I have lived my whole life in this floating province of the Argentine Republic, that has been called its political emigration, and that has been composed of the Argentinians that left the soil of their tyrannized country, to study and serve the cause of liberty abroad. Almost all of our liberal literature has been produced in the moving but fertile soil of this nomadic province. El Peregrino, El Facundo, El Angel Caido, El Avellaneda, los Himnos de Mayo, la América Poética, the historical newspapers, memorable of that bygone era, and even the fundamental laws that govern the Argentine Republic today, have been produced in the migrating and nomadic province of the Argentinian people, that has been called its liberal emigration.1 (Belgium, 1873)
When Juan Bautista Alberdi wrote these words, he had been living abroad for thirty-five years and was looking back at a life of politics dedicated to a country he had left as a young man in 1839. Before leaving Buenos Aires, Alberdi and various other young educated men connected with the University of Buenos Aires had started a literary salon where they discussed and published their ideas for the future of the Argentine Confederation, a future in which they saw themselves as the inevitable leaders. Argentina was not yet a republic with a constitution but a loose confederation of provinces, under the domination of the authoritarian Governor of Buenos Aires, Juan Manuel de Rosas. Rosas saw them as a threat and not as potential allies; they were potential competitors to his own power, and their Romantic ideals and francophilia were threatening. The Young Generation, as they styled themselves after Giuseppe Mazzini’s Young Italy, found itself increasingly obliged to follow the dictates of the authorities and Alberdi, like many others, decided to flee across the river to Montevideo, Uruguay, where he could express his ideas more freely. Others settled in Bolivia, Chile and Brazil. After Rosas’ fall in 1852, and the unification of the republic a decade later, they would become the central political and cultural figures that shaped the republican institutions that emerged in the second half of the century.
In Chile too, a generation that came of age in the relative political opening in the 1840s, fed on the Romantic, Utopian socialist ideals of José Victorino Lastarria’s 1842 Literary society and radicalized by the political conflicts toward the end of the decade, faced a decade of exile after 1851. The authoritarian government of President Manuel Montt (1851–1861), though it institutionalized repression with a lower degree of violence than across the Andes, led many young Chilean opposition members into exile in Peru and the Argentine Confederation. Figures such as Benjamin Vicuña Mackenna would play a central role in political and intellectual life upon reincorporation into public life after the election of a moderate, consensual president in 1861.
Starting from the outbreak of the independence wars, and continuing though the first 50 years after independence, civil strife led to large waves of exile, both popular and elite, that shaped subsequent politics for generations. This book traces the impact of exile on the formation of independent republics in Argentina and Chile from the first autonomist movements in 1810 until roughly 1862, when former émigré Bartolomé Mitré was elected to the presidency of a unified Argentine Republic and a law of amnesty was passed in Chile, which allowed for safe return from exile. It argues that exile is an essential part of the foundation of political order in South America and played a major role in shaping political thought in the nineteenth century.2 In an era of porous and ill-defined borders and weak public authorities—when state, nation and border cannot be taken for granted—exile was key in the formation of republican institutions, international borders and the emergence of Romantic nationalities. Border crossing, especially when political, played an important role in the process of state formation and the imagination of cultural nations in a Romantic mold. In this sense, political displacement was not just a form of absence from the political field but also an expression of loyalty and political participation that connected the émigré to his or her homeland.
The Alberdi passage captures an essential truth about South American exile in the nineteenth century beyond the immediate ideological and political context that led to emigration. The central, founding texts of Chile and Argentina, including fiction, poetry, historical narratives as well as legal and political writing (including the origins of the 1853 Argentine constitution), were written in a context of exile and nation-building from abroad. Generations of political leaders, including two presidents each in Argentina and in Chile,3 as well as prominent writers and intellectuals, spent formative years in exile, where they acquired knowledge and experience that would play an important role in their subsequent careers. Indeed, Alberdi referred to himself as “el ausente” (the absent one) and never permanently returned to the country he had done so much to help create. Surprisingly, this fact has escaped systematic attention from historians, although it is commonplace enough to note this formative aspect of exile in individual biographies.
Though the narrative focuses primarily on the social and cultural history of a few dozen of these intellectuals from Chile, Argentina and to a lesser extent Uruguay, it is important to understand them as part of broader waves of exile. The intellectuals who lived in exile were typically white, male members of the political and cultural elites, even if they did not necessarily enjoy any particular wealth or influence.4 A few prominent women émigré writers have been studied in other contexts, notably Manuela Gorriti and Mariquita Sánchez de Thompson.5 Yet many other women emigrated, leaving little archival trace. The view of the nineteenth-century exile as an elite, masculine experience is, in part, the result of the constraints imposed by the sources, but this study tries to bring out as wide a view as possible of the exile communities in order to provide context to their formation.
A contemporary observer put the number of Chilean émigrés in the Argentine Confederation at around 2000.6 The émigré merchant Gregorio Beéche, the Argentine Confederation’s consul in Valparaiso after Rosas’ fall, undertook the collection of “statistical data on Argentinians” in the Pacific, though he apparently never completed the work.7 He nonetheless estimated the number of Argentinians in Chile in 1854 at 10,500, more than any other nationality, drawing the number from the 1854 Chilean census.8 These references are necessarily vague, yet they give an idea of the size of the waves of exile. The numbers actually studied here, drawn primarily from the rolls of exile associations—thus implying a certain degree of functional literacy—were much smaller, around 120 Chileans and 709 émigrés from the Río de la Plata. The discrepancy between these numbers is not only a reflection of a lack of sources, it also hints at larger context of popular exile, comprised of peons, militia members and their families who fled across borders after defeat on the battlefield. This popular exile is also problematic because it is not clear to what extent they identified with the Chilean or Argentine national projects promoted by exile leaders.9
The geographic reach of this study is also variable, the scale shifting between a comparison of Chilean and Argentine exiles, global phenomenon relating to exile such as the revolutions of 1848 and the circulation of Romantic Socialism as well as a specifically South American scale of the formation of sites of exile. The use of Argentina is in this sense anachronistic and should be understood in terms of a yet unfulfilled political project, given that the Argentine Republic was only formally constituted with the incorporation of Buenos Aires to the Confederation between 1859 and 1861. Furthermore, many of the “Argentine” émigrés studied here were actually born in what would become the independent republics of Bolivia and Uruguay.10 These territories were part of the Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata, under Buenos Aires’ jurisdiction during the colonial period, and they continued to play a role in the civil wars of the 1820s and 1830s. Though it was legally a recognized sovereign, independent republic after 1828, Uruguay represents a case in point, because it was in many ways subsumed in the dynamics of the Argentine civil wars, including exile.11 This is a reflection of both the uncertain territorial configuration of the Argentine Confederation and territorial dynamics that went beyond the uncertain national borders. Furthermore, while the émigrés themselves are mostly limited to Chile, Argentina and to a lesser extent Uruguay, the sites of exile also include Peru, Bolivia and Brazil as well as—to a much lesser extent—Paraguay, Ecuador, the United States and European counties such as Spain, France, England and the Italian states. Thus, an important objective is to understand the impact of exile by studying émigrés from Chile and Argentina as case studies to explore the broader impact of political displacement across South America.
The need to examine the founding generations of South American politics and letters in light not only of exile, but also mobility more generally, has recently received more attention. Various authors have argued that exile also contributed to constructing collective imageries, as émigrés reflect upon the reasons for their exile, comparing their host country with their country of origin. Rafael Rojas has insisted upon the role of exile in the translation of ideas—both in the literal and metaphorical sense of adapting them to local circumstances—between host and expelling countries in the context of Spanish American independence.12 Cuban exile in the United States has also been the occasion to reflect upon the ways that the imagination of a Cuban identity in the nineteenth century was a product of exile writers, in particular, in New York and New Orleans,13 though a recent contribution argues that Cuban exile inspired opposition movements in Mexico and across the Gulf world...