I believe many of the immigrants to the US were equally as poor as the ones who arrived in Argentina. At the time, it was pretty much a random choice: do we sail to the US or Argentina? :-) For ex, my ancestors were coal miners from near Manchester (god forbid… I was there about a year ago). Anyway, they did the same thing in the US, coal mining. Nothing glamorous about that. It’s interesting that Argentina had conventillos while the US had whole neighborhoods (like Little Italy in NYC)… I don’t know. There has to be something to that.

Anyway, my time is pretty tight over the next few days because we’re leaving on the 29th for Lisboa. But hopefully we can get together & chat soon. If not, definitely when we’re back in June. Saludos!

I agree with every single word in your paragraph that tracks down racism and discrimination back to Sarmiento & co. And also with the idea that those immigrants’ Europe was already falling apart, far from being a paradise. But that is precisely it: most of those people thought they had first lost the European paradise (absolutely arguable there was one too) before they left… which is why they assumed they HAD TO leave. I think that is the main difference with many emigrant waves towards the US for example, where many “new rich” went to become richer and didn’t have to deal with such heterogeneous cultural ingredients for the melting pot until a lot later, when they were already consolidated. The immigrants who came to Argentina in the 19th century had already packed the too little or nothing they had together with a ton of loss. And they brought it in their luggage and passed it on to following generations as part of their DNA. Hence tango, just to name something obvious :)

I would absolutely love to talk about all this and go deeper into details with you. Till then, my gift to you is recommending some of the best Spanish written prose I’ve ever read personally, which also gives you a thorough grasp on how Argentines started becoming who they are. It’s called FRONTERA SUR and the author, HORACIO VÁZQUEZ-RIAL, is an Argentine who HAD TO leave in exile in Europe in the ‘70s, losing thus his own paradise lost :)

One thing I hadn’t remembered is the attempt to incorporate the romantic image of the gaucho into collective memory during the 1920s (hence all the great gauchesco literature like “Don Segundo Sombra“). I’m glad you mentioned it. To me, incorporating the ideal of the gaucho failed as well although at the same time, I think it was a valid attempt to construct a unique national identity.

Sarmiento & other idealists/racists :) certainly had the notion of an “imagined community” in mind when they looked to Europe to populate the pampas. But they soon realized that idea failed. As I’m fond of saying, literally everyone came to Argentina… from trained professionals (best example would be all the architects who made BA beautiful) to unskilled workers. The oligarchy loved the trained professionals, but all those others… not so much. They realized their experiment was failing early on (the 1909 May Day demonstrations, the birth of the Liga Patriótica Argentina & the reverse immigration law designed to send anarchists back to their country of origin). So while the elite were celebrating what they saw as their own tradition & identity, the lower class didn’t seem to buy into it.

Something else which has always struck me as strange is that I’m only third-generation American, exactly like so many Argentines of my age. My ancestors arrived in the 1860s to the US, so a bit before mass immigration began in Argentina. Anyway, the USA is just as much of a melting pot as Argentina yet did a much more thorough job of incorporating immigrants. It would be interesting to find out how many US immigrants returned to their country of origin after “doing America” compared to Argentina. Here I think it was about 50%, but no clue as to US figures. I love your idea of nostalgia over paradise lost (especially since Europe wasn’t exactly a paradise when those immigrants arrived)… definitely worth exploring.

It’s funny… I see that mélange as preventing the formation of collective memory whereas you don’t. But perhaps that’s because I don’t always see national identity & collective memory as part of the same package. Sometimes yes, sometimes no. But like you say, it’s true that Argentines come together against outside threats & mock themselves. But when it comes to an internal package of shared information based on references to the past, I don’t quite see it here. But I’ll keep looking :-) Thanks again for one of the best comments I’ve had on the blog!!

Interesting reading, thanks to contacts we have in common on FB! It is a breath of fresh air to read well informed, argued opinions and conclusions. So I trust you will take the following with the understanding of someone who can take argued, respectful (partial) disagreement. I am not referring to the lack of cultural patrimony self-preservation interest and policies, because I totally agree with that (I won’t even get started on the current Governor…), but to your conclusion on the lack of Argentine collective memory.

I believe seeing all that you do see is really valuable, as it is the basics towards understanding the Argentine identity. Seeing only this, though, would lead to missing out all the complexity of the (re)construction of the Argentine identity since the foundation of this nation state up to date. What you observe is absolutely part of the Argentine identity. But I believe it has nothing to do with a lack of collective memory. It’s there, but just very different and very differently constructed from the one in your or my country of origin.

There’s no text-book to follow in order to build national identity and THUS collective memory; in fact recipes have widely varied worldwide. Here, it was quite simple and as MADE UP as everywhere else: establish a raw model hence an elite, suppress the social categories that do not fit it, invent a cultural pattern. It happened in Europe, in the USA and in Latin America. In this country, very roughly summed up, it translated into mixing up oligarchy with criollos, denying the prevalence of the indigenous people and the existence of an African descent, and centering the spirit root-myth on the gaucho.

Now, however, as of the end of the 19th century, the main figures that made the argentinidad tick and roll have been immigrants. Not just any type of immigrants? Of course not. There was in fact a recipe that pursued, just like in every nation state’s creation, the accomplishment of a certain “imagined community”, as Benedict Anderson calls it. And they did follow that recipe that promised to achieve just that, again, like everywhere else, through a social construction (big part of it reflected in monuments, for instance).

Immigrants –from so many different places, so heterogeneous, yet all exiled- have been precisely the core of the Argentine national identity as we know (and clash with) it today. And that is what makes it oh so full of contrasts and contradictory! But it is this inherent mélange of contrasts and contradictions which define Argentine national identity and what, along with this construction, have turned into collective memory. Argentine collective memory gathers that mélange, and yet find its equilibrium point towards cohesion in the one factor that exile meant to them and their ancestors. I like to call that, away from the botanic metaphor of “uprootedness”, simply nostalgia over the paradise lost. “I’m Spanish/ Italian/ French” has to do with that, I think.

But Argentines do recognize themselves as such, with a specific national identity and specific collective memories, besides just simple historical data. Otherwise, they wouldn’t stick together when facing a common external/ foreign obstacle and they would not mock themselves and their contradictions like a nation that knows damn well where it comes from and what it’s been through. Nicely put, food for thought, where they are going from here and what they’ll do with their past, reflected in both facts and architecture.

Thank you for reading. Enjoy this, son argentinos y están al palo :)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6GL9AR76jKk