Emotions and Migration in Argentina at the Turn of the 20th Century

María Bjerg

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781350193963
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: History

Revealing the lives of migrant couples and transnational households, this book explores the dark side of the history of migration in Argentina during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Using court records, censuses, personal correspondence and a series of case studies, María Bjerg offers a portrayal of the emotional dynamics of transnational marital bonds and intimate relationships stretched across continents. Using microhistories and case studies, this book shows how migration affected marital bonds with loneliness, betrayal, fear and frustration. Focusing primarily on the emotional lives of Italian and Spanish migrants, this book explores bigamy, infidelity, adultery, domestic violence and murder within official and unofficial unions. It reveals the complexities of obligation, financial hardship, sacrifice and distance that came with migration, and explores how shame, jealousy, vengeance and disobedience led to the breaking of marital ties. Against a backdrop of changing cultural contexts Bjerg examines the emotional languages and practices used by adulterous women against their offended husbands, to justify domestic violence and as a defence against homicide. Demonstrating how migration was a powerful catalyst of change in emotional lives and in evolving social standards, Emotions and Migration in Early Twentieth-century Argentina reveals intimate and disordered lives at a time when female obedience and male honour were not only paramount, but exacerbated by distance and displacement.

1

The Land of Prosperity

Between 1880 and the outbreak of the First World War, Argentina received 4.2 million immigrants. The expansion of this flow, which reached its historical peak at the beginning of the twentieth century, suffered an interruption during the first half of the decade of the 1890s. Between 1881 and 1890 the number of immigrants was over one million, with some 650,000 settling permanently, a notable number in a country whose total population was approximately two million people. However, after the economic crisis of 1890, immigration declined, and immigrants who returned to their home countries exceeded the number of those arriving.¹ The former migration flow patterns were reestablished in the first decade of the twentieth century, when the positive balance of arrivals versus returns surpassed one million.²

Around 80 percent of immigrants came from Italy and Spain.³ Most of them were young men, unskilled day laborers from rural backgrounds who arrived through the mechanism of chain migration looking for a job in a country that was experiencing a formidable economic boom due to the expansion of agriculture and livestock exports. The relevance of migration chains may be noted in the regional traits of the migration process. For example, most of the Italians came from the South and Central regions of the peninsula, especially from Sicily, Calabria, Basilicata, and the Marches. Whereas more than half of Spaniards were from A Coruña and Pontevedra provinces, whose crowded settlement in Buenos Aires transformed the city into a “Southern Galicia.”⁴

The engine of economic expansion was set in the countryside, where Sarmiento—one of the mentors of Argentina’s modernization and president of the country in the period 1868–1874—had imagined a landscape dotted with agricultural colonies. His discourse evoked bucolic images of a country of farmers where the sown land displaced the loneliness of the estancia (cattle ranch), and industrious European immigrants contributed to eradicate barbarism.⁵ Even though the agricultural colonization projects were successful in some provinces of the littoral, like Santa Fe and Entre Ríos where Italian, Swiss, German, and Jewish farmers settled, by the turn of the century, most immigrants lived in cities, towns, and villages. Two factors discouraged the settling of the newcomers in rural Argentina. On the one hand, the most intense demand for labor lasted only a few months per year and it was reduced to the harvest season. And on the other hand, the concentration of land in large agricultural and livestock ranches—especially in the province of Buenos Aires—and the steady increase of land prices hindered immigrants’ access to purchase. However, the continuous expansion of agriculture since 1890 allowed immigrants with little capital at their disposal to rent a piece of arable land as sharecroppers.⁶

Cities and towns did not secure permanent employment for everyone either, but they offered a wider variety of opportunities. The industrial economy sector, which grew in consonance with the rhythm of the agrarian one, employed many laborers in meatpacking plants and flour mills that produced goods both for export and for the domestic market. Other industries, such as textiles and food processing, supplied products elaborated with local primary material, while a network of workshops, generally owned by better-off immigrants, supplied the rest of the domestic market.⁷

Turn-of-the-century Argentina was a country under construction that grew at a frenzied pace, thus the expansion of the urban grid also created new job opportunities. Cities were expanding, new towns were being founded, luxurious urban mansions, sumptuous public buildings, and working-class houses were being built, and new railroad lines were extended (from 2,300 kilometers in 1880 to 16,700 in 1900).⁸ The ruling class made use of all this evidence to celebrate the success of their modernizing project and resorted to images of a thriving country to promote Argentina abroad, trying to attract new settlers and foreign investors.⁹

Among the Argentine ruling class and intellectual elites, cities were regarded as the privileged tools to lead the modernization of the territory, and not as the consequence of modernization itself. This conception of modernity had its most audacious expression when Dardo Rocha—governor of the province of Buenos Aires—set out to create a city from its foundations. In 1880, the province had to accept the transformation of the city of Buenos Aires into Argentina’s federal district and was forced to find a place to set its own capital city. Rocha rejected outright any possibility of establishing it in some preexisting town and committed himself to founding La Plata. Lomas de Ensenada, the site chosen for the new provincial capital, was humid and swampy but had the advantage of being close to the shore of the Rio de la Plata and the Ensenada natural harbor. On a suffocating morning in mid-November 1882, the groundbreaking ceremony took place, and from then, the place became the scene of a feverish activity led by legions of masons, bricklayers, carpenters, and laborers who built the city at an amazing speed. Stylish buildings inspired by European metropolises transformed the landscape day after day to make Rocha’s utopia come true. As some sort of Peter the Great from the Pampas, he had decreed that a great city would be erected in Lomas de Ensenada. In the following years the governor’s residence, the building of the Provincial Legislature, the city hall, the courthouse, and the train station were opened. Meanwhile, tram rails were laid, streets paved, and schools and private houses built. When the decade of the 1880s was coming to an end, La Plata already had 6,000 inhabitants and had been awarded a gold medal for modernity at the 1889 Paris Exhibition.

The broad boulevards and diagonals of the brand-new provincial capital—whose design is said to have been inspired by Jules Verne’s harmonious urban community of France Ville—as well as Buenos Aires’ avenues, which were lined by elegant mansions and petits hôtels, nurtured the Parisian daydreams of the local ruling class, and forged the collective imaginary of Argentina’s indefinite progress. However, this open and promising new country still was a magmatic emergent society in which job instability frustrated the expectations of upward mobility, prompting many immigrants to return to their home countries. Even though the rates of return migration differed by decade (for example, they were higher in the decade of the 1890s, due to the financial crisis) and national group (Italian immigrants tended to return home more often than their Spanish counterparts), between 1880 and 1910, 36 percent of immigrants headed back to Europe. Nonetheless, this figure encompasses not only those who returned permanently, but also the contingents of the temporary day-laborers known as golondrinas (swallows) who, profiting from cheap fares and relatively high local wages, traveled annually from the South of Europe (in particular, from Italy) to the Pampa Húmeda for the harvest.

The national population censuses of 1895 and 1914 provide two eloquent pictures of the impact of immigration and its uneven distribution throughout the country. In 1895, one out of four inhabitants was an immigrant, while in 1914 that figure had climbed up to one out of every three. Among the foreigners, there was a larger number of young people—between the ages of 20 and 40—than among the native population, and men far outnumbered women.¹⁰ The impact of the immigration flood upon the preexisting population was the highest in the world (around 25 percent in 1895, and 30 percent in 1914).¹¹ Most foreigners settled in the city and the province of Buenos Aires and in the towns of the littoral, contributing to accelerating the pace of urbanization. In 1895, 37 percent of the Argentinian population lived in urban areas, and by 1914 that number had climbed to 51 percent.¹² Buenos Aires—both the Capital city and the province—Santa Fe, and Córdoba were the fastest growing areas,¹³ whereas most of the other provinces (the so-called el Interior), whose productive profile did not fit in with the model-based agricultural and livestock exports, were excluded from the benefits of progress, lagging far behind the splendor of the “modern” Argentina.¹⁴

In the decades of the 1880s and 1890s, along with immigrants from Italy and Spain, also French, British, Germans, and Scandinavians arrived at the port of Buenos Aires. These were European and Christian minorities who adapted quite smoothly to the social and cultural dynamics of the country. Nonetheless, at the turn of the century, the migration flows began to show a novel religious and cultural profile. In addition to the typical southern Italians and northern Spaniards, Jewish, and Arabic-speaking immigrants from Greater Syria began to reach the shores of the Río de la Plata. The “exoticism” of the “Russians” and “Turks” (as the local population referred to the Jews and the Syrian-Lebanese) became a matter of concern for the ruling class, which sought to amalgamate the multiple identities that coexisted in the country into a homogenous cultural landscape.

Far from cultural unity, towards the end of the Belle Époque, the urban areas of Argentina had become a cosmopolitan world, where many languages were spoken, different religions were practiced, and an intense sociability charged with ethnic meanings was taking place. The country had been modernized—in a partial, but undeniable way—and immigrants and their children were experiencing upward mobility by entering the universe of the middle-classes. A house of their own, either as an aspiration or as a reality, was regarded as the most telling symbol of upward mobility both in the rhetoric of the ruling class and the hopes of thousands of immigrants. From the perspective of the country’s political leadership, a family home could shape the workers into moral and cautious individuals and contribute to their integration into the host society. While for the immigrants, owning a house gave way to greater stability and better living conditions in “decent” neighborhoods, which used to show distinctive ethnic marks because of the influence of chain migration.¹⁵ In these small worlds of countrymen, relatives, and acquaintances, the language and the traditions of the regions of origin were preserved. Nevertheless, their inhabitants could not stay away from the cosmopolitan dynamic of the city and had to adapt to the frenzy of modern life, and to the emotional and cultural standards of the fin-de-siècle Argentine society.

In the daily life of the ethnic neighborhoods, the preservation of the immigrants’ cultural traits and habitus through maintenance of homelands’ dialects, culinary traditions, clothing styles, and emotional standards was reinforced by an intense associative life based on the plethora of formal institutions, most of which adopted the form of mutual-aid societies. Founded in both big cities and small provincial towns, these associations channeled the integration of immigrants to the host society by offering health services to their members and acting as intermediaries in the incorporation of newcomers to the labor market. However, they also played a crucial role in the immigrants’ social lives. The observance of national holidays of the homeland, the balls and the dances, and the concerts and plays performed in the mutual aid societies’ halls, were usually attended by a large audience of ordinary members and leaders, who despite social class differences, came together in the same imagined community. In these events, the leaders publicly reaffirmed their status as an ethnic elite, their symbolic capital, and their role as promoters of myths that shaped the group’s identity. Instead, the reaso...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 The Land of Prosperity
• 2 Promise, Wait, and Betrayal
• 3 Breaking the Sacred Vows
• 4 The Anatomy of Everyday Hatred
• 5 The Passion of Jealousy
• 6 Killing for Love
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright