Identity
in the making
Literature,
immigration and society in the Belle Époque (1880-1920)
We
sociologists know that when one type of society begins to emerge, the
other is not yet dead. That is exactly what happened in Argentina in
the years corresponding to the so-called Belle Époque, whose
end around 1920 already showed a population predominantly of
immigrant origins of one or two generations and, along with it, an
aristocratic world in decomposition. For the same reason, foreigners
who had enjoyed the possibility of high social mobility in the times
prior to 1870 would lose it later when it was restricted to families
of other Latin American or European elites.
Meanwhile,
in literature, the works marked the relative success that rogues and
upstarts could achieve at that time in their purposes, which can be
seen in En la sangre (1887) by Eugenio Cambaceres,
Irresponsable (1889) by Manuel Podestá and La bolsa (1891)
by Julián Martel. Cambaceres' novels represent the first
manifestations of naturalism in the River Plate region. They take
sides with the well-off classes and disapprove immigration in the
last quarter of the 19th century since it did not fit, supposedly,
with the country project dreamed of by those sectors.
Juan
Agustín García and José María Ramos Mejía highlighted the
absence in Buenos Aires of an aristocracy with lineage like those of
Lima or Chuquisaca.
According to Losada, the genealogy and composition of high society,
added to social mobility and the consolidation of a capitalist logic
that made wealth the main pillar of the social position, made it
increasingly difficult to speak of an aristocracy in Buenos Aires.
The structural transformation that was taking place in society
allowed Daireaux to foresee that:
…little by
little, a very different aristocracy will be reconstituted from the
old one in which it will not be enough to be a descendant from a
patrician of old Creole lineage, from a leading figure of the
Independence or of more modern times, or even from a well-known
person; only the possession of a real estate fortune would allow
access to it”
A
renewal crossed the political, economic and intellectual elites of
1880 and 1920 as a consequence of the transformation of society and
the recomposition of the population due to immigration, which was one
of the privileged goals of the modernization program of the second
half of the 19th century. But, with the first strikes at the
beginning of the 20th century, the initial enthusiasm and optimism
regarding the role of the immigrant began to decline until the latter
even occupied the position of the unwanted, the guilty of all the
“evils” that began to afflict the Argentine lands. The “evils”
of modernization were converted into “evils” of immigration. From
there it was believed that through regulations such as the Law of
Residence, for example, and persecutions of the “foreign element”
that controlled its presence in the country, the “evils” would
disappear.
| When the bill authorizing the expulsion from the
country of any foreigner believed to be “compromising national
security or causing disturbances in public order” was discussed in
Congress, few congressmen, including Carlos Pellegrini (son of
immigrants), protested the implications that such a measure would
have: discouragement of immigration, abandonment of the liberal
tradition.
In
January 1919, after a violent return of the immigration wave, the
great metalworkers strike took place, in which almost all of its
participants were immigrants and which would culminate in the famous
“tragic week.” These events constitute an example of what was
brewing in the social imagination: liberal cosmopolitanism was
beginning to generate a phenomenon of the opposite sign, conservative
nationalism. Every time one appears in Argentine history, the other
reappears. And the nationalists even propose themselves as an
alternative model of modernization, arguing that the Creole, the “son
of the homeland,” has far superior working and cultural conditions
than the immigrant. And that the latter would probably “set back”
the rural areas.
Horacio Quiroga’s story “El Hombre
Artificial” (1910) introduces us to two immigrants: the Russian
Donissoff, who arrives in Buenos Aires in 1905, and the Italian Marco
Sivel, who arrived a year earlier. Together with an Argentine born in
the capital, Ricardo Ortiz, they set up a laboratory with machines
and instruments brought from the United States. The experiment to be
carried out can be read as the construction of the nation. A Russian,
an Italian, a Creole, and the American instruments. The Argentine,
Ortiz, is pessimistic about it: “It can’t be done, Donissoff,
it’s impossible!” he points out. And we can say that there are
two “creatures.” One is Biogenic: the artificial man, and the
other is Ortiz himself. The experimenters seek to implant pain to
Biogenic. It is what he needs to be human, to be a country: to have
the experience, to have lived. To live, you need to have lived. But
there are two who have not lived, because Ortiz has not suffered yet.
So he has to earn that suffering by torturing. Ortiz hesitates and
finally kills Donissoff, which allows him to cry, to suffer. But, at
the same time, his suffering was the end of all utopian illusion:
“Everything was concluded.”
This pessimism regarding the
results of immigration can be extended to a good part of Latin
America and even to the United States where, in 1917, Congress passed
a law - over the presidential veto - prohibiting the admission of
foreigners who would not pass a reading and writing test: another of
the privileged figures of modernization along with the problem of
simulations that Ingenieros would study and that would later make
Haffner, Roberto Arlt's character, say: “I am civilized. I cannot
believe in courage. I believe in betrayal.”
From
1880 onwards, Buenos Aires clearly abandoned its profile as a
pedestrian and Creole city. In 1884, Lucio V. López published La
gran aldea, a book he wrote with two parallel, though not
simultaneous, cities in mind: the still colonial Buenos Aires of 1860
and that of 1880, in whose excessive growth origins, languages and
cultures were mixed. In 1899, Eduardo Wilde published Prometeo y
Cia, with prints and chronicles from which images of a changing
city emerge and that the author explores with skepticism. And in
particular, with regard to the mixture of languages, Ernesto Quesada
inserted his criticism into the central debates of the 1990s on the
identity of the language and, therefore, of the Argentine in the face
of the arrival of the immigrant masses.
For Quesada, the language considered “national” was that one of
the educated people and of the writers (not the “jargons” or that
other one of the foreigners) and he reflected on how to make the
inherited Spanish language one of his own. But it happened that
during the 19th century Italian immigration to South America had
surpassed that destined for North America, and it would begin to
leave its mark on the language. At the same time, Italy was the
country that contributed, in numbers incomparable with those of other
Latin American countries, the greatest number of immigrants to
Argentina. One of these Italian immigrants is the father of Genaro,
the main character of the novel En la sangre (1886), by
Eugenio Cambaceres. This story, based on the notions of social
Darwinism prevalent at the end of the century, shows us the immigrant
as someone who occupies the position of the worst in society. The
immigrant is seen there effectively as the social waste from which
comes Genaro, the son of immigrants who hates the liberal elites and
who, according to David Viñas, will reappear later in Mustafá and
Giacomo, by Armando Discépolo.
His first contempt is for the liberal institution “par
excellence”: What is school for? The university appears
guarded by an ignorant Galician and Genaro, born of a degraded and
vile Napolitan, faces the eternal laws of blood, transmitted from
father to son. But he “was not born in Calabria but in Buenos
Aires, he wanted to be a Creole, generous and selfless like the other
sons of the earth.” Thus, he tries to find solace in the
vituperation of the Creole and the Spaniard:
Who
had been his caste, his grandparents? Brutal gauchos, commoners
raised with their feet on the ground, bastards of Indians smelling
of colts and Galicians smelling of filth, adventurers, upstarts,
spendthrifts, without God or law, job or benefit, the kind that
Spain sent by the boatload, that it threw in droves into the sewer of
its colonies; His parents were peddlers… He was the son of two
miserable gringos, but his parents had been married, he was a
legitimate son, his mother had been honest, he was not a son of a
bitch at least.”
And
hatred and contempt lead him to go into debt, to lose the fortune of
his wife, daughter of creoles, whom he ends up threatening with
death: “…I will kill you one of these days, if you are
careless!”
In
Irresponsable (1889), a book by Manuel Podestá that we have
already mentioned, we find the opposite position: here the immigrants
are seen as life givers and the “bad guys” are the creoles. The
author was the professional son of an immigrant who constructed a
wandering Jew from the university as a hero. The immigrants are
painted here as “aimless beings”, “wandering the streets like
birds without a nest”, “pariahs” who arrive in a cosmopolitan
city that improvises everything, where everyone makes a fortune
without great effort. With the Jewish mark, the immigrants are here
the caravan in search of a promised land.
Meanwhile and in
parallel to these processes, among some privileged members of the
generation of the 80s, the figure of the dandy writer will stand out
with his characteristic style full of digressions which will find an
appropriate mold in the literary talks or causeries, as
Mansilla calls them. Among the “talkers”, Eduardo Wilde and
Miguel Cané also stand out. In all of them, their travel stories are
key literature: Una salida a los indios ranqueles (An
excursion to the Ranquel Indians) (1870) by Mansilla, Viajes y
observaciones (Travels and observations) (1892) by Wilde and En
viaje (1884) by Cané. Distinguished and refined conversation was
defined by moderation, an attitude expected in nineteenth-century
behavior considered appropriate.
Conversation in salons was thus a school of the so-called civilized
behavior. Lucio Victorio Mansilla, a paradigmatic causeur of his
generation, is the author of the important Entre nos. Causeries
del jueves (1889-1890): his talks, edited by himself and which
arose within the framework of the activities of his sister Eduarda’s
salon in Buenos Aires. His stories abound in anecdotes from the
private lives of public figures he knew and frequented. He cultivates
the audience with his witty words and his poise, threading together
memories, anecdotes, opinions, constructing a singular figure with
the aura of the liberal elite. The colloquial formula that gives the
work its title refers to an audience of peers marked by illustrious
characters capable of capturing winks, innuendos and ironies and
understanding quotes in French. But other texts were those that
narrated the city and what happened in it: Buenos Aires desde
setenta años atrás (1881) by José Antonio Wilde, Memorias
de un viejo (1889) by Víctor Gálvez
and Las beldades de mi tiempo (1891) by Santiago Calzadilla,
construct a nostalgic image of the village city that they witnessed
and remembered then from its recent modernity.
The
intellectual world of those years, in a general climate of confidence
in “progress,” privileged “facts” and the search for
objective laws of society, according to the theories of Comte and
Spencer. It oriented the study of that society and its
representations according to mass psychology and social positivism,
with a concern for homogenizing the population that had been
numerically increased by immigration. At the same time, and without
being disconnected from the above, a growing relevance was given to
the “moral” question linked to the “undesired effects” of the
modernization project of the generation of the 1980s. Moral concern
was not only linked to the immigration issue: electoral fraud was
evident as well as the search for rapid enrichment through financial
speculation by important sectors of the ruling political class. It
was in the works of Agustín Álvarez, Carlos O. Bunge and, above
all, José Ingenieros, that the most notable reflections on this
subject could be appreciated, having Agustín Álvarez been the
precursor of this moralistic orientation.
In Nuestra América (1903), Carlos O. Bunge describes
laziness, sadness and arrogance, which he supposed derived from
indigenous, black and Spanish societies, as illnesses of Hispanic
American politics. In El hombre mediocre (1913), Ingenieros
distinguishes the “idealist”, rebellious and maladjusted, from
the “mediocre man”, deceitful and easily tamed, and in Hacia
una moral sin dogmas (1917) he will lead the former towards a
solidary ethics.
Ingenieros himself was one of those
foreigners who had arrived in Argentina. And in the last years of the
19th century and the first years of the 20th century, in the press,
in congress, in literary works but also in the street, the changes
that immigration caused were discussed. There was full awareness of
the importance of the cultural transformations that were taking
place. For some, like Miguel Cané, they were devastating for the
country, going so far as to say that thousands of “criminals” and
“madmen” were arriving in Argentina destined to fill our prisons
or to be a slow poison for our society. Stereotypical images of
criminal immigrants began to appear in many articles published in the
Archivos de Psiquiatría y Criminología, where sociologists
accompanied the writers in the vituperative
characterization.
Miguel Cané was a central figure in this
process. From the Senate and in his writings he advocated the
prohibition of entrance for undesirable immigrants and the expulsion
of those who were already in the country. He maintained that national
preservation should be above liberal immigration policies. Hence, he
introduced the Bill for the Expulsion of Foreigners in the Senate on
June 8, 1899. At the time, the bill collided with the strong mesh of
a half-century-old tradition that postponed its promulgation,
although for a few years.
Among the sociologists who began to
affirm that Argentines were superior to immigrants - that even in
certain nationalities they would inherit strong tendencies to crime -
was Juan Bialet Massé, who in his Informe sobre el estado de la
clase obrera en la Argentina (1902) defended Creole work over
foreign work after a trip promoted by the Argentine government
throughout the country.
But the position of immigrants was
not only that of waste and evil. The problem was that waste and evil
were already beginning to be the majority. So, in the vision of
nationalism, we were facing a process that seemed irreversible, in a
country full of immigrants loaded with viruses in their blood, a
poisoned, sick “social body” that made it dangerous to live in.
We had to flee at least from the cities, cores of modernization and
mass immigration: that would be the end of the liberal city.
The
position of the immigrant would then intersect with that of the
criminal and the pretender. José Ingenieros himself, one of the
first successful immigrants, would understand these pretenders.
Pretenders and delinquents who could, like the farmer of El
casamiento de Laucha or the grocer of Juan Moreira, not
pay the honest worker what was owed. In the case of El casamiento
de Laucha (1906), by Roberto Payró, we hear the main character
say: “I charged the farmer two days’ wages (…) who took a few
cents from me like a good gringo.” Here the immigrant is also an
outcast who “went around like a ball without a handle” (in the
case of the Galician grocer who had become creole), or he is the
smart guy who comes to “make it in America,” like the priest. And
Laucha throws away everything he earned with work, ruins the grocery
store, “but also, what a party!”
Roberto Payró, who had
defended immigration so much, comes in 1909, in his Chronicles,
to review that position, maintaining that as a result of the massive
arrival of foreigners now “everything is anarchic, indecisive,
nebulous, insecure.” In the magazine Caras y Caretas of June
12 of that same year, in an article entitled “Dangerous
Immigration,” immigrants are fused with anarchists, speaking of the
latter as “changeable and unprincipled” adventurers, who only
seek to “create problems wherever they can.”
In 1911,
Italian immigration was suspended for a period of fourteen months.
The fact is that Italy did not want to accept the Argentine order for
sanitary inspection of ships arriving from there. Generosity toward
immigrants lost its disinterest - if it ever had any. In the United
States, journalists, intellectuals and politicians also saw
immigration as the origin of urban social problems.
In short,
between 1880 and 1920 the country was changing at a dizzying pace.
Political power was beginning to pass from an elite to a middle class
that was being formed in part thanks to the integration of these
immigrants. In this context, the modernist poets appeared, led by
Rubén Darío. However, the most outstanding for Argentina was
Leopoldo Lugones, who gave the famous lectures in 1913 at the Odeón
theatre (collected in 1916 under the title El payador) in
which he canonised Martín Fierro “to provide the country with its
own epic like any civilized nation has”.
The fact that the
figure of the gaucho became a symbol of national tradition in the
early years of the 20th century - when until then it had been an
emblematic representation of resistance to authority and of Creole
barbarism - favoured the exaltation of the humble origins of
important sectors of high society: having "gaucho" origins
then ceased to be a sign of a rudimentary ancestry to reflect an
intimate connection with the roots of the nation.
The nationalist sermons, both that of Lugones and that of Ricardo
Rojas, sought to oppose Europeanism and to install the features of
its own tradition in the construction of Argentine cultural and
literary history
A few years earlier (1905), on the other
side of the cultural tradition, the Podestá brothers had brought
Marco Severi to the stage of the Rivadavia Theater, a drama by
Payró in which he opposed the xenophobic ideas of the men of his
generation. In it he attacked the law of extradition and residence of
foreigners in the country. Marco Severi is the story of an
immigrant who has committed a crime in his homeland but who leads an
honest life in Argentina. And a year earlier, when Gregorio de
Laferrère staged ¡Jettatore! and Roberto J. Payró did the
same with Sobre las ruinas, Florencio Sánchez premiered La
gringa, which will postulate the final harmonious synthesis
between the gringo and the criollo who confront each
other in the countryside: their children get married. The mixture of
languages, the Argentine speech far from the castizo norm, and the
local conflicts caused by economic misery and political corruption
are favorite ingredients of theater companies and the public.
Florencio Sánchez understands this and continues to satisfy this
demand in his works.
The sainete criollo genre will be
a product of this with its costumbrismo and the conventillo as
a meeting place, a crossing of foreigners and compadres, where
caricatured habits and slang are condensed, not without humor. In the
festive farce Tu cuna fue un conventillo (1920), by Alberto
Vacarezza, for example, the public laughs “with” the characters
who manage to overcome social or romantic problems in the courtyard
of the tenement, a true “melting pot of races.”
We
see then how immigrants as bilingual communities draw borders and
provoke a debate about inclusions/exclusions in society. From the
great optimism of 1853, we were moving on to pessimism at the
beginning of the century and the crises of 1919 and 1929/30.
The immigrant who had occupied the place of the ideal in Facundo in
1845, the figure of the “summoned” in the Constitution of 1853,
the spoiled child of the generation of the 80s, little by little
became the “ugly and disturbing upstart” of Las multitudes
argentinas by José María Ramos Mejía, the “hidden danger”
of the1902 Residence Law, and the violent and execrable anarchist of
1919.
There is another central character in these years that
we have not yet included in this story. This is Eduardo L. Holmberg,
the prototype of the man of the generation of the 80s who not only
took charge of spreading Darwinism, positivism and the advances of
science in the country, but he was also a precursor of the fantastic,
police and science fiction genres in our literature.
In his Viaje Maravilloso del Señor Nic-Nac (1875) the figure
of the immigrant comes to us accompanied by a “counterfigure”:
that of the Creole or “national type” who is shown to be
“absorbed, devoured by the whirlwind of an inexplicable
cosmopolitanism”. Although the decrease in the image of the
national in the face of the weight of immigration will be a very
frequent topic from 1880 onwards, it already constituted the
framework of the conversation between Seele and Nic-Nac in the second
part of the novel.
In any case, the quintessential character
who will characterize the image of the national during these years
will be Juan Moreira (1879-1880)
by Eduardo Gutiérrez, the gaucho who carries with him the anathema
of being the son of the country, the one who has a hard time getting
a job because in the ranch they prefer that of a foreigner; who kills
an immigrant even if it is not worth it, even if he has to flee the
country. Because there is no possible pact with his counterpart, this
one was a businessman and Moreira says he does not have “the skin
for business.”
The
conflict between creoles and immigrants will find a literary solution
in the already mentioned La gringa (1904), by Florencio Sánchez,
where as we said the conflict is overcome through the fusion of the
races that have needed each other, just as Carolina also said to
Laucha in Payró's novel: “What I needed was a ‘coven’
like you.”
In 1909, Ricardo Rojas published La
Restauración Nacionalista, a text that articulated the most
heated polemic, appearing months before the first Centenary
celebration.
In this book, Rojas warned about the dangers that the family, the
language, and the entire country were facing due to the prevailing
cosmopolitanism, proclaiming: “Let us not continue tempting death
with our cosmopolitanism without history and our school without a
homeland.”
On November 17 of that same year, at the funeral of Ramón Falcón,
chief of police murdered by anarchists, a series of distinguished
citizens spoke out against immigrants, concluding that “the
cosmopolitanism of our laws has brought us to the brink of social
disorganization.”
The nationalists also maintained that immigration destroyed the
Argentine character and patriotism, railing against foreign music and
also against tango, the last one seen as a “repugnant, hybrid,
unfortunate music” and “a lamentable symbol of our
denationalization.” Gálvez, Rojas and Lugones were some of the
main standard-bearers of the gaucho, Creole, traditional
counterfigure to confront cosmopolitanism and immigration. And José
Ingenieros would add to this debate in Sociología Argentina
(1913) with an irony: the children of foreigners almost always become
patriots. The figure becomes a counterfigure. The stage for the
Centennial celebration was dressed for the occasion with countrymen,
taming and branding gaucho ceremonies, but the Prussian uniforms and
the public made up of immigrant families insinuated that the
autochthonous airs were only a decoration offered to the foreign
delegations in the midst of a markedly European ethnography and
architecture.
An interesting work in this regard written in
the year of the Centennial is Los gauchos judíos, by Alberto
Gerchunoff, testimony of a process by which a foreigner chooses to
become an Argentine citizen. The author is thus the spokesman for an
experience that constitutes one of the characteristics of the
construction of the Argentine nation since the 1980s: the mixture of
races and cultures in a country that needed to populate the space in
order to govern, as Juan Bautista Alberdi had seen years
before.
The national question had brought the figure of the
gaucho to the table of discussion on identity, now loaded with
positive values and presented as a response to immigration,
but, on the other hand, the foreigner appeared with equal force.
On
the one hand, the conflict makes nationalists like Lugones, Rojas,
Manuel Gálvez and Joaquín V. González think, and on the other,
some sons of immigrants who, in the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters
and in magazines like Nosotros, welcome the incorporation of
the foreign component into the formation of the national being. Among
these are the already mentioned Gerchunoff, Payró, the Italian
Roberto Giusti, Rafael Arieta and Arturo Marasso, defenders of
cosmopolitanism, the coexistence of dialects and socialism. They do
not seek the past or the “voluntarist” vindication of the
indigenous or the gaucho but the future through immigration.
On
the nationalist side, the project to invent the identity of the
country initiated by J. V. González with La tradición nacional
(1891) is completed with two other books: El juicio del siglo
(1910) and Mis montañas (1923). The writer warns in them
about the need to reflect seriously on the laws that should guide the
progress of Argentine society, taking into account the wave of
immigration, the imminence of mass movements, the relations between
new classes and the economic opening to the world.
Until
then, many Argentines ignored gaucho literature. The gaucho was
disdained as an obstacle to civilization. But with the traditionalist
and nationalist resurgence, the gauchos
become prettier and the gringos become ugly, they become
grotesque due to their often failed greed, generating a new conflict
already mentioned in this game of figures and counterfigures:
immigrant parents and Creole children.
In short, when
immigration appears, nationalist resurgences appear. This game is at
the center of the modernization process that is constituted, first,
by leaving the gauchos aside, and then by excluding the immigrants
themselves in the (only symbolic) recovery of the
former.
Cosmopolitan cultural refinement will continue to be an
indelible mark of identity after 1920, but now linked to a
revaluation of the Creole heritage, unthinkable in the last decades
of the 19th century. To a certain extent, this fusion was also
condensed in literature by Ricardo Guiraldes' Don Segundo Sombra
(1926), whose character - unlike what happened in Martín Fierro
- will coexist peacefully with it without worrying too much about its
existence.
Mixtures marked these decades: a time of
experimentation in laboratories like the one we saw in El hombre
artificial and test tubes that will mix many things: blood,
language, nations and finally classes to create what Ramos Mejía
will call the “guarango” in Las multitudes argentinas
(1899).
In
the already mentioned La gringa, by Florencio Sánchez,
Nicola's children have become creoles, the immigrants give in to the
near fatality of exogamy in a foreign land. The optimistic ending -
"From there the strong race of the future will emerge" -
humanizes both parties who understand each other in the fusion. And
in the also already mentioned El casamiento de Laucha, all the
languages (Neapolitan, gaucho, cultured, the language of the
province) are spoken in a story that is in turn a mixture
derived from two genres: the gauchesca and the picaresque.
Laucha, a middle-class Creole, a rascal, knows how to read and write
and makes an alliance with the two immigrants, Carolina and the
priest. He forges with both of them. He pretends to reach the capital
and uses any means. When he speaks with the Spanish grocer, their
lives mix, as music will also mix in those years to give rise to
tango.
The passion for enrichment linked to the position of a
double European-American identity is in the history of our Latin
American literature from the conquest (with Garcilaso) to the Italian
immigrant who not only splits his nationality but also his
profession: the school teacher also keeps the accounts of various
business houses; the shoemaker sells lottery tickets; the typist has
a tailor's shop; the grocer sells everything; arts and commerce are
combined in the immigrants who can be several things at the same
time, always trusting in that utopian dimension of America.
Double
identities then populate the period; the character of Marco Severy
being a criminal in Italy and an honest man in Argentina, like so
many “converts” in the history of travel from Europe to America,
or as seen in the autobiographical novel Las dos patrias
(1906), by Godofredo Daireaux. In all of them we find an immigrant’s
desire to excel, traceable from the chronicles and narratives of the
Conquest to José Ingenieros, a successful immigrant but also a
pretender who changes his name to rise and constitutes the new great
Argentine that everyone dreamed of being. They all seem to want to
succeed, to become famous or rich, which resulted in the
multiplication of identities, even in their jobs. That is why it is
so difficult to say what we Argentines are. Perhaps that is it: a
desire.
Daniel Scarfò
