The Limits of the Melting Pot in Urban Argentina: Marriage and Integration in Córdoba, 1869-1909 Open Access

After their arrival in Argentine cities, both immigrants and in-migrants applied themselves to seeking their livelihoods; once they contemplated remaining in the same area, they would make additional efforts to cement their social ties to their new environment through appropriate marriages. Here we will examine a random sample of the marriages that non-cordobés males contracted in the city of Córdoba between 1869 and 1909, during the period of massive immigration. We will focus on the types of brides they selected and on the degrees of social integration and mobility they achieved through marriage.¹

The city of Córdoba was selected because it has always played a crucial role in Argentine political life, it has been a focus of the nation’s intellectual activity, and it constituted a central juncture between the northern and western regions and the metropolis of Buenos Aires. Furthermore, in geographical area and population it has continually vied with the city of Rosario for second place among Argentine cities. Córdoba’s size facilitates research. Documentation consulted for this study is not yet available in much larger centers, such as Buenos Aires, and in addition, the informal and bureaucratic arrangements required to use archives are more feasible in a provincial capital like Córdoba, which, while it now has nearly one million inhabitants, is perhaps only one-tenth the size of greater Buenos Aires.

This article forms part of a larger study which, using various samples, examines different aspects of mobility and assimilation of residents in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Córdoba. We emphasize, therefore, that marriage is one of several avenues of mobility for migrants, and other issues of integration, such as political participation and social stratification, remain the subjects of other tests.²

In asking what factors were most responsible for the choices of marriage partners, we will consider three elements that critically affected selectivity: 1) birthplace; 2) residential ecology; and 3) economic and status motivations. This work, then, represents an urban experience and thus considers municipal environment and policies necessary to understand the social behavior of city residents.

Theoretical Considerations of the Melting Pot

Without losing sight of the romantic aspect, marriages—particularly in societies that underwent large-scale migrations—can be viewed as economic arrangements providing security for nonworking women and legal inheritances for children.³ Economic and legal accommodations, however, were not the only concerns. In addition, couples often reckoned with the social effects that marriages would have on their own communal situations, principally, the degree of social integration facilitated by their unions. Concerns of economic standing, limitations of distance, ethnic animosities, and human ecology all condition the selection of marriage partners.

No “free market” situation exists, even when the “currency” is love. We may view marital unions as one representation of the community’s social boundaries, and as indicators of social fluidity or rigidity. The selection of mates provides information on local society, including its norms of ethnic integration and residential patterns, as well as on the way in which its recent members accommodate their interest to the new realities.⁴

The assumptions about the social and demographic impacts of a massive and largely male immigration, such as occurred in Argentina, have traditionally rested upon an organic view of collective social behavior. The individual components of a society, according to this view, temper and mold all group actions. Evidence of the fusion which massive immigration into Argentina exerted on natives and foreigners is extrapolated from census data. The number of creoles— Argentines reaching far back in their lineage—was small throughout this period. Creoles must have been absorbed and their identity seriously altered by the immigrants. Such a scheme defines amalgamation as deterministic, and its resultant “types” as the perfectly acculturated offspring of immigrants. It is this emergent mass that José Luis Romero characterizes as “hybrid.”⁵

If in the nation’s rural and isolated zones observers found pockets of immigrants retaining their customs and mingling with their own kind, the urban centers—runs the argument—provided an ambience more conducive to social and cultural integration. This integration, though, was bounded by some institutional, and mostly male-dominated circles, such as ethnic voluntary associations, the immigrant press, and consular representations.⁶ Nonetheless, in the cases of foreign women and of immigrant family members, other than the male heads of households, the evidence from Córdoba fails to support this widely shared view of urban social amalgamation. Gino Germani and other leading exponents of the view that Argentina evolved into a kind of ethnic monolith as the result of male preponderance among the immigrants betray their own warnings and do, in fact, place “excessive emphasis on ‘rational’ or instrumental motivations, not taking into account the possible complexity of the psychological processes. . ..”⁷

The results of this study of marital unions among the different nationalities in the city of Córdoba do not support the belief that, as a whole, Argentina was free from ethnic tensions or hostility toward amalgamation. Moreover, the selections of marriage partners not only display a bias between Argentines and Europeans, but also provide evidence of the strong preference for endogamy within each national group.

Nationality and Nationalism: Córdoba

Commentators on Argentina have assumed that immigrants blended most readily into creole society via the avenue of marriage. The greatest demographic and cultural achievement of Argentine society, according to Germani, Romero and others, was its ethnic fluidity.⁸ The notions of Córdoba’s historians and observers of the local scene parallel those with national perspectives. In 1910, Manuel Río pointed out that in one-third of the marriages in Córdoba Province one or both partners were foreigners, and that nine out of twenty children were born from such unions. These statistics prompted him to assume that a profound and rapid modification in the human components of Argentina was already under way. “In this melting pot,” he wrote, “the material for one of the future Argentine types is being forged.”⁹ Efraín Bischoff, one of Córdoba’s most prolific writers of local history, currently continues to echo notions of the Argentine melting pot thesis.¹⁰

Thus, while modern Argentine historians and sociologists have been exposed to liberal theories about impending miscegenation, they have virtually ignored the effects on the families of the ethnically disparate young men and women of the period. Instead, the emotions and familial dynamics resulting from exogamous marriages have been the subjects of works in the literary field and in popular culture. Few historians, however, employ literary works in their interpretations of the national culture.

In the field of literature, the Uruguayan playwright Florencio Sánchez wrote a considerable number of plays around the turn of the century depicting the life and mores of the people of the Río de la Plata area. The protagonists of one of his most famous plays, La gringa, display not only stereotypical characterizations of creoles and Italians, but also the wide social and cultural distances which had to be bridged before they could work and live together.¹¹ Sánchez weakened the distrust between the two main characters of the play, an Italian and a creole, in a fashion typical of turn-of-the-century progressives: the marriage of the Italian’s daughter with the creole’s son. But this resolution took place only after considerable strain and emotional cost.

Similarly, José S. Alvarez refers in his short stories to the processes of obstinacy and sacrifices experienced, especially by creole parents, before they would permit immigrant men to court their daughters. In a piece entitled En familia, Eleuterio is the unfortunate father, saddened by his five daughters’ marriages to immigrant men. He personifies the deeply wounded nationalist whose family and heritage are disappearing before his eyes.¹²

This distrust between creoles and Europeans resulted in animosities which prevented intermarriage, since such unions created a social stigma for both families. Although the Argentine government sought to foster a spirit conducive to ethnic exogamy, it did not succeed, at least in Córdoba, in diluting the purity of different nationalities.

The data set gleaned from the marriage sample make necessary a serious reevaluation of the significant judgments of Germani, Romero, Río and Bischoff. According to the chief of the city’s Office of Statistics, only 372 weddings took place in Córdoba during 1874, while over 3,000 cordobesas were still “waiting for their turn.” He noted a lack of enthusiasm for marriages between Argentine women and immigrants. The news prompted the editors of the weekly La Carcajada to report that their “female [creole] compatriots either do not like the foreign men, or the latter do not like the former; since while twenty-nine foreign women have married foreign men, only ten Argentine females have been able to mingle with foreigners.”¹³

If marriages between Europeans and creoles were essential ingredients of the liberals’ plan to form the new Argentine, the family was believed to cause the quickest and most durable cultural changes.¹⁴ In spite of efforts to propagate the liberals’ designs, however, the men who migrated to the city of Córdoba maintained clearly defined predilections for their brides, as can be shown by the tables below. Table I displays a cross-tabulation between the places of birth of grooms and brides who married in the city between 1869 and 1909. The results are clear: European men were equally well-disposed toward Argentine-born as toward European women. Over 52 percent of the European grooms married Argentine women, while the remaining 47.7 percent wed their own ethnic cohorts.¹⁵ Creole men, however, were extremely reticent to marry non-Argentines: only 1 in 100 creoles married a European woman while nearly 99 percent chose Argentine brides.

This general picture challenges the accepted view of the nationwide melting pot. If a melting pot existed, it was by no means universal as not all ethnic groups were equally willing to blend with other groups. The cordobés population, one of the targets of the elite’s tactics of change, was most resistant to foreigners. While many nineteenth-century Argentine liberals held anti-nativist feelings, the subelite creole males acted in reverse fashion, at least in the matter of marriage. Between Europeans and creoles, the melting pot mentality appears to have worked in only one direction—by the European males entering the local society. Criollos newly arrived in Córdoba remained almost totally introverted.

Factors involving national heritage and time affected the general patterns shown already. The strength of the relationship between the birthplaces of grooms and brides in Córdoba, using Pearson’s r correlation, and with Argentina and Europe as the geographic spheres, is a very strong value of +.68. This correlation score confirms statistically the evidence displayed in the cross-tabulations. The integration of immigrants into local native society may have been somewhat conditioned by other socioeconomic factors, such as the differences in the life-styles of urban-oriented immigrant merchant families and of creole peon households; yet, marriage was principally a function of, and limited by, a tendency to cluster around one’s own native group. That fact is, at first glance, particularly true of Argentine men who were not receptive to the possibility of having immigrant wives, regardless of socioeconomic status. The overall picture of European men has shown a more or less even propensity to mingle with criollas as with extranjeras; yet, we will see that their choices, too, become less balanced when controlling for specific factors.

The decline in the number of unattached immigrant men toward the end of the century was reflected in the statistics of marriage in Córdoba: the number of marriages by Europeans dropped significantly beginning in the mid-1890s. An almost total absence of marriageable European women in Córdoba during the 1870s had been a central reason for the overwhelming proportions of marriages between immigrants and creoles. This incipient melting pot began to wane with the presence, however tentative, of European females. Our sample data indicate that as early as the 1880s, when males still represented by far the greatest proportion of immigrants, the percentages of intra-European unions quickly doubled, and continued to climb through the end of the period under study. Moreover, Table II shows that while initially the ratio of unmarried European men to unmarried European women was nearly ten to one, it decreased sharply by 1906. Among Argentines, however, the relatively greater proportion of unmarried females remained nearly constant throughout. Thus, the potential for intermarriages between immigrant men and Argentine women should have been facilitated by a surplus of both groups in the city.

It was more difficult for non-cordobeses to find mates than for the local population. In an Argentine city the size of Córdoba, natives and longtime residents knew virtually everyone within the same socioeconomic circle; the possible exception might have taken place among the agricultural laborers who lived too widely dispersed over the surrounding area to keep in close contact with one another. Geography and social ecology were essential in facilitating the informal network of intra-cohort communication. Merchants had their associations or formed ad hoc organizations to petition the authorities for commercial privileges; various immigrant groups had their voluntary associations; the creole elites had their social clubs; and, by the end of the century, many skilled workers also formed their own organizations.¹⁶ However, it took time for new residents in urbanized areas to belong to social organizations, to establish themselves as legitimate members of the mercantile sector—in short, to “belong.” Yet, marriages for these outsiders took place within a relatively short time after arriving in the city, often in a matter of only months. How could the parents or guardians of courted women, in many cases recently arrived themselves, feel secure about their suitors? In a very real sense, men who planned to marry also had to “wed” the brides’ families. Our data show that if all other factors were held constant, the groom and the father of the bride usually employed “heritage” as a point of commonality between them. Table III indicates that the place of birth of the brides’ fathers was of critical importance; it radically altered the general pattern of intra-ethnic marriages from that displayed using only the brides’ and grooms’ birthplaces.

While nearly half of the European men married women within their own ethnic group, approximately 80 percent of those men were actually marrying into families where the father was also European. Likewise, the Argentine men married into creole families at an overwhelming rate of 92.5 percent. In fact, the correlation score between areas of birth of grooms and brides’ fathers is stronger (+.71) than the one between the nationalities of grooms and brides (+.50).¹⁷ Such results indicate that the differences in national heritage remained viable elements of selection.

Enough time had elapsed by 1910 to have a large population of first-generation Argentines, yet women of these households maintained their cultural traditions, not by marrying creoles, but by keeping the families ethnically homogeneous through marriage to European men. An unswerving recalcitrance on the part of traditional creoles to marry first-generation Argentine women aided the endeavors of immigrant families with Argentine-born daughters to remain within their own ethnic communities.

The partial correlation of marital unions, controlling for the effects of the fathers’ origins, indicates the impact that parentage had on the execution of marital choices. A partial correlation between two variables provides a measure of their relationship while adjusting for the effects caused by one or more additional variables on the same relationship. If the birthplace of a woman mattered to her suitor, as evidenced by a correlation score of +.68, the birthplace of her father represented an even stronger input into the dynamics of inter-ethnic mingling in Córdoba: the strength of the association between grooms and fathers of the brides on the basis of geographic background is a stronger +.71.¹⁸ When we computed the correlation once again between grooms and brides, this time controlling for the effects of the women’s fathers, the score dropped significantly to +.22.¹⁹ These results signify that the birthplace of the prospective father-in-law alone was responsible for over 41 percent of the variance in the choices of marriage partners. Without taking into consideration the effects of the fathers, the nationalities of the brides alone accounted for only 4.8 percent of the variance.

Buenos Aires vs. Córdoba

In Table IV we present the endogamy rates of four nationalities residing in Buenos Aires during 1893-1894, 1899-1901 and 1907-1908. These figures come from a work prepared by the Italian demographer Franco Savorgnan, and were employed by Gino Germani in his influential study, Política y sociedad to show the high incidence of intermarriage in Argentina.²⁰ The figures attest to a decreasing rate of intra-ethnic unions for all but one group, the Spanish immigrants, who increased their rates by nearly 6 percent between 1893 and 1908. Of all the ethnic groups, Argentines in Buenos Aires are shown as most receptive to amalgamation; their endogamy rate revolved around 45 percent and represented the lowest figure. Table V demonstrates a different situation in Córdoba, where the Argentines remained aloof, their endogamy rate of 98.5 percent standing in sharp contrast to the Argentine porteño average of 45 percent. Proportionately, the Frenchmen residing in Córdoba, not the Argentines, mingled the most; but Frenchmen also married as many French women as natives. Cordoba’s Italian men displayed a rate of ethnic endogamy of over 70 percent. Except for the Frenchmen, the Spanish men had the lowest, not the highest rate of introversion, as was the case of Buenos Aires—nearly one-third of them married native-born Argentine women.

Our sample, however, provides more information based on ethnic lineage than that of earlier researchers. Table VI shows that the coincidence between grooms and fathers-in-law was once again higher than that between men and women in all groups but one, since the rate for Argentines fell by approximately 4 percent to 93.9. The proportions of marriages where the groom and the father-in-law came from the same country, however, showed marked increases. Among Frenchmen the figure now jumped to 50 percent, Italians showed a 3.3 percent increase, while the increment among the Spaniards was of nearly 12 points.

The proportions of unions in Córdoba, when controlling for the effects exerted by the women’s fathers, stand in sharpest contrast to the traditional assumptions about ethnic endogamy and the “melting pot” in Argentina. The lineage behind each marriage brings into serious question the accepted notions about an environment that produced ongoing cultural and ethnic blends. We suspect that the data gathered by Savorgnan would have shown significantly different results if he had identified first-generation Argentines as such. Marriages within ethnic “communities” occurred at a greater rate than he realized. In using aggregate data, however, Savorgnan did not have the marriage acts available to him. Thus, the great divergence between cordobés and porteño figures may be only apparent. Cultural differences between Buenos Aires and major cities of the interior may also have accounted for the variations; only further studies in other urban centers can provide more precise answers. We should be cautious, however, about differences in cosmopolitan outlooks between Buenos Aires and leading interior cities. Córdoba, Rosario, and Mendoza, at least, soon matched the internationalist porteño perspective; they did not remain “provincial” or “Hispanic,” as did northern centers like Salta and Jujuy.

In order to make the fairest comparisons between the accepted endogamy rates, such as Savorgnan’s, and the cases in Córdoba, we devised tables for the same nationalities during the same years. Table VII shows that the sharp differences between the groups remained, while Table VIII, controlling for the fathers-in-law, exacerbates these differences once again.

Published results stemming from aggregate data on Buenos Aires have long been projected for the whole of Argentina. In fact, as soon as immigration and economic development began, leading Argentines predicted such results. In addition to pointing to the lack of women during the first waves of immigration, they characterized European men as more family oriented than creole men and offered this as evidence for the mixture of immigrant men with creole women.²¹ Moreover, they did not accept the unions of different nationalities prosaically. They believed them to be essential and claimed that the nation’s future and its progress depended greatly on ethnic mixtures which would result in a harder working population of capitalists.

Residence and Romance

The selection of grooms and brides depended in large measure upon where people lived. The relative distances between them, the mode and availability of transportation, and the economic standing of their neighborhoods all were crucial. The two-way frequency distribution in Table IX cross-tabulates the census sections of brides’ and grooms’ homes for the years 1889-1909. Sections 2, 3, 4, and 5 formed the city’s center; Sections 1, 6, 7, 8, and 9 comprised suburban zones, some of which were situated quite far from the downtown areas. The data indicate that most of the brides and grooms lived in the same censal sections. The modal frequencies—the cells where the largest numbers of cases took place—appear at the census sections where both partners originally resided, regardless of age, socioeconomic status or occupation. The least frequent cases of intersectional marriages appeared between metropolitan zones farthest away from each other. (See map.)

The “district” represented the censal geographic unit within each section. The city’s metropolitan area contained several districts per section, and virtually all covered an area formed by a six-block rectangle. We would expect, therefore, that inter- and intra-district marriages occurred with regularity, since the districts were so small that a short walk could enable a man to go courting in one adjacent to his own.

Tables X and XI show the rate of intra-district marriages in the central and peripheral areas, respectively, between 1889 and 1909. The average geographic endogamy rate of 53.5 percent for peripheral (usually marginal and agricultural) districts stood much higher than the 39.4 percent average for the central area. The comparisons of these percentages are difficult, however, since the area covered by each of the suburban districts was considerably larger and held a much lower concentration of residents than did districts within the city’s core. The absence of suburban intra-district unions in some of the districts (37, 54, 59, 60, and 81) may have been a function of the nearly total lack of marriageable women along those tracts composed of virtually deserted lands. By the same token, the occurrences of total endogamy (Districts 29, 33, 39, 47, 58, and 76) could have been the result of men not wishing or not able to travel relatively great distances to seek potential marital relationships closer to the city. The cases of high suburban geographic endogamy also included the marriages between members of extended families who worked together on the same or contiguous farms. It was also not unusual for hired farmhands in agricultural districts distant from the urban center to be accepted into the owners’ families through marriages with their daughters.

Among Córdobas non-native males, social, cultural, and economic norms were also responsible for geographic endogamy. These men tended to settle and remain close to the residences where they first settled upon arrival. Both creole and European migrants who settled in the central area, but who could not afford to pay much for lodging, rented rooms in the tenements that proliferated in Córdoba at the turn of the century. In addition, cultural inputs affected choices of residence, particularly in the case of creoles. Migrating creole families consisted principally of displaced agricultural laborers without skills for most urban employment. The unskilled and the service sectors were the only avenues of work for those who wished to live in the central part of the city. The majority had spent their Uves tilling the soil, and found comparable work in the suburbs where they lived in humble shacks known as ranchos.

Communication within and among marginal sections was difficult, especially after dark, the courting period for most of the working men who labored from ten to fourteen hours daily. Pedestrians found roadways either dusty or muddy, depending on the season of the year. Streetcar service between suburban sections was either limited or nonexistent. Although the city of Buenos Aires had a number of streetcar systems in operation by the early 1870s, the city of Córdoba had only three as late as the 1890s.²² The streetcar lines of the “Tramway San Vicente” linked the center of the city directly to the suburb of San Vicente (Section 7), while the “Tramway de Córdoba” and the “Tramway Argentino” joined General Paz (Section 8) to the commercial core.²³ However, no public transit lines joined the center with other suburbs until after 1900, and no streetcar systems linked any two suburban areas during our period.

The city’s influential and moneyed circles saw the streetcar less as a basic social organism than as a speculative commercial venture aimed at increasing the number of potential shoppers brought to the downtown area. The route of the “Tramway San Vicente,” for instance, benefitted leading merchants by following the important commercial streets on which they owned shops. They had invested in this streetcar line in order precisely to insure that the route would serve to increase their own sales’ volume.²⁴

The high incidence of violent crimes reinforced the parochial nature of social contacts by keeping residents close to their homes at night. This was particularly true of suburbanites. On the north shore of the Primero River, east of the train station located in Alta Córdoba (part of Section 6), lay one of the city’s rancheríos, or slums. It typified Cordoba’s poor areas with dark, narrow and dirty alleys that delineated the boundaries of barrios tragicomically named by the popular wit: “Barrio of the Frayed Clothes,” “Barrio of the Moth,” “Barrio of the Scraps.” One observer likened the suburban byways to a “social underground” where pedestrians faced threats ranging from stonings to stabbings.²⁵

Streetlights, even in the central zone, were neither efficient nor numerous until well into the twentieth century. A candle served as the only streetlight in each block of the most central area until 1871. Each one burned perhaps for as little as one hour, and shed light only in the immediate vicinity of its post. After 1871, when the National Exposition took place in Córdoba, the city began to use kerosene for its streetlamps but the number of lamp posts remained low. Night-walkers still needed to carry their own lamps for safety’s sake.²⁶ Kerosene remained in use in suburban sections, however, throughout the 1890s, long after the electrification of streetlights in the center had taken place.²⁷

A process of decay resulted inevitably from a municipal policy that tended primarily to the needs of the center, at the expense of the suburbs. Thus, inadequate transportation, high crime rates, and dark, forbidding streets, all conspired to keep Córdoba’s residents near their homes to seek their closest co-nationals.

Marriage, Mobility, and Integration

Some scholars argue that financial considerations often induced parental acceptance of inter-ethnic marriages. They assume that creole families tolerated many such unions in the hope of benefitting from the financial input of immigrants who had money, or who showed promise of having some in the near future.²⁸ Though not impossible, socioeconomic mobility through marriage for the men in our sample was minimal. The commonality of social attributes— literacy, residential area, and occupational levels—of grooms’ and brides’ families was so prevalent at wedding time that the occupational distribution of the grooms, shown in Table XII, could hardly have altered as a result of their marriages. The lines of social stratification in Córdoba were too rigorously drawn to permit a man in the service sector, for example, to marry into a family of merchants; nor would the daughter of a doctor marry someone in petty trade. Even members of the alto comercio rarely entered into families of distinguished professional cordobeses.

The rare cases of inter-ethnic marriages did, however, suggest some financial or status benefits. The marriage of Carlos Barruti in 1870 illustrates a case of economic improvement for the creole family.²⁹ Barrati had been born in Montevideo to Italian parents, and by the time of the first national census in 1869 was living with his widowed mother in downtown Córdoba as part owner of a confitería.³⁰ He married a cordobesa named Gregoria Cabanillas, daughter of middlelevel Córdoba parents. Although only twenty-six years old at the time of his marriage, Barrati was already well on his way to becoming a wealthy man by local standards. He had joined with a Spanish Basque to launch a successful business, and it is evident from the amounts of their investments that neither of the two had started the business from a position of poverty. Barrati’s prospective father-in-law, Abelino Cabanillas, borrowed over 800 gold pesos in goods and cash from the business, even though he owned no interest in the corporation. The marriage was less than one year old before the young bride became a widow. She received half of her husband’s estate: merchandise, 2,888 gold pesos; furniture, 1,330; two houses downtown and a parcel of land outside the city, 8,759; liquid assets, 750 gold pesos.³¹ Thus, the Cabanillas family improved economically from Gregoria’s marriage to Barrati. While Barrati’s large assets were not typical of immigrants in Córdoba, his case does exemplify the marriages of mutual benefit that took place among the minority comprising the city’s exogamous unions.³²

The Italian José Barrera’s marriage to the creole Gregoria Gómez illustrates the case of ethnic fluidity that was possible when both partners belonged to the lower class. In 1908 he was a milkman living on Tablada Street, within Section 2, close to the riverbank, in a slum area festering with tenements, tuberculosis, and streetwalkers. As were other grooms in inter-ethnic marriages, Barrera was illiterate. Nearby lived Bautista Gómez, a handicapped creole who had migrated from the town of Copacabana in the Department of Ischiln, part of the poor and arid northern area bordering the Province of Catamarca. His twenty-three-year-old daughter Gregoria worked and cared for her unemployed father. Any suitor of hers could expect to share the burden of the Gómez’ financial situation. Until then, she would remain the only source of support for her family.³³

Firmly established European merchants in the city found it somewhat easier than less wealthy comerciantes to marry into merchant creole families. The results in such cases entailed integration, but no social climbing was implicit since the parties belonged to the same social station. The marriage of Heriberto Martínez in 1890 typifies this type of union. Martínez, a Spaniard who had arrived in Córdoba as a small child, achieved high standing in the community and became one of the city’s leading wholesalers.³⁴ As a leader in the commercial circles, he also enjoyed numerous social and political contacts. His marriage to Manuela Carranza, the daughter of a respected creole merchant, cemented an economic as well as a familial relationship.³⁵ Still, as illustrated in Table XIII, most European merchants did not marry Argentine women. Nearly eighty-five percent of the European men involved in non-manual occupations married daughters of Europeans. The overwhelming majority of the non-manual occupations represented the mercantile trades. Usually, the grooms reported their occupations at the time of their weddings simply as comerciantes.

Within the limited integration that took place between Europeans and creoles, inter-ethnic marriages were most common among the European professionals. The marriage of Andrés Raedemacker is a a case in point. Raedemacker had been professor of music at the Brussels Conservatory, where earlier he had received his degree. After his arrival in the city of Córdoba in the late 1880s, he became professor of piano at the newly founded National Institute of Music. The students at the Institute represented the city’s fashionable, traditional and wealthy creole families. Although the cost of matriculation was minimal, certain basic musical requirements, which could only be fulfilled through private lessons, permitted only the wealthy to attend.³⁶ In this social circle Raedemacker met his bride, Luisa Novillo. Her father had been a highly successful businessman who by 1895 listed himself simply as rentista (landlord), indicating the ownership of a great amount of wealth in real property.³⁷

As professor of music at the National Institute, Raedemacker earned no more than seventy pesos monthly, and his financial state could not improve significantly by tutoring students privately. Moreover, the Baring Crisis of 1890 would soon force the Institute to close. His marriage in 1889, however, provided Raedemacker with financial security.³⁸ In cases of socioeconomic mobility like Raedemacker’s, where the man’s income was low, it was essential that his occupation be prestigious enough to permit contacts among the elite. Only by participating socially in the events and festivities of the rich could anyone with titular prestige and little wealth hope to break into the highest social class; otherwise, the odds against marrying outside one’s own financial station were too overwhelming.

Conclusions

Social contacts in nineteenth-century urban Córdoba, at least the relations between its men and women, were conducted in parochial fashion. The geographic reach of socialization was limited. Not only did men and women restrict their contacts to the same census section, but they also limited their courting to the small perimeter that comprised the few blocks around their home or contiguous districts. A large share of the responsibility for prolonging the residents’ sub-barrio mentality rested on the conscious neglect or the unavoidable limitations of the municipal administrations that failed to carry out a modern program of urban development. Poor lighting and inefficient policing made the suburbs dangerous places after dark—the time most residents would do their courting. Even in the central zones it was not customary to be out late at night, so that short distances between the residences of men and women were also essential to sentimental propinquity downtown.

The limited network of public transportation exacerbated the limitations of geographic outreach. If it was at least possible for some dauntless men to walk in a dark street or to confront the shadowy suburbs where they lived, it was unusual to go from one suburb to another, or to travel regularly from one point within the metropolitan area to a place across town. The commercially oriented streetcar system was never meant to serve the social needs of the public. The municipal authorities did little to expand public transportation until the twentieth century, thereby acting to stifle any possibilities of expanding one’s social frontiers.

Marriages took place among near neighbors. Yet, the urban social ecology was open sufficiently to prevent the formation of ghettos. The processes of Córdoba’s ethnic amalgamation resulted in segregated households, not segregated barrios.

An immigrant’s professional status, as we have seen, could occasionally overcome his financial deficiencies. By processes of emulation and socialization within the elite, he could achieve economic mobility through marriage to one of its members. Mobility via marriage remained relatively uncommon in Córdoba, however, because an immigrant’s aspiration to belong to a social stratum superior to the one in which he circulated was difficult to attain. One could argue that Córdoba’s interior location sheltered its traditions from the cosmopolitan and modernizing processes that were developing in larger cities like Buenos Aires. According to this view, Córdoba’s rigid social stratification system rested, as is the case with power relations, on the influential clusters in the local community having “their source of legitimacy in the folkways, some of which may be unique to the community.”³⁹ We submit, however, that Córdoba’s folkways were not unique, nor were its social boundaries unusually rigorous in an Argentine context.⁴⁰

Nationalism remained the biggest contributor to the high incidence of intra-ethnic unions, regardless of social rank or time period. Analysis of marriages along a general European-Argentine dichotomy of grooms and brides shows that any melting pot that may have existed was not facilitated by native men. At this level of analysis the eventual appearance of the “new Argentine” was almost solely a function of the energy that immigrants—not creoles—exerted. While at least some Europeans wedded Argentine women, the intermarriage rates involving creole men were infinitesimal.

Europeans were indeed melting into the native population by exercising their marital choices; yet, when employing ethnic lineage as an analytical tool, we find the great majority of foreign men marrying mostly their own. Ethnic endogamy, then, was not the predilection only of creoles. Most Argentine females born to immigrant parents also married foreign men. Both creoles and Europeans were thereby responsible for prolonging the period of cultural pluralism in Argentina. It is not certain that ethnic antagonism was the source of the ethnic endogamy; but neither was it accidental that members of each national group kept mostly to their own in the selection of mates.⁴¹

The mistake of Argentine scholars has been to think of their country, because of its sparse native population during the nineteenth century, as a vacuum in which the varieties of immigrant elements floated freely until they all mixed. But a nation even in its formative stages is not a vacuum. It merely represents a geopolitical expression capable of accommodating self-restricting nuclei of people, every nucleus living in harmony with every other. There was, then, no single free market, but a number of them, mostly self-sufficient, and each with its own currency of ethnicity. The members of each group need not have felt any requirement or desire to alter radically its composition.

Most nineteenth-century liberal Argentine leaders envisioned the economic benefits of invigorating their country through the formation of a “new Argentine man.” Most liberal Argentine scholars of modern times uphold the notion of the Argentine melting pot as an accomplished fact.⁴² Most present-day cosmopolitan Argentines will deny the existence of ethnic separation in large urban centers as if the recognition of cultural pluralism were a self-denigrating admission. Only those men and women of the period we studied, in seeking to marry their own, really understood their circumstances. It was not for the sake of economic benefit, nor to substantiate subsequent sociological theories, nor to quiet the self-imposed fears of later generations that they married whom they did; all they sought was their own happiness. In so doing they displayed the great flexibility required to find each other in a strange environment, and adapt the cultural norms of their native areas to their new situations.

It is our hope that further tests of historic ethnic familial assimilation be conducted into the past of other Argentine cities. Only then can we generate the comparative perspective necessary to observe variation and posit theories. For now, we can show some comparative figures gathered from the only available published sources. Table XIV displays the percentages of marriageable Argentines and immigrants in the cities of Buenos Aires, Rosario, and Córdoba for different years between 1900 and 1906. However, such data impose three serious limitations to their usage. First, because so many thousands of immigrants arrived yearly to Argentina it is especially important to gather data on a temporally even basis. Secondly, differences in the compilers’ categorizations hide reality and hinder a viably comparative sense; the city of Rosario, for example, classified both males and females above the age of fifteen as marriageable, while Buenos Aires and Córdoba considered males above the age of twenty. Differences in years and ways of gathering data were responsible for the deviation from porteño and cordobés figures. Thirdly, and most importantly, the data shown were aggregated already by census enumerators and leave no opportunity to answer questions of ethnic lineage.

One of the attitudes that has stifled intra-Argentine comparisons has been the pervading sense that cultural differences between the “modern” littoral region and the more “traditional” interior have been responsible for Argentina’s internal normative disparities. Such is the orthodox view, best explained by Germani’s center-periphery dyad. Recently, however, another view posits that when migrants met in a metropolitan area with urbanites with different cultural values, the two sets of norms held by these actors simply fused.⁴³

This article sampled only in-migrants and European males—non-natives of the city of Córdoba. Most of the Argentines in the sample who migrated to Córdoba were not from other large cities; instead, they had been rural residents from the province’s interior or from adjacent provinces. These in-migrants were no more “traditional” than were the in-migrants taking up new residences in the city of Buenos Aires; the city of Córdoba was to them a bustling center of urban activities and functions just as Buenos Aires was to others. The more limited social and economic contact with Europe kept by the interior’s major cities does not imply that they were more “traditional” to those newly settled in them. Argentine in-migrants were on an equal footing with European immigrants when they first faced their new residence, Córdoba.

Probably, the best way of researching the degrees and forms of the Argentine melting pot would be through attitudinal surveys; unfortunately such a method is closed to historians who work on the period of massive immigration into Argentina. This should not close the door to social urban histories. In lieu of questionnaires, researchers must seek in archival sources the social data necessary to address the issues. Argentine notarial archives, with their wealth of social information at the individual level, can provide answers to historical questionnaires. Until the time when we can observe comparable raw data, the experience in the city of Córdoba—one of the three largest centers during this period—stands in sharp contrast to the conventional wisdom that has represented the whole nation.

Author notes