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Dr. David Keeling University Distinguished Professor of Geography Department of Geography and Geology Western Kentucky University Bowling Green, KY 42101

Chapter 4 in Herb, G., Kaplan D. (eds.) Scaling Identities: Nationalism and Territoriality. Boulder, CO: Rowman and Littlefield (October 2017 publication).

Sociocultural and Territorial Aspects of Argentine Identity

National and individual identities in Latin America have been shaped by myriad external

and internal forces dating back to, and even before, the European conquest of the region. Even

the term Latin, introduced by the French in the nineteenth century, fails to recognize the cultural

complexity of the region and presumes a more homogenous set of national identities than those

that actually exist. Contemporary Mexicans are profoundly different from Chileans, for example,

and Colombians are light years away from Argentines in how they see themselves domestically

and externally, despite similar influences of a Spanish colonial system, extractive economies,

and nineteenth-century Bolivarian notions of territorial nationalism and political independence.

Argentina stands out in Latin America as a fascinating case study of identity, nationalism, and

cultural complexity for many reasons. Its particular geo-historical cultural experience sets it apart

from other Latin American countries, and Argentines often are portrayed stereotypically as the

most difficult and complex society in the region, seen as arrogant, pushy, obsessed with

territorial nationalism, and somehow quite different from others in the hemisphere.

Argentina is a fascinating and provocative example of how, in many respects, the

territorial aspects of national identity (Yo soy Argentino) remain in conflict with, and perhaps

have superseded, the social-cultural aspects of identity (Argentinidad). A key question posed in

this chapter, therefore, is this: How has national identity been rationalized by the Argentine

political and economic elite to support a stereotyped and self-glorified perspective on their

heritage? The origins of Argentina’s contemporary geopolitical, economic, and cultural identities

are indeed complex, fascinating, and contradictory. A well-known, tongue-in-cheek explanation

for Argentina’s heritage is that, while modern Mexicans descended from the Aztecs and

Peruvians descended from the Inca, Argentines descended from the boats! In the early twentieth

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century, a popular observation oft-repeated in the clubs and salons of Europe was “Oh to be as

rich as an Argentine,” reflecting a socioeconomic status at the time that set Argentines apart from

all others in Latin America. Even the names appended to the coastal territory explored by

Europeans in the early sixteenth century were more aspirational than reality—the Río de la Plata

(Silver River) and Argentina (from the Latin argentum and a Spanish adjective meaning

silvery)—and this observation holds true even today. In the early years of the twenty-first

century, Argentina’s national identity and ambition continue to seem more aspirational and

contradictory than intrinsic to and integrative of the political-territorial state, as suggested by the

realities of its historical development. From colony to independent territory, through attempts to

exterminate indigenous cultures and the Europeanizing of its socioeconomic vision in the

nineteenth century, and through internal wars, ideological battles, economic collapses, and

myriad other challenges in the twentieth century, Argentina continues to struggle with defining

its own internal identity and its wider place in regional and global systems.

An additional element is the issue of scale related to the evolution of Argentine territorial

and national identity. The external boundaries of the modern political state do not align with the

historical economic and political identities that existed at myriad regional and local scales.

Within Argentina, today’s regional and local identities do not always align unambiguously with

the centralized, homogenous conception of the state’s national identity. Moreover, as Brenner

(1999, 69) argues, the forces of economic globalization have “decentered the national scale of

social relations and intensified the importance of both sub- and supra-national scales of territorial

organization.” Witness Argentina’s current efforts to exert more influence within and beyond its

borders through internal regional restructuring, global trade alliances, irredentist arguments, and

a reinvigorated belief in the superiority of its national identity.

Identity (Argentinidad) is a collective cultural phenomenon that is inextricably

intertwined with place, scale, politics, and geo-historical experiences (Herb and Kaplan 1999;

Smith 1991). As such, this chapter aims to shed light on the development and consolidation of

Argentina’s territorial identity, its contradictions, and its meanings by unwrapping the myriad

spatial and temporal layers that have shaped contemporary society. It aims to position attachment

to territory, historical experiences, and social values at the heart of how Argentine identity is

understood at different scales in an increasingly globalized milieu.

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Creating an Argentine Territory

Prior to the nineteenth century, Argentina as a territorially constructed political state did

not exist. Its territorial structure and identity emerged and coalesced from a series of geo-

historical events that shaped the wider region in profound ways. An enduring myth in any

analysis of territorial identity in Latin America, and Argentina specifically, is the notion of terra

nullius (empty land) to justify colonial settlements and the conquest of indigenous societies

(Wright 1992). The official history of national territorial identity frequently begins with the

arrival of Europeans, with extant indigenous identities simply erased by the colonizers and

reconfigured by the Spanish through writings in various Codices. For example, many pre-

Columbian Codices, which recorded the cultural history of indigenous societies prior to

European conquest, were burned by Spanish missionaries because of their “pagan” content.

When the Spanish marched down the Andes to enter what is today northwestern

Argentina, or sailed up the Río de la Plata to the environs of modern-day Buenos Aires or south

along the Patagonian coast, they encountered indigenous peoples like the Diaguita, Querandí,

Charrúa, Tehuelche, and other groups, each with their own sociopolitical identities, spaces, and

value systems. Although Andean groups as far south as modern-day Santiago, Chile, had been

subsumed into the Incan empire for decades, other societies in the Southern Cone were

structured spatially by resources, relationships with neighboring groups, and local environmental

conditions. When the Spanish arrived in northwest Argentina from Cuzco in the mid-sixteenth

century after subduing the Incan Empire, they established settlements in Santiago del Estero

(1553), Tucumán (1565), Salta (1582), and Jujuy (1593). An enduring myth of the early

conquistadores is that they were motivated by gold, God, and glory, but the reality in early

Argentina proved quite different. As few extractable, wealth-generating resources were easily or

quickly found within the boundaries of what became modern Argentina, land ownership to

enhance personal status proved to be the dominant strategy of settlers during the Spanish colonial

period.

Before settlement of the northwest, the Spanish Crown had aimed to establish a viable

port at the end of the long sea routes from Europe across the Atlantic to consolidate territorial

control in the face of competition from Portugal and England. In 1516, Juan Diaz de Solis

scouted a likely site along the banks of the Plata but he was killed by the Charrúa people. The

first settlement of Buenos Aires, established by Pedro de Mendoza in 1536, succumbed to

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indigenous attacks and was abandoned in 1542. A permanent settlement finally appeared on the

Río de la Plata shoreline in 1580 after an expedition arrived from Paraguay, and it became the

foundation for modern Buenos Aires. Over the next two centuries, relative isolation (the

empire’s backwater), the rise of smuggling, and a growing level of local defiance against the

Spanish Crown shaped political and economic identities, encouraged a growing notion of self-

reliance, and eventually forced the Crown to restructure the region’s territorial administration by

creating the Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata in 1776, governed from Buenos Aires. The

colonial administrators realized that the Crown’s American empire had profoundly different

social and economic geographies, that local and regional identities had a clear scalar component,

and that a homogenous view of colonial identities and relationships just did not work. However,

the selection of Buenos Aires as the new Viceroyalty capital further exacerbated growing

differences between the region’s interior and coast that would have long-lasting consequences

for the territorial identity and political integrity of Argentina over the coming decades and

beyond.

Figure 4a – The Territory of the Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata, 1776.

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The Argentine wars of independence between 1810 and 1816 revealed conflicting ideas

about what was, or should be, the territorial scale of a newly independent political state.

Territories that were part of the Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata (figure 4a), such as modern-

day Uruguay, Paraguay, and Bolivia, along with significant territory identified as controlled by

indigenous groups or seen as terra nullius (including the Malvinas/Falklands that played a

critical role in shaping territorial nationalism in the twentieth century), were not part of the

original Argentine state. No clearly defined, territorially based political identity emerged, even

after the Congress of Tucumán declared in 1816 that the United Provinces of the Río de la Plata

(figure 4b) were independent from Spain.

Figure 4b – The Territory of the United Provinces of the Río de la Plata, 1816.

However, the political-legal concept of uti possidetis juris (land controlled by Spain

should pass to Argentine control) was applied to conceptions of what should be the territorial

extent of a newly independent Argentina. At the time, though, Argentina’s territorial identity was

ill formed, imagined at a very local scale, and not yet politically or culturally defined. Over the

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following four decades, internal civil conflict prevailed, with struggles between Federalist and

Unitarist geopolitical ideologies. Would Argentina have a political territorial structure similar to

the United States, with power devolved to and shared with the constituent territories of the new

country, or would Buenos Aires govern the country within a centralist model not that dissimilar

from colonial Spain, Britain, or postrevolution France? The critical question of what constituted

Argentine territory bedeviled early nationalists, who struggled with the scope and scale of local

and regional interests and identities. As Szuchman (1994, 10) cogently observed, “the animosity

between Buenos Aires and the interior was . . . sustained by competing self-identities and

perceptions of what comprised the real Argentina,” an observation that still shapes conceptions

of Argentine identity in the twenty-first century.

Figure 4c – Territory of the Argentine Confederation.

Three critical territorial problems faced the post-Constitution strategists, however. First,

the Province of Buenos Aires, controlled by strongman Juan Manuel de Rosas until 1851,

refused to join the new Argentine Confederation (figure 4c). Most of the region’s tax revenues

were generated by the country’s major port in the so-called State of Buenos Aires, and the

ongoing political territorial struggles between Unitarists and Federalists stifled trade and revenue

sharing between the two governments. Meanwhile, Paraná in the northeast had been chosen as

the first capital of the Confederation, but it had no real trade connections to anywhere and lacked

any national influence. Second, the government of the Argentine Confederation had little

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understanding of its territorial extent or the scale of its possibilities. Borders were ill defined,

huge swathes of territory in the Pampas and Patagonia remained under the influence of

indigenous villages or gauchos (rural cowboys), and conflict in Uruguay, along with the War of

the Triple Alliance against Paraguay, stifled any political-territorial compromise.

Britain had taken control of the Malvinas/Falkland islands in 1833, despite protests by the

Rosas dictatorship, and there were concerns about Chilean encroachment in Patagonia. Attempts

by Buenos Aires in the late 1840s to regulate shipping along the Paraná and Uruguay rivers had

encouraged a combined French-British blockade of the Río de la Plata, which forced the British,

French, and Argentines to sign the Arana-Southern Treaty in 1850 (wherein, some analysts

argue, Argentina gave up its claims to the Malvinas/Falklands). Finally, despite the vast herds of

cattle roaming the Pampas grasslands and the economic potential of Argentina’s vast territories,

the fledgling country had no money, technology, labor, or viable strategies to Europeanize its

culture and economy. In terms of global trade potential, the territory still remained an economic

backwater, stuck at the end of the long Atlantic trade routes with very little to offer the rapidly

industrializing economies of the United States and Great Britain. Argentina’s emerging political-

economic identity existed at a much lower scale than the emerging global system within which it

nested.

These three geopolitical and economic problems, however, had solutions embedded in

the philosophies and politics of the so-called Generation of ’80, the ruling elite who dominated

Argentine politics from 1880 to 1916 and who helped to develop the country’s newfound sense

of uniqueness and cosmopolitan identity. Political rivalry between the interior and the coast was

resolved in 1880 when Buenos Aires became the federal capital of a united Argentine Republic.

This resolution recognized the port city as the most geographically sensible point of contact with

the wider world, and allowed it to scale up its connections within the existing hierarchies of

trading nations. Buenos Aires’ ascendency in the political hierarchy changed the scale and

context of the relationships between the interior and the exterior and further exacerbated

differences in regional identities and loyalties between the porteños (residents of the port) and

those who lived beyond the province of Buenos Aires.

Next, between 1878 and 1880, what became known as the Conquest of the Desert, led by

Julio Argentino Roca, opened up the vast southern pampas and Patagonian lands by forcibly

removing, pacifying, or killing indigenous peoples. Roca (2011, 26) argues that Argentine’s self-

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respect “as a virile people obliges us to put down as soon as possible, by reason or by force, this

handful of savages who destroy our wealth and prevent us from definitely occupying, in the

name of law, progress and our own security, the richest and most fertile lands of the Republic.”

During this campaign, the Military Topographic Institute was formed in December 1879, as the

government had long been unsure about the geographic identity of the western and southern

pampas south to Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego, and it produced myriad maps that helped to

define practically and legally the scale and extent of the country’s territory. Between 1880 and

1930, Argentina consolidated its territory, grew the economy, and inserted itself effectively into

emerging twentieth-century global trade networks, portraying itself as an advanced, democratic

society much like the United States, Canada, and Australia.

However, significant events in the Western Hemisphere began to shape how Argentina

envisioned its integration into, and subsequent role in, the world economy. The growing regional

influence of the United States that followed its annexation of Mexican territory, incursions into

Central America, the 1898 Cuban War, the creation of Panamá and the subsequent opening of

the canal, and the impacts of the Mexican Revolution, followed in short order by World War I

and the Great Depression, encouraged a rethinking of Latin American and, thus, Argentine

identity in the face of what became widely perceived as “Yankee” aggression and expanded

imperialism. These profound changes at the hemispheric scale influenced changes at the regional

and local scales, and helped to restructure the way that Argentina perceived itself internationally

and internally, especially in terms of its geopolitical role in the region.

In recent years, Argentina’s regional influence, and thus the perception of its importance

as a political state, has been overshadowed by Brazil’s impressive economic growth, its hosting

of the 2014 FIFA World Cup and the 2016 Olympic Games, and by the improved geopolitical

standing of Latin America more broadly in the global system (Benwell and Dodds 2011).

Sensitivity to regional competition, to concerns about U.S. military involvement in the region

under the guise of fighting drug cartels, and to any attempt by outsiders to interfere in the

continent’s political affairs, all explain to some degree Argentina’s growing rhetoric about

neocolonialism and its increasingly strident demands about the Malvinas/Falklands. In the next

section, the analysis moves from territorial identity to national or cultural identity to

contextualize how Argentines see themselves and their country internally and beyond.

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The Emergence of Argentinidad

A clear sense of Argentine national identity began to emerge during the last decades of

the late eighteenth century. As the first generation of Argentine-born Spaniards (criollos), along

with newly minted mestizos (typically the union of a Spaniard and an indigenous woman), castas

(mixed races), and other new-world residents, began to exert political and economic influence in

their respective settlements, two territorial scales emerged to shape their identities and their value

systems. First, Argentines existed at the end of long and difficult mandated transportation routes

via either Peru and the Caribbean or the Atlantic, which minimized the influence of the Spanish

king locally and slowed communication dramatically. Second, even though the Spanish-born

political and economic elite (peninsulares) exerted significant control over local and regional

decisions, this distance from the real seat of power especially shaped the attitude of the criollos

and fostered an obedezco pero no cumplo reality (loosely translated as “I hear the King’s

command but I do whatever is necessary given local conditions”). This attitude of “respecting”

the law but acting out of local necessity became a quintessential component of political and

social action over the following decades.

As the nineteenth century dawned, no explicit Argentine identity existed based on a

conception of territory that might suggest the formation of a modern, integrated political state.

Vast swathes of the Pampas grasslands and Patagonia remained relatively unknown and isolated,

inhabited by indigenous groups, gauchos, Afro-Argentines, various social outcasts, and

frontiersmen. Effective Viceroyalty control extended north from about thirty-six degrees south

latitude, and included modern-day Uruguay, Paraguay, and Bolivia. Although most colonial

citizens certainly understood their political-economic identity within the wider context of Spain’s

American empire, it is clear that individual territorial and cultural identities were emerging at

multiple scales. For example, the inhabitants of Buenos Aires, known as porteños, clearly saw

themselves as different from those who lived beyond the coastal area, in part because of the long

history of porteño self-sufficiency and creative responses to Spanish laws designed to protect

trade with the Crown. This sense of local pride, self-worth, and creative politicizing became

evident during the Napoleonic Wars in Europe that disrupted Spain’s interaction with its colonies

and precipitated, among other events, the 1806 capture of Buenos Aires by the British. The

Viceroy fled upcountry to Córdoba leaving local merchants and politicians to deal with the

British invaders, who were expelled after forty-six days. A second British invasion followed in

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1807 and the emboldened criollos fought tenaciously and expelled the British again. Encouraged

by this victory over the British with little meaningful help from the Spanish Crown, and with

growing sentiments about independence shaping the psyche of most porteños, a local criollo

junta deposed the Viceroy in May 1810, and declared itself in control of the immediate territory,

although without a formal declaration of independence from Spain.

Individual or group identities often are associated strongly with a sense of belonging to a

political state (patriotism) or national group (nationalism), where certain characteristics such as

language, religion, shared experiences, or ethnicity provide connections that bind people

together. In the case of newly emerging Argentina, part of the challenge in the early years of

independence, aside from the internecine struggles, was to identify those commonalities (flags,

patriotic songs, unifying myths, a common history, a constitution, music, cuisine, etc.) that might

help define an acceptable state-based territorial, rather than local, identity. Argentine

revolutionaries believed that the state, first and foremost, should be a political association created

by individuals who shared a unifying political identity, and that common cultural traits were not

that important (DeLaney 1997). Counter to a territorially nationalist viewpoint—Argentina for

unique ethno-cultural Argentines—the philosophy in Argentina seemed to be the establishment

of a political state shaped by the principles of popular sovereignty, equality, liberty, and justice,

despite the myriad ambiguities inherent in determining who would or could be a citizen of the

new state. The only scale that mattered should be the national scale, as regional and local

differences should not matter. With this context in mind, let’s turn to the next phase of identity

building in Argentina—massive European immigration, the triumph of political centrism, and the

role of nineteenth-century liberalist philosophies in defining a territorial framework for

development.

With over four million immigrants arriving in Argentina between the 1850s and the

1910s, unexpected cultural values and attitudes emerged to challenge existing ones. Immigration

was promoted by the passage of Argentina’s 1853 Constitution, whose architects like political

theorist Juan Bautista Alberdi identified immigrants as the cornerstone upon which the state’s

political and economic identity would be built. In many ways, Argentina’s modern identity, or

Argentinidad (Argentineness), emerged out of the contradictions and struggles that shaped this

new society through to the early 1930s. Juan Bautista Alberdi, Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, and

other “liberal” reformers (in the nineteenth-century sense) were influenced significantly by

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emerging notions of exceptionalism and manifest destiny in the United States, its territorial

expansion shaped by a “from sea to shining sea” ideology, French republican principles, and

European immigration. Moreover, Alberdi particularly had an abiding and strident distrust of

native Spanish cultural-political identity and believed that Anglo-Saxon, Protestant immigrants

were needed to transform the customs and work habits of the existing population (Romero 1968).

Sarmiento argued that, in addition to a native Spanish predisposition for religious fanaticism,

violence, and despotic politics, the very nature of Argentina’s geography, characterized by the

harsh, empty, vast Pampas, the Andean “wall,” and beyond, had created a dominant culture

typified by ideological contradictions, laziness, and recklessness. Northern European immigrants

would correct these tendencies and bring a modern, industrializing work ethic to this new society

(Sarmiento 1868 [reprint 1993]. Argentina’s particular ethno-communal identity of gauchos,

castas, Afro-Argentines, Spanish, indigenous, and criollos would be transformed into the

homogenous, nationalist-driven population necessary for the development and prosperity of the

new state. Argentine cultural identity should be characterized by civilization and not barbarism,

argued Sarmiento (1993), if it hoped to become a member of the industrialized and developed

club of nations.

Alberdi’s vision of immigration and investment that would transform the very nature of

Argentine national identity and society began in earnest after 1880, but not in the way he had

envisioned. Nearly five million Europeans poured into the country over the next fifty years,

mostly from Spain (1.7 million) and Italy (2.3 million), but not from the coveted Anglo-Saxon

Protestant societies that Alberdi so admired (Adelman 1995). A healthy smattering of French,

Welsh, Russians, English, myriad nationalities from the Ottoman Empire, Germans, Austrians,

and others from Eastern Europe made up the balance of immigrants, with most choosing Buenos

Aires and the inner Pampas as their preferred new home. Included in this wave of immigrants

were about 150,000 Jews, mostly Ashkenazi from Europe but also a few Sephardics from

Morocco and the Ottoman Empire territories.

Although Argentina did not get the northern European immigrants many believed were

essential to changing the cultural identity of society, it did get massive investment from Britain

through the financing of new technologies. The scale of Argentina’s engagement with the global

economy changed as the country received almost half of all British investments worldwide up

until World War I, primarily in infrastructure such as railroads, meat-packing plants, warehouses,

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port facilities, fencing, water pumps, and windmills. The Pampas region was transformed from

barely 400,000 hectares under cultivation in the early 1870s to over 25 million hectares by 1914,

with nearly 25,000 miles of railroads and other infrastructure moving grains and cattle quickly

and efficiently to Buenos Aires and other ports along the Río Paraná. Argentina’s wealthy elite

extolled the virtues of this “United States of South America,” celebrating a new economic and

political identity, one enjoyed primarily by Buenos Aires and its surrounds, by expanding

haciendas, building public monuments and mansions in the capital, and touring Europe’s cities in

grand fashion proclaiming that God was, in fact, an Argentine! During this Belle Époque,

domestic industrialization increased, using 100 units as a base in 1900, from about 15 units in

1880 to over 400 by 1930. Immigrants swelled the population of Buenos Aires to over 1.5

million by 1914, with over half of the city’s residents foreign born, and wealth trickled down

through the ranks of railwaymen, factory workers, entrepreneurs, latifundistas (large-scale

landowners) and tenant farmers, dockhands, and schoolteachers.

Argentina ranked as one of the ten wealthiest societies in the world alongside countries

like the United States, Britain, Australia, and Canada, far ahead of Spain, Italy, Germany,

France, and other admired European states. Argentines saw little in common with their Latin

American neighbors, most of whom seemed mired in poverty, political crises, and the cultural

legacy of miscegenation. Argentine identity became whitewashed, literally, with the belief that

the country had evolved into a Europeanized, cosmopolitan, developed society, with any traces

of its African, indigenous, or mixed heritage subsumed or eliminated from the national psyche.

Any hint of destructive nationalism, seen as a centrifugal force elsewhere in the world, was

overwhelmed by an emerging sense of Argentine patriotism or state-based nationalism, with

individual identities tied to the political state and not to any specific ethnic-religious-linguistic

heritage. The triumph of a state-based national identity over locally scaled identities seemed

complete.

Yet, all was not well in this new Argentine paradise, despite the myriad measures of

economic and infrastructural growth. Many of the social-political characteristics of new

immigrants did not fulfill the Alberdian vision for the construction of a new Argentine identity.

Strains of anarchism, communism, and syndicalism influenced the political views of many

immigrants, especially Italians, who refused to buy into the Argentine identity promoted by the

Generation of ’80. A significant number of immigrants became known as golondrinos

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(swallows), as they moved back and forth between southern Europe and Argentina with the

harvest seasons, showing little political loyalty to either home. As the twentieth century dawned,

fracture zones became ever more evident in social, political, and economic institutions as

Argentina celebrated its 1910 centennial as a country.

Consolidating an Argentine Identity

An identity schism emerged in early twentieth-century Argentina, as the growing gap in the scale

of wealth and development between the coast and interior exacerbated perceived differences in

identity—what, where, and who characterized the real Argentina? Hipólito Yrigoyen, president

from 1916 to 1922, proved to be extremely popular with middle- and working-class voters as he

encouraged and facilitated their integration into the political process. Yrigoyen played up anti–

North Americanist sentiments, distanced himself from the reigning European cosmopolitanism

embraced so enthusiastically by Argentina’s elite, and promoted an Argentine and wider Latin

American identity rooted in a common Hispanic heritage. As an example, he declared October

12 the Día de la Raza (equivalent to Columbus Day in the United States) to counter Pan-

Americanism with a specific Hispanic-American identity that excluded those of Anglo-Saxon

heritage. This growing tension between competing political and social identities among different

groups is explained by Argentine writer Ernesto Sabato (1976, 17–18) thus:

“With the primitive Hispanic American reality fractured in Buenos Aires and its immediate hinterland due to immigration, its inhabitants have come to be somewhat divided with all the dangers but also with all the advantages of that condition: because of our European roots, we deeply link the nation with the enduring values of the Old World; because of our condition as Americans we link ourselves to the rest of the continent, through the folklore of the interior and the old Castilian that unifies us, feeling somehow the vocation of the Patria Grande San Martín and Bolívar once imagined.” One of the most important contemporary symbols of Argentine cultural identity emerged

during this period of profound political and economic change. Widely admired today as a

universal symbol of Argentine identity, the tango has its origins firmly planted in a segment of

society marginalized and despised by the ruling elite. Among the social outcasts, pimps, petty

criminals, Afro-Argentines, gauchos, prostitutes, and others living on the physical and economic

margins of porteño society, emerged a musical fusion of styles including African rhythms,

Cuban Habanera, Uruguayan candombe, milongo rhythms, and the minuet-style of European

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mazurkas, which coalesced into the lyrics and dance called tango. Immigrants introduced the

bandoneo, a German instrument, to the music and, by the early twentieth century, the art form

had become ubiquitous in the cafés, dancehalls, clubs, and brothels frequented by the urban

lower working classes. The lyrics were sung primarily in lunfardo, a local lower-class dialect

that fused myriad languages together. Porteño high society viewed the tango with some distain,

condemning it as sleazy and licentious compared to the sophisticated European operas and

concerts avidly consumed in the recently constructed, architecturally spectacular Teatro Colón

(1908) located in the heart of Buenos Aires. By the eve of World War I, a watered-down version

of the dance, with its moves tempered to accommodate the stricter sexual morality of Europeans,

had become a sensation in Europe’s capitals. As the Argentine elite viewed most things

European as sophisticated and worthy of adoption, particularly any trend emerging from Parisian

salons, it quickly co-opted the tango as its own national symbol. With the rise to prominence of

Argentine singer Carlos Gardel, now viewed as the world’s preeminent tango performer, the

porteño elite completed the repackaging of tango from its local, despised, and marginalized role

into an international symbol of Argentine cultural identity, exuding the sophistication and style

so admired of European art forms.

On the economic front, Argentina had become increasingly indebted to the British

capitalists who controlled the country’s infrastructure and purchased most of its exports. The

national economy struggled as World War I disrupted exports and dramatically slowed the flow

of foreign investment. Unemployment skyrocketed, inflation set in, salaries stagnated, and the

types of social movements encouraged by the Russian Revolution that emerged in postwar

Germany, Hungary, and Italy led ultimately to social conflict in Argentina that culminated in the

Semana Trágica (Tragic Week) during January 1919. Worker protests were violently suppressed

by the police and the army, resulting in deaths on both sides, followed by increased repression of

groups like Jews, Catalans, and anyone deemed to have Bolshevik or anarchist tendencies.

Argentina’s self-proclaimed identity as a liberal, democratic, and progressive society began to

change as internal social conflict and external forces encouraged a shift to a more conservative,

chauvinistic, state-centered identity. From 1930 to the Malvinas/Falklands War in 1982,

Argentina adopted a more strident territorial nationalism at home and abroad. This growth of a

more strident nationalism had been nourished by a belief that the very essence of an Argentine

race had been profoundly weakened by immigration. Nationalist rhetoric blossomed in many

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elite circles, drawing on a perceived threat of a dangerous urban dominance led by Buenos Aires

and a widespread fear of foreign economic-cultural control. According to nationalists, this threat

to identity and sovereignty was the fault of the Jews, Masons, the British, the United States, and

a host of other external influences. Both military and civilian leaders saw growing potential

support from the native lower classes as key to advancing an anti-immigrant, anti-imperialist

agenda.

In 1946, Juan Domingo Perón, a former military officer, assumed the presidency with

help from the working classes—nicknamed los descamisados (the shirtless ones)—a vociferous

anti-British rhetoric, and the political savvy of his actress wife Eva Duarte de Perón (Evita). As a

junior minister, he had previously worked to build a strong national response, and thus enhanced

national pride, by organizing fundraising events for relief supplies after a devastating earthquake

struck the western rural town of San Juan. Perón further enhanced national pride, or

Argentinidad, by swapping British debt incurred during World War II for outright ownership of

the country’s railroad network, and by developing a five-year plan to modernize the national

infrastructure, especially in the interior provinces. Nationalization and protectionist policies

effectively changed the scale of Argentina’s engagement with the global economy and

encouraged Argentine belief that they could develop into a First-World country on their own

terms and with their own resources. Perón also continued the mapping and exploration work of

the Military Geographic Institute (IGM), designed to understand more clearly the nature and

extent of Argentine territory, its boundaries, and its available resources. Unfortunately, several

economic policy mistakes such as the nationalization of the railways, rapid growth in public

spending that spurred inflation, and neglect of the agricultural sector, contributed to the collapse

of the Peronist political party after Perón’s ouster in 1955. Thereafter, the rise of right- and left-

wing extremism within the broader context of the Cold War led to successive coups and the

seizing of political control by the military in the mid-1970s.

Between 1976 and 1983, Argentina collapsed into the national nightmare called the Dirty

War, when upward of 30,000 civilians were tortured, mutilated, and disappeared. During this

period of abusive military rule called the Proceso, the government promoted a vociferous and

aggressive nationalism bolstered by Argentina’s home success in the 1978 FIFA World Cup and

by the fantasy of becoming an influential First-World regional power. Argentina’s national

identity entered a bellicose and chauvinistic period, where arguments about how the country’s

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greatness had been stymied and despoiled by foreign powers were coupled with military

aggressiveness in taking a strong foreign policy stand on territory and trade issues. Critical to this

aggressively nationalistic view was the use of educational propaganda, maps, and historical

interpretations to demonstrate how the former Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata had been

mutilated and disemboweled by foreigners. Territorial conflict over the Malvinas, Beagle

Channel Islands, and parts of the Andes region were offered as evidence that enemies like Chile

and Britain were eating away at Argentina’s territorial identity, and thus efforts to restore

Argentina to its former territorial glory were necessary and justified (Keeling 2013). Amid

increasing domestic resistance to the military’s economic and political policies, the government

invaded the Malvinas/Falklands in April 1982, an action greeted with wild enthusiasm by many

Argentines who believed this action critical to restoring the country’s national pride, earning

international respect, and cementing its identity as a strong regional power. However, the

invasion quickly degenerated into a political disaster with a humiliating military defeat by the

British, loss of the government’s credibility, and a widespread belief that Argentina had been

betrayed by the international community.

With the restoration of participatory democracy in 1983, Argentines fell victim to the so-

called Lost Decade. The national economy collapsed, hyperinflation hit 12,000 percent in 1989,

and debt defaults and replacement of the peso currency with the devalued austral scarred the

national psyche. Already home to more psychologists per capita than anywhere else on earth,

with most located in Buenos Aires, Argentines turned inward to try and make sense of a battered

and damaged national identity. In May 1989, voters turned to a Peronist candidate, Carlos

Menem, from the impoverished interior province of La Rioja, hoping that he would restore

Argentine pride, solve the country’s economic woes, and reposition Argentina more favorably in

the wider regional and global economy. Menem quickly discovered that the Argentine economy

was damaged beyond repair, so he turned Peronist ideology on its head by adopting policies of

neoliberalism and globalization and selling most government-owned assets to foreign investors,

which solved the country’s financial woes temporarily. The new peso became fixed 1:1 to the

U.S. dollar, and Argentine pride in country and economy rebounded as economic growth

returned, inflation was tamed, and foreign investment once again flowed into the country.

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Yo Soy Argentino—Argentine Identity Today and Tomorrow

The return of economic and political stability in the 1990s proved short-lived, and

Argentines entered a new phase of struggles to define and consolidate their national identity. The

political-economic system deteriorated rapidly between 1998 and 2002, again damaging not only

quality of life across the social spectrum but also the national psyche. With the constant reminder

of the Dirty War’s atrocities provided by the weekly protests of the Mothers of the Plaza de

Mayo and the ongoing massive accumulation of sovereign and personal debt, Argentina’s

national identity in the twenty-first century is shaped by the weight of recent history and the

realities of its current economic debacle. The rise to power of the Kirchner family, first with

Nestor as president (2003–2007), followed by spouse Cristina (2007–2015), reignited debate

about whether or not Argentine identity is “broken” or has reached a level of nationalistic

chauvinism that has become increasingly dangerous and provocative. Cristina Kirchner’s

vitriolic pronouncements about the Malvinas/Falklands, for example, suggested a calculated

move toward cultural creationism, a strategy of mythologizing historical events, territories, and

core identities for political purposes. The Argentine Congress, for instance, recently passed a law

that stated all public transport facilities must carry a sign asserting that the Malvinas belong to

Argentina (Las Malvinas son Argentinas)! The goal clearly is to reinforce a specific, nationalist

version of Argentine history, culture, and identity, imagined or otherwise. However, the 2015

election of President Mauricio Macri, the Propuesta Republicana (PRO) party leader, portents a

softening of the combative nationalist rhetoric that framed the Kirchner era.

In celebrating the 200th anniversary during 2010 of Argentina’s first declaration of

independence in Buenos Aires, the government tried to repackage national identity by linking it

to a sense of regional (be)longing that desperately needed nurturing. The Bicentenary was

promoted officially as an opportunity for Argentines to reexamine critically their origins, values,

beliefs, and future potential. Kirchner tried to harness the growing “pink-tide” political ideology

that argues Latin American societies should seek more freedom and influence in the global

system (compassionate capitalism), as they have the resources and capabilities to shape their own

regional and global identities. For example, Argentines pride themselves on leading the region in

the adoption of transgender rights and enhancing the role of women in wider society. Yet, what

seems to have emerged in Argentina recently is a schizophrenic national identity. There exists a

strong desire for acceptance of Argentina on the global stage, with explicit recognition sought of

18

its unique cultural identity based on a Europeanized, cosmopolitan heritage. On the other hand, a

strong nostalgia for a nationally authentic culture (Argentinidad) is evident that stresses

commonalities with Latin American neighbors, such as a shared Spanish colonial history and

ethnic heritage. Recent genetic studies, for example, show that about one-third of Argentina’s

overall population has Amerindian ancestry, which rises to two-thirds in the northwestern

provinces of the country. The country also remains extremely divided along socioeconomic lines,

with GDP (purchasing power parity) per capita in the Buenos Aires metropolitan area (>

$40,000) more than five times higher than average per-capita GDP in the northeastern and

northwestern provinces ($8,000) (figure 4d).

Figure 4d – Regional Distribution of Gross Domestic Product (Purchasing Power Parity).

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Summary

In conclusion, the evidence suggests that Argentina has developed a fabricated

nationalism resulting from educational and governmental propaganda that has encouraged a

state-based identity at odds with the notion of a popular, authentic cultural identity that exists at

multiple regional and local scales. A wry comment often heard among Argentines discussing

their identity is that Argentina has always been a country of the future. However, they live in a

present solely determined by conflicted interpretations of the past, with little consideration for

how the present might determine the future. Although the extant boundaries of Argentine

territory have been settled for nearly two centuries (with the exception of the Malvinas/Falklands

claim and the spatial disarticulation of Tierra del Fuego caused by the Strait of Magellan),

powerful internal spatial divisions remain on myriad political-economic-cultural levels.

Ambivalence continues to dominate Argentine self-identity at multiple scales. At the rural scale,

primarily in the areas north and south of the Pampas grasslands, local versions of national

identity generally clash with the more secular, urban, and modern version found in the territory

bounded by the inner Pampas, including such cities as Buenos Aires, Mar del Plata, Rosario, and

Córdoba. Depending on the current political climate and dominant ideological orientations,

Argentines continue to oscillate between an identity linked to Latin American commonalities,

such as a shared colonial experience, and an identity highlighting the country’s uniqueness as a

Europeanized, cosmopolitan, nationally integrated society.

In terms of consolidating a national identity, Argentina can be considered a significant

failure in the region. It remains dangerously divided spatially, economically, politically, and

ideologically between the haves and the have-nots, and between the porteños and the interior.

Argentina has never achieved the potential promised by a stable territorial structure that has

avoided the kind of ethno-religious-linguistic centrifugal forces geographically fracturing so

many other political states. Argentina’s geopolitical future depends in large part on the ability of

its society to address regional socioeconomic differences at multiple scales in ways that reinforce

a strong national identity consistent with its regional and local realities, rather than tear it apart

because of unrealistic conceptions of Argentinidad.

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