Alfonso X El Sabio

Ese sobrenombre lo obtuvo por su actividad literaria, linguística, legislativa, histórica y astronómica:

Identity in the making (published originally in Spanish in 2015 as "La identidad en fragua")

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 elites¹.

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.² 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”³

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.”⁴

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.⁵ 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.⁶ 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.”⁷

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!”⁸

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.⁹ 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 Gálvez¹⁰ 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.¹¹ 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.¹² 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.”¹³

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 1929/30.¹⁴ 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.¹⁵ 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.”¹⁶

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’¹⁷ 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.¹⁸ 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.”¹⁹ 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.”²⁰ 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.²¹

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).²²

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

1 See Losada, Leandro. La alta sociedad en la Buenos Aires de la Belle Époque. Buenos

Aires, Siglo XXI, 2008.

2See José M. Ramos Mejía, Rosas y su tiempo. Buenos Aires: Emecé, 2001 and Juan Agustín García, La ciudad indiana. Buenos Aires: Hyspamérica, 1986.

3Daireaux, “Aristocracia de antaño”, quoted by Losada, Leandro (2008). All translations in this document are mine.

4 Arlt, Roberto. Los siete locos. Los lanzallamas. San José: Universidad de Costa Rica, 2000, p. 440

5See Quesada, Ernesto. El problema del idioma nacional, Buenos Aires: Revista Nacional Casa Editora, 1900.

6 See Viñas David. Grotesco, inmigración y fracaso: Armando Discépolo. Buenos Aires: Corregidor, 1973.

 Cambaceres, Eugenio. En la sangre. Buenos Aires: Ediciones Colihue, 2008, p. 108. This definition reveals the pejorative bias that surrounded gaucho origins in the 1880s. Similar notes can be found in the Divertidas Aventuras del Nieto de Juan Moreira by R. Payró, published in 1910.

8 Cambaceres, op. Cit. p. 154

9 See Elías, Norbert, El proceso de la civilización. México: FCE, 1988 and Sennett, Richard, El declive del hombre público. Barcelona: Anagrama, 2011.

10 Vicente Quesada's pseudonym.

11In South America (1894), ¿Adónde vamos? (1904) and La creación del mundo moral (1912)

12See Losada, Op. Cit.

13^{From here, the grotesque genre would emerge -after a previous step through the Creole sainete- with El organito (1925), combining with the picaresque in Armando Discépolo. David Viñas maintains in this regard that "in the grotesque-picaresque of Armando Discépolo the characters of the liberal city are summarized, and if up to here they were repeating Cambaceres, perhaps Payró or Fray Mocho, or contemporary Arlt, with this 'madhouse' where cornering and gloom as a whole predominate the moral scenery is what materializes the deterioration. From the optimism prior to 1919 we had moved on to cautious pessimism, to skepticism; but now we border on cynicism: evil is neither conjured nor justified, it is assumed and also 'internalized'" (Viñas: 1973). Although it retains the clichés of the farce - thwarted love, pretense, jealousy, tensions between foreigners and those born in the country - in the Creole grotesque novelties appear such as the scrutiny of human relationships, the pessimism of men and hypocrisy.}

14 Viñas argues that there were then seven alternatives for the “unworthy” immigrant: invent, steal, prostitute (prostitutes, maintained ones, pimps, informers or servants), go mad (“or immerse oneself in the whole range of imbecility”), commit suicide, flee (“specifically with the spiritual variant of entering a convent”) or get even with the old immigrant or the parents (Viñas forgets the variant of the army). But the figure of the immigrant can only be read as a figure of failure if it is read with candor. It is not about reversing the place of evil. Although the “evil” were not the immigrants, neither was it outside the constitution of their subjectivities in the process of modernization.

15 Holmberg was a precursor in Argentina of what C. P. Snow would call the “third culture” in the mid-twentieth century, which affirmed the advantage of being a scientist and a man of letters, since he believed that they were two ways of looking at the world that were not opposed but complementary. He was also one of the founders of the Revista Literaria (1879), an organ of the Círculo Científico Literario, a publication that brought together scientists and writers.

16 “Cuero para negocio”. Gutierrez, Eduardo. Juan Moreira. Barcelona: Red Ediciones, 2012, p. 207.

17“Joven”, young person, pronounced in “cocoliche”, a mix of Italian and Spanish spoken by the Italian inmigrants.

18 In 1810 the May Revolution established the first local government on May 25.

19Rojas, Ricardo. La restauración nacionalista. Bs. As.: Ministerio de Justicia e Instrucción Pública, 1909, p. 347-8.

20La Nación, Bs. As., 17-11-09

21 In 1911 Giusti published Nuestros poetas jóvenes, Revista crítica del actual movimiento poético argentino where he mainly railed against Rojas, especially regarding his La Restauración Nacionalista, maintaining that it is foreigners who will make history.

22 Regarding the mixture of languages, an article published in Caras y Caretas in 1900 entitled “Modificaciones al idioma” maintained that the confusion of the Tower of Babel is “nothing compared to what is happening in our language”. And again Cané in “La cuestión del idioma” (La Nación, 10-5-1900), affirmed that no great literature could emerge from the devastation of language.