Ambivalent Argentina: Nationalism, Exoticism, and Latin Americanism at the 1889 Paris Universal Exposition

The world at once present and absent which the spectacle makes visible is the world of the commodity dominating all that is lived. The world of the commodity is thus shown for what it is, because its movement is identical to the estrangement of men among themselves and in relation to their global product.

—Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle

A rapid glance at the catalogs and official reports published to commemorate nineteenth-century universal exhibitions reveals few traces of Latin American participation in them. Despite the abundance of references to both European and North American pavilions, as well as to African and Asian delegations, Latin American nations are seldom mentioned in the books that celebrate world’s fairs.¹ Nevertheless, international exhibitions, particularly those that took place in the last decades of the nineteenth century, were of significant relevance for Latin American governments, the elite that ruled their countries, and local public opinion. Expositions were a chance to promote interest in the region and to expose a new image of their nations. Newspapers and public debates brought the issue to the fore, and states invested heavily in the construction of national pavilions.2 As a result, the perception of Latin America at the world’s fairs appears divided and even contradictory. If we look at local sources such as newspapers, chronicles, and testimonies from Latin Americans, there is clearly a strong and recognizable presence of the region at the expositions, which were extremely significant for Latin American audiences and ruling classes. But if we look at the official catalogs and other sources that record the events in Europe, we find little or no trace of their participation, evidence that Latin American pavilions held little relevance for official record keepers.

Why this indifference toward Latin American countries in reports of the fairs? How does one explain the virtual absence of records—photographs, monuments, objects—of Latin American pavilions in catalogs and books devoted to the exhibitions? Why did Latin America’s presence at the universal exhibitions seem inconsequential and yet, simultaneously, generate tremendous interest domestically? This article will try to address these questions, focusing on the Argentine pavilion at the 1889 Paris Universal Exposition.

During the second half of the nineteenth century, world’s fairs experienced enormous growth, fueled by imperial rivalries, free trade, and growing nationalism. Exhibitions took place mostly in Europe and the United States, but also in peripheral regions, like Australia or Argentina, which staged their own national and international fairs.

3 These exhibitions are significant, for, as they anticipate our own era of globalization, they offer considerable insight into the development of its features and, consequentially, into economic trends such as the rhetoric of free trade and protectionism, internationalism and national rivalry. Like today, objects, commodities, and cultures were displayed at the turn of the century with the purpose of portraying a “total” image of human progress. Presented as an inventory of the world, the exhibitions are comparable to the encyclopedias of their time, as they shared a similar all-encompassing aim, that of capturing the diversity and multiplicity of human culture. As did the encyclopedias, the exhibitions seemingly proclaimed to have an open ideology, but concealed an agenda of domination. In fact, it was one nation—and its incarnated values—that controlled the portrayal of every distinct nationality and culture, just as it was one language and one culture that exercised the cultural hegemony over the rest, organizing the content of the universe. The Paris Universal Exposition and the British Encyclopedia can be read, then, as expressions of the same process of categorization and distribution of knowledge in a context of nineteenth-century imperialism. Both involve fantasies of colonial domination and national hegemony. In the case of world’s fairs, it is a city containing within it the entire world, “a city inside of the Great City,” as Rubé...