Homogeneidad y nacion, con un estudio de caso: Argentina, siglos XIX y XX (review)

Homogeneidad y nación, con un estudio de caso: Argentina, siglos XIX y XX. By MONICA QUIJADA, CARMEN BERNAND, and ARND SCHNEIDER. Colección Tierra Nueva e Cielo Nuevo, 42. Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 2000. Plates. Tables. Bibliography. 260 pp. Paper.

From around the early nineteenth century, the quest for social and cultural homogenization and the elimination of internal differences became high priorities among the nations of North America and Western Europe. In the United States, for example, succeeding generations strove to create a common citizenry in a society of immigrants and claimed success through the so-called American melting pot. After World War II, a countertrend opposed homogenization, exalted difference, and abandoned the idea of the melting pot. In the United States, the second trend helped create the civil rights movements and resulted in the movement called multiculturalism. The process had many parallels in Western Europe. The emphasis on centralization in Napoleonic France epitomized the trend toward homogenization. Currently, the goals of Basque, Catalan, or Scottish separatists embody the reverse.

The five long essays in this book, mostly written by Mónica Quijada, are an attempt to examine homogenization in Argentina. Up to a point, general trends resembled those in the United States. In Argentina, the task of building a citizenry meant counteracting ethnic variety deriving from the colonial era and the national differences from the European immigration of the late nineteenth century. The Argentines adopted the idea of the melting pot, defining their country as a crisol de razas. As Quijada observes, there were also striking differences between Argentina and the United States. In the independence era, Argentina contained a substantial African and indigenous population, but neither Africans nor Indians appeared in subsequent Argentine national self-conceptions. In the minds of its people, Argentina became a "white country," in which blacks and Indians were forgotten. As Quijada emphasizes, the American transition from homogenization to multiculturalism did not occur. Argentina remained suspended at stage one, still pursuing homogenization and locked into the myth of the melting pot.

The book focuses on three related questions: How was the peculiar sense of national identity created in Argentina, which included only Europeans and erased the non-Europeans? With their historically diverse populations, why have Argentines failed to express subnational "difference"? Why do Argentines imagine themselves as descended uniformly from white Europeans? Quijada addresses these questions in three essays: the first examines the concepts of homogenization and its modern reversal using secondary literature on Western Europe and the United States; her last piece looks at homogenization in Argentina, again mostly through secondary literature; she contributes a third chapter on the indigenous peoples of Argentina. A fourth essay, by Carmen Bernand, studies the Afro-Argentine community and slavery; and fifth, by Arndt Schneider, treats immigrants and the Argentine melting pot. Neither Bernand nor Schneider cast such light on the general questions raised by Quijada. Bernand includes some interesting archival material on urban slavery in Buenos Aires around 1800 mainly to show that the burdens of slavery were relatively light. She has little new on the controversial issue of the disappearance of the black community (commonly attributed to attrition by war and miscegenation). Schneider contributes only a précis of secondary literature. Far more substantive than that of the other authors, Quijada's work has some defects in writing and conceptualization. She has no convincing answers to the general questions she raises. Secondary sources provide most of her data, with the exception of some informative primary data on Indians in the 1870s. She asserts the importance of territoriality in conceptions of Argentine nationality. In her view, Argentines are all the people born on Argentine soil who all have experienced the "alchemy of the land." The idea requires more elucidation. From Quijada's discussion, it remains unclear how this idea originated, how successive generations interpreted it, or how they...