In the last meeting of the year of the Dialogue Series organized by NOTICIAS and the Edhasa labelin the Fund Bookstorethe topic was immigration. That of the last century and the current one, the one that constituted our idea of nation and the one that still articulates our image of who we are.
To discuss the topic, two historians with great experience: Mirta Zaida Lobato and María Bjerg. The first is professor at the University of Buenos Aires and author of books such as “History of female workers in Argentina, 1869-1960” and “Argentine childhoods”, among others. María Bjerg has a doctorate in History from the University of Buenos Aires and CONICET researcher. He wrote “Stories of immigration in Argentina.”
Edhasa editor Fernando Fagnani moderated the talk. Here the main moments.
Fernando Fagnani: We usually always talk about immigration in the past tense. This is explained because there was a flood of immigration between 1870 and 1920. But migrations continue to work, both internal and external. What culture produces immigration?
Mirta Lobato: From my point of view, immigration refers to movement, to people who move from one place to another. The most important research associates “immigration” with “transatlantic immigration”, but we know that immigration has multiple facets with respect to places of origin. Immigration is also associated with an idea of nation. What place did each of these immigrants have in the construction of the nation?
Maria Bjerg: In the process of building a national identity, immigrants play a fundamental role, especially in terms of how they are integrated, how they are homogenized, how they are acculturated through state policies. Also They have to go through a very intense process of mutation of their own subjectivities, their own emotions..
Mirta Lobato: The idea persists that Argentina was built from the port of Buenos Aires. Fray Mocho in one of his stories, “The Welcome,” says: “There the husbands arrive for our daughters, the ones who come to work. And we go backwards.” “Recular” is “to go backwards.” And it expresses how immigration generates a tension, a conflict, which is crossed by the emotions of the people who arrive and the people who are there. The Argentines are “regressing”. This expresses the fear of losing one’s place in society.
Fernando Fagnani: In what would be the great immigration of the beginning of the last century there were devices to integrate immigrants that are not there today.
Maria Bjerg: With the migrants of the late 19th and early 20th centuries andThe national state builds an identity for a white Argentinabased on a hyperselective idea of a type of European migration. A myth that was sustained for a long time. First, Gino Germani and then the historians who came after us, ended up in some way reproducing that myth. Because the bulk of interest was concentrated in this limited chronology, which is neither more nor less than the chronology of the myth. The problem now is how we get contemporary migrants there. There is unwanted immigration and very recent desired immigrationwhich is the Venezuelan one, with the famous decree 70 of Mauricio Macri, which in some way reimplements the selectivity process in favor of these Venezuelan migrants.
Mirta Lobato: I was thinking about how the pact of that overseas immigration was burying other migrations that also occurred in the early 20th century. I think of Bolivians, Paraguayans, Uruguayans and even Brazilians and Peruvians. There are population movements that did not receive as much attention, because the Spanish and the Italians monopolized all the attention. The French, Germans, Jews, the “Turks” are fewer in number and more difficult to study. The illusion of whitening is also associated with the idea of an industrious nation. These immigrants have to moralize the country, but also allow it economic development. And although at the beginning of the century they may be threatening for the Creoles who are “retreating”, they are not so much so because the economy is expanding and needs arms. In present times, they are seen as a threatening factor, because they come to take jobs away from Argentines.
Fernando Fagnani: Venezuelans are people who are inserted in a work culture. And they come to compete in a country where a part of the population is outside the work culture. The Venezuelans who arrive are better off than several generations from the suburbs.
Mirta Lobato: The same thing happens with Bolivians. Which in turn have very dense networks that allow them to be inserted into a matrix, whether textile or fruit cords. The expression of native fear of these Bolivians says that they do not pay taxes or that they are coming to take our jobs. And the truth is that if this fruit chain did not exist, we would not eat vegetables.
Maria Bjerg: I want to return to something that Mirta raised. The immigrant as a modernizing factor. During the 1910s that figure changed. It is replaced by that of the dangerous immigrantwhich also has a long presence in Argentine political and social discourse. From those subjects who were criminalized (especially based on their political positions, linked to anarchism); to current migrants accused by prestigious politicians of being drug traffickers, with political proposals for the restoration of a gendarme state. In relation to politics, one would tend to think of political participation through voting. And that happened very little among immigrants. The socialists fought enormously for naturalization, so that immigrants could vote and finally failed in that utopia. And there is something that Hilda Sábato raises: there are ways of doing politics or intervening in public life that are much more diverse, among which immigrant associations played a very important role, because political leadership was generated there. And there they created their own clientele. In order to sustain this leadership they went in the opposite direction to the socialists, who wanted immigrants to forget their origin, become naturalized and be able, through voting, to resolve the ills of the republic. To the extent that Immigrants lose contact with their originthose leaders lose legitimacy and power.
Fernando Fagnani: At that time, to build the nation you needed immigrants. And not only as a workforce. Not today. Today they are people who come to work or who simply escape. But it does not have a place of participation. Essentially, because society and politics do not consider it necessary. For example, in the case of the Russians, they simply escape.
Mirta Bjerg: There is an axis that we do not touch on and it is the issue of racism. To what extent there was effectively an open door policy, to what extent a selective profile of the migrant population, beyond the fact that there were indeed political and parliamentary discussions to implement restrictive policies and that was never put into practice.
Eduardo Zimmerman said that the word “race” or “racism” was present in the language all the time, but that the use was very fluid. Sometimes, it could refer to a certain ethnic group towards which selectivity or discriminatory policies were intended, but in general there was not such a persistent notion of race, such as a superior race and an inferior race. And on the other hand, internal migrants also contribute to the configuration of that national identity through the negativein the sense that they are left outside. They are excluded from that myth, from that identity rhetoric and then they become the “little black heads.”
Mirta Lobato: With the internal migrant there is a kind of racism. My idea is that the “cabecita negra” is a metropolitan construction, which is associated with a historical moment, which is identified with Peronism. In Argentina, The one who is excluded, because he has become a citizen and, therefore, made invisible, is the Indian.. And that is my most radical position, in the face of this idea of the “little black head” that absolutely colors any interpretation you have about who the other is. Finally, the other is the native. The one who did not enter the myth. He did not enter the myth and that makes him non-white.
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