Oldal 24 [24]
OCR
MODERNIZATION, MIGRATION AND NATIONAL IDENTITY IN THE ARGENTINE CASE, 1870-1945 Central Europe. The fourth national census of 1947 counted 249,330 Jews and 310,633 Protestants, that is 1.6% and 2% of the Argentine population, respectively. At the same time, Catholics made up 93.6%. While these figures lump together immigrants of the first generation and their Argentine descendants, they are a good estimation of the weight of the most important religions at the end of our period. Eighth, mass migration was produced by exceptional demographic and economic conditions in the old continent but also, in the Argentine case, by a particularly broad and generous migratory policy. That was the consequence of two confluent processes. On the one hand, the ideas of intellectuals such as Alberdi and Sarmiento, who considered that European immigration (especially the northern one) was essential to increase the population and leave behind the negative Spanish legacy." On the other hand, there was a legal system with large guarantees for immigrants. This system was based on three underpinnings: the National Constitution of 1853-1860, the Citizenship Law of 1869 and the Immigration and Colonization Law of 1876 (the so-called Avellaneda Law). These policies suffered changes in practice (for example, the increase of requirements and administrative obstacles) during moments of social conflict from 1900 until the first post war, a period that started a policy of “closed doors”. The increase in xenophobia and nationalism in culture and politics during the 1920s and especially the 1930s produced a rejection of groups considered less assimilable, in particular Jews and political refugees, suchas Spanish Republicans. Despite these negative processes, neither the legal system nor the pro-migratory consensus were put into doubt because their advantages were obvious for a large set of actors (landholders, industrialists, etc.). As clear evidence of this consensus, Argentina had never established a quota system, unlike the United States in 1924 or Brazil in 1934.’ After the second post war period, Peronism went back to an “open door” policy, like the liberal one of the 19" century.® MIGRATORY INTEGRATION AND NATIONAL IDENTITY: A CENTRIFUGAL AND PLURALIST SOCIETY The impact of mass migration, briefly exposed, compels us to analyze now the central issue of national identity, a kind of obsession in psychoanalytic coffee Tulio Halperin Donghi: ;Para qué la inmigracién? Ideologia y politica inmigratoria y aceleraciön del proceso modernizador: el caso argentino (1810-1914), in Halperin Donghi: El espejo de la historia. Buenos Aires, Sudamericana, 1976, 189-238. See the contribution of Elda Gonzalez Martinez in this volume. Biernat, Carolina: ;Buenos o utiles? La politica inmigratoria del peronismo, Buenos Aires, Biblos, 2007. + 23 +
