proved to be uniquely destabilizing, as ideologues from both strands have attacked the Argentina’s liberal political institutions and, at times, each other. At no point was the clash between Argentina’s two nationalisms more dramatic than in the late 1960s and the 1970s. During these years, Argentina witnessed the emergence of a variety of Peronist guerrilla organizations, which sought to mesh Marxism with a left-wing, socially inclusive form of nationalism. One of the most violent, and by far the most influential, was the Montoneros, a group that captured the imagination of a generation of young middle-class Argentines. The Montoneros took their name from the rural militias of the nineteenth century, and its founders cast themselves as the latest protagonists, or heirs, of a historical struggle to defend the “real” Argentina of the masses against exploitation by foreign capitalists and their domestic allies.4 But what the Montonero leadership saw as patriotism, others viewed as treason. Right-wing factions within Peronism itself denounced the guerrillas as Marxist-inspired infiltrators, who were seeking to hijack the movement. Similarly, nationalist military officers believed the guerrillas to be under the influence of exotic ideologies that posed a threat not simply to the established order but to the nation itself. The reign of terror these military men unleashed was unprecedented in twentieth-century Argentine history and led to the kidnapping, torture, and killing of more than twenty-five thousand citizens, many of whom had no connection to the guerrillas. The purpose of this “Dirty War,” as it came to be called, went far beyond containing the guerrilla threat. Rather, as the regime repeatedly proclaimed, its mission was to wipe out all “antinational” ideas and influences in order to defend the true Argentina. The intense violence of these years—and the simultaneous claims made by all sides that they represented the “true” nation—obscures the
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4 IDENTITY AND NATIONALISM IN MODERN ARGENTINA
fact that, beginning in the 1930s, left- and right-wing nationalists openly admired each other’s books, occasionally published in each other’s journals, and even enjoyed cordial personal relations. While these interactions and collaborations never solidified into any kind of alliance, the fact remains that Argentina’s two types of nationalists were in many ways kindred spirits, who shared many of the same assumptions about why the country had failed to flourish. In the aftermath of the 1955 coup that ousted Juan Perón, these similarities produced a complex political landscape, in which individuals who began their political careers identifying with one strand of nationalism often swerved toward the other. Indeed, such were the enduring affinities between these nationalist strands that most of the founders of the Montoneros actually began as activists in right-wing nationalist groups, such as Círculo de Plata and Tacuara. For these individuals, as Argentine scholar Hugo Vezzetti has argued, the transition from the right to the left entailed neither a “rupture” nor a “conversion” but is best understood as a kind of leftward slippage that left core beliefs and values intact. According to Vezzetti, even as they transitioned to left-wing radicalism, the Montonero leaders retained a “firm nucleus of convictions” based on the original “nationalist, antiliberal mold.”5 Also striking, as historian Sandra McGee Deutsch has reported, even in the midst of the violence, young guerrillas continued to read the works of prominent right-wing nationalists.6 Why did the line between Argentina’s two nationalisms prove so permeable? What kind of bridge could exist between two ideological movements, whose leaders had, by the late 1960s, become such bitter enemies? Just as important, how did these two nationalist strands work in tandem to undermine Argentina’s liberal traditions? The similarities and shared roots of Argentina’s two nationalisms, as well as their broader impact on Argentine political life, form the subject of this book. To tackle these issues, this study shifts the focus away from nationalism per se—understood here to be a set of political ideas articulated by ideologues concerned with the defense of their country’s cultural, economic, and political sovereignty—to examine instead how nationalist leaders from the 1930s onward conceptualized or imagined Argentina and the discursive constructions they used to describe the nation and its problems. I take as my starting point the premise that to fully understand any nationalist movement requires understanding the vision of nationhood
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Introduction 5
that animates it.7 Nations, as numerous scholars have noted, can be imagined in very different ways, and how individuals or specific groups define their nation largely determines what they see as worth defending.8 In addition, how an individual imagines, writes, or talks about his or her nation is inextricably intertwined with a whole range of beliefs that are central to any nationalist program. Questions pertaining to who can belong to the nation (and especially whether immigrants or minority groups can be accepted as full-fledged members of the national community), whether foreign cultural influences are perceived as threatening or benign, and whether domestic ethnic or religious diversity is viewed as a threat to national unity are inseparable from how individuals conceptualize their nation and what they see as the basis of their collective identity. This work argues that, despite their very different political programs, Argentina’s right- and left-wing nationalists shared a vision of the Argentine nation that had roots in, and thus bore the lasting imprint of, ethno-cultural forms of national identity associated with the Romantic nationalism of nineteenth-century Europe.9 This is not to argue that Argentine nationalists should be considered Romantic thinkers or, even less, should be identified as such. Rather, my claim is that these nationalists operated within a conceptual matrix rooted in understandings of nationality and history that were inspired by the ideas of Romantic nationalism, ideas that had gained currency in early twentieth-century Argentina during an era of mass immigration. While historically contingent and ideologically plurivocal, the assumptions central to this conceptual framework proved remarkably persistent and structured how post-1930 nationalist intellectuals from across the political spectrum imagined argentinidad. Within the Romantic vision, nations are understood to be organic ethno-cultural communities, whose existence predates the creation of the state and whose members possess intrinsic mental and emotional traits that distinguish them from other nationalities. The supposedly homogenous collective character of the people, rather than their shared political values or loyalties, forms the basis of the nation’s identity and serves to bind members together. Moreover, because the nation’s identity is believed to be based on the intrinsic qualities of the people that endure across the generations, nationality is understood to be an inherent state
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6 IDENTITY AND NATIONALISM IN MODERN ARGENTINA
of being that can neither be acquired nor shed. Argentina’s nationalists embraced an essentialist vision of national identity that strongly echoed the Romantic understanding of nations, although with variations and modifications over time.10 While disagreeing vehemently about the qualities that defined true Argentines, both right- and left-wing nationalists saw the nation as a bounded, homogenous community that existed independently of the state, whose members shared a set of distinctive traits that marked them as Argentines. According to nationalists, it was Argentines’ intrinsic collective character or essence—rather than their conscious embrace of, or loyalty to, the nation’s political values and institutions—that defined the “true” Argentina. The nationalists’ vision of the nation as an enduring homogenous community rooted in history contrasted sharply with how the country’s founding generation had understood the nation they sought to create. The liberal leaders of Argentina’s independence movement had defined their nation primarily in “civic” terms11—that is, they understood their nation to be a manmade association of citizens that had broken with Spain, not in the name of a preformed ethno-cultural community, but for the purpose of establishing a new nation on the basis of a new political project.12 In contrast to twentieth-century nationalists, who drew a sharp distinction between the nation (defined in ethno-cultural terms) and the institutions of the state, nineteenth-century liberals believed that the creation of the state and the nation were inseparable processes. In other words, they believed that, in organizing the state and establishing its institutions, they were creating the nation. This is not to say that in imagining this new nation, these elites discounted the importance of forming a common culture and a racially homogenous population. Indeed, central to the nineteenth-century liberal vision of the Argentine nation were the intertwined notions of “racial whiteness and cultural Europeanness,” qualities that elites sought to bolster by encouraging European immigration.13 At first glance, this emphasis on white identity suggests an ethnic vision of Argentineness that reserved membership in the national community for individuals of European ancestry, and whose primary ties were those of blood. Yet as multiple scholars have noted, while Argentine elites continued to prize whiteness as a marker of civilization and refinement, in practice the category of “whiteness” proved to be extremely elastic.14 Moreover, this elas-
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Introduction 7
ticity worked in tandem with the two other beliefs central to early nineteenth-century understandings of the Argentine nation: that membership in the national community was first and foremost a matter of political loyalty, and that the desired cultural traits associated with white Europeans were acquirable rather than innate. This voluntarist understanding of national belonging meant that all native-born individuals who were loyal to the state were understood to be Argentines, regardless of their race. Similarly, while European immigrants were certainly preferred, all newcomers—again regardless of ancestry or race—were seen as potential Argentines.15 E L SE R N A C IO NA L A ND T H E MY T H OF THE TW O ARGEN TIN AS
In exploring the ethno-cultural vision of Argentine identity at the core of twentieth-century nationalist thought, I focus on two related tropes that were central to the discourses of both right and left nationalists and that continue to have currency in present-day Argentina. The first is the notion of el ser nacional, a term that appeared repeatedly in the speeches and writings of the leaders of both strands. Variously translated as “the national being” or “the national soul,” nationalists understood el ser nacional to be an enduring cultural essence that made Argentines unique and served as the basis of their collective national character. Although a few mentions of el ser nacional can be found in Argentine political writings before the 1930s, it was in this decade that the term gained widespread currency and indeed became ubiquitous in nationalist discourses. The second trope, related to the notion of el ser nacional, is that of the “two Argentinas.” According to both right- and left-wing nationalists, there existed two very different Argentinas: one true and authentic, the other false and artificial. The true Argentina, of course, was an organic community, whose members possessed a unitary collective character rooted in el ser nacional. The false Argentina, nationalists argued, was that constructed by liberals. According to both right- and left-wing nationalists, Argentine liberals had always ignored the realities of the authentic Argentina and sought instead to create a new nation on the basis of borrowed values and institutions from liberal Europe. The result, nationalists argued, was an artificial liberal state that had nothing to do
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8 IDENTITY AND NATIONALISM IN MODERN ARGENTINA
with the true Argentina and that indeed threatened its very essence. Like the concept of el ser nacional, the trope of the two Argentinas proved to be extraordinarily enduring, and by the 1960s had become a common sense way of understanding the nation and its problems.16 Indeed, so seductive was this notion that variations of it have been adopted by some non-Argentines as well.17 This belief in the existence of the two Argentinas and the conviction that the true nation possessed a unitary ser or essence that defined its collective character were enduring elements of both right- and left-wing nationalist thought. Both tropes, of course, were inventions or intellectual constructs. Clearly, there is no such thing as a unitary ser nacional to which all true members of the national community are psychologically or spiritually connected. Similarly fantastical is the notion that the country’s liberals somehow created a false Argentina at odds with the supposedly “true” Argentina (as is the related claim that anyone who embraces liberal values could not be a “real” Argentine). Emphasizing the invented or imagined nature of these constructs does not, of course, detract from their significance, for, as anthropologist Allan Hanson has noted in another context, “Inventions are precisely the stuff that cultural reality is made of.”18 Unquestionably for Argentina’s right- and left-wing nationalists, el ser nacional and the two Argentinas were tangible realities. Accordingly, these “facts” helped structure how they understood their country’s history, perceived its problems, and imagined solutions. These constructs also provided ideologues of both nationalist strands with a set of guiding myths and historical narratives that were remarkably similar. Yet what served to unify these two strands of nationalism also acted as a wedge to drive them apart. My focus on the nationalists’ shared embrace of an essentialist vision of Argentine identity can also provide insight into the profound differences that divided them. Although both right- and left-wing nationalists believed in an enduring ser nacional and in the existence a “real” Argentina at odds with the “false” liberal state, how they imagined the content of this supposed ser nacional and the true Argentina differed dramatically. It is in these differences that we can find some of the sources of their often mutual hostility and the reasons behind their failure to unite against the liberal state and the imperialist powers they believed this state served.
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Introduction 9
This nationalist right’s vision of the true Argentina was straightforward enough. Although they became highly factionalized as the twentieth century wore on, right-wing nationalists shared the assumption that Argentines were by definition Hispanic (or Latin, in some versions) and above all Catholic. For these nationalists, the real or authentic Argentina possessed an ethnic core that was Catholic and Spanish, or Latin, and any individuals or influences that threatened to dilute its purity were causes for concern. The nationalist left, in contrast, had a less tidy understanding of el ser nacional, one that was more socially inclusive in that it made room for non-Catholics and non-Hispanics/Latins.19 First promoted in the 1930s by FORJA, this vision of the true Argentina held that while el ser nacional contained elements of the Spanish legacy, it had incorporated other influences and other peoples. As a result, these nationalists understood Argentina’s ser nacional to be something newer, more original, and distinctively Argentine. Just as importantly, the nationalist left insisted that the true ser nacional was most evident in the lives and culture of “el pueblo” or the common people. In its view, the Argentine masses—even those born of recent immigrants—formed a unitary, culturally homogeneous folk community that most purely embodied Argentina’s supposedly authentic national qualities. INT E L L E C T U A L ROOTS
From where did the essentialist notion of el ser nacional and the related (and equally) essentialist belief in a “true,” enduring Argentina come? Any attempt to understand the power and resonance these constructs held for Argentine nationalists inevitably leads to the problem of how, why, and when—in a country with a long-standing liberal tradition— such a way of conceptualizing Argentine identity came to enjoy such currency. Clearly, the right- and left-wing nationalists’ shared obsession with el ser nacional and their belief in the existence of a true Argentine nation at odds with the liberal state did not suddenly materialize from thin air in the 1930s. Accordingly, I seek to understand how and why this occurred by asking the following: Why did so many twentieth-century intellectuals and opinion makers come to accept as “fact” the existence of an Argentine ser nacional? Why, in a country “born liberal,” did such an
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10 IDENTITY AND NATIONALISM IN MODERN ARGENTINA
influential group of political actors come to believe in the existence of a real or true Argentina that existed apart from (and indeed was threatened by) the liberal state?20 What events, both in terms of concrete occurrences and new intellectual formations, sparked this new way of thinking and talking about Argentine identity? These questions, of course, lie at the very heart of larger problems in intellectual history— that is, why broad intellectual shifts occur, how new conceptual paradigms and orientations emerge, and what circumstances make it possible for certain ideas to be “thinkable” at particular historical moments.21 The answers to these questions, as suggested above, can be found in the tumultuous decades of the early twentieth century. During these years, massive immigration and new intellectual currents from Europe led many Argentines to question traditional notions of Argentine identity. Between 1880 and 1930, the country’s robust export economy made it a favored destination for Europeans seeking opportunity, and within the span of a few decades millions of immigrants poured onto Argentine shores. Although the Argentine state had long encouraged immigration, the sheer number of newcomers sparked fears that Argentine society was in danger of being overwhelmed, leading many native intellectuals to call for the defense of the nation’s culture and traditions against the incoming tide. At the epicenter of this movement was a new generation of intellectuals, who have since become known as the cultural nationalists. This group of thinkers, I argue, played a central role in undermining the traditional civic vision of the Argentine nation, and helped spark a paradigmatic shift in how significant numbers of Argentines began to understand their nation’s identity. Early twentieth-century Argentina was ripe for such a shift. As British historian Eric Hobsbawm has noted, the experience of rapid immigration and the crowding of cities with new social groups were key factors that led to the rise of ethno-cultural nationalism in late nineteenth-century Europe.22 Facing similar circumstances, and drawing from Romantic nationalist intellectual currents from Europe (especially Spain), the cultural nationalists began to promote the notion that Argentines formed—or should form—a unitary raza, or race, whose distinctive qualities must be defended and nurtured. According to Ricardo Rojas, one of the movement’s key intellectuals, the peoples of each nation formed—or at least should form—a homogenous race that possessed its
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Introduction 11
own collective “soul” and a “racial memory.”23 In Argentina’s case, he believed that the national race had largely solidified during the nineteenth century, when mystical forces emanating from the Argentine soil had fused together the indigenous and European races to create a unique racial type.24 Thus for Rojas, Argentina already possessed a distinctive racial profile—a kind of ethnic sponge that could absorb the millions of immigrants arriving on the nation’s shores without losing its basic form. Fellow cultural nationalist Manuel Gálvez concurred with Rojas’s assessment that Argentines formed a distinctive race, but he disagreed about its content. In his view, the Argentine nation was defined by its Catholic faith and Hispanic heritage, and thus its race was at root Spanish. Declaring Spain to be the “crucible of the race,”25 he lauded the mother country for its deep Catholic spirituality and indifference to the lure of materialism and urged his countrymen to return to their Spanish origins.26 In writing about this presumed Argentine race, the cultural nationalists used the term to denote the shared qualities of an enduring ethno-cultural community rather than to describe people of a particular phenotype. Rojas made this explicit when he insisted that he employed the word race not as a scientist would but in the “old, romantic sense [having to do with] collective personality, historical group, cultural consciousness.”27 It is important to note, however, that the line between Rojas’s and Gálvez’s historical cultural definition of race and biological understandings of race was often fuzzy, an ambiguity fueled by the simultaneous circulation of other notions of race that reflected the emerging discipline of genetics, social Darwinism, neo-Lamarckian notions of the inheritability of acquired characteristics, eugenics, and Italian theories of criminology.28 And, as Sandra McGee Deutsch has observed, although early twentieth-century Argentines typically spoke about race in cultural terms, the cultural traits that defined this supposed race were seen as innate rather than acquirable.29 Thus despite their disavowal of biological notions of race, the “Argentine race” envisioned by Rojas and his fellow cultural nationalists was understood to be a bounded ethnic community, whose members shared fixed psychological traits that were transmittable from one generation to the other.30 While the cultural nationalists were among the most prominent champions of the idea of an Argentine race, theirs were not lone voices
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12 IDENTITY AND NATIONALISM IN MODERN ARGENTINA
launched into a void. Rather, as will be developed in chapter 2, these individuals employed language, ideas, and images that resonated with, just as they helped shape, contemporary understandings of Argentine nationality.31 Indeed, by the early 1920s, the idea that Argentines formed, or should form, a distinctive national race, which in turn belonged to a larger racial family, became widely accepted among those Argentines who wrestled with the myriad consequences of mass immigration. What was the connection between the early twentieth-century idea of “the Argentine race” (however it was understood) and the later notion of el ser nacional that figured so prominently in post-1930 nationalist discourses? I argue that the growing belief that Argentines formed (or would form) a bounded ethnic community and that a unified “national type” was developing fundamentally reset the conceptual parameters within which future debates over Argentine identity would unfold. In proclaiming the existence (or emergence) of a distinctive, unitary “Argentine race,” the cultural nationalists and like-minded intellectuals undermined the traditional nineteenth-century view that being an Argentine was first and foremost a question of allegiance to the Argentine state, its constitution, and the political values this document enshrined. And although the break with Argentina’s liberal past was never complete, the spread of the essentialist notion of an Argentine race among early twentieth-century intellectuals and opinion makers made possible or “thinkable” the later (and equally essentialist) notion of el ser nacional. Indeed, I believe there is a direct continuity between the two terms in that during the 1930s this phrase came to replace the term race, when the latter came to have a more strictly biological or genetic meaning.32 In other words, after 1930 or so the concept of el ser nacional provided a way of talking and writing about the supposedly intrinsic, collective, and unitary character of the Argentine people, without straying into increasingly messy questions of bloodlines and phenotypes. The concept of “path dependence” is useful here in thinking about intellectual continuities between the pre- and post-1930 periods. First developed by economic historians to understand the persistence of seemingly obsolete technologies, path dependence holds that in certain instances, contingent historical circumstances, such as random events and decisions made by key historical actors, have produced technological innovations that eventually become “locked-in,” and thus foreclose the
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Introduction 13
evelopment of other, more efficient technologies.33 More recently, hisd torical sociologists and historians have adopted the concept of path dependence to explore the persistence of institutions, practices, and ideas that emerge during so-called critical junctures, defined as moments of crisis or change during which traditional practices and understandings are in flux.34 These critical junctures serve as “genetic moments” that produce new ways of thinking or new forms of social organization that respond to the crisis at hand.35 Once they take hold, these ideas, practices and institutions persist and continue to drive ways of thinking and behaving long after the disappearance of the conditions that prevailed when they emerged. Applying this concept to the case of Argentina, I see the early twentieth century as a critical juncture, during which mass immigration and rapid modernization shook the foundations of the traditional social, cultural, and political order. As Argentine intellectuals grappled with these challenges, and more specifically with the problem of how to incorporate immigrants into the nation while at the same time protecting a national culture they believed to be under siege, they seized on a set of ideas that happened to be available at that particular moment and that made sense to them: varieties of the ethno-cultural nationalism then circulating in Europe, and especially Spain. Once the idea of an Argentine race came to be embraced by a substantial segment of the nation’s intellectual elite, it achieved a certain “stickiness” and served to channel subsequent discussions about Argentine identity along similarly unitary and essentialist lines, even after the initial triggers (mass immigration and rapid modernization) came to an end in the late 1920s. In other words, during the early decades of the twentieth century, the growing acceptance of the idea that Argentines formed a distinct race or ethno-cultural community produced new ways of thinking and talking about argentinidad; this sent subsequent discussions of the nation and its problems along conceptual pathways that reinforced certain understandings of Argentine identity while at the same time closing off—or at least making less likely— alternative ways of imagining the nation.36 Just as the concept of path dependence can help explain continuities between the early twentieth-century embrace of the idea of the Argentine race and the later notion of el ser nacional, it can also shed light on connections between different formulations of this imagined race and
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14 IDENTITY AND NATIONALISM IN MODERN ARGENTINA
later versions of the (equally) imagined Argentine ser. As noted, cultural nationalists Gálvez and Rojas promoted different interpretations of the supposed Argentine race, but both agreed that Argentina already possessed a well-developed ethnic profile that would remain unaltered by mass immigration. Other intellectuals of the period, however, adopted a much more dynamic and inclusive vision of the supposed Argentine race. While still embracing the cultural nationalists’ essentialist concept of a unitary national race, such figures as the politician Horacio Oyhanarte and elite writer Francisco Soto y Calvo argued that the national race was still in its infancy. Accordingly, they believed that Argentine ethnicity would be fundamentally reshaped by the millions of immigrants that continued to flood Argentine shores. The ultimate result, in their view, would be a completely different “racial type” that would be both new and completely Argentine. Thus as Argentines struggled with the challenges of mass immigration, the idea of an Argentine race served as an empty screen on which a number of images could be projected. In the starkly different visions of this supposed race that were articulated during this period, I argue, we can see the outlines of the competing versions of el ser nacional—one Catholic and elitist, the other popular and inclusive—that were so central to the thought of Argentina’s later nationalists. H IS T O R IO G R A P H IC A L CON TEXTS
This work seeks to contribute to current scholarship in a number of areas. First, my emphasis on the importance of massive immigration in helping to produce a broad shift in understandings of Argentine identity takes inspiration from Lilia Ana Bertoni’s 2001 Patriotas, cosmopolitas y nacionalistas: la construcción de la nacionalidad argentina a fines del siglo XIX (Patriots, cosmopolitans and nationalists: the construction of Argentine nationality at the end of the nineteenth century). This work examines Argentine reactions to immigration during the 1870–1900 period, arguing that the arrival of millions of immigrants during these years undermined the traditional understanding of Argentina as a civic community and helped spark the spread of an essentialized notion of argentinidad as an inherent state of being or feeling. My work, which
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