Cousins and Strangers: Spanish Immigrants in Buenos Aires, 1850-1930 (review)

Between the middle of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the Great Depression, approximately 2 million Spaniards, more than came to Spanish America during the entire colonial period, migrated to Argentina. By 1914, Buenos Aires ranked third to Madrid and Barcelona in total Spanish population. The fact that the Spaniards came from the nation that had colonized Argentina made them different from other immigrant groups. (In addition, they spoke a variant of the local language, and had been coming to the region since the sixteenth century.) After the Italians, they comprised the second-largest ethnic community.

This engrossing study of Spanish immigration and immigrants concentrates on the interaction among a community’s premigratory skills, the needs of the receiving society, and migration patterns themselves, as it skillfully weaves structural or historical forces with individual agency. The book is divided into two sections which roughly correspond to the Old World and the New. The first section considers macro-factors of migration, discussing the social, political, and economic changes that led Europeans in general, and Spaniards in particular, to leave the Old World and the reasons that Argentina became a land of immigration. Because Moya believes that to fully understand emigration and immigration, one must combine macro- and micro-analysis, he goes beyond the nation-state and examines in detail the economy and society of specific places that produced migration. He argues that these locales, varying from semi-industrialized Catalan cities to the rural hinterland of Galicia, are representative of different streams of Spanish immigration. Indeed, throughout the book, intra-Spanish differences, as well as similarities, are constantly being examined.

The second part of the book concentrates on the behavior and experiences of diverse Spanish immigrants in the port city, particularly their short and long-term residential patterns, their occupational history, their institutional and social life, and the reception of these immigrants and their response to the porteño world. Throughout, Moya underlines the centrality of local or regional networks, the flow of information, the importance of the timing, and the size of the immigration. He suggests that those immigrants who came from places that consistently provided few immigrants over long periods of time adopted relatively easily to the host country.

This book operates on many levels. First, it is a wonderful study of Spanish immigration and immigrants. But Moya places his study in the larger context of nineteenth-through-twentieth-century European migrations to the New World, constantly comparing and contrasting the Spanish porteño experience with that of other European population movements. Informed by the extensive literature on immigration into the United States, he also underlines the regional, class, and gender diversity of the Spanish population. Moreover, Moya uses the Buenos Aires case to test theories about immigration, ranging from “push-pull” to intergenerational residential patterns of immigrant groups. Along the way, he challenges long-held assumptions about immigration, immigrants, and the Buenos Aires experience. For example, Moya finds the residential patterns described by Scobie to have oversimplified the interaction between immigrants and urbanization and to have overemphasized the poverty of central-city immigrant life. ¹

Moya draws on a wide range of material, including various censuses, ship registers, records of immigrant associations, popular songs, plays and poetry, the writing of leading thinkers, and oral histories. He complements quantitative with qualitative analysis, but is always moderate, honest, and sensible in his interpretation of the material under consideration. In addition to the interesting essay on sources, the book has several tables, charts, and maps that present the detailed empirical data being analyzed. Moya writes with clarity, humor, and grace, making his information and analysis accessible to the least, as well as the most, methodologically sophisticated readers. In sum, Cousins and Strangers stands as a model for future studies of immigration to Argentina and other regions in Latin America.