Immigration and National Identity in Latin America, 1870-1930

Immigration and National Identity in Latin America, 1870–1930
Immigration and National Identity in Latin America,

1870–1930
Michael Goebel
Subject: 1889–1910, 1910–1945, Cultural History, International History, Social History
Online Publication Date: May 2016 DOI: 10.1093/acrefore/9780199366439.013.288
Summary and Keywords
Although on a lesser scale than the United States, southern South America became a ma
jor receiving region during the period of mass transatlantic migration in the late 19th and
early 20th centuries. Even as the white elites of most Latin American countries favored
European immigration in the late 19th century, since in their eyes it would “civilize” their
countries, it was the temperate areas closely tied into the Atlantic economy as exporters
of primary products that received the bulk of European laborers. Previously scarcely pop
ulated lands like Argentina, Uruguay, and southern Brazil thus witnessed massive popula
tion growth and in some ways turned into societies resembling those of other immigra
tion countries, such as the United States and Canada. This article concentrates on lands
where the overwhelming majority of migrants headed, although it also briefly deals with
Latin American nations that received significantly fewer newcomers, such as Mexico.
This mass migration lastingly modified identity narratives within Latin America. First, as
the majority of Europeans headed to sparsely populated former colonial peripheries that
promised economic betterment, migration shifted prevalent notions about the region’s
racial composition. The former colonial heartlands of Mexico, Peru, and northeastern
Brazil were increasingly regarded as nonwhite, poor, and “backward,” whereas coastal
Argentina, São Paulo, and Costa Rica were associated with whiteness, wealth, and
“progress.” Second, mass migration was capable of both solidifying and challenging no
tions of national identity. Rather than crossing over well-established and undisputed
boundaries of national identities and territories, migration thus contributed decisively to
making them.
Keywords: migration, national identity, nationalism, nation-states, racism, race, regionalism
The Reasons for Mass Migration

The widespread notion of Latin America as a world region shaped by a long-term history
of mestizaje (“racial mixing”), which gained currency in the early 20th century, also im
plies that it has been a region of immigration. Indeed, given the well-known arrival of
Spanish conquistadors and of African slaves during colonial times, Latin America had al
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ways been a region of significant “immigration,” long before most of its countries gained
independence from the Iberian motherlands in the early 19th century. Yet, in terms of
numbers, it was the period ranging from 1870 to 1930 during which immigration reached
truly massive proportions. According to José Moya’s calculation, in the course of the year
1910 alone, more Spaniards (131,000) arrived at the port of Buenos Aires than did during
more than three centuries of colonial rule all over the Americas.1 This inflow of people in
the six decades after 1870 was thus quantitatively unprecedented, embedded in a wider
set of global movements of peoples.2 As opposed to the migrations of other world regions,
the vast majority, although not all, of those who crossed the Atlantic toward the Americas
hailed from Europe.
In the Americas, far more migrants headed to the United States than to Latin America, as
Table 1 shows. Some historians have taken this difference as evidence of the greater at
tractiveness of North America over Latin America, alleging that the latter region re
mained mired in political instability, poverty, and “xenophobia” during the 19th century as
a legacy of Catholicism and Iberian colonialism.3 If one measures the numbers of arrivals
against the pre-existing population of the respective receiving countries—which is what
one would have to do in order to say something about relative attractiveness—it turns out
that in Argentina and Uruguay the ratio of newcomers to residents surpassed that of the
United States and Canada during much of the second half of the 19th century. Uruguay’s
population grew sevenfold in the second half of the 19th century, and Argentina’s quadru
pled, owing in good part to immigration.4 The composition of the flow of migrants to Latin
America, meanwhile, was less diverse than the one to the United States. Italy, Spain, and
Portugal—in that order—furnished the largest numbers by far, together providing well
over two thirds of the entirety of immigrants to Latin America between 1870 and 1930.5
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Table 1 European Immigrants to American Countries, ca. 1820–1932
U.S. Argentina Canada Brazil Cuba Uruguay Mexico Chile
32,564,000 6,501,000 5,073,00 4,361,000 1,394,000 713,000 270,000 90,000
Source: Moya, Cousins and Strangers, 46.
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Within Latin America, the preferred destinations of overseas migrants were unevenly dis
tributed (Table 1). Only Argentina, Brazil, Cuba, and Uruguay drew significant numbers of
overseas immigrants. Another one of Moya’s calculations brings the steep discrepancies
into sharp relief: “Peru attracted in one hundred years [after independence] fewer Euro
pean immigrants than did Argentina in one month and the United States in one week.”6
The absolute figures given in Table 1, moreover, were not only heavily concentrated in the
period from 1870 to 1930, they would look even more skewed toward certain destinations
if the various countries’ pre-existing populations were taken into account. The entire Ar
gentine territory, for example, hosted only 1,877,490 inhabitants according to the census
of 1869,7 but then drew 840,000 immigrants in the 1880s and another 1.76 million in the
first decade of the 20th century.8 This article deals with this uneven spread by focusing
primarily on the countries within Latin America where the vast majority of migrants were
headed.
This asymmetric distribution casts doubt on traditional explanations that have attributed
these vast demographic movements to the racism of Latin American elites, which from
the middle of the 19th century onward pledged to “whiten” their countries’ “racial stock”
by encouraging European immigration.9 Virtually all white Latin American elites nurtured
such racial fantasies of “whitening” their allegedly “backward” populations. Mexican
president Porfirio Díaz (1884–1911), for example, desperately tried to lure (ideally Eng
lish) settlers to Mexico, whereas a few decades later the Dominican dictator Rafael Trujil
lo yearned for Europeans to ward off what he perceived as the threat emanating from the
neighboring republic, Haiti. Although Mexico drew a steady trickle of Chinese and Arab
immigrants in the early 20th century and Trujillo managed to persuade 750 Jewish
refugees from Nazi Germany to come to the Dominican Republic in 1937, none of this
came remotely close to fulfilling the grand dreams of demographic engineering formulat
ed by countless statesmen in favor of large-scale European settlement for the imagined
purpose of “civilizational improvement.”10 In 1935, the Dominican Republic had 52,000
Haitian-born residents, 9,000 British West Indians, yet only 3,000 Europeans.11 In short,
while the elites’ wish for “whiter” populations varied little across Latin America, its real
ization differed massively between countries. The racism of Latin American elites is a
poor explanation for transatlantic migrations.
Likewise, the capacity of states either to attract or to curb immigration should not be
overestimated. European states and politics in the mid-19th century, to be sure, mattered
insofar as the rise of liberalism removed legal obstacles to emigration. Apart from the Do
minican settlement scheme for Jews, there were also a few other state-sponsored pro
grams contributing to encouraging immigration—most notably the one adopted by the
state of São Paulo in the 1890s, which managed to draw significant numbers of Venetian
families to work on the state’s coffee fazendas in replacement of slave labor.12 But when
Italy forbade Brazilian recruitment through subsidized fares and contracts in 1902, citing
the exploitative conditions on the fazendas, a largely self-sustained stream of other mi
grants, many of them still Italians, replaced the state-sponsored settlers. The relative suc
cess of the São Paulo scheme in fact stemmed partly from the simultaneous economic cri
sis in the Rio de la Plata, which diverted to Brazil migrants who previously had headed
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further south. By contrast, Uruguay, which until the 1870s had the highest ratio of immi
grants to resident population in Latin America, had hardly any official policy of attracting
immigrants, which at any rate would have been undermined by the country’s endemic po
litical instability and a weak state. When Uruguay did adopt a law trying to encourage im
migration in 1890, the number of arrivals in fact dropped due to the economic crisis.13 In
order to kindle migration, states thus had to remove barriers—as most did. But beyond
this, their power to really channel, and particularly to attract, large-scale immigration
was limited.
For the same reason, from a social-history perspective it makes little sense to categorize
migration to Latin America according to the receiving nation-states. Migrants constantly
crossed boundaries within Latin America, with the Rio de la Plata countries especially in
tegrated. An Italian diplomat in the 1890s doubted that Uruguay was “anything more
than a bridge between the ocean and Argentina.”14 In 1907/08, 18,600 Argentine citizens
and 27,800 Brazilians lived in Uruguay, while roughly 100,000 Uruguayans (almost a
tenth of the country’s population) lived in Argentina—though most of these people’s par
ents had been born in Europe.15 Italian sources did not differentiate between the River
Plate countries until after the unification of Italy. German emigration records summarily
referenced Südamerika in a single rubric.16 Although scholars are accustomed to using
national statistics and to framing their research objects nationally, rural Uruguay and
southern Brazil had much more in common—economically, culturally, socially—than Rio
Grande do Sul and Rio de Janeiro. Likewise, the similarities between the cities of Buenos
Aires and Montevideo were greater than those between the Argentine provinces of
Buenos Aires and Catamarca.
Although racist precepts percolated into legislation, law enforcement remained weak and
labor needs strong. Uruguay’s 1890 law, for example, stipulated that “Africans, Asians,
and Gypsies” be barred entry into the country, but there were few migrants to test the se
riousness of this provision. Following the U.S. Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, many Latin
American states followed suit in the hysteria over the “yellow peril” and outlawed Chi
nese migration, but border controls were as yet all but nonexistent, while short-term la
bor demands at any rate trumped racial fears.17 In the Spanish-speaking Caribbean is
lands and rimlands, where racial anxieties were no less pronounced than in South Ameri
ca, black West Indians provided an indispensable workforce for U.S. companies and the
state expansion of infrastructure in the early decades of the 20th century.18 In the course
of the Amazonian rubber boom, a multinational workforce including laborers from various
Asian and British-Caribbean countries flocked to the Brazilian interior for infrastructure
projects.19 Non-Europeans stepped in for Europeans where the latter were not available—
racist rhetoric about “whitening” notwithstanding.
To explain the gist of mass migration to Latin America in the late 19th and early 20th cen
turies, one has to look for “mightier laws than those produced in national legislatures.”20
The usual candidates for explanation remain the most compelling. As mortality fell more
quickly than birth rates, population growth created economic pressures in large parts of
Europe. Industrialization and urbanization had produced an additional population that
Page 5 of 18

needed to be fed, something partly provided for by the Americas, which in turn required
laborers. As trade between Europe and the Americas intensified, infrastructures im
proved (partly fueled by British capital), communications redoubled, shipping times
dropped, and costs were cut, migration became an ever more viable option for increasing
numbers of people. Networks of information and kinship spread so as to connect specific
places of origin with particular destinations. Wage differentials or the opportunity to buy
land often undergirded these migration systems.21 Finally, with steamships allowing, the
option of returning home—earnings in hand—lowered the psychological barrier to emi
gration. In fact, the majority of emigrants who went to Latin America between 1870 and
1930 probably did not leave with the intention to stay abroad. Contrary to conventional
public perceptions of migration as definite movement from one place to another, about
half of the European migrants to Latin America eventually returned home.
Accommodation, Exclusion, and National Iden

tity
From a bird’s-eye perspective, scholars have sometimes contrasted the increasingly na
tivist United States of the late 19th and early 20th centuries to Latin American receiving
societies that were allegedly more welcoming. Eduardo Míguez has argued that “it is like
ly that the integration of immigrants into the local society was faster and more successful
in many of the migrant flows that arrived in Spanish and Portuguese America than in
their North American counterparts.”22 Comparisons of the social mobility and various
yardsticks of “assimilation”—such as residential segregation and marriage patterns—of
Italians in the Rio de la Plata and the United States have confirmed this impression.23 The
relatively short cultural and religious distance that separated Italy from Latin America
may account for a part of the divergence between North and South America, but labor
market development and, above all, the timing of the migratory process played a more
crucial role. While Italians in the United States were latecomers who had to squeeze into
a fully fledged industrial society, in the River Plate they had long influenced trade, bought
land, and contributed to nation-building more broadly. Therefore, Spaniards, who were
culturally even closer to Argentines and Uruguayans, but on average arrived later than
Italians, typically in-married more often, clustered more residentially, and owned less
property than Italians.24
Though perhaps true for the comparative experience of southern Europeans, it is mistak
en to contrast a uniformly xenophobic United States to a steadfast xenophilic Latin Amer
ica. For the treatment meted out to immigrants in Latin America, elites’ “whitening” ide
ologies and nationalism did matter very much. Race—or more broadly, origin—crucially
shaped migrants’ experience, as elite templates for idealized national identities had been
tailored for some migrants and not others. Nonwhites on the whole were treated far
worse. Afro-Caribbeans, in particular, encountered vicious racist hostility, punctuated
with violence on occasion, in most of the countries they went to.25 Contrary to Europeans,
in the early 1930s the overwhelming majority of West Indian migrant laborers either vol
Page 6 of 18

untarily returned or were forcefully expelled from the various host countries in which
they had worked.26 Anti-black sentiment reached its tragic apogee in the Dominican Re
public in 1937, when national troops and local officials engineered the killing of several
thousand ethnic Haitians.27 Sinophobic campaigns in turn had victimized the Chinese in
19th-century Cuba and in revolutionary Mexico.28
European immigrants were not always well received either, although they rarely encoun
tered the same degree of hostility as nonwhites. Popular xenophobia in revolutionary
Mexico targeted not only Chinese traders but also the Spanish, pejoratively called
gachupines, who suffered both harassment and expulsion.29 On a broader scale, the same
elites that earlier had advocated European immigration grew skeptical over its benefits
once this immigration was actually forthcoming in large numbers. Thus, Argentina’s
champion of “civilization” and immigration, the writer-statesman Domingo Faustino
Sarmiento, railed against his country’s “Italianization” by the 1880s.30 Just like in the
United States, relative latecomers perceived to be culturally more different bore the
brunt of discrimination. Thus, southern Italians, who on average arrived later and settled
more often in cities, felt less welcome than northern Italians, who had come earlier and
headed to the countryside more often. As early as 1878, the Italian consul in Montevideo
claimed that “the epithet Neapolitan was a synonym for criminal and evildoer in the eyes
of police.”31
After the late 19th century, Argentine nationalism, increasingly centered on the exaltation
of the rural pre-immigration archetype of the gaucho, developed in good measure in oppo
sition to mass immigration.32 As Catholicism gradually became an ingredient of right-
wing nationalism, so did anti-Semitism, which erupted in serious ethnic violence during
the so-called “tragic week” in 1919.33 States also grew more hostile to immigration over
time. Against the background of anarchist political activities, the Argentine government
of Julio A. Roca passed a residency law in 1902 allowing for the easier expulsion of for
eigners.34 In the context of World War I, political anxieties also entailed measures against
Germans who had settled in large numbers in southern Brazil and were suspected of cre
ating a “fifth column” for the German Empire.35 By the 1930s, when the Depression fu
eled a global rise of xenophobia, many Latin American governments enacted laws to curb
the entry of migrants. The authoritarian regime of Brazil led by Getúlio Vargas was a case
in point, trying to “Brazilianize” immigrants already in the country, for example, by clos
ing down foreign-language schools and outlawing “foreign” organizations, such as Zionist
political associations.36 Latin American nationalisms, in short, became more intolerant of
immigration over time. In spite of the 19th-century rhetoric about “civilizing” and
“whitening,” these nationalisms also targeted European immigrants.
Compared to U.S. nativist campaigns against southern and eastern Europeans, Latin
American anti-immigrant nationalisms stemmed less from elitist prejudice against down
trodden aliens inasmuch as (European) immigrants in Latin America were not normally
poorer than the native population. Later arrivals who stayed in cities typically suffered a
clearer exclusion from rising national imaginaries, but they were not the most marginal
ized socio-economically. Contrary to the United States, in South America it tended to be a
Page 7 of 18

long-term socio-economic advantage to have settled in a city, since these were typically
the more dynamic nodal points of outward-looking economies. Whereas in the United
States ethnic discrimination coincided with socio-economic disadvantages, no such
straightforward link existed in Latin America. Thus, the figure of the gaucho that oppo
nents of mass immigration evoked in Argentina not only symbolized a rural idyll but also
stood for the poor social outcast who had been dispossessed by the pitiless encroachment
of capitalist modernity that European settlers had brought to the pampas. Mexican His
pano- and Sinophobia in the revolutionary years likewise was part and parcel of a popular
nationalism that identified foreignness with unwarranted privilege, wealth, and power.37
Latin American anti-immigrant nationalisms, in other words, could be as much a popular
as an elite affair.
One reason for this had to do with the long-term colonial tradition of thoroughly Euro
peanized—i.e., somewhat “foreign”—elites in Latin America, which endured well after the
independence wars of the early 19th century. British and Irish mercenaries played an im
portant role in bringing about the independence of several South American republics and
began occupying influential positions thereafter.38 One of Argentina’s foremost indepen
dence heroes, Manuel Belgrano, was the son of a Ligurian trader, whose compatriots al
most monopolized shipping in the Rio de la Plata throughout the 19th century and en
joyed excellent ties to the emerging national political elite, from which in fact they gradu
ally became indistinguishable even before the mass arrival of poor Italian laborers in the
last decades of the century.39 These intimate links to Europe of large parts of Latin Ameri
can elites partly account for the rise of “whitening” ideologies from 1850 onward and for
the positive prejudice with which many early immigrants from Europe were met. In con
trast to common understandings of nationalism in Europe and the United States today,
this nation-building brand of Latin American nationalism was indeed xenophilic rather
than xenophobic. Only after World War I were national identities in Latin America con
strued in contradistinction to immigrants and to Europe.
In the countries of mass immigration, the imaginary boundaries that new forms of nation
alism drew often became internalized, as the later sociological literature on “internal
colonialism” made clearer.40 Since mass European immigration alongside economic inte
gration into the Atlantic economy had profoundly transformed the demographic composi
tion of the population and deepened socio-economic rifts between poor rural backlands
and industrialized urban centers, new dividing lines emerged. São Paulo elites, for exam
ple, contrasted their state’s supposed “modernity” and “whiteness” with Brazil’s allegedly
“backward” northeast.41 Even in Argentina, where European immigration had been much
more spatially comprehensive than in Brazil, a sort of bi-culturalism emerged. Although
not necessarily tied to immigration in explicit terms from 1930 onwards, Argentine na
tionalists continue to this day to contrast an allegedly “authentic” gaucho and mestizo
interior to the liberal-cosmopolitan city of Buenos Aires, which they depict as a bridge
head of Europeanness and of “imperialist” intrusion. Divisions between the national and
the foreign, thus, were internalized inasmuch as the very capital was perceived as exter
nal to the nation.42
Page 8 of 18

While immigration to Latin America interacted in complicated ways with the local con
struction of national identities, it also did so in relation to the migrants’ societies of ori
gin, which in many cases were not clearly defined nation-states either. Emigrants from
Ottoman lands, who went to virtually all countries of the Americas, were a case in point.
Summarily called “Turks” (turcos), they included Arab Christians and (fewer) Muslims
from today’s Lebanon and Syria, Jews from across the Ottoman Empire, as well as Arme
nians, but hardly any people who today or in historical settings other than Latin America
would be labeled Turks. It was only upon emigration that, depending on their place of ori
gin and ethnic and religious factors, they gradually began to “acquire” other identities:
Armenians unsurprisingly disentangled themselves from the term turco, as did many
Jews, especially after the foundation of the state of Israel in 1948, while Arab Christians
and Muslims became “Syrian-Lebanese” in Argentina and Brazil, “Palestinians” in Hon
duras, and “Lebanese” in Mexico and Ecuador.43
Turcos may have been especially illustrative of the shifting nature of national identities,
but they were not isolated cases. In Brazil and Peru many “Japanese” came from Oki
nawa, which had been colonized by the Meiji Empire only in 1879, to undergo a forced
“Japanization” from 1890 onward. This process perhaps helped to fuel emigration but was
itself undertaken by the authorities partly with an interest in how overseas Okinawans
could help Japan’s wider geopolitical ambitions.44 Many of Argentina’s “Germans,” espe
cially in the province of Entre Ríos, in fact hailed from the lower Volga area of Russia,
where they had settled since the late 18th century.45 The “nationality” of the few thou
sand Cape Verdeans who went to Argentina between the 1920s and 1940s was hard to es
tablish for immigration officials, too, even if their passports unmistakably identified them
as Portuguese.46 West Indians officially migrated to Central America as British subjects,
as did the roughly 12,000 Irish who settled permanently in Argentina during the 19th
century. Argentines eventually resorted to calling them “English” (ingleses).47
The larger migratory groups also came from areas whose national identity was subject to
various kinds of dispute. Before 1861 and 1871, respectively, “Italians” and “Germans”
did not arrive as such, but as Ligurians or Calabrians, Prussians or Swabians. The
“French” who from 1850 onward went to Argentina and Uruguay came chiefly from the
Basque Country. If marriage practices in Uruguay are anything to go by, they typically so
cialized with other Basques, from both sides of the Franco-Spanish border—which as a
consequence mattered much less for social life in the Rio de la Plata than the difference
between Spanish Basques and other Spaniards.48 The “Spanish” who went to Argentina,
Uruguay, and Cuba in the late 19th and early 20th centuries were in fact mainly Galicians
(around 65 percent of the total), whose “Spanishness” was as questionable as the solution
proposed by the receiving societies, which for reasons of simplicity accustomed them
selves to call all Spaniards gallegos. Then again, some of these migrants officially never
crossed any national boundary, for until 1898 Cuba was still a Spanish colony.49
Finally, the high incidence of return migration among most groups that had gone to Latin
America ensured that diasporic identity constructions fed back into homeland nation
alisms. To an extent, it was in the Americas that many Ligurians or Calabrians really be
Page 9 of 18

came “Italians.” This becoming national in the diaspora was frequently kindled through
external events, such as World War I, but could also emerge from more mundane issues.
The local context of origin—or campanilismo, to use the pejorative Italian term for emo
tional attachment to the local bell tower—mattered less as the very process of movement
forced migrants to interact ever more with the representatives and legal intricacies of na
tion-states, be they consuls or immigration officials. Immigrant associationism, although
often based on regional or village origin, reinforced this nationalization in the diaspora.
The myriad of Basque or Galician associations in 19th-century Buenos Aires, for example,
formed the bedrock for the emergence of a more unified “Spanish” associationist
culture.50 In other cases, for example, among immigrants from Syria and Lebanon, limit
ed political freedoms at home made the diaspora the most propitious terrain for national
ist politics.51 In summary, contrary to common perceptions of migration as crossing fixed
nation-state boundaries, migration to Latin America and the global spread of nation-
states were processes that were intimately interwoven.
Discussion of the Literature

Although the major population movements to Latin America between 1870 and 1930 are
reasonably well known, they remain understudied when compared to the parallel experi
ence of the United States. As a consequence of this and of the global power of Anglo-
American academe, Latin American migratory histories have had a limited impact on the
building of theory compared to those of the United States. Scholarship on migration to
Latin America has traditionally been as nationally focused as the historiography on the
United States. Recent years have seen major strides in attempts at overcoming this na
tion-centered approach to migration, in particular through the rise of comparative stud
ies.52 Much of this scholarship is comparative in the sense of edited volumes or special
journal issues, which typically provide limited comparability between the cases studied
therein.53 Monographs that are in themselves explicitly comparative remain rare.54 The
study of several “groups” within one national setting, in turn, is even less common, espe
cially in English.55 Doubly transnational studies—that is, works that examine the links
existing between migrants in different receiving countries—are all but nonnexistent, in
spite of much anecdotal evidence that such connections were very strong. Numerically, at
any rate, the vast majority of studies continue to concentrate on one “ethnic” or “nation
al” group within one receiving nation-state, owing to a lack of funds for cross-national re
search in Latin American universities and the ongoing weight of methodological national
ism.
Naturally, the degree of scholarly interest in historical immigration differs among Latin
American countries, depending less on real numbers than on the centrality that (Euro
pean) immigration has had in the national imaginary. Hence, Argentine and foreign soci
ologists and historians have long had an interest in the country’s immigrant past, which
has produced sophisticated and thorough social-history monographs.56 In spite of the rel
atively limited number of migrants who went to Chile, there has been a thriving literature
on them, too. Scholarship on migration to Brazil, in turn, has usually treated its subject
Page 10 of 18

matter as a regional, rather than national, affair. Hence, apart from Jeffrey Lesser’s
works, which disproportionately deal with small non-European groups and the discourse
about them,57 historians have chiefly concentrated on individual groups either in São
Paulo or in southern Brazil. There have been remarkably few studies on the Cuban case,
even though the Caribbean island was the third most important recipient of European im
migrants between 1870 and 1930. Although there are several studies of Chinese-Cubans,
there is hardly any reliable scholarship in English on the many Spaniards who came to
the island.58 The main reason for these continent-wide mismatches is the extent to which
any given country has fashioned a Europeanized national identity for itself, or not.
The nation-focused approach more generally owes much to the long-term predominance
of concerns over the extent to which any given migrant group “fits” into receiving nation-
states. This was further reinforced by the sway of the Chicago School of Sociology, with
its characteristic preoccupation about the degree and speed with which immigrants “as
similated” into a host society implicitly understood as possessing a pre-existing and sta
ble national identity. With some notable exceptions,59 this brand of scholarship has had
little interest in the shifting nature of the nationalisms of the receiving societies—a field
generally ceded to specialists of “nationalism,” who tended to have other theoretical
points of reference than the social history of migration.60 It remains for future historians
to integrate these two fields of inquiry more fully and grant due attention to how migra
tion and nation-state formation have interacted with one another.
Primary Sources
The most relevant primary sources for such a vast field of inquiry will inevitably depend
heavily on any individual researcher’s particular topical and methodological preferences.
Public archives on average function less smoothly in Latin America than they do in Eu
rope and the United States, although there are notable exceptions in Brazil, Chile, and
Mexico. The archives of the foreign ministries of sending countries—such as Germany,
Italy, or Spain—can therefore provide interesting general overviews for specific groups,
as sending nations typically maintained an interest in the representation of “their” dias
poras, often trying to harness them for geopolitical purposes. Consular reports ending up
with the foreign-ministry files of European countries also allow interesting insights into
the everyday lives of migrants on many occasions. National libraries in Madrid or Rome,
as well as in other places, also often hold an impressive amount of monographic contem
poraneous literature on immigrants and their reception in Latin America.
Archival options in Latin America itself vary widely, yet rarely have the paper trails of
public ministries proven the most fruitful entry. Apart from published censuses, scholars
have typically resorted as a first point of call to the documentation of immigrant associa
tions: mutual aid societies, social clubs, ethnic medical insurances, trade unions, and the
like. This method has sometimes yielded fascinating serial data on immigrant social life,
but it has three drawbacks: the material is frequently almost impossible to trace, it is usu
ally in a precarious and incomplete state, and it captures only “affiliated ethnics,” leaving
Page 11 of 18

out immigrants less active in official community life. Ecclesiastical (parish) records, cen
sus manuscript schedules, arrival records, and civil registry files are therefore often still
preferable in order to collect meaningful series. The Centro de Estudios Migratorios Lati
noamericanos in Buenos Aires and the Museu da Imigração do Estado de São Paulo are
among the most useful institutions to provide initial guidance. In a second step, documen
tation in municipal archives will sometimes prove more rewarding than national ones.
Accessing intellectual-history sources giving insights into the discourses and official poli
tics of immigration and national identity is a great deal easier, which is perhaps why so
many scholars have contented themselves with doing exactly that. Many such sources are
likely to be published ones, in the form of either books or periodicals. The historical immi
grant press of many Latin American countries is perhaps more readily accessible in the
United States, although the hemerotecas of National Libraries in Latin America itself also
hold a good amount of material. Much the same can be said of the nonimmigrant press, of
which ever more is being digitalized—with the Spanish National Library as a pioneer for
Spanish-speaking countries. Published books in Spanish and Portuguese in many cases
are also easier to find in major U.S. university libraries than within Latin America itself.
Published censuses, parliamentary debates, and the yearbooks of public agencies—for ex
ample, port authorities—on the other hand, are usually best searched in the National
Archives of Latin American countries. Serious scholarly studies will therefore almost al
ways have to rely on primary-source material from various countries at once.
Further Reading
Baily, Samuel L. Immigrants in the Lands of Promise: Italians in Buenos Aires and New
York City, 1870–1914. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999.
Baily, Samuel L., and Eduardo José Míguez, eds. Mass Migration to Modern Latin
America. Wilmington, DE: SR Books, 2003.
Fausto, Boris, ed. Fazer a América: A imigração em massa para a América Latina. São
Paulo: Editora da Universidade de São Paulo, 1999.
Foote, Nicola, and Michael Goebel, eds. Immigration and National Identities in Latin
America. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2014.
Goebel, Michael. “Gauchos, Gringos and Gallegos: The Assimilation of Italian and Spanish
Immigrants in the Making of Modern Uruguay.” Past and Present 208 (2010): 191–229.
Goebel, Michael. Overlapping Geographies of Belonging: Migrations, Regions, and Na

tions in the Western South Atlantic. Washington, DC: American Historical Association,
2013.
Lesser, Jeffrey. Immigration, Ethnicity, and National Identity in Brazil, 1808 to the
Present. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013.
Page 12 of 18

López, Kathleen. Chinese Cubans: A Transnational History. Chapel Hill: University of

North Carolina Press, 2013.
Masterson, Daniel M., and Sayaka Funada-Classen. The Japanese in Latin America. Ur
bana-Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2004.
Moya, José C. Cousins and Strangers: Spanish Immigrants in Buenos Aires, 1850–1930.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998.
Moya, José C. “A Continent of Immigrants: Postcolonial Shifts in the Western Hemi

sphere.” The Hispanic American Historical Review 86.1 (2006): 1–28.
Nugent, Walter. Crossings: The Great Transatlantic Migrations, 1870–1914. Bloomington:

Indiana University Press, 1995.
Putnam, Lara. Radical Moves: Caribbean Migrants and the Politics of Race in the Jazz
Age. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013.
Weinstein, Barbara. The Color of Modernity: São Paulo and the Making of Race and Na
tion in Brazil. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015.
Notes:
(1.) José C. Moya, Cousins and Strangers: Spanish Immigrants in Buenos Aires, 1850–
1930 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 123.
(2.) For a concise overview, see Adam McKeown, “Global Migration, 1846–1940,” Journal
of World History 15.2 (2004): 155–189. A useful survey of the height of migrations from
Europe to the Americas is found in Walter Nugent, Crossings: The Great Transatlantic Mi
grations, 1870–1914 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992).
(3.) David S. Landes, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and
Some So Poor (New York: Norton, 1998), 310–334.
(4.) Figures always vary widely. For an overview, see Nicolás Sánchez Albornoz, “The Pop
ulation of Latin America, 1850–1930,” in The Cambridge History of Latin America, ed.
Leslie Bethell, vol. 4, c. 1870 to 1930 (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press,
1986), 121–156, esp. 130, who probably overstates the numbers. Moya, Cousins and
Strangers, 46 gives higher figures about the destination of European emigrants, but these
exclude return migration.
(5.) Concise overviews can be found in José C. Moya, “A Continent of Immigrants: Post
colonial Shifts in the Western Hemisphere,” The Hispanic American Historical Review
86.1 (2006): 1–28; and Michael Goebel, “Reconceptualizing Diasporas and National Iden
tities in Latin America and the Caribbean,” in Immigration and National Identities in
Latin America, 1850–1950, eds. Nicola Foote and Michael Goebel (Gainesville: University
Press of Florida, 2014), 1–27.
Page 13 of 18

(6.) Moya, Cousins and Strangers, 50–51.
(7.) Primer Censo de la Nación Argentina 1869 (Buenos Aires: Imprenta del Porvenir,
1872).
(8.) Samuel L. Baily, Immigrants in the Lands of Promise: Italians in Buenos Aires and
New York City, 1870 to 1914 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999), 54.
(9.) For example, Jeffrey Lesser, Immigration, Ethnicity, and National Identity in Brazil,
1808 to the Present (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 12–16; and
May E. Bletz, Immigration and Acculturation in Brazil and Argentina, 1890–1929 (New
York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 12–56, both open their accounts with surveys of such
“whitening” ideologies.
(10.) Jürgen Buchenau, “The Limits of the Cosmic Race: Immigrant and Nation in Mexico,
1850–1950,” in Immigration and National Identities, Foote and Goebel, 66–90, here 75;
Allen Wells, Tropical Zion: General Trujillo, FDR, and the Jews of Sosúa (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 2009). On blanqueamiento in the Dominican Republic, see April
Mayes, The Mulatto Republic: Class, Race, and Dominican National Identity (Gainesville:
University Press of Florida, 2014), esp. 61–77.
(11.) Lara Putnam, “Migrants, Nations, and Empires in Transition: Native Claims in the
Greater Caribbean, 1850–1950,” in Immigration and National Identities, Foote and
Goebel, 31–66, here 40.
(12.) Thomas Holloway, Immigrants on the Land: Coffee and Society in São Paulo, 1886–
1934 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980).
(13.) Michael Goebel, “Gauchos, Gringos and Gallegos: The Assimilation of Italian and
Spanish Immigrants in the Making of Modern Uruguay,” Past and Present 208 (2010):
191–229, here 197.
(14.) Cited in Juan Antonio Oddone, “La politica e le immagini dell’emigrazione italiana in
Uruguay, 1830–1930,” in L’emigrazione italiana e la formazione dell’Uruguay moderno,
eds. Fernando J. Devoto et al. (Turin: Fondazione Giovanni Agnelli, 1993), 77–119, here
98. Guy Bourdé, Urbanisation et immigration en Amérique latine: Buenos Aires XIXe et
XXe siècles (Paris: Montaigne, 1974), 162 estimates that about 17 percent of the approxi
mately 7.6 million European arrivals to Buenos Aires between 1857 and 1930 (of whom
many left again) came from Montevideo.
(15.) Milton Vanger, The Model Country: José Batlle y Ordóñez or Uruguay, 1907–1915
(Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1980), 17.
(16.) Fernando Devoto, “Un caso di migrazione precoce: gli italiani in Uruguay nel secolo
XIX,” in L’emigrazione italiana, ed. Devoto et al., 1–36, here 15; also, Nugent, Crossings,
66.
Page 14 of 18

(17.) Adam McKeown, Melancholy Order: Asian Migration and Globalization of Borders
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 324–341.
(18.) Lara Putnam, Radical Moves: Caribbean Migrants and the Politics of Race in the Jazz
Age (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013).
(19.) Sidney M. Greenfield, “Barbadians in the Brazilian Amazon,” Luso-Brazilian Review

20.1 (1983): 44–64.
(20.) Moya, “A Continent of Immigrants,” 3.
(21.) More broadly on globalization and Latin America, Michael Goebel, “Globalization
and Nationalism in Latin America, c. 1750–1950,” New Global Studies 3.3 (2010).
(22.) Eduardo José Míguez, “Introduction: Foreign Mass Migration to Latin America in the
Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries—An Overview,” in Mass Migration, Baily and
Míguez, xiii–xxv, esp. xxii.
(23.) Herbert Klein, “The Integration of Italian Immigrants into the United States and Ar
gentina: A Comparative Analysis,” The American Historical Review 88.2 (1983): 306–329;
and Baily, Immigrants in the Lands of Promise.
(24.) Goebel, “Gauchos, Gringos and Gallegos.”
(25.) Nicola Foote, “British Caribbean Migration and the Racialization of Latin American
Nationalisms,” in Immigration and National Identities, Foote and Goebel, 205–234.
(26.) Barry Carr, “Identity, Class, and Nation: Black Immigrant Workers, Cuban Commu
nism, and the Sugar Insurgency, 1925–1934,” The Hispanic American Historical Review
78.1 (1998): 83–116; and Marc C. McLeod, “Undesirable Aliens: Race, Ethnicity, and Na
tionalism in the Comparison of Haitian and British West Indian Immigrant Workers in Cu
ba, 1912–1939,” Journal of Social History 31.3 (1998): 599–623.
(27.) Richard Lee Turits, “A World Destroyed, a Nation Imposed: The 1937 Haitian Mas
sacre in the Dominican Republic,” The Hispanic American Historical Review 82.3 (2002):
589–635.
(28.) Kathleen López, Chinese Cubans: A Transnational History (Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 2013), 144–162; and Robert Chao Romero, The Chinese in Mexico,
1882–1940 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2010), 145–190.
(29.) Pablo Yankelevich, “Hispanofobia y revolución: españoles expulsados de México,

1910–1940,” The Hispanic American Historical Review 86.1 (2006): 29–59.
(30.) Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, Conflicto y armonía de las razas en América (Mexico
City: UNAM, 1978 [1882]).
Page 15 of 18

(31.) Cited in Juan Antonio Oddone, Una perspectiva europea del Uruguay: los informes
diplomáticos y consulares italianos, 1862–1914 (Montevideo: Universidad de la Repúbli
ca, 1965), 83.
(32.) Lilia Ana Bertoni, Patriotas, cosmopolitas y nacionalistas: la construcción de la na

cionalidad argentina a fines del siglo XIX (Buenos Aires: Fondo de Cultura Económica,
2001); and Jeane DeLaney, “Immigration, Identity, and Nationalism in Argentina, 1850–
1950,” in Immigration and National Identities, Foote and Goebel, 91–114.
(33.) See Daniel Lvovich, Nacionalismo y antisemitismo en la Argentina (Barcelona: Javier

Vergara, 2003), chap. 3.
(34.) Gabriela Costanzo, Los indeseables: las Leyes de Residencia y Defensa Social
(Buenos Aires: Madreselva, 2009).
(35.) Stefan Rinke, “The Reconstruction of National Identity: German Minorities in Latin
America During the First World War,” in Immigration and National Identities, Foote and
Goebel, 160–181.
(36.) See, e.g., René Gertz, O perigo alemão (Porto Alegre: Editora da Universidade Fed
eral do Rio Grande do Sul, 1991); and Jeffrey Lesser, Welcoming the Undesirables: Brazil
and the Jewish Question (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 105.
(37.) Buchenau, “The Limits,” 79–88.
(38.) Matthew Brown, Adventuring Through Spanish Colonies: Simón Bolívar, Foreign
Mercenaries and the Birth of New Nations (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2006).
(39.) Tulio Halperín Donghi, El enigma Belgrano: un héroe para nuestro tiempo (Buenos
Aires: Siglo XXI, 2014).
(40.) Pablo González Casanova, “Internal Colonialism and National Development,” Studies
in Comparative International Development 1.4 (1965): 27–37.
(41.) Barbara Weinstein, The Color of Modernity: São Paulo and the Making of Race and
Nation in Modern Brazil (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015).
(42.) Michael Goebel, Argentina’s Partisan Past: Nationalism and the Politics of History
(Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2011).
(43.) Ignacio Klich and Jeffrey Lesser, “‘Turco’ Immigrants in Latin America,” The Americ
as 53.1 (1996): 1–14.
(44.) Koichi Mori, “Identity Transformations among Okinawans and Their Descendants in
Brazil,” in Searching for Home Abroad: Japanese Brazilians and Transnationalism, ed. Jef
frey Lesser (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 47–66. On the role of Okinawa in
Meiji constructions of “Japaneseness,” see Tessa Morris-Suzuki, Re-Inventing Japan:
Time, Space, Nation (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1998), esp. 26–34.
Page 16 of 18

(45.) Beatriz Bosch, “La colonización de los alemanes del Volga en Entre Ríos, 1878–
1888,” Investigaciones y Ensayos 23 (1977): 295–310; and Christophe Albaladejo, “Les de
scendants des Allemands de la Volga dans la Pampa: la résistance comme culture,” in Une
pampa en mosaïque: des communautés locales à l’épreuve de l’ajustement en Argentine,
eds. Jean-Christian Tulet et. al. (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2001), 113–144.
(46.) Marta Maffia, “La migración caboverdeana hacia la Argentina: análisis de una alter
nativa,” Trabalhos de Antropologia e Etnologia 26 (1986): 191–207; McLeod, “Undesir
able Aliens.”
(47.) Helen Kelly, Irish “Ingleses”: The Irish Immigrant Experience in Argentina, 1840–
1920 (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2009).
(48.) Goebel, “Reconceptualizing,” 25.
(49.) For an overview see José C. Moya, “Spanish Emigration to Cuba and Argentina,” in
Mass Migration, Baily and Míguez, 9–28.
(50.) Moya, Cousins and Strangers, 277–331.
(51.) Steven Hyland Jr., “‘The Summit of Civilization’: Nationalisms Among the Arabic-
Speaking Colonies in Latin America,” in Immigration and National Identities, Foote and
Goebel, 256–280.
(52.) Two English-language examples that offer reasonably broad coverage are: Samuel
Baily and Eduardo José Míguez, eds., Mass Migration to Modern Latin America
(Wilmington, DE: SR Books, 2003); and Nicola Foote and Michael Goebel, eds., Immigra
tion and National Identities (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2014). An important
precursor to these works was the short survey by Magnus Mörner, Adventurers and Prole
tarians: The Story of Migrants in Latin America (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh
Press, 1985).
(53.) See, e.g., Ignacio Klich and Jeffrey Lesser, eds., Arab and Jewish Immigrants in Latin
America: Images and Realities (London: Frank Cass, 1998); Wanni W. Anderson and
Robert G. Lee, eds., Displacements and Diasporas: Asians in the Americas (New
Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2005); Jeffrey Lesser and Raanan Rein, eds., Re
thinking Jewish Latin Americans (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2008);
and the special issues of The Americas 53.1 (1996) on Middle Easterners; Caribbean Stud
ies 31.3 (2003) on Garveyism in the Hispanic Caribbean; Latin American Perspectives
31.3 (2004) on East Asians; The Hispanic American Historical Review 86.1 (2006) on vari
ous groups in various countries; and Portuguese Studies Review 14.2 (2006) on the Por
tuguese.
(54.) The most important are: Samuel L. Baily, Immigrants in the Lands of Promise: Ital
ians in Buenos Aires and New York City, 1870 to 1914 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press, 1999); Emilio Franzina, L’America gringa: storie italiane d’immigrazione tra Ar
gentina e Brasile (Reggio Emilia, Italy: Diabasis, 2008); Daniel M. Masterson and Sayaka
Page 17 of 18

Funada-Classen, The Japanese in Latin America (Urbana: University of Illinois Press,

2004); and Putnam, Radical Moves.
(55.) For examples, see Jeffrey Lesser, Negotiating National Identity: Immigrants, Minori
ties, and the Struggle for Ethnicity in Brazil (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999);
and Goebel, “Gauchos, Gringos and Gallegos.”
(56.) Above all the widely acclaimed Moya, Cousins and Strangers.
(57.) Lesser, Immigration, Ethnicity, and National Identity.
(58.) Moya, “Spanish Emigration,” implicitly shows the dearth of previous scholarship.
(59.) Esp. Lesser, Immigration, Ethnicity, and National Identity; also, Foote and Goebel,
Immigration and National Identities.
(60.) See, e.g., Nicola Miller, In the Shadow of the State: Intellectuals and the Quest for
National Identity in Twentieth-Century Spanish America (London: Verso, 1999).
Michael Goebel
Department of History and Cultural Studies, Friedrich-Meinecke-Institut, Freie Uni

versität Berlin
Page 18 of 18

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Immigration and National Identity in Latin America, 1870–1930

Immigration and National Identity in Latin America,

Summary and Keywords

Keywords: migration, national identity, nationalism, nation-states, racism, race, regionalism

The Reasons for Mass Migration

date: 07 August 2020

date: 07 August 2020

Table 1 European Immigrants to American Countries, ca. 1820–1932

U.S. Argentina Canada Brazil Cuba Uruguay Mexico Chile

32,564,000 6,501,000 5,073,00 4,361,000 1,394,000 713,000 270,000 90,000

Source: Moya, Cousins and Strangers, 46.

date: 07 August 2020

date: 07 August 2020

date: 07 August 2020

Accommodation, Exclusion, and National Iden­

date: 07 August 2020

date: 07 August 2020

date: 07 August 2020

date: 07 August 2020

Discussion of the Literature

date: 07 August 2020

date: 07 August 2020

Goebel, Michael. Overlapping Geographies of Belonging: Migrations, Regions, and Na­

date: 07 August 2020

López, Kathleen. Chinese Cubans: A Transnational History. Chapel Hill: University of

Moya, José C. “A Continent of Immigrants: Postcolonial Shifts in the Western Hemi­

Nugent, Walter. Crossings: The Great Transatlantic Migrations, 1870–1914. Bloomington:

date: 07 August 2020

(6.) Moya, Cousins and Strangers, 50–51.

date: 07 August 2020

(19.) Sidney M. Greenfield, “Barbadians in the Brazilian Amazon,” Luso-Brazilian Review

(20.) Moya, “A Continent of Immigrants,” 3.

(24.) Goebel, “Gauchos, Gringos and Gallegos.”

(29.) Pablo Yankelevich, “Hispanofobia y revolución: españoles expulsados de México,

date: 07 August 2020

(32.) Lilia Ana Bertoni, Patriotas, cosmopolitas y nacionalistas: la construcción de la na­

(33.) See Daniel Lvovich, Nacionalismo y antisemitismo en la Argentina (Barcelona: Javier

(37.) Buchenau, “The Limits,” 79–88.

date: 07 August 2020

(48.) Goebel, “Reconceptualizing,” 25.

(50.) Moya, Cousins and Strangers, 277–331.

date: 07 August 2020

Funada-Classen, The Japanese in Latin America (Urbana: University of Illinois Press,

(57.) Lesser, Immigration, Ethnicity, and National Identity.

Department of History and Cultural Studies, Friedrich-Meinecke-Institut, Freie Uni­

date: 07 August 2020

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(32.) Lilia Ana Bertoni, Patriotas, cosmopolitas y nacionalistas: la construcción de la na

Department of History and Cultural Studies, Friedrich-Meinecke-Institut, Freie Uni