Oy, My Buenos Aires: Jewish Immigrants and the Creation of Argentine National Identity

1: Argentina: A Land of Immigrants

14 CHAPTER ONE Argentina A Land of Immigrants The Mexicans descended from the Aztecs. The Peruvians descended from the Incas. The Argentines descended from ships. —Traditional Argentine saying Through immigration, a growing middle class, and a government that consciously tried to remake the city in a European image, the Buenos Aires of 1905 bore little resemblance to the city it had been only decades before. Hundreds of thousands of European immigrants had already arrived and the city reflected its cosmopolitan population. Economic growth from exporting wheat and hides helped to create an Argentine middle class (often immigrants ortheirchildren)whoworkedinwhite-collarjobslinkedtothegrowingexport economy and related infrastructure.1 The city grew outward with the growing population. Technological changes like the growth of electrified streetcar lines also allowed people to live farther away from where they worked, especially the middle class, who did not have the means to own a carriage or automobile of their own yet could afford the streetcar fare.2 The municipal government, with its dreams of mimicking European cities, began remaking Buenos Aires in the image of a modern metropolis, instead of a city that only decades before had been referred to as a gran aldea, or large town.3 The government’s projects involved widening and paving streets, electrifying the city, creating a network of public transportation, and cleaning up areas perceived as unhygienic. The municipal government was committed to creating a modern city. A Land of Immigrants 15 Fifty years earlier, Argentina and Buenos Aires had looked much different .4 The 1850s were a turning point in Argentine history, signaling the beginning of efforts to construct the modern nation. Though Argentina had gained independence in 1810, the intervening years were not a period of state consolidation . Instead, early nineteenth-century Argentine history was marked by the rule of caudillos, local and regional strongmen, who worked to gain more land and power for themselves and their followers. The most important of these caudillos was Juan Manuel de Rosas, a member of the landowning elite who was governor of the province of Buenos Aires from 1829 until 1852 (with a brief break in the 1830s).5 Famous for his use of state terror against his opponents, Rosas was not afraid of using violence to keep order and assert his control. Once Rosas fell from power, elites formed a new government based on liberal principles. The 1853 Constitution organized Argentina into a republic . From the 1850s until the first decades of the twentieth century, Argentine politics were dominated by an elite group of men who ruled as an oligarchy.6 Political debates of the mid- to late nineteenth century were often framed as fights between “civilization and barbarism,” a dichotomy explored by President Domingo Faustino Sarmiento in his famous work Facundo: Civilización y barbarie.7 Civilization was the city and liberal laws inspired by Enlightenment ideals, while barbarism connoted the rural areas, ruled by the patron-client relationships that bound a caudillo and his followers. Sarmiento himself was the embodiment of the principles of civilization, as he proved through both his writings and his political career. His barbaric counterpart was Rosas, the dictator who became a symbol for Argentine liberals of all that was wrong with their country. Nineteenth-century liberals wanted to move beyond the rural past that Rosas embodied and make Buenos Aires a shining example of a modern city and the seat of a government based on laws and principles rather than personal relationships. A Place for Immigrants in the Nation? In many ways the city represented the triumph of nineteenth-century liberal values, while the rural identity included the conservative ideals that had fallen out of vogue in the city. The ideals of liberalism and conservatism, contentious throughout Latin America during the nineteenth century, pitted liberals, who followed European ideas of secularism, free trade, and private property, against conservatives, who were committed to the status quo set up by the Spanish colonial state.8 By the end of the nineteenth century, most regions of chapter one 16 Latin America had moved definitively toward the liberal programs. Argentina was no different. Liberals, notably politicians and theorists like Sarmiento and Juan Bautista Alberdi, sought to increase European influence by encouraging the arrival of immigrants, who would supposedly remake Argentina into a modern, European-style nation.9 As Samuel Baily writes about Sarmiento, “[H]e was both consistently a champion of immigration and concerned about the threat...