The Racial Articulation of Middle Class Identity in Argentina - Garguin

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'Los Argentinos Descendemos de los Barcos': The Racial Articulation of

Middle Class Identity in Argentina (1920-1960)
Enrique Garguin
To cite this Article Garguin, Enrique(2007) ''Los Argentinos Descendemos de los Barcos': The Racial Articulation of Middle
Class Identity in Argentina (1920-1960)', Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies, 2: 2, 161 — 184
To link to this Article: DOI: 10.1080/17442220701489563
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Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies
Vol. 2, No. 2, September 2007, pp. 161–184
‘Los Argentinos Descendemos de los

Barcos’: The Racial Articulation of
Middle Class Identity in Argentina
(1920–1960)
Enrique Garguin
Downloaded By: [Boero, Alejandro] At: 22:21 13 August 2010
This essay examines some aspects of the making of middle class identity in Argentina
during the first half of the 20th century. Its main argument is that this identity only
crystallized when it was articulated through racial discourses accompanying the
empowerment of the Peronist working class during the 1940s and 1950s. If a middle class
identity was not clearly articulated earlier, it was due, in part, to ‘common sense’
understandings of the nation as homogeneously white, European, and socially mobile,
notions that did not favor the circulation of the concept of a middle class. This paper thus
analyzes two processes – the profound and persistent identification of the Argentine
nation with Europe, and the racialization of the social and political ‘Other’ performed by
anti-Peronist forces – in order to better understand the relatively late appearance of an
unambiguously middle class discourse, as well as the intertwined construction of
whiteness and middle class identity in Argentina.
Keywords: Argentina; middle class; whiteness; racial articulation;

national identity; peronism
The historical formation of the Argentine middle class is particularly paradoxical.

Early 20th century Argentina boasted the largest ‘middle sectors’ and the most
vigorous capitalist economy of Latin America (Johnson, 1958). Based on the 1936
Census, Gino Germani (1942) estimated that the middle class constituted
45.9 per cent of the economically active population in the city of Buenos Aires.
Moreover, between 1916 and 1930, Argentina was ruled by the Unión Cı́vica Radical
(UCR), often considered an ‘archetypical’ middle class based political party (e.g.
Rock, 1977). However, one finds scant reference to the middle class in primary
sources until the 1950s (Romer, 1998; Garguin, 2002; Adamovsky, 2005). This is all
the more remarkable considering that by 1900 Argentines possessed a clear sense of
ISSN 1744–2222 (print)/ISSN 1744–2230 (online)/07/020161–24 ß 2007 Taylor & Francis

DOI: 10.1080/17442220701489563
162 E. Garguin
upward social mobility and a well-established (working) class discourse. Indeed, it is
hard to talk about the Argentine middle class before the emergence of Peronism as
anything other than the kind of heuristic category through which today’s scholars try
to standardize the multifarious realities that have previously resisted reduction to
that category.1
This article is concerned with the time-lag between the advance of the process of
capitalist development in Argentina and the emergence of the idea of ‘middle class’ as
a distinctive social and political subject. How did an articulated notion of middle
class, as a concrete social and political subject, actually emerge? How can we explain
the late popularization of the term ‘middle class’ that would later seem so appropriate
to characterize central aspects of Argentine history? I argue that during the first half
of the 20th century the notion of middle class was constructed on the basis of two key
differentiations: one in opposition to the landed bourgeoisie, mainly articulated
through the binary contrast of people/oligarchy; and another in opposition to the
working class, a difference that was mainly articulated through racial categories.2
Focusing on the realm of representation, this article analyzes one particular
dimension of the complex process of middle class historical formation in Argentina:
its discursive articulation. It argues that middle class identity in Argentina only
crystallized when it was articulated via a range of racist and racializing discourses
accompanying the emergence and entrenchment of Peronism. Underlying processes
of differentiation and identification were certainly at stake in both that middle class
identity and its racial articulation. If such a middle class identity was not clearly
articulated earlier, this was in part because representations of the nation had, up until
this point, focused around the image of immigrants and their children who, thanks to
their hard work and the generosity of the new homeland, sooner or later achieved a
relatively good social position. In other words, the dominant representation of the
nation until the mid-20th century was in part the result of extending the experience
of the urban middle sectors of Buenos Aires and the littoral to the whole country.
Thus, the nation was constructed as homogeneously white, European (by contrast to
the mestizo representation of other Latin American nations) and lacking significant
social differences, a representation that did not favor the configuration of a clear
notion of a middle class. The emergence of Peronism would stimulate the discovery
that such racialized image did not apply to the whole nation but only to a part of it;
and this part would be increasingly identified as the middle class.3
The Argentine Middle Class: A Delayed Identity?

By the mid-20th century, the middle class was represented in opposition to the
working class based Peronist movement. Paradoxically, the characteristics and
policies of Juan Perón’s government would soon be considered as ‘typical’ of Latin
American middle classes: economic nationalism, social welfare, and democratization
(Johnson, 1958). Moreover, Perón was probably the first politician to explicitly
address a middle class subject before shifting his attention toward the unions – a shift
due, in part, to the failure of his first appeals to middle class people (Perón, 1944,
pp. 120–137; Horowitz, 1999). It is not my aim to analyze that attempt or to explain
Racial Articulation of Middle Class Identity in Argentina 163
why it was negatively received, but these issues point to a more fundamental
question: was there an already formed middle class to be mobilized?
While there is no specific historical study of the formation of the Argentine middle
class, the existing historiography offers approaches and hypotheses through which it
is possible to contextualize the analysis of the racial articulation of a middle class
identity in the country. There is no doubt that the mass of immigrants arriving
between 1860 and 1930 had a great impact on the shaping of Argentine identities
(Romero, 1946; Halperin Donghi, 1987; Archetti, 1999). According to a popular
saying that links Argentine national identity with European immigration,
‘we Argentines descend from the ships.’ This myth of ‘Europe in the Rı́o de la
Plata’ coincides with another myth about the tremendous social mobility offered by
Argentina to anyone who wished to work hard on its generous soil. My first
argument is that as a result of these two myths – and the partial truths that they
expressed – the very notion of being Argentine became so conflated with social
mobility that the specific idea of a middle class did not carry much meaning and
hence remained undeveloped. The association of an ill-defined middle sector with the
nation at large was reflected and reinforced in the political arena by the UCR, which
hardly ever appealed explicitly to a middle class subject but rather to ‘the people,’
conceived of in binary opposition to the ‘oligarchy’ and identified with the entire
nation (Romero, 1946; Rock, 1977; Adamovsky, 2005).
The making of this national identity was never a smooth, linear process.
Sectors of the elite challenged it periodically, raising the traditional Creole
‘gaucho’ as the national hero (Halperin Donghi, 1987; Rock, 1987; Svampa, 1994;
Joseph, 2000). From below, working class based ideologies such as Anarchism
also offered contesting notions of identity. The latter, however, lost strength after
the first decade of the century (Rock, 1977; Campo, 1983), and a vast – and less
conflictive – web of ethnic and neighborhood associations, popular libraries and
political committees gained preeminence in their place during the 1920s. Some
authors identify the membership of those voluntary associations as ‘popular
sectors’ (Gutiérrez & Romero, 1995), a descriptive term in tune with the then-
dominant notion of ‘the people,’ but one which also blurs processes of class
formation underlying those seemingly consensual ‘popular sectors.’ Other scholars
have noted the importance of class tensions within many associations whose
elites were, unlike the rank and file, mainly from the middle sectors. Most
importantly, Eduardo Mı́guez (Devoto & Mı́guez, 1992, pp. 354–358) suggests
that voluntary associations were sites where middle class people constructed their
middle class identity. I argue along similar lines that a middle class identity was
not clearly constructed until Peronism eroded the popular public sphere that
began to consolidate itself in the 1920s.4 Identifying ‘the people’ with the
working class and replacing those associations with unions and Unidades Básicas
(political committees mostly led by workers), Peronism deprived that popular
public sphere of its mediating role between the state and ‘the people.’ Peronism,
thus, broke the middle sectors’ main links with ‘the people’ and encouraged a
new tripartite image of society (oligarchy/middle class/people) to compete with
the old bipartite one (oligarchy/people) (Garguin, 2002).
164 E. Garguin
Peronism and the working class, however, were not the only actors in this drama.
The middle sectors of the 1940s considered themselves to be not only a central part
of ‘the people,’ but also the ‘heirs of Europe’ and immigration. Thus, confronted with
the disturbing emergence of Peronist workers in their space, they sought to
differentiate themselves not only from the oligarchy, as in the past, but also from the
new Peronist Other. A racialized gaze seems to have played a key role in this process.
The Peronist masses, with all their plebeian features overtly displayed in public, were
almost incomprehensible within previous symbolic and cognitive schemata, and were
soon identified with new migrants from the interior of the country. The middle
sectors increasingly objectified and belittled them through the use of the term
‘cabecita negra’ (little black head) which became tantamount to Peronist worker
(Ratier, 1971; Jauretche, [1966] 1982; James, 1988). This fit into a long-standing
tradition through which the rising middle sectors racially stigmatized those political
adversaries with plebeian attitudes and constituencies (Taylor, 1979, pp. 120–126).
Such a racist reaction suggests that a deep sense of whiteness may have played an
important role in the process of middle class formation. This is something that has
not received the attention it deserves, since race is practically a taboo topic in
Argentina. Anthropologists have unveiled the deep sense of whiteness implicit in the
dominant national imaginary for contemporary Argentina (Briones, 1998, 2005;
Segato, 1998; Grimson, 2005), some of them even centering their analysis on the
middle class (Joseph, 2000; Guano, 2003, 2004).5 Scholars have noted both the
‘success’ achieved by the 19th century elite’s project of whitening the population
(Halperin Donghi, 1987; Andrews, 1990; Wade, 1997; Segato, 1998; Briones, 2005),
and the appropriation of European racial science by intellectual elites during the first
decades of the 20th century (Helg, 1990; Stepan, 1991; Svampa, 1994). But what was
the bridge between 19th century whitening projects, the explicit racism of early 20th
century intellectuals, and the racialized class language of mid-century?
I argue that the bridge was the dialectical process of white and middle class identity
formation. I will consider some of the trails connecting both ends of that bridge
through the analysis of discourses produced by intellectuals, politicians and other
public figures. Not all of them can be characterized as belonging to the middle
sectors, but their ideas and preconceptions put down deep roots into public opinion
as well as in common sense. This was in part due to their prestige (they wrote mainly
from a white, educated and ‘civilized’ position), which made their work core reading
across a range of social sectors, particularly among those that would become middle
class. It is also due to the amazing efficacy of public schools in spreading similar
values. Finally, the very same ideas were dispersed among innumerable voluntary
associations and through mass media, and their enduring effects can be seen even
today (Joseph, 2000; Guano, 2003, 2004; Briones, 2005).
Thus, this article traces the construction of a key element of the national
imaginary – its belief in its European roots – and its crisis with the rise of Peronism.6
I try to show how a particular social actor, ‘the man from Corrientes and Esmeralda’
depicted by Scalabrini Ortiz ([1931] 1971),7 created a partial and synthetic image of
himself; an image that, extended in both social and geographical senses, became the
archetypal figure of the whole nation. This hegemonic construction, through which
the porteño who met his friends in downtown coffee shops would be identified with
the whole nation, resulted from the displacements inscribed in two key myths. On the
one hand, the myth of upward social mobility made class differences irrelevant by
extending some people’s experience of mobility to the whole population. On the
other hand, the myth of Europe in the Rı́o de la Plata projected onto the whole
population the ethnicity of the overseas immigrants, who were considered to be
homogenously white and European.
Argentines Descend from Ships

Racially [Buenos Aires] is a white city. [. . .] It is a white city within a mestizo America.
A black man in Buenos Aires is as exotic as in London. And the same is true for a
gaucho. In that sense, it is whiter (extremely white) than New York; the latter has to
employ racism at all costs in order to maintain its whiteness. [Buenos Aires] has no
Indians or mulattos. Its men and women do not have the same skin and hair color,
nevertheless they are white. This does not constitute a privilege, especially from an
aesthetic point of view, but it is a good eugenic possibility. (Escardó, [1945] 1968, p. 16)
The myth of the European origins of the Argentine population is linked to 19th
century elite efforts to think of Argentina as different from the rest of Latin America
which, according to the ideological tropes of the time, did not fit within the category
of ‘civilized societies.’ Even in the times of independence, the Rı́o de la Plata area
exhibited ‘a more complete consensus than other regions of Spanish America’ about
the benefits expected from immigration; a consensus with only ‘partial and
ephemeral hesitations and dissidences’ (Halperin Donghi, 1987, p. 191). Together
with the success of pro-immigration projects during the second half of the
19th century, that consensus encouraged the making of a national imaginary in
which the (European) immigrants occupied a central place.
While the idea of Argentina as a white nation can be traced back to the mid-19th
century, it was during the 20th century – as an effect of massive immigration – that it
crystallized into an undisputable ‘myth of origin’ and achieved common sense status,
expressed in the standing joke that Argentines descend from ships. In fact,
19th century intellectuals recognized the dubiousness of the idiom, affirming that
the white and European character of the Argentine population was a matter of
dominance, not total exclusivity. Since they could not deny that non-white elements
were involved in the making of the ‘Argentine race,’ they resorted to various devices
to try to prove that such elements were minimal or were subsumed under the
dominant (European) ones.
Bartolomé Mitre was probably the first proponent of an organic and coherent
image of Argentine history and nationhood, one which proved to be particularly
compelling and lasting. The ‘father of Argentine historiography’ claimed that the Rı́o
de la Plata region had been different from the rest of the Spanish colonies since the
times of the conquest. In many respects, its history had been much closer to the
history of the English colonies of North America than to the history of the rest of
Spanish America. In his view, Mesoamerica and the Andes were populated by
semi-civilized peoples that had been conquered by rapacious and adventurous men
representing the most backward features, not only of Europe, but also of Spain.
166 E. Garguin
The result had been the establishment of feudalism and a hardly desirable racial
mixture. By contrast, the Rı́o de la Plata region had received the most advanced
settlers among the Spaniards, ‘true colonists in the sense of settling and civilizing,’
‘true immigrants’ bringing with them a ‘municipal spirit’ and a work ethic. In
addition, they had not found precious mineral wealth or vast indigenous populations
to subdue. The result had been the making of a ‘rudimentary democracy’ based
on scarcity, work, and shared efforts (Mitre, [1857] 1950, pp. 20–25). From its
inception, then, the nation had been linked to the most advanced expressions of the
process of Western civilization. And it had been also blessed with a promising racial
composition:
Three races converged [. . .] to create the physical and moral genesis of the (Rı́o de la)
Plata’s sociability; the European or Caucasian as an active component, the indigenous
or American as an auxiliary one, and the Ethiopian as a complement. An original type
resulted from their fusion. In this type the European blood prevailed because of its
superiority, constantly regenerating itself through immigration. Next to it, another

mixed race of the black and the white grew and improved, assimilating the physical and
moral qualities of the superior race. (Mitre, [1857] 1950, p. 31)8
Mitre recognized that the colonial history of the interior of the country was closer
to the history of Peru. The resulting feudal backwardness had been a main cause of
the long-term conflicts between Buenos Aires and other provinces. But in the making
of the nation, the interior had been subsumed under Buenos Aires (which was
‘the head and soul’ of the Argentine Provinces), much in the same way as the ‘inferior
races’ in the Rı́o de la Plata region had been subsumed under the superior elements of
European origin.
Mitre’s arguments conjured and vanquished the ghosts of inferior races and
justified his idea of an Argentina born from the seeds of European liberty and
democracy. Such intellectual construction, however, was not enough to place
Argentina on the same plane as the advanced societies of Europe. Hence,
pro-immigration policies were meant not only to civilize and ‘populate the desert,’
but also to whiten the population – in and of itself, an implicit part and parcel of the
civilizing project.
Within this context, the immigration projects were considered as quite successful
in spurring economic growth and contributing to the transformation of the country’s
ethnic composition. As a process coeval with the expansion of Social Darwinism and
the biological theories of races, it is not surprising that so many intellectuals glorified
the whitening road (Helg, 1990). Authors such as Domingo Faustino Sarmiento
(in his later years) and José Ingenieros (in his most positivist stage) wrote global
interpretations of Argentina and Latin America that were centered on their racial
compositions. They saw rigid racial hierarchies, slightly mitigated by the socializing
effects of public education (Helg, 1990; Svampa, 1994, pp. 115–128; Terán, 1986,
pp. 51–84). These authors contributed to the establishment of long-lasting racial
stereotypes, but their racial thought was not the most influential aspect of their
writings. By the early 20th century, the problems the elites feared the most were not
related the racial inferiority of the population, but to massive immigration (which in
turn had ethnic and racial connotations) and its disruptive consequences for the
quiet, village-like life that had characterized criollo Buenos Aires until then
(Helg, 1990, pp. 45–47). This was the most pressing issue for many intellectuals at
the time of the euphoric celebrations of the Independence Centennial.
Much has been written about the nationalist reaction of the Centenario but, as
Halperin Donghi (1987) has pointed out, that nationalist reaction did not deny the
immigrants’ contribution and did not attempt in any way to curtail the immigration
process. On the contrary, it sought to promote national cohesion by accelerating the
assimilation of foreigners, revealing at the same time the existence of deeply rooted
perceptions about the importance of the immigrants’ contributions.9 In this sense,
the nation was seen as a project in the making, as Horacio Rivarola argued in 1910:
No, they aren’t [the immigrants’ children] similar to the primitive Argentines, or to
their parents’ countrymen: they possess a bit of both groups. The environment modifies
them; cross-breeding modifies them even more; they aren’t but they will be; in a sense
they are Argentines, but in an other sense they are yet to be; their unity as a race is not
complete, it will be, it will be in the future. (quoted in Bagu, 1950, p. 44)
The national feeling, then, was to be found in the future; it was a project that had
to be fostered by the state, as made clear in the nationalist program promoted by
then-Secretary of Education Ramos Mejı́a. This program was directed toward
[. . .] the first immigrant generation, the most genuine child of an environment that is
starting to take form albeit with a certain vagueness, depositary of the future sentiment
of nationality, naturally, in the modern conception of the term. (quoted in Halperin
Donghi, 1987, p. 228)
Rivarola and Ramos Mejı́a, as well as Mitre, looked to the future for the realization
of the nation. After the Centennial, however, there was a key change to the
19th century liberal immigration project. What immigration advocates expected had
already been partially attained and partially disproved. The whitening aspect of the
project, in particular, appeared to have been successfully achieved on the surface,
while at the same time it did not seem to be the expected panacea. This situation
might have weakened their faith in immigration, but even chauvinist reactions
proved unable to undermine the 19th century consensus about the expected positive
outcomes of European immigration (Halperin Donghi, 1987). In any case, the image
of the Argentine population as overwhelmingly European was irreversible. The 1914
National Census reinforced that symbolic construction by showing that about one
third of the population had been born in foreign lands and the proportion rose to
about half in the city of Buenos Aires.
A consensus was built around the ‘melting pot’ model.10 Its constitutive elements
were already present in 19th century thought, but it became common sense in the
20th century, albeit with an important variation. Since then, the crucible would only
recognize European immigrants and criollos (allegedly of European origins as well)
as its components. In other words, by mid-19th century the nation’s presumed
dominant whiteness went hand in hand with the recognition of its still racially
troublesome character, an ongoing whitening project, and a clear awareness of
the different and conflictive interior. By the 20th century, immigration had
already given some of the expected results. At the same time, the provinces of the
168 E. Garguin
interior – already defeated by the federal government – did not cause more political
problems and were replaced in the elite’s concerns by a new source of malaise
provoked, in part, by the cumulative effects of pro-immigration policies. From
Buenos Aires outward, all Argentina was seen as a country of European origins, and
thus elite concern was no longer located in a racial Other, but within a population
considered as homogeneously white.
‘We are a country of immigrants,’ announced Socialist representative Enrique
Dickman to his colleagues in 1924. An immigrant himself, Dickman added:
The Argentine country, this vast crucible of a new race has brought here men of all
races, the upper crust of human races. It is enough to look at this arena and to analyze
each representative here to see that this is something new, singular, unique and
exemplary in this world [. . .]. I am part of the Argentine crucible, the Argentine tree
deeply rooted in the native race of the country, its robust Iberian trunk, its implanted
branches of all the most vigorous and intelligent races, and its blood sprinkled with a
touch of Semitic ferment which is, historically and socially, the leaven of a healthy and
fertile rebellion. (Dickman, 1946, pp. 154–155)
It seems surprising how the melting pot idea could coexist with the valuing of
some races as superior to others. Obviously, when referring to ‘the most vigorous and
intelligent races,’ Dickman had in mind the European races. Twenty years later, in
1946, he proclaimed the need ‘to attract – as in the past – a healthy and large
immigration.’ As in 1924, he did not always refer explicitly to the European
immigrant he had in mind, but occasionally he did, calling for ‘the arrival and
permanent settlement of a large and laborious European immigration’ (Dickman,
1946, p. 152). In fact, he used interchangeably notions such as ‘all races’ or simply
‘immigrants,’ together with others that made explicit reference to Europe, all of them
melted into a common anti-racist critique (Dickman, 1946, pp. 152–157). Hence,
after specifying the different nationalities of European (and only European)
immigrants, he concluded:
Such is the ethnic composition of the Argentine country. It is a real and wonderful
melting pot! And it is a monstrous aberration to encourage hatred among races and
religious persecution in the social and political environment of Argentina! (Dickman,
1946, p. 154)
Notwithstanding the universal character of his anti-racist discourse, Dickman
considered European and immigrant as synonyms and, more astonishingly, he
erased any consideration of the continent’s native peoples: ‘In America, we are all
immigrants – with the exception of native Indians that form a minority of the
population’ (Dickman, 1946, p. 154).
Dickman was not the only proponent of this kind of thought. Criticizing the overt
anti-Semitism of a schoolteacher, Augusto Bunge, a Socialist representative as well,
exclaimed: ‘A teacher, a school chair who propagates racial hatred in a country that has
been enriched with the contribution of all the white nations of the world!’ (Bunge,
1933). The naturalized way in which these public figures identified ‘immigration’ with
the European ‘white nations’ confirms how deeply rooted was the identification of
Argentina with immigration and European whiteness. The consolidation of this
imaginary was in part linked to the contemporary making and expansion of the
popular public sphere I mentioned earlier, since that web of voluntary associations not
only had frequent contacts with the intellectuals and politicians analyzed here, but
spread the very same ideas. An article published by the Asociación de Maestros (1931,
p. 19), which grouped thousands of teachers in the Province of Buenos Aires, similarly
began: ‘In a cosmopolitan country like ours . . .’ With equal spontaneity, a traveling
salesman’s wife greeted her Brazilian peers: ‘From Rosario de Santa Fe [the second
industrial and port city in Argentina], where the assimilation of races, temperaments,
and cultures is making a uniform, progressive and liberal human type . . .’ (Clarin,
1940). Is it necessary to speculate about which races were making that ‘uniform,
progressive and liberal human type’? Similar quotations can be easily found in diverse
sources, but the given examples are enough to show the spontaneity of a discourse that
took for granted the European origins of the Argentine population, a notion that
achieved the status of common sense as early as the 1920s.
There were, certainly, dissenting voices denying immigrants a place in the making
of nationality, but they did not manage to erode the emerging common sense.
Moreover, they did not question the immigrants’ contribution to the population,
which remained the center of their concerns. They only rejected immigrants’ claims
to a role in the spiritual formation of the nation. Conservative nationalist Carlos
Ibarguren, for example, stated in La Inquietud de Esta Hora (1934):
the massive avalanche of immigrants [. . .] has transformed Buenos Aires and the littoral
into a polyglot and heterogeneous region, a real chaotic ethnic Babel [that] has not
promoted the formation of a spiritual unity, a proper Argentine soul. This soul will
emerge and will be powerful only when nationalism creates the moral and organic unity
of all the social forces amalgamated in one only spirit. (quoted in Archetti, 1999, p. 31)
In a strictly demographic sense then, the crucible of races was apparent even for
Ibarguren. As Eduardo Archetti points out, Ibarguren did not see the nation as a
mixture of races. ‘The idea of amalgamation so explicitly presented’ was ‘a kind of
Renanian conception of the spirit of the nation as an expression of a collective
psychology.’ Hence, nationality was ‘reduced to a psychological phenomenon, to a
collective consciousness that [had to] be created. The question of racial mixing [was]
thus avoided’ (Archetti, 1999, p. 31). Following this trend, Carlos Ibarguren even
dared to deny the Argentine origins of tango, arguing that it was the result of
hybridity. Such an attitude, in marked contrast with common sense, pushed Ernesto
Sábato to ironically contend:
In fact, while it is certain that tango is a product of hybridity, it is false to say that it is
not Argentine; in any case, there aren’t any platonically pure peoples, and today’s
Argentina is the result (often a calamitous one, to tell the truth) of successive invasions,
starting from the one headed by the family of Carlos Ibarguren who, undoubtedly,
should be regarded by the Cafulcurás as an intruder, and whose opinions should be
considered as typical of an improvised Pampean.
Denying the Argentine origins of tango is a very pathetic self-destructive act; it would be
the same as denying the existence of Buenos Aires. Ibargueren’s autistic thesis would
erase in just one move our capital city [. . .]. And there wouldn’t be a government either,
since our presidents and governors tend to be mere children of Italians or Basques, or
hybrid products exactly like the tango. But what am I saying? Not even nationalism
170 E. Garguin
would survive the hecatomb, since we would have to sacrifice the Scalabrini Ortizes and
the Mosconis. (Sábato, 1963, pp. 11–12)
Far from denying the white character of the criollo population, nationalists and
catholic spiritualists reproduced the same kind of curses against aboriginal peoples
and Afro-Argentine population earlier expressed by turn-of-the-century-liberal
intellectuals. In this regard, many exponents of the reactionary nationalism that
emerged in the 1920s were better followers of the late Sarmiento than those who
explicitly vindicated the 19th century liberal tradition, including the socialists.
‘Mental and ethnic mulattos’ was the formula used by Manuel Gálvez to diminish his
liberal and positivist intellectual enemies, vindicating catholic and Hispanicist
spiritualism in its place (Quattrocci-Woisson, 1995, p. 92).11 Revisionist historian
Ernesto Palacio went even further. He claimed that the Indians’ contribution to
Argentina had been null in cultural and even demographic terms. ‘We are a white
nation,’ he asserted, an extension of Spain, ‘of its race,’ in America. And arguing
against those who might have thought that there was something positive in the
aboriginal peoples, he claimed that the country folk who knew the Indians had never
fallen prey to such mistaken thinking. In order to prove this, he invoked the gaucho
Martı́n Fierro, the character of the famous poem by José Hernández:
The Indians spent their life
stealing or lying on their bellies.
The law of the spear’s point
is the only one they’ll respect
and what they’re lacking in knowledge
they make up with suspicion
[. . .]
they’ve a mortal hatred for Christians
and give no quarter when they fight
[. . .]
all a savage knows
is how to get drunk and fight.
‘He who speaks,’ continued Palacio, ‘is not a mestizo . . .[like most] . . . men of our
pampas he is white and he is a Christian: he is a Spaniard. And as such, he is happy
about the tribes’ extermination’:
. . . these savage barbarians
won’t cause damage again. (Palacio, 1941, pp. 62–64)
In the next section I will focus on the significance of such racist and racializing
discourses for the articulation of a middle class identity. Here, I will focus on the
building of a national consensus around the European origin of the Argentine
population, paying special attention to another track of nationalist discourse that
incorporated popular tones and was far from progressive liberalism and from
conservative nationalism, but remained attached to the white-nation myth.
El Hombre que Está Solo y Espera, by Raúl Scalabrini Ortiz ([1931] 1971), provides
a particularly interesting example. The book was written when Scalabrini Ortiz was in
the process of breaking with the liberal tradition in which he had been formed. While
the book became a manifesto for popular nationalism, it also tried to respond to
those who questioned the idea that Buenos Aires could incarnate the national soul
because of its hybrid nature forged in a crucible of immigrants. With six editions in
two years, the book was one of the best sellers of the 1930s, a decade particularly
concerned with questions about the ‘national being.’
According to Scalabrini Ortiz, ‘the porteño is a chemical combination of
races . . . whose main property is that it rejects any filial relationship with their
ancestors.’ The craftsman of that alchemy is ‘the spirit of the land,’ represented
as an unreachable and ‘gigantic man.’ This complex race eludes comprehension
because while ‘the testimony of the porteño circulates within a formal European
system,’ his ‘substance’ is quite different. ‘Whoever focuses on his physiognomy
or habits will think himself in Europe, but anyone who observes his pulse or
inspirations will realize that he is not’ (Scalabrini Ortiz, [1931] 1971, p. 29).
When Scalabrini Ortiz talks about European physiognomy and habits he is
clearly talking about a white and civilized ideal type, even though he refers to it
as only a superficial form covering the more significant substance. The character
that best incarnates the Argentine substance imposed by the enigmatic Giant, by
the land, is the porteño, ‘the man from Corrientes and Esmeralda,’ who, for him,
‘is the Man by antonomasia’:
The Man from Corrientes and Esmeralda is the center in which the Argentine vortex
converges on the most subjugating spiritual frenzy. Whoever is far from him will have a
more unmistakable foreign flavor, the most extravagant peculiarities [. . .] but he will
have less spirit of the land.
In any direction the Republic becomes blurred and gradually vanishes. It has a Peruvian
and Bolivian flavor in the rocky northern regions of Salta and Jujuy; a Chilean one on
the Andean border; a certain mountainous soul on the coastal area next to Paraguay
and Brazil and an imprecise polymorphism in the deserted Patagonian lands.
(Scalabrini Ortiz, [1931] 1971, p. 34)
This is particularly significant because Scalabrini Ortiz made explicit, from outside
the liberal field, the lack of representativity of the man from the provinces of the
interior in relation to the Europeanized porteño. In the interior, he recognized the
existence of people who were partially different. They were (formally) less European,
but that did not make them more Argentine. Far from questioning the exclusion of
the criollos in the hegemonic discourse, Scalabrini Ortiz reinforced that exclusion by
identifying middle sector porteños as archetypically Argentine. Similar to Dickman’s
crucible, he argued that Argentines ‘come from four different races’ but he never
specified what races he was referring to, and he returned again and again to the
dominant notion of the nation’s European origins. He even claimed that the porteño
retained some ties to his origins and, hence, ‘those who manage to save some money
do not miss any opportunity to travel to Europe’ (Scalabrini Ortiz, [1931] 1971,
p. 38). Europe is the only origin he constantly considered as constituting the porteño.
Yet, inside the porteño
the man from Europe is always part of a plurality, something that in himself appears
mutilated, incomplete. The porteño is the man of an individualistic society formed by
juxtaposed individuals, kept together by one thing only: their veneration to the race
they are making. (Scalabrini Ortiz, [1931] 1971, p. 38)
172 E. Garguin
The porteño, archetype of the Argentine, is still in the making, which is ‘why the
porteño son of a European father is not the descendant of his ancestor [. . .] He is not
the son of his father, he is the son of his land’ (Scalabrini Ortiz, [1931] 1971, p. 38).
In fact, Scalabrini Ortiz is talking about the integration of the immigrants’ children in
Argentina, accepting and reproducing the myth of the country’s European origins
without asserting that these children were identical to their immigrant parents.
Argentina may not be Europe in the Rı́o de la Plata, but we, Argentines, certainly
descend from (European) ships. Indeed, all of Scalabrini Ortiz’s book can be read as
reflecting a constant counterpoint between the porteño and the European with the
intention of revealing the peculiarities of the former, which are encountered in a
more intimate and deeper stratum than his European appearance. In addition, ‘the
man from Corrientes and Esmeralda,’ the white porteño, belonged to the middle
sectors, for his point of reference was not any porteño, but one with a certain standard
of living, which allowed him to put aside the problems of work and subsistence, go to
downtown cafés in the evening, and save money to travel to Europe.

Up to this point I have traced the construction of a discourse about the nation
which had many roots in the 19th century and crystallized into common sense in the
20th. At the center of this construction was the assertion of the European origins of
Argentina’s population. Some upheld the melting pot model without hesitations.
Others thought that it was necessary to prompt the immigrants’ children to absorb
the criollo national ‘substance.’ For all of them, however, the search for a national
definition during the first half of the 20th century took for granted the European
foundation of Argentina’s population. We can see the influence of this idea in the
essays of the ‘theoreticians’ of the ‘criollo style’ in sports like football and polo, as well
as in the rise of Tango as the national music (Archetti, 1999). Clearly, none of the
writings that I analyze here can be individually taken to represent the whole content
of the common sense notion that I am trying to tease out. Two elements, however,
allow me to argue that they reflect a hard core of thought that was shared by the
majority of the urban population of the littoral. The first is the fact that discourses
that were very dissimilar in other respects presented a clear consensus on the
understanding of national origins. The second element is that, typically, such
consensus was expressed as something that was taken for granted and tended to
appear among the less analytical components of those discourses. This peculiarity
tells us that we are dealing with conceptions that are deeply ingrained in a domain
lying beyond critical consciousness. They would not be there if they had been
confronted by competing or antagonist representations.
Certainly, the shared consensus built a myth of origin with numerous exclusions.
African and Indigenous ascendancy was virtually erased from the representation of
the nation,12 and the identification with Europe ignored the population from the
interior and the least privileged social sectors from the littoral. This was done without
any significant challenge to a representation of the national community that
imagined it as something homogeneous, which could be a hybrid but not divided.
In addition, many of its advocates, as well as its implicit ‘porteño’ referent, belonged
to the ill-defined urban middle sectors of the littoral region, particularly the city of
Buenos Aires. Retrospectively, and bearing in mind other features of the social
position of these sectors, it would seem that they could have easily claimed a middle
class identity. But they did not do it, probably because they considered that such
identification was unnecessary. I will return to this point after reviewing the impact
of the emergence of Peronism on the notion of the white-European nation and on
the idea of the middle class.
Peronism and Racialization

Well, there they were, showing their might so that nobody would doubt that they really
existed. We watched them from the sidewalk, feeling something similar to compassion.
Where were they coming from? So, it was true that they existed? And in such numbers?
And so different from us? [. . .] that day, when the voices burst and the columns of
anonymous earthen-colored faces started to parade, we felt that something
was vacillating, something that until that moment had been unmovable. (Luna, 1971,
p. 321)
Peronism produced a radical rupture within the dominant national self-

representation. The rising plebeian masses had no place within a nation
imagined as civilized, European, and culturally homogeneous. Confronting their
entrance into the political stage, many people like Felix Luna felt that ‘something
that until that moment had been unmovable’ was now shaking. The result would
be the emergence of a new identification: that of the middle class. A middle class
that would preserve many features that had been previously considered as
belonging to the whole nation and were now increasingly perceived as only
belonging to a part of it. This shift happened hand in hand with another process
through which racist sensitivities and racializing discourses produced a category
which even today continues to denote the Peronist masses: the ‘cabecita negra’
(little black head). Years later, the most famous publicist of popular nationalism,
Arturo Jauretche, wrote:
The presence of the ‘cabecita negra’ had a strong impact on the urban
physiognomy . . . [it challenged] mental colonialism [. . .] flooding the commercial
centers, the recreational areas and the means of transportation, even reaching summer
resorts.
Even the children of the most recent immigrants felt hurt [. . .]. The city seemed
crippled, but it was just a repeat of what had happened a few decades earlier, when their
parents arrived from overseas aboard the third class of ships. (Jauretche, [1966] 1982,
pp. 298–299; see also Ratier, 1971; Taylor, 1979, pp. 27–28)
Compelling as it is, Jauretche’s interpretation points to a rupture and a Peronism/

cabecita negra identification that, in fact, were much less linear and automatic than
they seem. The rise of Peronism was first perceived by its opponents within
the conceptual frame of the anti-fascist struggle, while the Peronists developed an
interpretation based on the people/oligarchy dichotomy.13 Neither of these
representations implied changes in the national self-image. Centered as they were
on the political realm, they did not foster clear distinctions in terms of class or
ethnicity – although Peronists gave preference to social features, and the
incorporation of the civilization/barbarism dilemma by Unión Democrática
opened the possibility of cultural and ethnic abysses. It is worthwhile paying special
174 E. Garguin
attention to the anti-Peronist camp because that sector needed significant discursive
inflections in order to account for the novelty.
The fascism/anti-fascism dichotomy pervaded anti-Peronist discourse since its
inception. While this paradigm framed the debate in political terms, its broader
cultural tones were based on an articulation of the civilization/barbarism dichotomy.
Thus, an anti-fascism that regarded itself as representing both civilization and the
whole nation saw the rise of Perón as the rise of a barbarian totalitarian fascism
(Bisso, 2005). The consequence was an Other that was excluded from the national
construction; an Other that would soon reveal itself as the popular majority in the
urban littoral that had been the center of so much national thought. Although at first
this division was constructed as political, it soon incorporated cultural features, and
it would not take long before it was also extended to reflect class, ethnic and racial
differences.
On October 17, 1945, workers poured into the streets of the main cities and
occupied the symbolic center of the country, the Plaza de Mayo, demanding the
appearance of their new leader, Colonel Juan Perón. The full implications of this
unexpected event were not immediately clear, but the workers’ mobilization caught
many actors completely unprepared and astonished the anti-Peronists. Since they
really believed that they represented the ‘true’ Argentina, the demonstration of the
existence of such massive support for Perón undermined the very foundation of their
self-image. They first processed the shock within the old paradigm of the anti-fascist
struggle, which had proved effective in previous contexts (Bisso, 2005). But new
elements (or old ones, re-signified under the new circumstances) also appeared; and
these new elements were bound to contribute to the construction of an Other that
was much more radically different than the one that emerged within the purely
politically framed dichotomy. Of course, it would take time to complete the
transition from the people/oligarchy bipartite scheme of society to the tripartite
model based on popular masses/middle class/oligarchy. In the meantime, however,
the anti-Peronists tried to make sense of the new, incomprehensible reality without
changing the core of their self-image and identity. This shaped a discursive trend that
symbolically denied that Perón’s followers were members of the true nation. ‘That
human scum is not, in fact, the great Argentine people [. . .], it is just Perón’s people,’
stated Eugenia Silveyra de Oyuela in Antinazi (quoted in Bisso, 2005, p. 312). ‘The
people observed them passing by . . .’ commented the popular newspaper Crı´tica
(quoted in James, 1995, p. 126), while a leaflet of the Communist Party stated that
the demonstrators had ‘provoked a popular repudiation coming from all the sectors
of the Republic’ (quoted in Luna, 1971, p. 305).
The ‘people’ were not Peronist, and Peronists could not be a legitimate part of
the people. Then who were they? Why did they support barbarian Fascism? The
most sympathetic analyses explained that support through notions of heteronomy
and demagogic manipulation of the inexperienced masses. Figures such as
‘lumpenproletariat’ and ‘compadrito’ (wise guy) reappeared in the political
language to contrast the allegedly uncivilized manners of Perón’s followers with
the previously idealized workers who were seen as educated and respectful men
of labor. The socialist newspaper La Vanguardia (LV), for example, asserted on

October 23, 1945:
Blue-collar workers, as we have always defined our men of work [. . .]; those who feel
the dignity of the tasks they perform, [. . .] were not there. This is a public and
unquestionable truth that cannot be denied. (quoted in James, 1995, p. 113)
On occasions, Peronists were relegated to the world of deviance: ‘Colonel Perón

showed his troupe of pimps and gangsters,’ claimed the official newspaper of the
Communist Party in the epigraph of an allegoric drawing of a group of prostitutes
and delinquents under Perón’s control (quoted in Luna, 1971, p. 306). In other cases,
their disdain was framed in aesthetic terms. According to La Nación, the ‘spectacle’
had been ‘unusual and disgraceful’ (in Luna, 1971, p. 309); according to Crı´tica, the
demonstrators ‘offended the good taste and the aesthetics of the city, made ugly by
their presence in our streets’ (quoted in James, 1995, p. 126). Ernesto Sammartino
(UCR representative) referred to the Peronists as a ‘zoological deluge,’ casting them

into the animal realm.
The derogative treatment of the Peronist Other soon acquired racial tones. The
socialist paper labeled the Peronist parade a ‘horde,’ a ‘masquerade,’ and a ‘mob
[balumba], which sometimes degenerated into murga’ (quoted in Campo, 1983,
p. 230). Months later, Américo Ghioldi wrote in the editorial of La Vanguardia of
the demonstrators’ predisposition toward
Romerıá, candombe, popular dancing, naked dances, spontaneous – if not gracious –
relaxation, tricks against this or that [. . .], in conclusion, all that is proper, in their
bodies and their symbolism, to the liberation of native and rudimentary forces. (quoted
in Campo, 1983, p. 241)
In such writings there began to appear a range of discourses that made certain
racial figures the subject of derision. La Vanguardia frequently repeated the image of
‘candombe,’14 whose racial connotations were as evident as its metaphoric use –
nobody could actually think La Vanguardia was describing an African-Argentine
parade. As Plotkin (1995, p. 190) says: ‘October 17 was a modern version of the
candombes in Rosas’ period. The only difference was the skin color of its performers.’
However, such discursive racialization of the Other is particularly meaningful
because of what it implied in terms of self-representation: implicitly, those who used
such a language put themselves in the place of the authentic white or, at least, the
not-black. The counterpoint between the (implicit) whiteness of the speaker and the
Peronist masses is clearly expressed in an anonymous poem that used a metaphor of
whiteness to mock the promise of fair elections: ‘The day we vote, white will be the
act,/the ballot boxes will be white/and white will be the emotion . . ./the day we
will vote, everything will be white/as white were the candombes of the revolution’
(La Vanguardia, February 24, 1946, p. 8).
Years later, a renowned writer would say that Perón ‘formed an army of
anthropomorphic mulattoes, stubborn illiterates, and a horseback corps that made
up his court’ (Martı́nez Estrada, 1956, p. 21). Racial stigmatization of the political
enemy had many precedents (Taylor, 1979, pp. 120–126; Jauretche, [1966] 1982,
pp. 358–359). Scalabrini Ortiz gave testimony around 1931: ‘they now talk about the
176 E. Garguin
foreign rabble [chusma agringada], the unrefined plebeian, as they talked in the past
about the tapes, the mulattoes, the zambos, the Indians, the chiruzas’ (Scalabrini
Ortiz, [1931] 1971, p. 144). We might conclude from this that by 1930, Argentina
had replaced a language based on race with another one based on class, but this was
not exactly true. Thus, La Fronda claimed in 1929 that the electoral triumph of
Radicalism was the ‘mirage of the malón,’ ‘the essence of a candombe,’ and had ‘as its
main consequence the predominance of a Negro-like mentality’ (quoted in Svampa,
1994, p. 153).
Though not a novelty, the racial stigma of the political enemy, added to the
re-enactment of the civilization/barbarism dichotomy with which anti-Peronists tried
to make sense of the new phenomenon, surely facilitated the construction of a racial
Other. However, although traditional understandings suggest otherwise (Ratier,
1971; Jauretche, [1966] 1982; Briones, 2005), the chain of signifiers linking the
Peronist working class with migrants from the interior and cabecitas negras did not
seem to emerge in 1945 but during the Peronist years.15 Nor does the construction of
a racialized Peronist Other seem to have been a response to the arrival of people from
the interior provinces. The actual numbers of migrants to Buenos Aires from the
interior provinces (vis-à-vis those from the provinces of the littoral) by 1945 is still
unclear (Halperin Donghi, 1973; Svampa, 1994), but contemporary accounts did not
emphasize ethnic differences when referring to the new arrivals. Only a few alluded to
such differences, as Scalabrini Ortiz did in February 1946 while recalling the events of
October 17, 1945:
It was the most heterogeneous crowd imagination could conceive. The traces of their
origins could be seen in their physiognomy. The descent of the Southern European was
together with the blond-man of the North and the olive-skin person where the blood of
the native still survived. (quoted in Chávez, 1996, pp. 29–30)
Scalabrini Ortiz distinguished the criollo from the interior by his physiognomy, but
he found criollos together with southern and northern Europeans, making a
‘heterogeneous crowd.’ Similarly, The Communist Party argued that ‘Peronism
managed to deceive some sectors of the working class, small ones, especially women
and young men recently incorporated into production and from the interior’ (quoted
in Campo, 1983, p. 230) but explained this by emphasizing the political inexperience
of youth – and not their ethnic or regional origins (see also Codovilla, 1945,
pp. 140–143; Altamirano, 2001, pp. 181–182). The youth of most demonstrators was
mentioned by almost every source and is one of the features pointed out by James
(1995) to explain the festive and iconoclastic features of the workers’ rally in La Plata.
For most witnesses the use of disparaging, and sometimes even racist adjectives,
did not really evoke ethnic-racial differences as a social categorization referent.16 The
evidence suggests that, at the beginning, the anti-Peronist discourse put in motion an
old battery of derogatory terms – including racist stigmatizations – forged against
popular political enemies. As Julie Taylor (1979, pp. 112–122) has shown, negative
images of the popular masses had a long history in Argentina. At the same time, the
anti-fascist frame within which Peronism was first analyzed had already re-enacted
the traditional opposition between civilization and barbarism, an opposition which
was never free of racial connotations (Taylor, 1979; Svampa, 1994; Joseph, 2000).
Both processes helped consolidate some disparaging chains of signifiers, such as
Carnival-candombe-ignorant Negroes or malón-savages-unrefined Indians. It is clear
that in Argentine society (then and now) poverty darkens in much the same way as
dark skin signifies poverty – if not atavistic backwardness or perversion. In any case,
it seems that the chain of signifiers linking the Peronist masses with the ethnic/racial
Other crystallized in the term ‘cabecita negra’ during the early 1950s, when the
discursive processes analyzed here had precipitated in a way that facilitated the
perception of the racialized Other as an invader of the sacred spaces of a society that
had constructed itself as white and European.
The Argentines who used racial references to describe those who transgressed
norms of respectability were implicitly activating the old association between race
and civilization, according to which non-white races were deaf to the calls of
modernity. In racially stigmatizing the Other, they were at the same time racializing
themselves, since the process implied that they were everything the Other was not:
white, civilized, and European. Another crucial implication was the realization that
these features did not describe the whole nation but only a middle class situated
between the old oligarchy and the (Peronist) working class. It is in this sense that I
argue that the Argentine middle class was a new ‘discovery.’
The rise of Peronism made visible two absences in a national identity that had been
constructed by the society of Buenos Aires: the excluded working class and people
from the provinces of the interior. The figure of the ‘cabecita negra,’ a synthesis of an
Other radically opposed to the respectable, white and civilized man, would come to
include everyone who had been rejected from the spaces and benefits of urban,
modern civilization. And it would be at that point that a diverse array of urban
occupations, lifestyles, and levels of education would be articulated and unified into
the notion of the middle class. We are talking, then, about a double process in which
the groups that defined a social and ethnic Other (the Peronist worker as cabecita
negra) were simultaneously constituting themselves as white and middle class. When
the irruption of plebeian Peronism into the public sphere destroyed the symbolic
construction of a community that had been imagined as national (through a
discourse of binary opposition to the oligarchy), that construction was subsequently
rebuilt and re-imagined as simply a part of the nation, distinct not only from the
oligarchy, but also from the working class, even as it retained many of the features
that had previously characterized the whole nation.
Conclusion
I will conclude by revisiting my reading of Scalabrini Ortiz’s work; a reading that I
view as a hub for the different lines of analysis explored in this article. This is due not
only to the substance of Scalabrini Ortiz’s writing, but also to the ways in which his
work was read after the fall of Perón. A good example of these ways of reading is
revisionist historian José Marı́a Rosa’s prologue for the re-issued 1964 edition of
El Hombre que Está Solo y Espera. The identification of (European) immigration with
the nation is not limited to progressive liberals and socialists. Those who questioned
178 E. Garguin
the liberal notion of the melting pot also recognized the profound impact of
immigration on the Argentine nation although, like Scalabrini Ortiz, they tried to
reduce it to a superficial appearance of an erstwhile, deeper essence. José Marı́a Rosa
was evidently aware of this, as he remarked:
Scalabrini Ortiz analyzed the Argentine of the 1930s and early 1940s [note that he wrote
the ‘Argentine’ when it was evident that Scalabrini Ortiz’s referent was just the porteño.
Indeed, not even all porteños but only the one from the center of the city, the porteño
from Corrientes and Esmeralda.] To him, the Argentine is a ‘multi-gene,’ a product of
the clash of many races, but not a hybrid at all; Adán Buenos Aires cannot be explained
by the matter that constitutes him, or by the education he received. (in Scalabrini Ortiz,
[1931] 1971, p. 11)17
Moreover, what in the 1930s was understood as representing the Argentine – a

porteño somehow located above the inferior levels of society – appears more clearly
defined in the 1960s as ‘Adán Buenos Aires, the middle class man of Argentina . . .’
(in Scalabrini Ortiz, 1971, p. 12). The gap separating the porteño from the ‘middle
class man’ seemed difficult to bridge; yet Rosa took the risk. It is true that Rosa used
‘Adán Buenos Aires’ to talk about Scalabrini Ortiz, the author; yet ‘Adán Buenos
Aires’ was also the man from Corrientes and Esmeralda and, Rosa added, ‘a little part
of us all’ (in Scalabrini Ortiz, [1931] 1971, p. 15). In short, ‘Adán Buenos Aires’ is the
porteño, the Argentine (and, as such, the immigrants’ child):
Adán Buenos Aires [. . .] is the middle class man trapped by the feeling of nationhood,
[. . . the] identification with the land and the dead has reached today the middle class to
which Adán Buenos Aires belongs to, [he is] possibly a child of gringos brought by
Alberdi and a student in the schools of Sarmiento, but also a man that after stepping on
this land is absorbed by a spirit stronger than blood or education. (in Scalabrini Ortiz,
[1931] 1971, pp. 13–14)
It is worth noting that Rosa used the expression ‘middle class’ four times in six
pages to refer to the ‘Adán Buenos Aires’ that, as previously mentioned, was
Scalabrini Ortiz, as well as Rosa himself, the porteño, and the Argentine. He did this
in the 1964 prologue to a book of 140 pages that uses the expression only once.
Indeed, Scalabrini Ortiz refers at one point to the porteño as the ‘middle class man’
(Scalabrini Ortiz, [1931] 1971, p. 108). This isolated reference demonstrates that the
concept did exist and was understood. Yet, at the same time, it also shows an almost
intuitive reluctance to use it – in clear opposition to Rosa’s abundant use of it
30 years later. For Scalabrini Ortiz, notions like ‘the man from Corrientes and
Esmeralda’ or simply ‘the porteño’ (which Scalabrini Ortiz repeated once and again to
mean the same) seemed more adequate, especially because of their general nature and
lesser precision. To him, as to the porteño, ‘words are dangerous toys,’ and he ‘does
not use them to classify his equals’ (Scalabrini Ortiz, [1931] 1971, p. 113).
While the category of middle class classifies people, Scalabrini Ortiz saw such
classifications as dangerous and unnecessary. Still, the fact that he employed the
category at least once indicates that his reluctance to use it was not caused by doubts
about its applicability, but rather by the sense that it was not necessary to use a term
that excluded many people that should not be excluded. That is why ‘middle class’
was used as a synonym of ‘the man from Corrientes and Esmeralda,’ equivalent to
‘porteño’ and identical to Argentine – the descendant of ships. During the 1930s (and
by contrast to the post-Peronist years), the concept of middle class was used on few
occasions, not to designate a clearly defined or differentiated class, but to refer to a
group that more often than not was considered part of ‘the people’ and, as such,
equivalent to the nation. Moreover, as in the case of Scalabrini Ortiz, the notion of
middle class was frequently used as a synonym of ‘the people,’ which was conceived
as one entity free of extreme poverty or deep divisions. This way of imagining
the social world was far removed from the one that became dominant after the
overthrow of Perón, when in a wide variety of writings – many of which evoked the
connection Peronism/cabecita negra – the middle class appeared not only as different
but also in opposition to ‘the people.’ The gap between them is the result of the racial
articulation of the middle class identity that was constructed during the years of
Peronismo.
It could be argued that it was the middle class that embodied the idea of the
Argentine nation during the first half of the 20th century. And that it became
racialized too: the middle class, like Argentina, came from the ships and was
European and cosmopolitan. But strictly speaking, the middle class did not exist as
different from the nation as a whole. In practical terms, there was no middle class
until the disruptive emergence of Peronism questioned ideas that were deeply rooted
in the collective porteño imagination, opening a gap in which race and class were
conflated and eventually became undistinguishable. During the first half of the 20th
century, the symbolic construction of a civilized Argentina as homogeneously white
and open to upward social mobility allowed social and political conflicts to
be represented through a bipartite image; an image in which the only opposition to
‘the people’ was an oligarchy whose wealth and power did not prevent the rest of the
nation from attaining a ‘respectable’ and ‘modern’ lifestyle. The emergence of
Peronism did not erase this people/oligarchy dichotomy. What it did was add
another element by drawing a new class line that also implied a racial and cultural
division. The people could not longer be ‘one’ after the ‘discovery’ of a Peronist
working class that was neither ‘civilized’ nor descended from the ships. With that
‘discovery,’ a tripartite image of society became possible, and it was at that point that
a heterogeneous assortment occupational and social positions were unified into the
notion of an Argentine middle class; a middle class that inherited the cultural and
racial features that were previously viewed as characterizing the entire Argentine
nation.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Paul Gootenberg, Brooke Larson, Ana Julia Ramı́rez, Silvia Cristelli,
Ana Barletta, León Zamosc and the anonymous LACES reviewers for their helpful
comments to previous versions of this article. Liliana Kuguel helped me with the English
version. Finally, I would like to acknowledge the Social Sciences Research Council for an
International Dissertation Field Research Fellowship.
180 E. Garguin
Notes
[1] The troublesome nature of the concept of middle class is well known. Different from the
bourgeoisie and the working class (which, at least within the Marxist tradition, have a clear
definition), the notion of middle class is, more frequently than not, employed as a residual
category; without structural specificity or inherent unity, it is not even clear that the middle
class can achieve the status of class strictly speaking (Garguin, 2006). However, this situation
does not constitute an obstacle for this particular essay since its object of study is the
emergence of the native concept as a crucial element in the making of a middle class identity. In
addition, given the fact that prior to the 1950s there was no significant use of the term, I am
using ‘middle class people’ or ‘middle sectors’ to refer, in a descriptive way, to the would-be
middle class. In general, those categories refer to the following occupations: clerks, commerce
employees, professionals, and small proprietors of commerce and industry.
[2] Processes of class differentiation based on unequal distribution and appropriation of cultural
as well as economic capital (Bourdieu, 1984) were underlying those social constructions. Since
the last quarter of the 19th century, the capitalist expansion brought about deep shifts in the
country’s urban configuration (Germani, 1962; Scobie, 1977). The expansion and
diversification of the occupational market, mass consumption, and educational opportunities

offered not only possibilities of upward social mobility, but also implied social distinctions
based on a differential appropriation of the new forms of capital. During the 1930s on, the
transition from the agro-export pattern of accumulation to import substitution industrializa-
tion (Peralta Ramos, 1972; Dı́az Alejandro, 1983) surely accelerated those social processes.
[3] For articulation I mean the process by which the diversity inherent in any group is subsumed
by an ‘equivalential logic’ that, through the exclusion of an Other, produces some ‘closure’
(even though a precarious one), allowing the ‘differential ensemble’ to be constructed as a
totality (Laclau, 2005, pp. 69–70). Racial, for in the Argentine middle class identity formation
case, I consider that ‘the differential and the equivalential logics’ worked through ‘the
formation of othered groups on the basis of selectively racialized and ethnicized marks [. . .]
which reproduce inequalities not only by overlapping diverse cleavages, but also by the
invisibilization of what is considered the norm’ (Briones, 2005, p. 17; see also Wade, 1997,
pp. 5–24).
[4] I prefer the concept of ‘popular public sphere’ instead of that of ‘popular sectors’ to emphasize
the idea of a contested field where different subjects are being made and remade through their
practices. See Eley (1992); and Laclau (1977).
[5] There is a difference in goals between these works and my own. While I am interested in the
middle class as a problematic historical object, Joseph and Guano take it for granted, as a
given group where to analyze racialization processes (their own object of study). On the other
hand, all those anthropological studies make incursions into history to trace what Briones
(2005, p. 20) calls ‘national formations of otherness,’ pointing out key aspects of its historical
construction. However, not being the historical process the center of their concerns, and given
the scarcity of historical studies on the subject, they could not go beyond some very suggesting
hypotheses. My own work tries to contribute to a better understanding of racialization
processes as well as of middle class identity formation.
[6] The other central aspect of that national idea – which could not be analyzed here – is the one
built around the myth of Argentina as a ‘promissory land’ offering every possibility for
upward social mobility according to merit and effort. As Diego Zenobi (2005) and Ricardo
Fava (2005) show, such a myth is also still alive among middle class people.
[7] Corrientes and Esmeralda is a paradigmatic corner of downtown Buenos Aires used by
Scalabrini Ortiz to characterize the lives of every ‘porteño’ (inhabitant of the port city of
Buenos Aires).
[8] Mitre’s interpretation soon became canonical. Certainly, the aspect that would later receive
more attention was the one stating the liberal and democratic nature of the nation from the
beginnings; but we will see his racial interpretation reappearing, as well. President Ortiz
probably had Mitre’s schema in mind when he said in 1941: ‘Democracy is racial and
historical and for this reason it translates the deepest feelings of liberty and of civil and
political equality which are constituents of the dominant characteristics of our idiosyncrasy’
(quoted in Bisso, 2005, p. 146).
[9] Being this the vision of the majority of the criollo elite, it is not surprising that the
immigrants themselves and the urban popular culture of the littoral region, in general, also
shared such a perception. See Eduardo Archetti’s (1999) analysis of tango and polo.
[10] Archetti (1999, pp. 56–60, 102–109) rightly points out that the melting pot model implies a
notion of mixture and that non-liberal sectors of Argentine intelligentsia coined different
models to characterize the national spirit. In most cases they stated that the Argentine
idiosyncrasy could not be the product of a mixture, but had to be produced by the infusion
of a previous and immutable ‘substance.’ But this did not affect their recognition (most of
the time implicitly) that the population was a hybrid (with European predominance).
[11] Some nationalists vindicated a place for the indigenous peoples, but the natives they had in
mind were, more usual than not, those belonging to the past: the surviving indigenous
peoples, those in the flesh, were rarely (if ever) vindicated. In La maestra normal (1914),
Gálvez showed such an ambiguity: he presented the ‘vanquished races’ as clearly degenerated
and decadent but keeping some of the deepest secrets of nationality – in contrast to the
foreign influences of Positivism and Normalism. Likewise, the novel presented the interior
provinces as the last reservoir of the national being – yet, again, combining such a
vindication with less positive considerations, symmetrical to those fostered in relation to the
‘vanquished races’ (Cf. Svampa, 1994, pp. 102–107, who centers her analysis of Gálvez on his
more programmatic and much less popular Diario de Gabriel Quiroga). However, it is worth
mentioning the case of Ricardo Rojas and his Eurindia (see Funes & Ansaldi, 2004).
[12] For the invisibilization processes, see Quijada (2004); Andrews (1990); Segato (1998);
Briones (2005).
[13] The military regime established in 1943 after a long decade of exclusionary and fraudulent
conservative governments was clearly retreating by 1945. The ‘democratic’ opposition
confronting it moved ahead step by step, pushed forward by the advance of the Allied troops
in Europe. Perón, the strongman of the military regime, managed to get the support of the
workers, a group that had not been in anybody’s plans until then, but one whose virtual
political and economic weight had been increasing for the last decade with the growth of
import substituting industrialization. The 1946 election was marked by both attempts to
impose a particular vision and representation of the national crossroad: the Unión
Democrática repeated that Argentina was confronting a vital dilemma between the last
personification of barbarian Nazi fascism and the continuity of the liberal democratic
national tradition, while Peronism rejected any relationship with defeated fascism and
claimed that the nation had to choose between going on with the new policies of social
justice, political sovereignty and economic independence or going back to oligarchy’s
oppression and antinational policies (Luna, 1971; Campo, 1983; James, 1988; Bisso, 2005).
[14] LV, December 4, 1945, p. 2, and February 24, 1946, p. 8 (I thank Andrés Bisso for facilitating
me his notes of LV). The already mentioned leaflet of the Communist Party preferred to talk
about the ‘Peronist malón’ (quoted in Luna, 1971, p. 305).
[15] The relationship between ‘cabecita negra’ and Peronism became a central topic in the socio-
political literature of the 1960s, particularly that written from a filo-Peronist point of view;
not by chance, it is the same literature that nurtured the explosion of a discourse centered on
the middle class analyzed by Altamirano (1997). See, among others, Jauretche ([1966] 1982);
Ratier (1971); Luna (1971); Hernández Arregui (1960); Sebreli (1964). In the literary field,
the paradigmatic case is Cabecita negra by Germán Rozenmacher (1963). None of them
mention a source for previous uses of ‘cabecita negra.’ The oldest reference I have found is in
a novel published in 1953 by Bernardo Verbitsky (Academia Nacional de Letras, 2003, p. 21),
the creator of another famous term in 1962: ‘villa miseria’ (slum). Neiburg (1995, p. 268)
even seems to suggest that the term had been practically coined by Peronists themselves, as a
182 E. Garguin
synthesis of everything positive within the national field. Most probably, however, it is that
the just-mentioned intellectuals took the term from oral uses, where it should emerge to
stigmatize a Peronist Other marked on the basis of perceived phenotypic differences
constructed in opposition to the norm that was implicit in the previous national
construction.
[16] Writing in 1969, for example, Luna frequently asserts ethnic differences (as in the case of the
quoted epigraph), but his book does not include any contemporary reference supporting
that. Similarly, del Campo (1983, p. 239) points out that none of the labor leaders
interviewed in the Oral History Program of Di Tella Institute underlined any relevant
participation of migrants from the interior before 1946. Scalabrini Ortiz’s quotation is a
partial exception, but even more remarkable is the fact that his is the only ethnic mention we
find in the contemporary narratives (until 1955) compiled by Chávez (1996). Moreover, this
book includes two poems written by Chávez himself: ‘Habla el cabecita negra que fue a la
plaza,’ written in 1965, glorifies the cabecita negra as the main character in every national
heroic event; but ‘October,’ written in 1954, does not mention the cabecita negra or the
migrant from the interior provinces at all.
[17] Adan Buenosayres is a novel published by Leopoldo Marechal in 1948. Its main character, a
porteño writer, represents both the author’s alter ego and the Argentine archetype. For Rosa,
he is ‘the middle class man’ as well.
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‘Los Argentinos Descendemos de los

Keywords: Argentina; middle class; whiteness; racial articulation;

The historical formation of the Argentine middle class is particularly paradoxical.

ISSN 1744–2222 (print)/ISSN 1744–2230 (online)/07/020161–24 ß 2007 Taylor & Francis

The Argentine Middle Class: A Delayed Identity?

Argentines Descend from Ships

superiority, constantly regenerating itself through immigration. Next to it, another

downtown cafés in the evening, and save money to travel to Europe.

Peronism and Racialization

Peronism produced a radical rupture within the dominant national self-

Compelling as it is, Jauretche’s interpretation points to a rupture and a Peronism/

of labor. The socialist newspaper La Vanguardia (LV), for example, asserted on

On occasions, Peronists were relegated to the world of deviance: ‘Colonel Perón

(UCR representative) referred to the Peronists as a ‘zoological deluge,’ casting them

Moreover, what in the 1930s was understood as representing the Argentine – a

diversification of the occupational market, mass consumption, and educational opportunities

Histories, LACC, SUNY-SB, Stony Brook.

Quattrocci-Woisson, D. (1995) Los Males de la Memoria, Emecé Editores, Buenos Aires.

Enrique Garguin is at Universidad Nacional de La Plata, Facultad de Humanidades y Ciencias de

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