Homogeneidad y nación, con un estudio de caso

From around the early nineteenth century, the quest for social and cultural homogenization and the elimination of internal differences became high priorities among the nations of North America and Western Europe. In the United States, for example, succeeding generations strove to create a common citizenry in a society of immigrants and claimed success through the so-called American melting pot. After World War II, a countertrend opposed homogenization, exalted difference, and abandoned the idea of the melting pot. In the United States, the second trend helped create the civil rights movements and resulted in the movement called multiculturalism. The process had many parallels in Western Europe. The emphasis on centralization in Napoleonic France epitomized the trend toward homogenization. Currently, the goals of Basque, Catalan, or Scottish separatists embody the reverse.The five long essays in this book, mostly written by Mónica Quijada, are an attempt to examine homogenization in Argentina. Up to a point, general trends resembled those in the United States. In Argentina, the task of building a citizenry meant counteracting ethnic variety deriving from the colonial era and the national differences from the European immigration of the late nineteenth century. The Argentines adopted the idea of the melting pot, defining their country as a crisol de razas. As Quijada observes, there were also striking differences between Argentina and the United States. In the independence era, Argentina contained a substantial African and indigenous population, but neither Africans nor Indians appeared in subsequent Argentine national self-conceptions. In the minds of its people, Argentina became a “white country,” in which blacks and Indians were forgotten. As Quijada emphasizes, the American transition from homogenization to multiculturalism did not occur. Argentina remained suspended at stage one, still pursuing homogenization and locked into the myth of the melting pot.The book focuses on three related questions: How was the peculiar sense of national identity created in Argentina, which included only Europeans and erased the non-Europeans? With their historically diverse populations, why have Argentines failed to express subnational “difference”? Why do Argentines imagine themselves as descended uniformly from white Europeans? Quijada addresses these questions in three essays: the first examines the concepts of homogenization and its modern reversal using secondary literature on Western Europe and the United States; her last piece looks at homogenization in Argentina, again mostly through secondary literature; she contributes a third chapter on the indigenous peoples of Argentina. A fourth essay, by Carmen Bernand, studies the Afro-Argentine community and slavery; and fifth, by Arndt Schneider, treats immigrants and the Argentine melting pot. Neither Bernand nor Schneider cast such light on the general questions raised by Quijada. Bernand includes some interesting archival material on urban slavery in Buenos Aires around 1800 mainly to show that the burdens of slavery were relatively light. She has little new on the controversial issue of the disappearance of the black community (commonly attributed to attrition by war and miscegenation). Schneider contributes only a précis of secondary literature. Far more substantive than that of the other authors, Quijada’s work has some defects in writing and conceptualization. She has no convincing answers to the general questions she raises. Secondary sources provide most of her data, with the exception of some informative primary data on Indians in the 1870s. She asserts the importance of territoriality in conceptions of Argentine nationality. In her view, Argentines are all the people born on Argentine soil who all have experienced the “alchemy of the land.” The idea requires more elucidation. From Quijada’s discussion, it remains unclear how this idea originated, how successive generations interpreted it, or how they applied it to Argentina’s once enormous foreign population.Aside from such criticisms, the essays have many positive and informative features. Quijada illustrates the role of the Cortés of Cádiz in adapting French Revolutionary concepts of citizenry to Spanish America. She notes that territorial definitions of citizenship enabled Argentines to mask differences created by ethnicity. On Indians, she points to the shift in the late eighteenth and late nineteenth centuries, from inclusive paternalistic to destructive Social Darwinist attitudes, which added up to a life-and-death difference for Indians. Quijada’s last chapter contains some interesting comments on the Enlightenment cult of nature and the contributions of Alexander von Humboldt to patriotic awareness in Spanish America. (She might have traced this idea into the early twentieth century, when Argentine intellectuals created a vision of the country as a latter-day Garden of Eden). Like many students of the early nineteenth century in Latin America, she stresses the importance of Montesquieu in creating a sense of national identity and a quest for suitable institutions.These are fascinating subjects, but tangentially related to the themes initially set up by Quijada. The quest for homogenization, and then in recent times the pursuit of its reverse, are subjects surely tied to the evolution of Liberalism. In nineteenth-century Latin America, Liberalism became Eurocentric and, eventually, plain racist. In Argentina, Liberalism as developed by the intellectuals of the mid-nineteenth century assumed similar features and created many of the country’s enduring guiding myths. With Liberalism as its centerpiece, the book might have achieved greater clarity and persuasiveness

Art · Catalan · Citizenship · Constitution · Economic history · Ethnology · Genealogy · Geography · Humanities · Immigration · Indigenous · Melting pot · Multiculturalism · Political science · Politics · Population · Sociology · Spanish Civil War · Argentine historical studies · Demography · History · Indigenous Cultures and History · Latin American Cultural Politics · Law

• El proyecto colonizador de México a finales del siglo XIX. Algunas perspectivas comparativas en Latinoamérica

  Open Access•M Rodríguez M, Marcela Martínez Rodríguez•Secuencia•2010

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