Immigration and Urban Social Problems in Argentina and Chile, 1890-1914 Open Access

Argentina and Chile, which had welcomed unrestricted European immigration since the mid-nineteenth century, began to turn against their foreign-born residents as World War I approached. One reason behind this shift in opinion was the growing conviction among the upper classes of both nations that immigration was the principal cause of urban social problems which had begun to appear by 1890. As in the United States, Argentine and Chilean observers used immigration to explain such varied problems as pauperism, crime, labor unrest, and anarchism.¹ At times, the accusations which the native-born upper classes levelled against the immigrants were justified, but more often the foreigner was used as a scapegoat.

The concern which the Argentine elites felt about the impact of immigration was understandable, for the newcomers were rapidly reshaping the nation’s economic life and social structure. The first Argentine census, taken in 1869, revealed that only 1.8 million people inhabited the republic’s huge area of about one million square miles. Argentina remained a “desert,” as Domingo F. Sarmiento had characterized the country in 1845.² But by 1914 the population had increased four-fold, and Argentina had become one of the world’s leading agricultural exporters. Basic to this rapid growth were the three million immigrants, primarily Italians and Spaniards, who settled in Argentina between the two censuses. On the eve of World War I, 29.9 percent of the Argentine population had been born abroad, probably the highest proportion of foreign-bom residents in any large country.³

These immigrants provided the labor force for Argentina’s expanding economy. For one thing, the foreign-born supplied much of the rural manpower which produced wheat and beef exports. Furthermore, they comprised about sixty percent of the urban proletariat, which was concentrated in Buenos Aires and included railroad workers, draymen, longshoremen, and others who transported and handled the rich agricultural produce.⁴

Other immigrants brought technical skills and entrepreneurial abilities to Argentina. European businessmen prospered and by 1914 owned seventy-two percent of the nation’s commercial houses, as well as the bulk of Argentine industry, still in the initial stages of development.⁵ Numerous immigrant professionals and clerical workers also arrived. By 1914 at least twenty percent of employed Argentine immigrants had entered the middle sectors of society, and Europeans held approximately forty-six percent of the republic’s middle-sector positions.⁶

Although Chilean immigration was smaller and more bourgeois than Argentina’s, the impact of the foreign-born in Chile was also great. Only about 100,000 Europeans, mostly Germans, Spaniards, and Italians, came to stay between the arrival of the first colonists in the 1840s and the outbreak of World War I. The last census before the war, taken in 1907, revealed that 4.1 percent of the population was foreign born.⁷

Attracted by generous land grants in the newly developing southern “frontier” region, thousands of Europeans in Chile built up flourishing small farms. But the bulk of the European-born population. entered the middle sectors in Chile’s major cities, mining towns, and seaports. By 1914 the foreign-born community owned thirty-two percent of Chile’s commercial firms and forty-nine percent of its industrial establishments.⁸ If the urban immigrant did not become a businessman, he often found employment in a commercial or banking firm or as a pharmacist, engineer, teacher, or other professional. Fewer European immigrants became urban laborers in Chile than in Argentina.

Immigration was only one agency of the headlong change which Argentina and Chile experienced during the 1890-1914 period. Foreign trade throve; exports of Chilean nitrates and Argentine beef and wheat reached unprecedented heights by 1910. This prosperity expanded internal markets and stimulated the beginnings of industrialization. During the same years urbanization was rapidly taking place. By 1914 Buenos Aires contained 1.5 million inhabitants and was one of the world’s great metropolitan centers, while in Chile, Santiago’s population more than doubled (to 450,000) during the quarter century preceding the First World War.

The working classes that inhabited these growing cities did not share the prosperity which gave a veneer of opulence to Santiago and Buenos Aires. In Chile real wages of urban laborers declined between 1890 and 1914, while according to available evidence those in Argentina rose only slightly.⁹ Housing was generally wretched. As late as 1912 a survey sponsored by the Argentine government found that in Buenos Aires the average immigrant working-class family, which contained five persons, lived in one room averaging twelve feet by twelve.¹⁰ Almost no social or labor legislation existed in either nation before 1914 to brighten the lot of the urban workers, but mobility between the urban working class and the middle sectors did exist, at least in Argentina. Between 1895 and 1914 approximately one-fifth of that country’s urban working-class population was able to enter the expanding middle groups.¹¹

These rapidly changing nations were still dominated by a few thousand upper-class families, who nearly monopolized social prestige, almost completely controlled politics, and strongly influenced intellectual life. Particularly in Argentina upper-class status before 1914 required a distinguished Castilian lineage. Relatively few immigrants or their offspring had entered the social elites.¹²

The economic base of the upper class in Argentina was possession of the nation’s best agricultural and pastoral land. A few hundred families, for example, owned most of the fertile land in Buenos Aires province, perhaps the richest agricultural region in Argentina. The landed elite did not enact a workable homestead law, and by 1914 only about thirty thousand immigrants were rural landowners.¹³ In Chile upper-class wealth was derived from nitrate mining as well as from the ownership of the large estates in the rich Central Valley.¹⁴ The only important nucleus of immigrant landholdings was in the remote southern provinces.

The ruling groups in both countries still generally accepted classical economic liberalism, including the principle that prosperity and growth require maximum international mobility of labor. Powerful interest groups, including Argentine landholders and Chilean mine owners, were convinced that immigration of cheap wage labor was essential to their prosperity as well as to national progress. As a result, the governments of both republics allowed foreigners to enter and settle virtually unrestricted. This created a dilemma, for the Argentine and Chilean elites also feared that immigration was the basic cause of urban social problems, some of which, like labor unrest and anarchism, directly challenged the ruling groups in their monopoly of power.

The crowds of tired, dirty, unemployed drifters and beggars who poured into the major cities of both nations constituted an obvious urban problem. In Argentina evidence suggests that some of these unfortunates were immigrants. One author in 1910 reported that seventy-three percent of the inmates in the Buenos Aires beggars’ asylum were foreigners. Similarly La Nación noted during an unemployment crisis in 1914 that over ninety percent of those seeking public assistance had been born abroad.¹⁵

Argentine journalists and sociologists were quick to use such data to support their contention that immigration was the prime cause of rising pauperism.¹⁶ These writers tended to ignore the desire for a decent job and livelihood that had led most of the newcomers to emigrate and instead assumed that many were unprincipled parasites, able to work but preferring to beg. An example of such xenophobic slander occurs in the play La pobre gente by Florencio Sánchez. An Argentine woman asks a friend, “Do you remember the turca who used to live upstairs? . . . Well, now she is rich, earning all she wants by . . . sending her children out to beg.”¹⁷

Writers like Sánchez who equated mendicancy with immigration were not presenting a balanced analysis. Sickness and ignorance had created pauperism since colonial times in Argentina; immigration was only a contributing factor to a complex socio-economic problem.¹⁸ Furthermore, according to travellers’ accounts, many of Buenos Aires’ paupers were not foreigners but obviously nationals.¹⁹

There was little indication that Chilean paupers included many immigrants. Nonetheless, some journalists and politicians attempted to blame Chile’s foreign-born population for the increasing number of beggars visible in the growing cities. Without offering supporting evidence these persons maintained that many foreigners were of such low quality that they avoided work, drifted into pauperism, and made that problem much worse than it would otherwise have been. According to Senator Vicente Reyes, the beggars of Santiago and Valparaíso had been recruited by Chilean colonization agents in alleged centers of vice like Marseilles, “where the very scum of the emigrants . . . who live in caves and have neither notions of morality nor habits of labor, await passage.”²⁰ Newspaper editorialists would add that immigration had brought to Chile hundreds of European Gypsies, a people whom El Mercurio likened to “ants, rabbits, or locusts,” in their alleged appetite for begging or for extracting money disreputably.²¹

In Argentina a problem more serious than pauperism was the rapidly rising urban crime rate, particularly in Buenos Aires. Between 1887 and 1912 the city’s population tripled while the number of crimes reported increased seven times. By 1914 Buenos Aires was notorious for its professional thieves, pickpockets, and racketeers.²² The sudden rise of Argentine crime was at least partially due to rapid social change and urbanization, which were dissolving the traditional bonds of a stable society and leaving a great mass of unattached individuals.²³

The many intellectuals who attempted to explain the causes of urban crime tended to overlook these complex social forces and instead blamed immigration. This was an arbitrary conclusion for which there was little statistical support.²⁴ Argentine writers often mentioned the Buenos Aires census of 1909, which reported that immigrants accounted for slightly less than half the city’s population, but for 65.6 percent of the criminals apprehended between 1900 and 1909.²⁵ But the intellectuals did not mention other statistics which invalidated the conclusion they wished to draw. In the segment of the population most likely to commit crimes—that is, males of age twenty and over—77.2 percent (in 1914) were foreign born.²⁶ Thus nearly four-fifths of Buenos Aires’ adult males were foreigners, but the evidence indicates that this group was responsible for only about two-thirds of the capital’s crimes.

Aside from citing statistics, Argentine intellectuals who commented on the causes of crime invoked theories of biological determinism to fix the blame on immigration. Whereas writers of an earlier generation had employed racial theories to argue that immigrants were ethnically superior and would improve the mestizo population, by 1905 sociologists were beginning to uphold the Argentine creole as racially superior to several immigrant groups, including the Italians and the Spaniards. Because they were biologically inferior, the theory continued, these immigrant groups inherited stronger propensities to commit crime than did the creoles. This theory was first and most explicitly formulated in Argentina by Cornelio Moyano Gacitúa, a sociology professor at the University of Córdoba. His La delincuencia argentina (1905), the first study devoted specifically to Argentine crime and heavily biased against immigrants, influenced other scholars of the time, including Eusebio Gómez, who became Argentina’s best-known criminologist before 1914.²⁷

Relying on the theory that criminal tendencies were biologically transmitted, Argentine writers repeatedly argued that immigration was bringing to Buenos Aires “the anti-social scum of the rest of the world” and permanently instilling strong criminal tendencies in the Argentine population.²⁸ Stereotyped images of immigrant criminals appeared in many articles published in the Archivos de psiquiatría y criminología, the professional journal of Argentine criminologists. The typical Italian immigrant, wrote one contributor, always bore “his inseparable steel knife,” which he was quick to use because of “his volcanic temperament and his excitable, aggressive passions.”²⁹

Men of letters joined the sociologists in casting the foreigner as a criminal. In a short story, La venganza del capataz, Manuel Ugarte portrayed an Italian immigrant who diabolically hatches a plan to torture to death his unfaithful wife and her lover. “His wild and turbulent blood, which united all the atavisms of the Mediterranean, could not be content with a brusque execution,” commented Ugarte.³⁰

The Italians received equally cutting treatment in another genre, the sainetes, short plays popular during the early twentieth century. Alberto Novión’s La cantina portrayed the Italians of Buenos Aires’ “Boca” waterfront area as drunken vagrants who constantly brandished huge daggers. After witnessing one of these Italians knife another to death, an Argentine army officer bitterly scoffs: “Look at him !. . . They say it is these men who bring progress and civilization.”³¹ Equally critical was José S. Álvarez, a short story writer popular around 1910. His Mundo lunfardo presented a lurid description of Italian thieves in Buenos Aires.³²

Perhaps because of the middle-sector character of Chilean immigration, fewer writers identified it as a principal cause of crime. But the Conservative Party’s newspaper El Porvenir nonetheless attempted to convince its readers that foreign-born thieves and vagrants were rapidly increasing Chile’s criminal population. This was so, claimed one editorialist, because immigration is a “safety valve the European countries use to release their undesirable social elements.”³³

Nicolás Palacios, the most famed Chilean writer of his time, expressed his strong agreement with this indictment of immigration. Palacios, who claimed to follow Gustave Le Bon’s racial principles, in 1904 published Raza chilena, an immensely popular book which presented racial theories startling to the Chilean reading public. Rejecting nineteenth-century Positivists who scorned the Chilean mestizo as inferior, he upheld the Chileans as a superior race. Palacios asserted that the early settlers of Chile were not Latins but a more “advanced” race, the descendants of the Gothic peoples who had arrived in northern Spain after the fall of Rome. In Chile, the theory continued, these Germanic conquistadores mixed with another allegedly superior race, the Araucanian Indians. Issuing from this mixture, Palacios continued, was the Chilean mestizo race, a strong people which inherited less tendency toward criminality than Italians or Spaniards, the two largest European immigrant groups in Chile. To substantiate this theory of criminality, Palacios presented only one set of statistical data, which counted (in 1896) one Chilean criminal per 107 citizens, but one foreign criminal per thirty-five foreign-born residents.³⁴ To condemn Chile’s small foreign population as a major cause of crime on the basis of this sketchy data was unjustified.

Closely related to the problem of crime were prostitution and the white-slave trade, both of which had made Buenos Aires infamous by 1914.³⁵ The consensus of Argentine writers was that white-slavers, pimps, and prostitutes were predominantly foreign-born. The white-slaver allegedly booked first-class passage to Buenos Aires in order to avoid the immigration inspectors, who examined only second-class and steerage passengers. Once in the Argentine capital, he would deliver his human cargo to some large entrepreneur or would himself set up business. Such was the theme of Pedro Pico’s sainete, Así empieza una historia, in which a nefarious Spanish immigrant agent sends an unsuspecting immigrant girl into a career of prostitution. After studying the problem in his law school dissertation, the brilliant young intellectual Manuel Gálvez charged that foreigners in Argentina were stimulating the growth of a huge industry based on traffic in human flesh.³⁶ Similar complaints resounded both in the newspapers and in Congress.³⁷ But publicists tended to use immigration as an easy explanation for prostitution, which had long existed in Buenos Aires,³⁸ rather than investigate the manifold social and economic factors which might have caused it to flourish.

Prostitution did not trouble Chileans as much as the chronic alcoholism, which appeared in the cities during the 1890s. Hesitating to investigate the poverty and malnutrition which turned Chilean workers to drink,³⁹ several writers argued that the immigrants who produced and sold alcoholic beverages were responsible. The Italians, exclaimed one editorialist, were hardly a civilizing factor, for “they have opened taverns on every corner in Santiago and the other important towns, certainly not to educate or regenerate the people, but to corrupt them, exploit them, and addict them to vice!”⁴⁰ German immigrants, who had introduced modern brewing techniques and who nearly monopolized the industry after 1890, were the targets of other writers.⁴¹

Intense labor unrest and the emergence of a militant anarchist movement deeply troubled many Argentines and Chileans during the quarter-century preceding World War I. Bombings, assassinations, and endemic labor turbulence reminded the upper classes that urban workers were deeply dissatisfied. Troubled by the unrest and the mounting violence which afflicted Argentine and Chilean cities, intellectuals cast about for explanations.

Although a number of investigators suggested that the precarious economic situation which the urban masses faced might explain labor unrest, many writers in both countries attributed it to immigration. They based this belief on inaccurate assumptions about the nature of Argentine and Chilean society, to the effect that social mobility and economic opportunity prevented the emergence of a class struggle as in Europe. According to this reasoning, which assumed that the objective conditions for class conflict were not present, urban social unrest could result only from foreign agitators, determined to revolutionize Argentine and Chilean life.

Social mobility did exist, but not to the extent indicated by intellectuals like Emilio Rodríguez Mendoza, a columnist in El Mercurio. He argued that in Chile, “no one is hungry who wants to work . . .. Prosperity is within the reach and at the disposition of everyone. It is simply a question of work.”⁴² In Argentina no one developed this Horatio Alger theme more thoroughly than the prolific social commentator Lucas Ayarragaray. In a 1912 essay he contended that “the European social problem is absolutely unknown here; we have neither castes, privileges, feudal complexions, nor historical injustices.” The class struggle, proclaimed Ayarragaray, can hardly exist “where classes do not exist.”⁴³ Seemingly unaware that speculation had pushed land prices to prohibitive heights and that graft and maladministration were making the colonization laws almost ineffective, Argentine intellectuals claimed that a discontented worker could easily escape the city and become a small landowner.⁴⁴ With few exceptions, the articulate classes of both countries stubbornly continued to associate the rise of anarchism with European immigration.

Some factual basis existed to support this conviction, for European anarcho-syndicalist and socialist labor organizers had been arriving in both republics throughout the 1890s. In Chile El Mercurio began to note with alarm the arrival of foreign anarchists as early as 1894. Anarcho-syndicalism enjoyed little success during the next two decades, though several Europeans did help Valparaíso-born Luis Emilio Recabarren to found the modern Chilean socialist movement.⁴⁵

When three bloody episodes of urban labor unrest shook Chile in the first years of the twentieth century, upper-class opinion directed its wrath against foreign labor organizers, terming them unscrupulous “agitators” who goaded the usually docile Chilean workers into strikes and protests. This argument first appeared in 1903, when Valparaíso’s stevedores and draymen began a protracted strike, leading to several bloody confrontations with the police as well as to massive arson and looting. The author who commented most extensively on this outbreak of violence was Benjamín Vicuña Subercaseaux, the rich, well-travelled scion of two leading families and one of Chile’s most respected writers. He claimed that the Valparaíso working class was well paid and had no reason to strike. Only “waves of human scum thrown upon our beaches by other countries” could have caused the turmoil.⁴⁶ Other Chilean writers agreed that the leaders of the Valparaíso affair were “drifters and adventurers” who had migrated from “the most rotten holes of the Old World.”⁴⁷

Two years after the Valparaíso bloodshed, organized labor in Santiago called a general strike to protest a new import duty on Argentine cattle which greatly increased meat prices. Again mass violence broke out, and this time the turmoil did not subside until the police had killed at least sixty people and wounded several hundred more. According to El Porvenir, the voice of the agricultural interests which profited from the cattle tariff, the cause of this tragedy must have been professional revolutionary agitators expelled from Europe and Argentina. Vicuña Subercaseaux agreed and added that the real exploiters of the laboring class were not the capitalists, but foreign agitators and labor organizers, who “profit like pariahs at the cost of the hunger and life of the people.”⁴⁸

More tragic than this unrest in Santiago and Valparaíso was a massacre of unarmed workers which occurred during a general strike in the nitrate mining center of Iquique. On December 21, 1907, determined to prevent mass demonstrations, the commanding officer of the local military garrison ordered a huge crowd of strikers that had gathered in the main plaza to disperse. The throng refused, the troops opened machine-gun fire, and hundreds fell dead or mortally wounded. The government officially admitted the death of 267, but the real figure was probably much higher.⁴⁹ News of this slaughter shocked all Chile, but several congressmen and intellectuals tried to relieve the government of responsibility by throwing the blame on “professional agitators . . . who are known criminals” expelled from Europe.⁵⁰ After the 1907 tragedy newspapers began to argue that Chile should bar further immigration of urban workers and welcome only agricultural colonists, who presumably would promote development and prosperity, but would not create labor unrest or social problems.⁵¹

Troubled by the unrest and carnage of these years, Chilean intellectuals and journalists began to call for legislation to forbid entry of foreign labor agitators and to expel those already in the country. They reasoned that Chile’s long tradition of legal equality between foreigners and citizens was outmoded, since most European countries as well as Argentina (in 1902) and Brazil had enacted laws against foreign agitators. The argument continued that without such a law, Chile was rapidly becoming “what England is in the Old World—the asylum of all those pursued by justice.”⁵² Newspapers supported the campaign for restrictive legislation by portraying immigrants in the most unflattering terms. One cartoon in the conservative La Unión presented a wild-eyed, grubby anarchist debarking in Valparaíso. A notice on his suitcase proclaims: “Graduate of the Old World anarchist university. Arriving to give lessons and courses in Chile.”⁵³ But those who wanted to limit immigration found that liberal economic theories, still widely accepted in Chile, together with the nation’s cosmopolitan tradition, were difficult obstacles to overcome. Congress did not enact antiforeign legislation until December 12, 1918, and then perhaps as a result of the recent triumph of Bolshevism in Russia. The so-called “Residence Law” of that date enabled the government to expel foreigners who had been condemned abroad for crimes, who had no useful occupations, or who preached violent social or political change.⁵⁴

In Argentina a movement also was gathering momentum to quell working-class unrest through restrictions on immigration. And as in Chile, there was some truth to allegations that unrestricted immigration was allowing European labor organizers to proselytize. The militant Italian anarchist Pedro Gori, for example, organized anarchist syndicates and founded working-class newspapers during his sojourn in Argentina between 1898 and 1902.⁵⁵ By the latter year, the anarchists had begun to organize Buenos Aires’ huge unskilled laboring class. Socialist-affiliated unions generally appealed only to railroad workers, skilled laborers, and artisans.

Troubled by the emergence of militant urban workers determined to improve their economic position, some Argentine intellectuals began to criticize the nation’s traditional policies of unrestricted immigration. To convince the public that foreign anarchists were at the root of the unrest, newspaper and magazine writers stereotyped the typical anarchist as a fat, swarthy, and ugly Italian or Spaniard bristling with knives, bombs, and other lethal weapons. The anarchist was allegedly an unprincipled, shiftless adventurer, anxious only to make trouble in whatever part of the world he chanced to land.⁵⁶ “Today I am in one place. Tomorrow they’ll throw me out, and I’ll be somewhere else,” complains a Spanish immigrant anarchist in Los fuertes, a sainete by Carlos María Pacheco.⁵⁷

The most persistent backer of restrictive legislation in Argentina was Miguel Cané, a well-known diplomat, essayist, and champion of the aristocracy. After returning from an ambassadorial post in Paris, where French laws against foreign agitators had impressed him, Cané claimed in an 1897 essay that thousands of “criminals and . . . madmen” were arriving in Argentina and were “destined to fill our prisons or to be a slow poison for our society.”⁵⁸ From his Senate seat and in a book published in 1899, Cané emphasized that Argentina, defenseless in the face of the anarchist threat, must forbid the entry of undesirable immigrants and expel those already in the country. To this end Cané introduced a “Residence Law” in the Senate on June 8, 1899.⁵⁹

The government hesitated, however, to reverse Argentina’s half-century-old tradition of unlimited immigration, which had been a principal cause of national prosperity and growth. Then a huge anarchist-led general strike at the height of the harvest season in 1902 threatened to halt Argentine exports, which would seriously imperil the republic’s European credit standing.⁶⁰ President Roca called Congress into special session on November 22 and asked it to act against foreign agitators and declare a state of siege which would force the strike to end.⁶¹

With ill-concealed haste, Congress enacted a Residence Law on the first day of the special session. During the brief debate, most speakers emphasized that sinister foreign agitators were determined to subvert Argentina’s economy and were “the only cause of the present strife,” as Minister of the Interior Joaquín V. González put it.⁶² The congressional majority brushed aside a few dissenting voices and enthusiastically approved the Residence Law, modern Argentina’s first legislation designed specifically to discriminate against the foreign-born. Its principal provisions empowered the executive to expel any foreigner whose conduct the president believed dangerous and to prevent the entry of foreigners the executive branch believed might become troublemakers.⁶³

Many Argentines who agreed that immigration was the basic cause of anarchism nonetheless strongly opposed the Residence Law. La Nación, for example, emphasized that unrestricted immigration had been the keystone of Argentine progress and civilization and that the new legislation might discredit the republic in Europe and thus discourage the migration of agricultural laborers upon whom the the economy depended.⁶⁴ In 1904 opponents of the law in Congress unsuccessfully tried to repeal it.⁶⁵ The following year Roberto J. Payró, a well-known author of socialist tendencies, wrote his play Marco Severi to portray the injustice and hardships inflicted by the Residence Law on immigrants who had become good citizens.⁶⁶

During the years following passage of the Residence Law labor agitation continued, and strikes increased in frequency. The most severe violence occurred in May 1909, when 200,000 Buenos Aires workers called a week-long general strike to protest the bloody police repression of a May Day anarchist meeting. The strike ended only after the government threw five thousand soldiers and armed police into the capital and arrested hundreds of strikers.⁶⁷ Growing class hatred in Buenos Aires was bound to precipitate more violence, which suddenly exploded on November 14, 1909, when a gunman assassinated the metropolitan police chief, Ramón L. Falcón.

The assassin was a Russian worker named Radowidsky, a fact which gave the elites a good excuse to start a xenophobic campaign. Soon after the murder several socially prominent young men formed the Juventud Autonomista, Argentina’s first avowed anti-immigrant society. Although this group was short lived, its intention “openly to combat the ideas of certain immigrant groups, which are the cause of our present social commotion”⁶⁸ foreshadowed the rash of ultranationalist groups which began to appear after World War I. At Falcón’s funeral distinguished citizens bitterly attacked radical immigrants and warned that “the exaggerated cosmopolitanism of our laws has brought us to the brink of social disorganization.”⁶⁹ Both major Buenos Aires newspapers now abandoned their opposition to restrictive immigration legislation and strongly criticized anarchist and socialist immigrants.⁷⁰

The campaign against foreign labor organizers and anarchists culminated in 1910 during the centennial celebrations of Argentine independence. Hoping to impress the world with Argentina’s progress, the government organized elaborate festivities. When the anarchist leadership, still bitter over the repression of 1909, announced plans for a general strike during the centennial festivities, Congress reacted on May 14 by declaring a state of siege.⁷¹

That night, the Buenos Aires police, joined by numerous upper-class volunteers who formed a “citizen militia,” attempted to eliminate the capital’s working-class leadership. The vigilante mob sacked offices and newspaper plants, while the police arrested and deported scores of labor leaders. The following night the citizen mob, unhindered by the police, struck at Buenos Aires’ so-called “Russian district” and destroyed the property of several Russian Jews thought to be sympathetic to the working-class movement.⁷² A few days later the centennial celebrations took place peacefully, but in a grim city whose angry passions were repressed only by thousands of troops and police.

Violence next struck Buenos Aires on June 27, when a bomb exploded during a performance at the luxurious Colon theater, a gathering place of Argentine high society. The police, unable to identify the culprit, finally accused a Russian anarchist named Romanoff, who was probably innocent.⁷³ Congress responded the next day with new antiforeign legislation, the Social Defense Law. The legislators, who vigorously applauded speeches attacking foreigners in the labor movement, were clearly using immigration as a scapegoat for Argentina’s worsening social violence.⁷⁴ Aside from repeating the provisions of the Residence Law, the new law specifically prohibited the entry of anarchists and restricted anarchist meetings and demonstrations.⁷⁵ In contrast with the mixed reception received by the Residence Law Argentine upper-class opinion generally applauded the Social Defense Law.

Along with their support of tougher repressive legislation, Argentine writers by 1910 were questioning whether urban-directed immigration ought to continue. Similar to the editorials appearing in Chile’s El Mercurio at about the same time, the Buenos Aires writers alleged that Argentina neither needed nor wanted more urban immigrants and welcomed only agricultural laborers.⁷⁶ To prevent further agglomeration of the foreign-born in the capital, some journalists urged that the government require immigrant ships to avoid Buenos Aires and dock at Rosario or Bahía Blanca, whence the immigrants would presumably move to the agricultural areas which needed labor. The government hastily rented an immigrant hostelry at Bahía Blanca. But after the first ship docked there in 1910, La Nación was dismayed to note that at least one third of the foreigners refused agricultural jobs and promptly entrained for Buenos Aires.⁷⁷ The newspapers seemingly did not realize that immigrants would continue to seek employment in the capital until the government enacted more liberal land policies.⁷⁸

This desire to reduce urban immigration reflected a widespread opinion among the Argentine upper classes that the foreign-born residents of Buenos Aires were responsible for the capital city’s social problems and labor unrest. In the neighboring republic of Chile, the ruling groups were similarly troubled by working-class unrest and also established a pattern of blaming foreign-born agitators. The intellectuals and the government in both republics magnified far out of proportion the contribution of the Europeans to the rise of urban social problems. It was simpler for the Argentine and Chilean elites to blame the outsider than to admit that other and more complex causal factors, like the rise of modern cities, the economic exploitation of the working classes, and the decay of traditional social and economic institutions, might have been responsible. So strong was the belief that immigration was at the root of social problems that both governments enacted anti-foreign legislation, controverting policies designed to encourage immigration which Argentine and Chilean statesmen had constructed painstakingly during the previous half century. But neither nation seriously attempted to reduce the flow of immigration. Although the governing classes were convinced that it was a source of crime, agitation, and unrest, they also believed that it was an integral and necessary part of the international economic system upon which their own prosperity rested.

Author notes