Immigration and National Identities in Latin America

Immigration and National Identities in Latin America
University Press of Florida

Florida A&M University, Tallahassee
Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton
Florida Gulf Coast University, Ft. Myers
Florida International University, Miami
Florida State University, Tallahassee
New College of Florida, Sarasota
University of Central Florida, Orlando
University of Florida, Gainesville
University of North Florida, Jacksonville
University of South Florida, Tampa
University of West Florida, Pensacola
Immigration and
National Identities
in Latin America
Edited by Nicola Foote

and Michael Goebel

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Pensacola · Orlando · Miami · Jacksonville · Ft. Myers · Sarasota
Copyright 2014 by Nicola Foote and Michael Goebel
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Contents
ist of Illustrations vii

L
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction. Reconceptualizing Diasporas and National Identities in

Latin America and the Caribbean, 1850–1950 1
Michael Goebel
Part I. Spaces of Migration

1. Migrants, Nations, and Empires in Transition: Native Claims in the
Greater Caribbean, 1850s–1930s 31
Lara Putnam
2. The Limits of the Cosmic Race: Immigrant and Nation in Mexico,
1850–1950 66
Jürgen Buchenau
3. Immigration, Identity, and Nationalism in Argentina, 1850–1950 91
Jeane DeLaney
4. Nation and Migration: German-Speaking and Japanese Immigrants in
Brazil, 1850–1945 115
Frederik Schulze
Part II. Migrating Peoples

5. Motherlands of Choice: Ethnicity, Belonging, and Identities among
Jewish Latin Americans 141
Jeffrey Lesser and Raanan Rein
6. The Reconstruction of National Identity: German Minorities in Latin
America during the First World War 160
Stefan Rinke
7. In Search of Legitimacy: Chinese Immigrants and Latin American
Nation Building 182
Kathleen López
8. British Caribbean Migration and the Racialization of Latin American
Nationalisms 205
Nicola Foote
9. Italian Fascism and Diasporic Nationalisms in Argentina, Brazil, and
Uruguay 234
Michael Goebel
10. “The Summit of Civilization”: Nationalisms among the Arabic-
Speaking Colonies in Latin America 256
Steven Hyland Jr.
Conclusion. Writing Latin American Nations from Their Borders:
Bringing Nationalism and Immigration Histories into Dialogue 281
Nicola Foote
ibliography 305
B
List of Contributors 345
Index 347
Illustrations
Figures
1.1. Map depicting migration within and around the Greater Caribbean,
1840s–1920s 35
1.2. Map depicting migration into and out of the Greater Caribbean,
1850s–1930s 37
4.1. Modesto Brocos, The Redemption of Ham (A redenção de cam),
1895 122
5.1. “Reirse es Kosher.” Plural JAI, Buenos Aries, May 5, 2012 157
9.1. Chart depicting Italians as a percentage of total population in the
nations of Argentina, Uruguay, and Brazil 238
9.2. Chart depicting Italians as a percentage of total population in the
cities of Buenos Aires, Montevideo, and São Paulo 238
9.3. Chart depicting net number of Italian immigrants to Uruguay,
1880–1929 246
9.4. Chart depicting net number of Italian immigrants to Argentina,
1855–1919 247
9.5. Chart depicting net number of Italian immigrants to Brazil, 1855–
1919 247
Tables
1.1. Immigrant populations of the greater Caribbean, ca. 1930 42

2.1. European migration to Mexico in comparative perspective,
1820–1932 67
2.2. Selected foreign nationals in the Mexican censuses, 1895–1970 78
Acknowledgments
The idea for this book originally emerged out of a panel of the Annual
Conference of the British Society for Latin American Studies held at the
University of Bristol in 2010, although the editors of this book go back even
further to their PhDs in history at University College London.
Over the months and years, we assembled a group of contributors that
would allow us to cover the broadest ground possible in the history of im-
migration to Latin America; we are, above all, immensely grateful to our
contributors, some of whom have been willing to make time in their busy
schedules at extremely short notice to produce a chapter for this book, as
well as to the peer reviewers who provided such insightful comments.
The book would have been impossible without institutional and finan-
cial support through a Marie Curie Career Integration Grant and a John F.
Kennedy Fellowship at the Center for European Studies, Harvard Univer-
sity, which allowed Michael Goebel to find time and financial support for
this book.
Nicola Foote is grateful to Florida Gulf Coast University (FGCU) for the
award of sabbatical leave for the 2012–13 academic year, which provided
the time away from teaching responsibilities necessary to complete this
book. Thanks also to Dean Donna Henry and to Eric Strahorn for provid-
ing travel money for archival work related to this project in 2010 and 2011.
The library staff at FGCU was essential to this project. Thanks to Rachel
Tait for her help with interlibrary loan, and to Rachel Cooke for obtaining
manuscript materials from the National Archives. Thanks to Erik Carlson
for pushing for funding for library materials that supported this project.
Thanks to Tim Shannon for help with formatting illustrations.
Nicola Foote was also able to benefit from the wonderful resources at
the Smathers Latin America Collection at the University of Florida. Thanks
especially to Paul Losch and Richard Phillips for their helpful suggestions
x · Acknowledgments
and encouragement during multiple research trips. Thanks also to Marcel

Carter for help with transportation to and from the library.
Several research assistants helped with the preparation of this volume.
Thanks to Philine Apenburg, Norma Ladewig, and Tristan Oestermann at
Freie Universität Berlin, whose assistance was financed through the Marie
Curie Grant. Thanks also to Michael Rodriguez of FGCU, who did amaz-
ing work in compiling the bibliography and helping to format the manu-
script. Thanks also to John Cox who helped with proofreading the volume
proposal.
Thanks to Duke University Press for permission to publish maps previ-
ously published in Lara Putnam’s chapter “The Making and Unmaking of
the Circum-Caribbean Migratory Sphere: Mobility, Sex across Boundaries,
and Collective Destinies, 1840–1940, in Dirk Hoerder and Nora Faires, eds.,
Migrants and Migration in Modern North America: Cross-Border Lives, La-
bor Markets, and Politics in Canada, the Caribbean, Mexico, and the United
States (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2011). Thanks also to Daniel
Sacroisky for permission to publish his cartoon that originally appeared in
Plural JAI, Buenos Aries, May 5, 2012.
At University Press of Florida, Amy Gorelick was a wonderful source of
help and support as we developed this project, and we are grateful for her
enthusiasm for the volume. Meredith Babb has been an excellent editor
and extremely helpful in the later stages of this project. Thanks also to Sian
Hunter and Dennis Lloyd for their assistance with this volume.
On a personal note, Nicola would like to thank Carlos King for being
such a wonderful, supportive, and loving husband during the preparation
of this volume, as well as her parents, Margaret and Jeff Foote, for allow-
ing their holidays to be diverted to Gainesville so that she could do some
library work for this project.
Introduction
Reconceptualizing Diasporas
and National Identities in Latin America
and the Caribbean, 1850–1950
Michael Goebel
What’s the recipe for a Turk? Take the 25 de Março Street cocktail shaker and put
in a Syrian, an Armenian, a Persian, an Egyptian, a Kurd. Shake it up really well
and—boom—out comes a Turk.
Guilherme de Almeida, 1929
Migrations to Latin America and the Caribbean, 1850–1950
Even though Latin America has been a continent primarily of emigration

during the last decades, historically the region has been one of mass im-
migration. One aim of this book is to provide an overview of the history of
migrations to Latin America between 1850 and 1950. In contrast to much
of the previous scholarship, this volume does so by specifically examining
the interaction between transnational migrations and the formation of na-
tional identities. Building on the fields of migration studies and national-
ism theory, neither the nation-states from which migrants came nor those
to which they moved are seen as preexisting but are rather in a continual
processes of being (re)defined. By analyzing these processes from a com-
parative angle, the book seeks to engage Latin American and Caribbean
history more firmly with recent approaches to the history of global mi-
grations at the height of the worldwide spread of nationalism. In order to
make room for examining less-studied groups such as the Chinese, and for
analyzing the long-term repercussions of immigration to Latin America,
2 · Michael Goebel
the book chooses the unusual time frame of 1850–1950 instead of the more
common 1870–1930, the period during which the largest numbers of for-
eign immigrants arrived.
Although the well-known arrival of conquistadors and African slaves
during the period of the Iberian empires had turned Latin America, strictly
speaking, into a region of “immigration” well before the period studied in
this volume, the inflow of peoples between 1850 and 1950 (concentrated
especially in the six decades after 1870) was quantitatively unprecedented,
embedded within a larger set of global migrations, of which those across
the Atlantic were only the best known.1 The main destinations within Latin
America were, in descending order, Argentina, Brazil, Cuba, Uruguay, and
Chile. Roughly 4 million immigrants settled permanently in Argentina be-
tween 1870 and 1930, 2 million to 3 million in Brazil, and perhaps 1 mil-
lion in Cuba and 300,000 in Uruguay. Since in some countries, such as
Argentina and Uruguay, the preexisting population was small, the relative
impact of these immigrations was sometimes greater than the impact of
immigrations to the United States. Uruguay’s population grew sevenfold
in the second half of the nineteenth century, and Argentina’s quadrupled,
mainly due to immigration.2 As was the case in the United States, Europe
furnished the greatest numbers of immigrants in Latin America, with Italy
and Spain being the two most important sending countries in quantitative
terms, followed by a number of other European countries, such as Portugal,
Germany, the British Isles, and France. In addition, especially after World
War I, there were growing numbers of Eastern Europeans, among them
many Jews, migrating to Latin America just as they did to the United States.
But Europe was by no means the only sending region of migrants to
Latin America. From the 1850s Chinese workers went to Cuba, other Carib-
bean countries, and Peru. After 1900 Peru and especially Brazil began to re-
ceive significant numbers of Japanese. Middle Easterners, mainly from to-
day’s Lebanon and Syria, arrived in virtually all Latin American countries,
and in especially large numbers in Argentina and Brazil. Armenians, too,
came to settle in cities such as Buenos Aires, São Paulo, and Montevideo.
Migrants from the British West Indies, often working for North American
railway or fruit companies, began to form significant, if marginalized, parts
of the populations of countries such as Costa Rica, Panama, and Ecuador,
while many Haitians went to neighboring Cuba. Colonial Caribbean coun-
tries, meanwhile, saw the mass arrival of Asian indentured laborers, who
altered the population structure of Surinam, British Guiana, and Trinidad.
Introduction · 3
Furthermore, migrations within Latin America, both internal and between

countries, often neighboring ones, set in on a larger scale, leading to the
growth of urban centers such as Mexico City, São Paulo, or Buenos Aires,
the latter two of which had initially expanded mainly due to transatlantic
migrations. All these movements had far-reaching impacts on the national
identities of virtually all Latin American countries, which at the same time
were being constructed and continually renegotiated.
Although the broadest population movements are well known to spe-
cialists, the histories of the many migrations into Latin America and the
Caribbean between 1850 and 1950 remain understudied when compared
to the parallel experience of the United States. While there are countless
studies of individual migrations, much of the literature on the topic is com-
partmentalized into individual case studies. In spite of a body of compara-
tive scholarship slowly building up,3 a large proportion of studies, many of
which are written by the descendants of immigrants themselves, continue
to focus on one “ethnic” or “national” group within one receiving nation-
state because of a lack of funds for cross-national research in Latin Ameri-
can universities and the ongoing weight of methodological nationalism
both within Latin America and among historians outside the region, who
tend to be specialized in individual national histories. As a consequence of
this as well as the overwhelming global power of Anglo-American academe
in terms of theory-building, Latin American migratory histories have had
a limited impact compared to those of the United States. Though in de-
clining measure, theoretical models derived from the Chicago School of
sociology—especially the opposition between “assimilation” and “plural-
ism”—continue to be the framework in which historical migration to Latin
America is mostly being discussed. Since mass migration to Latin America
declined sharply from 1930, the scholarship on historical migrations to
Latin America, eventually left to historians alone, has been less influenced
by more recent theoretical models than by the historiography on migration
to the United States, where, due to ongoing immigration, disciplines other
than history continued to influence the methods and approaches of migra-
tion studies. This disjunction is all the more regrettable because the na-
ture of Latin America’s immigration histories can tell us a great deal about
migratory processes more generally. Building on a growing literature that
complicates straightforward assumptions about the relationship between
migrations and national identities, this book seeks to contribute to redress-
ing this problem.
4 · Michael Goebel
Migration Studies and Theories of Nationalism
One obstacle to setting this right is that, in spite of their obvious related-
ness, migration studies and theories of nationalism have developed in a
curious separation from one another. The major paradigms of migration
studies were long informed by the experience of migration to the United
States, in particular the so-called second wave that set in around 1890 and
brought primarily Southern and Eastern Europeans to North America.
From the 1920s the Chicago School of sociology dominated the field for
several decades by studying the “assimilation” of these immigrants into
American society. Although the ideas of this school were not monolithic
internally, most of the scholars associated with it—ranging from Robert
E. Park and W. I. Thomas to Louis Wirth and Milton Gordon—studied
the degree to which immigrants retained or gave up their cultural bag-
gage in the process of fusing into what was frequently called the “American
mainstream.”4 The thrust of the underlying assumptions was that immi-
grants should and eventually would shed their old-world habits in order
to achieve social upward mobility as well as to allow for the creation of a
viable American identity.
From the 1960s such arguments were challenged by a new generation
of migration scholars, sometimes called “pluralists” or “retentionists.” Al-
though, ironically, “assimilation” as understood by the Chicago School had
by then arguably become a reality of American society, the pluralists pro-
claimed that assimilation was neither realistic nor desirable.5 Instead of
focusing on macro social developments and statistics, which appeared to
corroborate the decline of the importance of distinctions based on ethnic
origin, these authors concentrated on the micro level of migratory chains
and networks, which they found helped the survival of the immigrants’
and their descendants’ cultural and ethnic particularities. It was no coin-
cidence that this paradigm change in migration studies came alongside
the civil rights movement and a general upsurge in identity politics. Being
a backlash against earlier assumptions of Anglo-conformity, the writings
of “pluralists” sometimes stressed the “roots” of immigrants and “ethnics”
as if these were primordial and unchangeable.6 Yet both “assimilationists”
and “pluralists” spent little time on conceptualizing the “mainstream.” This
shortcoming has been pointed out in relation to the Chicago School, but
it can also be extended to its “pluralist” challengers.7 The problem could
well be attributed to a much broader one identified by Nina Glick Schiller
and Andreas Wimmer—namely, the blind eye of mainstream sociology for
Introduction · 5
the rise and ongoing importance of nationalism owing to an implicit and

unacknowledged methodological nationalism.8
Thinking about the “mainstream” was left to a different field of study:
that of nationalism. Similarly to migration studies, theories of nationalism
have been bedeviled by a dichotomy, dividing “constructivists” or “mod-
ernists” such as Benedict Anderson, Ernest Gellner, and Eric Hobsbawm
from “primordialists,” “perennialists” or “ethno-symbolists” such as An-
thony Smith. Whereas the former have insisted that nations are “invented”
or “imagined” and that “it is nationalism which engenders nations and not
the other way round,” the latter have typically stressed that such inventions
are restricted by the available “raw material” from which nationalism is
built and that “a state’s ethnic core shapes the character and boundaries of a
nation.”9 Ironically, the constructivist viewpoint in theories of nationalism
predominated in the 1970s and ’80s, precisely at the time when the argu-
ably more primordially inclined “retentionists” seemed to be carrying the
day in migration studies. Communication between these fields was mini-
mal, further limited by disciplinary boundaries (the best-known migration
scholars were often sociologists, while the major theorists of nationalism
came more often from history, political science, or anthropology) as well as
geographical separation (migration studies were dominated by American
academics, while British-based scholars made a greater impact in theories
of nationalism).
Just as the most influential authors on migrations showed little concern
to conceptualize nationalism, the most-read scholars of nationalism rarely
had a major interest in migrations.10 Although theorists of nationalism
such as Anderson, Craig Calhoun, or Elie Kedourie studied how the idea
of the nation—what Anderson has called the “modular” form of national-
ism—traveled around the globe, they related these movements to intellec-
tual transfers rather than the mass flows of peoples that interested students
of migration.11 Moreover, as Rogers Brubaker has remarked, an overriding
concern with the origins of nations and nationalism gave rise to an implicit
tendency, even among constructivists, to see nations as relatively stable en-
tities once they had been invented by nationalists.12 If migrants did come
into the picture, their role was that of real or potential challengers of an
already existing national identity.
Over the last two decades, the dichotomous structuring of both migra-
tion studies and nationalism theories has largely been worn away. Migration
scholars who had been trying to reappraise the concept of “assimilation”
are now stressing that this term cannot be understood without granting
6 · Michael Goebel
serious attention to the transformations of the “mainstream” as a result of

migrations.13 Numerous studies have shown that, depending on context-
specific variables, there is no strict opposition between the retention of
ethnic networks and the adjustment into receiving societies. In many in-
stances ethnic networks worked as promoters of, not as obstacles to, assimi-
lation.14 Nor was there a straightforward relationship between the declining
importance of ethnic distinctions and socioeconomic upward mobility.15
Historians of migrations, including those to Latin America, have moved
away from privileging either macro social phenomena or a micro approach.
By integrating the two, they have arrived at more nuanced interpretations
of how migrations were open-ended processes shaped by conditions in a
number of interlinked localities instead of a definite movement from one
place to another with a fixed outcome.16 In theories of nationalism, the old
divide between “perennialists” and “constructivists” has survived to this
day. But when it comes to concrete historical studies, most scholars would
now pursue a combined approach that examines the interaction between
the efforts of the state and intellectuals to forge national identities and the
popular customs that they belabor.17
Parallel to the development of theoretically more open frameworks, his-
torical studies of both immigrations and the formation of national identi-
ties in Latin America have expanded enormously over the last decades.
Nonetheless, in both fields the dearth of historical scholarship on Latin
America in comparison to other world regions and, particularly, the lim-
ited impact of studies on the region’s history on theory-building continue
to be rightfully lamented. The major theorists of nationalism have relegated
Latin America to a few uneasy footnotes, admitting that its history may
sit uncomfortably with their overarching frameworks. But this has rarely
impelled them to question their models.18 Likewise, the region’s immigra-
tion history has usually at best served as a counterexample to the North
American case with which it has been compared in terms of the relative
“integration” of immigrants into the receiving societies. As summarized by
Eduardo Míguez, the most prominent argument has been that “it is likely
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 Portu-
guese America than in their North American counterparts.”19 Regardless
of whether one concurs with this statement (or whether an agreement can
be reached on what “integration” and “successful” mean), the contribution
of studies on historical immigrations into Latin America to the conceptual
tools of migration studies has been minimal.
Introduction · 7
More problematically still, notwithstanding the changes within both

fields of study during recent decades, when immigration and nationalism
have been studied together, the pair has usually been conceptualized in
a binary opposition, where nationalism is almost equated with nativism
and xenophobia. Apart from the exacerbating factor of the divide between
migration studies and nationalism theories, three interrelated reasons are
responsible for this tendency: first, the predominant focus in historical mi-
gration studies on the second wave of migrations to the United States and
its related history of negative prejudice against immigrants perceived as
ethnically different; second, contemporary public debates on immigration,
especially in Europe and the United States, with their usual concentration
on the question of the extent to which immigrants “fit” into presumably
preexisting “national identities”; and third, partially a result of all the above,
a frequent implicit narrowing down of the very term “migration” in schol-
arly as well as wider public debates to those migrations that cross national
boundaries and are seen as culturally very different. The problem, there-
fore, is not a specifically Latin American one.20
Yet, if (European) immigrants to Latin America were—as much of the
historiography comparing North America and South America has it—
more often met with positive rather than negative prejudice, and if im-
migrant incorporation coincided with the clearer formulation of national
identities across the region rather than succeeding it, then Latin American
history might help complicate any plain dichotomy between migration and
national identity. Historians of nationalism and national identity construc-
tions in Latin America are in fact lamenting that there is too little trans-
national work in their field and that “we need to know far more about the
international context in which national identities evolved, about the trans-
fer of people, ideas and images in both directions.”21 Yet, in spite of such
demands, most scholars continue to be steeped and interested in either
migrations or the study of nationalism, and when attempts have been made
to combine the two, this was done mostly through an opposition between
migrations and national identities.
Interactions between Transnational Migrations and Constructions of

National Identities in Latin America
To be sure, there are countless Latin American examples of discrimination,

racism, xenophobia, and types of nationalism that advocated assimilation-
ist policies toward immigrant communities and their descendants. Many
8 · Michael Goebel
of the contributions to this volume testify to the recurrence of prejudice

against immigrants as outsiders. Although in the mid-nineteenth century
many Latin American political elites were enthusiastic about “civilizing”
or “whitening” their countries through European immigration, they grew
more skeptical over time as results failed to yield the envisaged outcomes.
As the chapters by Stefan Rinke and Frederik Schulze show, this change in
attitudes affected even those who initially had been among the most cov-
eted groups to “whiten” Latin American countries, such as the Germans.
In the eyes of Brazilian elites, Germans turned into dangerously isolationist
aliens, especially during World War I. Jeane DeLaney’s contribution in this
volume on Argentine elites’ attitudes toward immigration reveals a similar
change over time. The writer-statesman Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, for
example, was a fervent advocate of (ideally northern) European immigra-
tion in the 1850s and ’60s, but by the 1880s he railed against the “Italianiza-
tion” of Argentina.22 Against the background of anarchist political activi-
ties, the Argentine government of Julio A. Roca passed a residency law in
1902 allowing for the easier expulsion of foreigners.23 In several countries,
various forms of anti-Semitism developed alongside right-wing Catholic
nationalisms, erupting in serious ethnic violence during Argentina’s so-
called tragic week in 1919.24
The majority of chapters in this volume also mention that by the 1930s
governments enacted laws to curb the entry of migrants.25 Even long before
then, discriminatory legislation existed in some places. As early as 1890, the
supposedly liberal Uruguayan state enacted a law that tried to stimulate the
immigration of Europeans but specifically forbade the entry of Africans,
Asians, and “Gypsies,” which had little effect in practice because none of
these three groups intended to migrate to Uruguay in large numbers at the
time. The measures of the 1930s, however, did affect many immigrants. The
authoritarian regime of Brazil led by Getúlio Vargas, dealt with by Schulze,
was a typical case, trying to “Brazilianize” immigrants already in the coun-
try, for example, by closing down foreign-language schools and outlawing
“foreign” organizations, such as Zionist political associations.26 Unsurpris-
ingly, migrants perceived as religiously, racially, or ethnically “different” or
“inferior” according to globally circulating ideas about race were targeted
more than others, as becomes particularly clear in the chapters by Lara
Putnam and Nicola Foote, which both deal with migrants from the Brit-
ish Caribbean. In the 1930s the Cuban governments of Ramón Grau San
Martín and Fulgencio Batista deported more than 25,000 Haitians in an at-
tempt to “Cubanize” the labor force.27 Postrevolutionary Mexico—whether
Introduction · 9
in spite, because, or regardless of its limited number of immigrants—wit-

nessed a great deal of working-class and peasant xenophobia directed es-
pecially against the Spanish and the Chinese but also against Arabs, who
were accused of “suck[ing] the few available resources” (chupan las pocas
economías)—a xenophobia addressed by Jürgen Buchenau and Kathy Lo-
pez in this volume.28 As Buchenau underlines in his chapter on Mexico, the
notion of an unchangingly xenophilic Latin America versus a xenophobic
North America has to be treated with great caution. In many instances na-
tional identities were construed or mobilized in opposition to migrations.
However, the contributions to this volume as a whole, in addition to an
ever-growing number of studies, also show that the increasing movement
of peoples, and with them goods and ideas, into Latin America—engaging
flows in the opposite direction as well as within Latin America and on to
other places—interacted with the global spread of nationalism and ideas
about nationhood in much more complicated ways than any simple com-
pilation of anti-immigrant sentiments would suggest. On the one hand, it
could be argued that it was only through conceptualizing the world as one
divided into nations that migrations really became understood as such. As
even the most superficial survey of the field of migration studies as well as
public debates will quickly reveal, the very term “migration” has for a long
time almost been equated with “international” or “transnational” migra-
tion. The world’s leading journal in the field, the International Migration
Review, is mainly concerned with movements of peoples crossing national
boundaries. There are studies of other migrations, labeled “internal,” but
these are typically left to demographers, sociologists, or historians working
within the framework of individual nation-states. In a sense, therefore, it
was nationalism that made migrations visible. Moreover, migratory flows
themselves can be determined by various forms of nationalism. Exclusion-
ary or discriminatory nationalisms can work as “push factors.” The drawing
and establishment of national boundaries, in turn, can sometimes work as
“pull factors,” as they did in those cases where migrants specifically went to
border areas for economic purposes such as smuggling—undermining but
sometimes unintentionally consolidating these boundaries. The Chinese
in northern Mexico and southern Peru (who were particularly targeted in
xenophobic attacks, according to Lopez in this volume) were an example
of this.29
On the other hand, migrations made and reshaped national imaginar-
ies and nationalisms because they involved sweeping global demographic
shifts. As José Moya has underlined, the unprecedented scale of movements
10 · Michael Goebel
of people across the Atlantic easily exceeded the grip of policymakers in

any particular nation-state trying either to kindle or to withhold them.30
Many transnational migrations were preceded (and followed) by what in
hindsight has been classified as “internal” migration, modifying the social
fabric and the economies as well as the national imaginaries of the sending
areas. They were also intimately interwoven with large-scale migrations
across national boundaries in the larger supranational sending areas, for
example, Europe or the Caribbean.31 In the receiving context of the Ameri-
cas, wide-ranging and hardly controllable changes were brought about. The
former colonial peripheries (such as Argentina, Uruguay, southern Brazil
or the northern and western parts of the United States) were transformed
into the economically most dynamic regions of the hemisphere, while the
economic heartlands of the former colonies based on mining or plantations
(from the southern United States via Haiti, central Mexico, and Peru to the
Brazilian northeast) declined. Those areas where many migrants went be-
came more urbanized and industrialized—and vice versa; migrants went to
the urbanizing and industrializing regions. Lara Putnam’s argument in this
volume—that mass migration in the Caribbean, at least until the turn of the
century, was driven by economic forces rather than by the racial fantasies of
intellectual or political elites—could easily be extended to most of the cases
studied in this book.
These large-scale movements had far-reaching implications for the con-
struction of national identities, both in international comparison—with
some countries construed as more “modern,” “white,” or “dynamic” than
others, which were cast as “backward” or “racially inferior”—and by in-
ternally reshuffling imagined boundaries of centers and peripheries. The
question of whether a country’s national identity was coded as primarily
“ethnic” or “civic,” if one wants to work with this classic distinction in stud-
ies of nationalism, was as closely related to migratory flows as it was to the
question of whether the state preceded nationalism or vice versa, as Rogers
Brubaker has argued in his comparative study of citizenship and nation-
hood in France and Germany.32 Most European sending countries adopted
one form or another of the jus sanguinis (conferment of citizenship based
on descent) in order not to lose their overseas denizens, while virtually
all American countries adhered to the jus soli (citizenship based on place
of birth), which led to frequent diplomatic conflicts.33 The point may sound
banal today, but it is still worth making: the mass movements of people
preceded the formation of national identities—Putnam’s Caribbean in
Introduction · 11
this volume being a clear case in point—as often as they followed on its
heels.
The significance of migratory flows for the construction of national iden-
tities, however, did not always correlate directly with their size. For Mexico,
Jürgen Buchenau has convincingly pointed out that “small numbers” could
have a “big impact.”34 Some of the most illuminating studies to analyze the
intersection between migrations and national identities concern smaller
groups, a good example of which is migrants from the Middle East. Steven
Hyland’s chapter in this book shows particularly well how migrants from
that region debated the constant (re)drawing of imperial, colonial, or na-
tional boundaries in their home countries. Although the first immigrants
from Arab lands to Brazil were Moroccan Jews in the wake of the Spanish-
Moroccan war of 1859–60, in both Argentina and Brazil immigrants from
Arab countries from the 1890s were summarily called “Turks” (turcos) be-
cause they mainly came from the Ottoman Empire. This category included
Arab Christians and (fewer) Muslims from today’s Lebanon and Syria, and
Jews from across the Ottoman Empire as well as Armenians but hardly
any people who today or in historical settings other than Latin America
would be labeled Turks. Depending on their place of origin and ethnic
and religious factors, these migrants and their descendants subsequently
“acquired” other identities: Armenians understandably (and successfully)
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 Honduras, and “Lebanese” in Mexico and Ecuador.35
In virtually all other areas of origin, too, the nationality of the emigrants
was open to negotiation before and after migration. In Brazil and espe-
cially Peru a large proportion of “the Japanese” were not necessarily re-
garded as such in Honshū, since many came from Okinawa, which had
been colonized by the Meiji Empire only in 1879. The islands’ inhabitants
underwent a forced “Japanization” from 1890 onward, perhaps contribut-
ing to emigration, but in itself undertaken by the authorities with an eye on
how overseas Okinawans might fit into Japan’s imperial political designs.36
Many of Argentina’s “Germans,” especially in the province of Entre Ríos,
came from the lower Volga area of Russia, where they had settled since
the late eighteenth century.37 The “nationality” of the few thousand Cape
Verdeans who went to Argentina between the 1920s and 1940s was hard to
establish for immigration officials, too, even if their passports unmistakably
identified them as Portuguese. Making their appearance in Foote’s and Put-

nam’s chapters, the more numerous Anglophone West Indians who spread
across the Hispanic Caribbean between 1900 and 1930 of course did so as
British subjects—in contrast to Haitians, who seem to have suffered heavier
discrimination in part because they lacked this link to the British crown.38
The roughly 12,000 Irish who settled permanently in Argentina during
the nineteenth century also came as British subjects, but in contrast to both
West Indians in Spanish America and the Irish in the United States, they
were subsumed under the label “English” (ingleses) by many Argentines—
an etiquette that they increasingly rejected from the 1880s as nationalism
surged back home, but that they also learned to use creatively when it
promised socioeconomic benefits.39 Conversely, one could debate whether
the roughly 270,000 Spaniards who came to Cuba during the nineteenth
century should be classified under the rubric of “transnational migrations”
since Cuba was still a Spanish colony then. The 60,000 who arrived between
1800 and 1850, to be sure, were “transnational” migrants in the sense that
they came mainly from recently independent Spanish American countries,
such as Mexico and Venezuela. Between 1850 and 1898, in turn, many came
as soldiers from the Iberian Peninsula to fight against Cuban aspirations for
independence.40
Skeptics may dismiss such examples as fascinating yet quantitatively mi-
nor exceptions. They should be reminded, however, that virtually all the
“nation-states” that sent migrants to Latin America between 1850 and 1950
were themselves being formed or at least (re)negotiated and contested. Be-
fore 1861 and 1871, respectively, “Italians” and “Germans” did not arrive as
such, but as Ligurians, Piedmontese, Bavarians, and so forth. The “French”
who in the second half of the nineteenth century came in large numbers to
Argentina and Uruguay were mainly from the Basque Country, and if their
marriage patterns (in Uruguay) are anything to go by, they socialized with
other Basques, including those from across the Franco-Spanish border.41
The “Spanish” who went to Argentina, Cuba, and Uruguay in the late nine-
teenth and early twentieth centuries were primarily Galicians (around 65
percent of the total), Basques, Catalans, and Canary Islanders (in Cuba and
Uruguay) whose “Spanishness” was as questionable as the quandary’s solu-
tion adopted by “Argentines,” “Cubans,” and “Uruguayans,” who for rea-
sons of simplicity resorted to using the shorthand gallegos for all of them.42
These Latin American nationalities may well be put in quotation marks,
too, since by the beginning of World War I, over half of the populations
of Argentina and Uruguay were first- and second-generation immigrants
Introduction · 13
while Cuba, besides containing a large immigrant contingent, had until

recently itself been that “most faithful island” pertaining to Spain.
Moreover, migrants constantly crossed boundaries within Latin Amer-
ica. As Lara Putnam reminds us in her chapter, in some Latin American
countries the largest groups of foreigners in the early twentieth century
came from neighboring republics. But classic immigration countries in
South America also saw much cross-border movement. Uruguay, which
an Italian diplomat in the 1890s doubted was “anything more than a bridge
between the ocean and Argentina” (though a heavily frequented one), was
a particularly clear case in point.43 In 1908, 18,600 “Argentines” and 27,800
“Brazilians” lived in Uruguay, but their parents (especially parents of Ar-
gentines) were mainly Europeans, while a few of Uruguay’s Spanish citizens
were born in Cuba. Most of those listed as U.S. citizens who married in
Montevideo during the first three decades of the twentieth century had at
least one parent born either in Italy or Spanish America, or else came from
Puerto Rico.44 In turn, around 100,000 Uruguayans—almost a tenth of the
country’s population—lived in Argentina in 1907.45 As a consequence of
such movements, Italian sources rarely differentiated between the River
Plate countries until after the unification of Italy.46 But in people’s minds,
even the distinction between North America and South America may have
been blurred at times. “America” meant rather different things in differ-
ent regions of Italy, depending on where emigrants went to fare l’America.
German emigration records did not distinguish between Argentina and
Brazil, both Südamerika, until World War I.47 Only once clearer informa-
tion spread through the networks formed by the migratory process did
the contours of American nation-states become more precise in European
people’s minds.
Migrations also contributed to the establishment, (re)drawing, and
consolidation of national boundaries on a less imaginary level. In the Ca-
ribbean, where nation-states formed only during or after the century at
which this volume looks, this was especially clear. But even with regard
to continental Latin America, the political map of 1850 looked different
from that of 1950. Changes concerned especially the interior borders of
South America pertaining to areas that were difficult to access and claimed
by various neighboring countries. In other places, such as the Caribbean
lands of Central American countries or the southern parts of Argentina
and Chile populated by indigenous peoples, certain territories formally be-
longed to the nation-state, but they were barely integrated into the nation’s
social, economic, cultural, and political life. State- or company-fostered
transnational migrations frequently played a crucial role in the “nation-

alization” of such territories. After the 1860s, Germans, Swiss, and others
were attracted to southern Chile and a Welsh community began to settle
in Argentine Patagonia, partly as a result of state attempts to diminish the
weight of indigenous populations.48 In the course of the Amazonian rubber
boom, a highly multinational workforce, including laborers from various
Asian, European, and British Caribbean countries (especially Barbadians)
helped to “Brazilianize” the infrastructure of territories whose status was
previously disputed or formally belonged to Spanish American countries.49
Something similar could be said about marginal areas of Costa Rica or
Panama, mentioned by Foote and Putnam.
Several chapters in this volume highlight that wars constituted an im-
portant litmus test for migrations as well as debates around nationality.
Even if the relative absence of border conflicts, separatist movements, and
international wars in Latin America in comparison to other world regions
is sometimes noted by scholars of nationalism, they were intimately con-
nected to nation-building and the formation of national myths, with immi-
grants frequently wound up in them.50 In her chapter comparing Chinese
immigrants in three Latin American countries, Kathy Lopez demonstrates
that the participation of Chinese in the Cuban war of independence earned
them a more favorable position in Cuban society than was the case in Peru,
where many Chinese were associated with Chile during the War of the
Pacific, or in the heated climate of revolutionary Mexico. The restrictions
of German community life during World War I, outlined by Rinke and
Schulze, are another good example. In the Chaco War of 1932–35, which
resulted in Bolivia having to cede large swathes of territory to Paraguay,
German-speaking Mennonites who had recently come from Canada and
Russia proved a crucial factor in swaying the war’s outcome.51 By then, im-
migrants had long become actors in the national life of most Latin Ameri-
can countries.
Diaspora Nationalisms and Homeland Relations
Another issue to consider is that of “diaspora nationalism” or “long-dis-

tance nationalism,” which Steven Hyland and I deal with in this volume.
Its study, with the classic diasporic cases of Greeks, Jews, Armenians, and
to some extent Chinese and Indian expatriates in mind, was advocated al-
ready by Gellner as a peculiar case where a national identity is construed
without a state fostering nationalization through education and where, as
Introduction · 15
a result, the idea of the nation becomes particularly imaginary and deter-
ritorialized.52 The term “diaspora” has been popularized enormously in the
last two decades to include a majority of migrant communities. If the most
commonly applied yardsticks are taken, most of Latin America’s immigrant
communities between 1850 and 1950 could indeed be called “diasporas”:
they all were dispersed over several nation-states, even though the ele-
ment of trauma and forcefulness in this dispersal obviously varied; they all
developed some sort of awareness of themselves as a community distinct
from others surrounding them, combined with varying degrees of bound-
ary maintenance; and there was longing for a real or imagined homeland.53
One might lament that through the proliferation of the term “diaspora” it
loses its specificity to describe those who might now be called “victim dia-
sporas.” But the term’s heuristic benefit is that we gain a greater deal of sen-
sitivity to the multisited nature of transnational connections of migrants
and their relationship with an imagined or real homeland, both factors that
historiographies focusing exclusively on the nation-state have obscured.
Diasporic nationalisms engage many different and shifting types of
identity constructions. First, in the host societies, they interact (or don’t
interact) with the various identities—regional, national, supranational,
religious, ethnic, or racial—of co-migrants who come to be construed as
co-nationals, co-ethnics, and so forth. Zionism, discussed in passing by
Jeffrey Lesser and Raanan Rein in this volume, is perhaps the best-known
case of diasporic nationalism. But it has also been shown that Sicilians
or Calabrians really became “Italians” in the Americas (as well as “Ameri-
cans” or New Yorkers or Argentines or porteños), even if they mainly mi-
grated there after the unification of Italy. This process happened in part
through heteroreferential adscription, as in the common discrimination as
“dagoes” in the United States or in the slightly less malign gringos and tanos
of the River Plate. But this process also worked through a gradual replace-
ment of regional attachments (to “Neapolitan” associations or newspapers,
for instance) with national ones (“Italian”). This becoming national in the
diaspora was frequently kindled through external events, such as World
War I.54
Campanilismo (the Italian word for emotional attachment to the local
bell tower) or Kleinstaaterei (German for the division into small states of
what should be, according to the term’s implication, a larger nation-state)
are often seen as competitors or obstacles to a unified “national identity”
in such contexts. But subnational regionalism and nationalism frequently
interacted in mutually reinforcing ways. As José Moya has shown, Basques
and Catalans may have involuntarily turned into gallegos upon arrival in
Buenos Aires, but the myriad of their regionally based associations actu-
ally formed the bedrock for the emergence of a more unified “Spanish”
associationist culture too.55 In some cases this process occurred because
administrative deals with national (e.g., Italian or Spanish) authorities were
more practical and they were able to provide a greater deal of protection
and rights than associations based on regional origin. In other instances the
very fact of living abroad reinforced a common sense of belonging among
groups that were earlier stratified along regional divisions.
Second, diasporic nationalisms invariably engaged constructions of
national identity in the homeland regardless of whether this existed as a
nation-state or not. Again, the Jewish diaspora’s role in the foundation of
Israel and the ensuing Middle East conflict or the Armenian diaspora’s
importance in the country’s independence and the conflict in Nagorno-
Karabakh are only the best known of a great many possible examples. One
important driving force in diaspora-homeland connections was that, con-
trary to common perceptions of migrations as straightforward and definite
movements from one nation-state to another, they always involved much
return migration (on average probably nearly 50 percent for the migra-
tions discussed in this volume) as well as back and forth movements and
on-migrations, all within much larger circuits.56 As scholars are becoming
increasingly aware of this multisitedness, issues such as the transnational
dimensions of Giuseppe Mazzini’s ideas, including in Latin America, or the
importance of Giuseppe Garibaldi’s stay in South America for the unifica-
tion of Italy are increasingly being researched.57
Chinese diaspora nationalism is another good case. Sun Yat-sen, who
founded his Revive China Society in Hawaii in 1894, had a keen interest
in the exploitation of Chinese Coolies in Peru and Cuba, as revealed by
his library, which contained books based on the testimonies of returnees.
Famously, he called the overseas Chinese “the mother of the revolution
[of 1911].” A seminal Chinese nationalist tract from 1903 referred to Cuba
as evidence that “fellow countrymen” were “ill-treated abroad.” Although
the overwhelming majority of Chinese in Latin America at the time came
from Canton, forms of nationalism derived from the diasporic experience
gained an ever widening spatial circulation back in China.58 The Syrian
Social Nationalist Party, in turn, was founded in Lebanon in 1932 by Antun
Saadeh upon his return from São Paulo, where he had developed a nation-
alist consciousness in part through engagement with the texts of German
Introduction · 17
Romanticism as well as more recent race theories of the extreme right.59

The living conditions of German immigrants in southern Brazil in turn
buoyed the imagination of ethnic nationalists in the German Empire, who
were in search of a traditional ideal untainted by the supposedly corrupting
forces of modernity they believed were plaguing central Europe.60 During
the Weimar Republic (in varying degrees and depending on the political
conjunctures at home) and the Third Reich (far more aggressively), Ger-
man policymakers sought to galvanize “their” communities together with
Latin American intellectual elites for Germany’s political aims in Europe,
usually in contradistinction to anything perceived as “French.”61 The Ital-
ian fascist state also directed propaganda efforts toward “its” diaspora, with
especially intense efforts surrounding the Italian-Ethiopian war of 1935, as
my own chapter outlines.62
Third, owing to the multidirectional movements of diasporas, diasporic
nationalisms tend to promote or at least interact with the creation of supra-
or pan-national identities, which are usually based on linguistic, religious,
ethnic, or racial criteria. In fact, diasporic nationalism and pan-nation-
alism are often close relatives, so a clear-cut distinction between them is
difficult to establish. It could be argued that the nationalism of the African
diaspora, if it has ever existed in the singular, is much the same as pan-
Africanism—if by this latter term we do not refer primarily to attempts
to create supranational political structures uniting African nation-states.
Latin America is not usually treated as a privileged site for the study of
pan-African ideas since there exists an ongoing perception (or myth, if we
prefer) that, in comparison to the United States or the Anglophone Carib-
bean, the national identities of African Latin Americans—as Brazilians,
Colombians, or Cubans—trumped their racial identities.63 Regardless of
whether one shares this understanding or not, Latin America unquestion-
ably mattered for the history of pan-Africanism. Marcus Garvey’s travels
to Costa Rica and Panama between 1910 and 1912 exerted a crucial influ-
ence on the development of his ideas as well as his Universal Negro Im-
provement Association, which—as Lara Putnam and Nicola Foote both
discuss—opened branches in most Hispanic Caribbean countries in the
1910s. Many of its members, including Garvey himself, meanwhile, learned
to draw on the resource of their British citizenship (perhaps not quite a
pan-national but in hindsight arguably transnational identity) when this
appeared to be useful. The disappointing results of this strategy then helped
discredit British colonialism in Jamaica or Barbados, where many migrant
workers returned in the 1930s, coinciding with the stirring of pan-African

solidarities and anticolonialism that the war in Ethiopia provoked in this
setting (not to mention the earlier impact of the Harlem Renaissance).64
A pan-national concept that is of particular interest here is that of
hispanidad. After first being used by a Spanish priest in Buenos Aires in
1926, the concept came to rally a long-existing pan-Hispanic nationalism,
which was popularized by the right-wing Catholic intellectual Ramiro de
Maeztu, who had served as Spain’s ambassador to Argentina from 1928 to
1931, through his 1934 book, Defensa de la hispanidad. The celebrations
of October 12 (the day on which Columbus first landed in the Americas)
in many Spanish-speaking countries were subsequently labeled as Día de
la hispanidad. Although the concept was nourished by earlier ideals of
hispanoamericanismo, the repercussions of the Spanish civil war added a
marked association of the term with the extreme nationalist right and with
Catholicism in different settings. In Peru it served to lodge a distinction
between right-wing hispanistas and left-wing indigenistas. In Argentina it
was (paradoxically, one might think) always used in opposition to “cosmo-
politanism” and sometimes tied into anti-Semitism or invoked as a coun-
terweight to “Italianization,” as Jeane DeLaney shows in her chapter in this
volume.65
All of these examples demonstrate that national identities were not for-
mulated only in opposition to migrations but rather in their course. Vari-
ous identities—including those coded as national—oftentimes overlapped
rather than excluded each other. Contrary to what some Chicago School
theorists would make us believe, there was no strict correlation between
the degree of “assimilation” or “integration” and socioeconomic upward
mobility. Nor did “culturally similar” immigrants necessarily assimilate
more easily or fully. If this had been the case, on the basis of concepts such
as hispanidad, one would have to assume Spanish immigrants to be more
“assimilated,” “adjusted,” or “integrated” than others in Spanish America,
and the Portuguese to blend “more successfully” with Brazilians than other
immigrants. However, the Spanish and the Portuguese often scored higher
than others on the paradigmatic proxies for exclusion and separateness,
such as levels of in-marriage, residential segregation, propensity to crime,
or socioeconomic marginalization, all of which have been and continue to
be seen by policymakers and much of the public at large as inimical to “inte-
gration” and the formulation of a “cohesive” national identity. Thus, in spite
of their heavily male sex ratio, Portuguese immigrants in late nineteenth-
and early twentieth-century Brazil in-married more often, were poorer
Introduction · 19
on average, and more often imprisoned than most other “foreigners.” On

those same criteria as well as residence patterns, Montevideo’s Spanish were
more “excluded” than its Italians. Nonetheless, travelers described the city
as “typically” Spanish, and in the writings of local social chroniclers the
label “immigration” itself seemed to be reserved for non-Spanish-speaking
groups.66
Conversely, perhaps because they felt they had to, ostensibly “more dif-
ferent” groups were often keen to stress the cultural similarities between
their home regions and the receiving society. For example, as political
developments in the Middle East, mediated through what Brubaker has
called “ethnopolitical entrepreneurs,” began to stimulate pan-Arab feelings
in Latin America’s Syrian and Lebanese communities, the same “entrepre-
neurs” construed genealogies between Arab and Hispanic or Portuguese
culture, in the process drawing on concepts such as hispanidad, or, as hap-
pened in Argentina in the 1950s and ’60s, seeking to engage Catholic and
anti-Semitic strands of nationalism.67 Diasporic nationalisms therefore
need not be construed in opposition to nationalisms of the host countries.
Again, this can happen as DeLaney and Schulze suggest in their contribu-
tions. The chapters, however, provide many examples of compatibility or
mutual reinforcements of various kinds of national identification. My own
chapter, for instance, underlines the close overlaps between Italian Risorgi-
mento exiles and nineteenth-century nation-building in the Rio de la Plata.
Jeff Lesser and Raanan Rein mention Zionism as a vehicle to become Ar-
gentine since it gave Jews the kind of homeland that other Argentines—of
Italian, Spanish, Portuguese descent—had too. Kathy Lopez shows in her
chapter how Chinese immigrants and their descendants in Cuba sought to
construe analogies between the Cuban independence hero Carlos Manuel
de Céspedes and “their” national hero Sun Yat-sen.
Migrations and Comparison
Such manifold and varying relationships between migrations and the (re)
reformulation of nationalisms in their global embedding must lead us to
reconceptualize clean oppositions and dichotomies. Borrowing Peggy Lev-
itt and Nina Glick Schiller’s words, such rethinking indicates “that the in-
corporation of individuals into nation-states and the maintenance of trans-
national connections are not contradictory social processes. . . . Migrant
incorporation into a new land and transnational connections to a home-
land or to dispersed networks of family, compatriots, or persons who share
a religious or ethnic identity can occur at the same time and reinforce each
other.”68 There was not “less” nationality A if there was “more” nationality
B, but rather there was often “more” A and B as a result of migrations. As
demanded by Jeffrey Lesser and Raanan Rein for the study of Jewish Latin
Americans, the “nation” can and should still retain “a prominent position”
in studies of such connections. Like ethnicity, religion, race, or gender, “na-
tion” is one—and an important—“piece within a broader identity mosaic,”
whose constituent elements can be mutually exclusive but also compatible
or reciprocally reinforcing.69
The very term “transnational,” the use of which in social sciences and the
humanities has risen spectacularly in recent years, serves us well as a start-
ing point to think about how national identities were themselves formed
only in the process of being transgressed. As Kiran Patel has underlined, the
concept should not tempt us into a “postnational, historically teleological
wishful thinking that seeks to abolish nationalism and nation-states alto-
gether by denying their importance as subject matters of analysis.” After all,
“the very logic of the term” implies that “the nation-state or an elaborated
national consciousness represent a certain point of reference.”70 Bringing to
the fore the case of immigration to Latin America, the aim of this volume,
therefore, is not to minimize the historical importance of nation-states and
national identities but rather to conceptualize them as “processual,” under-
mined but equally importantly constituted through movements and shifts
that crossed their boundaries. “Transnational” communities were “transna-
tional” only because they engaged with national boundaries. For this pur-
pose, the authors present the insights that can be gleaned from migration
studies and from nationalism theories together.71
While recent developments in the discipline of history, with its new-
found interest in far-flung global connections and flows, have doubtless
contributed a great deal to complicating previous master narratives about
the world’s division into nation-states, they have arguably been weaker in
postulating structural and causal factors leading to change than earlier
theoretical models such as modernization theory, which is often cast as
its archenemy. Yet the search for causation might still be seen as part and
parcel of the historian’s job. In order to prevent the danger of the history of
migrations and national identities from falling apart into an infinite num-
ber of anecdotally fascinating but explanatorily weak series of connections
and spreads without specific spatial grounding, each of the chapters of this
volume adopts an explicitly comparative angle—whether by comparing
different communities within one setting or a community that has become
Introduction · 21
coded as such in different settings. The volume thereby seeks to meet a

frequently made but rarely implemented demand of historians of both mi-
grations and nationalism for a comparative framework.72 The goal, to be
sure, is not merely additive but is to compare systematically similarities
and differences between cases in order learn cumulatively about the rela-
tive weight of structural variables in shaping outcomes. In other words, a
transnational perspective is not seen as a deadly antidote to the alleged ills
that some proponents of transnational history believe to have detected in
historical comparison but is instead a necessary, complementary element.73
Because of its longue durée history of overlapping, blending, and compet-
ing national identities through migrations, the study of such movements
in Latin America between 1850 and 1950 can make an especially interesting
contribution to an emergent field of study thus defined.74
This volume is therefore divided into two parts that are designed to cover
the history of immigration in Latin America and the Caribbean as compre-
hensively as possible and to test different ways of how comparison can fur-
ther our understanding of this historical topic. The first part—consisting of
chapters by Lara Putnam, Jürgen Buchenau, Jeane DeLaney, and Frederik
Schulze—deals with geographical contexts, comparing various immigrant
groups within that space. Putnam surveys the entangled histories of in- and
out-migration in the circum-Caribbean. Since she concentrates on the Brit-
ish Caribbean, her chapter provides a welcome example of a context where
the very term “nation” grew in importance only during or after the pe-
riod of mass migration. Buchenau focuses on the untypical case of Mexico,
drawing out examples of both xenophilia and xenophobia, which appeared
to be rather often a popular affair directed against relatively wealthy im-
migrants in the Mexican context. Jeane DeLaney scrutinizes the changing
attitudes of Argentine elites toward immigrants, which informed the rise of
Argentine cultural nationalism from around 1880 onward, while Frederik
Schulze contrasts various nationalisms enmeshed in southern Brazil—that
of German and Japanese immigrants and that of Brazilian elites that over
time became wary of immigration.
The second part, consisting of six chapters, looks at one “group” in differ-
ent settings. In their contribution on Jews in Brazil and Argentina, Jeffrey
Lesser and Raanan Rein put forward a forceful argument against the myth
of Jewish exceptionalism—or, indeed, the exceptionalism of any immigrant
group. Fitting well with some of the arguments made in this introduction,
they stress that being Jewish did not usually mean being less Argentine or
Brazilian in any way. Stefan Rinke, meanwhile, concentrates on a particular
moment in the history of German Latin Americans—mainly in Argentina,

Brazil, and Chile. During World War I, Rinke demonstrates, they were sub-
jected to various degrees of hostility, most notably in Brazil. The chapter
is a useful reminder that community identity does not necessarily decline
with the length of stay in the host country but can be powerfully reinforced
due to external pressures. Kathy Lopez compares the history of Chinese
immigrants in Cuba, Mexico, and Peru. While she stresses that they were
subjected to discrimination in all three contexts, due to hemispherically
circulating discourses about the “yellow peril,” there were also significant
differences. Her chapter is thus a showcase of how the attribution of certain
characteristics to a particular group interacts with the political embedding
in different settings.
Nicola Foote builds on this theme in her assessment of the experiences
of British Caribbean immigrants in Latin America. Drawing on the often
neglected case studies of Peru, Ecuador, Brazil, and Venezuela in addition
to the more familiar examples of Central America and Cuba, her chap-
ter highlights how the critical contribution British West Indians made to
nationalist modernization projects was complicated by the negative ide-
ologies associated with blackness as well as by the close connection of
Caribbean migrants to imperialist powers—exacerbated in many cases
by forms of diasporic nationalisms that emphasized a “British” identity
and that foregrounded the English language and Protestant religions. Her
chapter underlines the tragic consequences of racism and xenophobia at
the level of lived experience but demonstrates that even exclusionary and
discriminatory nationalisms were shaped and informed by the actions of
migrants themselves, who were not passive agents in the process of identity
formation.
Finally, Steven Hyland’s chapter and my own chapter deal more specifi-
cally with diasporic nationalisms, focusing on the Syrian-Lebanese and the
Italian case, respectively. Hyland’s contribution, in particular, stresses the
heterogeneity of diasporic nationalisms among Arab communities in Latin
America. Given the fragmented religious, ethnic, and political landscape
of the post-Ottoman Levant, migrants in Latin America debated fiercely
over what political course their homelands should take. If Schulze’s chapter
emphasizes the social heterogeneity of immigrant groups, Hyland’s under-
lines that their visions of national identity were just as multifarious. My
own contribution adopts a similar view but highlights the long-term role
of migratory flows and demographics. Comparing diasporic nationalisms
among Italians in Argentina, Uruguay, and Brazil, I arrive at the conclusion
Introduction · 23
that the timing of migration played a crucial role in determining the poli-
tics of Italian communities in the Americas.
Notes
Epigraph: Guilherme de Almeida, quoted in Lesser, “(Re)Creating Ethnicity,” 58.
1. For a concise overview, see McKeown, “Global Migration.” A useful survey of the
height of migrations from Europe to the Americas is Nugent, Crossings.
2. Figures vary widely. For an overview, see Sánchez Albornoz, “Population of Latin
America, 1850–1930,” 130, who probably overstates the numbers. Moya gives higher figures
about the destination of European emigrants, but these exclude return migration (Cousins
and Strangers, 46).
3. Much of this scholarship is comparative in the sense of edited volumes or special
issues of journals in which each article treats specific, usually nationally framed, cases:
e.g., Klich and Lesser, Arab and Jewish Immigrants; Fausto, Fazer a América; Baily and
Míguez, Mass Migration; Anderson and Lee, Displacements and Diasporas; Lesser and
Rein, Rethinking Jewish-Latin Americans; and the special issues of Americas 53, no. 1
(1996), on Middle Easterners; Caribbean Studies 31, no. 3 (2003), on Garveyism in the
Hispanic Caribbean; Latin American Perspectives 31, no. 3 (2004), on East Asians; Hispanic
American Historical Review 86, no. 1 (2006), on various groups in various countries; and
Portuguese Studies Review 14, no. 2 (2006), on the Portuguese. In turn, monographs that
are in themselves explicitly comparative remain rare. The most important are Baily, Immi-
grants; Franzina, L’America gringa; McKeown, Chinese Migrant Networks; and Masterson
and Funada-Classen, Japanese in Latin America. The study of different groups within one
national setting is still less frequent in the English-language scholarship. Exceptions are
Lesser, Negotiating National Identity; and Goebel, “Gauchos, Gringos and Gallegos.” While
there are plenty of studies in languages other than English, some of which compare various
groups within one national setting (a good survey on the best-known case—Argentina—is
Devoto, Historia de la inmigración), the Latin American scholarship comparing differ-
ent settings within Latin America beyond one nation-state remains extremely thin. As
this overview underlines, the comparative literature has a bias toward smaller immigrant
communities that are perceived as more “exotic” on racial, ethnic, or religious grounds.
An important precursor of much of the scholarship mentioned here was the short survey
by Mörner, Adventurers and Proletarians.
4. The best-known works are Park and Miller, Old World Traits Transplanted; Wirth,
Ghetto; Warner and Srole, Social Systems; and Gordon, Assimilation.
5. The classic formulation of this idea can be found in Glazer and Moynihan, Beyond
the Melting Pot.
6. An extreme, more autobiographical or political than scholarly example is Novak,
Rise of the Unmeltable Ethnics. In hindsight, this book’s methodological nationalism, with
its square focus on U.S. (identity) politics, is as striking as its ethnic essentialism. The
author’s irate denial of “Americanization,” in my view, makes for a peculiarly “American”
book, arguably bespeaking an acculturation of sorts.
7. E.g., Persons, Ethnic Studies at Chicago, 87–89; and Kazal, “Revisiting Assimilation,”
446.
8. Wimmer and Glick Schiller, “Methodological Nationalism.”

9. Gellner, Nations and Nationalism, 55; Smith, National Identity, 39; Anderson, Imag-
ined Communities; and Hobsbawm and Ranger, Invention of Tradition.
10. Of course, there were always prominent exceptions—for example, John Higham
or, for Argentina, Sam Baily—but even they have usually treated nationalism/nativism
and migrations in separate studies: Baily, Labor, Nationalism, and Politics and Baily, Im-
migrants. A fruitful attempt truly to integrate the two fields in Latin American history are
the writings by Lesser, especially his Negotiating National Identity, although it is arguably
more indebted to cultural or intellectual history than to social history.
11. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 81; Calhoun, Nationalism; and Kedourie, Nation-
alism in Asia and Africa, 1–152.
12. Brubaker, “Ethnicity, Race, and Nationalism,” 28–30.
13. E.g., Brubaker, “The Return of Assimilation?”; and Alba and Nee, Remaking the
American Mainstream.
14. Such findings are summarized by Gans, “Toward a Reconciliation.”
15. An important article for this thesis is Portes and Zhou, “New Second Generation.”
16. A good example is Moya, Cousins and Strangers.
17. For Spanish American history, see the discussion in Miller, In the Shadow, esp.
32–42.
18. Colom González, “La imaginación nacional”; and Miller, “Historiography of Na-
tionalism,” esp. 203–7, both make this observation.
19. Míguez, “Introduction: Foreign Mass Migration,” xxii. The classic North American–
South American comparison is between Italians in the United States and Argentina: Klein,
“Integration of Italians”; and Baily, Immigrants.
20. Even sophisticated works such as Portes and Rumbaut, Immigrant America, since
their aim is “focusing on major aspects of the adaptation experience” (34), suffer from a
lack of conceptual interest in nationalism, discussing it mainly as nativism (346–49). A
classic in Latin American history from such a perspective is Solberg, Immigration and
Nationalism.
21. Miller, “Historiography of Nationalism,” 216.
22. Sarmiento, Conflicto y armonía. On anxieties about Argentina’s “Italianization”
more generally, see Bertoni, Patriotas.
23. Costanzo, Los indeseables.
24. See Lvovich, Nacionalismo y antisemitismo, ch. 3. A good hemispheric comparison
is Tucci Carneiro, O anti-semitismo.
25. Some of these measures were similar to the Immigration Act of 1924 in the United
States, but most of them were passed after 1930, when the global economic crisis had
already significantly reduced the number of immigrants anyway. There were, however,
many mutual influences across countries of the Americas in directing migratory flows and
legislation; see Bejarano, “La inmigración a Cuba.”
26. See, e.g., Gertz, O perigo alemão; and Lesser, Welcoming the Undesirables, 105.
27. Carr, “Identity, Class, and Nation”; and McLeod, “Undesirable Aliens.”
28. Alfaro-Velcamp, So Far from Allah, 116; on the other cases, see Hu-DeHart, “Rac-
ism”; and Yankelevich, “Hispanofobia.”
Introduction · 25
29. On their role as border communities, see Curtis, “Mexicali’s Chinatown”; and
McKeown, “Conceptualizing Chinese Diasporas,” 321.
30. Moya connects what he casts as primarily transatlantic migrations to what Ken-
neth Pomeranz has called the “great divergence,” which economically left China to trail
behind Europe from around 1800 (Moya, “Continent of Immigrants,” 4; Pomeranz, Great
Divergence). By contrast, McKeown, in “Global Migration,” points to the sizeable move-
ment of peoples across Asia.
31. A well-known case is that of the Italians, who until the 1870s and after World War I
in their majority went to other European countries but in between primarily went to the
Americas. See, generally, Gabaccia, Italy’s Many Diasporas.
32. Brubaker, Citizenship and Nationhood, 1–17. Brubaker later dismissed the whole
distinction, however, in “Manichean Myth.”
33. Álvarez, “Latin America and International Law,” esp. 305–6. On how understand-
ings and laws of citizenship were made through migrations between Argentina, Italy, and
Spain, see Cook-Martín, “Soldiers and Wayward Women.”
34. Buchenau, “Small Numbers, Great Impact.”
35. On Moroccan Jews in the Amazon, see Benchimol, Eretz Amazônia; generally, see
Klich and Lesser, “‘Turco’ Immigrants.”
36. Apart from Masterson and Funada-Classen, Japanese in Latin America, see also, on
Japanese immigration in Peru and Brazil, Takenaka, “Japanese in Peru”; Lone, Japanese
Community; and Lesser, Searching for Home Abroad; and especially the article by Mori,
“Identity Transformations among Okinawans,” 47–66. On the role of Okinawa in Meiji
constructions of “Japaneseness,” see Morris-Suzuki, Re-Inventing Japan, esp. 26–34.
37. Bosch, “La colonización”; and Albaladejo, “Les descendants des Allemands.”
38. Maffia, “La migración caboverdeana”; and McLeod, “Undesirable Aliens.”
39. Kelly, Irish ‘Ingleses’; see also Sábato and Korol, ¿Cómo fue?.
40. Moya, “Spanish Emigration,” 16.
41. Within a sample of 5,056 marriage records compiled from four Uruguayan depart-
ments between 1880 and 1930 (see Goebel, “Gauchos, Gringos and Gallegos,” 194–96 for
the sampling method) there were 67 Basque Frenchmen, of whom 34 married French-
women. Only one of these Frenchwomen was not Basque (compared to 30 percent of non-
Basques among the whole sample of Frenchwomen). Of the remaining 33 male French
from the Basque Country, 7 married Spanish women (all Basques) and 20 married Uru-
guayan women, all but 2 of whom had at least one Spanish or French parent. Although
the regional origin of the parents could not be ascertained, one would suspect a Basque
involvement there too.
42. Moya, “Spanish Emigration,” 20.
43. Quoted in Oddone, “La politica e le immagini,” 98. Guy Bourdé estimates that
about 17 percent of the approximately 7.6 million European arrivals to Buenos Aires be-
tween 1857 and 1930 (of whom many left again) came from Montevideo; Bourdé, Urban-
isation et immigration, 162.
44. Anuario Estadístico de la República Oriental del Uruguay; and Goebel, “Gauchos,
Gringos and Gallegos.”
45. Vanger, Model Country, 17.
46. Devoto, “Un caso di migrazione precoce,” 15.

47. Nugent, Crossings, 66.
48. Blancpain, Les Allemands, 450–53; and Williams, “Welsh Settlers.”
49. Greenfield, “Barbadians.”
50. E.g., Hobsbawm, “Nationalism and National Identity.”
51. Hughes, “Logistics,” esp. 436–37. The Bolivian campaign in turn was led by the
retired German general Hans Kundt; for an introduction to his role in the conflict, see
Farcau, Chaco War, 87–98.
52. Gellner, Nations and Nationalism, 101–9. The second term is preferred by Nina
Glick Schiller; see “Long-Distance Nationalism.”
53. The most important introductions to definitions of the term and its relation with
nationalism are Tölölyan, “Rethinking Diaspora(s)”; Cohen, Global Diasporas; Brubaker,
“‘Diaspora’ Diaspora”; Gal, Leoussi, and Smith, Call of the Homeland; and Bauböck and
Faist, Diaspora and Transnationalism.
54. E.g., Cinel, From Italy to San Francisco, 228–55; and Luconi, From Paesani to White
Ethnics. A good Latin American regional case study is Zanini, Italianidade.
55. Moya, Cousins and Strangers, 277–331.
56. For obvious reasons, this is less valid for the classic (victim) diasporas.
57. Bayly and Biagini, Giuseppe Mazzini. The general idea is well elaborated by Choate,
Emigrant Nation.
58. McKeown, Chinese Migrant Networks, 85–99; for the Sun quote, see Lum and Lum,
Sun Yat-sen, xv; on Sun’s library containing the 1860-book Bitter Society, see T’sai, “Chi-
nese Emigration,” 398; and Tsou and Lust, Chinese Revolutionary Army, 73. An important
article to stimulate research in this area, though not in relation to Latin America, is Duara,
“Transnationalism.”
59. Lesser, Negotiating National Identity, 62–63; and Schumann, “Nationalism,” esp.
601–3.
60. Conrad, Globalisierung und Nation, 229–78. In an interesting contrast to the
predominant view of an “assimilationist” Brazil versus a “pluralist” or segregationist
United States, pan-German nationalists loathed the United States, as opposed to Brazil, as
a “mass grave of Germandom,” due to assimilation; Chickering, We Men Who Feel Most
German, 88.
61. The literature on these topics, especially the Nazis, is obviously very broad. See, e.g.,
Rinke, “Der letzte freie Kontinent”; Goebel, “Decentring”; Brepohl de Magalhães, Panger-
manismo e nazismo; Newton, “Nazi Menace”; and Mitchell, The Danger of Dreams.
62. Bertonha, “Italiani nel mondo”; and Scarzanella, Fascistas en América del Sur.
63. The comparison of race relations in Brazil and the United States is a classic in the
literature at least since the days of the Brazilian intellectual Gilberto Freyre, who, in his
1933 book, Casa-Grande e Senzala (The masters and the slaves), favorably compared Bra-
zil’s alleged “racial democracy” to North American racism. For a brief overview of mutual
Brazilian–U.S. influences see Andrews, “Brazilian Racial Democracy.”
64. See the contributions in Caribbean Studies 31, no. 3 (2003): Harpelle analyzes how
Garvey organized a celebration for King Edward’s coronation in Costa Rica (“Cross Cur-
rents,” 48), and Hill argues that “the returning emigrants were a testament to the failure of
imperial citizenship,” kindling an anticolonial nationalism that was stirred further by the
Introduction · 27
war in Ethiopia (“Boundaries of Belonging,” 15–16). See also Lewis, Marcus Garvey, ch. 7
on Garvey’s travels.
65. See, generally, Falcoff and Pike, Spanish Civil War; Pérez Herrero and Tabanera,
España-América Latina; Moya, Cousins and Strangers, 332–84; and González Cuevas,
Maeztu.
66. Klein, “Social and Economic Integration”; Florentino and Machado, “Ensaio”; and
Goebel, “Gauchos, Gringos and Gallegos.”
67. Lesser, “(Re)Creating Ethnicity,” 47–48; and Goebel, “Von der hispanidad.” On
“ethnopolitical entrepreneurs,” see Brubaker, “Ethnicity without Groups,” 166.
68. Levitt and Glick Schiller, “Conceptualizing Simultaneity,” 1003.
69. Lesser and Rein, “Challenging Particularity,” 250–51.
70. Patel, “Transatlantische Perspektiven,” 628–29.
71. For a similar demand concerning the “processual” character of ethnicity, see
Brubaker, “Ethnicity without Groups”; and for an integrated field of study, see his “Eth-
nicity, Race, and Nationalism.” In history, such an approach to nationalism is proposed by
Duara, “Historicizing National Identity.”
72. Green, “L’histoire comparative”; and Stearns, “Nationalisms.”
73. The different positions are laid out in the following two articles: Seigel, “Beyond
Compare,” who appears to want to abolish comparisons with the help of the “transnational
turn”; and Kocka, “Comparison and Beyond,” who argues in favor of an integration of the
two. An earlier significant challenge to comparison is Espagne, “Sur les limites.”
74. Alba and Nee speculate that racial and ethnic stratifications in the United States in
the near future “could begin to resemble in certain aspects those of Latin America” in that
“race/ethnicity will lose some of its clear-cut, categorical character,” but they do not delve
into the history through which these stratifications developed in Latin America (Remaking
the American Mainstream, 290).
I
Spaces of Migration
1
Migrants, Nations, and Empires in Transition
Native Claims in the Greater Caribbean, 1850s–1930s
Lara Putnam
The notion of “entangled history” has recently been put forward to label
studies that trace interdependent social, cultural, and political processes
within two or more countries. The crucial claim is not that processes were
similar—they may or may not have been—but that they were connected:
that their causes and consequences can only be understood in the context
of the multilayered connections between the locales. This chapter argues
that the histories of the islands and the rimlands of the Greater Caribbean
(including the United States) were entangled in precisely this way from the
mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries. Within Latin American his-
tory the construction of racial hierarchies, the assertion of national identi-
ties, and the emergence of populist coalitions have generally been treated as
national-level dynamics: developing across the region at similar times for
similar reasons. Yet I argue that in the Greater Caribbean these were not
merely parallel but entangled developments—reflecting connections that
spanned the region and encompassed anglophone and francophone islands
as well as Spanish-speaking islands and rimlands. And in the entangled
histories of race, nation, and state formation here, matters of migration
played a central role.
This chapter traces the evolving politics of immigration in the Spanish-
speaking rimlands and islands; the British colonies, both mainland and in-
sular; and the northernmost pole of the circum-Caribbean migratory sys-
tem: the United States. (The French colonies and the independent republic
of Haiti also make brief appearances.) These lands comprised a shifting mix
of republics, protectorates, and colonies. Likewise, the political communi-
ties imagined (and defended, and transformed) by residents and sojourners
in the Greater Caribbean came in many shapes and sizes.
32 · Lara Putnam
The pages that follow highlight three basic subthemes: the importance
of the international gaze, the class divide over race, and the inconsistent
significance of “nation.” In regard to the first, by the dawn of the twentieth
century immigration law was everywhere understood as a component of
international positioning, and the polities of the Greater Caribbean were all
too aware of their own subordination within geopolitical structures. Span-
ish American statesmen worried openly about the threat of U.S. expansion-
ism. Both the optics and the substance of unbarred frontiers, they feared,
served to heighten that vulnerability.
Leaders in the British colonies, meanwhile, debated immigration control
in terms of their place within a formal rather than informal empire, draw-
ing comparison to the racially exclusionary policies enacted by the “white
dominions” of Canada and Australia in particular. Even more importantly,
the British Caribbean colonies were fundamentally sending societies, with
rates of emigration reaching as high as the one-quarter of working-age
Barbadian men who departed for Panama during canal construction. As
circum-Caribbean receiving societies (like Panama) raised barriers against
British West Indians in the 1920s, this regional panorama became the main
international frame against which British Caribbean immigration laws
were debated. Some voices argued that first-hand experience of discrimi-
nation elsewhere should make British Caribbeans loathe to build barriers
themselves. But as antiblack laws elsewhere and economic hardship in-
creased in tandem, answering nativism with nativism instead became the
order of the day.
The second subtheme tracks the class dynamics of ideas about race.
These class dynamics differed in the Spanish American republics and the
British colonies, yet by moving in opposite directions they converged over
time. In Spanish America, from start of independent life, elites talked
openly about racial difference: they saw changing the racial makeup of the
pueblo as crucial to national advance. European immigration must be en-
couraged; Asians and Africans barred. Among the Spanish American rural
and urban working classes, in contrast, race was not initially prominent
within discussions of difference or justice. By the 1920s and 1930s, though,
popular movements increasingly adopted the elite rhetoric of scientific rac-
ism and “assimilability” as they sought support for banning the foreign
workers they saw as undercutting wages and taking jobs.
In contrast, in the British colonies, across the nineteenth century racial
hierarchies and allegiances were openly important to the working classes,
who saw themselves as categorically separate from the white elites whose
Native Claims in the Greater Caribbean, 1850s–1930s · 33
power survived the end of slavery intact and from the indentured East In-
dian “coolies” whose labor planters’ profits now relied on. Yet elites here,
in contrast to the Spanish American republics, were loathe to talk about
race in public—they didn’t identify with the destiny of these pueblos, and
they harbored few optimistic fantasies about whitening the islands’ black
masses. By the 1920s and 1930s, though, seeking to co-opt the nativist lan-
guage with which popular leaders denounced antiblack immigration bans
elsewhere, British Caribbean elites grew to tolerate and in some cases prop-
agate race-based rhetoric—as long as it denounced Chinese and Syrians
rather than British or local whites as the enemy.
The third subtheme regards use of the term “nation.” Nación and na-
cionalismo were continually invoked in political rhetoric in the Spanish
American republics in this era, and their referents were relatively clear.
“Nationalism” in Cuba was about love and loyalty among Cubans. “La
nación” in Panama meant Panama. In the British Caribbean colonies, and
among British Caribbeans abroad, things were not so simple. Insular iden-
tities (Grenadian; Barbadian) were sometimes referred to as “national.” The
British West Indies as a unit was sometimes labeled a “nation.” Most of all,
especially in the decades after the Great War, “nation” referenced global
collectives identified by race: the “Negro” or “African” people worldwide,
and increasingly “the Indian people” at home and abroad as well. The spirit
of nationalism was essential to modern progress, all agreed. But which kind
of “nation” would be the nation of the future? The answer was entirely un-
clear as the decade of the 1930s and the long heyday of interregional migra-
tion drew to a close.
Finally, the pages that follow also capture three constants true across the
countries studied and over the decades we track. First, employers did not let
politicians’ noise about preferences for this or that group interfere with the
bottom line, which was access to workers willing to work. Second, Chinese
and Middle Eastern trading diasporas were the most tempting scapegoats
when times got hard. Third, immigrants from adjacent countries invari-
ably outnumbered all others. Yet for long stretches these “near neighbor”
migrants went unremarked in political debate, despite their highly visible
presence in working-class communities near borders and within capital
cities. Only occasionally were they more systematically targeted, and the
results could be tragic.
Throughout, this regional story was shaped by shifts beyond the region’s
borders. The transition of empires under way in the years covered included
three components: the end of Spanish imperial rule on the mainland in
34 · Lara Putnam
the first decades of the nineteenth century and in Cuba and Puerto Rico
by century’s end; the emergence and extension of U.S. informal empire,
ranging from heavy-handed support for U.S. investors abroad to military
interventions to formal dominion over Puerto Rico from 1898 forward; and
the waning of the British West Indies from centerpiece to backwater of the
British Empire, culminating in decolonization in the decades after World
War II. Such was the international context of regional entanglement.
A Region Remade: Islands and Rimlands as the Spanish Empire

Receded and U.S. Dominion Expanded, 1850s–1900s
In the wake of independence in the Spanish American rimlands (1810s–

1820s) and emancipation in the British Caribbean (1830s), those who
sought opportunity in and around the Greater Caribbean faced few bar-
riers to mobility and encountered only rudimentary state oversight upon
arrival. The newly empowered elites ruling Spanish American republics
fantasized about European immigrants who would advance agriculture
and offer a civilized example to the unruly mestizo and mulato masses.
Capturing the conventional wisdom, Venezuelan Carlos Gómez argued in
his 1906 dissertation that only mass European immigration could erase
via “wise ethnic fusion” (that is, sexual mixing) the “ugly heritage of vice
and illness that the Castilian, Indian, and black has left us” and replace it
with “a peaceful, prudent, and hardworking character.”1 In contrast to such
concern, British Caribbean elites rarely discussed their islands’ populations
as anything other than brute labor power; when they did so, they put their
faith in transformation through Christian instruction rather than immi-
gration and “ethnic fusion.”
In neither case, however, did these elite imaginings have much impact
on state practices, which pursued export-driven profits first and foremost.
By the final decades of the nineteenth century, Spanish American elites saw
infrastructure expansion and foreign investment as keys to national prog-
ress. Employers looked to nearby islands for a low-cost, mobile labor force.
Conceived of as a short-term means to a long-term end, this nonwhite
immigration occasioned few qualms among Spanish American elites even
though it contradicted their fantasies of whiter futures. The new projects
and plantations were often located in sparsely populated coastal lowlands
that had long been linked to the insular Caribbean by small-scale migra-
tion. Thousands of Windward Islanders and British Guianese provided the
bulk of laborers for gold fields in El Callao, Venezuela, in the 1850s, even
Figure 1.1. Map depicting migration within and around the Greater Caribbean, 1840s–1920s. Map created by Lara Putnam
and Bill Nelson. Permission granted by Duke University Press.
36 · Lara Putnam
as thousands of Jamaicans did likewise for the Panama Railroad. French-

patois speakers of African ancestry from the small islands of the Eastern
Caribbean cultivated cacao in northeast Venezuela and northern Trinidad
alike. In a parallel development in the western rimlands, English-patois
speakers of African ancestry pioneered the cultivation of bananas for ex-
port in eastern Jamaica, northeast Panama, and Honduras’s north coast
alike.2
With by far the largest economy and population of the islands at the
end of the nineteenth century—indeed, surpassing in population all of the
rimland republics except Mexico, Colombia, and Venezuela—Cuba was
both central to regional trends and exceptional in multiple ways. Seeking
to preserve the stability of sugar plantations powered by enslaved labor,
Cuban elites had declined to pursue independence during the rupture of
Spanish authority at the start of the nineteenth century. Across the ensuing
generations labor supply remained the primordial concern of plantation
elites. After further arrivals of enslaved Africans were definitively curtailed
at mid century, some 125,000 to 150,000 Chinese workers were brought in
under contracts of indenture. Slavery would not end here until 1886. Inde-
pendence would be nipped in the bud a decade later, as U.S. troops stepped
into the struggle between Cuban patriots, loyalists, and Spanish troops in
1898.3
The outsized power of sugar interests redoubled as U.S. investment in
Cuba reached new heights in the wake of 1898. Thus, although Cuban in-
tellectuals like the young Fernando Ortiz voiced in 1906 the same biologi-
cal and cultural concerns about immigration policy as Carlos Gómez in
Venezuela that same year—insisting that “race is the most fundamental
aspect we should consider in the immigrant,” dismissing the “black” and
“yellow” as “races well-known to be backwards,” and pondering the relative
merits of Northern and Southern Europeans—it was sugar planters’ labor
needs rather than eugenic considerations that shaped de facto immigration
policy.4 The booming Cuban economy continued to draw Spanish migrants
as it had in the past, more than 800,000 across the first three decades of the
twentieth century (many returned home, harvest earnings in hand; some
stayed). But already in the first decades of the twentieth century thousands
of Afro-Antilleans arrived to cut cane in Cuba, even though the entry of
contract laborers was formally banned. When sugar prices soared in the
wake of World War I, even this formal hindrance would be altered at em-
ployers’ behest.5
Figure 1.2. Map depicting migration into and out of the Greater Caribbean, 1850s–1930s. Map created by Lara Putnam and
Bill Nelson. Permission granted by Duke University Press.
38 · Lara Putnam
Similar elite demand for cheap labor in the wake of abolition brought
indentured workers to British colonies in the mid-nineteenth century. In-
dentured immigration provided unfree workers at fixed wages, postponing
the restructuring of labor relations that the end of slavery would otherwise
have required. British-ruled South Asia proved the steadiest supply. Inden-
tured East Indian migration began in 1845 and continued for three gen-
erations, until Indian nationalists (in India) succeeded in ending recruit-
ment for good in 1917. In all, 239,000 East Indians reached British Guiana;
144,000, Trinidad; 36,000, Jamaica; and 6,000, Grenada.6
Whereas in the rimland republics the lands receiving Afro-Caribbean
immigrants were generally distant from the centers of native population,
and therefore immigration’s impact on working-class wages disguised, in
the British islands the role of subsidized East Indian immigration in un-
dercutting the position of freed people’s descendants was clear. As a 1904
editorial in an opposition paper in Port of Spain pointed out, democracy
didn’t work like this. “When one considers that for many years the Austra-
lian Government, yielding to the pressure of the working-class vote, has
refused to permit the importation of cheap labour from the South Sea Is-
lands, and the strict regulation of immigration in the interest of the work-
ing population which is in force in the United States, one sees how large
a share of representation the labouring population acquires under a real
system of representative Government.”7 The Trinidad legislature’s support
of state-aided immigration was prima facie evidence that the “unofficial”
members supposedly appointed to speak on behalf of the people in fact did
nothing of the kind. “If the Administration assume that they have success-
fully achieved their alleged object and selected an unofficial section that is
truly representative of all classes of the population, it must appear strange
to them that the agricultural labourers, who form the great bulk of the
population, should, through their representatives, insist on keeping down
wages.”8 Yet the editorialists’ calls to “check . . . coolie immigration” made
barely a ripple in public debate and no impact on crown policy.9 The annual
allocation of newly arrived indentured workers to waiting plantations con-
tinued; for planters and their allies, this was the only “immigration ques-
tion” that mattered.
Thus, even as East Indian laborers flowed in, Afro-Caribbean laborers
flowed out, seeking the cash earnings that might bolster a family’s precari-
ous autonomy. Jamaicans built railroads in Costa Rica in the 1870s and in
Ecuador in 1900; emigrants from Guadeloupe and Martinique and more
Jamaicans labored in Panama on the French-run canal effort in the 1880s;
Windward Islanders harvested cacao in northeast Venezuela and joined the

second Orinoco gold boom by the thousands in the 1880s.
The Heyday of Labor Migration, 1900s–1920s
As we already previewed in the case of Cuba after 1898, the expansion of

U.S. investment went hand in hand with an expansion of U.S. political
sway. Sometimes this was effected through direct colonial possession, as
in Puerto Rico after 1898 and the Panama Canal Zone after 1903, and other
times through the threat or reality of military occupation, as in Cuba, the
Dominican Republic, Haiti, and Nicaragua. The completion of the Panama
Canal under U.S. control between 1903 and 1914 was both harbinger and
accelerator of this process. Ensuing cycles of boom and bust drew thou-
sands of migrants from the islands to Central American banana planta-
tions; Cuban and Dominican sugar plantations; and oil camps in Trinidad,
Mexico, and Venezuela.
Even more than Spanish American elites, Yankee employers sought la-
bor supplies with an eye to short-term production and profits rather than
the moral and biological legacies that concerned men like Carlos Gómez
and Fernando Ortiz. By the 1920s a new generation of nationalist reform-
ers in the Spanish American republics would make this the centerpiece of
their twinned denunciations of “foreign capital” and the “foreign workers”
it had “imported.”10 Such critiques captured the relationship between infor-
mal empire and local transformation but massively overstated the extent of
employer control. The great bulk of circum-Caribbean migration remained
self-directed, guided by networks of kith and kin rather than employer con-
tracting abroad.11
Port cities adjacent to centers of economic dynamism—Port of Spain,
Ciudad Bolívar, Carúpano, Barranquilla, Panamá, Colón, Bocas del Toro,
Port Limon, Veracruz, New Orleans, Havana, Santiago de Cuba—became
polyglot nodes in trading networks large and small. Those buying were as
cosmopolitan as those selling. On Port of Spain’s streets, wrote one trav-
eler in 1917, “a score of races” were on display: “half-naked, spindle legged
Hindus with huge turbans, stolid Chinese, herculean negroes, fiercely
mustached Latin-Americans, French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Eng-
lish, Americans, Dutch, Irish, Scotch, Norwegians, every race and nation
save Germans, are there, as well as innumerable unidentifiable individuals
in whose veins runs the blood of half the nations of Europe and varying
quantity of Africa.”12
40 · Lara Putnam
Struck though this traveler was by the range of Europeans he perceived

in Port of Spain, in numerical terms such migratory streams were negligible
in the plantation tropics, as census data makes clear (see table 1.1).13 Cuba
was the only exception: 1931 found more than 257,000 Spanish immigrants
there, easily outnumbering the 28,000 British West Indians and 77,000
Haitians tallied in the same year.14 Elsewhere Afro-Caribbean immigrants
swamped European arrivals. The Republic of Panama circa 1930 was home
to 23,000 island-born British West Indians and Costa Rica, 11,000 (with, in
each case, a second generation almost as large surrounding them); neither
Panama nor Costa Rica counted more than 3,000 European immigrants in
its population. The Dominican Republic in 1935, for all its Europhile his-
panidad, counted 52,000 Haitian-born residents, 9,000 British Caribbeans,
and only 3,000 Europeans in all (see table 1.1).
Meanwhile, throughout the period covered in this chapter, immigra-
tion from adjacent territories that shared a language and cultural heri-
tage—reflecting a common imperial past—outstripped all other migra-
tory movements. These were people who crossed borders of recent origin
and intermittent salience. Ever since independence, the largest numbers
of foreigners arriving in Venezuela had been Colombians in the Andean
border region, 19,000 of them resident in Venezuelan territory in 1936. In
turn, Venezuelans outnumbered all other immigrants in Colombia. The
pattern was replicated around the rimlands. Colombians outnumbered all
but Jamaicans and Barbadians in Panama, Nicaraguans matched British
West Indians in Costa Rica, Hondurans swamped all others in Nicaragua,
Salvadorans even more so in Honduras, Mexicans outweighed all others in
Guatemala, and Guatemalans in British Honduras (see table 1.1). In Great
Britain’s Eastern Caribbean colonies the same held true: immigrants from
nearby Windward Islands in Trinidad in 1911 included over 19,000 Barba-
dians, 10,000 Vincentians, and 8,000 Grenadians. Ten years later the total
of Barbadian-born had fallen to 16,000 (Panama and Cuba and now New
York City had become popular alternatives to Trinidad) but the total of
Grenadians had risen above 12,000.15
In general, political elites ignored this kind of migration. Certainly they
declined to legislate against it. Movement across these particular borders
often antedated the borders’ existence and was crucial to yearly agricultural
cycles and the long-term economic and demographic growth of border
regions. These “near neighbor” migrants occupied a contradictory position
in the territories where they sojourned. They intermixed and intermarried
with far greater ease than did foreigners more alien in appearance, lan-
guage, and habits. Yet their numbers and occupational overlap with local
populations made them conspicuous targets for working-class hostility. In-
timacy and animosity thus went hand in hand. Stereotypes of impoverished
near-neighbor immigrants allowed almost equally impoverished locals to
assert their own superior virtue. This was true of Guatemalans in southern
Mexico; Mexicans in eastern Guatemala; Salvadorans in Honduras; Nica-
raguans in Costa Rica; Colombians in Venezuela; Barbadians, Grenadians,
and Vincentians in Trinidad; and Haitians in the Dominican Republic’s
northwest frontera.16
Such migrants might face abuse but it was often of the same kind that
illiterate or rural migrants of any birthplace faced in the same societies. A
Port of Spain journalist in 1920 recorded an outburst from a local magis-
trate upon hearing that a defendant hailed “from Grenada, sir.” “Why can’t
you people from Grenada keep out of the island. We don’t want you here. I
have scarcely passed one single person from Grenada who was not a rascal.
Why can’t you keep to your blessed country? Pay £10 or do three months’
hard labour.”17 The immigrant sweating through three months’ hard labor
doubtless found the exchange less amusing than the journalist did. But,
ultimately, the ire of cranky judges was something that Port of Spain’s poor
had in common, whatever their island of birth.
Near-neighbor tensions could become explosive, however, when center-
state politicians needed a scapegoat or distraction. Most tragically, Domini-
can dictator Rafael Trujillo’s efforts to create a stark border out of a blended
near-neighbor frontier would lead to mass slaughter of Haitian immigrants
and Dominicans of Haitian ancestry in 1937, as I discuss later.18
The Temptation of Anti-Asian Demagoguery: 1900s–1920s
In the first decades of the twentieth century several hundred thousand Brit-
ish Caribbeans traveled to Panama, Costa Rica, Cuba, New York City, and
Venezuela, while an even larger number of men and women crossed the
borders of near-neighbor states for some portion of their lives. In contrast
to these major population movements, East Asian and Middle Eastern im-
migrants tallied only a handful, even fewer in number than the European
immigrants the Greater Caribbean’s Spanish American elites so desired.
Yet Asian migrants drew an extraordinary amount of attention from both
lawmakers and the public in colonies and republics alike.
Table 1.1. Immigrant populations of the greater Caribbean, ca. 1930
Year Total population Total born elsewhere (%)
British colonies
Jamaica 1921 858,118 18,096 (2%)
British Guiana 1921 297,691 53,966 (18%)
Trinidad & Tobago 1921 243,796 57,509 (24%)
Barbados 1921 156,774 5,373 (3%)
British Honduras 1921 45,317 7,000 (15%)

Spanish-speaking islands
Cuba 1931 3,962,344 436,897 (11%)
Dominican Republic 1935 1,479,417 73,070 (5%)
Puerto Rico 1920 1,299,809 8,167 (1%)
Rimlands
Venezuela 1936 3,467,839 45,484 (1%)
Colombia 1928 7,851,000 35,251 (0.4%)

Panama 1930 467,459 47,144 (10%)
Canal Zone 1930 39,467 33,193 (84%)
Costa Rica 1927 471,524 29,265 (6%)
Nicaragua 1920 638,119 10,375 (2%)
Honduras 1930 854,184 42,280 (5%)

Guatemala 1921 2,004,900 16,814 (1%)
Sources: Kuczynski, Demographic Survey, 79–80, 156, 198–99, 341; Cuba, Comité Estatal, Memorias iné-
ditas, 74; Cuba, Dirección General del Censo, Censo de 1943, 888–89; República Dominicana, Dirección
General, Población de la República Dominicana, 2, 5; U.S. Bureau of the Census, Fifteenth Census, 328,
334–35; Venezuela, Ministerio de Fomento, Sexto Censo de Población, 540–41; Colombia, Contraloría
General de la República, Memoria y cuadros del Censo de 1928, 39; Panamá, Secretaría de Agricultura,
1930 Censo Demográfico, 17, 21–23; Costa Rica, Base de datos del Censo de 1927, http://ccp.ucr.ac.cr/
censos/; Nicaragua, Censo General de 1920, 4; Honduras, Dirección General de Estadística, Resumen del
censo general, 32; Guatemala, Ministerio de Fomento, Censo de la población, 1:139, 2:57.
External birthplaces and number of residents from each
Top three external birthplaces / number of residents Europe Syria/ China

total Turcoa
India 7,145 Great Britain 2,410 China 2,302 2,612 245 2,302
India 39,965 British 10,128 Portugal 1,170 2,653 n/a 376
Caribbean
British 46,411 India 37,341 Venezuela 4,135 2,287 112 1,334
Caribbean
British 3,020 USA 706 Latin 627 336 n/a 1
Caribbean America
Guatemala 2,540 Mexico 1,391 Honduras 1,350 362 48 12
Spain 257,596 Haiti 77,535 British 28,206 266,863 n/a 24,647

Caribbean
Haiti 52,657 Britain/ 9,272 Puerto 3,221 2,926 1,242 312
British Rico
Caribbean
Spain 4,975 USA 1,617 Virgin 663 6,144 186 n/a
Islands
Colombia 18,872 Spain 5,506 British 5,261 12,916 2,167 935

Caribbean
Venezuela 14,748 Syria 2,967 Spain 2,465 7,499b 2,967 n/a
British 23,075 Colombia 6,083 French 2,690 3,062 294 2,742
Caribbean Caribbean
USA 15,166 British 8,011c Central 6,568 1,437 n/a 88

Caribbean America
British 10,595 Nicaragua 9,296 Panama 2,982 2,865 72 483
Caribbean
Honduras 5,019 Britain/ 1,576 El 748 961 106 462
British Salvador
Caribbean
El Salvador 18,522 Guatemala 7,885 Nicaragua 5,907 1,412 788 269
Mexico 5,043 El Salvador 2,948 Honduras 2,390 2,824 669 759
Notes: a. Includes all labeled Syrian, Turkish, Lebanese, Palestinian, Arab, and (in cases where Chinese and
Japanese listed separately) “Other Asiatics.”
b. Includes 1,436 “English,” many of whom may have been British Caribbean.
c. Includes 509 native French speakers, likely most from French Caribbean.
44 · Lara Putnam
The first wave of anti-Chinese laws in the Greater Caribbean followed

immediately upon those in the United States and Canada in the 1880s. But
the movement of racial ideologies and restrictionist legal forms was not a
one-way street from north to south. In fact, as historian Erika Lee points
out, awareness of Chinese labor on Cuban sugar plantations and of Brit-
ish debates over indentured labor in the postemancipation Caribbean were
part of the mix of ideas that went into North American debates over what
came to be called the “Yellow Peril.”19 By the first decade of the twentieth
century, immigration laws in the Spanish-speaking republics of the Greater
Caribbean barred entry to an expanding list of Asian and Middle Eastern
“races,” “nations,” or “peoples.”20
Yet settlers from these lands arrived in small numbers before, during,
and after such prohibitions were imposed. By dint of hard work, intraeth-
nic commercial networks, and a willingness to stump through rural areas
that local elites disdained, they carved their niche in small-scale trade. In-
deed, in many cases they came to dominate retail in the very same export
zones where Afro-Caribbean sojourners labored. This was true of Chinese
grocers and “turco” peddlers in Costa Rica’s Caribbean banana zone, “Pal-
estinians” on the north coast of Honduras, turcos in the Atlantic slopes
of Colombia, and libaneses or sirios in northeast Venezuela.21 Arab com-
munities of the Greater Caribbean were so small they barely merited the
term “community.” A given secondary city might be home to a handful of
extended families hailing from one or, at most, two towns in the Levant.
Nothing in the Greater Caribbean compared to the 65,000-strong Syro-
Lebanese community of Argentina in 1914 (discussed in chapter 10).22 Yet
the notice they drew was large.
Although in some cases—Honduras, the Dominican Republic, Colom-
bia—these merchant diasporas became securely consolidated as junior
partners to local elites, they repeatedly proved to be tempting targets for
populist outrage and mob violence. “Native” elites proved willing to whip
up popular hostility toward these “alien” merchants whenever economic
downturns threatened to push class conflict simmering between locals to
a boil. In turn-of-the-century Haiti, for instance, police and politicians
openly fanned popular anti-Syrianism with the encouragement of the Hai-
tian bourgeoisie. There was even a short-lived newspaper named L’Anti-
Syrien.23 An official commission in 1903 denounced the Syrians on both
populist and culturalist grounds: they had ruined rural marketwomen’s
livelihood; they “always remained strangers in Hayti, sticking to their own
customs and living lives entirely different to the Haytians.”24
Here too we see the international reverberation of anti-Asian laws.

As historian Brenda Plummer explains, “Haiti sought a precedent in the
Chinese exclusion laws of the United States, Australia and Cuba,” argu-
ing “that these states had reserved the right to bar nationalities deemed
unassimilable and harmful to national interests. Why then should Haiti be
prevented from doing the same?”25 However, in this case U.S. interests were
firmly aligned with the Syrians, who had come to provide a crucial chan-
nel for U.S. exports to Haiti. Newspaper reports captured the dual role of a
government that, having spurred popular resentment, found itself pushed
to act as the immigrants’ protector as well. President Pierre Nord Alexis
“paraded through the streets of the city today, throwing money to the na-
tives running behind his carriage. The people fought for the coins, at the
same time crying ‘Long life to Nord and down with the Syrians.’ The Syrians
are terror-stricken and do not leave their houses.”26 But foreign diplomatic
pressure averted mass expulsion, and profitable commerce continued.
In the British colonies as well, the position of East Asian and Middle
Eastern immigrants was shaped by multiple, partially countervailing pres-
sures. Within the popular classes, resentment against petty retailers whose
prices pinched could build into outright violence, as in the rioting against
Jamaica’s eight-thousand-strong Chinese community in 1918 that left Chi-
nese-owned shops across the island looted and destroyed.27 Oral histories
convey the perception of top-down encouragement: people heard both that
a “chiney man” had shot an Afro-Jamaican man over a love triangle, and
that in response “the government seh dem must mash down every damn
chiney man shop.”28 As we shall see, some Jamaican elites indeed sought
to align themselves with popular hostility to Chinese immigrants. But elite
opinion was hardly united. Some British Caribbean elites did not think
their islands’ populaces any better than the Asian immigrants other states
sought to keep out. Meanwhile, as in Haiti, although the example of states
elsewhere might spur restrictionism, the ability of local elites to act against
immigrants was hampered by geopolitical constraints: all the more so in
the British islands, which were not self-governing republics but colonial
possessions.
Six months before the 1918 riot, the parochial board of St. James had
already undertaken to debate the frontiers of native rights and the possibili-
ties of exclusion within empire. Board member and wealthy Afro-Jamaican
planter A. B. Lowe denounced Chinese shop owners’ supposed dishonesty
and vice and concluded, “it was unfair that our sons should go away from
this country in order that Chinese should supersede them.” In contrast,
46 · Lara Putnam
board member Brown—a white planter—insisted that racial divisions did

not exist within empire (a claim many less privileged than he would have
found laughable).29 “Supposing the people of Jamaica don’t want Chinese,”
he argued, still “they must subordinate their desires and requirements for
the welfare of the Empire as a whole.” Division would be bad for empire,
would be forbidden by imperial authorities, and was wrong to boot. “What
about Cuban prejudices? What about American prejudices? Now that our
sons are going north or south of the United States how would we appreciate
the banning of the Jamaican immigrant? In America the so-called Jamaican
is only a little less unpopular than the Chinese, and if it were not for the
raising of ‘a stink’ they would not allow us to land.”30 Here, as in scores of
other debates of its kind in the interwar British Caribbean, we see debate
over immigration entangled with emigrants’ experiences of racism abroad.
In this case, Brown used discrimination elsewhere to argue against dis-
crimination at home. But as we shall see, within the decade some working-
men’s leaders would argue the opposite, and some elites like Brown would
choose to go along.
Conspicuously absent from the 1918 debate in St. James was Latin Amer-
ican leaders’ faith that the masses could be improved by “wise fusion” with
certain immigrants and avoidance of others. On the contrary, the Jamaican
masses’ mixed blood and questionable morals were for Brown the final ar-
gument against exclusion. “Is a country consisting of English, Irish, Ameri-
cans, Indians and all classes of people going to determine who should or
should not be allowed to come here? . . . He did not think that it was for
the natives of Jamaica, with all our shortcomings—with our statistics of
marriages and births and criminal statistics also—to throw stones at the
Chinese.”31 For Spanish American statesmen such as Gómez and Ortiz, the
“shortcomings” of the “natives” could not be accepted so blithely: they be-
lieved they had nations to build out of these pueblos.
For the moment, Lowe’s 1918 proposal to exclude outsiders and protect
the masses did not prosper. Jumping to attest to Chinese merchants’ merits
and Jamaican peasants’ fecklessness, the parish fathers roundly defeated
his motion. The following year, in the wake of the anti-Chinese riots, the
island’s legislative council adopted an immigration law that required “all
aliens” to pass a “dictation test” by proving the ability to read aloud in Eng-
lish, French, or Spanish.32 With the imperial government’s acquiescence,
this common international mechanism was used in its accustomed role,
limiting Asian entry without mention of race or nationality.
But what of the largest immigrant group from Asia to be found in the
British Caribbean in these years—indeed, the largest immigrant group
there, period: the East Indians whose arrival had been not merely counte-
nanced but organized by the colonial government? In the Spanish-speak-
ing rimlands, as in the United States, Canada, and other self-proclaimed
“white republics,” South Asians were generally stereotyped—and barred—
alongside East Asians, Arabs, and other “Orientals.”33 However, within the
British Caribbean in this era, East Indians were not lumped with “alien”
Chinese or Syrians. To be sure, East Indians too were potential targets for
hostility from the Afro-Creole masses whose wages the indenture scheme
systematically undercut. But the contours of debate were far different.
In Trinidad and Guiana, East Indians and their descendants made up
over a third of local populations by 1921, and their labor remained essential
to planters’ plans. Indentured immigration was halted by Great Britain in
1917 not in response to workingmen’s complaints in the colonies but in re-
sponse to pressure from Indian nationalists who were long concerned over
the treatment of their countrymen abroad. Only one-third of East Indian
immigrants to Jamaica, one-fourth of immigrants to Guiana, and one-fifth
of immigrants to Trinidad returned to India upon completion of their term
of indenture.34 In other words, over the half century of indentureship, more
than three hundred thousand had stayed. Some of them and their descen-
dants remained on sugar plantations as resident workers; others had ac-
quired land through purchase or in exchange for forfeited return passage,
creating small farming communities.
In the wake of indentureship’s abolition, Caribbean elites congratulated
themselves on the “high degree of prosperity” that “free Indian commu-
nities” had attained.35 Simultaneously, the same elites imposed draconian
vagrancy laws to ensure that those prosperous Indian peasants could not
decline wage work entirely. They also cast about for some new immigra-
tion scheme that would bring at least temporarily dependent laborers from
India. That is, elites up through the early 1920s remained more worried
about having enough workers to keep wages low than about having enough
jobs to keep workers quiet.36 Even the question of immigrants mixing with
locals through sex—the centerpiece of eugenicists’ hopes and fears else-
where—was treated by British Caribbean elites as a matter of labor sup-
ply. Given the numerical predominance of men among East Indian im-
migrants and of women within Afro-Caribbean communities shaped by
outmigration to Panama and Cuba, “effort has been made” (explained a
48 · Lara Putnam
commentator in 1917) to “bring . . . about unions between East Indian men

and negro women.” But, alas, “race prejudice has proven too strong”: “they
do not mix.”37
Certainly there were exceptions, but on balance he was right. Afro-Ca-
ribbeans and Indo-Caribbeans coalesced as two separate collectives. The
perceived distance between them helped to paper over the heterogene-
ity within each. Grenadian and Barbadian immigrants in Trinidad might
face stereotypes or mockery, but at the end of the day all were “creole”
(understood as Afro-Creole) people. Hindu and Muslim families might
worship separately in Trinidad, but at the end of the day all were “Indian
people,” and they came to share rituals and symbols that back in India in-
stead marked divides between Hindu and Muslim.38 British Caribbean
elites could lament popular “race prejudice,” but it was the outcome of the
postemancipation labor system they themselves had created.
The Interwar Rise of Restrictionist Regimes: The Geopolitics and

Labor Politics of Biopolitics
In the two decades after the Great War, immigration control became an
evermore prominent component of nation-state formation, both institu-
tionally and symbolically.39 This international trend played out here with
regional specificities. National elites across the Greater Caribbean’s repub-
lics insisted that only by controlling their borders and ensuring that their
populations evolved in “eugenic” directions would they be able to protect
their nations against U.S. expansion. Reinforcing this conviction, leading
U.S. restrictionists in the 1920s worked actively to systematize immigra-
tion bans across the Americas. Spanish American elites began to prioritize
long-term population “hygiene” over the immediate joys of cheap labor,
not only in rhetoric now but in practice. And working-class leaders increas-
ingly adopted the same racialized rhetoric to push for workingmen’s rights.
The populist and eugenicist cases for immigration restriction, now
working hand in hand, echoed across the circum-Caribbean receiving so-
cieties whose politics were so entangled. In his widely read 1920 jeremiad
The Rising Tide of Color against White World Supremacy, Lothrop Stod-
dard denounced the greedy white “employers of labor” who “put private
interest above racial duty.” In his analysis, as in the Trinidadian opposi-
tion press a generation before, open doors were the weapon of the wealthy.
“Barring a handful of sincere but misguided cosmopolitan enthusiasts, it is
unscrupulous business interests which are behind every white proposal to

relax the exclusion laws protecting white areas.”40
In the United States, class-focused and race-focused nativist arguments
together culminated in the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924, hailed by one breath-
less supporter in the pages of Foreign Affairs as “a turning point in Ameri-
can civilization”: “an emphatic national decision that, to quote President
Coolidge, ‘America must be kept American.’”41 The act reduced downward
wage pressures by capping overall immigration and addressed eugenicists’
concern over the “dysgenic” impact of particular “stocks” by allocating slots
to “Nordics” rather than Italians, Slavs, Jews, and other southern and east-
ern Europeans. While the act’s impact on European immigrants absorbed
public debate, the impact on nonwhite immigrants was in fact more drastic.
Entry by any groups ineligible for citizenship—which is to say, all Asians—
was barred. Meanwhile, “non-self-governing” colonial possessions in the
Americas were placed under quota control for the first time. Then, simply
by not extending quota numbers to consulates in the Caribbean, the United
States in essence barred British Caribbean immigration, which fell from
more than twelve thousand immigrants in the first half of 1924 to fewer
than eight hundred in all of 1925.42
U.S. restrictionism added fuel to similar movements around the region.
Across the Latin American republics, new groups were rising to challenge
old elites, promoting a nationalist reorientation of economy and society
that similarly combined class-based and race-based arguments. The new
groups did not simply ape the North Atlantic eugenicism that predicted for
their Afro-Indo-Latin populaces perpetual decay. Mestizo populists were at
once racist and antiracist, rejecting biological essentialism while fetishizing
“national” essences, with nonwhite immigrants as a frequent foil.43 “Nei-
ther nations nor individuals are more or less intelligent, nor more or less
valiant, nor more or less apt for civilization because they belong to this or
the other race,” wrote Venezuelan intellectual Laureano Vallenilla Lanz in
1930.44 Rather than “Race” one “should speak of Society, Pueblo, Nation,”
and then recognize that “the sentiment of nationality and Patria, the ‘or-
ganic solidarity,’ are as deeply rooted and solidly established among us as
in any of the older nationalities . . . in spite of our ethnic mosaic and young
age.”45 All the more important, Vallenilla concluded—pivoting from antira-
cism to racism—to prevent immigrants of “African” blood from disrupting
Venezuela’s “organic solidarity.”
“We must ban yellow and [South Asian] Indian immigration and restrict
black as much as possible, even if at the start those preferences may be
50 · Lara Putnam
costly for us,” wrote future Venezuelan minister of agriculture and minis-
ter of hacienda Alberto Adriani a few years later.46 Afro-Caribbean immi-
grants “would undeniably contribute to the prosperity of the foreign capital
that exploits our mineral resources, and certainly would help to increase
our production, but at the cost of greater damages to our national life, for
these are people whose level of life is almost always inferior to ours, who
are in any case inassimilable, who bring no stimulus toward progress, who
threaten our social compact and weaken our international situation.”47
This last warning pointed to the external rather than internal conse-
quences of open borders. These were the geopolitics of biopolitics, and they
resonated in public debates in Santo Domingo, Havana, San José, and Cara-
cas alike. Everyone knew that the United States had been “especially harsh,
even unscrupulous,” in its treatment of countries with Afro-descended pop-
ulations, like Haiti and the Dominican Republic, reminded Adriani. “There
is every reason to believe that the yankees will be inexorable against pueb-
los composed of races they consider inferior, like the black race, or future
enemies, like the yellow.”48 Countries seeking to advance in the congress
of nations must note the immigration policies of their aspirational peers.
“Chinese and Hindus are inassimilable immigrants,” banned in the United
States, Argentina, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa, warned Adri-
ani.49 Did Venezuela want to be among the ban-ers or the banned?
Meanwhile, around the region, organized workers embraced nation-
alism and often nativism as they struggled for jobs, pay, and rights. The
Republic of Panama in the 1920s and 1930s saw multiple popular mobiliza-
tions, with allies ranging from local radicals with Comintern ties to junior
military officers resentful of U.S. domination to American Federation of
Labor (AFL) leader Samuel Gompers. The one issue on which all could
agree was that the blatant privileging of foreign capital over local labor
must change, and all except the Communists agreed that British West In-
dian workers, even those locally born, did not count as local labor. A drastic
immigration ban passed in 1926 had originally been framed to target those
stalwart scapegoats the Syrians, Turks, and Chinese but was revised to in-
clude West Indian Negroes, East Indians, and Japanese. Hispanic Pana-
manian commentators echoed the eugenicist/populist fusion heard from
California to Caracas in the same years: selective immigration restriction
was about placing the long-term needs of the pueblo over the short-term
desire for profits. What Panama needed was not cheap labor but “families
who will benefit us not only by means of material success but principally
by means of morals and race.”50
Although state rhetoric across the region now insisted that the hiring
preferences of transnational employers were no longer paramount, state
practice told a different tale. As a British diplomat in Bogotá explained
to his superiors, Colombia’s 1923 immigration law stipulated “that immi-
grants, whose admittance should be ethnically undesirable by reason of
their race being such as would derange the proportion of races forming
the Colombian stock, may be admitted or refused at the discretion of the
Ministry for Foreign Affairs. This gives the Government a free hand, and as
it is not its policy to encourage coloured immigration, it may be said that
immigration of British West Indians, in the strict sense of the word, is prac-
tically prohibited.” Yet somehow the United Fruit Company was routinely
able to acquire visas for the “coloured employees” it sought to bring in
to work on its Colombian enterprises.51 The scenario repeated in republic
after republic. Popular xenophobia made its way into law, yet enforcement
left the bottom-line interests of powerful employers untouched.52
Although anti-immigrant and anti-imperialist rhetoric often went hand
in hand, black immigrants made more tempting targets than Yankee in-
terlopers did. In 1924 the Panamanian Federación de Obreros denounced
the employment of “Jamaican and Barbadoes workers, whose inclination
is towards abjection and slavery, and whose productiveness as workers can
by no means be compared with that of the workers of Panama” in a report
to the AFL-dominated Pan-American Federation of Labor: it was adopted
unanimously. Two years later the Federación de Obreros sought AFL sup-
port as they petitioned the U.S. government that in the Canal Zone “pref-
erence be given the natives in positions not occupied by American workers
[my emphasis] and that the West Indian workers who are not needed be
repatriated to their place of origin.”53 That is, booting out dark-skinned
immigrants and their children was a battle Panamanian obreros thought
they could win. In contrast, the “American workers” who monopolized
the choicest jobs in the Canal Zone looked unassailable—and remained
unassailed.
Eugenicist alliances ultimately undercut labor agendas, however com-
patible they appeared. This was clear to some observers at the time. As
the British Caribbean-run, Panama-based Workman declared in 1924 with
regard to xenophobic agitation in Cuba, “if a surplus of West Indian labour
should menace the economic interests of Cubans” it was “only fair that they
protect themselves by restricting immigration from the West Indies.” But
to ban West Indians “to make room and give preference to Spaniards and
Italians,” as in practice was done, was both insulting and self-defeating.54
52 · Lara Putnam
Leaving the prerogatives of foreign-born whites untouched, restrictionist

bargains often succeeded in excluding foreign-born blacks while rarely se-
curing for the native-born working class the advantages they sought.
The “Blaze of Nationalism” among British West Indians at Home

and Abroad
This high-pressure era saw a wide variety of collective identities asserted

by British Caribbeans, especially overseas. They faced a world in which in-
dividual mobility increasingly depended on international negotiations and
in which nationalist claims had become a key resource in class struggle. Yet
British Caribbean emigrants had no nation-state to call their own.
Seeking cross-island alliance in support of demands for representative
government, intellectuals and activists of color had begun to preach the vir-
tues of federation among the British colonies. Men like Grenada’s pioneer-
ing journalist T. A. Marryshow saw unity as essential for advance within
the empire. “When the consciousness of oneness is sufficiently awakened
in the various islands,” argued Marryshow in 1915,
the West Indies will automatically come into its own as political en-
tity and a component part in the fabric of the British Empire. There
should be neither Grenadians, nor Barbadians, not Trinidadians, nor
any such “ians” among us, but West Indians and, fundamentally, none
other. . . . Only in this way can a West Indian Dominion come into
being which will cause us to be a respectable force in the affairs of
the world. We should all leave the “out grown shell” of insular limita-
tions and aspire to the more “stately mansions,”—the mansions of
nationality.55
Nationality, in this formulation, meant British West Indian unity, incom-
patible with (smaller) island loyalties but compatible with (larger) imperial
ones.
Yet, for migrants in overseas British West Indian communities, those
small loyalties loomed large. In Panama, Jamaica-born journalist Sidney
Young lamented in 1927 that “twenty-three years of residence in a foreign
country under singularly repressive conditions have not served to bring
the people of the various [island] groups into the close kinship which the
bonds of race, color, and nationality would warrant.”56 As with the “near
neighbor” migrants discussed earlier, it was precisely because “the aver-
age Barbadian, St. Lucian, Jamaican, Trinidadian, Grenadian, Antiguan”
in Panama shared so much that the differences between them—“national

customs and particularities,” Young called them—stood out in the fabric
of daily life.57 Note that in Young’s first sentence, “nationality” references
the collective of British West Indians, while in the second, the “national”
is island-specific: this in the writings of a single author discussing a single
topic.
Young railed against “the miserable doctrine of Insularity” that shaped
British Caribbean civic life in Panama.58 Yet for the migrants who read
Young’s pages, the reliable solidarity of home island associations—the
Sons and Daughters of Barbados, the Grenadian Benevolent Society—was
a crucial shelter rather than an “out grown shell.” Contrary to Young’s fears,
however, home island solidarity proved fully compatible with larger col-
lectives. Indeed, the avid associationism of British West Indians abroad
spurred rather than hindered the spectacular growth of the most influential
association of all, Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Associa-
tion (UNIA).
Founded by Garvey in Kingston in 1917 after his travels had taken him
through Costa Rica, Panama, and London, and refounded after his emigra-
tion to New York in 1918, the UNIA by 1923 claimed two million “active,
dues-paying members” around the Atlantic. The largest numbers of chap-
ters were in the United States, Cuba, Panama, Costa Rica, and Trinidad:
that is, precisely the top British Caribbean immigrant receiving societies.
Preaching racial solidarity, “Negro Nationhood,” and freedom of move-
ment, the UNIA bore the mark of this particular moment of mass emigra-
tion, race-based mobility bans, and race-conscious nativist claims. By 1927
Garvey had been deported from the United States, and U.S.-based UNIA
chapters fragmented and faltered. But within the Greater Caribbean both
the UNIA and other black internationalisms surged onward.59
Across the 1920s and 1930s, the proudly “race conscious” newspapers
run by men like T. A. Marryshow and Sidney Young routinely labeled the
collective made up of the Negro Race worldwide a “nation” as well. Proper
race-wide “nationalism,” author after author declared, was a spiritual ne-
cessity in the modern world. But structures mattered as well as sentiments
within this modern world, they knew, and what this meant for the Negro
Nation was unclear. In places like Venezuela, Panama, and Cuba, British
Caribbean migrants were confronted not only by mestizo nationalist hos-
tility but by concrete state power. Could Our Nation become Our State? A
typical reader’s contribution to the British West Indian-run Limon (Costa
Rica) Searchlight in 1931 argued that members of “the Black Race” should
54 · Lara Putnam
embrace the spirit of “Nationalism”; an appended editorial pointed to the

institutional crux of the matter. “Nationalize how, where, by what means,
because it seems to us for a people to Nationalize they must have a country
to do so in.”60 This was the very dilemma, the editor explained, that Marcus
Garvey had sought to answer in preaching “Africa for the Africans, at home
and abroad.”
“Nationalize how, where, by what means?” The question was on target.
In the 1930s there was no polity offering British West Indians full political
membership in any of the imagined communities they meant when they
spoke of “nationalism,” be it the Garveyites’ worldwide “Negro Nation-
hood,” Marryshow’s British West Indies–wide “mansions of nationality,”
or the individual islands whose “national customs” Sidney Young saw as
distractions from Pan–West Indian unity. What was on offer instead, as we
shall see, was an island-specific nativism—Jamaica for the Jamaicans, Trini-
dad for the Trinidadians—that elites in the British colonies now embraced
in rhetoric while still refusing to offer political rights for the Jamaican or
Trinidadian masses.
Nativism without Populism: The British Caribbean, 1920s–1930s
As restrictionism spread across the Greater Caribbean’s receiving societ-

ies, middle-class politicians in the region’s sending societies embraced the
time-honored strategy of scapegoating “alien” shopkeepers. Meanwhile
they utterly failed to address the genuine crisis created by the closure of
labor outlets abroad. Even more than with anti-Antillean agitation in
Panama, Costa Rica, Venezuela, and the Dominican Republic, xenophobic
rhetoric in the British colonies substituted for rather than accompanied
populist shifts. High property requirements for voting and the lack of self-
government meant that workingmen and women here had fewer levers to
use. Social guarantees were not forthcoming; labor protections and politi-
cal rights did not expand. As race-based restrictionism in the surrounding
republics hit working-class households across the British colonies, British
Caribbean elites performed nationalist concern while refusing even to de-
bate real structural or constitutional change. Once again, East Asian and
Middle Eastern immigrants found themselves at center stage in the politi-
cal theater.
The international moment had shifted, argued the Kingston Daily
Gleaner—voice of the island’s merchants, professionals, and resident plan-
tation owners—in October 1924. The U.S. Johnson-Reed Act, implemented
a month before, was taking a toll both materially and symbolically. No

more could the common shelter of empire be taken to disallow all barri-
ers. Emulating “America, Australia, Canada, [and] New Zealand,” Jamaica
too must move to “protect [her] nationals against the severe and desperate
competition of outsiders, even if some of these happen to be British sub-
jects.”61 As had so often happened elsewhere, Chinese shopkeepers would
be made the scapegoat for political and economic trends they had done
nothing to foster. Even the Jamaican Imperial Association—mouthpiece
of the wealthiest and whitest elites least concerned with the complaints of
the masses—now urged “vigorous enforcement” of the existing immigra-
tion law: “which of course,” they were quick to underline, “would not apply
to persons from the Mother Country, the self-Governing Dominions and
the United States of America.”62 Nativist immigration laws now seemed a
reasonable bargain—as long as they did not undercut white privilege.
With increasing intensity from the mid-1920s into the 1930s, politicians
in the British Caribbean—Jamaica and Trinidad in particular—followed
legislators in Canada, South Africa, and Australia in proposing race-based
immigration restraints. They did so in response to ever-louder street poli-
tics that demanded anti-Chinese exclusion at home in response to anti-
black exclusion abroad. A typical 1925 letter to the editor (signed by “A
NATIVE”) declared that the masses were mobilized: if the governor “fails
in this representation of the feelings of the natives over this Alien menace,
then every native is quite prepared to subscribe his quota towards the cost
of a strong and responsible deputation to England on the matter.”63
Encouraging popular hostility to focus on Asian and Middle Eastern
shopkeepers rather than on planter hegemony or electoral disenfranchise-
ment was a win-win proposition for the white and near-white elite and
middling sectors on islands like Jamaica and Trinidad, who themselves did
compete with hard-driving immigrant merchants. British officials strug-
gled to balance that calculus against the diplomatic complications discrimi-
natory legislation brought. The Colonial Office stalled proposed legislation
from the colonies for long months or even years as they fielded complaints
from Chinese diplomats and sought euphemistic language that would work
as nativist window dressing while not openly insulting any “Alien” race.64
Strikingly, South Asian immigrants and their children remained at the
margins of these impassioned debates over insular belonging and native
rights. They were not scapegoated as alien usurpers as were the Chinese and
Syrians, yet they were not positioned to claim “Native” rights as some Afro-
Caribbeans (in line with workers from Panama to Pittsburgh) attempted in
56 · Lara Putnam
these years. Proponents of anti-Chinese action in 1930s Jamaica formed the

Jamaica Native Defenders Committee (JNDC); returnees from Panama,
Cuba, and Costa Rica were prominent among its leaders, as were former
or current Garveyites. A typically fiery JNDC speech from 1931 threatened
that if the government refused to act against the Chinese, “people will think
about cutting throats, burning down shops and do all sorts of things. . . . We
are out to agitate for something, and that is to bid chinese goodbye.”65 Yet
JNDC speakers went out of their way to clarify that “when speaking of
aliens” they “meant specially the Chinese and Syrians; they did not refer to
the Indians, called ‘coolies.’ These last mentioned people were agriculturally
inclined and as the country was an agricultural one they fitted in well.”66
East Indians were not quite natives, but not quite aliens.
However, the same currents that encouraged Afro-Caribbeans in this
era to define themselves as part of a supranational “Negro Race”—a collec-
tive shaped by history, united in sentiment, and struggling together against
global oppression—impacted East Indians as well. The resultant essentialist
internationalisms tended to reify ethnic divides. Increasingly, some East
Indian elites proclaimed race- and culture-based reasons why East Indians
did not belong in the Caribbean—or certainly did not belong as part of the
political projects Afro-Creole politicians sought to lead.
When a British parliamentary commission visited Trinidad in 1922 to
assess possibilities for constitutional change, the East Indian leaders they
interviewed shared the goal of political integration: although some favored
formal communal representation, others argued the trend toward “dena-
tionalization” and absorption into the Afro-Creole populace—which they
viewed with equanimity—would make communal representation unneces-
sary. By the 1930s things were different. In dialogue with emissaries from
the anti-imperial Indian nationalist movement, East Indian leaders discov-
ered “a new spirit of renaissance or race determination or race conscious-
ness,” as one participant gushed in 1929. Both the vocabulary and the ideas
echoed the black internationalisms of which Marcus Garvey’s UNIA had
been a harbinger a decade before. By 1936, at an “All Indian Round Table
Conference” organized in Trinidad, East Indian elites from across the ideo-
logical spectrum spoke of “denationalization” as a specter to be avoided at
all cost.67
Nevertheless, in the same era of the 1930s, in both Trinidad and Gui-
ana, hard-hit East Indian cane workers joined forces with Afro-Creole or-
ganizers to demand food, shelter, and voice.68 Multiple kinds of political
community were imaginable at this moment, and which would predomi-

nate was unclear.
Anti-Immigrant Action, Return Migration, and the Dawn of

New Nations, 1930s–1950s
What kinds of societies did the early-twentieth-century heyday of circum-

Caribbean migration leave in its wake? A survey of the region circa 1930
shows us, first, a large group of emigrant-sending societies where immi-
grants rarely came to stay (Jamaica, Barbados, Puerto Rico, and all of the
Leewards and Windwards: each with only 1 to 3 percent of total popula-
tion born elsewhere); second, many countries where immigrants, although
highly visible in specific regions, made little dent in national-level figures
(Colombia, Venezuela, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Dominican Republic, Hon-
duras, and Costa Rica: 1 to 6 percent born elsewhere); third, a handful of
immigrant-heavy societies, where mass arrivals of foreign-born had been
fundamental to the preceding decades of growth (Panama, Cuba, the
United States, and British Honduras: 10 to 15 percent born elsewhere); and
fourth, outdoing them all, British Guiana and Trinidad: 18 and 24 percent
born elsewhere, reflecting the presence in each case of some 40,000 South
Asia-born residents, joined in Trinidad’s case by an equivalent total com-
posed of Barbadians, Vincentians, and Grenadians (see table 1.1).
As the eugenicist/populist frameworks developed in the 1920s col-
lided with global economic crisis in the 1930s, anti-immigrant nativism
moved from rhetoric to practice at a growing number of sites. European
immigrants—as we have seen, only present in truly sizable numbers in
Cuba—were not targets. On the contrary, they remained highly sought-
after, the desirables against whom “undesirable” aliens were defined. (The
working-class Cubans whose chance at upward mobility Spanish immi-
grants usurped felt differently, and for a brief populist moment in 1933, the
“Nationalization of Labor Law” was enforced to give Cubans preference
over Spaniards as well as over Haitians and British West Indians.69) In some
places, Chinese and Middle Eastern merchants drew renewed hostility; this
was true of Chinese and “Turco” shopkeepers in El Salvador, culminating
in the mass closure of businesses and threatened expulsion of the Chinese
(but not the Arabs) in 1931.70 Similarly, when labor riots broke out among
the suffering masses of Jamaica in 1938, Chinese shops were destroyed
across the island.
58 · Lara Putnam
But most pervasively, it was Afro-Antillean immigrants and their chil-

dren who bore the brunt of anti-immigrant action as the Great Depres-
sion dug in. To labor leaders seeking to ensure jobs for “native” workers
and to eugenicist elites seeking to guard the “blood stocks” against “Negro
contamination,” exclusionary laws no longer seemed sufficient. Four de-
cades of circum-Caribbean labor migration had created large, multigen-
erational Afro-Antillean populations in Venezuela, Panama, Costa Rica,
Cuba, and the Dominican Republic. In each case, in the 1930s the national
state undertook an array of actions both legal and extralegal to margin-
alize or remove Caribbean immigrants and their children. Deportations
on grounds of current unemployment or supposedly illegal original entry
occurred sporadically from Mexico to Venezuela. More systematic mass
deportations were threatened against British Caribbeans in the Dominican
Republic, Cuba, and Panama and were carried out against Haitians in Cuba
and the Dominican Republic.71
Made pervasively unwelcome, scores of emigrants and their foreign-
born children streamed back to Jamaica, Barbados, and Haiti. Smaller num-
bers returned to the Leeward and Windward Islands, but their proportional
impact was even greater. The practices of “indoor gate-keeping” that drove
them out of the Spanish American republics included workplace-specific
employment quotas, increased fees and fines, and plain old violence. Extra-
legal coercion was often left in the hands of local officials, allowing center-
state politicians to deny responsibility for what they dismissed as isolated
abuses.
The pattern was common to many of the Greater Caribbean’s porous and
heterogeneous borderlands, including eastern Cuba and northeast Venezu-
ela. But it reached its tragic apogee with the massacre of some 15,000 resi-
dents of Haitian ancestry in the Dominican frontera region in 1937. Locals
of varied and mixed origin had long moved back and forth through the
Haitian-Dominican borderlands. Indeed the border’s demarcation had not
been settled until 1936. This was a classic case of the “near neighbor” trans-
national movement so characteristic of Greater Caribbean frontiers. Or at
least it was until October 3, 1937, when General Rafael Trujillo sent troops
to the region with orders to kill all “Haitians” found. For five days they did
so, using machetes rather than bullets to disguise official involvement.
Three months later, as testimonies trickled out describing families
herded en masse into the woods for slaughter and refugees hacked to death
on the river bank as they sought to flee to Haiti, Trujillo still insisted that
any violence had been “a purely local incident, which is not international
or even national”—and moreover had been entirely provoked by illegal

Haitian border-crossing. Ultimately the guilt lay with the “100,000 Haitians
on Dominican soil taking employment from Dominicans and using our
land and resources.”72 The death toll was staggering, and sui generis, but
the justification was absolutely typical of the era.
Action against black and Asian immigrants was just one strand of a
broader reframing of national communities in the entangled Greater Ca-
ribbean in the 1930s. The story of the era is one of new inclusions and
exclusions at once. As global economic crisis shook regimes, the new na-
tionalist alliances opened the way for genuine, if not always permanent,
reforms. Across the region, in republics and colonies, Spanish-, English-,
and French-speaking alike, the late 1930s saw large-scale labor unrest. In
the republics—without the backstop of empire—this often triggered re-
gime change as self-described nationalist reformers within the military
stepped in to replace elites whose control over the political system was
fracturing. The equivalent dynamic in the colonies saw imperial warships
rushed to provide support to colonial governments threatened by strikes
and riots in Trinidad, Barbados, Jamaica, and British Honduras. Regime
change would come here, too, but through a slower process of negotiated
decolonization.73
Exactly what form would the new states take? Where would the internal
and external boundaries of “nation” be drawn? The outcomes were far from
predetermined, yet the conflicts over return migration and immigrant
rights in the 1930s foretold divisions to come. The restriction of return mi-
gration to island of origin presaged a divided archipelago rather than a
unified federation. And the street-level hostility toward Asian denizens in
Jamaica and Trinidad suggested that forging “national” solidarity across
lines of race and class would be challenging indeed.
The entanglements of immigration and political belonging in the Greater
Caribbean sat front and center in an analysis by Marcus Garvey in 1940. He
had jumped to offer evidence to the Royal Commission investigating the
causes of the popular uprisings that had shaken Port of Spain, Bridgetown,
and Kingston from 1935 to 1938. Garvey explained the crisis of imperial
rule as the culmination of a multisited saga of elite power, popular mobility,
and rising exclusion. He began with the remaking of labor regimes in the
wake of slavery. The “importation” of “coolie immigrants” had depressed
wages and “forced the ambitious labouring natives to seize the opportunity
of going abroad.”74
Here, as elsewhere, Garvey used the term “native” for Caribbean people
60 · Lara Putnam
of African ancestry. And throughout the rest of his testimony, in keeping

with the patterns of the preceding two decades, Garvey denounced anti-
black nativism in the receiving societies only to embrace anti-Asian nativ-
ism at home. “After the closing down of work in the respective countries
with prejudice drawn against the West Indians, large numbers of people
who went abroad returned to their respective homes and particularly Ja-
maica, to be confronted with, in Jamaica, the country being dominated by
Chinese, Assyrians, and in some respects Indians, and to find no opportu-
nity for work, employment, or business, in the land of their nativity.”75
The category of “nativity” was fundamental to Garvey’s argument, and
there was no possibility that it could be acquired by birth alone. Indians
born in Jamaica did not count. It was the West Indies’ destiny to be peopled
by “Negroes,” whose struggle against the “Asiatic races” was inevitable. For
Garvey, history mattered and labor struggles mattered, but ultimately an-
cestry and political community must coincide. “There is no doubt that the
question is basically racial.” Jamaica “is really economically monopolized
by the Asiatic races and one may mention prominently the Syrians, in com-
bination with the Jews. In Trinidad and British Guiana there is a similar
influence, particularly among the East Indians, that affects the good and
well being of the Negro race.”76 Echoing rhetoric that rang across Europe
at this moment—a week before the partition of Czechoslovakia in Munich
and two months before the Kristallnacht—Garvey saw races as actors in a
long-term battle for territory. The West Indies, like all countries, must in-
evitably “grow into might[y] native centres which will not offer any peace-
ful relationships between ambitious groups of opposite races.”77
The story of Caribbean nationhood is often used to counter such claims.
“Out of Many, One People,” holds Jamaica’s national motto. Yet the history
of the region is still being written, and the complexities of exclusion and
belonging that shaped the transition to independence were real and endur-
ing.78 As noted earlier, popular mobilizations in the British Caribbean in
the late 1930s saw multiple instances of alliance between East Indians and
Afro-descendants, all the more impressive because they cut across not only
the racial divide that preoccupied Garvey but also divisions of residence,
economic sector, language, and religion. However, such alliances proved
hard to sustain. Just like British West Indians born in Central America,
East Indians born in the British Caribbean were leery of radical political
movements that reached out for their support in times of need, given how
often they had been treated as alien by “local” working classes despite their
own local birth.
Worried that steps toward representative government might leave them

without political influence in these lands of their birth, East Indians tended
to support incremental reform and communal representation rather than
immediate decolonization and universal suffrage. In turn, worried that East
Indian “chauvinism” or “conservatism” might hamstring economic reform,
some Afro-Creole reformers supported language tests or literacy tests that
would exclude many from voting. The devil of democracy would be in the
details, and the details reflected disputes over race, culture, and belonging
that had been shaped by local class dynamics and region-wide state-mak-
ing alike.79
Conclusion
The politics of immigration and nationalism in the islands and rimlands of

the Greater Caribbean during the heyday of transoceanic migration were
entangled in multiple ways. Those who debated barriers to entry did so
with explicit reference to international comparisons and geopolitical con-
sequences. For Spanish American republics, the frame that mattered was
U.S. economic hegemony and military threat. For British Caribbeans, the
relevant frames were provided by the British Empire on the one hand and
the surrounding circum-Caribbean republics on the other (the latter in-
cluding the United States, but from this vantage as pioneer of anti-immi-
grant bans rather than source of menacing marines).
We began by noting regional differences in the class dynamics of explicit
race talk. We then saw a major convergence in the 1930s as mestizo nation-
alists, Afro-Creole advocates, and Hindu renovators all seemed to agree on
just how different they were from each other. In the international heyday of
romantic territorialist nationalism, everyone from canny elites to insurgent
middle sectors to hard-pressed masses spoke of nativity, nativism, and na-
tion as they staked their claims to a piece of the pie. Actors from Marcus
Garvey to Panamanian labor leaders reflect this supraregional trend. But
whereas within the Spanish-speaking republics the heyday of mestizo pop-
ulism brought at least rhetorical agreement on the inclusivity of “the na-
tion” by the 1930s (although in practice racism and poverty still barred full
participation by many), within the Caribbean’s British colonies the mean-
ing of nation was far less clear. Individual islands, the British West Indies
as a whole, and supraterritorial collectives like “Our Negro Race” and “Our
Indian People” all were called “nation” on a regular basis in this era. Which
62 · Lara Putnam
collective should be the “self ” on whose behalf “self-government” should

be sought would be the vexing question of the generation that followed.
Acknowledgments
The two maps in this chapter were designed by Lara Putnam and executed
by Bill Nelson. They appeared originally in Lara Putnam, “The Making
and Unmaking of the Circum-Caribbean Migratory Sphere: Mobility, Sex
across Boundaries, and Collective Destinies, 1840–1940,” in Migrants and
Migration in Modern North America: Cross-Border Lives, Labor Markets,
and Politics in Canada, the Caribbean, Mexico, and the United States, ed.
Dirk Hoerder and Nora Faires (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011),
and appear here by permission of the publisher.
Notes
1. Gómez, Contribución al estudio, 9. See also Palmer, “Racismo intelectual en Costa
Rica y Guatemala.”
2. Petras, Jamaican Labor Migration; Salas, Enduring Legacy; McGuinness, Path of Em-
pire; and Soluri, Banana Cultures, ch. 1.
3. Scott, Slave Emancipation in Cuba; Corbitt, “Immigration in Cuba”; and Chinea,
“Race, Colonial Exploitation and West Indian Immigration,” esp. 514–15.
4. Ortiz, “Inmigración desde el punto de vista criminológico,” 55.
5. De la Fuente, A Nation for All; and Casey, “Haitian Migrants in Cuba.”
6. Laurence, “Importation of Labour; and Roberts, Population of Jamaica, 128.
7. Editorial, “Our Unofficial Legislators,” Port of Spain Daily Mirror, November 14,
1904, 6.
8. Ibid.
9. Ibid. See discussion in Brereton, History of Modern Trinidad, 114–15.
10. Colby, Business of Empire; Bourgois, Ethnicity at Work; and Chomsky, “‘Barbados
or Canada?’”
11. E.g., Putnam, Company They Kept; Charlton, “‘Cat Born in Oven Is not Bread’”; and
Putnam, Radical Moves, ch. 1.
12. Verrill, Book of the West Indies, 150.
13. See analysis in Moya, “A Continent of Immigrants.”
14. Ferenczi and Willcox, International Migrations, 1:525–27; de la Fuente, A Nation
for All, 101.
15. Kuczynski, Demographic Survey, 3:11.
16. See, e.g., Quirós, “Inmigración e identidad nacional”; Edelman, “ Central American
Genocide”; and Sandoval García, Otros amenazantes.
17. “A ‘Systematic’ Impostor. The Magistrate on Grenadians,” Port of Spain Weekly
Guardian, February 14, 1920, 9.
18. Derby, “Haitians, Magic, and Money”; and Turits, “A World Destroyed, A Nation
Imposed.”
19. Lee, “The ‘Yellow Peril.’” See also Hu-DeHart, “Indispensable Enemy or Convenient
Scapegoat?”; and, for an even broader context, McKeown, Melancholy Order; and Lake and
Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line.
20. Putnam, “Eventually Alien.”
21. Klich and Lesser, “Introduction: ‘Turco’ Immigrants”; Foroohar, “Palestinians in
Central America”; Bruckmayr, “Syro-Lebanese Migration”; and Guzmán, A Century of
Palestinian Immigration.
22. Klich, “Argentine-Ottoman Relations,” esp. 179.
23. Plummer, “Race, Nationality, and Trade,” esp. 523–24.
24. “Deep Unrest in Haiti,” Port of Spain Daily Mirror, August 18, 1904, 2–3.
25. Plummer, “Race, Nationality, and Trade,” 525.
26. “Deep Unrest in Haiti,” Port of Spain Daily Mirror, August 18, 1904, 2–3.
27. Johnson, “Anti-Chinese Riots.” See also Bouknight-Davis, “Chinese Economic
Development.”
28. Johnson, “Anti-Chinese Riots,” 20.
29. “Parochial Board of St. James,” Kingston Daily Gleaner, January 7, 1918, 13.
30. Ibid.
31. Ibid.
32. Bouknight-Davis, “Chinese Economic Development,” 87. See also discussion in
National Archives of the United Kingdom, Colonial Office [henceforth, CO] 295/596/17:
Criticisms by the Chinese Government of the immigration legislation recently enacted by
the Government of Trinidad (1937).
33. Lake and Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line; and Mongia, “Race, National-
ity, Mobility.”
34. Roberts and Byrne, “Summary Statistics,” 132.
35. “A Settlement Scheme for East Indians,” Kingston Daily Gleaner, February 22,
1918, 7.
36. Brereton, History of Modern Trinidad, 158–60.
37. “Progress of East Indians in the West Indies,” Kingston Daily Gleaner, August 15,
1917, 11.
38. Williams, Stains on My Name; Munasinghe, Callalloo or Tossed Salad?; and Khan,
Callaloo Nation.
39. Fahrmeir, Citizenship; and Zolberg, Nation by Design.
40. Stoddard, Rising Tide of Color, 276.
41. Ward, “Our New Immigration Policy,” 110 and 104.
42. Zolberg, Nation by Design; Ngai, Impossible Subjects; Putnam, “Unspoken Exclu-
sions”; and Putnam, Radical Moves, ch. 3.
43. Stepan, “Hour of Eugenics”; and Putnam, “Eventually Alien.”
44. Vallenilla Lanz, “Disgregación e integración,” 325, 326.
45. Ibid., 333.
46. Adriani, Labor Venezolanista, 150.
47. Ibid., 149. See also Pellegrino, Historia de la inmigración, 1:148–58, 171–72; and
Wright, Café con Leche, 76–94.
64 · Lara Putnam
48. Adriani, Labor Venezolanista, 149.

49. Ibid., 148.
50. “Panama’s Immigration Need Is Discussed by ‘El Diario’: Spanish Daily Says Coun-
try Needs Brawn but not from the West Indies,” Panama American, December 29, 1926; see
also “West Indian Negroes Excluded in Drastic Immigration Bill: Chinese, Syrians, Turks
and East Indians Also Barred,” Panama American, September 19, 1926.
51. CO 318/406/1: Immigration of British West Indians in Central and South America:
Letter to Foreign Office from British legation in Bogotá, March 29, 1932.
52. See discussion in Putnam, Radical Moves, ch. 3.
53. Report of the Proceedings, 130; and “Mr. Adames letter to Mr. Hushing,” Panama
American, March 3, 1926.
54. “West Indian Labourers in the Republics: Views Expressed in Editorial Published
in ‘The Workman’ of Panama,” Kingston Daily Gleaner, September 5, 1924, 3.
55. Editorial, “West Indians and the West Indies,” West Indian (St. George’s, Grenada),
February 20, 1915, 2.
56. Sidney A. Young, “A Deplorable Trend,” Panama American West Indian Page, Feb-
ruary 10, 1927.
57. Sidney A. Young, “Blocking Progress,” Panama American West Indian Page, De-
cember 4, 1926.
58. Ibid.
59. Hill, Marcus Garvey and UNIA Papers, vol. 11; Martin, Race First; and Ottley, New
World A’Coming, 68–81.
60. “Nationalism and the Black Race,” Limón Searchlight, February 7, 1931, 5.
61. “The First Question,” Kingston Daily Gleaner, October 11, 1924, 12. On anti-Chinese
political debates in this era, see Carnegie, Some Aspects; on anti-Chinese popular mobili-
zation, see Post, Arise Ye Starvelings.
62. “Points Placed before the New Governor,” Kingston Daily Gleaner, October 1,
1924, 7.
63. “The Alien Question,” Kingston Daily Gleaner, May 15, 1925, 8.
64. See Putnam, Radical Moves, ch. 3.
65. “Another Sedition Case,” Limon Searchlight, June 6, 1931, 2. See also Carnegie, Some
Aspects, 99–111; and Post, Arise Ye Starvelings, 208–12.
66. “Enter Protest Dissolution of the Council,” Kingston Daily Gleaner, September 16,
1930, 14.
67. Singh, “Conflict and Collaboration,” 234, 237, 240; Samaroo, “Indian Connection”;
and Munasinghe, Callalloo or Tossed Salad?, 191. See also Shepherd, “Dynamics,” esp. 19.
68. Bolland, Politics of Labour, 252–57, 336–56; Lewis, Labour in the West Indies; and
Basdeo, “Indian Participation.”
69. McGillivray, Blazing Cane; and de la Fuente, A Nation for All.
70. Suter, “‘Pernicious Aliens.’”
71. Extensive evidence in support of this and the following paragraph is presented in
Putnam, Radical Moves, chs. 3 and 6.
72. “Dominican President Refuses to Arbitrate: Says Incident ‘Purely Local,’” Pittsburgh
Courier, December 25, 1937, 7. See Turits, “A World Destroyed, A Nation Imposed.”
73. For a synthetic overview, see Bolland, “Labor Protests, Rebellions.”
74. CO 950/44: Mr. Marcus Garvey (Universal Negro Improvement Association):

Memorandum of Evidence, Letter from Marcus Garvey to WIRC, September 21, 1938.
75. Ibid.
76. Ibid.
77. CO 950/44: Mr. Marcus Garvey (Universal Negro Improvement Association):
Memorandum of Evidence, Letter from Marcus Garvey to Lloyd, Secretary, WIRC, Sep-
tember 24, 1938.
78. Khan, “Journey to the Center of the Earth”; see also Mohammed, “Asian Other.”
79. Singh, “Conflict and Collaboration,” 242. On current tensions in Trinidad, see
Brereton, “All ah we is not one”; and Cudjoe, “Multiculturalism.”
2
The Limits of the Cosmic Race
Immigrant and Nation in Mexico, 1850–1950
Jürgen Buchenau
For Mexico is a land in which men have survived against heavy odds, like a cactus
in the desert or a golden dome built far from civilization.
Irene Nicholson, 1965
The two most prominent Mexicans of the twenty-first century are sons of
immigrants. With a net worth of approximately US$60 billion, the world’s
wealthiest individual is Carlos Slim Helú, a Lebanese Mexican. And in July
2000 Vicente Fox, the son of Irish and Spanish immigrants, won election
to the presidency of Mexico, thus ending the seventy-one-year rule of the
Partido Revolucionario Institucional. To the casual observer, Slim’s enor-
mous wealth and Fox’s political triumph appeared to show that Mexico,
like Argentina, Brazil, and the United States, had at last become a nation
of immigrants.1
In fact, however, Slim’s and Fox’s examples proved epiphenomenal rather
than paradigmatic. Whereas Argentina, Brazil, Canada, and the United
States received millions of newcomers during the heyday of transatlantic
migration in the period 1820–1930, only 270,000, or 0.5 percent of all Eu-
ropean immigrants in the New World, settled in Mexico (see table 2.1). In
1930 immigrants made up less than 1 percent of the Mexican population.2
To be sure, this small number made a big difference. In the course of the
late nineteenth century, European and Chinese immigrants seized control
of banking and commerce, and French and Spanish families pioneered
industrialization. In the twentieth century, immigrants came to play im-
portant roles in academia and the arts.3 Contributions from immigrants
have greatly shaped our understanding of the past century, especially the
Immigrant and Nation in Mexico, 1850–1950 · 67
Table 2.1. European migration to Mexico in comparative perspective, 1820–1932

Number of European Percentage of total European
Receiving Country Immigrants overseas immigration
United States 32,564,000 57.9
Argentina 6,501,000 11.6
Canada 5,073,000 9.0
Brazil 4,361,000 7.8
Cuba 1,394,000 2.5
Mexico 270,000 0.5
Peru 30,000 0.05
Other countries 7,677,000 10.65
Source: Adapted from Moya, Cousins and Strangers, 46. These figures exclude return
migration.
writings of the Polish-born writer Elena Poniatowska, now adopted as one

of Mexico’s own. Still, in light of the presence of 31.7 million Mexicans
and their descendants in the United States as of 2009, one would be hard
pressed to disagree with the assessment of historian Moisés González Na-
varro that Mexico is “a country of emigration rather than immigration.”4
This small yet influential immigrant population assimilated, but slowly.
This chapter builds upon my previously published work that focused on
European immigrants’ practices of self-exclusion, a product of their widely
held sense of racial and cultural superiority.5 Expanding the purview be-
yond merely European immigration, and taking into account the significant
scholarship that has appeared in the last decade, it analyzes endogenous
factors that affected the degree of integration of immigrants into the na-
tional polity. The complex relationship between Mexico and its immigrants
complicates the stereotype of a xenophilic country serving as “mother of
foreigners and stepmother of Mexicans,” a stereotype pertaining both to
the modernizing dictatorship of José de la Cruz Porfirio Díaz and to the
neoliberal regimes that have governed the country since 1982. Thus, elite
xenophilia contrasted with widespread popular xenophobia, a legal frame-
work that discriminated against foreign-born residents throughout most
of the twentieth century, and constructions of Mexican nationalism that
excluded immigrants.6
Immigration into Mexico therefore does not fit into either standard nar-
ratives of Mexican identity or other New World paradigms. It provides a
counterpoint to the hypothesis quoted in the introduction to this volume
that “the integration of immigrants into the local society was faster and
68 · Jürgen Buchenau
more successful in many of the migrant flows that arrived in Spanish and
Portuguese America than in their North American counterparts.”7 As re-
cently as 2010, the agency of the national government charged with pre-
venting discrimination reported that “the prevalent image of Mexico as a
country in solidarity with and open toward foreigners is debatable.”8
A Nation of Spaniards, “Indians,” and Mestizos
Unlike North Americans and the inhabitants of the Southern Cone, Mex-
icans have not imagined their country as a nation of immigrants. Their
historical memory focused on the experience of the Spanish-indigenous
encounter in the sixteenth century, and particularly the construction of
an exploitative colonial state on the ruins of the once-proud Mexica Em-
pire. Whereas North American whites traced their roots to a succession
of largely voluntary European migrations, and African Americans derived
their own identity from the legacy of the transatlantic slave trade, Mexicans
(as well as the inhabitants of other nations with large indigenous popula-
tions) imagined themselves as the products of the Spanish sexual conquest
of indigenous Mesoamerica. Forged in the crucible of racial miscegena-
tion—and particularly, as Mexicans imagined it, the union of Spanish con-
quistadors and indigenous women—was the mestizo, the prime exponent
of the national character. Mexico thus displayed what Estelle Tarica has
labeled “mestizo nationalism”: the identification of mexicanidad with the
miscegenation of the conquerors and the conquered, which produced a
new mestizo race.9 Of course, this imagining also included the nonmisce-
genated elements of Mexican society: the indios, who continued to make
up approximately 15 percent of the population and retained their languages
and customs; and the creoles, the descendants of the Spaniards who occu-
pied privileged political and economic positions. Although a quarter-mil-
lion African slaves had also arrived during the colonial period, contribut-
ing to the ethnic mix particularly on both coasts and in many of the cities,
their legacy remained almost forgotten in the national period until José
Vasconcelos included them in his representation of the “cosmic race”—
and, even then, in a merely marginal representation.10
In the colonial era, creole efforts at maintaining their dominance in a
multiethnic society contributed to constructions of national identity that
excluded immigrants. The creoles imagined themselves as the representa-
tives of a Spanish Roman Catholic community as embodied in the Virgin
of Guadalupe.11 By identifying themselves as “americanos”—or, as historian
Mark Burkholder has argued, “native sons”—the creoles defied the peninsu-
lares, the native-born Spaniards who held the most important political po-
sitions, and did not relinquish their association with the Spanish heritage.12
In this view, all those not of Spanish culture (“Indians” as well as foreigners,
particularly Protestants, Jews, and members of other faiths) remained out-
siders. The peninsulares, also pejoratively called gachupines, were the only
immigrant group recognized in this imaginary, and hardly in a favorable
light. Meanwhile, the growing group of mestizos assumed a position in the
middle of the Mexican social pyramid, and their sense of themselves as
products of the Spanish-indigenous encounter dovetailed with the creoles’
imaginary world made up of Spaniards, “indios,” and those in between.
Mexico also posed specific obstacles for immigrants. Despite the opti-
mism of German geologist Alexander von Humboldt, whose monumen-
tal Political Essay on the Kingdom of New Spain predicted great agricul-
tural wealth, Mexico offered few opportunities for immigrant farmers.13
Regionally diverse but predominantly dry and mountainous, the country
possessed relatively little farmland. Even more importantly, land was not
widely available. Prior to the 1850s, half of the arable land was the patri-
mony of the Catholic Church, and a small creole elite owned much of the
remainder. A prospective farmer who came without financial resources
therefore competed for jobs with the peasantry and led, more often than
not, a life of material deprivation. In addition, Roman Catholicism re-
mained the state religion through 1857, discouraging the immigration of
those of different faiths. Workers found low wages; artisans, competition
from a glut of skilled crafts people; and entrepreneurs, occasional efforts to
outlaw foreign ownership of retail businesses.14 For the first seventy years
after independence, the country’s political and economic problems added
to these factors that discouraged immigration. The Wars of Independence
(1810–21) left the economy ruined and political authority severely weak-
ened. In the succeeding decades, the country experienced four major for-
eign invasions, including the U.S.–Mexican War, which led to the loss of
half of the nation’s territory. Thereafter, the disastrous War of the Reform
(1858–61), followed by the French occupation and the war against Maximil-
ian’s empire (1862–67), wreaked havoc once again. To top it off, newcomers
who might have desired to settle in the temperate zones in the mountains
first had to pass through the tropical coastal areas, risking diseases such as
yellow fever and malaria.
As a result, the sparse foreign-born population of nineteenth-century
Mexico—composed primarily of the aforementioned Spaniards, U.S.
farmers, Guatemalan refugees, and European merchants—either came

from neighboring countries or counted on effective protection by fortune
and family networks. Even more strikingly, the presence of the first three
of these groups markedly increased the anti-immigrant tendencies of the
ruling class.
The case of the Spaniards is particularly instructive in this regard. Immi-
grants from Spain had come since the days of Hernán Cortés, and their de-
scendants had formed the creole elite that owned New Spain’s most precious
land. Excluded from the highest colonial offices, the creoles had grown to
resent more recent arrivals, especially during the Bourbon Reforms of the
late eighteenth century. During that era, ten thousand Spaniards arrived,
many of whom took advantage of family ties to become merchants and
landowners. Not only did most peninsulares boast indisputable limpieza de
sangre, or purity of blood, but peninsular merchants also found themselves
in a fierce rivalry with the creoles. Anti-Spanish sentiments served as one
of the causes of the Wars of Independence, and they intensified during the
wars as Spanish troops brutally suppressed the insurrections. The achieve-
ment of independence signaled the hour of payback. In 1828 the govern-
ment decreed the expulsion of all Spaniards, a decree enforced the follow-
ing year when Spain’s failed attempt at a reconquest led to the departure of
more than seven thousand peninsulares.15
U.S. immigration proved even more ominous. Recognizing the specter
of U.S. territorial expansion, late colonial authorities had invited English-
speaking Roman Catholic settlers to live in the sparsely populated north-
eastern province of Téjas. In 1824 the national government of Guadalupe
Victoria renewed this invitation, although signs already pointed to an un-
regulated influx of Protestant immigrants from the southern United States.
By 1833 the situation had gotten out of hand. More than thirty thousand
English speakers in Texas, a majority of whom did not respect Mexican law,
confronted approximately nine thousand Spanish speakers, and three years
later the Anglos launched a successful war of secession. The Texas seces-
sion and the subsequent war with the United States demonstrated that the
threat of U.S. land grabbing outweighed any possible benefits of immigra-
tion as long as political instability continued. Ironically, the annexations
also demonstrated the viability of immigration, as the United States soon
succeeded where Mexico had failed. After the war the United States fun-
neled hundreds of thousands of people into the old Mexican northwest,
many of them European immigrants. These areas—particularly California
and Texas—constituted the promising, exploitable frontier that could have

invited widespread immigration.16
The presence of a Guatemalan minority in the southeastern state of Chi-
apas constituted the mirror image of the Texas question. The westernmost
province of the old Captaincy General of Guatemala, Chiapas had not
joined the United Provinces of the Center of America that had emerged
from the collapse of Spanish colonial authority. While the other provinces
had joined Guatemala City in forming the new federation, Chiapas did not
follow suit. The creoles in the highlands of Chiapas favored annexation
by Mexico, while those in the lowlands preferred association with Guate-
mala. In 1842, several years after the disintegration of the United Provinces,
Mexico annexed Chiapas. For decades thereafter, thousands of Chiapane-
cos still thought of themselves as Guatemalans.17 Just as Mexicans native
to California and Texas became “foreigners” by means of shifting borders,
so did Guatemalans native to Chiapas—an intriguing case of transforming
identities by moving boundaries rather than people.
Finally, immigrants from central and western Europe—particularly
those whom historian Walther Bernecker has called the “trade conquis-
tadors”—acquired an influence disproportionate to their small numbers.18
The trade conquistadors came in order to advance the economic interests of
their families. Armed with investment capital, they soon dominated min-
ing, money lending, and wholesale trading. By 1850 a small group of British
investors owned most of the privately held mines. Moreover, the Europeans
took advantage of the prejudice of the upper classes against banking and
commerce to seize control over those sectors as well. Whereas investors
from London and Paris founded the first modern banks, French, German,
and Spanish merchants owned most of the warehouse stores that formed
the hubs of an extensive wholesale network. These bankers, merchants,
and miners far outnumbered the types of immigrants who dominated the
migrant flow to the United States—for example, peasant farmers and intel-
lectuals fleeing the stifling political climate in Europe.19
Nineteenth-century immigration to Mexico therefore followed a pat-
tern common to most of the Central American and Andean nations rather
than the one defining what we might call the “mass immigrant nations.” In
Canada, the Southern Cone, and the United States, most immigrants were
migrants of need who fled persecution or poverty in their home country.
Most of the immigrants who came to Mexico, on the other hand, were
migrants of choice. Like other heavily indigenous and mestizo nations
characterized by intense struggles over land, Mexico followed a pattern of

“qualitative” rather than “quantitative” immigration. The major historical
drama of the nineteenth century involved the unsuccessful incorporation
into the national body of a racially diverse population that spoke more than
one hundred indigenous dialects and languages rather than the creation of
what historian Alfred Crosby has called “neo-Europes” by means of a mass
influx of European immigrants.20
“Whitening” the Mestizo Nation?
Beginning in the mid-1850s and culminating in the long reign of General

Porfírio Díaz (1876–80 and 1884–1911), liberal modernization redefined
both the idea of the nation and the country’s approach to the issue of im-
migration. Following the mantra of the nineteenth-century Argentine
statesman Juan Bautista Alberdi that “to govern was to populate,” the lib-
eral regimes encouraged immigration as a way to unlock what they saw
as their nation’s enormous potential, to discourage further U.S. annexa-
tions, and to “whiten” the population. Three ironies marked this strategy.
First, the loss of land to the United States shifted the consensus within the
Mexican government toward an acceptance of immigration. Second, Díaz’s
policies facilitated East Asian and Middle Eastern immigration (especially
as what historian Theresa Alfaro-Velcamp has called the “back door to the
United States”) more so they did than European immigration.21 Third—and
perhaps most importantly—the liberals coveted foreign investments much
more than they did immigration.
The Liberal Reforma of the 1850s provided the legal and institutional
background to an era of contradictions that witnessed both the rapid
growth of foreign influence and the rise of popular xenophobia—contra-
dictions that were to contribute decisively to the Revolution of 1910. Seek-
ing to emulate the U.S. economic success that the liberals believed to be
based on yeoman farming, the Ley Lerdo of 1856 disentailed the lands of
the Church and invited Europeans to colonize these vast territories. The
ideology of reformers such as Benito Juárez emphasized immigration as
a way of infusing his country’s mestizo and indigenous population with
such Protestant virtues as thrift, industriousness, and discipline. Himself a
Zapotec Indian who only learned Spanish at the age of six, Juárez displayed
an abiding belief in European models. Therefore, the liberals invited more
immigrants to come to rural Mexico. Nonetheless, they could not persuade
more than a few thousand, as civil war and foreign intervention continued
to ravage the country until 1867. Moreover, the liberals feared the influence
of foreigners they considered “pernicious”—above all, foreign-born repre-
sentatives of the Church—to the extent that Article 33 of the Constitution
of 1857 threatened them with expulsion.22
The long-lived dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz witnessed a more sustained
attempt. What came to be known as the Porfiriato sponsored immigration
as key to its project of state and nation building. The Díaz regime advertised
Mexico as a land of unlimited opportunities for immigrants. The Porfirians
hoped that immigrants would bring modern agricultural practices to the
countryside. Moreover, the Díaz regime sought to settle the arid north, a
sparsely populated expanse with tenuous links to the capital. Finally, the
Díaz regime viewed immigration as a way of “whitening” a heavily misce-
genated population.
However, the Porfirian idea of whitening involved a cultural rather than
a strictly biological construction of race and ethnicity, contributing to an
emphasis on foreign investments over immigration. In contrast to the
widespread North American consumption of the social Darwinist thought
of Herbert Spencer—the notion that race and sex, as biologically con-
structed, determine the struggle for survival—French positivism as defined
by Auguste Comte remained more prominent in Mexico. Positivism em-
phasized cultural and economic “development” as measured by European
models rather than biological categories. To the Porfirian elite, whitening
thus meant the infusion of European money, education, and customs into
a countryside populated by supposedly indolent and ignorant indigenous
people. Being white, they believed, was a stage of civilization and a class
marker more than it was a biological condition. As skin color, ethnicity, and
class coincided to a great extent, this positivist orientation had little practi-
cal effect on the way the elite viewed the poor majority, but it did imply a
prioritization of economic development.23
When Porfirians considered the benefits of immigration for the mod-
ernization of their country, they were thus more interested in the influx of
immigrants’ capital and expertise than in their physical presence. Hence,
the most transformative foreign influence came by way of direct invest-
ment by faraway investors and corporations; witness the U.S.- and British-
financed construction of the railroad system, the transformation of Sonora
by U.S. copper barons such as William Greene, or Weetman Pearson’s role
in advancing British investments in the oil industry. Nonetheless, immi-
gration served, in the words of historian Adina Cimet, to “avoid a direct
confrontation of how to incorporate the indigenous population into the
body politic.”24 The influential education undersecretary Justo Sierra por-

trayed white immigration as a civilizing influence and ultimately as a step
toward the eventual cultural and racial fusion of the creole, mestizo, and
indigenous people.25
Therefore, foreign capital—not immigration, as in Argentina, for exam-
ple—formed the core of the Porfirian strategy. This strategy sought to take
advantage of the rapid expansion of industrial production and the con-
struction of efficient patterns of global exchange, which assigned to Mexico
the role of a raw material producer in the emerging global division of labor.
Countries that fell into this category not only furnished the industrializing
economies of the North Atlantic with metals, minerals, and foodstuffs; they
also became targets for investment capital as well as important markets for
surplus industrial products. Díaz and his allies believed that the surplus
capital generated by such export-led development would eventually lead
to industrialization. They envisioned Mexico as a modern nation sharing
in the prosperity of the North Atlantic economies—one that borrowed
freely from European and North American cultural and economic mod-
els while expressing pride in its historical heritage, as evidenced by Díaz’s
commission of a statue of the Aztec emperor Cuauhtémoc on the capital’s
main boulevard. Indeed, foreign capital flowed freely into Mexico in the
late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, building up an impressive
railroad network, modernizing the infrastructure (particularly in the ports
and major cities), and creating a sizable urban middle class.26
As investments and foreigners arrived together in many cases, foreign
residents reached the high point of their presence in the Porfirian era.27 Im-
migrants and their descendants were well represented in the Díaz cabinet:
the secretary of finance, José Y. Limantour, came from a French family,
and the secretary of foreign relations, Ignacio Mariscal, was married to a
woman from Baltimore. The peninsulares, who had completed their demo-
graphic recovery from the expulsions of the 1820s by the time of the 1910
census, married into Mexico City’s most distinguished creole families. Even
more importantly, the trade conquistadors ventured into industrial manu-
facturing. In particular, French textile manufacturers formed a powerful
industrial conglomerate in Orizaba, Veracruz, while Spanish merchants
joined influential creole families in the northern city of Monterrey in set-
ting up the beginnings of a steel industry.28
Encouraged by the impact of the foreigners already present, the Díaz
regime pursued a three-pronged strategy to lure more immigrants. The first
aspect of this strategy consisted of rural colonization projects. To encourage
rural immigration, the Porfirians sent agents to Europe to promote a sani-

tized version of Mexican reality. The most important of these agents, Ger-
man-born Heinrich Lemcke, traveled through Europe with a pamphlet that
portrayed Mexico as a country with wide-open spaces, abundant farmland,
and a scarcity of people to work the land other than those whom Lemcke
described as the somnolent, lazy, and superstitious “Indians.” It promised
generous government subsidies to prospective settler colonies, including
tax breaks and the provision of needed infrastructure. In 1882 much fan-
fare accompanied the launching of the most significant of these colonies,
six settlements whose inhabitants totaled more than 2,600 Italians. A few
decades later, four of these colonies had disappeared, as most of the Italians
had either returned home or moved to the United States.29
The second strategy entailed the recruitment of foreign workers and pro-
fessionals, an issue that dovetailed with the influx of foreign investments.
When British and U.S. companies built the railroad lines that connected the
U.S. border with Mexico City and the major mining centers, a large number
of Chinese and Italian coolies moved south from the United States or from
their countries of origin to do the actual work. Moreover, foreign mining
and oil companies brought their own engineers and overseers, individuals
who were paid many times as much as the Mexicans working alongside
them.30
Finally, a reform of immigration law that suited the needs of foreign
capitalists and immigrant farmers alike constituted the third prong of Por-
firian immigration policy. In 1883 the Mexican government passed legisla-
tion allowing foreigners the right to own land and subsoil resources. The
infamous “Law of Fallow Land” permitted private investors to scoop up
property declared “public,” much of it land taken from indigenous com-
munities. Three years later, the “Law of Foreignness and Naturalization”
established jus sanguinis as the guiding principle of Mexican citizenship
for the children of foreign nationals. Although the Mexican Constitution
of 1857 espoused the principle of jus soli—the idea that one’s place of birth
determines one’s nationality—the 1886 law allowed Mexican-born children
of foreigners to retain their father’s citizenship so long as they claimed that
citizenship by the age of majority.31
What was curiously absent from all of these measures was a plan to as-
similate foreign nationals, or at least to make them into what one thinker
called “the new creoles.”32 Indeed, the sizable foreign communities in the
capital became more rather than less isolated as the Porfiriato progressed.
In the 1890s these communities acquired a critical mass in Mexico City,
where members of the most sizable foreign communities established in-

stitutions such as schools, churches, and social clubs that allowed them
to raise their families in the host country. Correspondingly, the wall that
had always separated these communities from Mexican society grew much
higher. By 1900 the wealthiest and most conspicuous foreign diasporas in
Mexico City—the American, the British, the French, the German, and the
Spanish—had become enclaves, or “colonies.” In the words of a U.S. sociol-
ogist who grew up in Mexico City, a colony consisted of “those who seek to
maintain their own racial and cultural integrity although living in an alien
land which has an independent government.”33 This effort involved a sense
of superiority over the host society, the spirit of belonging to a close-knit
community, and the notion that the colony constituted an integral part of
the home country even though its members lived in a different society. For
example, instruction at the Colegio Alejandro von Humboldt, the German
school in Mexico City, endeavored to “preserve . . . children for German
culture.”34
Immigration thus resulted in unassimilated ethnic enclaves rather than
the whitening of Mexico, as little cultural transfer took place, least of all
in the cities. Similar enclaves also existed in southern Brazil, Chile, and
Argentina—but there they included rural areas, such as the environs of the
city of Blumenau in Santa Catarina, Brazil, which became one of the largest
German enclaves in Latin America, complete with schools that educated
the young in German culture until President Getúlio Vargas enforced “Bra-
zilianization” in the World War II era.
The raw numbers of immigration were even more disappointing. While
direct foreign investment into Mexico grew by a factor of twenty between
1880 and 1910, the owners of much of the money remained in Europe and
the United States. According to the census records between 1895 (the first
official census) and 1910, the number of foreign-born immigrants doubled
during these fifteen years—a far cry from the exponential growth of for-
eign-born residents of Argentina, Canada, and the United States. Immi-
grants founded only thirty-seven rural colonies in the Díaz era, and most
of them failed due to lack of government support, indigenous resistance,
and results that did not satisfy the inhabitants.35 As we have seen, these dis-
appointing results in part corresponded to an ambivalent attitude toward
immigration.
Porfirian attitudes toward Chinese (and, to a lesser extent, Japanese)
immigration are a good case in point because these populations could
not “whiten” Mexico the way that Europeans could. Chinese immigrants
arrived in ever greater numbers after the Chinese Exclusion Act diverted
them south from the United States, their preferred destination. Between
1882 and 1910, an estimated sixty thousand Chinese immigrated, two-
thirds of whom continued on to the United States or returned to their
country of origin.36 Initially the Porfirians showed themselves favorably
disposed toward the Chinese, whom they considered hard-working, dis-
ciplined, and thrifty—all qualities they believed to be lacking among most
Mexicans. They also considered the Chinese particularly well suited for
Mexico’s climate. For example, Secretary of Fomento Matías Romero, who
owned several coffee fincas in Chiapas, believed that “the only colonists
who could . . . work on our coasts are Asians, coming from climates similar
to ours, primarily China. The great population of that vast empire, the fact
that many of them are agriculturalists, the relatively low wages they earn,
and the proximity of our coast to Asia mean that Chinese immigration
would be the easiest and most convenient.”37 Romero’s viewpoint corre-
sponded to a widely held belief among hacendados and industrialists that
Chinese immigrants were well suited as laborers. But Chinese immigrants
did not follow the script assigned to them, acquiring a predominant role
in the dry goods trade and lending in northwestern Mexico, particularly
in the state of Sonora. As a result, they provided stiff competition to the
middle classes, engendering hatred and xenophobia.
Following an outbreak of bubonic plague on the Pacific coast in 1903,
Díaz decided to reevaluate East Asian immigration. The year 1908 saw the
publication of the nation’s very first immigration law, which prohibited
the entry of Asians with communicable diseases. The Porfirians also com-
missioned a report on the socioeconomic impact of Chinese immigration.
Among the more pro-Chinese committee members, one wrote that “the
Chinese and the Westerner are fundamentally different” but that “we need
their cooperation as an indispensable condition for development.” Another
committee member, however, labeled the Chinese population “a noxious
element because of its low conditions and its repugnant customs.” The re-
port contrasted Chinese immigration with “desirable”—in other words,
European—immigration, which cultivated the frontiers of both North
America and South America.38
The xenophobic angst that accompanied Chinese immigration revealed
both racist attitudes and an awareness of the growing number of Chinese
vis-à-vis European immigrants. While the number of Europeans grew from
about 26,000 to 47,000 between the 1895 and 1910 censuses, the East Asian
population catapulted from 1,500 to 15,000. In Sonora alone, the Chinese
Table 2.2. Selected foreign nationals in the Mexican censuses, 1895–1970

(in thousands)
1895 1900 1910 1921 1930 1940 1950 1960 1970
British 3 3 5 4 5 4 2 2 1
Chinese 1 3 13 14 19 7 6 5 2
French 4 4 5 4 5 3 3 4 3
Germans 2 3 4 4 7 4 5 7 5
Guatemalans 14 5 22 14 17 8 8 9 7
Japanese — — 2 2 4 2 2 2 2
Syrio/Lebanese
— — — — 4 4 5 4 2
Spaniards 13 16 30 29 47 29 37 50 31
U.S. Citizens 12 15 21 11 12 19a 83b 98b 97b
Source: Mexican census records.
Notes: a. Misleading or missing census data.
b. The figures for U.S. citizens include resident retirees who responded to the census. This
population burgeoned after World War II.
community was estimated at 4,486 individuals in 1910—by far the largest

foreign colony in that state. The actual number may have been far higher
because many Chinese crossed the U.S.–Mexican border, back and forth.
With good reason, historian Grace Peña Delgado has analyzed the Chi-
nese Mexican community as a transnational one that straddled the border-
lands.39 The Japanese immigrants who settled in Mexico’s Pacific port cities
maintained similarly intimate ties with Japanese communities on the West
Coast of the United States (see table 2.2).
Although xenophilic in comparison, the Porfirians failed to attract sig-
nificant immigration for a variety of reasons. In the first place, they re-
mained ambivalent about its benefits. Second, Mexico remained a relatively
unattractive target for immigrants. As land and work remained abundant
in North America and the Southern Cone, newcomers continued to flock
to these traditional targets of immigration, beckoned by relatives and
friends who already lived in those areas. The disentailment of millions of
acres of Church and peasant land led not to the development of a rural
middle class that would have proved inviting to foreign immigrants but
to the enrichment of wealthy hacienda owners and the impoverishment
of the peasantry. In the view of one historian, Porfirian policies produced
a chasm between the “modern” city and the “traditional” countryside—an
area that remained neglected and undercapitalized and therefore a poor
choice for a prospective immigrant.40 Actively discouraged by European
governments as well as the press, the colonization schemes only attracted
small groups of colonists. Finally, the Díaz regime itself became leery of
foreign influence; in the last years before his fall, don Porfirio nationalized
the railroads, signed restrictive immigration legislation, and developed an
anti-imperialist foreign policy.41 In the end, the failure of the immigration
project highlighted the deficiencies of the Porfirian model—a model that
had vastly increased foreign influence without leading to more prosperity
for all.
Revolutionary Nationalism and the Closing of the “Cosmic Race”
The period since 1910 has witnessed the end of pro-immigration sentiment
in Mexico and the beginning of an era in which the government has fo-
cused on the natural growth of the population. The Mexican Revolution
(1910–20), the Great Depression, and the two world wars combined to
discredit the notion that European immigration could solve the country’s
woes. In addition, non-European immigrant communities—particularly
the Chinese—found themselves racialized and oppressed in an atmosphere
of open xenophobia.
Accompanied by calls for land reform and an end to foreign privileges,
the revolution reminded the foreigners of their status as outsiders. As such,
they became targets of a wide variety of social movements that agreed on
limiting foreign influence. In 1907 a serious economic crisis had highlighted
the privileged position of foreign workers and professionals. This recession
intensified two responses to the foreign presence that had long simmered
in the Porfiriato: elite economic nationalism and popular xenophobia.42
While John M. Hart’s claim that the revolution was a war of national lib-
eration against U.S. imperialism appears overstated, most foreigners feared
conditions resembling those of the xenophobic Boxer Rebellion in China.43
These fears proved exaggerated because most foreign communities suffered
limited casualties during the ten years of civil war compared to the native
population, with total deaths of foreigners estimated at 1,477.44 In other
words, it was safer to be a foreigner in the Mexican Revolution than to be a
Mexican.
However, there was one group that faced conditions resembling the
Boxer Rebellion: ironically, it was the Chinese immigrants. The Chinese in
Mexico found themselves subject to widespread lynching, robberies, and
even murder. On May 15, 1911, just weeks before the triumph of the revo-
lutionary coalition under the leadership of Francisco I. Madero, a mob of
four thousand revolutionaries committed the single worst act of violence
against an immigrant community in the Americas when they murdered

303 foreign residents, a majority of them Chinese, in the northern town
of Torreón, Coahuila. Over the next eight years, another 257 documented
murders occurred, although estimates of the total casualty rate for the 1910s
ascend to 814. When the violence subsided, Sonora again became the epi-
center of anti-Chinese activity. In February 1916 Sinophobes founded the
Junta Comercial y de Hombres de Negocios (Commercial Union and of
Businessmen) in the town of Magdalena, which marked the beginning of
a campaign that would culminate in the expulsion of the Chinese from
Sonora fifteen years later.45 Under the motto “por la patria y la raza” (for
the fatherland and [our] race), this campaign enjoyed broad middle-class
support, including the collaboration of people who would go on to play
important roles in the emergent postrevolutionary state. For example, the
bullfighter Luis L. León, who would go on to serve as one of the founders of
Mexico’s official revolutionary party in 1929, wrote that “a true nationalism,
aimed at destroying, not only the eminent Chinese monopoly, but also even
the monopoly over the fountains of wealth of the state of other foreigners,
such as the North American companies, will . . . give us strong sympathy
in all of the republic.”46 Fortunately for the Chinese, they initially received
some measure of protection from the state government, especially from
Gov. Plutarco Elías Calles and his associates. A revolutionary commander
who had made a name for himself in part by waging war on the Yaqui in-
digenous population, Calles—himself no friend of the Chinese—desired to
avoid a second ethnic-based war in Sonora and aimed to uphold law and
order. He therefore instructed the municipal president of Magdalena “to
give protection to those foreigners [or] you will suffer the consequences.”47
However, Calles also suppressed further immigration.48
While the extreme response to the Chinese served as the tip of the ice-
berg, all immigrants came to realize that the xenophilic rhetoric of the
Porfiriato was a thing of the past. In April 1914 the U.S. occupation of the
port of Veracruz produced shrill denunciations on the part of both the
incumbent dictator, Victoriano Huerta, and one of his main opponents,
Venustiano Carranza. More than two years later, when Carranza’s victori-
ous faction convened a constitutional convention after the defeat of both
Huerta and Pancho Villa, the convention met in the shadow of the Puni-
tive Expedition, U.S. president Woodrow Wilson’s feeble attempt to pun-
ish Villa for his attack on Columbus, New Mexico. Not surprisingly, the
assembled delegates pursued a nationalist agenda designed to end the easy
ride of foreign interests. This agenda led to the inclusion of three articles
that made Mexico the first nation with a constitution that strove to protect
its citizens from foreign exploitation. Article 27 of the 1917 Constitution de-
clared land and mineral resources the patrimony of the nation. The article
also required all foreign nationals to forsake the diplomatic protection of
their home governments in questions relating to the private ownership of
natural resources. In a reformulation of the 1857 Constitution, Article 33
threatened recalcitrant foreigners with expulsion: “The Federal Executive
shall have the exclusive power to compel any foreigner whose remaining it
may deem inexpedient to abandon the national territory immediately and
without the necessity of previous legal action.” Finally, Article 123 outlawed
the preferential treatment of foreign workers. Nonetheless, foreign eco-
nomic interests remained dominant, and U.S. direct investment doubled
between 1910 and 1920.49
Article 33 played a particularly important role in targeting Spaniards.
Although liberal modernization had greatly softened the Hispanophobia
of the early republic, the revolution once again brought such sentiments
to the fore. Between 30,000 and 50,000 strong, the Spanish community
was the largest foreign community, and many of its members held exalted
positions in economic and cultural life. Of the approximately 1,200 expul-
sion orders under Article 33, Spaniards accounted for the single greatest
number, or 32 percent of the total, compared to 19 percent for the Chinese
and 11 percent for U.S. citizens. Although these numbers were not large,
the fact that the federal government (not state or local authorities) decreed
expulsion under Article 33 illustrated that the government considered His-
panophobia politically expedient, reflecting tens of thousands of lesser af-
fronts to the Chinese perpetrated by lower-level authorities and at the grass
roots.50
After 1920 the reform agenda of the winners of the revolution posed new
challenges to foreign immigrants. Although Articles 27 and 123 of the Con-
stitution of 1917 still awaited full implementation, the governments of Al-
varo Obregón (1920–24) and Plutarco Elías Calles (1924–28) professed the
desire to implement some of the significant social and economic provisions
of these articles. In addition, foreign entrepreneurs feared the possibility
of outright expropriation and, secondarily, the prospect of debilitating
strikes, protracted labor disputes, high taxation, and stifling government
regulations. During Obregón’s tenure, foreign merchants began to found
chambers of commerce along national lines that (unlike individual en-
trepreneurs) could appeal for diplomatic protection. For his part, Calles
struck a formal alliance with a major labor organization, and his efforts
to regulate the foreign-owned oil industry provoked a grave crisis with

the United States. Even more importantly, as president and as jefe máximo
(1928–34), when he continued to influence national politics from behind
the scenes, Calles pursued a campaign to eliminate the influence of the
Catholic Church, citing the fact that foreigners (i.e., the Vatican) directed
that Church as one of its many vices. At its height, the Church–state con-
flict led to the expulsion or execution of foreign-born priests and the sus-
pension of all official religious services in Mexico. Finally, just as foreign-
ers believed that the worst lay behind them, along came President Lázaro
Cárdenas (1934–40). The Cardenistas built a populist state with the support
of workers’ and peasant organizations and embarked on a reform program
that ended with the expropriation of the oil industry and the distribution
of 49 million acres of former hacienda land to peasants. To be sure, all of
these governments retained a capitalist blueprint, and none of them ever
considered Soviet-style expropriations.51
The Obregón and Calles administrations also signaled the coming of
a new era by their promotion of a program of cultural and racial nation-
alism that could incorporate the indigenous population into the state. In
particular, the concept of indigenismo sought to redeem the heritage of the
indigenous population. In the words of Manuel Gamio, a prominent in-
digenista, the postrevolutionary regimes were “forging a fatherland.”52 As
Gamio wrote in 1948, “indigenous culture is the true base of nationality in
almost all Latin American countries.”53 Gamio’s remarks again illustrated
that the cultural elites conceived of their nation as the heir of the Aztecs
rather than a melting pot in which immigrants played a prominent role.
This rhetoric—like that of the Constitution—cloaked a different purpose,
in this case the incorporation of the “Indians” into society rather than the
restoration of their lands at the expense of hacendados and privileged for-
eigners.54 Put another way, indigenismo aimed “to short-circuit the racial
distinctions differentiating individual citizens and determining their place
in a divided and hierarchical space by promoting an overriding collective
mission embodied in the national mystique.”55
Regarding the immigrants, an even more important concept for the re-
positioning of national identity was that of the “cosmic race” propagated
by Obregón’s secretary of public education, José Vasconcelos. Vasconcelos
followed in Justo Sierra’s footsteps when he talked about a cosmic mestizo
race: a race superior to its indigenous, European, and African components.
He expressly included immigrants in his imagining of the nation when he
argued that “the advantage of our tradition is that it has greater facility of
sympathy toward strangers. . . . This implies that our civilization, with all of
its defects, may be the chosen one to assimilate and to transform mankind
into a new type; that within our civilization, the warp, the multiple and
rich plasma of future humanity is being prepared.”56 For both Vasconcelos
and the mass education program he oversaw, the mestizo stood at the core
of this cosmic race, and the issue of incorporating and Hispanicizing the
foreign immigrant formed symmetry with the incorporation and Hispani-
cization of the “indio.” Therefore, foreigners remained welcome as long as
they displayed a willingness to join the cosmic race and thus abandon their
own cultural heritage.
This rhetoric aside, foreign immigration continued to increase during
the 1920s. As ever more stringent immigration restrictions diverted mi-
grant flows away from the United States, Mexico became the new home
of tens of thousands of mostly lower-class immigrants. Many of the new
immigrants were Eastern Europeans, Jewish refugees, and Middle Eastern
immigrants. In addition, Obregón invited a group of German-speaking
Mennonites to settle in a remote area of Chihuahua, the home state of his
archenemy, Pancho Villa. By the late 1920s almost 10,000 Mennonites lived
in Chihuahua. All told, the 1930 census counted almost 160,000 foreigners,
up from barely above 100,000 nine years before. The 1920s were a historical
moment in which Mexico appeared to be a haven for immigrants during
an era in which U.S. immigration policy became much more restrictive.57
Middle Eastern immigrants experienced the greatest increase—almost
300 percent—during the 1920s. During the Porfirian era, the northern
border region and some of the major cities had witnessed the influx of
a few hundred merchants from the Ottoman Empire. Commonly called
turcos, or Turks, these immigrants were in fact a diverse lot, including
Druze Christians, Muslims, and Jews from a variety of geographical ori-
gins. Most of them were sojourners, or newcomers who returned to their
place of origin after establishing their commercial interests. Following the
dissolution of the Ottoman Empire after World War I, Middle Eastern im-
migrants permanently settled in Mexico, assuming important positions in
the same merchant and other middle-class professions that also sustained
the Chinese community. Like the Chinese, the Middle Easterners crossed
the U.S. border back and forth, maximizing their commercial opportu-
nities on both sides. Many Mexicans mistrusted the Middle Eastern im-
migrants, particularly the Jews and Muslims among them. Over time, the
term “turco” came to stand for someone difficult to trust or to figure out.
For example, President Calles, a stern man with a steely, austere gaze, had
long been known as “el turco.” Much historical scholarship has continued
to perpetuate the myth that he was indeed of Middle Eastern origin, claim-
ing that he was of Jewish or Muslim descent. To be sure, Calles’s paternal
family name was Elías; he was from Sonora; like the Middle Eastern mer-
chants, he had operated a succession of mercantile businesses along the
border; and he displayed a strong antipathy toward the Catholic Church.
Nonetheless, his paternal ancestry from a creole Sonoran family remains
beyond doubt.58
It was Calles who presided over the first significant attempt to limit im-
migration—an attempt directed particularly against poor immigrants. In
March 1926 the government approved the Ley de Migración, or Immigra-
tion Law. Based in part upon its 1908 predecessor, the law again cited pub-
lic health concerns as a reason to restrict immigration. Even more impor-
tantly, the new law authorized the government to restrict immigration in
times of high unemployment and required would-be immigrants to present
written offer of employments to obtain permanent residency permits. The
following year the government prohibited the immigration of persons of
Middle Eastern origin, excepting only immediate family members of those
already in Mexico.59
Beginning in 1929 the Great Depression induced the government to
adopt even more stringent restrictions. In this endeavor, the Chinese com-
munity fared worse than any other. In 1931 the Sonoran state government
expelled all Chinese. That same year a report by a government commission
labeled Chinese immigration “an invasion as in a conquered nation.” As
in the case of the 1911 massacre, the Chinese found themselves singled out
based not only on their commercial success but also on frank racism.60
In the waning years of jefe máximo Calles, the national government also
sought to keep out refugees fleeing the fascist and Nazi dictatorships in
Europe. In 1933 a directive of the Secretaría de Gobernación aimed to “at-
tack the problem created by Jewish immigration, which more than any
other, because of its psychological and moral characteristics, and because
of the type of activities to which it dedicates and the procedures it follows in
pressing business of commercial nature that is inevitably its choice comes
to be undesirable.”61
However, the administration of Lázaro Cárdenas proved more recep-
tive, and the specter of totalitarianism prompted an inclusion of humani-
tarian concerns in this policy of selective immigration. Between 1937 and
1948, more than eighteen thousand Spanish Republicans arrived, fleeing
the dictatorship of Francisco Franco. With these left-leaning Spaniards,
Mexico received a group of white and well-educated immigrants, many of

them scholars and artists. Although marginalized equally by the conserva-
tive Spanish colony and anti-gachupín Mexicans, this group achieved an
important position in society. Republican Spaniards founded what would
later be called the Colegio de México, the country’s finest academic institu-
tion devoted to research and teaching in history, literature, and the social
sciences. They also enriched the life of virtually every major university and
cultural institution. Less important in quantitative terms but equally active
in cultural life was a group of Jewish refugees who escaped the Holocaust.62
The Mexican government also made a half-hearted attempt to encourage
the assimilation of the foreign residents. In 1933 a law imposed jus soli on
the children of immigrants, and three years later Cárdenas signed a law that
promoted the miscegenation of the foreign communities by waiving immi-
gration restrictions for those who married women of “Mexican origin.”63
These efforts at assimilation, however, ultimately failed. Despite the talk of
a cosmic race, Mexico remained a land of unhyphenated identities. Both
the disadvantaged indigenous societies and the privileged foreign colonies
remained separate from Spanish-speaking Mexico, and in the absence of
a hyphen, the road to assimilation led only over the chasm defined by the
dichotomy of mexicano and extranjero. Indeed, the revolutionary rhetoric
widened this chasm, and immigrant communities—particularly the Ger-
man community, which fell under the sway of Nazi propaganda—rein-
forced the structures of self-segregation.64
Although the Mexican government could not assimilate the foreign
colonies, the internal cohesion of some of these colonies began to fray at
the edges. Already, the French colony had seen its glory days slip away
with the departure of the Francophile Porfirians, and the British colony had
likewise faded into the background. Beginning in the 1920s other colonies
confronted a different threat: the disunity brought about by social differ-
entiation and political conflict. The conservative and elitist German and
Spanish merchant families, most of whom lived in the glory of an imperial
past and backed the Franco and Hitler regimes, found themselves threat-
ened by the influx of antifascist refugees.65
World War II gave further impetus to the dissolution of the foreign
ethnic enclaves by leading to efforts to curtail the activities of the Ger-
man, Italian, and Japanese communities. Because of Mexico’s proximity
to the United States, the U.S. government did not tolerate what it labeled
“fifth column” activities. Even before Pearl Harbor, FBI agents were at work
against Axis infiltration, the U.S. government issued a blacklist of “enemy
nationals” in Latin America, and the administration of Franklin D. Roos-

evelt pressured President Manuel Ávila Camacho to join the Allied camp.
After the German sinking of two Mexican vessels resulted in Mexico’s dec-
laration of war on the Axis powers, the Mexican government seized all
companies belonging to ethnic Germans, Italians, and Japanese, and the
Ávila Camacho regime also jailed hundreds of Axis sailors and presumed
spies.66
In the wake of this process, the only foreign community that continued
to prosper was the so-called American colony. In a larger sense, the Ameri-
canization of Mexico proved that the revolution remained as receptive to
foreign influences as the Porfiriato had been. During the thirties, U.S. citi-
zens—already the largest group of foreign residents—replaced the Chinese
as the fastest-growing immigrant community. As part of this migration,
U.S. cultural pilgrims, fascinated by Mexico’s revolution and rich cultural
heritage, came to complement their country’s economic influence. Other
North American residents in Mexico included retirees, entrepreneurs,
and professionals. In the interwar years, what Helen Delpar has called the
“enormous vogue of things Mexican” stood juxtaposed with an equally
enormous vogue of things “American,” as returning workers, the radio, and
motion pictures brought U.S. culture closer to Mexico. According to one
estimate, the number of U.S. citizens in Mexico quadrupled to forty-eight
thousand during the 1930s, though this figure very likely includes numer-
ous U.S. citizens of Mexican descent, many of whom were forcibly “repatri-
ated” during the Great Depression regardless of their nationality.67
By the forties, the Mexicans had learned that their country—unlike the
vast neighbor to the north—was a net exporter rather than importer of
migrants. Under the bracero program, thousands of Mexicans packed up
and moved to the United States, where they joined a Mexican American
community that had already greatly increased in number due to the exodus
of Mexicans fleeing the revolution, notwithstanding the mass repatriation
of Mexicans and Mexican Americans during the Great Depression.68 Not
surprisingly, many Mexicans came to the conclusion that their government
needed to assist the native-born rather than the foreign-born population.
Such was the background of the 1947 Ley General de Población, which
formally ended the official pro-immigrant orientation commenced in the
Liberal Reforma of the 1850s. Emphasizing the natural growth of the Mexi-
can population, this law tore down the last vestiges of policies designed
to “whiten” the population. The law stipulated public health and literacy
programs designed to reduce the steep mortality rates of Mexican children,
and it made immigration a secondary priority. It also contained incentives

for Mexican workers in the United States—the so-called lost sons—to
return.
The law highlighted Mexico’s predicament as a newly industrializing so-
ciety. As elsewhere in Latin America, the scarcity of manufactured products
during World War II had jumpstarted a national import-substitution pro-
gram to offset the declining terms of trade for raw materials. But Mexico
remained a predominantly rural country, and the age of internal migration
to Mexico City and the provincial capitals was still in its beginnings. The
Ley General de Población implied that Mexico would find enough workers
through natural growth and not through immigration. By the late seven-
ties, only refugees from the South American and Central American mili-
tary dictatorships were granted immigrant visas on a regular basis.69
It was only in the forties that the process of assimilation picked up steam.
Particularly in the larger cities, where foreign colonies had lived a life of
self-segregation, the lines between the colonies and Mexican society at
large began to blur. To begin with, industrialization swelled the ranks of
the middle class, whose members no longer accepted the artificial barriers
the foreign enclaves had erected to keep Mexican culture out of their com-
munities. As more Mexican families began to enjoy a higher income, many
of them enrolled their children in the schools of the foreign colonies that
enjoyed an excellent reputation for their stringent curriculum and their
bilingual education—and as the percentage of Mexicans in these schools
increased, the use of Spanish in the schools increased as well. In addition,
the emergent mass culture—music and motion pictures, in particular—ap-
pealed to the children and grandchildren of foreign immigrants. When
young Mexicans used the new media to articulate their own version of the
wave of counterculture made in the United States, their peers from foreign
families discovered that it was “hip” to be Mexican.70
Theresa Velcamp’s “multicultural Mexico,” a nation in which immigrants
and their descendants are freely accepted and assimilated, is therefore of
very recent vintage.71 Throughout the period 1850–1950, the Mexican gov-
ernment displayed an ambivalent attitude toward the relatively few immi-
grants who arrived in the nation during that century. Whether the Porfirian
dictatorship, which was devoted to opening its borders to foreign invest-
ment, or the postrevolutionary administrations that struggled with the ef-
fects of natural population growth, popular xenophobia, and revolution-
ary nationalism, Mexicans and their government found themselves caught
between the enticing prospects of immigration for economic development
and demographic, cultural, and political realities that left little room for
such immigration.
Notes
1. On Slim, see Alfaro-Velcamp, So Far from Allah, 9. On Latin American countries
that have experienced mass immigration, see Baily, Immigrants in the Lands of Promise;
Baily and Míguez, Mass Migration to Modern Latin America; Lesser, Negotiating National
Identity; and Moya, Cousins and Strangers.
2. Secretaría de Gobernación, Quinto censo de población, vol. 1: Resumen General (Mex-
ico City: Dirección General de Estadística, 1934), 8.
3. Salazar Anaya, La población extranjera.
4. González Navarro, Los extranjeros en México, back cover and passim; see also Yan-
kelevich, “Mexico for the Mexicans.” The statistics on Mexican immigration to the United
States come from the Pew Research Center; see Dockterman, “Hispanics of Mexican
Origin.”
5. Significant portions of this chapter were previously published in Buchenau, “Small
Numbers, Great Impact,” 23–49. See also Buchenau, Tools of Progress.
6. For case studies, see Salazar, Xenofobia y xenofilia.
7. Míguez, “Introduction: Foreign Mass Migration,” xxii.
8. Quoted in Yankelevich, Deseables o inconvenientes, 14. All translations are my own
unless otherwise indicated.
9. Tarica, Inner Life of Mestizo Nationalism.
10. Vasconcelos, La raza cósmica.
11. Brading, Los orígenes del nacionalismo mexicano; and Lafaye, Quetzalcóatl and
Guadalupe.
12. Knight, “Racism, Revolution, and Indigenismo,” 72–73; Anderson, Imagined Com-
munities; and Burkholder, Spaniards in the Colonial Empire.
13. Originally published as Alexander von Humboldt, Essai politique sur le royaume de
la Nouvelle-Espagne, 5 vols. (Paris: Schoell, 1811).
14. Berninger, La inmigración en México; and Bernecker, Die Handelskonquistadoren,
564–67.
15. Sims, Expulsion of Mexico’s Spaniards; Flores Caballero, Counterrevolution, 14–40;
and Lida, “Los españoles en México,” 429.
16. Benson, “Territorial Integrity in Mexican Politics”; and Brack, Mexico Views Mani-
fest Destiny.
17. Benjamin, A Rich Land, A Poor People, 7–9; and Zorrilla, Relaciones de México,
148–67.
18. The term comes from the title of Bernecker, Die Handelskonquistadoren.
19. See also Von Mentz et al., Los pioneros del imperialismo alemán; and Meyer, “Les
français au Mexique,” 52–60.
20. Lida, “Los españoles en México,” 435–36; and Crosby, Ecological Imperialism.
21. Alfaro-Velcamp, So Far from Allah, 31.
22. Olliff, Reforma Mexico and the United States, 17–18; González Navarro, Los
extranjeros en México, 1:230–353; and Brading, “Creole Nationalism and Mexican Liberal-
ism,” 139–90.
23. Raat, El positivismo durante el porfiriato.
24. Cimet, Ashkenazi Jews in Mexico, 20.
25. Raat, “Ideas and Society in Don Porfirio’s Mexico,” 32–53.
26. Katz, “Liberal Republic and Porfiriato,” 57.
27. Foreign investors who lived outside Mexico were another matter, as the investments
of large corporations continued to increase throughout the twentieth century.
28. Meyer, “Les français au Mexique,” 62–64; and Herrero, “Algunas hipótesis de tra-
bajo sobre.”
29. González Navarro, Población y sociedad en México, 2:117.
30. Brown, “Foreign and Native-Born Workers,” 786–818. For the example of the oil
industry, see Brown, Oil and Revolution in Mexico, chap. 1.
31. González Navarro, Los extranjeros en México, 2:82–122.
32. Molina Enríquez, Los grandes problemas nacionales, 146.
33. Davis, “American Colony in Mexico City,” ii.
34. Quoted in Buchenau, Tools of Progress, 46.
35. Salazar Anaya, “Migration,” 883–84.
36. Romero, Chinese in Mexico, 1.
37. Quoted in ibid., 176.
38. Quoted in Yankelevich, Deseables o inconvenientes, 26; and Romero, Chinese in
Mexico, 180–81.
39. Delgado, Making the Chinese Mexican.
40. Guerra, Le Mexique, vol. 1. Guerra’s conceptualization cannot account for the
highly commercialized and profitable agribusiness estates in Mexico.
41. Buchenau, In the Shadow of the Giant, chaps. 3 and 4.
42. For this distinction between elite economic nationalism and popular xenophobia,
see Knight, U.S.–Mexican Relations, 55.
43. Hart, Revolutionary Mexico. For a critique of Hart’s views, see Knight, “United
States and the Mexican Peasantry.” For the reference to the Boxer Rebellion, see Katz,
Secret War in Mexico, 75.
44. González Navarro, Los extranjeros en México, 2:48–49.
45. Romero, Chinese in Mexico, 147–57.
46. Quoted in ibid., 157.
47. Fideicomiso Archivos Plutarco Elías Calles y Fernando Torreblanca, Mexico City
(FAPECFT), Archivo Plutarco Elías Calles, Fondo Plutarco Elías Calles, serie 0204, gav. 86,
exp. 56, inv. 1082, Calles to Nicolás Burgos, Hermosillo, January 2, 1918.
48. On Sinophobia in revolutionary Sonora, see also Réñique, “Race, Region, and
Nation.”
49. Niemeyer, Revolution at Querétaro; and Womack, “Mexican Economy,” 80–123.
50. Yankelevich, “Hispanofobia y revolución,” 31–33.
51. Collado Herrera, Empresarios y políticos, 18–26, 124–25. On Calles, see Buchenau,
Plutarco Elías Calles, chaps. 5 and 6; on Cárdenas, see Knight, “Cardenismo,” 73–107.
52. Gamio, Forjando Patria.
53. Gamio, Consideraciones sobre el problema indígena, 8.
54. Knight, “Racism, Revolution, and Indigenismo,” 71–113.

55. Tarica, Inner Life of Mestizo Nationalism, xxx.
56. Quoted in Alfaro-Velcamp, “Immigrant Positioning,” 65.
57. Departamento de la Estadística Nacional, Censo general de habitantes; Secretaría de
Gobernación, Quinto censo de población; and Oeste de Bopp, “Die Deutschen in Mexico,”
495–96.
58. Alfaro-Velcamp, So Far from Allah, 45–109. On the idea of Calles as a turco, see
Buchenau, Plutarco Elías Calles, 8–9.
59. “Ley de Migración de los Estados Unidos Mexicanos,” Diario Oficial de la Feder-
ación, March 13, 1926; and Alfaro-Velcamp, So Far From Allah, 102–3.
61. González Navarro, Población y sociedad en México, 2:34–56; and Cimet, Ashkenazi
Jews in Mexico, 13.
62. Lida, “Los españoles en México,” 434–44; and Von zur Mühlen, Fluchtziel
Lateinamerika.
63. González Navarro, Población y sociedad en México, 2:45–52.
64. See also Yankelevich, Deseables o inconvenientes, 31–32.
65. Proal and Charpenel, Los barcelonnettes en México, 71–75; Meyer, Su majestad bri-
tánica y la Revolución Mexicana; and Oeste de Bopp, “Die Deutschen in Mexico.”
66. Paz, Strategy, Security, and Spies. See also Niblo, War, Diplomacy, and Development,
3–62.
67. Delpar, Enormous Vogue of Things Mexican, 15–53; Schmidt, Roots of “Lo Mexicano,”
98; and Camposortega Cruz, “Análisis demográfico,” 37.
68. Guerin-González, “Repatriación de familias.”
69. Salazar Anaya, “Migration,” 885; and Palma Mora, “Inmigrantes extranjeros,”
83–132.
70. Scanlon, Un enclave cultural; Zolov, Refried Elvis; and Monsiváis, “Tantos millones
de hombres.”
71. Alfaro-Velcamp, “Immigrant Positioning,” 61–62.
3
Immigration, Identity, and Nationalism
in Argentina, 1850–1950
Jeane DeLaney
Argentina stands out as one of the Latin American nations most deeply
reshaped by postindependence immigration. Like their counterparts in
many other countries in the region, Argentina’s nineteenth-century liber-
als saw European immigrants as bearers of the values needed to construct a
modern, prosperous nation that would belong within the orbit of Western
civilization. Yet with the exception of neighboring Uruguay, only Argentina
realized the ambition to become a nation virtually remade by immigrants.
A vast, sparsely populated country occupying almost a third of the conti-
nent’s east coast, Argentina became the preferred destination for millions
of Europeans who crossed the Atlantic during the late nineteenth- and
early-twentieth centuries in search of opportunity. Attracted by a booming
economy based upon the export of grains, wool, and beef, over 4 million
immigrants permanently settled in Argentina between 1870 and 1930. This
massive influx was the driving force behind the country’s explosive growth
in population, which rose from 1,737,923 in 1869 to just under 6 million in
1947.1 Just as dramatic was the number of immigrants versus the number
of native-borne. By 1914 almost 30 percent of the Argentine population was
estimated to be foreign-born, with much higher rates in key cities such as
Buenos Aires and Rosario.2
The arrival of millions of newcomers during these decades caused
many to rethink the country’s long-standing open-door policy and to ask
whether the state should impose new restrictions on who could immigrate.
Indeed, much attention has been paid to the rise of anti-immigrant senti-
ment among the Argentine elite during the early twentieth century, and
certainly there is abundant evidence of such feelings.3 But what should be
92 · Jeane DeLaney
remembered is that even during the years of peak influx, the overwhelming
majority of the Argentine upper class remained convinced that theirs was
an underpopulated country whose future depended upon attracting immi-
grants. By necessity, then, Argentine nationalism often—although certainly
not always—took an inclusive form, one in which immigrants continued to
be welcomed and were expected to become part of the national community.
But just how this process of “Argentinization” was to occur was a judgment
that changed over time, as understandings of Argentineness evolved.
In what follows, I argue that the experience of mass immigration dur-
ing the period 1880–1930 helped precipitate a significant and long-lasting
shift in notions of Argentine identity. Although ideas about anything—let
alone about something as elusive as national identity—are never uniformly
shared, it is possible to chart a broad transformation in how the nation’s
leading intellectuals, opinion makers, and key political figures spoke and
wrote about the nature of Argentine nationality. During much of the nine-
teenth century, the country’s liberal elite defined Argentineness primarily
in political terms. In other words, they believed that the basis of Argentine
identity was, or should be, Argentines’ qualities as citizens: their love of
liberty, their basic sense of egalitarianism, and their loyalty to the Argen-
tine state.4 As the century progressed, cultural aspects of Argentine identity
came to be emphasized, but the equation of “citizenship” and “national-
ity” still held, and the terms continued to be used interchangeably.5 The
onslaught of massive immigration, however, prompted early-twentieth-
century intellectuals to discard these earlier, more politically based defi-
nitions of Argentine identity in favor of new essentialist understandings
of nationality. Inspired by Romantic nationalist currents from abroad and
grappling with the impact of mass immigration at home, these intellectu-
als stressed the supposedly inherent cultural and ethnic qualities of the
Argentine people and posited the existence of a distinctive, homogeneous
national character.
Yet as these ideas about a supposedly unitary national character gained
greater acceptance, a new series of debates erupted over the nature of this
putative character and the role the immigrants played in its shaping. Were
the millions of immigrants flooding onto Argentine shores a key ingredi-
ent of an emerging Argentine nationality, or were they contaminants? Just
as important for the immigrants themselves was the question of whether
becoming a true Argentine required the shedding of prior ethnic and reli-
gious identities. Could one be a Protestant or a Jew, or conserve one’s Ger-
man or Italian heritage, and still be a true Argentine?
Immigration, Identity, and Nationalism in Argentina, 1850–1950 · 93
Immigrants themselves were not passive observers of these debates. As

they struggled to establish homes, find jobs, and develop friendships, the
newcomers also wrestled with their own identities and their places in their
adopted society. Some embraced their new country wholeheartedly and
sought to shed all aspects of their prior lives; others saw themselves as birds
of passage who were in Argentina only long enough to return home with
money in their pockets. A large number, particularly the Spaniards and
Italians who formed the bulk of the immigratory stream, chose to live in
neighborhoods of newcomers with similar origins. Within these neighbor-
hoods, they formed their own banks, ran their own schools, and estab-
lished mutual aid societies. Individually and through these institutions,
they organized civic and cultural festivals, promoted their interests, pres-
sured politicians, and manifested their allegiance to their new homeland.
With the passage of time, some—or, more often, their children—also be-
came respected intellectuals who participated in the lively identity debates
of the day. Thus, through their actions and ideas, immigrants sought to
make their own contributions to the meaning of Argentineness, and in
some cases to fight for a more pluralistic definition of what it meant to be
Argentine.
The Nineteenth-Century Background
Throughout most of the nineteenth century Argentina’s liberal elite saw

European immigration as the solution to two perceived problems. The first
problem was that of peopling the country’s vast territory. Endowed with
the second-largest landmass of all the Latin American nations, Argentina
lacked the large indigenous population that provided the initial demo-
graphic base of such countries as Mexico, Peru, and Bolivia. Spanish settle-
ment during much of the colonial period was similarly sparse, and only in
the final decades of the eighteenth century did the area begin to experi-
ence substantial growth. Still, at the time of independence the territory that
would become Argentina had only an estimated 400,000 souls.6 The sec-
ond problem the liberal elite sought to solve with European immigration
was the supposedly inferior quality of the existing population or creoles.
Creoles, these modernizers believed, suffered under the double burden of
an obscurantist Spanish cultural legacy and the supposedly negative ef-
fects of racial mixture between Spaniards, Africans, and Indians. Accord-
ingly, they saw immigration from Protestant Europe as the surest means to
whiten the population and build a prosperous, democratic society.
94 · Jeane DeLaney
This pro-immigration stance, evident from the very beginnings of the

republic, became one of the central preoccupations of the liberal Genera-
tion of 1837. Including such individuals as Domingo F. Sarmiento, Juan
Bautista Alberdi, and Bartolomé Mitre, this group, along with political al-
lies, gained ascendency after the ouster of dictator Juan Manuel de Rosas
in 1852. It was Sarmiento, who served as Argentine president from 1868–72,
who produced the most famous expression of his generation’s faith in the
benefits of European immigration. Published in 1845, his Facundo: Civili-
zación y barbarie (Facundo: Civilization and Barbarism) directly linked the
vast emptiness of the Argentine pampas or plains to what he believed to
be the violent and primitive lives of the rural creoles. Sarmiento affirmed
that the right kind of immigrants would allow the country to overcome
the cultural and racial legacies of the colonial past and to create a new, au-
thentically Argentine culture.7 Alberdi echoed this view. Like Sarmiento, he
hoped the influx of Europeans would inject Argentina with a “new spirit”
and introduce new attitudes toward work and progress. In a famous tract
that would serve as the basis of Argentina’s 1853 Constitution, Alberdi ex-
pressed his conviction that Europeans’ “habits of order, of discipline and of
industry” would prove infectious.8 For Argentina’s mid-nineteenth-century
intellectual and political elite, then, immigration was understood to be the
key to building a new nation, one they hoped would be radically different
from that forged during the colonial period.9
The liberal faith in mass immigration as the most important engine of
Argentine progress raises the following questions: Just how did this nine-
teenth-century elite envision the process by which immigrants would be-
come Argentines? Were immigrants expected to shed their former cultural
identities and national allegiances in favor of a new homogeneous Argen-
tine identity, or would a certain degree of ethnic and religious pluralism be
tolerated? Clearly, nineteenth-century liberals neither expected nor wanted
these newcomers to assimilate culturally into domestic society. Rather, as
noted, they saw European immigrants as agents of change that would help
sweep away the Spanish colonial heritage and bring with them the values
necessary to create a new national culture. Yet just how uniform or all-
encompassing did liberals believe this new common culture should be?
And what of the legal status of the newcomers?
Mónica Quijada has stressed that Latin America’s nineteenth-century
liberals followed the model of the French Revolution in identifying the na-
tion with an equal and sovereign people. With such a vision of the nation,
she argues, came the drive to erase ethnic and racial differences and to
create a homogeneous people who would share a common culture. In the

Argentine case, this meant the creation of a racially white, Europeanized
population that effectively erased (either through extermination or biologi-
cal absorption) peoples of African and indigenous blood.10
Quijada is certainly correct in noting the homogenizing impulse behind
nineteenth-century Argentine liberalism, especially as it relates to racial
whitening. Yet in the case of European immigrants, the realities on the
ground meant that demanding complete cultural and ethnic uniformity
was impossible. Beggars, of course, cannot be choosers, and in seeking to
attract massive numbers of European immigrants, Argentine leaders were
forced to open the transatlantic door as widely as possible. Thus, in contrast
to the United States, throughout the period of mass immigration Argentina
never seriously entertained restricting immigration on the basis of ethnic-
ity.11 Moreover, the Argentine state offered newcomers a range of protec-
tions that would allow them to decide the degree to which they wished to
retain prior identities and loyalties.
Religious tolerance and educational freedom provide obvious exam-
ples. Although the 1853 Constitution declared that the Argentine state
“sustained” the Catholic religion, it also guaranteed freedom of worship.12
Protestants were of course welcome, but so were Jews, at least officially. In
1881, for example, the government sent a special envoy to Europe with the
aim of fomenting the immigration of Russian Jews fleeing persecution in
their homeland.13 Religious pluralism was further affirmed in 1884 with the
passage of Law 1420, which prohibited religious (i.e., Catholic) instruction
in the public schools during regular school hours. Meanwhile, immigrants
enjoyed the right to establish their own private schools where students
could receive both religious instruction and lessons in their parents’ native
tongue. Although criticism of these schools mounted toward the end of the
nineteenth century as their numbers increased, the national government
yielded to immigrant pressure and continued to permit them.14
Given this acceptance of religious and ethnic pluralism, albeit within the
racial parameters of “whiteness” (a category that proved elastic), and their
own tendency to associate nationality with citizenship, nineteenth-century
liberals not unexpectedly stressed the need for immigrants to integrate
politically into their adopted homeland by becoming naturalized citizens.
Argentina had a long history of offering an easy path to citizenship, and the
1853 Constitution continued that trend by requiring only a two-year period
of residency. In 1869 new rules allowed even this provision to be waived in
certain circumstances and, as a further enticement, exempted new citizens
96 · Jeane DeLaney
from military service for a ten-year period. Few were tempted, however,
and naturalization rates in Argentina remained extremely low, hovering
around 5 percent between 1850 and 1930.15
Immigrants at Last
Despite the pro-immigration schemes of Argentine liberals, few Europeans

made their way to the nation’s shores during first seven decades follow-
ing independence. All this would change by the nineteenth century’s end,
when in a matter of decades Europe’s surging demand for grains, beef, and
wool enabled Argentina to boast one of the world’s fastest-growing econo-
mies. Beginning around 1870, what had been a small trickle of immigrants
swelled first to a respectable stream and then to a veritable flood.
The impact of this human tidal wave on Argentina society, culture, and
identity is difficult to overstate. While few members of the native-born elite
questioned the need for cheap European labor, the massive influx of for-
eigners raised fears on a number of fronts. One source of concern was the
nature of the immigrants themselves. Whereas nineteenth-century leaders
such as Sarmiento and Alberdi had hoped to attract yeoman farmers from
Protestant Europe, the immigrants who began to arrive at the close of the
nineteenth century were of a different sort. Predominately from Italy and
Spain, these often uneducated newcomers formed the basis of the nascent
urban working class and often provoked more disdain than admiration
from native Argentines. Immigrant militancy was another worry. Many
immigrants brought with them socialist and anarchist ideas, and elites of-
ten blamed them for labor unrest. The massive influx also awakened racial
anxieties, which were often tied to concerns over the social question. Al-
though the vast majority of Argentina’s immigrants were from southern
Europe and therefore considered “white,” native elites worried that many
of the new arrivals represented the dregs of their societies. Accordingly,
they urged the state to prohibit the entry of such undesirables, whom they
blamed for the rising social unrest, crime, disease, and delinquency.16 Fi-
nally, immigrants came under fire for their supposed “materialism,” exces-
sive greed, and utilitarian approach to life. Such a mindset, critics main-
tained, threatened to undermine the traditional Argentine values of honor,
generosity, and simplicity by infecting the native population with these new
pernicious values.17
Taken together, these concerns about the negative impact of immigra-
tion represent a remarkable reversal both in attitudes toward the immigrant
and in perceptions of the nation’s identity. Whereas liberal leaders previ-

ously had seen European immigrants as bringing civilizing values to a
backward society, turn-of-the-century elites assessed the value of the new-
comers from a very different position. Buoyed by their country’s stunning
economic success and steeped in nostalgia for a rapidly disappearing past,
many native-born Argentines now viewed immigrants as a threat to a na-
tional culture worth defending rather than erasing. Yet despite these new
attitudes toward immigrants, there remained the conviction that Argentina
still needed Europeans to prosper. The problem now became how to incor-
porate millions of newcomers while preserving—or creating—a coherent
national identity. The solution was in no way straightforward and inevita-
bly hinged on shifting and often divergent understandings of what it meant
to be Argentine.
One response to the challenge of mass immigration harkened back to the
traditional liberal view that identified Argentineness with citizenship. As
the growing immigrant population failed to naturalize, traditional liberals
became increasingly concerned about the impact on the nation’s political
institutions. Renowned jurist Estanislao Zeballos, for example, complained
that unless the immigrant could be persuaded to naturalize, Argentina
would be bereft of the citizens necessary to “use, defend, and perfect” the
nation’s political institutions.18 In 1887 both he and Sarmiento joined other
prominent members of Argentine society to form the Comité Patriótico,
whose aim was to promote naturalization. Widely read newspapers such as
La Prensa supported these efforts, calling naturalization “a supreme neces-
sity of the nationality.”19 Various proposals were put forth to deal with the
problem, including automatically granting citizenship to all immigrants
who had resided in the country for seven consecutive years. This plan ran
aground in large part because of fears that such policies would actually
discourage potential immigrants.20
Official interest in promoting naturalization peaked in the early 1890s.
From that point on, only Argentina’s Socialist Party would actively push
the issue. Instead, the state pursued an energetic program of patriotic edu-
cation aimed at instilling immigrant schoolchildren with a love of the fa-
therland. Interest in using the public schools to create a sense of national
identity surfaced as early as the mid-1880s, when reformers mandated the
teaching of new courses on Argentine history and geography, imposed new
regulations requiring that schools display the national flag, and ordered
schools to officially observe Argentina’s two independence days.21 These
efforts continued well into the new century. Of particular importance was
98 · Jeane DeLaney
the leadership of José María Ramos Mejía, a prominent sociologist and

president of the National Council of Education (CNE). As head of the CNE
from 1908 to 1912, Ramos Mejía urged schools to adopt texts authored by
Argentines rather than foreigners, and encouraged administrators and
teachers to organize frequent patriotic festivals.22
How did the immigrant children themselves react to these obligatory
patriotic celebrations? Contemporary accounts suggest that they did so
with enthusiasm. Although certainly not an unbiased observer, Ramos
Mejia’s description of immigrant school children raptly listening to “the he-
roic episodes” of Argentine history and singing patriotic songs “with their
faces scrunched [in concentration]” does give the sense that these were
more than rote exercises. Indeed, so taken was Ramos Mejía by the im-
migrant children’s obvious enjoyment of civic festivals that he confidently
lauded them as “the Argentine[s] of the future” who would soon be the
“depositor[ies] of the future sentiment of the nationality.”23 Another ac-
count by Enrique Dickmann, a Russian-born Jew who became one of the
first members of the Socialist Party to be elected to Congress, is interesting
both because it suggests enthusiasm on the part of the students and because
of Dickmann’s own reaction. In a speech before Congress, Dickmann de-
scribed attending a school program where “children of all races . . . and all
nations” rose together to sing a rousing rendition of the national anthem.
Dickmann professed himself to be so deeply moved by the experience that
his “eyes filled with tears” at the sight of this new generation of Argentines,
whose very lives were evidence of the deepening of Argentine democracy.24
As Dickmann’s comments suggest, adult immigrants also exhibited en-
thusiasm for patriotic festivals and often actively sought ways to identify
with Argentina. Despite their reluctance to become naturalized citizens (a
step Dickmann himself took), immigrants did mobilize around issues that
mattered to them directly. Beginning in the latter half of the nineteenth
century, Buenos Aires witnessed frequent mass meetings and demonstra-
tions as people from a variety of social backgrounds and professions orga-
nized to protest an unpopular policy, express their support for a particular
cause, or seek solutions to common problems. As is evident from press
reports, immigrants—both as individuals and in organized groups—were
prominent participants in these events, and in doing so sought to exercise
their influence in, and become a part of, their adopted homeland.25
Immigrants also demonstrated their sense of belonging by participating
in patriotic festivals organized by both the state and private civic groups.
During the 1890s festivals celebrating important dates such as May 25 (the
anniversary of the 1810 May Revolution) and July 9 (Independence Day)

became an important part of civic life in Argentina. Immigrant organiza-
tions, including groups of Italians, Spaniards, French, Austria-Hungarians,
Portuguese, and Jews, would regularly participate, a fact commented on
with pride by the national press.26 Describing one such celebration, one
newspaper enthused that “when rendering tribute to the cult of their ad-
opted country, foreigners, like the sons of the country are all one, are all
Argentines.”27
Less formal cultural activities also provided ways in which the foreign-
born could identify with their adopted homeland. Among the most promi-
nent were the círculos criollos or “creole clubs” that sprang up in Buenos
Aires at the turn of the century.28 These clubs, formed mostly by immigrant
youths, were social organizations through which members gathered to rec-
reate a rural atmosphere and practice the musical arts, dress, and lifestyle
of the Argentine gaucho. The gaucho had been despised by nineteenth-
century liberals as the embodiment of native barbarism. But by the end of
the century, the herdsman enjoyed a reversal in image as intellectuals began
to tout this traditional figure as the symbol of Argentine nationality. Urban
immigrants also embraced the rural herdsman with gusto. The initial spark
for the gaucho’s sudden appeal among the urban popular classes was the
appearance, during the 1880s, of a new mass-produced literature called the
“gauchesque.” Cheaply printed and written in a feuilleton style, gauchesque
literature proved wildly popular among urban immigrants and was quickly
adapted to the stage for audiences who eagerly followed the exploits of such
characters as the gaucho hero Juan Moreira and the outlandish “Cocoliche,”
a maladroit Italian immigrant whose bumbling attempts to imitate gaucho
speech and clothing were played up for comedic effect. Besides their sheer
entertainment value, gauchesque literature and theater gave immigrants a
means to identify with their adopted homeland and provided, as Adolfo
Prieto has argued, “immediate and visible form of assimilation, a credential
of citizenship” with which immigrants could integrate themselves into the
broader society.29
This immigrant fascination with the gaucho was often scorned by elites,
some of whom decried the gauchesque genre as a vulgar parody of true
gaucho culture. Worse still, some believed the popular celebration of gau-
chos as outlaws led to delinquency among young immigrants.30 But other
elites held more positive views. Some, such as writers Manuel Gálvez and
Eduardo Schiaffino, praised the popular version of the gauchesque for its
human warmth and capacity to evoke national sentiments (in themselves,
100 · Jeane DeLaney
and presumably in immigrants).31 Elites also sometimes praised the immi-

grants themselves for their enthusiasm for what had now become a national
icon. One of the highlights of Buenos Aires’ yearly carnival was gaucho
performances by the creole clubs, which invariably won enthusiastic ap-
plause from observers and accolades in the national press. Reporting on the
1901 festival, for example, La Prensa lauded one group for the authenticity
of its performance, noting that it was carried out “with all the faithfulness
of someone who has really lived the life of the gaucho.” Members of an-
other group won well-deserved applause, the newspaper reported, for their
“genuine criollo” verses.32
Tango was another cultural form in which immigrants played a cen-
tral role. Both a style of dance and music, tango emerged during the final
decades of the nineteenth century from the slums and brothels of Buenos
Aires. Embraced by the immigrant and native poor alike, it grew out of the
same musical tradition as the late nineteenth-century gauchesque, as popu-
lar singer-songwriters of that genre began to incorporate urban themes and
explore the shady underside of the city.33 Given that many prominent tango
singers (including, of course, the legendary Carlos Gardel) were themselves
immigrants or first-generation Argentines, it is not surprising that lyrics of-
ten focused on the clash and fusion of cultures as the newcomers and their
Argentine-born children made their way in the city. Initially associated
with crime and prostitution, tango was at first shunned by the middle- and
upper-class natives. Although many elites remained hostile to tango, oth-
ers came to laud it as an authentically Argentine art form, and by the 1920s
it had gained widespread acceptance among Argentina’s middle class as a
symbol of national identity.34
Taken together, these diverse activities and utterances suggest an open,
inclusive vision of Argentine identity that was shared by immigrants and at
least some natives. Although many Argentines did indeed worry about the
Babel-like heterogeneity of their cities, when we consider the educational
program of the state, the myriad ways in which immigrants sought to iden-
tify with their adopted homeland, and the positive responses of mainstream
newspapers like La Prensa, it is clear that important sectors of Argentine
society believed that immigrants could be transformed into loyal Argen-
tines, and that these newcomers could strengthen rather than weaken the
nation’s identity. What comes through as well is a degree of tolerance for
pluralism and the idea that becoming an Argentine was first and foremost
a question of loyalty. Immigrants themselves undoubtedly helped promote
this view. As they confidently marched in civic parades or performed in
gaucho festivals as part of Italian, Spanish, French, or Jewish immigrant

associations, they physically exhibited their conviction that one could be
both a member of an ethnic community as well as a loyal Argentine.
Complicating—and ultimately competing with—this inclusive and at
least partially pluralistic vision of Argentineness was the emergence of a
new intellectual movement that posited a narrower, unitary, and essential-
ist notion of identity and nationality. As is well known, the opening years of
the twentieth century witnessed the emergence of Hispanism, a movement
defined by its sympathy toward Spain and the belief that Spain and its for-
mer colonies formed a single spiritual and ethnic community. Hispanism
flourished throughout Latin America, fueled in part by Spain’s swift defeat
by the United States in 1898. Although most Latin Americans sympathized
with the Cuban cause, the U.S. intervention sparked fears of further U.S. ag-
gression in the region and produced a new sympathy for Spain. The result
was what Mónica Quijada has called a “sharpening of Hispanic American
ethno-cultural consciousness” and a growing belief that Hispanics should
strive to preserve their unique way of being or cultural essence.35
Intellectual influences from Spain also played a role. The ideas of Spain’s
famed Generation of 1898, all energetic proponents of Hispanism, were
widely disseminated in Argentina and had a direct impact on a young
generation of intellectuals known today as the cultural nationalists. At the
core of this group were Ricardo Rojas and Manuel Gálvez, both of whom
explicitly acknowledged their debt to the Spaniards, especially to Miguel
de Unamuno and Ángel Ganivet. A devout Catholic, Gálvez visited Spain
twice as a young adult and would become became one of the most impor-
tant Hispanicists of his day. One of his earliest and most influential works
was his 1913 El solar de la raza (The Ancestral Home of the Race). In this
work Gálvez lauded Spaniards for their “mystical, Catholic” character and
proclaimed that Spain was the country that had best preserved the essence
of latinidad.36 El solar struck a resonant chord with the reading public and
quickly sold out its first edition of four thousand copies.37 In a similar vein,
fellow cultural nationalist Emilio Becher urged his countrymen to return
to their Spanish roots. Despite the massive influx of immigrants, Becher
affirmed that “our civilization has not changed at its core.” Still, he believed
it was necessary to “strengthen our society on the cement of solid tradi-
tion” and to embrace “the indestructible soul of [Argentines’] Hispanic
ancestry.”38
Spanish immigrants themselves helped promote Hispanism. Having
long encountered the generalized anti-Spanish attitudes of Argentine so-
ciety, the new insistence that Argentina should defend its Hispanic char-
acter provided Spanish immigrants with a new boost in their collective
self-esteem. During the 1910 centennial celebrations of Argentina’s first act
of independence, approximately 100,000 Spanish immigrants turned out
in full force to welcome the Infanta Isabela, exhibit their pride in their
roots, and display their loyalty to their adopted country. Leaders within
the Spanish immigrant community also worked to promote the notion of
Hispanism by sponsoring and funding the visits of prominent intellectuals
from the peninsula.39
In considering the overall importance of Hispanism and its impact on
attitudes toward immigration, however, it is important to note that this
identification of Argentineness with Spanish ancestry and culture was but
a single thread within the broader tendency of what might be called the
increasing “ethnicization” of Argentine identity. As the twentieth century
unfolded, we begin to see a more generalized influence of European eth-
nic nationalist currents on Argentine thought as an increasing number of
intellectuals began to posit the existence of a distinctive raza argentina, or
Argentine race. According to this essentialist vision of nationality, nations
were understood to be distinctive, internally homogenous ethnic com-
munities whose members share intrinsic mental and emotional traits and
whose culture is unitary and immutable. That these ideas gained traction
at this time is not surprising. Indeed, as Argentina faced the influx of new
peoples, rapid modernization, and the rise of new social classes, it was ex-
periencing many of the same phenomena that had fueled ethnic national-
ism in late-nineteenth-century Europe.40
Writing about these new conceptions of nationality, historian Lilia Ana
Bertoni has characterized the early twentieth century as a moment when
Argentina’s tradition of “inclusive patriotism,” which respected a degree
of internal religious and ethnic pluralism, gave way to a “defensive and
exclusivist” form of nationalism that demanded cultural “homogeneity,
purity and invariability.”41 If referring only to the phenomenon of Hispan-
ism, Bertoni’s verdict is certainly accurate. Undoubtedly, for Argentina’s
non-Spanish immigrants, the drive to define the nation as Hispanic and
Catholic certainly felt exclusive. Thus, it was no longer enough to march
in civic parades as part of a French mutual aid society or an association of
Italian sailors, nor would decking out in gaucho attire turn Jewish colonists
into Argentines. In other words, full-fledged membership in the national
community was a matter of ancestry rather than of mere feeling or con-
scious choice. But as noted, Hispanism was not the only variant of ethnic
nationalism to emerge during these years. Indeed, I argue that it remained

subordinate to a broader tendency to see the Argentine race as still evolv-
ing, and whose final form would incorporate all of the nationalities that
were pouring onto Argentine shores. Thus, Bertoni’s judgment should be
modified: while promoters of the idea of the Argentine people as a still
evolving race clearly envisioned a national identity founded upon a fixed,
unitary culture, the fact that the elite continued to believe that Argentina
still needed immigrants meant that most strains of the new nationalism
had an inclusive rather than exclusive thrust.
This inclusive notion of Argentine race-in-formation had several varia-
tions. Ricardo Rojas, for example, believed the new race had been largely
formed but was still in the process of absorbing the new waves of immi-
grants. One of the most important intellectuals of his generation, Rojas
argued that Argentina’s national race was the result of the centuries-long
contact between Europeans and conquered indigenous peoples. He main-
tained, however, that this process was much more than simply the bio-
logical mixing of invaders and natives. Deeply influenced by European Ro-
mantic nationalism, Rojas posited the existence of invisible telluric forces
emanating from the soil that over time transformed the disparate peoples
living within the Argentine territory into a “homogenous race, and thus a
nationality.”42 The most national or representative human product of this
mystical blending, he maintained, was the Argentine gaucho or cowboy,
whom he described as the archetype of the Argentine race.43 Most impor-
tantly for our purposes was Rojas’ insistence that Spain had contributed but
one element of the Argentine race, and his refusal to identify Argentineness
with Catholicism. Thus, in his view all European immigrants, regardless of
nationality or religion, could be easily incorporated into the putative na-
tional race. At the same time, however, Rojas made clear his belief that the
immigrants would be absorbed into a preexisting national mold and would
play no role in shaping the still evolving Argentine race.
Other participants in the identity debates of the period took the idea
of Argentina as a race-in-formation a step further, believing that this race
was still in its infancy. Embracing a kind of melting pot model, but one
infused with essentialist meanings, they downplayed or rejected the no-
tion of a preexisting ethnic core into which the current wave of immigrants
would be absorbed. Writing in 1915, for example, prominent anthropologist
Salvador Debenedetti insisted on this point by proclaiming that the “soul”
of this “future race” was currently “shaping itself [plasmándose] . . . under
the influence of the social medium and the environment.”44 The son of an
Italian immigrant of Jewish extraction, Debenedetti had good reason to

see this race as both still unformed and capacious enough to include indi-
viduals of disparate ethnicities. A similar impulse may have informed the
thinking of writer Juan Más y Pi. A Catalan who spent much of his adult
life in Argentina, Más y Pi’s origins may have made him especially sensi-
tive to the hegemonic pretensions inherent in Hispanism. In any event, he
seemed to exult in Argentina’s contemporary heterogeneity, describing the
country as one of “great ethnic confusion, [an] enormous conglomerate of
all the races and castes.” And it was from this “confused conglomeration,”
he optimistically affirmed, that “a great race . . . would inevitably emerge.”45
Clearly, then, the spread of the essentialist notion of la raza argentina
encompassed a variety of ways of imagining Argentine identity, includ-
ing ways that immigrants themselves (or their children) sometimes helped
shape. And while there were certainly exclusivist, narrow definitions of Ar-
gentineness, others, such as the one articulated by Debenedetti and Más y
Pi (and even, to lesser extent, by such intellectuals as Rojas), were much
more inclusive. Indeed, it is perhaps the very capaciousness of this con-
struct that was the source of its broad appeal, allowing it to gain accep-
tance among individuals who might otherwise have championed the more
traditional liberal vision of Argentine identity that emphasized common
political values and loyalties rather than an imagined uniformity of being.
Identity and Immigration in the Post-1930 Period
How would attitudes toward immigration change in the 1930s, and what
would be the longer-term legacies of the early twentieth-century shift to-
ward ethnic or racial understandings of national identity? In answering
this question, it is first important to note the precipitous drop in the influx
of Europeans into Argentina, first as a result of the worldwide economic
crisis and then due to the outbreak of war. In 1933, for example, Argentina
received only 24,345 European immigrants, a number representing just a
fraction of the previous decade’s peak year of 1923, when more than 195,063
arrived.46 Immigration rates would remain low until the second half of
the 1940s, when the end of the war and a new economic boom once again
made Argentina an important destination for European emigrants. This
prolonged slowdown almost certainly led to a blurring of internal ethnic
identities as the lack of a constant stream of new arrivals lessened immi-
grants’ ties to their native countries. Matthew Karush has also emphasized
how new forms of communication and entertainment, such as radio and
cinema, worked to create a more integrated society during the 1930s. Ac-
cording to Karush, mass entertainment helped all Argentines develop com-
mon cultural reference points while leading to increased class polarization
due to different tastes and consumption patterns.47 In any event, both of
these outcomes very likely worked to weaken immigrant identities by con-
solidating new ones. Finally, concerns over the corrosive impact of Euro-
pean immigration on Argentine identity were probably lessened by another
demographic trend that gained importance by the mid-1930s: the rapid
rise of rural to urban migration. During the second half of the decade, the
growth of light industry in the cities served as a magnet for rural people
seeking employment. By 1947 an estimated 37 percent of the population of
greater Buenos Aires had migrated from rural areas.48
The easing of the immigrant “problem,” however, did not mean a lessen-
ing of the tendency—by now widespread among educated Argentines—to
conceptualize the nation in essentialist, unitary terms. To be sure, during
the 1930s the term “Argentine race” began to fade from identity discourse.
While never disappearing entirely, it would become less common as na-
tive intellectuals became less obsessed with the problem of incorporating
massive numbers of foreigners into an imagined national ethnic group. But
despite the loss of the initial trigger that prompted Argentina’s early-twen-
tieth-century flirtation with ethnic nationalism, much of the conceptual
framework emerging from these decades proved enduring and continued
to shape how Argentines thought about their identity. Thus we see during
the 1930s increasing references to Argentina’s índole nacional (inherent na-
tional character) and ser nacional (national being or soul). Carrying many
of the same essentialist meanings as “Argentine race,” these terms referred
to the supposedly immutable core essence of the Argentine people that was
believed to form the basis of their unique identity. Even as early twentieth-
century Argentines had disagreed over the nature of the imagined Argen-
tine race, so too was the content of the equally imaginary ser nacional hotly
contested.
One vision of the Argentine ser that gained force during the 1930s, and
which persists to this day among certain nationalist sectors, was the iden-
tification of Argentineness with Catholicism and—in some versions—with
the nation’s Latin or Spanish heritage. In many ways a continuation of His-
panism, this understanding of the nation’s identity was, not surprisingly,
championed by the Argentine Catholic Church. Determined to strike back
at Argentina’s tradition of liberal secularism, the Church entered a new pe-
riod of activism during the early 1920s as it sought to convince Argentines
that Catholicism formed the essential bedrock of the nation’s identity or,
in the words of one prominent priest, the “diamond axis of our being.”49
Central to this effort was the establishment in 1922 of the Cursos de Cul-
tura Católica, a Catholic educational institute conceived as an alternative
to the liberal-dominated public universities. Under the leadership of such
key nationalist figures as Fathers Leonardo Castellani, Julio Meinvielle, and
Spanish cleric Zacarías de Vizcarra, the Cursos would become, in the words
of Loris Zanatta, “a study group for young nationalists” of the period.50
Indeed, several individuals with ties to the Cursos, including Ernesto Pa-
lacio and Julio Irazusta, would become close associates of Gen. José Félix
Uriburu, the nationalist leader of the 1930 military coup against demo-
cratically elected president Hipólito Yrigoyen. Deeply hostile toward any
threats to what they saw as Argentina’s inherently Catholic character, these
intellectuals proclaimed that all of Argentine society was “formed in ac-
cordance with the laws of Catholicism,” and that “a true Argentine is born,
lives and dies within the sacrament of the Church.”51 Some adherents of this
Catholic vision of Argentine identity, such as Palacio, stressed ethnicity as
well, proclaiming that Argentines’ Spanish heritage formed the “invariable
substance” of the nation’s identity.52
Although constitutional order was restored in 1932, right-wing national-
ist groups would proliferate during the 1930s and ’40s. The crisis caused by
the world depression injected a new element into nationalist rhetoric as key
intellectuals such as Julio and Rodolfo Irazusta began to tie the defense of
Argentina’s supposed Catholic ser nacional to the defense of the country’s
economic sovereignty. Liberalism—both political and economic—came
under attack as nationalists argued that Argentina’s model of capitalist de-
velopment had stymied the growth of domestic industry and left it depen-
dent upon external markets for primary goods. It was in this context that
we see the rise of anti-British sentiment, especially in the wake of the 1933
trade agreement with Great Britain known as the Roca-Runciman Agree-
ment. This pact, which guaranteed Argentina continued access to British
markets provided that that all proceeds from these sales be used to pur-
chase British manufactures, incensed nationalists who accused Argentine
liberals of colluding with Britain to exploit the country and erase its Catho-
lic character.53
Contributing to the increasing nationalist rejection of liberalism were
intellectual influences from Europe, especially the ideas of Charles Maur-
ras. Italian fascism also became an important inspiration. This was par-
ticularly true of a subset of the clergy who believed that Argentina should
develop its own variant of Catholic fascism. In their view, this form of fas-
cism would function as a tool to rid Argentina of antinational liberalism
in all its forms and return the nation to its true Catholic being.54 Naturally,
this brand of nationalism, and the vision of the Argentine ser nacional that
informed it, was deeply anti-Semitic and hostile to pluralism.
The 1930s, however, witnessed the emergence of a competing vision of
Argentine identity, that, while still positing the existence of a unitary na-
tional essence also insisted on a more inclusive approach that took into
account the hybrid nature of Argentine society. Like the earlier and most
inclusive versions of Argentina as a race-in-formation, this vision of the
ser nacional saw immigrants as an essential ingredient of a new nation, and
indeed went further by explicitly embracing the urban masses as the core of
the nation’s identity. The most influential formulation of this hybrid vision
of Argentine identity came from the pen of celebrated writer Raúl Scal-
abrini Ortiz. The son of an Argentine mother and an Italian-born father,
Scalabrini became a respected writer during the 1920s. In 1931 he published
what was to be his most famous work, a book-length meditation on Argen-
tine identity titled El hombre que está solo y espera (The Man Who Is Alone
and Waits). Wildly successful, El hombre went through four printings in the
first five months, winning Scalabrini instant and enduring fame.
Scalabrini, like elite writer Ricardo Rojas before him, believed in the
existence of a national archetype that had emerged from the union of lo-
cal and foreign elements. Yet for the younger thinker, this archetype had
been produced by the fusion of the native creoles and the recent waves of
immigrants that had swept onto Argentine shores. Employing the meta-
phor of the water droplet, he argued that the contemporary Argentine was
a “chemical combination of races” that, like the fusion of hydrogen and
oxygen in the chemist’s test tube, had come together to create a substance
completely different from its constituent parts.55 This “chemical combina-
tion of races,” Scalabrini believed, had created a new national archetype
that was uniquely Argentine and utterly different from other nationalities.
Just as important for our purposes was Scalabrini’s insistence that this new
archetype was the anonymous denizen of Buenos Aires, where this fusion
between creole and immigrant had supposedly taken place. Affirming his
appreciation for the new urban culture formed during the period of mass
immigration, Scalabrini believed that the truest expression of the authentic
Argentina could be found in tango lyrics and the “stuttered scenes of the
sainetes” (popular plays) so beloved by ordinary people.56
Given the enormous commercial success of El hombre, it is clear that
Scalabrini’s popular, inclusive (albeit unitary) vision of Argentine identity

struck a resonant chord with much of the reading public. It also was to
become more than a mere literary phenomenon. In the years following
El hombre’s publication, Scalabrini underwent a conversion of sorts and
joined the Irazusta brothers in becoming an outspoken critic of British
economic imperialism. Through his friendship with Arturo Jauretche, Sca-
labrini became intimately involved with the left-wing nationalist organiza-
tion La Fuerza de Orientación Radical de la Joven Argentina (FORJA) and
served as its key theorist. Formed by dissident members of the Radical
Party, FORJA championed a variant of nationalism that was populist, an-
tiliberal, and anti-imperialist. Like their right-wing counterparts, Forjistas
embraced the idea of a unitary national character or essence and frequently
referred to the ser nacional or Argentine “soul.”57 But, for these nationalists
as for Scalabrini, this putative national essence was unavoidably the prod-
uct of a mixture whose ingredients included the diverse peoples who had
come to Argentina during the period of mass immigration. Thus, according
to one FORJA manifesto, Argentina was a nation “rooted in and nourished
by all the pueblos of diverse ancestries [estirpes] that had contributed to
our development.”58 FORJA leader Jauretche concurred. While he at times
praised right-wing nationalists for contributing to the “revalorization of
the Hispanic American roots of Argentina,” it was clear that he viewed the
Spanish legacy as only one element of the nation’s identity.59 The real Ar-
gentina, he insisted, was the Argentina of the “multitudes,” one that was in
the process of creating, “according to the modalities of its realities,” some-
thing “authentic and original.”60
What of the traditional liberal vision of Argentine nationality that
stressed that the basis of the nation’s identity were political values and loy-
alties rather than a unitary collective essence? Argentine liberalism had
entered the 1930s in disarray. Although liberals had successfully forced the
return to constitutional rule in 1932, they were sharply divided between
a conservative faction that controlled the presidency through a coalition
known as the concordancia and their sometime allies, a more progressive
branch that included elements of Radicalism, the Socialists, and a new party
known as the Progressive Democrats.61 Although this latter group sought
to defend Argentina’s tradition of secularism, many of the conservative lib-
erals had strong ties with Catholic nationalists and shared the latter’s anti-
Semitism. In the cultural field, this period also witnessed the emergence of
publications such as the famous magazine Sur and groups such as the Cole-
gio Libre de Estudios Superiores that supported the cause of liberalism and
antifascism both in Argentina and abroad.62 But even here there were con-
tradictions. Many of these liberal intellectuals, especially those associated
with Sur, were deeply elitist and looked back with nostalgia at an allegedly
purer, more authentic, more Argentine past. According to this view, most
forcefully articulated by famed liberal writer Eduardo Mallea, who himself
exhibited essentialist tendencies, the great waves of immigrants had weak-
ened “our spiritual form, our inheritance [acervo] of soul and conscience.”63
For various reasons, then, 1930s liberals were unable or unwilling to revive
the early, more inclusive liberal vision that stressed shared political values
and loyalties as the basis of Argentine identity.
In any event, any attempts to do so would have been cut short by the 1943
military coup. Carried out by a nationalist faction within the military called
the Grupo de Oficiales Unidos (GOU), the coup brought to power a regime
that sought to impose from above its vision of Argentina as a Catholic His-
panic nation. Pledging to restore Argentina’s traditional values and to fight
the “sinister” groups and policies that had weakened the nation’s Catholic
identity, the regime rolled back the liberal educational reforms of 1884 and
made Catholic religious instruction in the public schools mandatory.64 This
policy was the brainchild of novelist Gustavo Martínez Zuviría, the newly
appointed minister of justice and education and a well-known anti-Semite.
The regime also sought to protect the Hispanic character of Argentine so-
ciety by prohibiting parents from giving their children non-Spanish first
names. In October 1943 it promulgated Decree 11.609, which required all
individuals born in Argentina to receive proper Spanish names, or names
that had been “Castellanized” by common usage.65
The regime’s obsession with defending its Hispano-Catholic version of
Argentine identity spilled over into immigration policy. In 1945 de facto
president Gen. Edelmiro Farrell appointed anthropologist and Nazi sym-
pathizer Santiago Peralta to head the General Direction of Migrations
(GDM). At his urging, Farrell authorized the creation of the Office of Eth-
nography (later the National Ethnic Institute), also headed by Peralta and
under the jurisdiction of the GDM. Such a move reflected Peralta’s intense
concern with promoting and defending Argentina’s ethnic and religious
unity. Looking at horror at Yugoslavia, which encompassed a veritable
“checkerboard” of peoples of different “nationalities, religions, races and
cultures,” he affirmed that it should be the function of the state to manage
immigration flows in order to “perpetuate the native pueblo, defending its
culture in all its aspects: language, art, science, ethical and religious moral-
ity, institutions, justice, history, traditions . . . [all of which] are a blood
inheritance, the pride of the nation.”66 Accordingly, Peralta sought to take

a systematic approach to regulating immigration that would favor white
immigrants, who he thought would help to further erase Argentina’s indig-
enous peoples and could be easily assimilated into the existing population.
This policy meant encouraging the better-quality immigrants from Medi-
terranean countries and prohibiting the influx of those who possessed “a
cultural heritage that could be transmitted [through the blood].”67 Jews, in
other words.
The military government came to an end in 1946 when popular protests
forced the regime to hold elections. Won by the charismatic Juan Perón,
the elections marked a turning point in the country’s history. Perón’s vi-
sion of Argentine identity was complex and sometimes contradictory. A
prominent figure in the regime that took power following the 1943 coup,
Perón had made his career in the Argentine military at the moment when
the Church’s influence within that institution had reached new heights. Not
surprisingly, he had internalized many elements of what Loris Zanatta has
called the “myth of the Catholic nation.” At the same time, however, Perón
very quickly expanded his vision of the Argentineness, and like FORJA,
which disbanded in 1945 in order to free its members to support the Per-
onist cause, he stressed its popular content. Having gained power through
the support of the urban working class, Perón celebrated the masses—
which included recent arrivals, their children, and the mixed-race migrants
from the interior—as the embodiment of the real or authentic Argentina.
In doing so, he sometimes adopted language that suggested an essential-
ized, static, and unitary notion of Argentine identity. In a 1946 message to
Congress, for example, Perón complained that the elite’s efforts to force the
people “to assimilate an alien culture” had damaged the “national soul,”
resulting in a lessening of Argentina’s “unique characteristics.” The masses,
however, had finally rebelled and thus begun to reclaim “the intimate being
of this soul of ours.”68
At other times, however, Perón embraced a notion of identity that placed
more emphasis on political loyalties rather than a unitary essence, thereby
accepting a degree of pluralism. As Mariano Ben Plotkin has argued, Perón
conceived his movement as an all-encompassing civic religion in which
to be a good Argentine was to be good Peronist, a status open to all re-
gardless of place of birth or ethnicity.69 Accordingly, Perón actively courted
Argentina’s Jewish leaders and, indeed, appointed several Jews to his ad-
ministration. Many of his public statements also reflected a more open,
pluralistic vision of Argentineness. In his 1948 speech at the headquarters
of the Asociación Israelita Argentina, for example, Perón insisted that anti-
Semitism and Argentineness were incompatible. “How can it be accepted,”
he asked rhetorically, “that there would be anti-Semitism in Argentina? In
Argentina there should be no more than a single class of men: men who
work for the national good, without distinctions. [Individuals] are good
Argentines, whatever their place of origin, race or religion, when they work
daily for the greatness of the nation.”70
Perón’s immigration policies provide yet another twist to what seemed
to have been his protean vision of Argentineness. During the postwar eco-
nomic boom, his government actively promoted immigration, and once
more Argentina became an important destination for emigrating Euro-
peans. Between 1946 and 1955 net European immigration to Argentina
reached approximately 806,000.71 But who were these immigrants? Despite
the crisis of European Jewry and the country’s expressed willingness to
work with resettlement agencies such as the International Refugee Orga-
nization (IRO), the vast majority of this new wave of immigrants came
from Spain and Italy.72 This was by design. Taking an active role in the
immigration process, the Peronist state signed special bilateral agreements
with Spain and Italy while at the same time imposing new restrictions on
the entry of refugees.73 By 1949 Argentina had accepted only 32,172 refugees
through the IRO. Of these, the overwhelming majority were Catholics from
Eastern Europe.74 The tensions in Perón’s attitudes toward immigration and
nationality are on full display in the text of his 1946 law regulating immi-
gration. According to this decree, “in no case will immigration be restricted
or prohibited on the basis of origin or credo of any kind.” However, the text
continued, “preference will be given to immigrants whose origin, habits,
customs and language will facilitate assimilation with the ethnic, cultural
and spiritual characteristics of Argentina.”75
The years following the war would be the last time Argentina would
be a favored destination for Europeans as the country’s economic prob-
lems and political instability led prospective immigrants to look elsewhere
for opportunity. Since 1950 the immigrants who have come of Argentina
have come—usually illegally—from neighboring, poorer nations such as
Paraguay and Bolivia. But the experience of mass European immigration
continues to echo in Argentina in a singular way. The arrival of millions of
immigrants into a country with a small population and whose identity was
still in flux created, in many ways, an entirely new society. And perhaps as
importantly, the native elite’s resistance to this fact reshaped the country’s
intellectual and even political history. The result was the emergence and
widespread acceptance of new conceptions of Argentineness that weak-

ened the country’s nineteenth-century liberal tradition and helped fuel
narrower, less tolerant interpretations of the nation’s identity.
Notes
1. These figures come from Solberg, “Mass Migrations in Argentina,” 148 and 15.
2. Ibid., 150.
3. A classic treatment in English is Solberg, Immigration and Nationalism.
4. Myers, “Language, History, and Politics,” 122.
5. On the growing importance of culture in defining Argentine identity, see Myers,
“Language, History, and Politics,” 122. On the continual identification of citizenship with
nationality, see Pacecca “El fantasma en la maquina,” 118.
7. Ibid., 126.
8. Alberdi, Bases, 74.
10. Quijada, “El paradigma de la homogeneidad.”
11. Devoto, “El revés de la trama,” 284.
12. The link between religious freedom and Argentina’s ability to attract suitable im-
migrants is expressly made by Alberdi. See Bases, 77.
13. Lvovich, “Argentina,” 27.
14. For the late nineteenth-century struggles over immigrant schools, see Bertoni, Pa-
triotas, 64–77.
15. Rock, Argentina, 143.
16. Zimmermann, “Racial Ideas,” 36.
17. DeLaney, “Making Sense of Modernity.”
18. Estanislao Zeballos, Diario de Sesiones, Cámara de Diputados, October 21, 1887.
Quoted in Bertoni, Patriotas, 124.
19. “Editorial,” La Prensa, October 25, 1887. Quoted in Bertoni, Patriotas, 126.
20. Gandolfo, “Inmigrantes y política en Argentina.”
21. Bertoni, Patriotas, 45.
22. Halperín Donghi, “¿Para qué la inmigración?,” 479.
23. Ramos Mejía, quoted in Prieto, El discurso criollista, 32–33.
24. Enrique Dickmann, quoted in Dickmann, Nacionalismo y socialismo, 50.
25. See Sábato, Many and the Few, esp. ch. 7.
26. Bertoni, Patriotas, 83–84. For accounts of the participation of Jewish immigrants
in these festivals, see Deutsch, Crossing Borders, ch. 1.
27. Quoted in Bertoni, Patriotas, 98.
28. Micol Seigel estimates that at the turn of the century, there were about fifty such
clubs that actively participated in the yearly carnival festivities in Buenos Aires. Seigel,
“Cocoliche’s Romp,” 59.
29. Prieto, El discurso, 18–19.
30. On fears of delinquency, see ibid., 147–48.
31. Ibid., 158–59.
32. La Prensa, February 18, 1901, 4–5. Quoted in Seigel, “Cocoliche’s Romp,” 60.
33. For an innovative analysis of this process, see Bockelman, “Between the Gaucho
and the Tango,” 591–99.
34. Vila, “Tango to Folk,” 107.
35. Quijada, “Latinos y Anglosajones,” 599, 603.
36. Gálvez, El solar de la raza, 27.
37. Gálvez, El mundo de los seres ficticios, 12.
38. Emilio Becher, in La Nación, June 20, 1906. Quoted in Rock, Authoritarian Argen-
tina, 351.
39. Moya, Cousins and Strangers, 352–53.
40. On the factors leading to the rise of ethnic nationalism in Europe, see Hobsbawm,
Nations and Nationalism, 109.
41. Bertoni, Patriotas, 316. The term “inclusive patriotism” comes from p. 13.
42. Rojas, Los gauchescos, 114.
43. For Rojas’ concept of “Eurindia,” see his Eurindia. For his ideas about the gaucho,
see Historia de la literatura argentina.
44. Debenedetti, “Sobre la formación,” 416–17.
45. Más y Pi, “El arte en la Argentina.”
46. This occurred in 1923. See Devoto, “El revés de la trama,” 287.
47. Karush, “Melodramatic Nation.”
48. Solberg, “Mass Migrations,” 153.
49. G. Riesco, “El eje diamantino de nuestro ser,” El Pueblo, October 12, 1941. Quoted
in Zanatta, Del estado liberal, 295.
50. Zanatta, Del estado liberal, 45.
51. Rodolfo Irazusta, “Las relaciones entre la iglesical y el estado,” La Nueva Republica,
May 5, 1928; reproduced in Irazusta, El pensamiento político nacionalista, 108.
52. Palacio, La historia falsificada, 63.
53. The Irazusta brothers’ 1934 work La Argentina y el imperialismo británico. Los esla-
bones de una cadena. 1806–1933 was instrumental in fanning hostility to the treaty and
toward Great Britain more generally. From that point on, the theme of British imperialism
was central to Argentine nationalist thought. Such anger, however, did not seem to trans-
late into hostility toward British immigrants, who—particularly after 1890—represented
only a small portion of the foreign-born. In 1895, immigrants from Great Britain (includ-
ing the Irish), comprised 2.2 percent of Argentina’s immigrant population. This percentage
dipped steadily throughout the twentieth century, reaching 0.5 percent in 1947. Bailey and
Seibert, “Inmigración y relaciones étnicas,” 543.
54. Finchelstein, Transatlantic Fascism, 136–37.
55. Scalabrini et al., El hombre que está solo y espera, 41.
56. Ibid., 87.
57. See, for example, Amable Gutiérrez Diez, “Repudiamos el Frente Popular,” FORJA,
num. 1 (September 14, 1936), quoted in Scenna, 206; Gabriel del Mazo, “Yrigoyen,” For-
jando, vol. 1, no. 2, August 27, 1940, 2; and Atilio García Mellid, “La abstención electoral y
el comicio de Buenos Aires, Forjando, vol. 2, no. 11, January 1942, 1.
58. “La falsa opción de los dos colonialismos,” Organización Universitaria de FORJA,
1943. Reprinted in Jauretche, FORJA y la década, 102–7. Quoted material from p. 103.
59. Jauretche, FORJA y la década, 15n2.

60. Ibid., 17.
61. Nállim, Transformations and Crisis, 64.
62. Ibid., 67–85.
63. Mallea, Historia de una pasión, 71. For a fuller discussion of Mallea’s vision, see
Senkman, “Nacionalismo e inmigración.”
64. Pedro Pablo Ramírez, “Carta del Excmo. Sr. Presidente de la Nación Pedro Pablo
Ramírez al director del Criterio, monseñor Gustavo J. Franceschi,” June 22, 1943, published
in Criterio, July 1, 1943. Reprinted in García and Rodríguez Molas, Textos y documentos,
225–26.
65. After coming to power, Perón upheld Decree 11.609 but would issue a new decree
exempting diplomats and functionaries from the restriction.
66. Santiago Peralta, Conceptos sobre la inmigración (instrucciones de difusión al per-
sonal), pamphlet (Buenos Aires: Dirección de Migraciones, 1946), 6, 8. Quoted in Senk-
man, “Etnicidad e inmigración.” Ellipses are Senkman’s.
67. Peralta, quoted in Senkman, “Etnicidad e inmigración.”
68. Perón, “Mensaje del Señor Presidente,” 40.
69. Plotkin, Mañana es San Perón.
70. Juan Perón, Speech of August 20, 1948. Quoted in Buchrucker, Nacionalismo y
peronismo, 355.
71. Solberg, “Mass Migrations in Argentina,” 155.
72. For the years 1946–55, Italians made up about 45 percent of total net European im-
migration, with Spaniards making up about 23 percent.
73. Senkman, “Etnicidad e inmigración,” 11–12.
74. Ibid., 15.
75. Quoted in Avni, Argentina and the Jews, 184.
4
Nation and Migration
German-Speaking and Japanese Immigrants in Brazil,
1850–1945
Frederik Schulze
In January and February 1940 Brazilian army officer major Aristoteles de

Lima Câmara and the sociologist Arthur Hehl Neiva visited several rural
settlements of Japanese, Polish, and German immigrants in the Brazilian
states of São Paulo, Paraná, and Santa Catarina on behalf of the Council
for Immigration and Colonization (Conselho de Imigração e Colonização,
CIC). The purpose of the trip was to evaluate the integration of the im-
migrants into Brazilian society. The CIC was part of the nationalistic im-
migration policy of the authoritarian government led by Getúlio Vargas,
which demanded the assimilation of immigrants into the nation. In 1941
Lima Câmara and Hehl Neiva published a report about their trip in the Re-
vista de Imigração e Colonização—the official organ of the CIC—and stated
the following about the Japanese and German immigrants: “In Brazil there
are various cores of high concentration of alien elements and ethnics differ-
ent from the Brazilian which, pure or mixed in the most varied proportions
with indigenous or Negro African elements, constitute the substratum of
nationality. These cores, true racial, psychological, linguistic, cultural and
social cysts, in the broadest sense of this last term, including therefore eco-
nomic, moral and even political peculiarities, are, more or less, resistant
against the assimilation to the national milieu.”1 The scientists described an
antagonism between certain groups of immigrants—most notably, Japa-
nese and Germans—and the Brazilian nation and considered the “assimila-
tion” of the immigrants advisable and necessary.
Although the immigrants were not sufficiently assimilated and adapted
to the Brazilian nation—at least in the eyes of Brazilian political leaders,
116 · Frederik Schulze
proponents of German cultural policy in Brazil in turn bemoaned that the

German immigrants were losing their so-called Deutschtum (“German-
ness”). One of these actors was Gottlieb Funcke, since 1929 the perma-
nent representative of the Federation of German Evangelical Churches
(Deutscher Evangelischer Kirchenbund) for Brazil in Porto Alegre, a fed-
eration to which the German-speaking protestant synods in Brazil were
affiliated. In a speech in 1932 Funcke stressed the necessity to preserve
Deutschtum but noted that the immigrants had little enthusiasm for their
German heritage and culture. The contact with Brazilian society led, in his
opinion, to the “Brazilianization” (Verbrasilianerung) of the “Germans”:
“Not only the intimate German mother tongue, but also the good German
tradition and the honest German conscience among us is undeniably and
widely threatened by disintegration.”2
These examples highlight the way that in Brazil different actors thought
about issues of immigration and nation as intimately and inextricably en-
twined. However, Brazilian and ethnic leaders used divergent concepts of
what the nation was, and they differed with respect to their political goals
and their evaluation of the situation of the settlers. The various notions of
the meaning of “nation” used in these debates constructed certain national
groups as “imagined communities” to which the immigrants should af-
filiate—either to the Brazilian nation, which was engaged in a process of
nation building promoted by Brazilian intellectuals since the independence
in 1822 and again after the proclamation of the Republic in 1889; or to the
German nation, which German nationalists and colonialists defined as a
global community of descent; or to the Japanese nation, which served as
an organizer of emigration as well as an ideational point of reference for
the immigrants.3 The immigrants themselves were co-opted by nationalist
actors but rarely got a chance to articulate their own opinion. It is vital,
therefore, not only to analyze the globally circulating nationalist discourses
that homogenized the immigrants as groups with a common national de-
scent but also to point to the regional, local, and social heterogeneity of the
immigrants.
This chapter will show how “nation” and “immigration” were discussed
in relation to one another in Brazil. Which actors debated the role of the im-
migrants for the nation? Which were the competing nationalist discourses
on immigration to Brazil? And in what relationship to these discourses
did the immigrants themselves stand? My main examples are German and
Japanese immigrants in Brazil who experienced most of the conflicts re-
lated to issues of nationality and nationalism. Although Portuguese, Italian,
German-Speaking and Japanese Immigrants in Brazil, 1850–1945 · 117
and Spanish immigration were much more important in terms of sheer

quantity, German and Japanese migrants provide a unique window into
the negotiation of nationality because their ethnic leaders emphasized a
“proper” national group identity while Brazilian politicians and intellec-
tuals perceived them as a direct threat to Brazilian nationality. Through
studying the example of the two groups, the conflictive relationship be-
tween “nation” and “immigration” can be shown particularly well.
This chapter begins with a short overview of immigration to Brazil be-
tween 1850 and 1945 in which the motivations of the Brazilian state to pro-
mote immigration are discussed. Subsequently, the chapter describes how
the two groups of immigrants—or, to be more precise, certain actors from
these groups—positioned themselves toward the Brazilian nation and their
nation of origin. Finally, it examines the role of immigration sociology and
immigration policy in Brazilian nation building after 1930.
Mass Immigration to Brazil, 1850–1945
It was not just in 1850 that Brazil became a country of immigration. Never-
theless, this year was a watershed for Brazilian demographic development
because the country finally abolished the slave trade. As early as 1822, when
Brazil achieved independence from Portugal, Great Britain had insisted
on the abolition of the slave trade. When normal diplomacy brought no
results—the Brazilian government refused a renewal of the unequal Por-
tuguese–British treaties and did not implement several agreements—the
British exercised gunboat diplomacy.4 But domestic economic and politi-
cal reasons, too, led to a rethinking of the elites in the Brazilian Empire on
this question. In particular, the coffee planters from São Paulo and Minas
Gerais began to realize that they had to change the labor system on the
plantations as slavery came to appear an anachronistic and outdated model.
This perception was boosted by global shifts away from chattel slavery and
developing discourses of progress and modernity as well as the resistance
of enslaved people themselves, who time and again escaped and organized
uprisings. After 1850 the forced immigration of African slaves was replaced
by—usually voluntary—European and, later, Asian immigration.
Until 1850 Brazil was, as compared to the United States, an insignificant
destination for the transatlantic emigration wave from Europe. The coun-
try had been open to immigrants since 1818, but until the end of the 1850s
only a little more than 135,000 people immigrated to Brazil, among them
barely 65,000 Portuguese and 23,000 German-speaking people.5 In the
1860s 110,000 immigrants entered Brazil; in the 1870s, 194,000; and in the
last decade of the empire, 444,000. This increase originated mainly from
Italian immigration. Apart from the Portuguese, Spanish immigrants also
began to arrive in larger numbers. German immigration reached a first
climax between 1880 and 1889 with almost 19,000 arrivals. Other major
groups were the British, the French, the Austrians, and the Swiss. During
the First Republic (1889–1930), Brazil continued to be a country of immi-
grants with nearly 4 million entries in this period. The peak of immigra-
tion to Brazil was reached in the 1890s with around 1.2 million arrivals,
including 690,000 Italians, 195,600 Portuguese and 113,000 Spaniards. The
migrant flow stopped during World War I, when transport routes were
interrupted. Between 1910 and 1929, the Portuguese again constituted the
largest group of immigrants with 620,000 persons, followed by Spaniards
and Italians. German immigration peaked at almost 76,000 migrants. In
1908 the Japanese influx started, numbering 180,000 migrants by 1941.6 In
addition, 80,000 Arabs, the so-called sírio-libaneses, entered the country
after 1900.
Just as the immigrants’ countries of origin differed, so too did their mo-
tivations to move as well as their social, economic, religious, and political
backgrounds. Most of the immigrants decided to migrate due to economic
reasons, trying to escape poverty, supply shortfalls, or overpopulation. Oth-
ers fled political or religious persecution. In Brazil, they took heterogeneous
life paths, depending on the kind of immigration and the target regions. An
important migrant group was the educated middle class of British, French,
German-speaking, and U.S. merchants who established themselves after
1818 in port cities such Rio de Janeiro, Salvador, Recife, Porto Alegre, and
Belém as well as the inland city of São Paulo. Merchants were joined by dip-
lomats, journalists, clergymen, and, later, industrialists. These expatriates
kept in touch with their countries of origin and founded clubs, societies,
church congregations, and newspapers. Among those whose migration was
not temporary, some engaged in local politics.
Urban immigration developed a high visibility but was secondary in
terms of quantity compared to rural immigration. The majority of the im-
migrants were poor and mostly illiterate peasants. Brazil pursued an active
colonization policy to promote rural immigration and to these ends em-
ployed immigration agents in Europe, published advertising, subsidized
the passage immigrants, and offered state-owned parcels of land to the so-
called colonists (colonos). Emperor Dom Pedro I initiated this policy to
colonize the three southernmost provinces of Brazil—Rio Grande do Sul,
Santa Catarina, and Paraná—which, as well as Espírito Santo in the south-

east, were only sparsely populated. The south was chosen due to the mild,
nontropical climate and in order to consolidate Brazilian claims in the re-
gion against Argentina. The settlers cleared the forest off their small parcels
in order to carry out subsistence agriculture. In the course of time, pro-
vincial governments took over the colonization activities, established state
colonies, and distributed land.7 In addition, private colonization societies
founded settlements such as Blumenau, established in Santa Catarina in
1850, which was meant to receive German-speaking colonists. This coloni-
zation policy could lead to problems. The government did not always keep
its promises to the immigrants, and non-Catholics were not equal before
the law during the Brazilian Empire. Other problems could occur on the
spot: some settlers had difficulties in adapting to the new environment or
to the new labor conditions. Lower-class immigrants, mainly artisans and
servants before the onset of industrialization, went instead to the cities.
A third form of immigration was established in order to cultivate the
coffee plantations in São Paulo. In 1846 coffee planter Nicolau Pereira de
Campos Vergueiro started the implementation of a special kind of leasing
system (parceria).8 German-speaking immigrants were recruited to work
on the coffee plantations. They were supposed to pay off their debts—in-
cluding the cost of their passages and the leasing price for the land—with
the coffee crops they produced over several years. In fact, however, the
system led to an exorbitant indebtedness of the tenants, and the living
conditions were precarious too. When the realities of the practice became
known in Prussia, the Prussian government prohibited in 1859 the active
recruitment of Prussian immigrants for Brazil. After that Prussian immi-
gration to Brazil could occur only on one’s own initiative. Not until 1895
was the ban lifted. Thus, during the First Republic it was primarily Italians,
Spaniards, Portuguese, and Japanese who worked in the coffee production
of São Paulo. They harvested coffee as tenants within an improved leasing
system (colonato) that enabled them to practice subsistence farming, or
the immigrants bought land and worked on their own coffee plantations.9
Other immigrants went to the cities as workers. Immigration caused social
changes in Brazilian society: the labor system on the plantations and in the
industrial sector underwent changes, urbanization began, and the immi-
grated workers stimulated the foundation of labor unions and other social
movements such as the women’s movement.
In 1937 Getúlio Vargas, who had been president since 1930, issued a new
constitution that proclaimed the authoritarian period of Estado Novo. This
regime regulated and restricted immigration by law. Still, some 333,000

people immigrated in the 1930s and around 114,000 in the 1940s, includ-
ing a few thousand refugees from Europe, among them many Jews.10 The
beginning of World War II eventually halted immigration; the era of large-
scale immigration had come to an end. The year 1945 marked not only the
end of the Estado Novo through a military coup but also a new perspective
on immigration among Brazilian intellectuals: sociologists such as Gilberto
Freyre, although still propagating a Portuguese-dominated culture, ac-
knowledged for the first time the value of minority cultures for the nation.
Whitening the Nation
Beginning in the early nineteenth century and increasingly during the reign
of Dom Pedro II (1840–89) Brazilian politicians and intellectuals discussed
what the Brazilian nation was meant to be.11 European, North American,
and Hispanic American national discourses were stimulating for these de-
bates, and so were the recently established sciences such as national histo-
riography, ethnography, or geography. In 1838 the Brazilian Historical and
Geographical Institute (Instituto Histórico e Geográfico Brasileiro, IHGB)
was founded in Rio de Janeiro as an intellectual space for the discussion
of national issues.12 In this context Brazilian national literature and, later
on, other art forms such as painting emerged. In literature, Indianism (in-
dianismo) became important. Its exponents, José de Alencar or Gonçalves
de Magalhães, created the noble savage as founding myth of the Brazilian
nation despite the marginalization of indigenous peoples from Brazilian
national realities in the nineteenth century.
The idea of the “nation” served to affirm national unity and to demar-
cate boundaries against the Latin American republics and the old colonial
power Portugal. Another European concept that gained in importance in
Brazil was “race.”13 Arthur de Gobineau, one of the most prominent propo-
nents of racial theory, went to Brazil as a French diplomatic representative
and befriended Dom Pedro II. European racial theories provoked discus-
sions among Brazilian intellectuals because the construction and rating of
different races seemed to directly concern everyday reality in Brazil. Not
only were the so-called Ethiopian race and American race described as
inferior to the so-called white race, but mixture between distinct races, too,
was rejected as the fountainhead of degeneration.14 “Civilization,” progress,
and technical development, as the imperialist sciences of the West tried to
persuade, were only possible for the “white race.” The Brazilian elites of
European descent were facing a dilemma: on the one hand, they yearned
for an advanced nation that should be as close as possible to European
“civilization.” On the other hand, they had to integrate the contradictory
everyday reality of Brazil into their national project. In the eyes of racial
theorists, the large share of Afro-Brazilians among the population, the con-
tinued presence of the indigenous population, and, most of all the high
percentage of the so-called racially mixed led them to the pessimistic con-
clusion that Brazil was incapable of achieving European “civilization.”
Brazilian intellectuals replied to this dilemma with two strategies: first,
they tried to interpret the “racial mixture” as a positive and unique char-
acteristic of the Brazilian nation. By doing that, they adopted European
racial theories but updated them with new content. Bavarian biologist Carl
Friedrich Philipp von Martius, who became acquainted with Brazil during
his extensive travels in the 1810s, formulated this idea for the first time in
his text “Remarks on the Writing of a History of Brazil” (Bemerkungen
über die Verfassung einer Geschichte Brasiliens), which he submitted as
his entry for an IHGB competition in 1843 about how to write Brazilian
national history.15 With this text he laid the base for the influential stud-
ies by Sérgio Buarque de Holanda and Gilberto Freyre, who described the
“racial mixture” as constituent for Brazil.16
Second, many intellectuals simply adopted wholesale the European ra-
cial theory. Following social evolutionary theory, they interpreted the Afro-
Brazilian population as an obstacle for Brazil’s development. These thinkers
for the most part uncritically linked “nation,” “race,” and “progress” with
the issue of immigration. Whereas the Brazilian state initially promoted
immigration in order to develop southern Brazil economically, to protect
its Southern territory against Argentina and Uruguay, and to replace slavery
by wage labor, some Brazilian intellectuals assigned European immigrants
an important role in the “civilizing” of the nation they envisaged. The im-
migrants should not only guarantee the technical and social progress of the
nation but also “whiten up” the population over time—that is, eliminate
and dissolve by “racial mixture” those segments of the population defined
as inferior, such as the slaves and their descendants.17 The “whitening ideol-
ogy” (branqueamento) tied in with Martius insofar as “racial mixture” was
reinterpreted as reasonable or even desirable—as long as Europeans were
the main factor in the mix.
In the high esteem with which they perceived European immigrants,
Brazilian thinkers were part of a global discourse that was circulating also
in the Latin American republics. As early as 1852 the Argentine writer Juan
Figure 4.1. Modesto Brocos, The Redemption of Ham (A redenção de cam), 1895. Image
available at Wikicommons.
Bautista Alberdi called for a strong European immigration in order to civi-

lize the Argentine nation.18 Fears of non-European migration can also be
seen in the Chinese Exclusion Act passed by the United States in 1882.
All these discourses classified not only Afro-Latin Americans but also
Chinese “coolies” as backward, racially inferior, and nationally inade-
quate.19 Although some intellectuals supported Chinese immigration, the
anti-Chinese discourse was predominant in Brazil, so the “coolies” did not
play a significant role in Brazil. Japanese immigration did not occur during
the nineteenth century and, therefore, was not yet discussed.
During the First Republic the concept of whitening continued to be prev-

alent.20 Important proponents were sociologist Francisco José de Oliveira
Vianna, philosopher and literary critic Sílvio Romero, and the director of
the National Museum in Rio de Janeiro, João Batista de Lacerda. The only
thing they could not agree upon was how long the process of whitening
would last. Painter Modesto Brocos put the ideology of whitening in a nut-
shell. His 1895 painting “The Redemption of Ham” (A redenção de Cam)
shows, beginning on the left, three generations of Afro-Brazilians who are
getting whiter and whiter by “racial mixture” (see figure 4.1). In the center
we see a couple of an already light-skinned Afro-Brazilian woman and a
European immigrant whose child is very light-skinned. The Afro-Brazilian
grandmother on the left side of the picture thanks God for the redemption
of the curse that Noah declared on his son Ham, and with which the dark
skin color of African people was explained since antiquity. Crucially, it was
European immigrants who were able to lift this curse.
“Germanness” in Brazil
According to the whitening ideology, German-speaking immigrants were

considered desirable additions to the Brazilian nation. Nevertheless, con-
flicts arose because German immigrant elites had their own nationalist
ideas and because the integration of the immigrated Germans into Brazil-
ian society followed multiple paths. During the Brazilian Empire, private
societies and church authorities from Germany were actively engaged in
policies to maintain Deutschtum abroad—that is, to preserve the German
language and culture of the emigrants (Deutschtumspolitik).21 The idea be-
hind this was to use emigrated Germans and the so-called Germans abroad
(Auslandsdeutsche) for the expansion of German economic interests and
informal empire. German economists and geographers supported this
idea before 1871, and after the foundation of the German Empire several
middle-class intellectuals and politicians demanded more engagement in
the colonial policy and discovered the “Germans abroad” as a surrogate
for German colonies. These publicists observed the British advance in co-
lonialism and developed two aspirations: on the one hand, they called for
the redirecting of the German-speaking emigration away from its principal
destination, the United States, toward southern Brazil. Travel reports from
the 1850s and 1860s suggested that Deutschtum could be preserved particu-
larly well in southern Brazil because the settlers had almost no contact with
Brazilian society so that a “New Germany” could emerge.22 Emigration to
the United States, by contrast, appeared less desirable to German national-

ists because they considered that the migrants’ Deutschtum was too quickly
diluted there because the Anglo-Saxon culture was seen as very dominant
and absorbent.
On the other hand, the German actors started to work actively in favor
of the preservation of the German language and culture in southern Brazil.
In 1864 Friedrich Fabri, the superintendent of the Rhenish Missionary So-
ciety, founded a committee that in 1881 changed its name to Evangelical So-
ciety for the Protestant Germans in America (Evangelische Gesellschaft für
die protestantischen Deutschen in Amerika). By 1911 this evangelical society
had sent 102 German priests to Brazil in order to ensure ecclesiastical and
educational support for the immigrated protestant Germans (almost half of
all emigrants).23 In the eyes of Fabri, the Evangelical Society contributed in
this way to German colonial policy. Like Fabri’s 1879 book, Bedarf Deutsch-
land der Colonien? (“Does Germany Need Colonies?”), many Protestant
texts from Brazil emphasized the colonial aspect of their authors’ ecclesias-
tical work. “It is in fact a quite patriotic enterprise when we try to preserve
a part of the emigrants . . . for our fatherland. How important it is to have a
German brother tribe across the Ocean which thinks and acts in a German
way, which is sympathetic to us in trade and politics and which defends
our interests in all cases, is recognized by experts by now.”24 Robert Jan-
nasch, an important German economist, fostered emigration propaganda
and the economic relations to southern Brazil with his “Central Society for
Trade Geography and the Promotion of German Interests Abroad” (Cen-
tralverein für Handelsgeographie und zur Förderung deutscher Interessen im
Ausland).25 These and other globally active propagandists and societies,
such as the Society for Germanness Abroad (Verein für das Deutschtum im
Ausland), were well interlinked and connected with the German-speaking
elite of southern Brazil. They initiated an extensive activity in support of
Deutschtum, which included the establishment of churches, schools, local
societies, and German-speaking newspapers. After the foundation of the
German Empire in 1871, government agencies also got involved in the pres-
ervation of German language and culture; among such agencies were the
Imperial School Fund (Reichsschulfond), the Evangelical Church of Prussia,
and German diplomatic missions in Brazil. After an interruption during
World War I, German initiatives to foster Deutschtum in Brazil continued
until 1937.
But what did these actors consider as German? What kind of connec-
tion did they envision between immigrants and the “German nation,” and
what role did the new host nation Brazil play in these thoughts? Wholly
in the spirit of German nationalism in the nineteenth century, which the
historiography has described, as ethnic nationalism based on the jus san-
guinis, Deutschtum was for a long time defined as an ethnic community
with common descent.26 It was constructed in a very affirmative, positive
manner by using certain characteristics such as industriousness, punctual-
ity, order, cleanliness, loyalty, and morality. To make this self-image plau-
sible, negative counterimages of the Brazilians were constructed. This led
to an image of a homogenous German group in Brazil, a group that was
depicted as superior compared to the inferior other, Brazil. Germans were
also envisioned as bearers of a cultural mission and civilizing task in Brazil.
The idea of a cultural mission was connected to the “cultural work” of the
German farmers in the Brazilian jungle and endorsed civilizing and whit-
ening discourses:
The South American man . . . becomes accessible to the influence of
the Germanic cultural sphere. Therefore, the overall objective of all
aspirations on the mission territory in South America must be that
the immigrated protestants are brought firmly together in Church
and school, . . . so that the declined South American nationality is
reinforced by the example of Germanic life and receives from its ex-
ample and teaching the revitalization and the fertilization which it
needs in its own judgment.27
From this perception of nationality, certain consequences arose for the
situation of the “Germans” in Brazil. Since the “Germans abroad” played a
crucial role in German colonial designs, German nationalists not only rec-
ommended the preservation of German language and culture but also re-
jected the assimilation of immigrants into Brazilian society. Acquiring the
Portuguese language, living in the Brazilian environment, marrying Bra-
zilians, losing German citizenship (which happened with all immigrants
due to the Brazilian naturalization program in 1889), and adapting Brazil-
ian everyday culture—many Germans involved in the Deutschtumspolitik
considered these processes a problem and called them “Brazilianization,”
or degeneration, or “de-Germanization.”28 According to these German
thinkers, the change or the blending of German nationality had to be pre-
vented at all costs. The notion that Germans in Brazil might end up serving
as a “national fertilizer” (Völkerdünger) for the host country—improving
Brazil without benefit to Germany—came under particular attack.29 Simi-
larly, German nationalists rejected the idea that they should help Brazil to
“whiten” its society, fearing that doing so would lead to their own “racial
degeneration”: “there are Brazilians who think that they can use the strong,
blond and non-degenerated German to regenerate the Brazilian blood. But
for such experiments only the last-ditch quality of German scum prosti-
tutes itself. . . . At least we have come this far that even the smallest colonist
knows which evils result from such a blending.”30
Hence, some members of the intellectual elite of German immigrants
strongly opposed acculturation in Brazil. But in Brazil the local everyday
reality of the German-speaking people hardly corresponded with the ho-
mogenizing discourses of Deutschtum. On the contrary, the immigrants
were settling into Brazilian society and were forging a new life far away
from Germany in various and individual ways. As Jeffrey Lesser has ar-
gued, immigrants of various national origins created their own spaces for
negotiating identities in Brazil, which differed from hegemonic identity
conceptions, whether those of Brazilian nationalists or of ethnic leaders
of the respective immigrant groups.31 The German settlers were also not
as isolated as the colonial discourses suggested—recent historiography
has disproved that myth and shown various forms of exchange processes
between the settlers and the Brazilian society.32 German immigrants, for
instance, adapted Brazilian cultural practices such as language, alimenta-
tion, agricultural techniques, and forms of religiosity, to name a few. Other
German-speaking immigrants married Brazilians or were engaged in Bra-
zilian politics.33 Reports written by German priests in Brazil criticized such
changes of culture and behavior. After their arrival in Brazil, they quickly
felt disappointed and frustrated about the behavior of German emigrants
and, thus, constructed them as missionaries to preserve a culture they saw
as all too easily lost without their activities. However, the immigrants had
organized themselves independently during the first years in Brazil, had
found parishes, and had elected their own pastors. When the German cler-
gymen came to Brazil, many settlers defended themselves against the eccle-
siastical attempt of social disciplining.34
The implementation of the Deutschtumspolitik was complicated by such
concrete conflicts and by the fact that many colonists were acculturating
themselves into the new society. It was also challenged by the heteroge-
neity of the immigrants.35 If one bears in mind the different regions of
origin of the migrants, who in many cases emigrated long before the Ger-
man Empire was founded and only spoke dialects, it becomes evident that
we should not talk about the “German” immigrants in Brazil as a singular
unit. Other differences existed in terms of religion, social status, regions of
settlement, the type and timing of immigration, and the diversity between
urban and rural immigration. Only with time did the Deutschtumspolitik
lead to a certain degree of homogenization of the immigrants.
Even urban German-speaking elites, large parts of which basically agreed
with German state policy, recognized their own acculturation and created
a new identity, calling themselves “Teuto-Brazilians” (teuto-brasileiros).36
They felt still part of the German nation but identified themselves also with
their new home society, Brazil. As Giralda Seyferth has suggested, by refer-
ence to Fredrik Barth’s concept of ethnicity from 1969, the Teuto-Brazilian
identity conjured up by intellectuals was a construction, but it also had
“real” aspects.37 As Seyferth has shown, ideas of Deutschtum and of Brazil-
ian citizenship were amalgamated.
Recent historiography has criticized this concept of ethnicity as too
static. The identity of immigrants should be understood not only as an
ethnic one but also as connected to other components such as social sta-
tus, religion, gender, and regional identification.38 As a matter of fact, this
objection confronts us with a dilemma. On the one hand, we encounter
certain concepts like “nation,” “ethnicity,” Deutschtum, or “diaspora” in the
source material.39 These terms are part of homogenizing discourses that
intend to structure and construct reality but that do not necessarily reflect
reality. On the other hand, historians need group definitions in order to be
able to talk about history.
Moreover, it is necessary to stress the fact that reality was always more
heterogeneous, complex, and conflictive than these discourses suggest and
suggested. Homogenizing concepts, therefore, should be used as historical
terms but not as scientific concepts. Otherwise we run the risk of repeating
problematic discourses of the past. It is indeed quite difficult to assume a
single Teuto-Brazilian ethnicity, as the discourses of Deutschtum suggested
over decades. Instead of repeating these homogenizing concepts developed
by German-speaking urban elites, we should emphasize the heterogeneity
of the immigrants and their experiences. A similarly problematic concept
is “diaspora,” which is equally homogenizing and was used for that purpose
by German clergymen.40
The Japanese in Brazil
Japanese immigration to Brazil occurred relatively late in comparison with

German immigration.41 It also differed regarding its organization. After
1908 Japanese migrants arrived mainly as coffee pickers; they therefore
developed a “sojourner mentality.”42 Although they did not plan to stay in

Brazil forever and did not naturalize as Brazilian citizens, many Japanese
purchased land. In the mid-1920s some changes occurred when the Japa-
nese state, in cooperation with Brazilian authorities, became to main or-
ganizer of Japanese migration to Brazil. The Japanese government tried to
protect its emigrants and established purely Japanese settlements in Brazil,
the so-called colonial cores (núcleos coloniais). Célia Sakurai has called this
“patronized immigration.”43 Japan wanted to not only relieve its population
pressure but also to create a new market for its products.44 At the same
time, the Japanese state intended to promote a positive and modern image
of Japan overseas with the help of its emigrants.45
In fact, Japan and Japanese culture often fared badly in Western impe-
rialist discourses, as can be seen from the catchword “yellow peril” or the
U.S. Immigration Act of 1924, which prohibited Japanese immigration. At
the same time, Japan developed since the Meiji-era (1868–1912) expansion-
ist and imperialist activities in Asia and opened itself to industrialization.
In addition, there was a racial nationalism—for example, directed against
China—that sought to draw on aspects of “Western modernity.” Japan’s em-
igration policy was part of that nationalism, which strived to overcome the
Western racism and negative stereotypes of Japan. The Japanese perception
of immigration as a nationalist tool seemed to fit well with the Brazilian
ideas of immigration as a means to economic and cultural advancement.
As was the case with the Germans, the Japanese came up with the idea of a
cultural mission that even ordinary immigrants accepted: “Our immigra-
tion will mean something only if our blood purifies the Brazilian impurity
with our superior tradition.”46
To avoid the scenario of the United States, with its hostility to Japanese
immigration, Japan decided to cooperate closely with the Brazilian govern-
ment. It promised Brazil industrious, adaptable, and docile settlers who
would be different, for example, from the “defiant” German immigrants
whose ethnic leaders refused the assimilation into Brazilian society.47 Fur-
thermore, the settlers were supposed to stay permanently in Brazil. Brazil
was interested in the new immigration and participated in its organization.
In the early years of the First Republic, Japanophile voices prevailed over
those that warned against Asians. The Republican government pushed for-
ward the rapprochement with Japan with the signing of a treaty of friend-
ship in 1895, and the positive image of the country gained in strength
through the Japanese victory in the Russo-Japanese War (1904–5).48 The
measures of the Italian government against emigration to Brazil led to a

decrease of the Italian influx and, therefore, to Brazil’s opening to Japanese
migrants.
In Japan, emigration offices were founded and placed under the au-
thority of the Federation of Immigration Cooperative Societies in 1927.
In Brazil, the colonization society Burajiru Takushoku Kumiai (BRATAC)
acquired land in the states of São Paulo and Paraná with government bonds
and private capital from Japan. Then BRATAC resold the land to immigrant
families and built the infrastructure of the settlements, including Japanese
schools. Japanese cultural societies, youth groups, and newspapers were
founded too.49 The colonization policy resulted in homogeneous Japanese
settlements such as Bastos in São Paulo. This and the growing Japanese
imperialism that accentuated Japanese nationalist pride as well as religious
adherences meant that immigrant elites still identified with the Japanese
nation and the emperor.50 Even so, the Japanese immigrants soon entered
an acculturation process. The naturalized Japanese immigrants called
themselves Nikkei. Hereafter, as had occurred with German-speaking im-
migrants, Japanese ethnic leaders created the idea of a mixed nationality. As
a representative of the Japanese Student League of São Paulo proclaimed,
“We are proud and happy of being born in Brazil. Even though the blood of
the Japanese nation runs in our veins, our heart throbs with patriotism for
Brazil.”51 In a similar way, the magazine Transição, founded in São Paulo in
1939 by Japanese immigrants, tried to strengthen the identification of the
immigrants with Brazil.52
While the Nikkei stressed their loyalty to the Brazilian state, nation-
alist groups supported the preservation of Japanese culture and language
and promoted the Japanese emperor and his policy in the Japanese-lan-
guage press in Brazil, primarily during World War II.53 Some radicals even
founded secret societies that outlived the war. In summer 1945 the group
Shindo Renmei appeared for the first time in public by denying the Japa-
nese defeat.54 The group subsequently published evidence for the Japanese
victory and committed several homicides. As a reaction of these actions,
riots against Japanese-looking persons occurred in summer 1947, and four
hundred supporters of Shindo Renmei were arrested. From the 1950s on,
this kind of nationalism lost significance, not least because of a new wave
of immigration from Okinawa.
Assimilation to the Brazilian Nation: Policies toward Immigrants,

1900–1945
Although many Brazilian politicians and intellectuals supported immigra-

tion in principle, they voiced reservations against certain groups of im-
migrants, among them Germans and Japanese. Criticism leveled against
German immigration stemmed from Brazilian perceptions of the Deutsch-
tumspolitik since the German voices that refused “integration” seemed to
jeopardize the idea of “civilizing” and “whitening” the nation. To this end,
it was vital that the colonists became Brazilians and established members
of the society. Consequently, already during the nineteenth century, Brazil-
ians demanded the assimilation of the German-speaking settlers.
Around 1900 such debates intensified under the impression of the in-
creasing Deutschtumspolitik, and the Brazilian press discussed at length
the so-called German peril (perigo alemão) based on perceptions of the
expansionist plans of the German Empire in southern Brazil as well as the
lack of integration of the immigrants.55 Journalists and intellectuals such
as Sílvio Romero, who actually favored the “whitening” of Brazil, were not
satisfied with the situation and, upon worriedly noticing German nation-
alist discourses, warned against the “German peril.”56 German-speaking
journalists in Brazil in turn accused the Brazilian journalists of being na-
tivist and xenophobe and named them “Pan-Brazilianists” who neglected
Brazil’s cultural diversity.57 When the German Empire torpedoed Brazilian
vessels during World War I, Brazil declared war on Germany, and violent
riots against German businesses occurred in southern Brazil. The use of the
German language in public and in the German press were forbidden. The
war thus served as a catalyst for a conflict between two nations in which
many immigrants were caught between the fronts.58
In the 1920s the Japanese, too, were perceived as a threat. While the
Japanophiles dominated the debate around 1900, the opponents of Asian
immigration gained in strength as Japanese immigration picked up. Bra-
zilian observers were worried because the foundation of purely Japanese
settlements with schools and societies, promoted by the Japanese state, re-
minded them of the behavior of the Germans. Similarly to the German
precedent, Brazilian concerns were reinforced by Japanese imperialist ac-
tivities in Asia. Another reason was that racialist discourses continued to
be influential. As in the United States, where an anti-Japanese immigration
policy was adopted, the catchword of the “yellow peril” became common-
place.59 Brazilian politicians criticized the lack of integration of Japanese
immigrants as well as Japanese attempts at political meddling in Brazilian

affairs.60 A heated debate ensued between journalists and politicians such
as Alexandre Konder and José de Oliveira Botelho, who defended Japanese
immigration, and Miguel Couto and Vivaldo Coaracy, who were support-
ers of the anti-Japanese discourse and warned against the “infiltration of
the yellows” creating a “racial problem” for the future.61
From the 1930s anti-immigrant prejudices were tied into a much broader
nationalist discourse and immigration policy when Getúlio Vargas suc-
cessfully seized power in a coup d’état and ushered in a new vision of the
Brazilian nation. The Vargas regime replaced the oligarchic First Republic
(1889–1930), which had granted a large degree of autonomy to the federal
states. The two strongest states, São Paulo and Minas Gerais, had pushed
through their own interests, based on the coffee sector, and formed the
so-called coffee with milk alliance (café com leite). Vargas, who came from
Rio Grande do Sul, tried to strengthen the national government. For this
purpose, he passed a new constitution in 1934, which was intended to for-
malize his authoritarian-style governance. In 1937 Vargas staged another
coup and proclaimed the authoritarian Estado Novo. All democratic insti-
tutions were abolished. After 1937 Vargas tried to unify and vitalize the “na-
tion.” To this end he stressed the importance of the sense of community, the
family, and brasilidade (“Brazilianness”). During the Estado Novo, Vargas
introduced a number of nationalist practices, including national holidays
(for instance, “Flag Day” [Dia da Bandeira] with parades in honor of the
Brazilian flag) and a language reform in order to demarcate boundaries
between Brazilian and Continental Portuguese. Likewise, Brazilian history
was instrumentalized for patriotic purposes—in 1937, for example, the Na-
tional Institute of Historic and Artistic Heritage was founded.
One piece of this nationalism was a new immigration policy.62 The
constitution of 1934 had already affirmed the necessity that immigrants
“assimilate,” and had decreed “necessary restrictions to ensure the ethnic
integration . . . of the immigrant.”63 In 1938 the CIC was founded to discuss
the immigration question, to draft new laws, and to press ahead with the as-
similation of the settlers. Employees of the CIC, such as Lima Câmara and
Hehl Neiva, closely followed the migration theories of the Chicago School,
considered modern at the time, and tried to apply them to Brazil. Robert
E. Park and Ernest Burgess had developed a theory of assimilation in the
1920s. They envisaged an ideal integration of immigrants in the host society
and assumed that total assimilation would be desirable.64 Such theories fit
into the CIC’s policy and its demands for assimilation of the immigrants to
Brazilian national culture. Problematic cases were, in the eyes of the CIC,
the “reluctant” German and Japanese migrants. To solve this “problem,”
Lima Câmara and Hehl Neiva recommended “priests, teachers, schools,
press, radio, cinema, societies, soaked by the spirit of brasilidade extensive
intermixture with genuinely Brazilian elements.”65 Following such recom-
mendations, Brazilian migration legislation set quotas against “undesir-
able” immigrants, specifically targeting the Japanese, and in favor of those
who could enrich the Brazilian nation. Even though the regulations were
not strictly implemented because Brazil did not want to compromise the
good trade relations with Japan, immigration from Japan clearly declined.66
In addition to the quotas, Brazil implemented the nationalization of cer-
tain immigrant groups.67 In 1938 and 1939 various laws came into effect at
federal and federal state levels, nationalizing the foreign-language immi-
grant schools. The teaching language had to be Portuguese and the content
of teaching was supposed to foster brasilidade. The foreign-language press
and the use of foreign languages in public were prohibited in 1939. Mixed
settlements should prevent so-called ethnic cysts for the future. All these
measures put an end to the preservation of the German and Japanese lan-
guages and cultures.
With the start of World War II and with the Brazilian entry into the
war in 1942, the immigration issue became a question of national secu-
rity. Now the German-speaking, Japanese-speaking, and Italian-speaking
immigrants were considered “internal enemies” and “fifth columns.” This
seemed plausible since the Foreign Organization of the German Nazi party
(NSDAP/AO) behaved aggressively in southern Brazil since the mid-1930s
and sought to manipulate also those German-speakers who did not have
German citizenship.68 In 1938 the organization was declared illegal, and
the Brazilian police authorities arrested its members, including German
priests, who were then detained in camps. Even if the NSDAP/AO was
unable to mobilize the broad masses of the German-speaking population,
spectacular newspaper articles and police reports on German espionage
and Nazi activities suggested the opposite.69 Such police actions also hit
the Japanese and Italian communities.70 The discourse of the “yellow peril”
or the “Japanese peril,” mixed with war rhetoric, alleged a conspiracy of
the Japanese immigrants.71 Some German and Japanese immigrants were
indeed sympathetic to Japan and Germany, but the generalized condem-
nation of the immigrants affected thousands of noninvolved Brazilian citi-
zens who lived in the country for generations, who were considered still
“Germans” in that situation, and who suffered from the nationalization
campaign. As examples from the Japanese community demonstrate, the

aggressive nationalization policy sometimes had effects that were opposite
to what was intended, leading in some cases to a reidentification of the
migrants with their nations of origin.72
There were also Brazilian intellectuals whose understanding of immigra-
tion and its relation to brasilidade differed from that proposed by the CIC
during the Estado Novo. Gilberto Freyre, for instance, who published his
best-known work “The Masters and the Slaves” (Casa-Grande e Senzala) in
1933, developed the ideas of the Brazilian “racial democracy” (democracia
racial) and the Lusotropicalism.73 According to Freyre, one of Brazil’s key
characteristics was that all its “races” lived together peacefully, which in his
view was due to the special ability of the Portuguese to create civilizations
in the tropics. These civilizations, Freyre held, were free of racism and pro-
vided equal rights for all population groups. In the eyes of Freyre, Brazilian
culture was a predominantly Portuguese one, which “ha[s] succeeded in as-
similating not only the Amerindians . . . , but also the African slaves . . . and,
more recently, Spanish, Italian, German, Polish, Syrian, Japanese and other
immigrants.”74 Like his colleagues from the CIC, Freyre pleaded for the as-
similation of immigrants.75 He underlined that “such attempts by German
or Japanese or Polish sub-groups to lead in Brazil a separate life as super-
groups—based on a mystique of being not only different, but also superior,
to the Luso-Brazilian community—have failed.”76 This was, he observed,
facilitated by the nationalization campaign by Vargas and led to the social
advancement of the immigrants in the new society. On the other hand,
Freyre admitted that the immigrant groups contributed with their culture
to Brazilian society and encouraged, later on, even the bilingualism of the
descendants of the German-speaking immigrants.77
Unlike Freyre, who read the Brazilian assimilation policy as a success
story of national unity, German sociologist Emilio Willems focused on the
problems of minority groups.78 Willems, who worked in Brazil and mi-
grated in 1949 to the United States, adapted the acculturation theory by the
American anthropologist Melville Herskovits, who took into account that
the host society is also subject to changes as result of the presence of im-
migrants. This understanding implied that not only the immigrants had to
assimilate.79 Willems devoted himself in particular to the study of hybrid
minority subcultures and analyzed processes of change. He showed how
immigrants used Brazilian cultural techniques and mixed them with their
original everyday culture—for example, in cuisine or language—and how
the Brazilian society adopted cultural practices by the immigrants.
Conclusion
Between 1850 and 1945 “immigration,” “nation,” and “race” were key issues
in Brazilian public debates. Since the nineteenth century Brazilian intellec-
tuals and politicians discussed the nature and destination of the Brazilian
nation and wished for a nation as European, “civilized,” and “progressive”
as possible. European immigration gained in importance for the desired
building of a Brazilian nation. While Brazilians welcomed immigration
in order to “better” and “whiten” their nation, opposite ideas circulated
in Germany and Japan. Most notably, German nationalists at home and
overseas intended to instrumentalize the emigrants for German imperialist
designs. This led to a so-called Deutschtumspolitik in Brazil that increas-
ingly contradicted, with its emphasis on the preservation of Deutschtum
and its warnings against “Brazilianization,” the goals of Brazilian political
and intellectual elites. Although the majority of immigrants followed indi-
vidual ways of acculturation and identified with Brazil, the Brazilian cri-
tique homogenized—similar to German policy—the heterogeneous group
of the settlers by calling them “Germans.” Even if a policy equal to the
Deutschtumspolitik was missing in the Japanese case, the Japanese govern-
ment’s commitment to the immigrants’ cultural preservation, by founding
schools, societies, and nationalistic groups in Brazil, strengthened the close
ties and the identification of the immigrated people with Japan. Notwith-
standing the fact that many Japanese were acculturating themselves in Bra-
zil, Brazilian criticism emerged against the Japanese immigrants as well,
lamenting their poor assimilation. In the Vargas years, Brazil implemented
a decidedly nationalistic immigration policy, which adopted measures
against both immigrant groups.
Nationalist discourses used “nation” as an exclusive concept. As the na-
tionalist intellectuals perceived it, the immigrants should preserve the na-
tion or assimilate to it. Therefore, immigrants in Brazil got caught between
two distinct national concepts, which developed homogenous group cat-
egories and tried to classify the immigrants as “Japanese” or “German.” The
majority of the colonists, however, often could not express their opinions in
the issue. Some immigrants followed the ethnic leaders and became more
“German” or “Japanese,” others actively tried to acculturate in Brazil, oth-
ers—such as the “Teuto-Brazilians”—constructed their own hybrid spaces
of identity, and others simply chose individual courses of life. Immigration
was a practice that both affirmed and challenged the idea of the nation.
Various conflicts resulted from this ambivalence because many nationalists
had difficulties in accepting forms of difference, dissolution, and blending

of fixed categories.
Migration played a crucial role in Brazilian nation building. While the
perception of migration during the nineteenth century was dominated by
European concepts such as “race” and “civilization,” Brazil developed in
the first half of the twentieth century its own scientific and politic forms
of dealing with the topic, often in a nationalistic way. By doing so, Brazil
strengthened its national identity and was able to face Western hegemonic
behavior such as the German Deutschtumspolitik. Brazil, far from being a
country on the periphery, established its own powerful loci of enunciation
in a globalizing world.
Notes
1. Lima Câmara and Hehl Neiva, “Colonizações nipônica e germânica,” 96.
2. Funcke to the Deutscher Evangelischer Kirchenausschuss, Porto Alegre, May 13,
1932. Enclosure: Kirche und Volkstum, Vortrag, gehalten auf der Synodaltagung der
Deutschen Ev. Kirche von Rio Grande do Sul, 16, in Evangelisches Zentralarchiv Berlin
5–2243: Kirchenbundesamt. Akten betreffend: die Riograndenser Synode, 1931–1933.
3. “Nation” as a constructed category was theorized by Anderson, Imagined Communi-
ties; and Hobsbawm and Ranger, Invention of Tradition.
4. Bethell, Abolition of the Brazilian Slave Trade.
5. These and the following figures only consider arrivals and are approximate only.
Due to incomplete source material and a considerable remigration, there are no absolute
immigration figures for Brazil. The figures are taken from Asdrúbal Silva, Inmigración y
estadísticas, 149–57. An introduction to Brazilian immigration history can be found in
Fausto, Fazer a América. Immigration history enjoys great popularity among Brazilian
scholars. Hundreds of books, articles, and theses on immigration history have been pub-
lished in the last twenty years.
6. Masterson and Funada-Classen, Japanese in Latin America, 74.
7. Brazilian immigration policy is analyzed in Browne, “Government Immigration
Policy”; Seyferth, “Colonização e política imigratória”; and González Martínez, La inmi-
gración esperada.
8. Wagner, Deutsche als Ersatz.
9. Immigration into the coffee regions and the resulting social and economic trans-
formations are described by Holloway, Immigrants on the Land; and Font, Coffee and
Transformation.
10. Numbers are from Merrick and Graham, Population and Economic Development, 91.
11. Good overviews on Brazilian nationalism and nation-concepts are Moreira Leite, O
caráter nacional; and Burns, Nationalism in Brazil.
12. See Salgado Guimarães, “Nação e civilização.”
13. On the perception of racial theories in Brazil, see Skidmore, Black into White; and
Schwarcz, Spectacle of the Races.
14. The terms “Ethiopian race,” “American race,” and “Caucasian race” were used by
European racial theorists like Blumenbach. See Blumenbach, Über die natürlichen Ver-
schiedenheiten, 204.
15. Von Martius, “Bemerkungen.”
16. See Freyre, Masters and the Slaves; and Buarque de Holanda, Raizes do Brasil.
17. On guaranteeing the technical and social progress of the nation, see Browne, “Gov-
ernment Immigration Policy.”
18. Alberdi, Bases.
19. Dezem, Matizes do “amarelo,” 45–108; and Lesser, Negotiating National Identity,
13–39. Notably, the anti-indigenous sentiment that was so preponderant in other parts of
Latin America at this time was not a significant factor in Brazilian racial ideology. Instead
the romantic ideology of Indianism predominated.
20. Skidmore, Black into White, 53–69.
21. The German activities in Brazil are portrayed by Brunn, Deutschland und Brasilien;
Dreher, Kirche und Deutschtum; Kloosterhuis, “Friedliche Imperialisten”; and Rinke, “Der
letzte freie Kontinent.” See also Conrad, Globalisierung und Nation.
22. Two influential travel accounts were Avé-Lallemant, Reise durch Süd-Brasilien; and
Epp, Rio Grande do Sul.
23. Wachholz, “Atravessem e ajudem-nos.”
24. Die Arbeit, 45.
25. Kloosterhuis, “Friedliche Imperialisten,” 361–65.
26. Jus sanguinis (right of blood) determines nationality by descent, while jus soli
(right of the soil) means that everyone born inside a national territory is considered a
national. Rogers Brubaker recently questioned the distinction between ethnic and civic
nationalism based on these different judicial regimes: Brubaker, “Manichean Myth.” See
also Berger, “Germany.”
27. “Umfassende Missionsprojekte der Nordamerikaner in Südamerika,” Der deutsche
Ansiedler 28, no. 12 (1890), 91.
28. See Spliesgart, “Verbrasilianerung.”
29. “Der gegenwärtige Stand der Einwanderungsfrage in Brasilien,” Export 9, no. 17
(1887), 263.
30. Kunert, “Aus der deutschen Kolonie,” 13.
31. This complex of themes is discussed by Lesser, Negotiating National Identity.
32. Tramontini, A organização social; and Witt, Em busca.
33. Acculturation is described in Spliesgart, “Verbrasilianerung.”
34. See Schulze, “O discurso protestante,” 21–28.
35. René Gertz repeatedly called attention to this; see Gertz, O fascismo.
36. On the creation of Teuto-Brazilian identity, see Seyferth, Nacionalismo e identidade
étnica; and Gans, Presença teuta, 111–210.
37. Barth, Ethnic Groups and Boundaries, 9–38; Seyferth, Nacionalismo e identidade
étnica; Seyferth, “A colonização alemã no Brasil”; Seyferth, “German Immigration and
Brazil’s Colonization Policy”; and Seyferth, “Imigração e (re)construção de identidades
étnicas.”
38. Kleber da Silva and Arendt, Representações. Lesser uses the term “ethnicity” to em-
phasize the fluidity of migration identities and the agency of immigrants which challenges
national and racial concepts. See Lesser, Negotiating National Identity. The concept of mul-
tiple ethnic identities is strengthened also in the recent publications by Seyferth, e.g., her
“Imigração e (re)construção.”
39. “Diaspora” was used already by German clergymen to homogenize the “German”
protestant experience abroad. Borchard, Die deutsche evangelische Diaspora.
40. Ibid.
41. For the following see Sakurai, “Imigração japonesa para o Brasil”; Lone, Japanese
Community in Brazil; Masterson and Funada-Classen, Japanese in Latin America, 73–85;
and the excellent volume Carneiro and Takeuchi, eds., Imigrantes japoneses no Brasil.
42. Ibid., 73.
43. Sakurai, “Imigração japonesa,” 202.
44. Masterson and Funada-Classen, Japanese in Latin America, 79.
45. Dezem, Matizes do “amarelo,” 121–59, especially, 133–34.
46. Gaimusho Ryoji Iiju-bu, Waga kokumin no kaigai hatten: Iiju hyakunen no ayumi
(Tokyo: Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 1971), 141; quoted in Masterson and Funada-Classen,
Japanese in Latin America, 84–85.
47. See Lesser, “Japanese, Brazilians, Nikkei,” 5.
48. Dezem, Matizes do “amarelo,” 109–20 and 257–85.
49. About the press and everyday life, see Handa, O imigrante japonês.
50. See Maeyama, “Ancestor, Emperor, and Immigrant”; and Reichl, “Stages.”
51. Tschuida, “Japanese in Brazil,” 193.
52. See Lesser, Negotiating National Identity, 130–31.
53. See Lone, Japanese Community in Brazil, 150–59.
54. See Lesser, “Japanese, Brazilians, Nikkei,” 10–12; and Dezem, “Hi-no-maru man-
chado de sangue.”
55. Brunn, Deutschland und Brasilien, 201–18.
56. Romero, “O allemanismo no sul do Brasil.”
57. An example is “Etwas Nativistisches,” Deutsches Volksblatt, May 4, 1914, 1.
58. Luebke, Germans in Brazil.
59. In 1907 the U.S. and Japanese governments agreed on preventing Japanese im-
migration to the United States on an informal basis. In 1924 Japanese immigration was
banned by the Immigration Act. See also Dezem, Matizes do “amarelo,” 161–204.
60. Takeuchi, O perigo amarelo, 54–67.
61. Oliveira Botelho, A imigração japoneza, 53; Coaracy, Problemas nacionaes, 124. See
also Takeuchi, O perigo amarelo, 67–122.
62. Good overviews on the immigration policy of the Vargas regime are González
Martínez, La inmigración esperada, 183–200; Seyferth, “Os imigrantes e a campanha”; and
Bernasconi and Truzzi, “Política imigratória no Brasil.”
63. Constituição da República, 43.
64. Park and Burgess, Introduction to the Science of Sociology.
65. Lima Câmara and Hehl Neiva, “Colonizações nipônica e germânica,” 109.
66. Lesser, “Japanese, Brazilians, Nikkei,” 8–9.
67. About nationalization, see Harms-Baltzer, Die Nationalisierung; Seyferth, “Os imi-
grantes”; and Lesser, Negotiating National Identity, 115–46.
68. Bartelt, “Fünfte Kolonne ohne Plan”; and Müller, Nationalsozialismus in

Lateinamerika.
69. An important report was Silva Py, A 5a coluna. See also Dietrich, Caça às suásticas;
and Ferreira Perazzo, Prisioneiros da Guerra.
70. Takeuchi, O perigo amarelo, 153–89; and Masterson and Funada-Classen, Japanese
in Latin America, 130–40.
71. See Nucci, “O perigo japonês.”
72. Lesser, “Japanese, Brazilians, Nikkei,” 10–12.
73. Freyre, Masters and the Slaves; and Freyre, New World.
74. Freyre, New World, 147.
75. Ibid.
76. Ibid., 155.
77. Gilberto Freyre, “Discurso inaugural,” in I Colóquio de Estudos Teuto-Brasileiros,
17–20.
78. Willems, A aculturação. On Japanese immigration, see Saito and Maeyama, As-
similação e integração.
79. Herskovits, Redfield, and Linton, “Memorandum for the Study of Acculturation.”
II
Migrating Peoples
5
Motherlands of Choice
Ethnicity, Belonging, and Identities
among Jewish Latin Americans
Jeffrey Lesser and Raanan Rein
Germans always come in first place in the world, because of their minds. According
to experts, they say that Germans have the best judgment in the world, and then
come the Koreans, or rather the Japanese. And Paraguayans come in last place.
Guillermo Fischer, a Paraguayan of German descent married to what he defines as an
“authentic” Paraguayan, commenting on the relationship between ethnicity and national
identity in 2013
Guillermo Fischer is a descendant of a group of German immigrants who

migrated to Paraguay to form an Aryan stronghold called Nueva Germania
(established 1887). His comments on why he is a “better” Paraguayan are
not unusual in Latin America. Indeed, members of the many Latin Ameri-
can ethnicities that emerged following waves of immigration in the nine-
teenth and twentieth centuries tend to hail the national advantages of their
exceptional foreignness. Like Fischer, ethnic group members (and their im-
migrant forbearers) habitually make reference to the cultural superiority of
their real or imagined homeland (i.e., their premigratory roots) largely as
an assertion of privilege over native peoples and those of African descent.
Fischer’s comments are similar to professions of support for Zionism and
Arab nationalism or the use of Italian or German or Japanese words across
generations. In each case the speaker is doing more than simply performing
an internal ethnic construction. Rather, the speaker is promoting “foreign-
ness” as an asset in the service of national goals, a position that is resonant
across class and social lines. No wonder that ethnic and national leaders
consistently assert (as does Fischer implicitly) that their groups represent
142 · Jeffrey Lesser and Raanan Rein
the best citizens because they combine national and foreign traits. From
this perspective, Guillermo Fischer’s ideas are not so different from the ex-
ecutives who produced an advertisement for one of Brazil’s biggest banks,
claiming that “We need more Brazilians like this Japanese.”
These examples help us to understand why ethnicity is often presented as
exceptional, a perspective often unchallenged by scholars. Much of the his-
toriography on immigration to Latin America thus accepts the exceptional-
ity position, notably by focusing on single groups with little or no reference
to others.1 This idea was reinforced because the study of immigration and
ethnicity has traditionally been conducted by ethnic group members who
sometimes emphasize xenophobic attitudes rather than integration. While
the ethnic backgrounds of scholars have changed in the past two decades,
the discourse about ethnic studies has remained quite static. Thus, many
Latin American national historiographies (whether produced in the coun-
try or abroad) implicitly posit that the study of immigrants is primarily a
personal topic.2 Even today the majority of studies of Jews are written by
those of Jewish descent; Arabs, by those of Arab descent; Japanese, by those
of Japanese descent, and so on.
One of the ramifications of this relationship is that the study of im-
migrants and their descendants is frequently perceived via insider expe-
riences. Time and again, research methods generate information on the
discourses of primarily self-appointed community leaders. Newspapers
and memos produced by community institutions that represent only small
segments are overly privileged. In these documents, definitions of the in-
group are often extremely rigid, and the exceptionalist discourse is nor-
malized. Academic research on Jewish Latin Americans often centers on
synagogues, community centers, and Zionist organizations, even though
most Jews do not belong to these institutions. Such scholarship may lead
to a false impression of a cohesive and homogeneous Jewish population.
The same is true in studies of Latin Americans of Arab, Japanese, Polish,
Italian, and Portuguese descent. As a result, as Michael Goebel suggests in
his introduction to this volume, ethnic groups are presented as so unique
as to be unrepresentative of broad national experiences.
This essay takes a different approach. By thinking of immigrants as a
privileged category deeply connected to both non-blackness and non-Indi-
anness, we argue that the experiences of Jews in Argentina and Brazil help
us to understand multiple aspects of national identity. Our focus is not on
ritual specificity or charming food cultures but rather on the discourses
that Jews, like others, have used to establish their place among those groups
Ethnicity, Belonging, and Identities among Jewish Latin Americans · 143
with the highest positions in the overlapping hierarchies that together cre-
ate national identity in Brazil and Argentina. We are particularly inter-
ested in the majority of Jews in Latin America for whom “being Jewish” is
a personal ethnic identification, not a statement of community belonging
or religious faith. Finally, in a world characterized by globalization and
transnationalism, this essay enlarges the territorial boundaries of “Latin
America” to include Jewish Latin Americans who have relocated to various
countries, including those who moved to or “made aliyah” to Israel.3
Our approach yields fascinating results. Take, for example, the recently
built Jewish museum in Villa Clara, today a small town in the Argentine
province of Entre Ríos. Villa Clara was founded in 1892 by the European-
based Jewish Colonization Association (JCA) as an agricultural colony for
refugee Jews. The colony originally had a few hundred Jewish settlers, and
today the town of Villa Clara has a population of around three thousand,
of whom about fifty trace their roots to the original Jewish colonists. The
Museo Histórico Regional de Villa Clara (note that the word “Jewish” does
not appear in the name of the museum) is constructed around a founda-
tional claim made by those few descendants of the original Jewish farmers
as well as by Jewish organizational leaders both in Argentina and abroad.
They posit that Villa Clara was a wasteland before the arrival of their an-
cestors from eastern Europe. This position provoked a strong reaction on
the part of Gaucho descendants in the region. They disputed the “Jewish
version,” emphasizing the existence of several rural hamlets with popula-
tions of both indigenous peoples and Gauchos before Jews arrived in large
numbers.4
A traditional analysis of the Museo Histórico Regional de Villa Clara
could take one of two approaches. The first could situate the museum within
the context of Argentine Jewry and could likely leave unquestioned, as does
the museum itself, the idea that Jewish immigrants settled an unpopulated
territory. A broader yet still traditional approach might note that many
Jewish museums in the Americas make agricultural settlement a founda-
tional Jewish and national moment that led to individual success, either in
making the land bloom (to follow a traditional Israeli Zionist narrative) or
in providing the impetus for rapid migration to urban areas, where educa-
tion and wealth were just a step away.
Yet an entirely different perspective appears when we compare the Museo
Histórico Regional de Villa Clara to other immigrant or ethnic museums
in Latin America. One ethnic group that has invested in museums are Nik-
kei, a generic term developed in Latin America to define those of Japanese
descent.5 In Brazil, Paraguay, and Peru, there are numerous Japanese immi-
gration museums, each of which tells a story that would be recognizable to
visitors to the Museo Histórico Regional de Villa Clara. In these museums,
Japanese immigrants are presented as settling on uninhabited land given
up by elites as unproductive. The newcomers struggled and made the land
bloom. As the rural colonies expanded, the youth moved to the cities for
education and to reposition not as farmers but as members of the dominant
urban classes.6
Many of the exhibitions in “Jewish” and “Japanese” museums (we might
call them Argentine or Brazilian museums) are interchangeable. Photos
and dioramas of virgin forests are common, never including local peoples,
whether gauchos, indigenous peoples, or those of mixed descent. There is a
focus on tools, suggesting that immigrants brought modernity to their new
countries and that success was achieved through merit, not through the
luck of “racial” advantage of whiteness that Jews and Japanese entered with
great rapidity in Latin America. The museums are also similar in that they
display stories of success, even though historians would find in the docu-
ments of the colonization societies large numbers of complaints about poor
conditions and lack of hope. In these documents, movement to the city,
whether of Jews or Japanese, is represented as a failure, not as the natural
progression that the museum exhibitions suggest.
Clandestine Practices and Other Colonial Experiences
In the colonial dependencies of the Spanish empire, immigration was re-

stricted to Christians of “pure blood.” Jews, converted Jews, and descen-
dants of converted Jews were not allowed to settle. Neither were Moors
and heretics, although this is often left out of accounts of the Inquisition
in the New World. Laws, however, only tell us part of the story. In fact, a
variety of public and secret ethnic rituals arrived in Latin America with the
early European colonizers in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. While
the research focus has been on Jews, often suggesting that something
unique about members of the group allowed practices to continue across
the oceans, new scholarship shows that Muslim practices arrived as well,
not only among African slaves but also among Spaniards.7 The Inquisition
had forced much Jewish practice underground, and many of those char-
acterized as “Jews” by Iberian political and religious leaders were actually
the descendants of converted Jews. Variously called judaizantes, Marranos,
conversos, and New Christians, they went to Latin America in small num-
bers to escape economic, social, and religious persecution.8
There is a heated debate in the historiography about how to define those
in mid-sixteenth century New Spain (today’s Mexico and Central America)
whom the Inquisition categorized as Jewish or New Christians. Many of
the accused were surely sincere Catholics. Some may have been crypto-
Jews even though the evidence presented for the continuing existence of
this group often fails the tests of conventional historians.9 Others appear
to have maintained a syncretic set of beliefs. An emblematic figure of pre-
sumed Jewish descent in colonial Mexico was Luis de Carvajal (1567–96),
tried twice by the Inquisition and finally burned alive at the stake as an
unrepentant “Judaizer.” Carvajal composed—out of his own will, not un-
der Inquisitorial pressure—his memoirs detailing his observance of Jewish
customs.10
There were several mid-seventeenth-century waves of persecutions
against supposed Judaizers in Mexico and Peru. These actions were often
motivated by political and economic, rather than religious, reasons. This
was also the case in Brazil, whose mother country, Portugal, had forced
conversion of its Jews in 1497. While there was an important sixteenth-
century Jewish presence in Brazil as a result of Portuguese colonial ex-
pansion, it would be inappropriate to characterize it as a “community” in
the contemporary academic sense of the word, since practice, when it oc-
curred, was clandestine. The one exception came in 1630, when the Dutch
invaded northern Brazil and allowed the open practice of Judaism. Follow-
ing the expulsion of the Dutch by the Portuguese in 1654, some practicing
Jews became crypto-Jews, others moved to the Netherlands, and still others
migrated to the Americas, notably the Dutch island of Curação, where a
synagogue has been in continuous use since the mid-seventeenth century.11
The largest Jewish populations in eighteenth-century Latin America
were composed primarily of Sephardic Jews (those of Iberian descent) in
Surinam and Brazil. By the 1800s the vast majority of those of Jewish de-
scent had assimilated. What has persisted is a focus on crypto-Jews, both
among a small group of academics and a much larger group of ethnic
Jews. Both seem to be looking for evidence of long-term settlement in the
Americas in order to suggest that the masses arriving from Europe and the
Middle East in the nineteenth century were simply another step in a five-
hundred-year story of Jewish life in the Americas.
Those who study crypto-Jews often present the story as exceptional and
part of a long history of Jewish victimization and resistance. Other groups,
however, also make crypto claims. For decades, Peruvians of Japanese

descent have posited that the Incas were a lost tribe of Japanese. Former
president Alberto Fujimori mobilized this fiction for political purposes
by dressing as both an Inca and a samurai during his campaign. Among
Mexicans of Chinese descent comes a different kind of crypto claim. Some
believe that following a great ancient sea battle against a superior enemy,
a divine wind saved the Chinese navy by blowing it to a secret land, where
the sailors found what has come to be known as the Aztec Empire. And
among those of Middle Eastern non-Jewish descent comes a similar crypto
claim involving a lost tribe of Arabs who sailed and populated the Ama-
zon. In other words, the indigenous peoples of Brazil and Peru are in fact
authentic Arabs (unless they were crypto-Jews or crypto-Japanese—how
confusing).12
Much less is known about early Jewish communities in Latin America
than the size of the historiography would suggest. Even so, it is clear that
there is virtually no link between the contemporary communities formed
by European and Middle Eastern Jewish immigrants to Latin America in
the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and the small numbers of individu-
als who practiced Judaism openly or secretly during the colonial period.
The colonial link allows ethnic groups to claim national authenticity. That
Jews (or others) arrived in an unpopulated land and made it prosper is the
discursive foundational bedrock for nineteenth- and twentieth-century na-
tional identity.
Multiple Motherlands in Argentina and Brazil
Argentina
Argentina has the largest number of Jews in Latin America, resulting from
a great fifty-year wave of European immigration that began during the last
quarter of the nineteenth century.13 Jews in eastern Europe—especially in
the Pale of Settlement—felt a growing pressure to seek a better future out-
side the continent. Physical harassment, social pressures, and economic
plight all contributed to this situation. While a few Jews sought refuge in
Palestine, most looked across the Atlantic for a home in the Americas. Jew-
ish organizations created a number of settlement plans following Theodor
Herzl’s description of the choice facing the Jewish masses in eastern Europe
as one between “Palestine or the Argentine.” The agricultural settlements
established in Argentina and Brazil, such as Villa Clara, seemed to offer a

partial solution to the Jewish question.14
Just as Jews were looking for a safe haven outside Europe, Argentine
authorities adopted a policy to encourage European entry. Elites desired
to increase the relatively small population and to “whiten” it by bringing
European immigrants who they hoped would ensure development. Mod-
ernization, which included a strong sense of racial exclusivity, was the main
motivation behind the maxim coined in 1853 by the intellectual and poli-
tician Juan Bautista Alberdi: “Gobernar es poblar” (to govern is to popu-
late).15 Indeed, from the 1870s until the economic recession of the early
1930s, immigrants flooded onto Argentine shores. While Argentine leaders
hoped to attract Northern Europeans, most in fact came from either south-
ern or eastern Europe. As Catholics and speakers of a Romance language,
Italians and Spaniards found their integration into Argentine society to be
relatively smooth.
Other newcomers, notably urban and rural Jews from central and east-
ern Europe and Jews and Arabs from the Ottoman Empire, faced different
issues. For most “Semitic” immigrants, Argentina proved to be a “promised
land,” and social and economic ascension went hand in hand, albeit with
constant and at times violent reminders of their minority status. By the
twentieth century, they had established communal institutions that satis-
fied many of their social, economic, and cultural needs. The immigrants
and their descendants created a rich mosaic of social, cultural, political,
and ideological life, which reflected a wide variety of faiths, identities, and
social practices. At the same time, both Jews and Arabs faced similar ste-
reotypes as to their “otherness.”16
Chronologically, the first Jewish immigrants began to arrive in the 1840s,
and the evidence of colonial-era conversos and crypto-Jews that exist for
Brazil in a limited way cannot be found in the Argentine case. Like Brazil,
however, Argentina’s “pioneers” included Moroccan Jews, although this
group arrived at the same time as did German Jews. An important mile-
stone in Jewish immigration was recorded in 1881 when, following pogroms
in Russia, the Argentine government decided to send a special emissary to
tsarist Russia to encourage Jews to immigrate. The first organized group of
820 Russian Jews arrived in August 1889 on board the ship Wesser. They
were sent to establish Jewish agricultural colonies, and some of its members
founded the Moisesville agricultural settlement that became an important
part of the Argentine national creation myth.17 Arab immigrants did not
establish agricultural colonies, but most of them did settle in the provinces
in the interior and thus could claim pioneer status as well. In the second
half of the nineteenth century, as Argentina emerged from a series of civil
wars and provincial rebellions, Arabs and their social and commercial net-
works in the different provinces of the interior helped to shape a unified
Argentina.
While mass Jewish immigration to Argentina was primarily Ashkenazi,
Jews from Spanish Morocco also arrived in the mid-nineteenth century.
They were later joined by Sephardim from the declining Ottoman Empire
(especially from today’s Syria) who arrived alongside waves from eastern
and central Europe.18 Sephardic Jewish immigrants often felt more com-
fortable among Arab Christians and Muslims than among Ashkenazi
Jews.19 They shared the same language, customs, food, and music with the
Arabs and joined the same ethnic associations, especially outside of Buenos
Aires.
The Argentine government’s open immigration policy dramatically
changed the demographic profile of the country, as became apparent in the
1914 census. Over twenty years, the country’s population had almost dou-
bled (to about 7.9 million), and more than a third of the inhabitants were
foreign-born. In the capital city of Buenos Aires, this figure was around 50
percent. As for Jews, the rate of growth was much higher—between 1895
and 1919, the Jewish population increased from 6,000 to 125,000.20
The original elite vision of a focused and expanding Jewish agricultural
enterprise did not last. In the late nineteenth century, most Jewish Argen-
tines were concentrated in JCA colonies, but by the end of World War I the
majority were urban dwellers, with Buenos Aires housing the largest Jew-
ish population. In contrast to the limitations imposed by the United States
and other countries, Argentina’s open immigration policy remained almost
unchanged with the exception of a temporary break during the Great War.
It was only the world economic recession in the wake of the 1929 Wall Street
crash that brought immigration to a virtual halt. The ensuing political up-
heaval provoked the first successful military coup in Argentina’s history
(September 1930), in turn reinforcing nationalist, Catholic, and xenopho-
bic social tendencies.21
Xenophobic attitudes constituted obstacles for non-Catholic immi-
grants, not just Jews, because of their supposed difficulties in adjusting to
Argentine society and culture. Furthermore, all newcomers—especially
non-Catholics—were expected to abandon their customs in favor of the
new culture that was emerging in Argentina as the twentieth century
moved forward. In spite of (or perhaps because of) a population of close

to 250,000 Jews in the 1930s, Argentina proved unwilling to open its gates
to refugees during World War II, even though around 40,000 Jews entered
(legally or illegally) between 1933 and 1945.22 In the mid-1940s, following
the end of hostilities in Europe, immigration to Argentina resumed, albeit
in smaller numbers than in the past. The populist president, Juan Perón,
lifted most immigration restrictions in 1947, and during the next three
years more than 300,000 immigrants, primarily from Spain and Italy—the
two “mother countries” of most Argentines—entered the country. While
only 1,500 Jews entered Argentina in the second half of the 1940s, the Per-
onist regime did grant amnesty to all illegal residents, allowing some 10,000
Jews to obtain legal status. The 1950s witnessed the last wave of Jewish im-
migration to Argentina. These new arrivals were refugees from the Com-
munist repression in Hungary in 1956 or Jews who had escaped from the
hostile policy adopted by the Gamal Abdel Nasser regime in Egypt. From
that point onward, the number of Jews in Argentina began to decline.
The size of the Jewish Argentine population and the relative ease of entry
over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have not created
a sense of comfort among many Jewish Argentines. Their continued sense
of uncertain belonging helps to explain why research on Argentine Jewry
is heavily focused on discrimination and racism. While evidence of anti-
Semitic manifestations is easy to find, Jews (and Arabs) have successfully
integrated into Argentine society. Polls in the past two decades emphasize
that Jews and Arabs are hated less than relatively new immigrants from
China, Bolivia, or Paraguay. Many Argentines also tell pollsters that they
consider multinational corporations, the Catholic Church, banks, politi-
cians, or the Army—and not Jews—as being “too powerful.”
Government-sponsored anti-Semitism has been rare in Argentina. It
manifested itself in the limitations imposed on Jewish immigration during
the 1930s and the 1940s (restrictions similar to those in other American re-
publics) and was also noticeable during the brutal military dictatorship that
ruled the country between 1976 and 1983.23 According to many testimonies,
Jews arrested by the military suffered more than non-Jews. However, com-
munity institutions continued with their normal activities, no anti-Semitic
laws were ever instituted, and Argentine relations with the State of Israel
were excellent.24
The transition to democracy in the 1980s and 1990s witnessed the adop-
tion of a more tolerant policy toward ethnic minorities and a growing
awareness of the multicultural nature of Argentine society. This did not
signal the complete disappearance of anti-Semitism or even of its occa-

sional violent manifestations. The two bomb attacks on the Israeli Embassy
and on the Jewish community center in Buenos Aires in 1992 and 1994,
respectively, represented a different kind of danger for Jews in Argentina:
transnational terror with local support. These bombings triggered grass-
roots mobilization and a continuing polemic among Argentine Jews as to
their individual and collective identities, their place in Argentine society,
and their relations with Israel, one of the many motherlands that Jewish
Argentines choose.
Brazil
Academic literature on Brazilian Jewry often ties Inquisition-era Jews (and
crypto-Jews) from Iberia with those masses from Poland and Germany
who arrived after World War I. The fact that the Brazilian census of 1872
recorded no Jewish inhabitants is not an impediment to the connection
drawn by those eager to suggest that Jews are more authentically Brazilian
than pretender Catholics. A telling example comes with the first modern
Jewish community (we use this term in the traditional sense here) in Brazil,
a group of three thousand North African migrants attracted to the Amazon
because of the rubber economy of the mid to late nineteenth century.
That this early and active Jewish community has been largely ignored by
scholars speaks to a number of broad issues. The first is the multiple mi-
nority status of Sephardic Jewry, which diminishes scholarly interest much
as it does for the Okinawans who make up the plurality of Japanese im-
migrants to Brazil. Second, North African Jews frequently intermarried in
Brazil, using non-Halachic conversion techniques (in other words they did
not strictly follow traditional Jewish law on the matter). The transgressive
exogamic practices seem to have made these Moroccan Jews less worthy
objects of analysis. While exogamy rates among those of Jewish, Arab, and
Japanese descent in Brazil are around 50 percent (in fact, the most “closed”
group in Brazil based on endogamy are rich, white Catholics), the academic
production almost exclusively focuses on those who are members of the
traditionally defined community.
The North African Jewish story also goes untold for methodological
reasons. In Brazil and elsewhere, Sephardic Jews were often called “Ar-
abs” (turcos); thus, finding them in the records demands more than simply
looking for references to “Jews.” Furthermore, many Jews returned to Mo-
rocco, leaving families behind. While out-migration from Brazil became,
historiographically speaking, a move out of the interests of the nation, the
families with indigenous women heads of household do not fit into tradi-
tional concepts of Jewish studies. That Brazilian identity was maintained
both in familial and in citizenship categories, and that Jewish identity was
maintained transnationally, has been virtually ignored.
As the nineteenth century progressed, hundreds of Moroccan Jewish
families moved to Brazil, settling in both Rio de Janeiro and Belém do Para
(a large city at the mouth of the Amazon). The Spanish-Moroccan War
(1859–60) and a profound sense of minority status were the main catalysts
for this migration. The group’s multilingualism—Arabic and Spanish were
used for business, French and Hebrew were learned at the Alliance Israélite
Universelle (AIU) schools, and Haquitia (Hispanic-Moroccan dialect) was
spoken at home—gave them a transnational perspective. Indeed, a report
from one of the AIU’s directors noted that by the 1880s, 95 percent of the
boys completing an Alliance education migrated to South America.
By 1890 more than one thousand Jews had migrated to the Amazon,
where the rubber economy was booming. Many Arab Jews settled in small
towns along the banks of the river, where they traded urban products like
clothes, medicine, and tobacco for rural products like fish, Brazil nuts, and
rubber. Morocco’s Arab Jews also discovered they could easily obtain Bra-
zilian naturalization certificates, which gave them a means of economic
and social protection (as Brazilians) if they returned to Morocco, where lo-
cal Jews were often the target of politicians. Many did go back to Morocco,
leaving in Brazil families with indigenous women who were converted to
Judaism; according to oral tradition the woman was brought into a room
blindfolded and told that a spoonful of molten gold would be put in her
mouth and that if she truly believed that the Jewish G-d was the one and
only G-d, the gold would taste as sweet as honey.25
In traditional scholarship, becoming Brazilian to return to Morocco
would likely be linked to Jewish refugee status in other times and places. Yet
thinking of that migration as a “Brazilian” (and not exclusively “Jewish”)
topic, leads us in new directions. For example, since the late 1980s, 250,000
Japanese Brazilians have migrated to Japan as part of a special visa labor
program for those of Japanese descent.26 Brazilian Nikkei often discover for
the first time what it is like to be considered unquestionably Brazilian, since
in Brazil there is no linguistic distinction between those from Japan and
those of Japanese descent—all are called “Japanese.” From this perspective
Moroccan Jewish transmigration is a normative Brazilian experience, not
an exotic and exceptional ethnic one.
The largely forgotten story of the Moroccan Jews who migrated to Brazil
stands in contrast to the vibrant memory of Jewish immigration from east-

ern Europe. Perhaps this is because Ashkenazic Jews have been a large ma-
jority in twentieth-century Brazil. Perhaps it is because eastern European
Jews, like those in Villa Clara and unlike those in the Amazon, came as
farmers and thus fit one set of early-twentieth-century national goals.
Between 1904 and 1924 the JCA formed two agricultural colonies on the
frontier of Rio Grande do Sul, following the establishment of the Argen-
tine JCA colonies discussed earlier.27 The eastern European Jewish colo-
nists who settled in Brazil never amounted to more than a few thousand
people. Yet as other countries in the Americas began to close their doors
to Jews after World War I (as they had previously with many Asian and
Middle Eastern groups), the numbers in Brazil began to rise. In fact, two
of the most noticeable new post–World War I groups who entered Brazil
were Jews and Japanese. These postwar immigrants differed in many ways
from the prewar group. Although Portuguese, Italian, Spanish, German,
and Middle Eastern immigrants continued to predominate, Japanese and
eastern Europeans (primarily Jews) challenged Brazilian national identity
in new yet similar ways.
Between 1924 and 1934 eastern European immigration to Brazil in-
creased almost tenfold to over 93,000 persons. Jews made up about 45 per-
cent to 50 percent of those immigrants, and by the mid-1920s, Brazil was
the destination for more than 10 percent of the Jews emigrating from Eu-
rope. By the early 1930s the Jewish population of Brazil approached 60,000
as the Japanese population approached three times that number.28 Jews,
like Japanese and Arabs, became successful in part by negotiating their
non-blackness by refusing traditional immigrant roles as sharecroppers on
large plantations.
The combination of economic success and cultural difference made Jews,
Japanese, and Arabs particular targets of Brazilian nativists in the wake of
the Depression. Immigrants had been expected to save Brazil’s agricultural
economy and Europeanize the culture at the same time. Jews (and others)
seemed to do neither. In 1934 immigration quotas were established as the
growing Jewish and Japanese immigrant population, a worsening economy,
and rising nativism made ethnicity an important topic among intellectu-
als, state politicians from urban areas, and federal leaders. Yet the grow-
ing public discourse opposing Jewish immigration and the resulting secret
prohibition on visas for “Semites” neither stopped Jewish entry nor par-
ticularly changed its pattern. One of the most important reasons was that
a philo-Semitic vision began to gain credence within the government.29
From this perspective German, Italian, and Austrian Jewish refugees were
increasingly seen as bringing skills and capital to Brazil. International pres-
sure to accept refugees was matched by a change in perception among some
of Brazil’s most important immigration policy makers. By 1938 new rules
regarding Jewish immigration reopened Brazil’s gates to such an extent that
more Jews were to enter that year than in any of the ten years previously.
These numbers mirror that of the Japanese whose legal entry exceeded the
quota limits by between 200 and 300 percent through 1942.
In the 1950s Jews again began to immigrate to Brazil in significant num-
bers, this time from the Middle East, especially following the Suez Crisis
of 1956. They came at the same time as Okinawans who had been forced
off their land following the postwar United States occupation of that part
of Japan. By 1960 Jewish Brazilians numbered about 100,000 but, as is the
case throughout the Americas, disputes about population size abound. In-
formation collected for the 2000 Brazilian census showed a Jewish popula-
tion of 86,825, although Jewish organizations in Brazil place the number
between 120,000 and 140,000. Some evangelical and Jewish groups use a
much larger number by suggesting that most Portuguese colonizers were
New Christians and extrapolating that number out to the current Brazilian
population.
Approaches Old and New
Scholarly interest in Jews as a subject of Latin American studies has grown

markedly in the last two decades, especially when compared to research on
Latin American immigrant groups who trace their ancestry to the Middle
East, Asia, or non-Jewish eastern Europe. The historiography on the Jew-
ish presence in Latin America, however, is still characterized by essentialist
concepts and overemphasizes particularity. Jews, the research seems to say,
are a minority unlike other minorities. Thus, comparative frameworks tend
to be diasporic and suggest that ethnicity is a nonnational phenomenon.
This tendency is not exclusive to scholarship on Jews, and a version of
this chapter could easily have been written for those Latin Americans of
Japanese, Chinese, or Lebanese descent. The dominance of transnational
ethnicity over other components, including national identity, thus seems
to be one aspect of ethnic identity performance in the Americas. Yet new
research paradigms might focus on engagement in the national context in
order to create comparison and contact zones with other ethnic minorities,
such as Latin Americans of Polish, Japanese, Chinese, Syrian, or Lebanese
descent. It might be useful to move beyond the binary view of ethnic mi-
norities as either diasporic or national.
Research on ethnicity in Latin America often presumes that the children
and grandchildren of immigrants feel a special relationship to their ances-
tors’ place of birth or imagined homeland. Implicit in this assumption is the
idea that ethnic minorities do not play a significant role in national identity
formation in the host country. Some studies of Jewish Latin Americans,
for example, assume that rank-and-file support of Zionist organizations is
primarily related to loyalty to the State of Israel. Yet recent research suggests
that conclusion is not the only one.30 Indeed, Zionism appears to be one of
the strategies espoused by Jews in order to become national citizens of Ar-
gentina and Brazil. Jewish Latin Americans needed to have a Madre Patria
to be like Italian and Spanish immigrants (who had Italy and Spain). For
Jews, who were at times excluded from national citizenship prior to migra-
tion, the imagined motherland became Zion, or Israel. From this perspec-
tive Israel was constructed as a nation of origin rather than as a political
project to safeguard the future.31
The historiography also tends to assert that heritage makes one a mem-
ber of an ethnic community. Yet many individuals do not see themselves
(or wish to be seen) as members of a formally constituted ethnic or re-
ligious community.32 There are many studies of ethnic community lead-
ers and institutions, but few on the 50 percent (or more, in many places)
of Jews not affiliated with Jewish institutions. The frequently used term
“Jewish community” can be misleading when, without careful analysis, it
refers only to those affiliated with Jewish organizations, synagogues, social
clubs, or youth movements. Documenting life stories and reclaiming the
memories of unaffiliated Jews will provide important lessons on the nature
of national and ethnic identity. Studies might be conducted of Jews (or Ar-
abs or Asians) married to people who identify themselves as having other
origins, individuals who express ethnic identity based on rejection (what
some scholars have termed “self-hatred”), and authors who do not explic-
itly express their Jewishness.
Much scholarship on Latin American ethnicity correctly notes that
majority discourses are frequently racist. Yet there is often a gap between
rhetoric and social practice. Indeed, racist manifestations have not pre-
vented members of numerous Latin American ethnic groups from entering
the dominant political, cultural, economic, and social sectors. Discourse-
focused research tends to find victims and make racism appear an abso-
lutely hegemonic structure. As a result, it is easy to connect ethnic identity
formation to discrimination and exclusion. Some scholars examining so-

cial status, on the other hand, have come to different conclusions. They sug-
gest that success among Asian, Middle Eastern, and Jewish Latin Ameri-
cans places them in the “white” category and thus as part of the dominant
classes.33 Anti-Semitism has been a favored topic for scholars of Jewish
Latin America, but there is often little social and cultural research on the
ways in which Jews are embedded in prevailing national structures.
While studies on Jewish Latin Americans as members of the dominant
classes are rare, the literature does focus on economic success stories, of-
ten giving the impression of homogeneous, unstratified ethnic commu-
nities. Latin Americans of Asian and Middle Eastern descent seem to be
uniformly situated in the middle class or higher. This image is even stron-
ger with regard to Jewish Latin Americans. Many scholars do not consider
research on the Jewish poor—possibly because these studies might shatter
myths that celebrate upward mobility as a unique ethnic trait.
Conclusion: Latin American Homelands Abroad
To make a single characterizing statement about contemporary Jewish

Latin Americans would be an error. Intermarriage rates are high, but so
is the growth of ultra religious worship.34 Discourses about anti-Semitism
remain vibrant aspects of identity expressions, even though acts of violence
are rare. Zionist movements are strong among affiliated Jews throughout
Latin America, although aliyah rates are extremely low in Brazil compared
to Argentina. This difference is in part linked to how many Jews “feel” anti-
Semitism on a day-to-day basis. This “feeling” is at times economically
motivated, without the subject being a victim of xenophobic attitudes. Se-
bastian Klor convincingly shows that the many Argentines who migrated
to Israel during its first two decades of existence came largely from the
lower middle class while economically successful Jews were less likely to
migrate.35
The location of “Jewish Latin America” has expanded since the 1960s
to both Israel and to North America. The previously discussed strategy of
using an overseas motherland to create a claim of an exceptional national
identity thus continues in new forms. There are currently around one hun-
dred thousand Israeli citizens of Latin American origin. Their integration
into Israeli society is considered a success story since many have attained
prominent positions in various fields. However, Latin American Israelis
do not promote group ethnicity, preferring individual mobility to group
assertiveness. Two major factors are at play here. First, there has never been
a “wave” of immigration from Latin America to Israel, although there were
peaks in the 1970s and 1980s, a time of military dictatorships in the South-
ern Cone. Second, there is wide spatial distribution of Latin American Is-
raelis, thus no neighborhoods or towns are “Latin” in the way many are
“Russian” or “Ethiopian.”36 Klor’s argument about class also suggests that
invisibility is part of a broader Israeli national ideal of marketing aliyah as
a “prize” for successful Jews, not a “salvation” for less rich ones.
Latin American Israelis see their premigratory cultural orientation as an
asset in the informal and improvisational climate of Israeli society. Latin
American music, novels, and films have been popular in Israel for decades.
Interest in Latin American culture grew dramatically in recent years as the
number of Israeli youngsters traveling to South America increased. Today
telenovelas have large audiences. Compared to many other newcomers to
Israel, Latin American immigrants arrive with a stronger knowledge of Is-
rael, Zionism, Judaism, and the Hebrew language. Quite recently there has
been a dramatic increase in the number of Latin Israeli websites providing
a space where Latin American identity can be asserted. As one of our in-
formants told us, “It is cool to be Latino in Israel.”37
This chapter argues that Jews are normative Latin Americans. It pro-
poses that national categories such as “Argentine” and “Brazilian” include
members of numerous “minority” groups, all of whom promote their at-
tachment to multiple motherlands as critical to their status as national
citizens. We have looked at some of the traditional academic ideas about
Jewish Latin American life and have asked if new approaches might gener-
ate new data and new conclusions. We are interested in comparison within
national boundaries and hope to see more research on those who define
themselves as “ethnic” in noninstitutional ways. In this way we can begin
to understand immigrants and their descendants not as in Latin America
but as Latin America.
Recently the Israeli comedic television program Eretz Nehederet (Israel’s
version of Saturday Night Live) did a parody of the Taglit (Birthright) pro-
gram, which “offers the gift of a free, 10-day educational trip to Israel for
Jewish adults between the ages of 18 to 26.”38 The skit focused on four stu-
dents, three from the United States and one from Brazil. The North Ameri-
cans were couched in two ways: the girls/women were stereotyped Long
Islanders desperately looking for their Jewish identity through Holocaust
memory experiences, and the boy/man was from the Midwest and seemed
to think he was in a summer camp. The Brazilian, however, was presented
Figure 5.1. “Reirse es Kosher.” Plural JAI, Buenos Aries, May 5, 2012. Permission granted
by cartoon author Daniel Sacroisky.
differently. At first he had nothing to say about Israel or Jewishness. Rather,

he seemed obsessed with Brazil: his comments revolved exclusively around
Brazilian futebol, Brazilian drinking rituals, and Brazilian sexuality. Yet
the skit ended in an unexpected way as the group finds itself alone in a
minefield. Suddenly the Brazilian was remade as the one who most read-
ily adapts to the Israeli reality. He saved the others by teaching them to
dance capoeira (an Afro-Brazilian martial art/dance) to the Michel Teló
global mega-hit “Ai Se Eu Te Pego” (which references Brazilian sertanejo
or “country” music). Latin American birth allows the negotiation of the
Middle Eastern minefield.
This sense of Jewish Latin Americans as particularly prepared for inte-
gration into Israeli society is not without its discontents. In May 2012 the
Buenos Aires–based Jewish Argentine online magazine Plural JAI (“Plural
Lives”) presented a cartoon that sums up the fluid nature of immigration,
national identity, and ethnicity. In the first block (see figure 5.1), a Jewish
Argentine is surrounded by his motherland choices: he sits in his home
in Buenos Aires looking at a wall covered with Jewish and Israeli sym-
bols, including the name of the country written in Hebrew, a photograph
of Jerusalem, and a group of religious ritual implements. The second block
shows the same person after having migrated to Israel. Now his wall is
covered with a picture of tango star Carlos Gardel, a Boca Juniors pennant,
and a photograph of Buenos Aires. His Jewish ritual implements have been
replaced by ones of national identity—a bombilla to drink mate and a statue

of tango dancing. The idea is not that he has exchanged one motherland
for another. Rather, he has multiple motherlands, each of which he chooses
to bring to the fore at different moments. In other words, he is a typical
immigrant.
Notes
Epigraph: Nadia Sussman and Simon Romero. “A Lost Colony in Paraguay,” New York
Times Video, May 5, 2013. http://www.nytimes.com/video/2013/05/05/world/americas/1000
00002208901/a-lost-tribe-in-paraguay.html?ref=americas?ref=americas.
1. Recent examples include Schneider, Futures Lost; Rein, Argentine Jews or Jewish Ar-
gentines?; Buchenau, Tools of Progress; and Deutsch, Crossing Borders.
2. See, for example, Sociedade Brasileira de Cultural Japonesa, Uma epopêia moderna;
or Kahan et al., Marginados y consagrados.
3. For an earlier discussion of these issues, see Lesser and Rein, “Challenging Particu-
larity,” 249–63.
4. Freidenberg, Invention of the Jewish Gaucho.
5. See Lesser, Searching for Home Abroad.
6. The historiography on the Jewish agricultural colonies in South America is con-
stantly expanding. Among recent additions, see Cherjovsky, “La faz ideológica; and Flier,
“Historia y memoria.” See also the 2005 edition in Spanish of Avni’s classic work, Argentina
y las migraciones judías.
7. Reis, Slave Rebellion.
8. Bodian, Dying in the Law of Moses; and Kagan and Morgan, Atlantic Diasporas.
9. Neulander, “Crypto-Jews of the Southwest,” 64–68.
10. On Carvajal and the Spanish Inquisition in Mexico, see Cohen, Martyr; and Lan-
yon, Fire and Song.
11. Wachtel, Faith of Remembrance.
12. Lesser, Negotiating National Identity.
13. On the discussions as to the number of Jews in Latin America in general and in
individual countries, see Della Pergola, “Demographic Trends of Latin American Jewry.”
14. Avni, Argentina and the Jews.
15. On Argentine immigration policy, see Solberg, Immigration and Nationalism.
16. Mirelman, Jewish Buenos Aires. On Arabs in Argentina, see the relevant essays in
Akmir, Los árabes; and Agar, Contribuciones árabes; Klich, Árabes y judíos; and Rein, Más
allá del medio oriente.
17. Gerchunoff, The Jewish Gauchos.
18. Bejarano and Aizenberg, Contemporary Sephardic Identity.
19. Klich, Árabes y judíos; Rein, Árabes y judíos; and Rein, Más allá del medio oriente.
20. Rein, Argentine Jews or Jewish Argentines?, 29–35.
21. Finchelstein, “Anti-Freudian Politics.”
22. Senkman, Argentina, la Segunda Guerra Mundial.
23. Avni, “Antisemitism in Argentina.”
24. Dobry, Operación Israel.

25. For an analysis of this story and its broader context about immigrant explanation
of national authenticity, see Lesser, Immigration, Ethnicity, 116–49.
26. Lesser, Searching for Home Abroad.
27. Lesser and Rein, Rethinking Jewish-Latin Americans.
28. Levy, “O papel da migração,” 71–73.
29. Lesser, Welcoming the Undesirables.
30. Nouwen and Rein, “Cultural Zionism.”
31. Brodsky, “‘Miss Sefaradí’”; and Nouwen and Rein, “Cultural Zionism.”
32. Fishman, Double or Nothing; Cohen, American Assimilation or Jewish Revival?;
Jmelnizky and Erdei, La población judía; and Karol and Moiguer, Cultura de la diversidad.
33. On Brazil, see Sociedade Brasileira de Cultural Japonesa, Uma epopêia moderna;
and Sorj, “Brazilian Non-Anti-Semite Sociability.” On Argentina, see Sofer, From Pale to
Pampa.
34. Jacobson, “Modernity, Conservative Religious Movements.”
35. Klor, “The Aliyah.”
36. Roniger and Babis, “Latin American Israelis”; Bar-Gil, We Started with a Dream;
Goldberg and Rozen, Los latinoamericanos; and Herman, Latin American Community.
37. Rein, Argentine Jews or Jewish Argentines? ch. 2.
38. Taglit-Birthright Israel, “About Us,” http://www.birthrightisrael.com/site/Page
Server?pagename=about_main (accessed May 21, 2012). For a discussion of a similar pro-
gram for the Arab Diaspora, see Tofik Karam, Another Arabesque.
6
The Reconstruction of National Identity
German Minorities in Latin America during the First World War
Stefan Rinke
Translated from German by Christopher Reid
Over the course of the nineteenth century, some 150,000 Germans im-
migrated to Latin America, particularly to Brazil, Argentina and Chile.
Compared to the size of the Spanish or Italian immigration, this number is
relatively low.1 Still, it seemed even to contemporaries and later generations
of historians influenced by the paradigm of the nation that the German im-
migrants and their descendants occupied a peculiar place in society. They
seemed to have a tendency to isolate themselves from the population and
the politics of their host countries and to maintain a culturally and ethni-
cally defined identity. It was argued that German immigrants’ insistence
on using their mother tongue and following German traditions and their
consciousness of belonging to a German cultural community—albeit not
precisely definable—made them stand out from other immigrant groups in
Latin America. This was the case even when they no longer had German
citizenship but instead officially identified themselves, or were identified as,
Chilean or Brazilian, for example.
Before 1945 such an assessment was usually an expression of national-
ist arrogance. This supported the view that the immigrants belonged to
one of those rather remote “tribes” that supposedly composed the Ger-
man nation.2 In the lingo of the period, no matter whether they resided
in Latin America or elsewhere in the world, these German immigrants
were called “Germans abroad” (Auslandsdeutsche). At the time they were
thought to be part of an almost mystical “Germanness” (Deutschtum) that
transcended state borders and was responsible for—as it was sentimentally
put—an “indissoluble bond” between all those who carried “German blood
in their veins.”3 In this discourse, the host nation made demands regarding
German Minorities in Latin America during the First World War · 161
affiliation and ownership that, it is now known, became more forceful be-
tween the founding of the German Empire and the end of Nazi rule.
In particular, the establishment of numerous supposedly “typically Ger-
man” associations and organizations was considered for some time to be
evidence of an effort to maintain the German emigrants’ group identity in
Latin America.4 Nonetheless, more far-sighted observers recognized early
on that there was more to this lofty goal than “preserving Germanness.”
The establishment of schools and Protestant churches, the construction of
hospitals, and the establishment of fire departments in fact made survival
possible in a foreign and often repellent environment. The institutions and
associations offered immigrants protection and social contacts in their new
environment. Given the state’s relative absence and the arbitrariness of the
authorities, they also reflected an act of self-support. These institutions of-
ten nurtured an idealized image of Germany and the value of so-called
Germanness abroad. It was against the backdrop of nationalist and racist
ideas that the feeling of superiority over the Latin American population
grew. This was particularly true for the decades following the founding of
the German Reich, and especially the beginnings of the Kaiser’s interna-
tional and naval policy, a time when symbolic, self-affirmative municipal
anniversaries and memorial projects celebrating German history were very
common. German nationalism also found enthusiastic supporters in Latin
America and was actively promoted by organizations in Germany.5
The national euphoria, however, affected only parts of the German mi-
nority in the Latin American countries. In social, religious, and ideological
terms, the Germans were more (e.g., in Argentina) or less (e.g., in Chile)
heterogeneous groups—despite the fact that the nationalist spokesmen
would not acknowledge this and even though other parts of the population
frequently perceived them as being a completely homogeneous, foreign,
self-referential community. The German immigrants arrived at very dif-
ferent times, came from different regions, represented different religious
confessions, and were recruited from diverse social strata. Recent research
has increasingly emphasized the role of women, whose experiences often
differed significantly from those of male migrants.6
The term “German colony” therefore had a leveling effect from the out-
set.7 In addition, detailed historical studies show that acculturation and as-
similation processes had begun among ethnic Germans in Latin America,
which were accelerated by membership in the Catholic Church, migration
to the cities, or marrying into the host society.8 A German ethnic identity—
with “ethnic” here understood as a nonpolitical category for distinguishing
162 · Stefan Rinke
between groups—remained, and continues to remain, from one generation

to the next.9 In any case, there were few practical benefits to this. Even from
a national (which is to say political) point of view, the blanket character-
ization about the “community of ethnic Germans,” which was continually
invoked in relevant commemorative publications, was a construction that
increasingly diverged from reality.10
These heterogeneous groups of male and female emigrants from Ger-
manic countries lived in Latin America in settlement colonies. Following
the unification of Germany in 1871, they could also be understood as an
“imperial diaspora,” even though the German Reich did not have any for-
mal colonial possessions in Latin America.11 Just the same, these ethnic
Germans cultivated their own ties between Germany and the host coun-
tries, which had varying degrees of intensity depending on the historical
context. Simultaneously, the growing communication opportunities in the
nineteenth century led to an increasingly close relationship with the old
fatherland, which in turn had gained greater appeal as a reference point
for emigrants since the Reich’s founding. Thus, under the paradigm of the
nation, an identifiable “discontinuous social space” of diaspora emerged
at the end of the nineteenth century. The constructors of the space were
aware of it and consciously reflected on it. This contributed to a brand of
politics that was attuned to it, the so-called Deutschtumspolitik (policy of
“Germanness”).12
The outbreak of the First World War appears to have postponed the
process once again. The war years continued long after to be recalled by
ethnic Germans in Latin America as a period of great solidarity, and they
were even romanticized in view of the internal conflicts of the 1920s and
1930s.13 From this perspective, it seemed as though the class and party divi-
sions between 1914 and 1918 had been reconciled by some kind of overseas
truce or “überseeischer Burgfrieden.” This was important for surviving in
a suddenly adverse or even openly hostile environment, where ethnic Ger-
mans were increasingly perceived for various reasons as foreign nationals
and thus a potentially dangerous group. The reconstruction of the national
identity of an ethnic minority under conditions of crisis can be appreci-
ated by focusing on the experience of the “Germans abroad” living in Latin
America during the First World War.
The questions that are pursued in the following generally reflect two
levels of analysis: the perspective of the Germans on the one hand, and
that of the host countries on the other. In what ways did the war change the
German populations in Argentina, Brazil, and Chile, the countries that are
under examination here? What measures were taken by the governments

in Latin America? To what extent did the behavior of Argentines, Brazil-
ians, or Chileans change toward their fellow ethnic German citizens? Did
the opinion of Latin Americans about the Germans fundamentally change?
What effect did these relationships have on the self-confidence of ethnic
German minorities and their sense of collective identity? What survival
mechanisms did they develop? The preceding questions are addressed in
what follows in three steps. First, I summarize how the German emigra-
tion to Latin America and the so-called Auslandsdeutschtum (“German-
ness” abroad) constituted a motive for the German expansion in the long
nineteenth century. Then I discuss the period of World War I and how the
United States’ entry into the war had a decisive impact on the attitude of
many Latin American countries while marking a turning point in the situ-
ation for the German minorities.
German Emigration to Argentina, Brazil, and Chile
The German emigration to Latin America began soon after the indepen-
dence wars in the early nineteenth century. It took place in three major
waves until the outbreak of the First World War and was an expression of
economic crises at home and the beginning of efforts to promote immigra-
tion in the countries of destination. The first of these waves occurred in the
1820s and mainly involved Brazil, which took in a large percentage of the
total German emigrant population. The second phase was in the 1850s, in
which more than 20,000 Germans immigrated to Latin America. Along
with Brazil, their destination countries included Chile and Argentina.
There was another surge to Latin America between 1866 and 1900, which,
according to German statistics, peaked in 1890 with 5,924 emigrants. After
the turn of the century, the number of emigrants to the subcontinent fell al-
most continuously, reaching an absolute low point of 579 in 1907. Numbers
started to rise again slightly in the years preceding the outbreak of the war.
The percentage of German overseas emigration to Latin America remained
well below that of German emigration to the United States.14
The most important Latin American destination for German emigrants
in the 1820s was Brazil. Chile and Argentina became more important later
on, whereas larger German settlement projects only occurred in exceptional
cases in the rest of Latin America. In Brazil, immigration was concentrated
in the southern states of Rio Grande do Sul, Paraná, and Santa Catarina.
In the areas that were still undeveloped, farm colonies emerged that soon
164 · Stefan Rinke
created their own cultural institutions and small-scale industries. A similar

pattern of German emigration could be found in southern Chile in the
areas around the cities of Valdivia, Osorno, Temuco, Concepción, Lake
Llanquihue, and, later on, the frontera. In Argentina, by contrast, closed
German settlements, comparable to those in Brazil’s southern states, were
not established before the war. Some colonies were established in the prov-
inces of Santa Fe and Entre Ríos. In 1914 about 40 percent of Germans lived
in the growing capital, and many found employment with the numerous
German-Argentine trading companies and other commercial enterprises.
The governments in all three countries encouraged German immigration
at least temporarily and more or less systematically through recruitment
and the granting of certain benefits. Private shipping and settlement com-
panies as well as emigration agencies also played a central role.15
In addition to the emigration of farmers and peasants to settled areas,
the migration of German entrepreneurs, businessmen, engineers, and offi-
cers to the major cities, harbors, and trade centers in all the Latin American
countries was already being observed in the nineteenth century as an im-
portant element of German emigration to the subcontinent. This “elite mi-
gration” was numerically insignificant but important in qualitative terms.
In many cases these emigrants came from Hanseatic towns and belonged
to internationally active trading companies, industrial concerns, or banks.
The financial strength of this elite, which included the leading representa-
tives of the expatriate German economy, gave them a wider leadership role.
Their presence was especially influential regarding the relevant issues of the
entire so-called German colony, the numerous German associations and
organizations, communication with the German Reich’s authorities, and in
dealings with the ruling classes of their host country.16
After the negative experiences of settlers in Brazil, the Prussian and later
German government adopted a restrictive emigration policy. This was re-
flected by the “von der Heydt rescript” from 1859, which prohibited the
recruitment of emigrants to Brazil. It was also facilitated by the view, shared
by German chancellor Otto von Bismarck, that emigration was fundamen-
tally harmful to the economy. Nonetheless, in the 1870s the nationalist right
started to demand taking control of the inevitable emigration to countries,
notably Brazil, where the emigrants lived in closed settlements and were
therefore able to preserve their national identity. Commercial, ideological,
and political reasons went along with “world-political” motivations that
ranged from exerting informal influence to creating a “new Germany.” The
revision of the emigration legislation in 1896–97, which made the routing
of emigration to southern Brazil a national priority, was evidence of the

changed view on emigration. However, as the number of emigrants con-
tinually decreased from the turn of the century, large-scale settlement proj-
ects could no longer be realized. The focus therefore turned more intensely
toward the ethnic Germans already living abroad, who became the objects
of a new policy of “Germanness” (Deutschtumspolitik).17
Advocates and opponents both agreed that the emigrants and their
descendants—the “Germanness abroad”—had to maintain their national
heritage (Volkstum). Otherwise they would simply be absorbed as “cultural
fertilizer” by the host countries and ultimately be of no value to the German
Reich. This belief was formed in the nineteenth century and was based on
an ethnically oriented national consciousness, embodied in the definition
of jus sanguinis set down in the Nationality Law of the German Empire and
States of 1913. With the beginning of Wilhelminian “world politics” in 1890,
the Germans abroad increasingly occupied the public’s attention. The or-
ganizations of the political right such as the Pan-German League, the Ger-
man Colonial Society, and the General German School Association found
that “Germanness abroad” could serve as an instrument for the realization
of their colonial aspirations. These were first aimed at informal expansion
entailing territorial expansion over the long term. As the matter touched
upon commercial interests, the export sector, in particular shipping lines
and Hanseatic trading organizations, supported these circles.18
A variety of arguments were made about the significance of the Ger-
mans abroad. Thus, as consumers of German products and services, they
would be able to boost the export sector while providing the raw materials
the German Reich needed to confront international competition. More-
over, as pioneers and representatives of the German people overseas, the
Germans abroad would be given the responsibility of improving the repu-
tation of their homeland around the world and demonstrating the assumed
superiority of the German culture and race. To this end, close cultural and
religious ties were established between the Germans and the ethnic Ger-
mans outside of the country. This was made possible, for instance, through
the support of German-language schools abroad, which were assigned the
task of keeping alive the mother tongue. Latin America was thought of as a
special target area. The prospect of creating isolated settlement structures
was deemed essential to having an active policy of “Germanness” aimed at
preserving the German national heritage.19
In this context, the organizations established by the Germans abroad
played a central role. A large number of German associations were founded,
166 · Stefan Rinke
especially in Argentina, Brazil, and Chile. The life of the expatriate German
community was organized by associations. Recreational activities included
gymnastics, shooting sports, bowling, and singing. There were also social
services designed to support volunteer fire departments and health and
burial funds as well as hospitals, schools, and churches. Military or veter-
ans’ associations considered it their mission to strengthen the patriotism of
Germans abroad. In this, they were supported by an ever growing number
of military officers from the Reich who since the late nineteenth century
served as advisers in the armies of Argentina and Chile.20 The urban ethnic
German elite also created exclusive German associations or clubs that had
their own buildings and whose rooms in turn were used by other associa-
tions. The heads of the German associations in the main cities also mostly
understood themselves as representatives of the entire German “colony” of
their respective countries. At the same time, these clubs were often in close
contact with the social organizations of the Latin American elites.21
These associations were initially examples of self-support due to the ab-
sence of the state and the negligence and arbitrariness of the authorities.
Beyond this, the associations represented meeting places with the more or
less explicit self-understanding of contributing to the preservation of the
German cultural identity or Deutschtum. This was accomplished by main-
taining traditions, norms, and the German language, especially through
institutions such as schools and churches. This aspiration was closely tied
to a sense of cultural superiority. Pride was engendered through the power-
political advancement of the old fatherland since the founding of the Reich
but above all since the beginning of the Kaiser’s “world politics.” It was
further bolstered by German advisers working in support of Latin America
and the attractiveness of their schools and hospitals, even to non-German
groups. Especially in urban environments such as Buenos Aires, where in-
teraction with the foreign environment was inevitable and the proportion
of German nationals in the German community was high, a self-image
was cultivated of a closed, nonpolitical, respectable, and hardworking com
munity.22
Nonetheless, the monolithic community—evoked by historical refer-
ences and the very use of the term “Germanness” in commemorative pub-
lications or other elite bulletins—was an idealized construction. What is
striking, rather, is the heterogeneity of the ethnic German groups. Mem-
bership to different social classes with conflicting policy objectives was
particularly noteworthy. Further dividing lines included religious confes-
sion, regional distribution, the different experiences of life in the city versus
the countryside, and the contrasts between German nationals and those of
German descent.
A number of organizations and sociopolitical actors in the Reich saw
it as their duty to oppose the acculturation and assimilation tendencies
among the Germans abroad. An important role was played by the Asso-
ciation for Germanness Abroad (Verein für das Deutschtum im Ausland;
VDA), which grew out of the General German School Association in 1908.
Its goal was to preserve the national and cultural identity of ethnic Ger-
mans, above all through supporting German schools and awakening in-
terest in the Reich in “Germanness abroad.” The focal point of the VDA’s
work was the German minorities in Europe, although the local group in
Hamburg founded in 1903 dealt specifically with supporting Latin Amer-
ica. After the turn of the century, there was a discernible increase within the
context of “world politics” in the level of attention being directed overseas
and a growing involvement in nationalist and pan-German agitation.23
In addition to the VDA, the churches were the most important trans-
national promoters of “Germanness” before the war. In many cases, the
parish was in charge of the German-language schools and the German
clergy were active as instructors. This political self-understanding of “Ger-
manness” was especially pronounced in the Protestant church, whose goal
of preserving belief among the Germans abroad was closely aligned with
the effort to maintain the German national heritage (Volkstumsarbeit).
Their primary area of activity in Latin America was in the southern Bra-
zilian states. According to contemporary estimates, more than half of the
Germans and German descendants in Brazil belonged to the Protestant
faith. Spiritual care was mostly conducted by pastors who were sent from
Prussia. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, a movement began to-
ward greater centralization of the traditionally independent churches. The
establishment of the Synod of Rio Grande in 1886 at the initiative of Wil-
helm Rotermund was especially important in this regard. This undertak-
ing intensified after the turn of the century. Thus, the German Evangelical
Association of Parishioners of Santa Catarina and the Central Brazilian
Synod for the states of Rio de Janeiro, Minas Gerais, São Paulo, and Espírito
Santo were founded in 1911 and 1912, respectively. Already by 1900, ties
were established to the Protestant senior church council (Oberkirchenrat),
which sent a permanent representative to Brazil for the first time in 1911.
In contrast to these organizations, the Evangelical Lutheran Synod of Santa
Catarina, Paraná and Other Countries of South America, founded in 1905,
received their pastor from the Lutheran church treasury associations. In
168 · Stefan Rinke
addition, the rivalry with the Missouri Synod, started by German immi-
grants in the United States, was becoming apparent.24
In Argentina the share of Protestants among the Germans and ethnic
Germans was estimated to be around 65 percent. From 1899 the majority
were concentrated in the German Evangelical Synod of La Plata, which,
along with fifteen listed parishes in Argentina, also included three parishes
with various locations for services in Uruguay and Paraguay. The largest
congregation was in Buenos Aires. Beyond this, some parishes existed
in the provinces of Entre Ríos and Santa Fe and in the newly established
settlements in the northern territories, where spiritual needs were usually
met by itinerant preachers. Along with youth ministries and social ser-
vices, evangelical churches maintained about thirty schools, primarily in
the province of Entre Ríos. The Missouri Synod had been active in La Plata
since 1905. They ran a theological college in Crespo.25
Another German Lutheran synod was founded in Latin America in 1906
in Chile, where about two-thirds of the Germans abroad were Protestants.
In 1914 it comprised ten parishes. Besides the large urban parishes in Con-
cepción, Valparaíso, and Santiago, there were further parishes in Temuco,
Valdivia, Osorno, and Puerto Montt and near Lake Llanquihue. Due to the
vast distances and a strong desire for self-sufficiency, closer relations did
not develop among the parishes within the Chile Synod. At any rate, the
“national” work in collaboration with the German heritage organizations
was accorded great importance in all communities.26
The Catholic Church, by contrast, did not take a systematic approach to
promoting the German heritage, although it was represented by the work
of German orders in Latin America. The majority of the scattered Catholic
Germans abroad were not served by German clergy but belonged to the
respective Latin American parishes. This did not apply, however, to the
southern states of Brazil, where there were larger, to some extent religiously
segregated German settlements and about 40 percent of the Germans and
ethnic Germans were Catholic. Of particular importance was the work
of the Jesuits from German provinces, who were principally active in the
school and community ministries in Rio Grande do Sul from 1842 onward.
They also operated a seminary in São Leopoldo, where the language of in-
struction was nonetheless Portuguese. The Franciscans started to build up
Brazilian ecclesiastical provinces again in 1891. Besides this, Benedictines,
Salesians, and other German clerics and some diocesan priests were also
active in Brazil.27
Similar to Brazil, the German Catholic Church’s pastoral care to the Ger-
mans abroad in Argentina and Chile was tended to by various orders. By
the nineteenth century, Jesuits, Redemptorists, and especially Divine Word
missionaries were present in Argentina. Due to their efforts various com-
munities were established, as in Buenos Aires (1911). For the most part, the
fathers of the Divine Word served as teachers and operated a number of
the various Catholic schools. From the turn of the century the Divine Word
missionaries worked in Chile as pedagogues along with their missionary
work through the Bavarian Capuchins. The children of the Latin Ameri-
can elites were also taught at their schools. Numerous conflicts arose in all
countries due to the coexistence of Germans of different confessions.28
The Reich’s leadership got involved in the effort to preserve the German
heritage. Accordingly, the kaiser’s navy periodically visited important Latin
American ports and was celebrated by the Germans abroad. Already at this
stage, these visits were intended to counteract the existing ideological and
social conflicts and the differing interests of expatriate and ethnic Germans
through an appeal to shared patriotism. Enthusiasm over the German na-
val power, especially among the Germans in Latin America, often led to
the presence of naval detachments at the founding of naval associations,
which then affiliated themselves with the central headquarters in Germany.
Grand Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz consequently noted in hindsight that
the navy had done more than the foreign office to cultivate “Germanness”
overseas.29
One of the main instruments for government agencies and private or-
ganizations to promote “Germanness” were the so-called German inter-
national schools (deutsche Auslandsschulen). A secret memorandum by
the education department of the foreign office, dated April 1914, laid out
the current situation and the status of their development. Latin America’s
central importance in the report was obvious. According to a conservative
estimate, there were a total of some 900 schools around the world, of which
734 were located in 12 Latin American countries; 600 schools were identi-
fied in Brazil alone. In terms of the total number of schools, Argentina
came next with 70, and Chile with 40. Only then did Romania, a European
state, follow with the fourth-highest number of schools at 26.30
Since the mid-nineteenth century and, more particularly, the beginning
of the kaiser’s “world politics,” there was a steady increase in the number
of German schools registered abroad. Many of the more important insti-
tutions in Latin America were founded in this period, including those in
170 · Stefan Rinke
Santiago (1891), Buenos Aires (the Belgranoschule, 1892), Asunción (1893),

Caracas (1894), Mexico (1894), Havana (1898), Guatemala (1900), Porto
Alegre (1901), Punta Arenas (1907), Lima (1910), and San Jose (1912). These
and several of the existing older schools strove for closer cooperation with
the German school system in order to help their students gain access to
German universities. Indeed, prior to 1914 only three schools in Latin
America (the Belgranoschule and the Germaniaschule in Buenos Aires,
and the Deutsche Schule in Mexico) had the right to issue certificates for
students to gain admittance to the one-year military service. The German
government’s interest in the foreign schools was demonstrated after the
turn of the century by increased contributions from the Reich’s schools
fund, inspection trips and the official placement of teachers. All the same,
regular criticism came from the Germans abroad about inadequate aid and
their home country’s disinterest.31
Since state support was generally denied to private German-speaking
schools in Latin America, the issue of funding was a central concern. Even
before the war, the majority of the costs were covered by tuition. In ad-
dition, the Germans abroad who were organized through school associa-
tions raised money by means of dues, school events, and donations. Further
money came from the Reich’s schools fund, which was allocated by the
German foreign office according to significance, need, and the availability
of resources.32
To sum up, despite efforts to promote a policy of “Germanness,” a pro-
cess of assimilation and acculturation was apparent even before the First
World War. However, it was highly variable for the expatriate German
groups in the different states, the diverse social strata and confessions, and
in terms of its development over time. In the case of Chile, the process
was first identified among the lower classes in the cities. Catholics were
far more affected than Protestants. Germans abroad of the middle class
were also able to quickly assimilate if they married into the nation’s upper
echelon. Other recognized paths toward assimilation were marrying into
the local elite and the gradual abandonment of the native language, which
often went hand in hand with enrolment in foreign-language schools.33
The Impact of World War I
When the war first broke out, all Latin American countries proclaimed
their strict neutrality.34 Initially the German minorities appeared to have
no cause for concern. It was clear from the outset, however, that the conflict
this time would not be limited to Europe but would also make its pres-
ence felt in Latin America. The Allies successfully implemented a new type
of economic warfare with their naval blockade and the destruction of the
German transoceanic cables. Contacts with Germany were already greatly
restricted in September 1914.35 For the many Germans actively involved in
trade, this caused enormous disadvantages.
The Allies’ most effective tool against German economic interests in
Latin America proved to be the “blacklist” policy. It derived from the Brit-
ish Trading with the Enemy Act from December 1915. A blacklist was first
published in February 1916 that contained the names of German, ethnic
German, or German-friendly businesses and companies where German
capital was invested. The ban, which restricted all Allied firms from con-
ducting financial transactions with these companies, was enforced with the
help of a comprehensive control and espionage system. This affected not
only German and ethnic German companies but also their Latin American
business partners.36
The aim of the blacklist was the long-term destruction of German over-
seas trade and German investments in Latin America. The measures had
their intended effect. Purchasing raw materials, selling goods, applying for
credit, and using services now all became a problem. Long-standing busi-
ness relationships were dissolved. German employees at English and French
companies were dismissed. At the same time, the cost of living increased.
Many Germans abroad found their livelihoods severely threatened. Unem-
ployment among the Germans contributed to significant social tensions.
There were fewer and fewer neutral firms willing to cooperate since they,
too, were fearful of appearing on the blacklist themselves.37
Besides the impact of the specific economic measures taken by the Al-
lies, the interests of ethnic Germans were also affected by the anti-German
sentiment. Pro-Ally propaganda organizations, for example in Brazil, had
a hand in its cultivation. Commentary favoring the Allies predominated in
the Argentine, Brazilian, and Chilean press. Only a few conservative news-
papers such as the Chilean Ilustrado Diario sympathized with the Central
Powers. Certainly the “wave of hatred for Germans” identified by some
contemporaries at the beginning of the war was an exaggeration. Nonethe-
less, it pointed to the fact that Germany’s reputation and, by extension, that
of the Latin American German minorities had suffered considerably due
to the invasion of neutral Belgium.38 Even German commentators were
forced to conclude that the press coverage accurately represented much
of the public’s opinion in Latin American. More precisely, it reflected the
172 · Stefan Rinke
attitude of the dominant political and economic elites, who had developed
stronger ties with France and England than with Germany due to cultural
affinities and shared economic interests.39 If the “Germans” in Latin Amer-
ica were often viewed as hardworking and industrious, they also had to
contend with the stereotype of being arrogant and militaristic. The First
World War had an obviously negative effect on the perception of many
observers.
The twofold pressure emanating from the anti-German sentiment and
the Allied economic war created new problems that had devastating conse-
quences for the daily existence of the German minorities. It contributed to
a “siege mentality” among the Germans abroad, which provoked defensive
reactions and new strategies for survival.40 Economically, the close ties to
parts of the Latin American elites that had been traditionally good were
maintained and strengthened. They were indispensable for camouflaging
German goods through the use of the names of business partners. The do-
mestic market and adjoining states increased in importance for the trade
and direct investments of Germans abroad. Until April 1917, the United
States was an important market and supplier of raw materials and goods.
In general, the war years led to a withdrawal of national economies from
the world market and a stronger focus on the region.41
In addition, the pressure from the economic war brought about the
merger of various interest groups. German Argentine trading compa-
nies, for example, were organized as the Committee for the Freedom of
Trade, which sought to influence policy through lobbying. In Brazil, Ger-
man banks and leading businesses founded a special insurance company
called Companhia Internacional de Seguros and thus made themselves in-
dependent from the Allied insurers but also from those of the Reich.42 A
direct response to the introduction of the blacklists was the founding of
German chambers of commerce and trade associations in 1916. Chambers
of commerce were established in Buenos Aires, Valparaíso, and Montevi-
deo. In Rio de Janeiro, the association of German Brazilian companies was
founded with local affiliates in São Paulo, Porto Alegre, Bahia, and Pernam-
buco. These organizations of trading companies, representatives of German
industrial companies, and banks looked after their shared interests. They
also supported the German propaganda efforts through donations to vari-
ous Latin American newspapers and their involvement in the founding of
a separate Spanish-language paper in Buenos Aires, La Unión.43
Besides the central economic aspect in the foundation of these inter-
est groups in the main cities and ports, cultural and ethnic unity—that is,
the German identity—once again became an integration factor. The eth-

nic Germans in Latin America had also been infected by the nationalist
euphoria in the Reich. Many tried to make their way to Germany in or-
der to actively join in the struggle. In several places, donations exceeded
expectations.44
The increasing pressure, however, meant that a stronger organizational
commitment was necessary. At first, charitable societies and press and in-
formational committees were created to address the most urgent problems.
The high point was the establishment of so-called Volksbünde. They as-
pired to unite all Germans and ethnic Germans under a national ideal and
give visible confirmation of the overseas truce in Argentina, Chile, and to a
lesser extent in Brazil.45 The German Federation for Argentina (Deutscher
Volksbund für Argentinien; DVA) and the German-Chilean Association
(Deutsch-Chilenischer Bund; DCB) were established by 1916. A large pro-
portion of the members were teachers, professors, journalists, and busi-
ness leaders. The new foundations set the goal for themselves of becoming
umbrella organizations with local groups spread across the country. They
wanted to create a connection between the German nationals mostly living
in the cities and the ethnic Germans in the provinces, and they wanted to
reconcile the old conflicts between Catholics and Protestants.
The fact that this united front could be quite fragile, however, is shown
by the events in Chile. On the issue of membership, a compromise could
only be achieved after long negotiations. It provided for the inclusion of
ethnic Germans who, while lacking German-language skills, still reflected
the “German attitude.” In 1916 the so-called Großbund aller deutschen
Feldgrauen (General Association of German Field Greys) was established
as a counterorganization.46 Still, the DCB ultimately prevailed. In 1917 ap-
proximately one-fifth of Chile’s ethnic Germans were organized in fifty lo-
cal branches of the association. The DCB therefore had much greater suc-
cess than the DVA. The members of these Volksbünde devoted themselves
in special committees to promoting German-language schools, nurturing
the German language and culture, counseling immigrants, and assisting
the unemployed and the needy as well as to propagandizing the war and
establishing ties with neighboring countries.47
A people’s federation project was also initiated in Brazil, which was
nonetheless condemned to failure because of its utopian dimension and
the specific local conditions. From mid-1915 the Swiss pastor Gottlob Wil-
helm Zimmerli campaigned on behalf of the German foreign office to set
up a Germanic Confederation for South America, which would eventually
174 · Stefan Rinke
comprise the entire subcontinent.48 Early successes, such as the creation

of local groups in Porto Alegre and Blumenau, could not belie the funda-
mental criticism raised by the German-Brazilian side against Zimmerli.
Given the feelings of irritation toward the Germans, especially in Brazil,
the mere idea of a “Germanic Confederation” gave rise to suspicions. The
anti-German Brazilian newspapers and the British Daily Mail, in fact, were
all too happy to accept the news as proof of German expansionism in Latin
America. Since Zimmerli lost his official backing, the Germanic Confed-
eration dissolved again in 1917.49 The main reasons for the failure of these
initiatives in Brazil were ultimately the rapidly growing tensions with the
German Reich due to the U-boat warfare and the marked distrust before
the war of the seemingly autonomous German communities in the south-
ern states.
Anti-German Sentiments
The situation escalated even further with the United States’ entry into the
war in April 1917. The blacklists were greatly expanded, and their enforce-
ment became much more effective. Thus, among other things, so-called
gray lists were introduced that contained suspicious neutral companies.
The “white lists,” by the same token, verified the companies that were not
under suspicion. As a result of the United States’ war involvement, the year
1917 witnessed a severing of ties, and many Latin American countries en-
tered the war on the side of the Allies.50 In these countries, the German
minorities’ situation was sometimes very tense, whereas in some neutral
states it remained undisturbed. The following examples show the range of
responses of three different countries.
The reaction in Brazil was especially severe. Because of the sinking of
Brazilian ships by German U-boats and other diplomatic incidents that
were detailed in the pro-Allied press, tensions already ran high from the
beginning of 1917. These coincided with attacks on German minority in-
stitutions. A few days after Brazil suspended its diplomatic relations with
Berlin in April, anti-German riots were incited in Porto Alegre. Within
three days, around three hundred houses were looted and destroyed. Soon
after, the unrest spread to Pelotas. A second wave of mob action against
German Brazilians came after the Brazilian declaration of war at the end of
October, impacting such cities as Curitiba, Santos, and Rio de Janeiro.51
The anti-German press campaign and the reservations about the alleg-
edly arrogant and even racist ethnic Germans were undoubtedly important
factors in the outbreaks of violence. The Germans’ lack of integration in
the Brazilian commonwealth was now a cause for their blame. The massive
mobilization of Brazilians points to the fact that there were a variety of
anti-German stereotypes and emotions among the population, especially
the sizable Italian communities, which could be tapped into relatively
easily. This included a fear of an alleged German takeover, the proverbial
“German threat.” The spontaneity of the outbursts was put into question,
however, for large companies and German newspapers were systematically
attacked. It is thus likely that, along with the anti-German sentiment, bribes
from the Allies also played a role.52
The Brazilian government was not in a position to effectively check the
disorder. Be that as it may, various measures were implemented after the
outbreak of war that made no distinction between German nationals and
German Brazilians. As a consequence, all the publications and services in
the German language were banned, a measure that hit the Protestant com-
munities especially hard. A censorship office was set up, and the German
schools were closed if they did not begin teaching lessons in Portuguese.
Another set of laws was directed against the economic activity of the Ger-
mans. Among other things, the branches of the German banks were put
under government control and the president was given the right to sell
off German property. Finally, a state of emergency was proclaimed in the
southern states, leading to the internment of several hundred Germans.53
The pressure increased considerably for the German minority in neu-
tral Argentina, too. The campaign undertaken by entente-friendly orga-
nizations to break with the German Reich intensified after the entries of
Brazil and the United States into the war. The sinking of Argentine ships
by German U-boats was viewed by many Argentines as a provocation, and
large anti-German rallies took place in April and June 1917. However, un-
like in Brazil, there was also a vocal movement at this time of the so-called
neutralistas, who recruited themselves from the ranks of military officers
influenced by German training, Catholic priests, and other Conservatives.
The climax of the anti-German riots followed a few months later in connec-
tion with a diplomatic incident known as the Luxburg Affair, in which the
Argentine foreign minister was insulted by the German ambassador. As the
German educator in Argentina Wilhelm Keiper put it, September 13, 1917
turned into a “black day” for Buenos Aires’ German minority when their
institutions were exposed to massive destruction and looting. Just as with
176 · Stefan Rinke
the outbreaks of violence in Brazil, the violence in Argentina was hardly

entirely spontaneous. The pro-Allied interest groups hired unemployed
sailors to help facilitate the unrest.54
By contrast, the situation in Chile remained calm. No riots were car-
ried out against the German minority, even though the vast majority of
newspapers—especially the leading El Mercurio—made no secret of their
pro-Allied stance. In Chile, it was primarily the external pressure of the
Allied economic war that drove the Germans and ethnic Germans closer
together.55
The growing strain caused the German minorities to respond by gradu-
ally adapting their survival strategies. For instance, the establishment and
consolidation of the German-Chilean Confederation did not fail to cause
concern. The pro-Allied Chilean press further evoked the phantom of the
“German threat.” The German-Chilean Confederation accordingly needed
to take these attitudes into consideration with regard to its activities. In
light of the anti-German riots, the German Federation for Argentina im-
posed even stronger restrictions. Outwardly, the German organizations in
Chile and Argentina tried to attract as little attention as possible. In both
cases, however, the German groups recognized the importance of main-
taining informal links with leading politicians, business representatives,
and opinion leaders in order to exert influence, even using corruption, as
in Argentina.56
The most lasting change for the German minority occurred in Brazil.
There harassment and hostility exacerbated their already existing tendency
toward isolation. Rising unemployment caused economic difficulties. Nu-
merous associations responded to the measures of the Brazilian govern-
ment by dissolving themselves or by changing their names into Portuguese
names. The example of João Becker—the German-born archbishop of Rio
Grande do Sul who banned preaching in German—demonstrates the ten-
dency to cooperate with the state. The life-threatening danger that at first
seemed to emanate from the Brazilian legislation moderated over time be-
cause the regulations were not uniform in all states and were not always
ruthlessly enforced.57
Conclusion
World War I confronted the heterogeneous German groups in Latin

American countries with a completely new and unexpected situation. The
external pressure was first manifested in the Allied economic war, which
impacted almost all Germans and ethnic Germans with varying degrees of
intensity. Another factor was the anti-German sentiment among the pub-
lic, which was fueled by an entente-friendly press. From 1917 the situation
for Germans abroad became considerably more precarious, especially in
Brazil. First, anti-German legislation was an existential threat to the Ger-
man minorities’ social life, schools, churches, and associations. Even when
compared to laws of the United States, these laws were unusually severe.58
The scale of the violence against the Germans was also unprecedented. As
motivating factors, the anti-German resentment and the perception of the
Germans as a racist, marginalized, sectarian, and economically privileged
group proved to be as important as the bribes from pro-Allied forces.
After the war, however, the escalation of violence was also quickly forgot-
ten. Opinion about the Germans remained ambivalent. On the one hand,
the Germans continued to be appreciated in the Latin American societies
as industrious and valuable citizens; on the other hand, they were seen as
a state within a state, and thus as a potential danger. Yet a gradual change
was evident. During the war, but especially in the subsequent two decades
and in the wake of growing nationalism, the Latin American states were no
longer willing to grant the German minorities extensive cultural autonomy
above and beyond other immigrant groups.
The Germans responded to this threat with a two-pronged approach:
first, by intensifying relations with Latin American elites and, second, by
attempting to reconstruct their national group identity on the basis of
ethnic categories. The concept of a national association, which had reso-
nated greatly during the war, indicated the revival of these ideas. Partly
voluntarily and partly in response to external pressure, German Argentin-
eans, German Chileans, and German Brazilians now defined themselves
as Germans in a Latin American setting, while their awareness of being
Argentineans, Chileans, or Brazilians with German ancestry faded into the
background. Moreover, they were perceived by their environment in refer-
ence to the category of national difference, which also had an effect on their
self-perception. In any event, the overseas truce proved to be fragile. There
were already visible signs of deterioration in the final year of the war. When
the largest German emigration wave to Latin America took place after the
war and the Latin American countries intensified their nationalization ef-
forts, it became clear that the aspect of ideological differences within the
German groups outweighed the feelings of national solidarity.59
178 · Stefan Rinke
Notes
1. See Statistik des Deutschen Reiches, vol. 360, 229; Bernecker and Fischer, “Deutsche
in Lateinamerika”; and Kellenbenz and Schneider, “La emigración alemana.”
2. Penny, “German Polycentrism.”
3. Oberkrome, “Geschichte, Volk und Theorie.”
4. See Newton, German Buenos Aires, 26–29; Sauveur-Henn, Un siècle, 321–40; Roche,
La colonisation, 482–86; Luebke, Germans in Brazil, 47–49; Young, Germans in Chile,
155–62; and Blancpain, Les Allemands, 596–602.
5. Blancpain, “Des visées pangermanistes”; and Kloosterhuis, “Friedliche Imperialisten.”
Even before the founding of the Reich, the greater integration of ethnic Germans in the
German national consciousness had been discussed; see Weidenfeller, VDA, 28–97.
6. Bilot, Allemandes au Chili.
7. This also applies, of course, to such terms as “German abroad,” “German school,” and
so on. On this point, see Rinke, “Der letzte freie Kontinent,” 337.
8. For Chile, see Young, Germans in Chile, 166–67.
9. In my distinction between the concepts “ethnic” and “national,” I follow Hobsbawm,
“Nation, State, Ethnicity, Religion,” 38.
10. There is great need in this area of research for a comparative analysis on the history
of German minorities in Latin America that is oriented to modern ethno- and sociohistor-
ical issues. An important step in this direction has been made by Tobler and Waldmann,
“German Colonies.”
11. On this point, see Cohen, Global Diasporas, 68–76.
12. Osterhammel, Die Verwandlung der Welt, 175–76.
13. See, e.g., Lütge, Hoffmann, and Körner, Geschichte, 368–70. See also Rinke, “Export
einer politischen Kultur,” 353–80.
14. Statistik des Deutschen Reiches, 360:229; and Bernecker and Fischer, “Deutsche in
Lateinamerika,” 197–98.
15. Roche, La colonisation; and Oberacker and Ilg, “Die Deutschen in Brasilien.” For
Chile, see above all, plus Blancpain, Les Allemands. For Argentina, see Hoffmann, “Die
Deutschen in Argentinien,” 84–96 and 107.
16. Bernecker and Fischer, “Deutsche in Lateinamerika,” 207–10.
17. Fischer, “Deutsche und schweizerische”; and Fiebig von Hase, Lateinamerika,
1:192–247. See also Hell, “Der Griff nach Südbrasilien”; and Kannapin, “Die deutsch-ar-
gentinischen Beziehungen,” 74–86, 117–49 and 230–48.
18. Fiebig von Hase, Lateinamerika, 1:202–18; and Blancpain, “Des visées pangerman-
istes,” 456–60. For more on the greater incorporation of ethnic Germans into the German
national consciousness before the Reich’s founding, see Weidenfeller, VDA, 28–97. On the
question of citizenship, see ibid., 339–41.
19. The programmatic statements on this issue prior to 1914 are legion. On this point,
see the bibliography in Fiebig von Hase, Lateinamerika, 2:1110–49; and Deutsches Aus-
lands-Institut, ed., Bibliographisches.
20. Schaefer, Deutsche Militärhilfe.
21. Newton, German Buenos Aires, 26–29; Roche, La colonisation, 482–86; Luebke,
Germans in Brazil, 47–49; Young, Germans in Chile, 155–62; and Blancpain, Les Alle-
mands, 596–602.
22. Blancpain, Les Allemands, 597; Roche, La colonisation, 483; and Newton, German
Buenos Aires, 28. In 1929 Schreiber (Das Auslanddeutschtum, 305–7) counted a total of
fourteen German hospitals in Argentina, Brazil, and Chile. The largest was in Buenos
Aires, with two hundred beds and sixteen doctors.
23. Weidenfeller, VDA, 301–22 and 363.
24. Prien, Evangelische Kirchwerdung, 113–203. In summary form, see also, Prien, “Die
‘Deutsch-evangelische Kirche.’”
25. Gabler, “Kirche und Schule,” 119; Petersen et al., Handwörterbuch, 1:135–36; and
Newton, German Buenos Aires, 25–26.
26. Politisches Archiv des Auswärtigen Amtes (PAAA), 79124, Gesandtschaft, Die
deutsche Kulturpropaganda; Kohlsdorf, “Die deutsch-evangelische Kirche in Chile”; and
Gabler, “Kirche und Schule,” 120.
27. Kleinschmidt, Das Auslandsdeutschtum, 236–57; Luebke, Germans in Brazil, 38–39;
and Brunn, Deutschland und Brasilien, 192–94.
28. Kleinschmidt, Das Auslandsdeutschtum, 230–35; Petersen et al., Handwörterbuch,
133–35; and Blancpain, Les Allemands, 602–13 and 751–82.
29. Von Tirpitz, Erinnerungen, 72; Brunn, Deutschland und Brasilien, 194–98; Newton,
German Buenos Aires, 30; and Blancpain, “Des visées pangermanistes,” 451. On the naval
associations, see Ojeda-Ebert, Deutsche Einwanderung, 128; and Fiebig von Hase, Lateina-
merika, 1:77.
30. The memoir has been published in Düwell, Deutschlands auswärtige Kulturpolitik,
268–370. See also Hell, “Griff nach Südbrasilien,” 189–200 and 235–36.
31. Schmidt, “Grundlinien der geschichtlichen.” On the expatriate German criticism,
see Wilfert, Die deutsche Auslandsschule, 8–9.
32. Foreign office memorandum from April 1914, reprinted in Düwell, Deutschlands
auswärtige Kulturpolitik, 307–14 and 333–70.
33. See the overview in Young, Germans in Chile, 166–67.
34. Worth consulting on the political attitudes in Latin America during World War I is
Martin, Latin America and the War.
35. For a general discussion on the Allies’ blockade, see Hardach, Der Erste Weltkrieg,
19–33.
36. Couyoumdjian, Chile y Gran Bretaña, 137–50. On the handling of the blacklists
in Argentina, see Bundesarchiv Potsdam (BAP), Auswärtiges Amt (AA), 4732, Deutsche
Handelskammer Buenos Aires, Bericht über die Lage des deutschen Handels in Argenti-
nien zu Anfang des Jahres 1919 (Buenos Aires, January 23, 1919). On Chile, see BAP, AA,
44813, Deutsche Handelskammer Valparaiso, Bericht über die Lage des deutschen Handels
in Chile zu Anfang 1918 (Valparaíso, December 14, 1918); and Hartwig, “Die Methoden des
Handelskrieges.”
37. Bundesarchiv Koblenz (BA), AA, 6674, Handelssachverständiger Bruchhausen,
Generalkonsulat, to AA (Buenos Aires, May 22, 1916). On the problem of unemployment
during the war, see Newton, German Buenos Aires, 38–45. Sauveur-Henn, Un siècle, 528.
The problem was also encountered in Brazil: Luebke, Germans in Brazil, 196–99. On the
effect of the blacklists in Brazil, see ibid, 113–14.
180 · Stefan Rinke
38. Gast, Deutschland und Südamerika, 9–10.

39. Sperber, “Die Haltung.”
40. Luebke, Germans in Brazil, 92.
41. On trade with the United States, see BAP, Reichswirtschaftsministerium (RWM),
929, Konsul Rößler to AA (Rio Grande do Sul, September 24, 1915). According to a report
from Chile, the terms of the blacklist were often bypassed by merchants from the Allied
countries, who were able to secure lucrative deals in this way; BAP, AA, 44813, Erckert to
AA (Santiago de Chile, April 26, 1920). On the efforts of German companies under the
terms of the blacklists, see also Sheinin, “Diplomacy of Control,” 175–76.
42. On the committees that were founded, see Gravil, Anglo–Argentine Connection, 137.
On Companhia Internacional de Seguros, see Zimmermann, Theodor Wille, 157.
43. BAP, AA, 44674, Consul von der Heyde to AA (São Paulo, February 23, 1917); and
Wahrhold Drascher, “Die deutschen Handelskammern in Südamerika,” Der Auslands-
deutsche 7 (1924), 702–4. On La Unión, see PAAA (Politisches Archiv des Auswärtigen
Amtes), 121902, Ambassador Luxburg to AA (Buenos Aires, April 25, 1916).
44. On the solidarity of the Germans in Latin America, see BAP, Deutsche Kolonialge-
sellschaft, 297, Deutsch-Südamerikanische Gesellschaft, “An die Deutsch-Südamerikaner
und die Südamerikanischen Freunde Deutschlands” (August 1914); Gast, Deutschland und
Südamerika, 37–39; Newton, German Buenos Aires, 32–51; and Sauveur-Henn, Un siècle,
529–30.
45. See, e.g., Luebke, Germans in Brazil; and Blancpain, Les Allemands, 831–61.
46. On Argentina, see Hayn, “Gründung und Kampfjahre,” 133; “Die Tätigkeit des
Deutschen Volksbundes”; and Newton, German Buenos Aires, 57–61. On Chile, see PAAA,
Gesandtschaft Santiago de Chile, Schu 10 f1, DCB, Ambassador Erckert to Wilhelm Muen-
nich (Santiago de Chile, December 1, 1917). See also the contemporary depiction of Kurt
Bauer, “Die Chiledeutschen während des Weltkrieges,” Auslandsdeutsche Volksforschung 2
(1938): 464–72; Blancpain, Les Allemands, 576–77 and 845–53; and Ojeda-Ebert, Deutsche
Einwanderung, 130–34.
47. On the work of the DCB, see BA, Deutsches Ausland-Institut, Archiv (DAI-Ar-
chiv), Neu/1208, Paul Oestreich, “An das Deutschtum in Chile,” Proceedings of the DCB,
September 28–29, 1917 in Concepción. Santiago de Chile, 1917, 1–7; and BA, Deutsches
Ausland-Institut, Archiv (DAI-Archiv), DCB, “Kurzgefasster Bericht ueber die Bundes-
taetigkeit seit der Gruendung bis zur letzten Tagung im Dezember 1925,” Concepción
1930, 7–10.
48. PAAA, 20949, note for Under Secretary Zimmermann (Berlin, June 20, 1916); Lu-
ebke (Germans in Brazil, 107) correctly supposes that Zimmerli came to Brazil as an agent
of the German government.
49. On Zimmerli’s successes, see PAAA, 20949, Erckert to AA (Santiago de Chile, Oc-
tober 24, 1916). On the critique, see PAAA, 20948, Ambassador Pauli to AA (Petrópolis,
February 22 and March 3, 1916); ibid., Ernst Rotermund to AA (São Leopoldo, February
18, 1916). On the anti-German propaganda, see PAAA, 20949, Daily Mail (September 14,
1916); PAAA, 60027, Counsellor Will, note (Berlin December 23, 1921).
50. Bailey, Policy of the United States, 306.
51. Luebke, Germans in Brazil, 119–46 and 162–74.
52. As ibid., 135, suggests.
53. Ibid., 164, 173–201. On the Brazilian war legislation, see Brasilianischer Chargé
A. de Ipanema Moreira to Secretary of State Robert Lansing (Washington, November 9,
1918), Annex: Foreign Minister Nilo Peçanha to the Department of State, in supplement 2
of Foreign Relations of the United States 93 (1918), 356–57. On the problems of the schools
in particular, see also Koch, “Kriegsgeschichte der deutschen Schule.”
54. For the perspective of an eyewitness, who nonetheless was already writing under
the influence of the conditions of World War II, see Keiper, Das Deutschtum, 51–57. See
also Newton, German Buenos Aires, 49–51. For the Argentine side, see Llairo and Siepe,
Argentina en Europa, 17–33. For the Luxburg Affair, see above all, Doß, Das deutsche Aus-
wärtige Amt, 46–65; and Kannapin, “Die Luxburg-Affäre.”
55. The fiercest protests in Chile against the policy toward the Germans arose following
the destruction of the German ships interned in Chilean ports in September 1918. Couy-
oumdjian, Chile y Gran Bretaña, 131–35.
56. For more on the bribery of influential politicians in Argentina, see Sheinin, Di-
plomacy of Control, 172–73. On the reactions of the Germans, see also Newton, German
Buenos Aires, 47–48.
57. Luebke, Germans in Brazil, 180–99.
58. Ibid., 201.
59. On the 1920s, see Rinke, “Der letzte freie Kontinent,” 291–412; and Rinke, “Deutsche
Lateinamerikapolitik.”
7
In Search of Legitimacy
Chinese Immigrants and Latin American Nation Building
Kathleen López
There was not a single Chinese Cuban deserter; there was not a single Chinese
Cuban traitor!
Gonzalo de Quesada, Mi primera ofrenda, 1892
Is it possible to believe that the barbarian Zulu or Inca Indian is more assimilable
than people of the classical secular civilization of Asia?
Dora Mayer de Zulen, La China, elocuente y silenciosa, 1924
The yellow race, especially the Chinese race, is so distant from the Indo-Latin in
civilization, in customs, in religion, and in political and moral ideals that the Chi-
nese seem to us like beings from another world.
José Angel Espinoza, El problema chino en México, 1931
Beginning with the Haitian Revolution and the independence wars of the
early nineteenth century, elite and popular sectors across Latin America
and the Caribbean have engaged in complex discourses on race, citizen-
ship, and nation. In the age of abolition, new flows of labor migrants en-
tered the region to supplement or replace African slaves on plantations
and to develop export economies and expand frontiers. They became a
central component of debates on national culture and identity. Chinese
immigrants, as one of the main sources of nonwhite labor, were simul-
taneously promoted as efficient workers for progress and prosperity and
criticized as harmful to the physical and moral well-being of the nation.
Through a comparative analysis of three countries with traditionally large
Chinese populations—Cuba, Peru, and Mexico—this essay demonstrates
the centrality of Chinese immigration to Latin American constructions
of the nation. Each, in varying degrees, became a setting of anti-Chinese
Chinese Immigrants and Latin American Nation Building · 183
discrimination, policies, and violence, accompanied by public discourse on

the suitability of the Chinese for national inclusion. The actions of Chinese
migrants in defense of their claims to citizenship and belonging also subtly
shaped the rhetoric of nation building. As Chinese became part of the fab-
ric of these respective nations, they continually challenged discrimination
and maintained their own ideas about inclusion in Latin American societ-
ies as well as Chinese diasporic communities.
Chinese Settlement Patterns in Latin America
While the broad patterns of Chinese migration were similar across Latin
America and the Caribbean, their experiences diverged according to lo-
cal political context, economic climate, and geographical settlement. As
slavery came to an end over the course of the nineteenth century, planter
and industrialist elites across the Americas faced the challenge of finding
an adequate labor supply to fuel economic and territorial expansion. When
attempts at bringing large, sustained numbers of white European work-
ers to the region fell short, they turned to Asian indentured laborers. The
British primarily imported East Indians for plantation labor in their Ca-
ribbean colonies (especially Guyana, Trinidad, and Jamaica) but also im-
ported smaller numbers of Chinese, as did the French and Dutch. Central
American republics such as Panama and Costa Rica also used Chinese for
railroad construction.
The massive importations of Chinese to Cuba and Peru, however, drew
the most criticism, prompting decades of international debate on “coo-
lie” labor and the suitability of Asians for settlement in the New World.1
Although South China had a long-standing tradition of emigration, new
developments, including European incursions, overpopulation, natural
disasters, and ethnic conflict, motivated Chinese to leave their villages be-
ginning in the mid-nineteenth century. An antidynastic millenarian move-
ment known as the Taiping Rebellion (1851–64) nearly toppled the Qing
dynasty and further propelled migration, both internal and overseas. Dis-
placed rebels escaped capture from officials by boarding ships bound for
Southeast Asia, the Americas, and Hawaii. Local Qing authorities also used
the coolie trade to rid themselves of hundreds of Taiping rebels.2 In the
Spanish colony of Cuba, tens of thousands of Chinese indentured laborers
worked alongside slaves in the sugar, railroad, mining, and construction
industries beginning in 1847, while in the newly independent republic of
Peru they were concentrated on coastal sugar and cotton plantations and
184 · Kathleen López
guano pits beginning in 1849. Planters and overseers blatantly disregarded

the contract provisions, and Chinese were beaten, chained, deprived of
food, and forced to work under inhuman conditions. The wages that sup-
posedly distinguished immigrant contract laborers from African slaves
were routinely withheld. Chinese experiences in the guano pits of Peru’s
Chincha Islands were among the most deplorable. Guano (seabird dung)
was an effective fertilizer that became a highly profitable export for Peru.
Gangs of coolies picked and loaded guano onto carts and shoveled it into
boxcars or chutes leading to ships waiting below. The stench, toxic fumes,
and extreme heat and humidity caused respiratory health problems and
prompted suicides.3
An international investigation in 1874 led to the cessation of the traffic
and the end of Chinese indenture in Cuba and Peru by the 1880s.4 The coer-
cion and brutality of the indenture system left little possibility for a Chinese
laborer to return to China. Those who managed to survive indenture re-
migrated or settled into local societies as agricultural and urban workers,
artisans, and labor contractors. By the 1880s and 1890s, they were followed
by free laborers and small entrepreneurs. Additionally, Chinese merchants
with capital and commercial networks in Hong Kong and San Francisco
established branches of transnational firms for importing food and luxury
goods from China and also engaged in the sale and distribution of local
products.
Patterns of Chinese settlement differed significantly in Mexico, thereby
contributing to a high degree of sustained anti-Chinese sentiment sup-
ported by official policies. Like Peru and the other Latin American repub-
lics, Mexico achieved independence from Spain in the early nineteenth
century. Chinese began to settle its northern frontier regions during the
1860s and 1870s. After the passage of the U.S. Chinese Exclusion Act of
1882, more Chinese diverted their paths to Mexico, some with the intention
of crossing into the United States legally or illegally. José de la Cruz Porfirio
Díaz Mori, who ruled as dictator from 1884 to 1910, intensified efforts to
bring in Chinese laborers for the development of farming and mining when
Spanish immigration proved insufficient. Chinese merchants in Mexico
monopolized the grocery and dry goods trade, bolstered by transnational
linkages with U.S.-based Chinese wholesalers. Although the total numbers
of Chinese in Mexico did not reach those of Cuba and Peru, by the early
twentieth century they were a highly visible group, concentrated in the
northern borderland regions and constituting the second-largest foreign
community after the Spanish.5
Foreign Bodies and National Battlegrounds
In each of these three emerging nation-states, the Chinese played a pivotal

role in major nationalist military struggles of the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries. Whether as combatants, supporters, or targets, the ex-
periences of the Chinese in battles for sovereignty and territory shaped im-
ages of them in the national imaginary and set the stage for their reception
in the decades to come.
In Cuba, Chinese are known for their participation alongside former
slaves in the nineteenth-century struggles for independence from Spain
(1868–98). Cubans were forced to reconsider the relationship between race
and the emerging nation, and the independence movement advocated the
abolition of slavery and embraced Cubans of color. Intellectuals and activ-
ists of all socioracial backgrounds forged a conception of a raceless Cuban
nationality as the ideological foundation of the movement.6 Like African
slaves, hundreds of Chinese indentured laborers followed their masters in
supporting the insurgency, either as combatants or in auxiliary roles. The
recent history of the Chinese as coolie laborers who had suffered the same
atrocities as slaves made them a natural choice for the construction of a
cross-racial discourse about Cuban revolutionary soldiers. Both slaves and
coolies shared a common trajectory from bound laborers to cimarrones
(runaways) to freedom fighters. Daily interactions with Cubans, partici-
pation in ethnic networks, and the making of legal claims facilitated the
Chinese transition out of indenture. But it was their participation in the
struggles for independence from Spain that enabled Chinese inclusion
as an integral component in the public discourse on the Cuban nation.
Nationalist writings on the role of the Chinese during Cuba’s shift from
colony to nation further cemented their position, at least on the surface. In
particular, Cuban statesman Gonzalo de Quesada immortalized the patrio-
tism and loyalty of Chinese freedom fighters in his 1892 work Mi primera
ofrenda. It is often repeated that two Chinese veterans were eligible to serve
as president of the first Cuban republic in 1902.7
Chinese in Peru were also pulled into an international dispute, the War
of the Pacific (1879–83), fought between Chile, Peru, and Bolivia over
boundaries and mineral-rich coastal territory. In contrast to Cuba, how-
ever, Peruvians came to know the Chinese as “traitors” who supported the
enemy. Indentured laborers felt no loyalty to Peruvian landholder elites,
whose continued wealth and privilege came at the expense of their own toil.
When Chilean general Patrick Lynch entered the south in December 1880,
about one thousand Chinese agricultural workers in the Cañete Valley

joined his army. Armed Chinese with painted faces, charging in battle and
sacking estates, generated a fearsome image among Peruvians. A Chilean
popular song evokes the red-haired general liberating Chinese indentured
laborers from Peruvian plantations: “The red prince freed the Chinese of
Cerro Azul.” While sympathetic toward the Chinese, the song perpetuates
popular attitudes of Chinese as peculiar and savage, with their wartime
shouts of: “Let’s cut off their heads, let’s eat their kidneys with chopsticks of
ivory.”8 In a cruel twist, rather than being freed, many Chinese were forced
by the Chilean army to return to work in nitrate mines and guano deposits,
build roads, and bury the dead or care for wounded troops.
While the Cuban battleground provided an opening for Afro-Asian al-
liances against a common enemy, in Peru the popular classes turned their
wrath against the Chinese. Chinese shopkeepers in Lima made sure to dis-
tance themselves from marauding bands of coolies by contributing to the
public defense fund and forming a militia to defend the Peruvian capital.
Still, the occupation of Lima exacerbated ethnic conflicts. On January 15,
1881, as the Chilean army advanced, Indians and mestizos sacked Chinese
shops and killed some 70 or 80 merchants. In the following months, peas-
ants in the countryside burned cane fields and attacked white landholders
as well as hundreds of Chinese laborers (from 700 to 1,500 according to
the British diplomat). Some Peruvian writers commented sympathetically
on the massacres perpetrated against the Chinese amid the rioting and
chaos. In his history of immigration to Peru, nineteenth-century scholar
and diplomat Juan de Arona generally advocates for European laborers. But
he portrays Chinese resistance during the February 1881 black uprising in
the Cañete Valley in a positive light, describing it as “the most heroic and
original action of our Chinese colony in those tragic days . . . that would
remain forgotten if we do not bring it to light now. . . .”9
While Chinese in Mexico were mostly shopkeepers and merchants and
did not join en masse in the revolutionary struggles of the early twentieth
century, they served as highly visible targets of popular resentment. In the
context of the antiforeignism and emerging nationalism of the Mexican
Revolution of 1910, the concentration of Chinese made the northern re-
gions especially conducive to anti-Chinese attitudes and policies. For two
days in 1911 bands of soldiers associated with revolutionary leader Francisco
Madero attacked Chinese residents in the town of Torreón, resulting in 303
deaths and extensive property damage. The incident marked one of the
bloodiest anti-Chinese massacres in the Americas. Over the course of the
next decade, a growing xenophobia converged with revolutionary national-

ism in Mexico, and Chinese continued to face attacks on their shops and
Sinophobic policies. General antiforeign sentiments and agitation among
the Mexican people became directed specifically against the Chinese.10
These prolonged battles—for independence in Cuba, for territorial and
economic sovereignty in Peru, and for revolution against the established
order in Mexico—were pivotal events in the construction of these na-
tions. The involvement of a group of foreigners, therefore, could be used
to further a particular agenda for development, progress, and national
identity. Accounts of Chinese patriotism in Cuba and disloyalty in Peru
were surely exaggerated. Supporters of the Chinese in Cuba evoked their
unfailing loyalty during the struggles for independence, something un-
available to their counterparts in Peru, who were etched as traitors in Pe-
ruvian national memory. The wars also affected interethnic relations. In
Cuba, Chinese fought alongside Afro-Cubans and were at least nominally
incorporated into raceless nationhood. In Peru, however, racial and ethnic
divisions between Chinese, blacks, and indigenous peoples became sharper
as imported Chinese coolies were viewed as an instrument of the ruling
oligarchs. Landowning elites in Peru ultimately feared popular reaction
and ethnic disturbances more than the occupying Chilean army. National-
ist struggles had perhaps the deepest impact on the Chinese in Mexico.
The antiforeign attacks perpetuated during the revolutionary movement
in Mexico continued through the first half of the twentieth century and
included boycotts and discriminatory legislation, eventually culminating
in the most extreme outcome—the expulsion of the Chinese from Sonora
in 1931.
The Chinese, Mestizaje, and Latin American Nationalisms
Seeking political stability, economic prosperity, and international le-

gitimacy, Latin American politicians and elites publicly debated how to
integrate the diverse populations of former colonial societies within the
territorial borders of the new nations. Theories of “scientific” racism preva-
lent in the late nineteenth century underpinned ideological arguments for
elimination of nonwhites from the national body. Eventually these yielded
to culturally based arguments that aimed for some version of mestizaje or
racial mixing as the foundation for the new nations and highlighted the
potential of native indigenous and African-descended populations.11 At the
turn of the century the young Cuban republic, founded upon principles of a
raceless nationalism, attempted to come to terms with its African heritage.

Decades later Peru and Mexico, with their larger indigenous populations,
focused on the moral and educational uplift of Indians and mestizos.
Even while debating the place of the African and indigenous elements,
Latin American nations consistently preferred European immigration as
a key to whitening and progress. Proposals for nonwhite immigrants—es-
pecially black and Chinese—came under frequent attack. Official policies
toward Chinese ranged from immigration restrictions and discouragement
of permanent settlement to outright expulsion from the national territory,
as in the case of Mexico. Popular opposition, while most extreme in Mex-
ico, erupted into riots across the region. In the press, Chinese immigrants
were uniformly described as clannish, corrupt, inassimilable, and unfair
competition for natives. The same characteristics that made Chinese shops
popular among local residents—offering low prices, extending credit, using
family labor—became a source of resentment among the working classes.
The United States played a key role in shaping anti-Chinese attitudes
and circulating ideas of “yellow peril” in the hemisphere. News of violent
clashes between Chinese and labor movements and unflattering depictions
of Chinese quarters spread beyond its shores. After the passage of the Chi-
nese Exclusion Act in 1882, the United States sought to prevent Chinese and
other undesirable immigrants from using Latin American and Caribbean
seaports and border towns as a “stepping stone” for illegal entry. With the
passage of Military Order No. 155 in 1902, the American occupation gov-
ernment directly imposed U.S. immigration law on the new Cuban nation,
including a ban on the entry of Chinese laborers. Although not consis-
tently enforced, it served as the official basis of Cuba’s immigration policy
through the first half of the twentieth century.12
At the outset of the Cuban republic, Chinese were nominally protected
by a concept of nation and citizenship that embraced men of all races. The
Cuban Constitution of 1901 granted universal manhood suffrage to former
slaves and Chinese ex-coolies. However, despite recognition of the Chinese
in the Cuban struggles for independence, and alongside their official inclu-
sion in the nation, an alternate view developed in the press, in government
and police reports, and in popular literature. Shortly after independence,
tension between two seemingly opposite discourses took root: one imagin-
ing the Chinese as an essential part of the fabric of the Cuban nation, and
the other portraying them as something exotic and alien (and in its more
aggressive form, as something dangerous to the Cuban nation).13
Although influenced by U.S. policies, the nationalist focus on whitening
throughout Latin America had its roots in Spanish colonialism and drew
inspiration from European models of progress. In Cuba, the Law of Im-
migration and Colonization of 1906 allocated $1 million to promote white
settlement, of which 80 percent was to be used toward bringing families
from Europe, in particular the Canary Islands. The remaining $200,000
was designated for the importation of braceros, or day laborers, from Swe-
den, Norway, Denmark, and Northern Italy.14
Supporters of the legislation justified their promotion of white immi-
gration with current racial theories in social science. Creole writer Ramón
Meza y Suárez Inclán believed that “the vile shackle of a contract” lay be-
hind Cuba’s problems with Chinese, always associated with the atrocities of
slave-like coolie trade, far from the desired image of modernity.15 President
of the Academy of Science Juan Santos Fernández supported the govern-
ment’s proposal for Spanish laborers as a means to achieve cultural progress
and economic modernization. Santos contrasted Cuba’s slow development
to that of Germany and the United States, who paid attention to the physi-
cal characteristics of their populations. Cuba, in his view, had relied on
inferior races from Africa, Yucatán, and Asia to fulfill its need for cheap ag-
ricultural labor. He attributed Cuba’s low population density to the inability
of its mixed races to reproduce. Echoing the arguments behind the caste
system of colonial Spain, he claimed that the positive aspects of “purer”
races mutated in mixed descendants, generating the “impulsive forces
that produce the political crime of rebellion.”16 A major strand of thought
within these debates linked Cuba’s future to Spanish America even more so
than to the United States. The bill’s proponents noted the backwardness and
poverty of fellow Latin American nations. However, they claimed, certain
nations such as Mexico, Chile, Argentina, and Brazil “opened their doors to
European immigration, which has begun to leave its benevolent influence
on the progress of those peoples of our race.”17
A state-sponsored project committing funds to the importation of white
immigrants directly contradicted the multiracial vision of Cuba forged dur-
ing the recent struggles for independence from Spain. Afro-Cuban leaders
and their newspapers as well as the labor press denounced the proposal
from different angles. Due to the efforts of prominent black congressmen,
the final version of the law did not mention specific races to be excluded.
However, by clarifying that the funding was earmarked for Canary Island-
ers and Northern Europeans, considered white, the language of the law
excluded Afro-Caribbean and Chinese immigrants. The passage of the im-
migration law denied the viability of a native workforce, regardless of race.
Lillian Guerra comments that “a new Cuban nation would emerge, embod-
ied by new Cubans: white, docile, and energetic servants of their masters’
republican state.”18 The 1902 law officially excluded the Chinese, and the
1906 law reinforced the view that nonwhites were racially undesirable for
settlement in the Cuban republic. In subsequent years, Creole intellectuals
often juxtaposed Afro-Caribbeans and Asians, as in the essay “The Yellow
Danger and the Black Danger” that appeared in the new cultural monthly
magazine Cuba Contemporánea, and they pitted both groups against “Cu-
ban solidarity.”19 Immigration policies translated into real numbers, and
between 1900 and 1929, about 900,000 Spaniards entered Cuba.20
Anti-Chinese discourse rooted in ideologies of racial purity and nation
building found even more tangible expression in Peru and Mexico. In May
1909 lower-class Peruvians burned and looted Chinese shops during what
began as a Workers’ Party rally in the streets of Lima. Cries of “Death to
the Chinese!” and “Down with the Chinese!” were fueled by anger at the
government for importing Chinese as cheap laborers. Just two days after
the riot, the mayor of Lima ordered the destruction of the Callejón Otaiza,
a group of buildings around a courtyard within which hundreds of Chinese
lived and worked. The Chinese quarter had been a frequent target of criti-
cism in the press and raids by sanitation authorities.21 In Peru, where Chi-
nese merchants dominated key sectors of industry, working classes used
anti-Chinese portrayals to critique upper-class corruption and exploita-
tion of the masses. Although the Chinese did not compete directly with
many Peruvian trades, they were blamed for inflation in the shops and for
unfair competition, “singled out more as a highly visible symbol than as
a critical threat.”22 In 1917 members of a bakers’ guild founded the Anti-
Asian League (Liga Antiasiática) to protest competition from Chinese. At
the Third Pan-American Scientific Congress in 1924, José Felix Cáceres of
the Lima Geographical Society captured the anti-Chinese stereotypes that
had been circulating for decades in his presentation of “The Racial Problem
in Peru and Asian Immigration.” He characterized Chinese as morally and
physically inferior, “a constant obstacle to our psychic and physical well-
being, due to the manifestation of their character, customs, temperament,
and vices in repugnant excess,” in particular brothels, gambling houses, and
opium dens. While Chinese were clearly obstacles to progress, he claimed,
the passive Indian population also resisted uplifting efforts. Like others of
his time (and many among his Latin American audience), the solution for
Cáceres was white immigration from Europe.23
In both Cuba and Peru a series of immigration restrictions excluded
Chinese during the first few decades of the twentieth century. The August
1909 visit of Chinese diplomat Wu Tingfang to Peru resulted in a volun-
tary suspension of Chinese emigration (similar to Japan’s 1907 Gentleman’s
Agreement with the United States). However, the loosely enforced policies
were no match for the market in false documents and failed to stop large
numbers of Chinese from coming to Cuba or Peru, many with the aim of
entering the United States.
The more extreme anti-Chinese sentiment in Mexico developed into a
sustained, highly organized political campaign. The chief spokesman of
the Mexican anti-Chinese movement was Sonoran schoolteacher and local
political candidate José María Arana. In general, the campaign grounded
itself in promotion of Mexican businesses and sanitation but also extended
to support for a ban on intermarriage and residential segregation. Among
the proliferation of ordinances were taxes; prohibitions on selling food,
laundering clothes, and leasing land; demands for Chinese to hire more
Mexican workers; and even a requirement that Chinese take public baths.24
In the eyes of lower- and middle-class Mexican nationalists, wealthy Chi-
nese merchants were another group of foreign capitalists, similar to the
Americans and Europeans thought to be responsible for the economic ex-
ploitation of the Mexican people. Propaganda leader José Ángel Espinoza
filled his anti-Chinese tracts with vile caricatures depicting disease and
filth in Chinese-owned businesses and passages describing their supposed
criminality and duplicity.25 A proliferation of clubs and publications to dis-
seminate the anti-Chinese message indicated a merging of middle-class
and worker interests in defense of racial purity and patriotism. Altogether,
215 anti-Chinese organizations existed throughout the country by 1932.26
As Evelyn Hu-DeHart notes, “Arana’s lasting achievement was to change
the mode of engagement with the Chinese from physical attacks on their
properties and persons to a political campaign, using the law and political
pressure to force them out of Mexico, in effect resorting to a different kind
of violence.”27 Antichinistas even drew inspiration from the deportations of
Mexicans by the United States to racially justify the expulsion of a particu-
lar group of foreigners.28
The Problem of Miscegenation
In each of these societies the question of the position of Chinese had arisen
shortly after their arrival. Neither the Cuban nor the Peruvian governments
intended for Chinese coolies, overwhelmingly single men, to settle, and
forced recontracting became a common practice. After indenture, Chinese

generally settled alongside local women of lower social strata, producing a
second generation of “mixed” descendants. In Cuba Chinese entered into
marriages or common-law unions with slaves and former slaves, and in
coastal Peru, with Indians and to a lesser extent Afro-Peruvians.
During the late nineteenth century, Spanish officials formally classified
Asians in Cuba as “white” for census purposes. Socially, however, they were
viewed as nonwhite, and the mixed offspring of Chinese who blended into
the local population were considered de color or mestizo.29 Peruvians, on
the other hand, resisted placing these mixed children within existing racial
classification schemes. The young nation grappled with how to label the
generation of new “foreigners” in its midst. Isabelle Lausent-Herrera notes
the significance of debates over a racial category for mixed offspring of
Chinese at this critical juncture in Peruvian history. Because they were not
officially named, they were denied a place within Peruvian society. The lo-
cal vernacular term “injerto” (transplant) came to be used for the offspring
of Chinese men and indigenous women (but not Afro-Peruvian women).
The use of this term suggests the extent to which Peruvian-born children
with Asian features remained perpetual outsiders.30
The nationalist-inspired Sinophobia found throughout Latin America
in the early decades of the twentieth century was highly gendered and fo-
cused on the debilitating effect that racial mixing with Chinese would have
on a nation’s purity. In general, elites came to consider miscegenation as a
natural means to assimilate and integrate a nation’s indigenous and African
populations. But the same approach did not apply to Asians, and interracial
mixing generated opposition to Chinese inclusion in the national body.
Pro-whitening elites in Cuba and Peru spoke of miscegenation with
Chinese in terms of the degeneracy of society, with the children of such
unions weakened physically and morally. In 1909, when a diplomatic rep-
resentative petitioned for lifting restrictions on Chinese entry to Cuba, the
commissioner of immigration cited “differences of language, religion, and
customs that impeded the assimilation of the Chinese element” into Cu-
ban society. Rather than assimilating, the Chinese clustered in the suburbs
of major population centers, “forming colonies where they live a semi-
savage existence, engaging in all kinds of vice, and constituting centers of
infection.” Furthermore, he emphasized, the Chinese that did form unions
with blacks, mulatos, and even whites, “produce rickety descendants.”31
Likewise, images of Chinese Mexican children as racially degenerate and
subhuman stemmed from a belief that the impure Chinese threatened
Mexican mestizaje and national identity. Against a backdrop of Mexican

revolutionary nationalism, popular cartoons, poems, and songs (corridos)
criticized Chinese Mexican unions. Proponents of the Sinophobic cam-
paigns in Mexico took this linkage between miscegenation and national-
ism even further by condemning Mexican women who married prosper-
ous Chinese merchants as dirty, lazy, unpatriotic, and shameless. By law,
Mexican women who married foreigners lost their Mexican nationality.
In the eyes of ardent nationalists, then, these disloyal Mexican women be-
came “Chinese” through the malleable constructs of race and citizenship.
A typical cartoon depicts an imprisoned Mexican wife of a Chinese with
her malformed offspring, accompanied by the caption: “Oh wretched one!
You thought you would enjoy an easy life upon surrendering yourself to a
Chinaman, and now you are a slave and the fruit of your error is a freak of
nature.”32 Eventually, Chinese–Mexican intermarriage was banned in So-
nora, as part of an attempt to translate into policy the unsuitability of Chi-
nese and their offspring for membership in the postrevolutionary Mexican
nation. Discourse also zeroed in on the damaging effect of Chinese immi-
grants who usurped “female” jobs and drove honest Mexican women into
prostitution. In Mexican frontier society the Chinese had concentrated in
work such as laundries and domestic service traditionally performed by
Mexican women.
In Defense of Chinese Communities
In the face of anti-Chinese attacks, Chinese merchants across Latin Amer-

ica and the Caribbean launched a multipronged defense of their commu-
nities. They positively portrayed their contributions to the economic vital-
ity of the nation and pointed out laws that (at least on paper) guaranteed
equal treatment for all foreigners. Leaders of the Chinese communities in
Cuba and Peru repeatedly called upon diplomats to protect their status
as cosmopolitan merchants, seeking equal treatment to other foreigners.
Beginning with the exclusion of Chinese laborers from Cuba in 1902, dip-
lomats focused on the effect of immigration restrictions on transnational
business activity. Chinese migrant elites in Peru similarly used economic
achievement and progress as the basis for their claims to social legitimacy.
In particular, they equated themselves with North American and Euro-
pean foreign merchants, considered by many of Peru’s coastal elites to be
an ideal model for the nation.33 Despite severe obstacles, Chinese in Mexico
also defended their community through ethnic associations and the legal
system, even bringing claims before the Mexican Supreme Court. Robert
Chao Romero details several cases in which they challenged the constitu-
tionality and applicability of the anti-Chinese laws. They were not always
successful, as in a 1930 decision upholding the ban on Chinese intermar-
riage with Mexicans. A federal legislator commented that the majority of
the judges “consider Chinese immigration undesirable and pernicious for
our nation.”34 Despite such defeats, through the act of petitioning, Chinese
made claims to membership in Mexican society, whether as naturalized
citizens or foreigners with rights.
Beyond seeking diplomatic and legal defense, the Chinese produced
Spanish-language publications highlighting merchant community achieve-
ments, homeland politics, and integration into local society. At the core of
these publications were claims to legitimacy as essential components of
Cuban and Peruvian progress and national identity.
In Cuba, when a stricter immigration decree was passed in 1926, Chi-
nese merchants demanded a change in policies. In an open letter to the
Cuban president, the Association of the Chinese Colony of Cuba (Aso-
ciación de la Colonia China de Cuba) and the Chinese Chamber of Com-
merce of Cuba (Cámara de Comercio China de Cuba) described Chinese
immigrants as model participants in the Cuban nation, “without violent
occurrences, without intervening in the political struggles of China or this
country.”35 A 1926 pamphlet titled “Legitimate Aspirations of the Chinese
Colony of Cuba” invoked the history of Chinese participation in the Cuban
wars for independence as a cornerstone of their claims to citizenship. The
pamphlet stated: “many of our members lent their generous aid to the cause
of Cuban independence, bravely fighting for the liberty of this nation, mer-
iting what has been stated in books, pamphlets, diaries, discourses . . . from
the Apostle of Independence José Martí to Gonzalo de Quesada.”36
In 1924, the same year that a prominent Peruvian articulated a system-
atic anti-Chinese statement, the upper-strata Chinese in Peru distributed
their own publication to members of congress. The Chinese Colony in Peru:
Representative Institutions and Men: Its Beneficial Action in National Life
paralleled other Chinese diasporic community publications with its biog-
raphies and celebratory advertisements of Chinese-owned firms. But es-
says on low rates of delinquency and begging among the Chinese revealed
an intention “to convince congress of the importance of having a Chinese
colony among us as an element of progress, as a factor of order, and as a
stimulant of the national energies” through the employment of thousands
of Peruvian workers in businesses and on plantations.37 This approach
dovetailed with the goals of the 1919 military coup in Peru that ushered in
the second presidency of Augusto Leguía with his ambitions of Peruvian
wealth and modernity, grounded in commerce, a rising middle class, and
urban development. Adam McKeown describes this period as “a relatively
golden age of influence and prestige for many of the Chinese merchants in
Peru” who responded to Leguía’s platform by portraying themselves as key
to local development and international reputation.38
Besides upper-strata Chinese, some liberal intellectuals defended the
Chinese presence within their respective Latin American nations. Support
for the Chinese Revolution of 1911 and Sun Yat-sen’s republican movement
in China synchronized with the modernizing goals of Latin American na-
tions. In Cuba, journalist Guillermo Tejeiro praised Chinese contributions
to Cuban society and emphasized the revolutionary struggles for a modern
nation shared by Chinese and Cubans.39 Local supporters described Chi-
nese immigrants as honorable and hardworking and at times reminded fel-
low Cubans of the maltreatment Chinese suffered during the coolie period.
But in general the coolie period was relegated to the past, a vestige of the
colonial era.40
One of the Peruvian Chinese community’s most well-known defenders
was the German-born Dora Mayer, who was educated in Peru as a young
child and became an activist for the indigenista movement. In 1909 she
cofounded the Pro-Indigenist Society (Asociación Pro-Indígena) along
with Pedro Zulen, himself a Peruvian-born Chinese of mixed descent. The
group sought to protect Indians from elite destruction in the name of re-
form and to study and preserve elements of native culture. Mayer also be-
longed to a group of intellectuals involved with the leftist, anti-imperialist
American Popular Revolutionary Alliance that promoted Latin American
unity and indigenous causes and drew inspiration from Sun Yat-sen’s re-
publican movement in China.41 For the occasion of the centennial celebra-
tion of Peru’s independence in 1924, Mayer published the book China, Si-
lent and Eloquent, a celebration of the grandeur of Chinese civilization and
history. One section focused specifically on the Chinese of Peru and their
suitability for becoming proper Peruvian citizens, “a social element more
useful than any other.”42 Mayer was impressed with the Chinese individuals
or firms who owned or leased land on coastal haciendas, growing cotton,
cane, rice, and corn and employing up to three hundred or four hundred
Peruvian workers.43 As Adam McKeown notes, this romanticized work
marks a departure from Mayer’s earlier pro-indigenist writings, in which
she characterized Indians, blacks, and Asians as “the feet and the hands of
the whites.”44 However, her newfound support for the Chinese as a solution
for Peruvian economic and national development was a qualified one. She
clearly distinguished the more educated and cultured recent arrivals from
common laborers.
Mexican Chinese found few local defenders, with the exception of elite
agriculturalists and industrialists who promoted inexpensive and efficient
Chinese labor for the expansion of the tropical coastal regions and northern
frontier. Rather than rallying Mexicans behind them, however, they drew
the ire of the lower-middle classes and leaders of the anti-Chinese move-
ment, who criticized these chineros as enemies of the nationalist cause.45 As
in Cuba and Peru, anti-Chinese attitudes and rioting were at times more an
expression of class animosity than of sheer racism.
With the onset of the global depression and the formation of nativist
movements in the 1930s, nationalization policies throughout Latin Amer-
ica targeted West Indians, Asians, and other foreigners. Across the region,
late-nineteenth-century anti-Chinese discourses resurfaced and took on
new forms. Although economic elites still deemed immigration necessary
for industry and progress, a flurry of laws aimed to limit the Chinese in the
workforce and prevent intermarriage with native women.46 Many Chinese
migrants returned to China after the onset of the global depression and the
passage of restrictive laws. But the situation in Mexico diverged with the
outright expulsion of Chinese. Chinese were deported from the northern
state of Sonora in 1931, ostensibly for failure to comply with a law requir-
ing that 80 percent of employees be Mexican. Some Chinese relocated to
the capital and other regions of Mexico, some fled to the United States
(where they faced Immigration and Naturalization Service interrogation),
and some returned to China. By 1940 the Chinese population in Mexico
dropped to less than five thousand, virtually eliminated in the northern
regions.47
By contrast, in Cuba and Peru, we begin to see a degree of inclusion
during the 1920s and 1930s, reinforced by multiple generations of locally
born Chinese. At the height of nativist movements, established Chinese
merchants launched new magazines to defend and promote their commu-
nities. In 1934 an association of Chinese merchants in Cuba founded the
bilingual magazine Fraternidad, which specifically responded to issues of
immigrant incorporation and generational differences.48 With sections in
Chinese and Spanish, the magazine was geared toward both Chinese and
non-Chinese retailers, reflecting the Chinese community’s desire for ac-
ceptance by the greater Cuban merchant community. The Chinese section
included association business, homeland politics, and announcements rel-

evant to the Chinese community while the Spanish section featured both
prominent Chinese and Cubans in the society pages. Images and stories
depicting the transnational Chinese merchant community in a favorable
light filled the magazine’s pages. Photos of weddings to Cuban women and
baptisms of second-generation children underscored Chinese migrant in-
tegration into Cuban society and national culture. Even as they maintained
transnational ties to China, merchants used the press to promote an image
of the Chinese as an essential component of Cuban society and national
identity since the independence struggles. Furthermore, the Spanish-lan-
guage articles made the magazine accessible to the generation of Cuban-
born Chinese who were unable to read Chinese characters.
Locally born Chinese, including those with Cuban or Peruvian moth-
ers, also struggled for full inclusion both within the Chinese community
and within larger society. Later generations were integral to defending the
broader Chinese communities and to making claims for “cultural” citi-
zenship in the respective nation-states. In Peru the locally born or tusan
community developed strategies for acceptance within the traditional
Chinese transnational merchant community. In 1931 two Peruvian-born
Chinese founded the magazine Oriental, sponsored by Chinese and Pe-
ruvian wholesalers and focusing on Peruvian-born Chinese. The monthly
magazine presented the tusan community as a counter to the Chinese-born
merchants as the only “legitimate” stakeholders of and leaders of the estab-
lished Chinese regional and political associations.49
In their defense of their communities, Chinese merchant elites distanced
themselves from lower classes of laborers and store clerks and from the
stigma of the earlier coolie period. They also subscribed to prevalent racial
thinking, confident that their class position conferred an “honorary white”
status upon them. In the case of Cuba, Fernando Ortiz’s 1940 formulation
of “transculturation” has been the basis for a conception of cubanidad or
“Cubanness” that incorporates Europeans, Africans, and, to a lesser extent,
Asians. Although this set of ideas offered a conceptual pathway toward an
ideology of “belonging” to a transcultural Cuban nation, color continued to
be pervasive for Chinese who continued to identify with white society and
sought official recognition of their “mixed” children as blanco or white.50
Peruvian Chinese similarly understood the socioracial hierarchy within
which they operated and sought to claim a position as legitimate foreign-
ers within the modernizing nation.51
World War II became a catalyst for Chinese migrants in the Americas
when the fate of China during the Japanese occupation and praise for Chi-
nese in the U.S. military fostered sympathy in public discourse. Unfortu-
nately, the rise in status of Chinese in the Americas was accompanied by
the demonization of Japanese in Latin America, whether immigrants or lo-
cally born. Japanese entry had followed on the heels of the Chinese through
contract arrangements with Japanese emigration firms, a circumstance that
offered them considerably more resources. Still, they were treated as a ra-
cial minority and suffered discriminatory attacks, especially in Peru (in an
example of the “othering” of all Asians, Japanese merchants in Peru were
called “chinos de la esquina” or street-corner Chinese). During World War
II up to 1,800 Peruvian Japanese, along with 500 from other Latin Ameri-
can nations, were deported for incarceration in the United States, separated
from their families, and stripped of their homes and businesses.52 The Chi-
nese magazines Fraternidad and Oriental advocated attacks and boycotts
of Japanese businesses in Cuba and Peru. Chinese merchants seized the
opportunity to further promote an image of their own community as an
integral part of the nation. On a practical level, the wartime cooperation
between allied governments led to the lifting of restrictions on Chinese
entry into American ports. In the United States, men of Chinese descent
enlisted with other Americans for battle, and the government repealed the
long-standing Chinese Exclusion Act in 1943. Even before this landmark
action, China and Cuba signed a reciprocity treaty in 1942 that eliminated
immigration restrictions based on race or nationality and guaranteed the
Chinese treatment equal to that of other foreigners in Cuba.53
During the postwar period, local histories and yearbooks began to cel-
ebrate the achievements of Chinese merchants. The time was ripe in Cuba
for the appearance of Cuban journalist and historian Guillermo Tejeiro’s
illustrated book in commemoration of the centennial anniversary of the
first arrival of the Chinese. This type of album is typical among Chinese
overseas communities in the Americas. What makes it significant, however,
is that it was published in Spanish by a non-Chinese author, intended pri-
marily for consumption by Cuban audiences. Known for his advocacy of
the Chinese community, Tejeiro had previously published an article in the
Havana newspaper El País on the parallels between the Cuban and Chinese
national heroes José Martí and Sun Yat-sen. Tejeiro reprinted the entire text
of the 1942 treaty in his work commemorating the Chinese in Cuba, calling
attention to its role in erasing the injustices of the previous four decades of
Cuban immigration law. He highlighted the significance of the treaty for
Sino-Cuban relations and for the development of the Chinese community
in Cuba.54 From the 1940s onward, a plethora of articles celebrating the his-
tory and customs of the Chinese in Cuba appeared in mainstream Cuban
magazines such as Bohemia and Revista Bimestre Cubana.
The expulsion of the Chinese, which had devastating effects on Chinese
Mexican families, also shaped conceptions of the Mexican nation. Julia
Schiavone Camacho demonstrates how deported families moved beyond
regional attachments as they developed strong national identities as Mexi-
cans during their exile in the United States and in the Portuguese colony of
Macau on the southeastern Chinese coast. Mexican women whose citizen-
ship had been revoked after they married Chinese men mounted legal chal-
lenges to their status. From 1937 to 1938 the Mexican government granted
permission for over four hundred Mexican women who had been in China
to repatriate to Mexico with their children, a process that continued from
the end of World War II through the 1960s. Their efforts to return home
eventually compelled the Mexican government to expand its boundaries of
citizenship and nation.55 Likewise, Chinese merchants in Cuba sought to
bring their wives and children from China as they demanded access to full
protection under Cuban law and inclusion into Cuban national life.56
Conclusion
After the end of the abominable coolie trade, the Chinese who settled in
Cuba encountered less discrimination than elsewhere in the Americas.
Rather, they were officially incorporated into a conception of a raceless,
classless citizenry beginning with the founding of the Cuban nation. Chi-
nese participation in Cuba’s liberation struggles and efforts at forming in-
terracial marriages and other alliances were key to their earlier integration.
The Cuban Revolution of 1959 further altered the Chinese community. On
one hand, its promise to combat institutional racism offered a premise of
equality for all racial and ethnic minorities. But the revolution devastated
the foundation of the merchant class, and large numbers of Chinese left
Cuba, especially after the nationalization of small businesses in 1968. With
no substantial new migration, fewer than 150 native Chinese remain in
Cuba today.
Yet through the middle of the twentieth century, the experiences of the
Chinese in Cuba, Peru, and Mexico bore significant similarities. Anti-Chi-
nese discourse portrayed them as “aliens” to be expunged rather than in-
corporated into the national body. In Cuba and Peru, campaigns and riots
that focused on hygiene, morality, and labor competition targeted Chinese
populations from time to time, especially during economic crises. Anti-

Chinese attitudes reached an extreme in Mexico, caught up in the context
of a revolutionary nationalism and anti-imperialism. The purge of Chinese
from the northern Mexico in 1931 amounted to a full-blown attempt to
cleanse the nation.
While historically Sinophobia can be found everywhere across Latin
America and the Caribbean, perhaps more significant for the question of
immigration and national belonging are the differences among anti-Chi-
nese campaigns and the Chinese community’s ability to mobilize a defense.
In Cuba, anti-Chinese policies occurred alongside an official rhetoric that
recognized Chinese participation in Cuban independence and the found-
ing of the nation. Sinophobia never coagulated into a sustained, organized
political movement, as it had in Mexico and to a much lesser extent in
Peru. In Cuba and Peru, Chinese were deported in accordance with exist-
ing immigration policy but not en masse simply for being Chinese. Despite
proposals for eliminating Havana’s Barrio Chino in the 1920s, it grew to
become the largest in all of the Americas by the 1940s.
While numbers were usually small in comparison to Afro-descended
and indigenous populations in Latin America, the Chinese presence con-
tinually stirred nationalist imaginings. Exploring Chinese immigration is
essential to understanding the development of hemispheric national iden-
tities. Scholarship on the region, however, has traditionally not reflected
the significance of the Chinese to developing republics. Until recently, his-
torians of Latin America focused on the study of European immigrants in
industry and agriculture. Theorizing of race and identity has consequently
been dominated by a concept of mestizaje primarily concerned with ra-
cial mixing of indigenous, African, and European populations.57 Elite
discourses on nation building concentrated on uplifting the African-de-
scended population in Cuba and Indians in Peru and Mexico. Asians and
Middle Easterners were viewed as beyond incorporation, due to perceived
cultural differences, concentrated settlement patterns, and smaller num-
bers. The constant presence of anti-Chinese discourse reminds us of the
significance of Chinese migration for constructions of national and cul-
tural identity. Recent research with hemispheric, transnational, and bor-
derland perspectives has begun to bring the Chinese presence from the
margins to the center of academic debate in the study of migration, race,
and citizenship in the Americas.58
Whereas Cuba’s revolution halted significant new immigration, Peru
and Mexico, like other Latin American countries, have continued to attract
Chinese migrants up to the present day. The new migrants, who differ from
the more established Chinese merchants in regional dialect and class status,
are generating new national discussions about foreign immigration and
about China’s geopolitical presence and economic role in Latin America
and the Caribbean. Not surprisingly, much of this discourse echoes the
anti-Chinese voices that filled newspapers and speeches across the region
a century ago.
Notes
I am grateful to Nicola Foote and Michael Goebel for encouraging me to think com-
paratively and for their useful framework for conceptualizing immigration and national
identity. I also thank Daniel Masterson and an anonymous reader for their comments and
helpful suggestions for improving this chapter.
1. Accounting for deaths on the voyage, 124,873 Chinese arrived in Cuba from 1847 to
1874, and 92,130 arrived in Peru from 1849 to 1874. Scholars estimate even higher numbers
than the official entries recorded at ports. Pérez de la Riva suggests a total of 150,000 to
Cuba, including contraband and Chinese from California. Meagher calculates 109,146 ar-
riving in Peru. Pérez de la Riva, Los culíes, 179; Rodríguez Pastor, Hijos del Celeste Imperio,
26; and Meagher, Coolie Trade, 222. For a recent comparative study of Chinese indentured
labor in Latin America, see Narvaez, “Chinese Coolies.” From final emancipation in 1838
until 1918, 429,623 migrants from India and 17,904 from China entered the British colo-
nies, mostly British Guiana, Trinidad, and Jamaica. The last shipload of Chinese arrived
in the British West Indies in 1884, while the importation and use of Indian laborers con-
tinued into the early twentieth century. Look Lai, Indentured Labor, 19.
2. Kuhn, Chinese Among Others, 39–40.
3. Meagher, Coolie Trade, 222–28.
4. Scholars have debated the experiences of Chinese indentured laborers in Cuba as
nominally free workers in a slave society and as a step toward modernity and liberalism.
As Lisa Yun notes, testimony from the Chinese themselves suggests a “counternarrative” to
the interpretation of nineteenth-century Asian migrants to the Americas as voluntary and
as representing a transition from slavery to wage labor. Yun, Coolie Speaks.
5. In 1926 the number of Spanish residing in Mexico reached 48,558, while that of
Chinese reached 24,218, followed by Americans, Syro-Lebanese, Germans, and Canadians.
Romero, Chinese in Mexico, 55–56.
6. For the development of this nationalist discourse and the contradictions within it,
see Ferrer, Insurgent Cuba.
7. For the Chinese in the Cuban struggles for independence, see López, Chinese Cu-
bans, ch. 4.
8. Bonilla, “War of the Pacific,” 108. Jorge Inostroza popularized the song “Los chinos
de Cerro Azul.”
9. Arona, La inmigración, 49. Juan de Arona was the pseudonym for Pedro Paz Soldán
y Unánue. For accounts of the Chinese in the War of the Pacific, see Bonilla, “War of the
Pacific”; Rodríguez Pastor, Hijos del Celeste Imperio, 231–32; and McKeown, Chinese Mi-
grant Networks, 140–41.
10. See Hu-DeHart, “Immigrants”; Knight, “Racism, Revolution, and Indigenismo”; and
Romero, Chinese in Mexico. For the role of the Chinese presence in shaping postrevolu-
tionary regional and national identities in northern Mexico, see Rénique, “Race, Region,
and Nation.”
11. Graham, Idea of Race; and Appelbaum, Macpherson, and Rosemblatt, Race and
Nation.
12. Corbitt, “Immigration in Cuba,” 304–5. Sections 7 and 8 of the law excluded the
Chinese, with the exception of those classified as merchants, students, diplomats, and
tourists. Chinese workers who had resided in Cuba since April 14, 1899, were also exempt.
13. The discussion of the role of Chinese immigrants in constructions of Cuban na-
tional identity appears in different form in my book Chinese Cubans. Studies of race and
nation-making in Cuba include Helg, Our Rightful Share; Ferrer, Insurgent Cuba; De la
Fuente, A Nation for All.
14. “Expediente, en inglés y español, referente a la inmigración de braceros,” Havana,
July 11, 1906–March 13, 1908, exp. 82, leg. 121, Secretaría de la Presidencia, Archivo Nacio-
nal de Cuba.
15. Herrera Jerez and Castillo Santana, De la memoria, 25, citing Ramón Meza y Suárez
Inclán, La inmigración útil debe ser protegida (Havana, 1906), 20–22. Meza delivered this
paper at the Fifth National Conference on Social Services and Correction in Santiago de
Cuba on April 16, 1906, in his capacity as delegate of the Sociedad Económico de los Ami-
gos del País and president of the conference’s immigration committee.
16. Guerra, Myth of José Martí, 147.
17. Ibid., 149.
18. Ibid., 150.
19. Pérez, “El peligro amarillo.”
20. Helg, “Race in Argentina and Cuba.” For racial gatekeeping policies, see Chomsky,
“‘Barbados or Canada?’”; and De la Fuente, A Nation for All.
21. Rodríguez Pastor, Herederos del dragón, 161–71; McKeown, Chinese Migrant Net-
works, 151–53; and Lausent-Herrera, “Chinatown in Peru,” 75.
22. McKeown, Chinese Migrant Networks, 152.
23. The essay “El problema racial en el Perú y la inmigración asiática” appeared in the
bulletin of the Lima Geographical Society. McKeown, Chinese Migrant Networks, 142–43.
24. Hu-DeHart, “Immigrants”; and Romero, Chinese in Mexico, ch. 6.
25. Espinoza, El problema chino; and Espinoza, El ejemplo de Sonora.
27. Hu-DeHart, “Indispensable Enemy,” 81.
28. Schiavone Camacho, Chinese Mexicans.
29. Martínez-Alier, Marriage, Class, and Colour.
30. According to Lausent-Herrera, the term most likely originated among the rural
population who were in contact with Chinese on the plantations, and it did not take on
a pejorative connotation until its use by the press and official documents in the early
twentieth century. The term was later supplanted by “tusan” (tusheng), usually reserved
for Peruvian-born with two Chinese parents. After 1870 young female injertas were sought
after in marriage to other mixed Chinese or Chinese no longer under contract. Lausent-
Herrera, “Tusans (tusheng),” 118.
31. “Expediente referente a la inmigración china,” Havana, September 1, 1909–June 21,
1914, exp. 83, leg. 121, Secretaría de la Presidencia, Archivo Nacional de Cuba.
32. Schiavone Camacho, Chinese Mexicans, 45. For the gendered aspects of the anti-
Chinese movement in Sonora and Chinese Mexican responses, see ibid., ch. 2.
34. Romero, Chinese in Mexico, 169. For Chinese legal responses to anti-Chinese per-
secution, see ibid., 166–72. For an in-depth examination of Chinese merchant defensive
strategies in Mexico during and after World War II, see González, “We Won’t Be Bullied
Anymore.”
35. Chuffat Latour, Apunte histórico, 175.
36. Quoted in Eng Herrera and García Triana, Martí en los chinos, 11–12.
37. McKeown, Chinese Migrant Networks, 170; see also Lausent-Herrera, “Tusans (tush-
eng),” 125–26. The original Spanish title of the publication is “La Colonia china en el Perú.
Instituciones y hombres representativos. Su actuación benéfica en la vida nacional.”
39. Tejeiro commemorated the life of Sun Yat-sen in an essay published on the anni-
versary of his death. Tejeiro, “Vida agitada.”
40. Amid a national wave of anti-Chinese discourse, defenders of the Chinese com-
munity emerged in the provincial town of Cienfuegos. El Comercio, April 16, 1928, 1, 3.
41. The Alianza Popular Revolucionaria Americana was known locally as the Partido
Aprista Peruano.
42. Mayer de Zulen, La China, 103.
43. Mayer included a chart of Chinese agriculturalists in Peru. Ibid., 178–80; and Ro-
dríguez Pastor, Herederos del dragón, 200–201.
44. Mayer de Zulen, La China; and McKeown, Chinese Migrant Networks, 155, 171.
45. Romero, Chinese in Mexico, 175–78.
46. In Radical Moves, Lara Putnam presents a connective historical analysis of anti-im-
migration restrictions across the circum-Caribbean region, especially those that targeted
black West Indians. A significant divergence from the pattern of anti-Asian restrictions
across Latin America and the Caribbean occurred in dictator Rafael Trujillo’s Dominican
Republic, which shifted its policies in 1931. The nation became known for its open-door
immigration policy that welcomed (with limitations) Jewish refugees from Europe, Span-
ish exiles from the Civil War, and Asians. However, only when European immigrants were
found to be insufficient did Dominican elites turn to Chinese (and later Japanese) as a
means to “whiten” society and to populate the border with Haiti.
48. The magazine (Lianhe Yuekan) was founded by the Union of Commercial Retailers
of the Chinese Colony in Cuba (Unión de Detallistas del Comercio de la Colonia China
en Cuba).
49. Lausent-Herrera, “Tusans (tusheng),” 126–30. The Chinese name of the magazine
is Tongfu Yipo (Dongfang Yuebao in Mandarin).
50. In 1945, for example, José Wong Lam appealed the court in Cienfuegos, Cuba, to
have his son’s birth registry changed from mestizo (mixed) to blanco (white). “Rollo de
apelación en expediente sobre subsanación de error en la inscripción de nacimiento de

José Wong Alonso” (1945), exp. 6652, Juzgado de Primera Instancia, Archivo Histórico
Provincial de Cienfuegos.
51. McKeown, Chinese Migrant Networks, 175–77.
52. Lesser, Negotiating National Identity; and Takenaka, “Japanese in Peru.” Michael
Gonzales details Japanese experiences in agriculture from 1899 to 1923, when the Peru-
vian and Japanese governments ended the emigration agreement. Japanese protested over
low wages and contract conditions, eventually joining forces with Peruvian peasants. See
Gonzales, “Resistance among Asian Plantation Workers.”
53. Corbitt, “Chinese Immigrants in Cuba,” 130.
54. Ibid. The treaty was published in the Gaceta Oficial de la República on December
24, 1943, and is reproduced in Tejeiro, Historia ilustrada.
55. Schiavone Camacho, Chinese Mexicans; and Romero, Chinese in Mexico, 87.
56. See López, Chinese Cubans, ch. 7.
57. Hu-DeHart, “Multiculturalism.” For studies that address non-European immi-
grants in Latin America, see Holloway, Immigrants on the Land; Lesser, Negotiating Na-
tional Identity; and Alfaro-Velcamp, So Far from Allah.
58. Among this recent work are Siu, Memories of a Future Home; Lee, “Orientalisms in
the Americas”; Hu-DeHart, “Indispensable Enemy”; Romero, Chinese in Mexico; Schia-
vone Camacho, Chinese Mexicans; Delgado, Making the Chinese Mexican; Chang, “Racial
Alterity”; and Young, Alien Nation.
8
British Caribbean Migration and the
Racialization of Latin American Nationalisms
Nicola Foote
Immigration in Latin American nationalist discourses was associated

overwhelmingly with whiteness and the ideal of social whitening. Elites
influenced by scientific racism and social Darwinist intellectual currents
that associated racial composition with modernity and progress sought
immigrants who would “improve” their racial stock and bring cultural at-
tributes that were perceived to be lacking in the existing population. As
we have seen in this volume, this project was racked with contradictions:
even the most “desirable” immigrant groups such as Germans or Italians
could prove a focus of nationalist concern when they maintained their
own cultural identities or provided economic competition, while Jewish
and Middle Eastern immigrants prompted questions about how far the
category of whiteness could be expanded. However, the tensions between
immigration and whitening were brought into sharpest focus by British
Caribbean migration—a group whose African descent made them the pre-
cise opposite of the whitening logic.1 This group represented one of the
largest immigrant flows to regions outside of the Southern Cone and played
a critical role in the nation-building process. British Caribbean labor was
essential to the construction of the transportation networks that facilitated
the integration of national resources as well as to the development of the
agro-export and mineral extraction industries that fueled the economic
boom of the period 1880 to 1930. Yet the connection between immigration
and whiteness was so powerful that these immigrants were not typically
viewed as such. Considered highly undesirable by nationalist elites, Brit-
ish Caribbean immigrants were typically classified as temporary “contract
workers” in customs logs and government data, thus distinguishing them
from the European “settlers” and “colonists” who were seen to be the true,
permanent, immigrant class.
206 · Nicola Foote
This separation between British Caribbean migrants and the category of

“immigrant” has fed into scholarly literature and affected our understand-
ing of the relationship between West Indians and Latin American nation
building. Although there has been a significant body of scholarship chart-
ing the essential contributions of British Caribbean migrants to regional
economic development, Afro-Caribbean migrants have typically been
omitted from comparative work on Latin American immigration while
theoretical studies of Latin American race formation have rarely looked
at black immigrants as case studies that can provide insight into broader
racial currents.2 This chapter addresses Aline Helg’s call for a renewed fo-
cus on the connection between race formation and the transnational dis-
tribution of Afro-Caribbean workers in Latin America by examining the
complex role West Indian migrants played in Latin American nationalisms
in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.3 It assesses the racial
discourses that surrounded black migrants and explores how their black-
ness came to symbolize the contradictions of nationalist development and
came to be used as a shorthand for fears about neocolonialism and impe-
rialism. It evaluates the relative weight that regional and international ide-
ologies of blackness played in the exclusion of British Caribbean migrants
and examines how intellectual currents translated into social realities and
helped shape the lived experience of black immigrants. The chapter uses a
broad comparative lens, evaluating the well-known case studies of Central
America and Cuba as well as the often neglected migrations to the Andean
and Amazonian regions of South America, and bringing migratory cur-
rents that predated the national period into conversation with those that
emerged in the late nineteenth and twentieth century.
Nation Building, Modernity, and British Caribbean Immigration
Latin American modernization projects were intimately entwined with

West Indian immigration. Almost every major infrastructural develop-
ment across the continent—beginning with the first tropical railroad built
in Panama in 1850 and ranging through the construction of roads, railways,
and air bases in Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Venezuela, Ecuador,
Colombia, Peru, and Brazil—used West Indian labor to connect agricul-
tural regions to coastal ports and create international networks. The size
of migratory streams could range dramatically, from the 119 workers re-
cruited for the expansion of the Valparaíso harbor in Chile to the 150,000
immigrants who worked in the construction of the Panama Canal.4 The
British Caribbean Migration and the Racialization of Latin American Nationalisms · 207
modernization of a transportation system in which exports had previously

depended on mule paths and canoe was essential to national development
and served to incorporate isolated and inaccessible areas more fully into
the national patrimony, demarcating frontiers, facilitating the expansion of
settlement in contested border regions, and creating a new range of agro-
export investment opportunities.
As industrialization and urbanization in the United States and Europe
stimulated demand for Latin American primary commodities, West Indi-
ans became a major workforce in the booming agro-export sector. Most
significantly, they formed a primary labor force in the United Fruit Com-
pany’s banana plantations in Central America and in the booming sugar
plantations of early twentieth-century Cuba. West Indians also worked in
the extraction of Amazonian rubber in Peru, Brazil, and Ecuador and in the
collection of hardwoods in Mexico as well as for American sugar interests
and fruit companies in Haiti.5 British Caribbean migrants were also es-
sential to mining and mineral extraction, working in gold and tin mining
in Venezuela, Suriname, and Costa Rica; guano extraction in Colombia
and the Galapagos Islands; and the booming oil industry in Venezuela.
While men were more numerous in these migrations, women also were
present; they were recruited for work as domestic servants, laundresses,
and cooks, and they also worked autonomously as higglers and occasion-
ally as prostitutes.
The centrality of British Caribbean immigrants to these infrastructural
and agricultural development projects underscores the important yet am-
bivalent role they occupied within the nation-building process. West In-
dian workers transformed nonproductive regions into thriving parts of re-
gional economies and were thus essential to economic modernization. But
they also highlighted the limitations of modernization and the fact that it
depended on foreign capital and foreign labor.
In some countries, the connection of West Indians to national integra-
tion was even more complicated. In the Miskito Coast of Nicaragua, the
Colombian islands of San Andrés and Providencia and the Bay Islands of
Honduras, black West Indian settlement predated the formation of the
nation-state, and the key issue in terms of nationalist integration of terri-
tory was the assimilation of these spaces that were culturally and ethnically
distinct and that did not identify with the new nations. In these regions
the descendants of the enslaved laborers brought from the West Indies by
eighteenth-century English privateering and land companies formed the
basis of a black and mixed-race Creole population whose members traded
208 · Nicola Foote
chiefly with Jamaica and educated their children on the island. Their num-
bers were supplemented throughout the nineteenth century by the set-
tlement of turtle fishermen from Jamaica and the Cayman Islands.6 San
Andrés and Providencia nominally became part of Colombia with inde-
pendence in 1822 but remained economically and culturally isolated from
the mainland. The British continued to formally hold the Miskito Coast
and the Bay Islands into the 1850s, only ceding control to Nicaragua and
Honduras in treaties under diplomatic pressure from the United States in
1859 and 1860.
Even after formal incorporation, English continued to be the dominant
language and Protestantism the dominant religion, and cultural allegiances
were more attuned to Britain and the United States than to Central Amer-
ica and South America. Assimilation thus became a nationalist priority.
This took the most dramatic form in Nicaragua, where national troops in-
vaded the Miskito Reserve in 1894.7 In Colombia, the government assigned
Catholic missionaries to San Andrés and Providencia to convert the West
Indian–descended population and to teach them Spanish in an effort to
“nationalize” the population.8
The presence of British Caribbean immigrants and their descendants
was thus central to the creation of the physical space of the nation. Whether
they were building the infrastructure necessary to ensure the integration
of national resources or whether they themselves and the territory they
inhabited were viewed as subjects for amalgamation and assimilation, the
connection between West Indians and projects of integration and mod-
ernization raised profound questions of blackness and national belonging.
These complex negotiations were influenced by regional and international
racial discourses and can only be understood in the transnational context
of U.S. economic penetration and expansion.
International Racial Discourses, Neocolonialism, and the Brutalities

of the Black Immigrant Experience
Harsh working conditions, racial segregation, and often savage violence

were staples of the West Indian experience in nineteenth- and early twen-
tieth-century Latin America. The racism and violence British Caribbean
migrants faced have typically been viewed by scholars as a function of U.S.
norms and attitudes in American enclaves and have not been interpreted as
symptomatic of broader currents. But while migrant experiences certainly
underline U.S. racism, the most notable abuses occurred when official state
actors—notably police officers and the armed forces—operated in collabo-

ration with American corporate interests. While in part their collusion re-
flected the corruption and fragility of many Latin American states, it is also
deeply revealing about racial attitudes at the regional level and how these
intersected with international discourses.
The racial mechanisms of the labor control strategies employed by
American companies were without doubt striking and important. U.S.
corporations sought to impose the same kind of Jim Crow segregation on
their labor force that prevailed in the American South. In the Panama Ca-
nal Zone, workers were assigned into gold and silver divisions according to
race, with black “silver” workers paid in Panamanian silver as opposed to
U.S. dollars, given barracks housing, and assigned more difficult and dan-
gerous tasks; meanwhile, the United Fruit Company organized both tasks
and amenities along racial lines.9 A number of mechanisms were used by
companies to avoid the practice of truly free wage labor. Payment to immi-
grant workers was often much lower than promised in recruiting contracts,
and U.S. enterprises sometimes substituted cash wages for tokens redeem-
able only in company commissaries.
Practices of debt peonage were often applied to West Indian immigrants.
Contracted fruit plantation workers in Nicaragua were not paid for their
first two months of labor and were then told that the cost of the food they
had been provided in the meantime, along with the provision of machetes
and work boots, was to be withheld from their wages.10 In the Peruvian
Amazon, sex was apparently used as a tool to submit black male workers
to the system of debt peonage. Arriving Barbadians were assigned Indian
women by company officials to serve as their “temporary wives.” The only
place where workers could purchase the necessities to support their new
“families” was in the company store, where prices were inflated 1,000 per-
cent over cost.11 Debt served to enhance the profit margins of international
corporations by allowing them to cut labor costs at the same time as prof-
iting from “wages” paid. It also reduced labor mobility and extended the
labor cycle of workers—especially important in isolated areas where the
cost of importing workers was high.
Working and living conditions for black migrants were often dire. Re-
ports from the Panama Railroad in the 1850s told of men laboring in waist-
deep water and simply slipping and falling to their deaths.12 One letter of
complaint from Jamaican railroad workers in Ecuador described the al-
located sleeping quarters as “an open horse stable full of swamps and dirt”
and asserted that conditions were so cramped it was impossible to lay down
210 · Nicola Foote
and that migrants had to “stand on their legs all the time,” making it impos-
sible to sleep.13 In Colombia in 1891 twelve Jamaicans taken to the island
of Roncador to load guano for the American-owned Colombia Guano and
Phosphate Company were left stranded on a reef when their American
ship departed without them. Seven escaped on a raft crafted out of coconut
palms; the rest died of starvation, their decaying skeletons later uncovered
by a British military command sent to investigate the accusations.14
Workers drew parallels with slavery in protesting their conditions. One
Barbadian described migrants in Cuba as being “made to work like Galley
slaves” and accused the Cuban government of “carrying on a slave trade.”15
In Peru, frightened workers wrote to the Barbados Advocate protesting
the failure of the Peruvian Amazon Company to honor the terms of their
contract, lamenting that “now we are Suffering day by day as slaves. We
thought that we were going there as labourers but we found out afterwards
there is Slaves where we are. We cannot get away because there is soldiers
guarding us.”16
Even when workers did not use the language of slavery, their treatment
was reminiscent of the worst forms of unfree labor. Workers on the Vera-
cruz Railroad in Mexico had to work under the control of guards armed
with guns and were forced to go to bed at seven o’clock in the evening.
Runaways were pursued by professional “hunters” with dogs and guns, and
those captured were whipped, evoking clear echoes of slavery.17 Likewise,
the Ecuadorian police force were deployed to “hunt, capture and keep to
forced labor men employed under forced contracts and deserting their
work.”18 Captured deserters were tied with ropes in batches of nine or ten,
and marched back to the railway works with armed soldiers on either side.19
In Peru, British Caribbean rubber workers reported being tied up on cross
poles, flogged, placed in the stocks, and marched through the rainforest
chained by the neck for minor transgressions of company authority such
as buying bread outside of the company store.20
Corporate officials sought to defend their actions by seeking to invoke
two of the key racial stereotypes of blackness—laziness and criminality—in
ways that resonated with nationalist public opinion. In a revealing article
in the main Guayaquil newspaper, two journalists described how they had
been invited by the Quito-Guayaquil Railway Company to take a guided
tour of immigrant worker camps. When they met the superintendent of
construction he read out an article to them from the Jamaican newspa-
per the Daily Gleaner, which he told them (and they duly relayed to read-
ers) that the emigration of thousands of Jamaican day laborers to work on
the railway in Ecuador had been a positive boon for the island because so
many known criminals were included among their number.21 This seems
to have been a purposeful exaggeration of the meaning of the text in the
original language. The article in question actually criticized the American
recruitment company for rounding up any worker who would go, with-
out consideration for their past experience or aptitude. The possibility that
some convicted criminals may have been sent overseas was only one of the
concerns, and was certainly not presented as a positive for Jamaica—quite
the opposite—because it was feared this would undermine the success of
the migration.22 But the exaggeration seems to have had the desired ef-
fect. “After listening to this snippet which made our hair stand on end, we
stayed by the Superintendent as if we were little old men and, unshockable,
he said to us, pointing to his revolver—‘don’t worry.’” The rest of the article
was then devoted to graphic accounts of the drunken antics of the workers
(their visit had coincided with payday) and to emphatic repetitions of their
gratitude for the protection of Americans with their guns from the terrify-
ing blacks.23
The promise implicit in the Grito del Pubelo article that arms could be
used to “protect” against black workers was frequently put into action. In
addition to their own often brutal enforcement of labor discipline dis-
cussed above, American business officials frequently made use of govern-
ment soldiers and police to defend their interests. Police were regularly
called in to arrest workers who broke their contracts and took up positions
with different companies, while the armed forces were routinely called in
to break up strikes. In Cuba, estate owners frequently used state troops to
drive away immigrants at the end of planting and harvest seasons in order
to avoid paying wages owed.24 State intervention was often violent. British
Caribbean miners reported being beaten by Venezuelan police acting at
the request of the El Callao Company when they tried to take up positions
at a rival mine.25 Police officers working at the bequest of the United Fruit
Company in Costa Rica burned the houses of British Caribbean strikers to
the ground and rooted up and destroyed their garden vegetable plots.26
An especially egregious state assault on British Caribbean immigrants
occurred in Culebra, Panama, in 1885, when an attack by Colombian troops
on a barracks where two hundred West Indian railroad workers were sleep-
ing led to the deaths of twenty-five men and the serious injury of at least
twenty others. Eyewitnesses testified that troops had blocked the doors to
the barracks, preventing any escape, and hacked at fleeing men with swords
and machetes. Troops then rifled through the trunks and possessions of the
212 · Nicola Foote
dead men, stealing their suitcases and personal belongings and removing
watches and cash from the dead bodies.27
The Colombian government presented a narrative in which the troops
were provoked by an attack on them by a “mob” of Caribbean immigrants,
and argued that their actions were ultimately about keeping the peace and
protecting the Colombian public. American interests in Panama accepted
the position of the Colombian government wholesale. The New York Times
wrote that “the individual ordinarily called ‘the Jamaican nigger’ . . . is with-
out any exception the most insolent, lawless, brutal and offensive species of
the human race” and insisted that the fact Colombian troops sustained no
injuries from the alleged mob attack was “not the least a refutation of this
story” since people within a mob were rarely good shots.28
Even after a joint British and French investigation found conclusively
that Colombian troops were the unprovoked aggressors in the attack, the
Colombian government continued to insist that the commanding officer,
Captain Cobo, had done no more than “defend himself and attempt to pac-
ify those who did not recognize his authority.”29 The more than fifty eyewit-
ness reports were dismissed as unreliable because they were “Jamaicans,
laborers, companions of the men who were killed”—their place of origin
given as an explicit reason to discount their testimony. Nonblack testifi-
ers, who admitted that they were not personal witnesses to the event, were
granted more reliability as they painted a picture of an angry black mob
capturing and torturing local villagers and firing weapons at troops.30 After
intensive British pressure, the Colombian Supreme Court demoted Cobo
from the rank of captain, but officials expressed sympathy for his plight and
were unhappy to see him punished, insisting that his conduct had “previ-
ously been irreproachable” and that “impudent zeal in the discharge of his
military duties” had been his sole offense.31 Although it is likely that mili-
tary loyalties and offense at British meddling were also factors in official
attitudes, the fact that the massacre of blacks could be discounted as “im-
pudent zeal” that might be viewed as a mere blip of an otherwise successful
career is telling about the depths of antiblack sentiment at the highest level
of the Colombian government.
While the Culebra massacre was noteworthy for its scale, the murder
of immigrants by police, armed forces, and company officials was far from
uncommon. In Costa Rica a Limón worker wrote to his wife that seven-
teen workers had been shot by police in the plantation areas in one single
week in 1910.32 In Ecuador the shooting of Jamaicans seemed to have devel-
oped almost into a sport. One complaint lodged with the British Consulate
pleaded, “They are shooting us like birds. An American called O’Brian is

calling the people out of the camp and shooting them.”33
Police shootings were especially widespread in Cuba at the height of the
1920s migratory boom. A Jamaican named Charles Sadler was shot in the
back by a Cuban rural guard while his hands were tied behind his back. An-
other Jamaican man who summoned the police to report a crime was shot
in the face by the Cuban police officer who arrived to investigate, losing an
eye.34 Oscar Taylor was shot dead from behind a closed door.35 One Cuban
Army officer was accused of the massacre of seventeen Jamaican workers
in Camagüey, allegedly “ordering a machine gun trained on the defense-
less men under the pretense of taking their photograph.”36 In several cases
Cuban police officers were brought to trial for killing British Caribbean
workers, but British Foreign Office documentation suggests that they were
almost always acquitted of murder, either on grounds of self-defense or
with the charge being downgraded to assault or “transgression of the law.”
The Cuban secretary of state stood by the judicial process and insisted there
was no evidence of guilt on the part of any of the Cuban police, instead ac-
cusing West Indian immigrants of inciting trouble with their own violence
and drunkenness.37
Women immigrants faced an additional layer of gendered vulnerability
to official violence, with rape and sexual assault by police and company
officials a common occurrence. The perpetrators were sometimes estate
foremen and overseers who knew they would not be questioned by local
law enforcement. In an especially tragic case in Puerto Rico, the manager
of the hacienda Libre de Palma in Humacao raped Elizabeth Williams, the
wife of a British Caribbean worker on the estate. Mr. Williams and some of
his fellow migrant workers confronted the manager about the attack, whose
response was to call in the civil guards. The men were arrested and impris-
oned, and when Elizabeth and the other men’s wives protested the arrest of
their husbands, they were beaten by the guards and also taken to jail. The
group was subsequently locked up without trial for over a year. Although
Williams was found to be pregnant (it is unclear whether this was as a re-
sult of the rape), she was not released and later gave birth in jail, where her
baby died.38 The vulnerabilities of black women who sought retribution for
sexual attack could hardly be more starkly apparent.
On other occasions the perpetrators of sexual violence were the police
themselves. In Limón a Jamaican woman named Mrs. Francis Tait com-
plained of being “molested” by police while imprisoned, while several Ja-
maican and Barbadian women in Guayaquil lodged reports of rape and
214 · Nicola Foote
sexual assault by the Ecuadorian police with the British consul.39 A rape
that took place in Honduras shows how police officers sometimes worked
together in planning assaults. Emma Broomfield reported to the British
consul how the deputy director of police came to her home with four fellow
police officers and announced that they had orders to arrest her husband.
When she told them her husband was not home, the deputy director en-
tered her house, leaving the other officers outside the door, took off his coat,
belt, and revolver, and forced her down on the bed. Her screams alerted a
neighbor, who tried to see what was wrong, but he was refused entrance by
the police officers, who said they were there “on authority.” The consul did
not investigate Broomfield’s allegations, writing testily that the problems
the West Indians had with the police were the result of their own failure to
comply with police orders.40 Yet the premeditated nature of the attack—the
grouping of multiple officers, the stationing of officers outside the door—
suggests that this was not an isolated incident and may well have been part
of a more systematic pattern of sexual abuse.
The abuse of British Caribbean immigrants also could involve forcing
them to serve as the perpetrators of assaults on other ethnic groups. East-
ern Caribbean immigrants employed with the Peruvian Amazon Com-
pany were caught up in the notorious genocide in the Putumayo, forced,
as investigating British Vice-Consul Sir Roger Casement wrote, “to act
as armed bullies and terrorists over the surrounding native population,”
who were locked into a brutal system of forced labor and violence.41 West
Indian workers were used to conduct raids on Indian villages, capturing
Indians and forcing them to work for the rubber companies. A Montserra-
tian named John Brown, who escaped from the Putumayo, described how
he had contracted to collect rubber with the Arana Company as part of
a group of fifty West Indian men. On their arrival at the Putumayo River
in April 1902, they were given guns and sent “into the forest to look for
Indians, and to kill them. We refused, saying that we had not come to kill
Indians but to do agricultural work.” The migrants were told that if they
would not kill Indians, they themselves would be killed. “They beat us with
swords, they put us in guns (hands tied across knees with guns underneath
knees), and did us all manner of wickedness. We cried for help but there
was none . . . We tried to escape but there was no means of doing so—only
one small steamer that belonged to the same company and they would not
take us away.” Even when their contracted term of labor ended after two
years, the migrants were still not permitted to leave.42
The use of West Indian migrants to inflict terror on the Amazonian
indigenous population became one of the central points of the international

investigation into the system of slavery and forced labor as the Putumayo
scandal broke following the publication of W. E. Hardenburg’s journalistic
reports in 1909 and 1910.43 Sir Roger Casement, fresh from his investigation
into the rubber genocide in the Congo, was sent to lead the British inquiry,
and his official report, although it documented the terrible abuses Carib-
bean workers had themselves endured, was ultimately unsympathetic,
describing them as “active agents” in a system of “armed extortion” and
“brigandage.”44 The Peruvian government sought to allocate blame for the
enslavement of Indians onto the black migrant overseers. The minister of
foreign relations, for example, described the “Barbados negroes” as “the
most implicit executors of every kind of order, no matter how infamous
they might be. They were the real henchmen of the Putumayo, sowing hor-
ror and panic among the Indians.”45 At least two Barbadians were arrested
and extradited in the American investigation into the atrocities.46 Notably,
after the 1912 scandal, despite two major international investigations, al-
most nothing was done to extricate the British Caribbean workers from the
Amazon, many of whom remained trapped.
Stereotypes of blacks as savage and violent made claims of Barbadian
culpability for genocide resonate with the wider public both locally and
internationally. Indeed, it is likely that these stereotypes of blackness played
a role in the assignment of blacks to the role of capturing and policing Indi-
ans in the first place. This reflects a broader reality: although in practice it
was often West Indian immigrants who were the victims of crime and vio-
lence, they were framed in nationalist discourse as the dangerous carriers
of such currents. Moreover, racial discourses were not just abstract ideas—
they had real and practical consequences at the level of lived experience for
British Caribbean immigrants. Thus it is essential to assess the ideological
underpinnings of the brutal treatment British Caribbean workers received,
and to examine how American ideas about black criminality, violence, and
degradation intersected with those that already existed in Latin American
society as a result of local histories of slavery as well as postemancipation
racial hierarchies.
Crime, Disease, and Political Disruption: Antiblackness and the

Discourse of Racial Danger
Throughout Latin America, British Caribbean migrants were consistently

discussed by nationalist elites and intellectuals in terms that focused on
216 · Nicola Foote
their blackness as a source of “racial danger” and that characterized black

immigrants as unhygienic, violent, and inherently criminal. These ideas
had a remarkable consistency across time and space, with the same kinds
of arguments articulated in Central America, South America, and Cuba,
and as strongly in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century as in
the 1930s and 1940s. As Lara Putnam notes in this volume, it took the re-
configuration of economic and political realities and the rise to power of
populist leaders for these discourses to move beyond the realm of exclu-
sionary “racial fantasies” and to be translated into action through immigra-
tion bans and deportations. However, the ideas forged in an earlier stage
of British Caribbean immigration formed an important foundation of later
antiblack nationalisms and are of critical importance in understanding
their development.
At the heart of anti–West Indian discourse was the idea that Antillean
immigrants imported delinquency and crime. British Caribbean migrants
were perceived as prone to drunkenness and drug abuse, and were alleged
to encourage these vices in the local population. In Ecuador, for example,
the chief of police in Guayaquil blamed black immigration for a wave of
drunkenness in the coastal provinces and argued that the behavior of Brit-
ish Caribbean migrants threatened the integrity of Ecuadorian culture and
society.47 In a fascinating precursor of the War on Drugs, West Indians in
the 1930s were accused of trafficking opium, cocaine, and morphine be-
tween Colombia and the Caribbean islands and were blamed by Colom-
bian elites for rising consumption of illegal drugs.48 Black criminality was
often seen as genetic and as an unshakeable reality of African lineage. In a
1906 essay that set the tone for nationalist thinking on race in the decade
before Fernando Ortiz emerged as a founder of Afro-Cubanismo and an-
tiracism, Ortiz argued that, in Cuba, black immigrants possessed inherent
criminal tendencies that were a serious threat to Cuban society. Criminolo-
gist Israel Castellanos labeled delinquency as “ethnically African.”49 Simi-
larly, in Honduras, well-known writer Froylán Turcios denounced plans to
import British Caribbean workers for the La Tela railroad, arguing that due
to their “physiological makeup,” blacks were “much more prone to violence
and crime.”50
Ideas about black criminality were often linked to Caribbean religious
practices. Black migrants were routinely accused of practicing witchcraft
and child sacrifice. In Costa Rica, the Pentecostal Union Baptist Society
was described by the leading national newspaper as a “monstrous cult
of undoubted affiliation with the devil,” and sect leaders were accused of
kidnapping children and drinking the blood of prepubescent girls.51 In

Venezuela it was a common belief that Antilleans sacrificed white children
as a cure for sickness, and it was frequently rumored in the oil fields that
white children in Maracaibo were disappearing, victims of black witch-
craft.52 These beliefs could have tragic consequences. In Cuba white crowds
lynched a Jamaican man in 1919 after he was accused of planning to kidnap
a white female child for a witchcraft ceremony while British Caribbeaners
Edward Robinson and Bernard Hall were arrested in 1921 on the charge
of stealing a Cuban child, who was later found to be asleep in her parents’
house.53 Aline Helg has discussed black religion as one of three “icons of
fear” surrounding blackness in Cuba, and the experiences of British Carib-
bean migrants in Latin America as a whole demonstrates that this pathol-
ogization of African-derived religious practices had a pan-regional reso-
nance that significantly impacted the experiences of black immigrants.54
Fear of black sexuality, another common trope in regional discourses of
blackness, can also be seen clearly in the hysterical imagery of black men
drinking the blood of white girls. Notably, however, it was the sexuality of
Afro-Caribbean women, rather than men, that was seen as especially prob-
lematic in anti-immigration discourses, and women migrants were widely
associated with prostitution and sexual promiscuity. Hortensia Lamar, the
leader of an elite Cuban women’s group, lamented that with the rise in black
migration “prostitution . . . increased considerably and with inconceivable
loathsomeness.”55 In Brazil Barbadian and Martiniquean women migrants
were consistently referred to as prostitutes in contemporary discussions,
despite the fact that most of them worked as laundresses or higglers.56 Sim-
ilarly, the arrival in Panama of a ship bringing 295 Martiniquean women
immigrants to serve as domestic servants and laundresses scandalized
American officials, who labeled them all as prostitutes. Although sexual
relationships do seem to have been forged between some of the women and
the Jamaican male laborers working on canal construction, only three cases
of prostitution were officially documented, and a majority of the women
were married and joined their husbands.57 The panicked reaction from
canal authorities reveals more about fears of black female sexuality than
about immigrant realities.
Associating black women with prostitution also meant they were of-
ten blamed for the high rates of sexually transmitted diseases in migrant
areas. This reflected a much broader correlation between British Carib-
bean immigrants and disease, which led to West Indians being constructed
as a threat to national hygiene. Black immigrants were seen as having a
218 · Nicola Foote
particular predisposition to diseases such as tuberculosis, leprosy, syphi-

lis, and even insanity, and were argued to be genetic carriers of diseases
such as malaria, typhoid, intestinal parasites, and smallpox. This reflected
high rates of disease stemming from poor conditions in West Indian labor
camps as well as the tendency to label indigent migrants as insane and
commit them to asylums. Emerging eugenic discourses were used to create
a biological argument about disease and genetics that pathologized black
migrants.58
These ideas were not just abstract but had real consequences at the
level of lived experience. Concerns about black disease led to a Jamaican
named Locksley Roye being shot dead in Cuba for refusing to take a dose
of medicine prescribed to him at the quarantine station set up to screen
incoming black migrants. As the Daily Gleaner recounted, “A doctor was
not employed to persuade him, but a rural guard was sent for, and this
worthy began his ministrations by having the man held down, opening his
mouth, and forcibly inserting the medicine. Then, the Jamaican showing
his objection violently to this mode of medical treatment, the rural guard
shot him dead.”59 The British consul noted that “Roye was not ill, nor was
he armed, and the necessity of an armed guard to administer medicine to
immigrants is not easily explained.”60 The Gleaner suggested, tongue appar-
ently in cheek, that “better dead than sick” might be the motto of the Cuban
police, but it is highly likely that fear of black contagion was bound up in
the police officer’s action.61
British Caribbean migrants were not just viewed as a biological threat to
the nation but also as a political threat. Many political leaders and intellec-
tuals argued that British Caribbean migrants were a major contributor to
regional political instability, owing to their alleged tendency toward violent
uprising and their close association with U.S. imperialism. In Venezuela
black migrants were perceived to be a significant factor in the civil wars of
the nineteenth century. The Venezuelan minister of the interior expressed
his concern about the arrival of blacks from Trinidad and Curaçao, “with
the pretext of coming to work in Venezuela, but who . . . are very prejudicial
to the tranquility of the territory,” and voiced a suspicion that landowners
were importing blacks specifically to serve in their personal armies, using
the need for labor as a cover for political ambitions.62 In Cuba the 1912 up-
rising by the Independent Party of Color (PIC) was attributed to black Ca-
ribbean migrants, with PIC leader Evaristo Estenoz rumored to be from the
Dominican Republic or Jamaica (he was Cuban), and with Jamaican and
Haitian immigrants said to have played a central role in the uprising (they
did not).63 In Central America the idea of an imminent armed black rebel-
lion became a central feature of anti-immigrant agitation in the 1930s. The
newspaper Panama American ran a series of articles alleging that blacks in
the canal zone were on the edge of armed revolt in June 1933, while a peti-
tion in the same year by Costa Rican banana workers protesting the United
Fruit Company hiring practices claimed that West Indians were taking up
arms and predicted an imminent black “invasion” of the highlands.64 In
Honduras, British Caribbean migrants crossing the border with Belize to
attend sporting events were assumed by the government to be smuggling
weapons to rebel forces and were arrested and deported.65
In each of these cases historians have found little evidence to support
contemporary arguments that West Indians were involved in armed up-
risings. However, the perception of black immigrants as representing an
armed threat and the way this perception was used to underline concerns
about Antillean immigration are significant for its connection to deeper
racial discourses regarding blackness and political violence. One of the
dominant tropes of regional blackness was the idea of black predisposition
to violence and militarism. This stemmed partly from colonial-era fears of
slave rebellions and was accelerated by Afro-Latin American use of mili-
tary service as a strategy for social advancement in the national period.66
Ecuadorian historian Hans Heiman Guzmán encapsulated these ideas in
his suggestion that the importation of African slaves had “disrupted the
course of Ecuadorian history” because of the “bloody and warlike ways of
blacks.”67 Similarly in Venezuela, economist Alberto Adriani insisted that
“in our country they [blacks] have been the raw material of disorder, the el-
ement from which our armies have recruited almost all their revolutions.”68
This idea that blacks were the root of political disturbance was developed
into arguments that blacks were simply incompatible with democracy. Ven-
ezuelan historian José Gil Fortoul drew on Herbert Spencer to argue that
racial characteristics determined political practice and that the country’s
long history of authoritarianism was the result of racial demographics.69
For Venezuela to have any chance to develop meaningful democratic insti-
tutions, Gil Fortoul argued, further black immigration had to be prevented.
The connection of British Caribbean migrants to U.S. expansion also
contributed to characterizations of them as a threat to political stability.
Cuban historian Emilio Roig de Leuchsenring, for example, argued that
black migration was problematic because African-descended peoples, be-
ing a “weaker” race, were more susceptible to domination by U.S. capi-
tal.70 This idea that the presence of blacks made nations vulnerable to U.S.
220 · Nicola Foote
intervention had widespread resonance. Many Latin American intellectu-

als began to make the connection between racial demography and U.S.
military intervention and to formulate this into a new measure of anti-
blackness. Alberto Adriani, for example, argued that “the Americans have
certain prejudices against the black race, and do not collaborate willingly
even with their compatriots of that race. . . . The Americans will show them-
selves to be merciless with regions inhabited by races that they consider
inferior, like the black.” This is why the American preference for black labor
was so dangerous—it brought in immigrants who not only did not contrib-
ute to “social progress” (whitening) but who also weakened the nation’s in-
ternational positioning.71 The connection between West Indian immigrants
and foreign powers thus became a self-reinforcing cycle, in which black
migrants were both symbols of U.S. imperialism and perceived to be a risk
factor for further domination.
Diaspora Nationalisms and West Indian Exclusion
It would be too simplistic to present British Caribbean migrants simply as

passive foils for racial discourses. They also contributed to the xenophobia
and nativism they encountered through their own ideas and actions, and
British Caribbean diaspora nationalisms were an important factor in the
othering of West Indian immigrants. Throughout the region, Antillean im-
migrants identified strongly and overtly as British and took pride in what
they perceived as their Anglo-Saxon culture. British Caribbean migrants
negotiated the dominant regional and international discourses of the time
by rejecting ideas about black inferiority and emphasizing instead their
connection to the cultural elements praised in scientific racial theory.
The travel narrative of British railway engineer Walter Wood provides a
telling example of how fashion and language were used to project a sense of
superiority among Trinidadian and Barbadian migrants in 1890s Venezu-
ela. As he recounted, “It was most amusing to see several of them, within
an hour of their arrival, dressed up, with a great display of shirt fronts,
collars &c, and in good cloth suits, parading the streets and the Plaza, as
if the whole place belonged to them and not hesitating to let it be known
that they were ‘English.’”72 While he found their efforts to claim a stake in
Englishness amusing, they seemed to resonate in Maracaibo, and by the
1930s the term “ingles” had become synonymous with black immigrants
from the British Caribbean, with whites from England itself designated as
“un inglés blanco.”73
British Caribbean pride in Anglo-Saxon culture could also lead to

contempt for Latin American host societies. In Limón, black immigrants
dismissed Spanish as “bird language” and regarded mestizo Costa Ricans
as uneducated and backward peasants.74 A petition by Hispanic banana
workers to the Costa Rican National Assembly in 1941 complained, “For
forty long years we Costa Ricans were displaced from the . . . Atlantic Zone
by Negroes. . . . They think that they are superior to us. . . . They look
down upon our language.”75 One second-generation Jamaican immigrant
revealed that growing up in the 1930s and 1940s she was forbidden to date
Hispanic men and was ostracized from her family when she started a rela-
tionship with a mestizo Costa Rican.76
Immigrants nurtured their British identity through the formation of
clubs, churches, and mutual aid societies specifically for people from the
British Caribbean. These institutions provided an important venue for sav-
ing and for community aid and played a critical role in cultural preserva-
tion and maintaining difference from the dominant community—celebrat-
ing important British and West Indian holidays with songs, dancing, and
food brought over from the islands; teaching English to the children of mi-
grants; and providing a space for community sporting events, most notably
cricket. The Garveyist Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA)
also formed an important element of the British Caribbean community
infrastructure and strongly influenced cultural and political developments
and race consciousness within the black immigrant community. The pan-
Africanism that the UNIA promoted encouraged black immigrants to take
pride in their blackness and gave migrants the tools to challenge the rac-
ism and oppression they faced, pitting them directly against the antiblack
discourses of dominant nationalisms.
Garveyism intersected closely with pro-imperial British diaspora na-
tionalisms. The Garveyist weekly newspaper the Workman, published in
Panama by the West Indian Protective League and circulated throughout
Latin America, took a “very pro-British” approach, emphasizing the signifi-
cance of membership in the British Empire and praising British interven-
tions on behalf of the West Indian community.77 In general, West Indians
in Central America and South America were committed to Empire, rally-
ing round the war effort in World War I and World War II and promoting
enthusiasm for British expansionism through their social institutions. A
speech given at “Empire Night” in the West Indian Masonic Hall in Colón
to celebrate what would have been the 102nd birthday of Queen Victoria
typifies the way in which Britain was elevated by Caribbean migrants: “It
222 · Nicola Foote
will go forth from the Republic of Panama to the civilized world that the
Britishers whose hearts are sincere have pledged their loyalty to the British
Empire. If ever its sovereignty is threatened or its dignity assailed we will
fly to the banner of defense. Take away the British Empire and we have
nothing. I do not love the empire for its government, but for the principles
on which the government rests. Those are what we fight for; those are what
the nations of the world rest on.”78 Through the glorification of the British
Empire, migrant commitment to a rival foreign power was clearly and un-
ambiguously projected.
West Indian identification with Britain could have very real consequences
in areas where territorial boundaries were under dispute. In Nicaragua, for
example, Jamaican influence in the Mosquito Reserve was perceived as a
major threat to national sovereignty. In 1875 the Nicaraguan government
complained to the British Foreign Office about Jamaican interference in
the reserve, suggesting that “certain natives of Jamaica” were “inciting” the
king of the Mosquito to “infringe the Sovereign Rights of Nicaragua.”79
The governor of Jamaica dismissed the likelihood of black Jamaican influ-
ence on the reserve, stating that “nothing can be more unlikely than that
the negroes of this Island should concern themselves with the affairs of a
distant country; and if indeed some few individuals may have been induced
to do so it is certain that their support is quite valueless.”80 Yet Jamaicans
did play a significant role in the Bluefields uprising of 1909 and formed a
major component of conservative general Juan José Estrada’s U.S.-funded
army, leading many Nicaraguan elites to hold them responsible for the sub-
sequent invasion of U.S. marines.81
Similarly, in Venezuela the important gold mines of El Callao were in
disputed territory claimed by the British as part of British Guiana in the
nineteenth century. The majority of the workers in these mines were mi-
grants from Trinidad, Barbados, and Jamaica who supported British claims
and were enthusiastic about the military action that occurred in 1884 and
1895. As one American chronicler testified, “The miners . . . would very
much prefer an English colonial government to Venezuelan rule. I have
been told by dozens of men, Americans, Germans, native Venezuelans and
representatives of other nations that if the question were submitted to the
people the decision would be almost unanimously in favor of England.”82
In this context of border conflict, and with the enthusiasm they manifested
for British colonial rule, West Indians could easily be interpreted as agents
of Empire.
Certainly, the British Colonial Office was an important source of sup-

port for British Caribbean migrants, and however ambivalent British con-
sular officials sometimes were about their responsibilities toward black
Caribbean subjects, they could also provide an important source of protec-
tion. West Indian claims to British intervention were often interpreted as a
manifestation of covert imperialism, pushing British ideas about the cor-
rect operation of the judicial system onto Latin American governments and
allowing British Caribbean immigrants to sidestep the local rule of law. The
Cuban secretary of state, for example, accused migrants of “committing
acts of disrespect, misdemeanours and breaches of the law” but seeking
“impunity” through British diplomatic attention.83
An intriguing example of the kinds of legal principles that were often
at stake in British intervention can be seen in the case of Jerome Jackson,
a British Caribbean immigrant in Brazil who was imprisoned for burglary
in Rio Grande do Sul in 1902. The British consul investigated and became
convinced that Jackson had been falsely imprisoned because his convic-
tion was based on the confession of an Italian immigrant who worked with
Jackson as a stevedore. The Italian later retracted his confession, claiming
that it had been beaten out of him in a brutal police interrogation and that
neither he nor Jackson knew anything of the crime. The consul believed
that the conviction had not been overturned simply because the victim of
the burglary was a prominent local judge and, convinced there had been
a miscarriage of justice, requested the intervention of the British govern-
ment.84 A petition was presented to the Brazilian government in Jackson’s
favor, but officials insisted that there were no legal grounds for a retrial
and that a presidential pardon was not a possibility in cases prosecuted at
the provincial level. The Colonial Office insisted that since the issue was
one of wrongful imprisonment, a solution must be found, and they con-
tinued to push for a clemency ruling. Although ultimately Jackson was
not released, his case was extensively engaged by the British and Brazilian
government. Leading British officials translated and pored over 160 pages
of court proceedings. Specialists in Brazilian law were consulted. Argu-
ments were made about what statements made under cross-examination
were worth, how confessions should be extricated, and how guilt in a crime
should be determined.85 All of this represented an effort to institute British
ideas about what constituted fair and impartial justice onto the Brazilian
legal system with a West Indian immigrant at its center.
The Jackson case was not unique. In Puerto Rico the British government
224 · Nicola Foote
intervened after six British Caribbean migrants working on a sugar planta-

tion were imprisoned without trial and sentenced to labor in a chain gang
for resisting arrest following a dispute over management abuses. The consul
protested the fact they had not been informed of the charges against them
and had received no trial, and that their right to contact British authorities
for assistance had initially been denied.86 British intervention was made
when Barbadian Adolphus Coulson was found guilty of the murder of his
wife in Panama and sentenced to death without a jury trial. While the Colo-
nial Office felt that his case “need excite no pity” because he had confessed
to poisoning his wife, it was still important “for the sake of principle” to
raise an appeal based on the absence of a jury.87 As the undersecretary
of state wrote: “It would appear . . . desirable to test the question on the
ground that there is a danger that injustice may be done to British Colonial
subjects, especially negroes, if they are liable to be tried for serious offenses
without a jury.”88 Compensation suits were also pursued by the British
government in many of the cases of police shootings and official violence
discussed earlier in this chapter, and were often successful. British Carib-
bean migrants played a decisive role in pushing these interventions—they
wrote letters, visited consular offices, and insisted upon support for their
rights. Such cases further entangled the relationship between migrants and
external powers and consolidated the association between West Indians,
neocolonialism, and outside intervention.
Inclusionary Nationalisms and the Limits of Assimilation
Migrant mutual aid networks, daily cultural practices, and efforts to ben-
efit from Britain’s international status did not preclude attempts to seek
national inclusion. Second- and third-generation British Caribbean im-
migrants began to engage more fully with Latin American politics from
the 1920s onward and to form organizations that articulated specifically
Latin American nationalisms. In Panama the National League of Criollos,
a second-generation political organization formed to gain rights for Pana-
manians of West Indian descent, fervently identified with the Panamanian
nation, stating that it would consider “all Antilles parents who try to in-
culcate in the minds of born Panamanians a different nationality, or [who]
try to bring to the child’s mind a higher regard for institutions and ideas,
rather than teaching him those of his country of birth,” as “enemies of the
soil and parasites on the Republic.”89 The strong language underlines their
frustration at the continued association of second- and third-generation
immigrants with Caribbean islands they had never visited, and their des-
peration to overturn the perception of Antilleans as agents of British and
American imperialism and to project an image of loyalty and commitment.
Their efforts were replicated in Costa Rica and Honduras as second- and
third-generation Caribbean immigrants in enclave communities sought
citizenship and national recognition.90
This new generation of West Indian community leaders promoted as-
similation and became convinced that the struggles they experienced in
their efforts to gain greater inclusion were jeopardized by problematic
community-level cultural practices. As a result they sought the transfor-
mation of group customs. Sometimes leaders focused on the minutiae of
everyday life. The “West Indian News” segment of the Panama Star and
Herald ran a series of editorials railing against what it called the “boisterous
and flippant practice” of engaging marching brass bands for funeral pro-
cessions, a practice that the paper noted both Americans and Panamani-
ans viewed as undignified and unserious.91 In other instances, community
leaders dwelt on more fundamental issues, such as family structure and
patterns of religious worship. In Costa Rica, for example, community elites
sought to stigmatize African-derived religious practices such as spirit pos-
session and to vilify matriarchal family structures in which women served
as heads of households.92
These efforts to gain national inclusion through community regulation
often led to class-based fractures as community elites sought to police and
control the behavior of other immigrants. Community leaders became
convinced that it was the moral failings of lower-class blacks rather than
the racism of dominant society that undermined their hopes of integration.
This attitude perhaps reflects an internalization of the class discourses in-
herent within emerging ideologies of mestizaje, which appeared to hold out
the promise of inclusion and mobility for those who met national cultural
and behavioral standards regardless of race or ethnicity.
Yet British Caribbean efforts at acceptance ultimately failed. This can be
seen most dramatically in Panama, where the 1941 constitution rendered
those of British Caribbean descent born in Panama after 1928 ineligible for
citizenship, casting those born after that date into what Michael Conniff
described as a “nationality limbo” that severely impacted their ability to
travel and find work and education. The British consul took up the issue
of citizenship with President Arias, who acknowledged that tens of thou-
sands of British Caribbean–descended people would become stateless. But
he argued that he was in fact being generous, quipping in what appears
226 · Nicola Foote
to be a distasteful joke, albeit one that is deeply revealing about the depth
of antiblack attitudes underlying the law: “At any rate, I will not do as the
Nazis do: I will not shoot them.”93 That even second- and third-generation
immigrants of British Caribbean descent were viewed as wholly foreign un-
derlines the deep relationship between race, culture, and national identity.
Neither could inclusionary efforts stem the wave of deportations that
proliferated in the 1930s and 1940s, fueled by the passing of highly restric-
tive immigration laws. Quota laws and immigration bans led to the forced
repatriation of tens of thousands British Caribbean migrants, many of
whom had left their islands of origins decades before and whose family
ties were all in Latin America. Cases like that of Emma Patrie, a Jamaican
widow in her sixties who was deported from Panama after twenty-nine
years and returned to Jamaica almost blind and with no family in the is-
land were not uncommon.94 Deportations were often exceptionally brutal
and undignified. In Venezuela armed police removed British Caribbean
migrants from their homes and workplaces and took them to deportation
camps, where they were forced to work unpaid for several months to “pay”
for their return passage and were fed only bread and cheese. Deportees
were placed in dugout canoes and sent up the Barima River to British Gui-
ana, or forced at gunpoint to jump off into chest-deep water yards from the
Trinidadian coast.95
Often deportations from legislation aimed at getting rid of recent Brit-
ish Caribbean immigrants in fact targeted members of the preexisting
black Caribbean-descended community. In Honduras, any black, English-
speaking person stopped without papers was deported to Belize during the
1930s. Many deportees appealed to the British consul afterward, insisting
that they had been born in Honduras, not infrequently tracing their heri-
tage back to the eighteenth-century settlement of the Bay Islands. People
traveling back from athletic events in Belize and children who had been
sent to go to school in Jamaica were often denied reentry to their homes,
splitting up families and adding to the number of stateless blacks. The “re-
patriation” of Afro-Hondurans to Belize was also noted by British officials,
who lamented that “this colony is in danger of having saddled on it, per-
sons unconnected with it, who are not even British subjects.”96 However,
the British government imagined that the Roatán Islanders deported to
Belize were purposefully presenting themselves as British subjects in order
to gain access to the wealth of the British Empire. In fact, as Glenn Anthony
Chambers has argued, their “accidental” deportation was just the last in a
long line of efforts to eradicate blackness from the national character.97
Even in countries where black immigrants were more successful in gain-

ing nominal citizenship, their inclusion was far from absolute, and it was
predicated on expanded state control over the British Caribbean commu-
nity. West Indians and their descendants were granted Costa Rican citizen-
ship in 1948 as a direct result of their support for José Figueres in the civil
war. Yet this was followed by the massive penetration of the central state
into Limón and a campaign to hispanicize the Afro-Caribbean population
by eradicating English-language education and placing new restrictions on
Protestant churches. Moreover, the white–mestizo Central Valley was still
considered to represent the “real” Costa Rica and the ideal of racial homo-
geneity continued to be a center point of national identity.98
The unsuccessful struggles of British Caribbean immigrants to obtain
national inclusion underline the limitations of an assimilationist frame-
work for understanding Latin American realities. Immigrants were viewed
positively only within a specific racial lens, and those who were of a race
perceived to be problematic were stigmatized and rejected even when un-
derstood to be economically important. If hyphenated European identities
did not emerge because Italian Brazilians and German Argentines were so
quickly absorbed as national subjects, the inverse is true for black immi-
grants. There were no Jamaican Costa Ricans or Trinidadian Venezuelans
because they were not accepted as such, remaining instead simply jamai-
quinos and antillanos.
Conclusion
A comparative analysis of West Indian immigration has deep resonance

for understanding the relationship between migration and nationalism in
Latin America. British Caribbean immigrants were essential to processes
of national integration. They played a critical role in building transpor-
tation infrastructure, extracting mineral wealth, and developing systems
of plantation agriculture. Yet they were deeply problematic for analogous
stages of nation-building—facilitating the spread of national consciousness
and ensuring national sovereignty—because of the strongly held convic-
tion that they were not suitable as permanent immigrants and could not
become national citizens. In part, this was because of the immigrants’ close
relationship with dominant foreign powers and because of their minimal
identification with their Latin American host nations. Yet it was also more
fundamentally about their race, which was considered to disqualify British
Caribbean immigrants from acquiring the status of nationals. Thus, the
228 · Nicola Foote
concerns of countries that had imported large numbers of West Indians

for economic and infrastructural development projects became similar to
those faced by countries with large West Indian-descended populations in
geographically isolated places that preexisted the nation-state. The same
type of “nationalizing” campaigns that were pursued in Nicaragua and Co-
lombia in the nineteenth and early twentieth century were adopted by na-
tions such as Panama, Costa Rica, and Venezuela in the 1930s and 1940s.
Exploring the intense racialization of these processes sheds new light
on the positioning of blackness within Latin American nationalisms.
Dominant theories of blackness and national identity in Latin America
emphasize the exclusion of blackness from nationalist ideals of mestizaje
but present this exclusion as a consequence of blacks’ lack of cultural and
legal distinctiveness as opposed to indigenous people, which led to them
being discursively blended into the category of the masses.99 A systematic
analysis of British Caribbean immigration underlines that in fact the exclu-
sion of blacks from national identity was intentional, systematic, and based
on a fear of blackness as a source of danger and pollution. Antiblackness
was deeply embedded within Latin American nationalisms and shaped the
lived experience of black immigration in profound and sometimes trau-
matic ways.
Beatings, floggings, false imprisonment, shootings, rape—even massa-
cres and lynchings—became almost routine in the British Caribbean dias-
pora. Black immigrants were vulnerable to abuses because of the ways in
which American corporate ideas about appropriate mechanisms of racial
discipline intersected with Latin American fears of imagined black crimi-
nality, violence, and poor hygiene. British Caribbean adaptation strategies
and diaspora nationalisms only reinforced the problem by bolstering per-
ceptions of them as unnational and outside of the citizenship base.
The role of international currents in shifting discourses of blackness is
significant. British Caribbean migration was fostered partly by interna-
tional elites and served as a reminder of how foreign influence was bound
up in modernization projects and deeper concepts of modernity. American
racial practices also contributed to and reinforced the stigma surround-
ing blackness. An analysis of British Caribbean migration thus reminds
us of the ethnic underpinnings of national identity while also elucidating
the transnational dynamics of identity formation and how nationalist ideas
were shaped by international discourses.
Yet elite attacks on black immigrants were directed just as much at “in-
digenous” black populations—Afro-Latin American descendants of slavery,
the Garifuna—as at British Caribbean people, and the attacks represented

an effort to exclude blackness from national imaginaries. As notions of
blackness were brought to the fore by British Caribbean immigration, their
meaning was negotiated in a manner that reinforced conceptualizations of
racial hierarchy and fueled the racialization of space. Preexisting fears of
blackness mediated the migratory experience of British Caribbean people,
but their migration also reshaped and reconstituted these images, rein-
scribing the exclusion of blackness ever more firmly into the racialization
of national identity.
An exploration of the experiences of British Caribbean immigrants thus
complicates our understanding of the positioning of immigrants within
Latin American racial systems, further underlining the limitations of the
conventional argument that “immigrant” was a privileged category re-
lated to nonblackness and non-Indianness. As Lesser and Rein point out
in this volume, such a formulation is deeply problematic for many groups
and does not take account of class and ethnic diversity within migratory
streams. However, it is especially inapplicable to West Indians who were
nonprivileged specifically because they were black. Excluding this reality
from theoretical models of migration only serves to perpetuate the dis-
cursive separations promoted by Latin American nationalists who denied
black migrants the status of immigrants because they did not comply with
the logic of social whitening. A full assessment of the relationship between
immigration and Latin American nationalism therefore must pay close at-
tention to the racialization of distinct migrant streams and challenge the
analytical binary between immigrant and blackness.
Notes
1. This chapter uses the term “British Caribbean” to refer to migrants who originated
from the British West Indian islands and British Guiana. Migrants from this region often
identified themselves as “West Indian”—a classification that has more typically been used
in the scholarly literature—so this term is also employed here as a descriptor. Haitians were
also sometimes part of the black immigrant stream, especially in the Caribbean islands
of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic, and many of the racial discourses
directed at British Caribbean migrants were also formed in relation to Haitian migration.
However, since the realities and identities of Haitian migrants seem to have differed from
those of migrants from the British Caribbean—most notably in the absence of a claim to
British subjecthood—they do not form part of this chapter.
2. Well into the 1980s, surveys of migration to Latin America examined only European
immigrants, with Middle Eastern and Jewish migration considered in very brief outline
and West Indians completely omitted. See Bastos de Avila, Immigration in Latin America;
230 · Nicola Foote
and Mörner, Adventurers and Proletarians. More recently, Baily and Miguez’s comparative
study of migration, while far more inclusive in its attention to non-European immigrants,
reiterates the binary between blackness and immigration, suggesting that to understand
the relationship between migration, race and ethnicity immigration we must ask “how did
immigrants . . . react to and interact with blacks?” See Baily and Míguez, Mass Migration,
285. Comparative work in Latin American racial theory is just as notable for its lack of
engagement with black immigrant realities. Applebaum et al.’s groundbreaking collection
Race and Nation, for example, included no chapter on black immigrant communities al-
though it did address European and Chinese migrants, while Dixon and Burdick’s excel-
lent recent volume, Comparative Perspectives, does not assess black immigration as a factor
in shaping regional blackness.
3. Helg, “Aftermath of Slavery,” 156.
4. West Indian immigration to Chile has been completely overlooked by historians.
For British consular reflections on recruitment for Chile, see G. S. R. Archer, Recruitment
Agent in Panama to W. L. C. Philips, Acting Colonial Secretary, August 14, 1913, National
Archives, Kew, United Kingdom; Colonial Office (CO) 28/282/25.
5. British Caribbean immigration to Haiti has been so neglected that even a 2004 con-
ference devoted to exploring Jamaica–Haiti connections did not examine the matter—the
discussion instead centered on Haitian migrants in Jamaica. See University of the West
Indies-Mona Latin America-Caribbean Center, Haiti–Jamaica Connection. Reports in the
Jamaican press on Haitian efforts to restrict Jamaican immigration provide insights into
the nature of the immigration stream and the challenges of immigrant realities. See Daily
Gleaner July 9, 1930; October 23, 1930; March 11, 1931; June 1, 1931; October 31, 1931.
6. Jones and Glean, “English Speaking Communities”; Dawson, “Evacuation of the
Mosquito Shore”; and Crawford, “Transnational World Fractured.”
7. Gordon, Disparate Diasporas, 53–67.
8. Desir, Between Loyalties, 12, 112–15. It should also be noted that in each instance,
policies of Hispanicization took hold at the exact moment that the boom in rubber and
coconut exports led to the increased penetration of U.S. capital and the onset of a new
wave of West Indian migration. Governments did little to distinguish between established
black Creoles, black indigenous communities such as the Garifuna or Miskitu, and newer
West Indian migrants, viewing them all as nonnational, and the renewed influx of black
immigrants reignited concerns about the sovereignty of marginal regions.
9. Newton, Silver Men; and Bourgois, Ethnicity at Work.
10. Daily Gleaner, April 25, 1911.
11. Consul-General Casement to Sir Edward Grey, March 17, 1911, in Great Britain,
Foreign Office, Correspondence Respecting the Treatment of British Colonial Subjects, 6.
12. Petras, Jamaican Labor Migration, 73.
13. Statement of David Burril, Alex White, Joseph Francis, Charles Goban, Jonh Letty,
and George Gedis, in “Precis of Complaints Received from Labourers vs the MacDonald
Company,” CO 137/618/14477.
14. Neale Porter to W. R. Estes, May 6, 1892; The Custos of the Cayman Island to the
Colonial Secretary, 18 June 1892; A. A. Weldon to H. M. S. Partridge, August 23, 1892. All
in U.S. State Department General Records. Consular Despatches, Kingston, Jamaica. U.S.
National Archives (USNA), Microcopy X 353.1 U58g T31, Reel 33.
15. Barbados Weekly Herald, June 8, 1929.

16. Quoted in Richardson, Panama Money, 110.
17. Daily Gleaner, March 4, 1908.
18. Colonial Secretary to Mr. J. Lanigan, March 20, 1900, in CO 137/618/14477.
19. “Report on the Condition of the Jamaican Labourers employed under contract with
the government of Jamaica by James P. MacDonald on the construction of a railway from
Guayaquil to Quito in the Republic of Ecuador,” February 1901, in CO 137/618/14477.
20. Consul-General Casement to Sir Edward Grey, January 31, 1911, in United States
Department of State, Slavery in Peru, 231–35.
21. El Grito del Pueblo, December 6, 1900.
22. Daily Gleaner, November 3, 1900.
23. El Grito del Pueblo, December 6, 1900.
24. Haggard to Cuban Secretary of State, January 3, 1924, in Great Britain, Foreign Of-
fice, and Cuba, Secretaría del Estado, Correspondence between His Majesty’s Government
and the Cuban Government, 5.
25. E. Gorst to the Foreign Office, March 25, 1907, in CO 295/443/10862.
26. Murray to Governor of Jamaica, May 29, 1919, in Great Britain, Foreign Office, Cor-
respondence Respecting the Treatment of British Colonial Subjects.
27. See summary in Dickinson to the Marquis of Salisbury, February 6, 1887, in CO
137/533/6890.
28. “The Culebra Massacre: A Few Lawless Negroes Responsible for the Affair,” New
York Times, June 17, 1885, 3.
29. “Précis of the Official Report of the Proceedings against Captain Pedro Antonio
Cabo for Exceeding His Duty in the Affair at Culebra,” enclosure, Dickinson to Foreign
Office, January 15, 1887, in CO 137/533/5194.
30. Text of Supreme Court of Justice Ruling, as printed in Diario Oficial, January
26, 1887; enclosure, Dickinson to the Marquis of Salisbury, February 6, 1887, in CO
137/533/6890.
31. Dickinson to the Marquis of Salisbury, February 6, 1887, in CO 137/533/6890.
32. Letter from the National Amalgamated Furnishing Trades Association on behalf of
Mrs. J. Glaney, enclosed in Mallet to FO, November 18, 1910, FO 371/944/41616.
33. “Precis of Complaints Received from Labourers vs the MacDonald Company,” CO
137/618/14477.
34. Barbados Advocate, October 27, 1924.
35. Haggard to Cuban Secretary of State, January 3, 1924, in Great Britain, Foreign Of-
fice, and Cuba, Secretaría del Estado, Correspondence between His Majesty’s Government
and the Cuban Government.
36. Wynter, Jamaican Labor Migration, 194.
37. Carlos Manuel de Cespedes to Charge d’Affaires, July 4, 1924, in Great Britain, For-
eign Office, and Cuba, Secretaría del Estado, Further Correspondence, 37.
38. H. A. Cooper to the Colonial Office, March 1, 1873, in CO 318/270/5857. The assault
was recorded by the British Consul as taking place on August 20, 1871.
39. Mallet to FO, December 2, 1911, in FO 288/125/565; and Beauclerk to FO, Lima, July
5, 1902, in CO 137/631/34768.
40. Young to FO, June 24, 1916, in FO 371/2643.
232 · Nicola Foote
Department of State, Slavery in Peru, 226. For the wider literature on the rubber boom and
genocide in the Putumayo, see Fernandez, “Upper Amazonian Rubber Boom”; Stanfield,
Red Rubber, Bleeding Trees; and Taussig, Shamanism, Colonialism and the Wild Man.
42. John Brown to Commissioner of Montserrat, February 3, 1910, in CO 28/274/8.
43. Originally published as a series of articles in Truth, Hardenburg’s report was pub-
lished in book form following the interest attracted by U.S. and British government inves-
tigations. Hardenburg, The Putumayo, the Devil’s Paradise.
Department of State, Slavery in Peru, 226. He was more sympathetic in his personal diary,
noting that “they said they acted under fear, under compulsion, and I believed it.” Mitchell,
Amazon Journal of Roger Casement, 128.
45. Romuelo Paredes, Confidential Report, Ministry of Foreign Relations, Iquitos, Sep-
tember 30, 1911, in United States Department of State, Slavery in Peru, 149.
46. Consul Fuller to Secretary of State, Iquitos, August 5, 1912, in United States Depart-
ment of State, Slavery in Peru, 42; Sir Edward Grey to Mr. des Graz, F. O., January 16, 1911,
in United States Department of State, Slavery in Peru, 221.
47. Informe de la Intendente de Policía de Guayaquil al Ministro de lo Interior, Men-
sajes e Informes, 1900. Archivo Biblioteca de la Función Legislativa, Quito.
48. Daily Gleaner, September 10, 1932.
49. Ortiz, “Inmigración desde el punto,” 54–56; and Amador, “Redeeming the Trop-
ics,” 88.
50. El Nuevo Tiempo, July 15, 1916.
51. El Diario de Costa Rica, September 20, 1936; La Voz del Atlántico, November 7, 1936;
and Atlantic Voice, November 7, 1936.
52. Tinker Salas, Enduring Legacy, 134.
53. Helg, Our Rightful Share, 238–39; Enclosure No. 2, West Indian Labourers in
Cuba, in Great Britain, Foreign Office, and Cuba, Secretaría del Estado, Further Corre-
spondence, 4.
54. Helg, Our Rightful Share, 16–17.
55. Hortensia Lamar, “La lucha contra la prostitución y la trata de blancas,” Revista
Bimestre Cubana 18 (1923): 134.
56. Julio Nogueira, “A Madeira-Mamoré: A Bacia do Mamoré,” Jornal do Commercio,
January 31, 1913, 15.
57. Daily Gleaner, December 28, 1905.
58. See, for example, Le Roy Cassá, “Inmigración anti-sanitaria,” 16–18.
59. Daily Gleaner, July 18, 1924.
60. Mr. G. Haggard to the Cuban Secretary of Foreign Affairs, January 3, 1924, in Great
Britain, Foreign Office, and Cuba, Secretaría del Estado, Correspondence between His Maj-
esty’s Government and the Cuban Government, 5.
62. Cited in Torconis de Veracoechea, El proceso de la inmigración en Venezuela, 73.
63. See most notably Velasco, “El problema negro,” 75, 79.
64. Conniff, Black Labor on a White Canal, 84; and Archivo Nacional de Costa Rica
(ANCR), Serie Congreso, no. 16753.
65. Chambers, Race, Nation and West Indian Immigration, 130–31.
66. See Foote and Horst, Military Struggle and Identity Formation, especially chapters
by Beattie, Foote, and Sanders.
67. Heiman Guzmán, Los inmigrantes, 50.
68. Adriani, “Venezuela,” 88.
69. Gil Fortoul, El hombre y la historia, 13–14.
70. Roig de Leuchsenring, Los problemas sociales, 18.
71. Adriani, “Venezuela,” 88–89.
72. Wood, Venezuela, 86.
73. Leonard, Men of Maracaibo, 106.
74. Purcell, Banana Fallout.
75. Quoted in Bourgois, “Black Diaspora in Costa Rica,” 149.
76. Life story submitted by Dalia in Autobiografías Campesinas. Unpublished manu-
script collection, Universidad Nacional Autónoma, Costa Rica.
77. Opie, Black Labor Migration, 87.
78. Panama Star and Herald, May 26, 1921.
79. Earl of Derby to the Colonial Office, April 1, 1875, in CO 137/480/36.
80. Sir William Grey to the Earl of Camararon, May 14, 1875, in CO 137/479/19.
81. “Jamaicans in the Nicaragua Revolution,” Daily Gleaner, April 14, 1910.
82. Curtis, Venezuela, 242.
83. Cespedes to Charge d’Affaires, July 4, 1924, in Great Britain, Foreign Office, and
Cuba, Secretaría del Estado, Further Correspondence, 37.
84. Hewitt to Marquess of Landsdowne, April 1, 1905, in CO 28/264/16186.
85. “Case of Jerome Jackson,” in CO 28/269/5443.
86. Cooper to Colonial Office, March 1, 1873, in CO 318/270/5857.
87. CO 28/269/29756.
88. Under-Secretary of State, Colonial Office to the Foreign Office, August 19, 1907, in
CO 28/269/29756.
89. Panama Star and Herald, October 8, 1926.
90. See Harpelle, “The Social and Political Integration of West Indians,” 116; and Cham-
bers, Race, Nation and West Indian Immigration.
91. Panama Star and Herald, October 11, 1926.
92. Foote, “Rethinking Race, Gender and Citizenship,” 204–5.
93. Conniff, Black Labor on a White Canal, 98–99.
94. Daily Gleaner, May 1, 1939.
96. Collett to FO, July 10, 1938, in FO 369/126/28133.
97. Chambers, Race, Nation and West Indian Immigration, 70–77, 124–25.
98. Biesanz and Biesanz, Costa Rican Life.
99. Wade, Race and Ethnicity; and Whitten, Black Frontiersmen.
9
Italian Fascism and Diasporic Nationalisms in
Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay
Michael Goebel
And the bystanders, seven or eight merchants from Brazil, Uruguay, and Argen-
tina, long emigrated from Italy, exclaimed in choir:
“We are still Italians! We are still Italians!”
Enrico Corradini, La patria lontana (1910)
The opening scene of the 1910 novel by the Italian nationalist Enrico Cor-
radini, La patria lontana (The distant fatherland), confronts a patriotic Ital-
ian traveler on a visit to Brazil with a wine merchant of Italian origin from
the Argentine province of Mendoza. The European visitor accuses the Ital-
ian Argentine businessman of having betrayed his fatherland by producing
wine in Argentina, thereby contributing to the decline of Italian viticulture.
Against these charges, several people of Italian origin from various South
American countries vociferously protest their italianità (Italianness). But
to no avail, as Corradini’s readers learn. The patriotic visitor, surely an alter
ego of Corradini, who when writing the novel had just returned from a long
trip to South America, always prevails with his argument that emigrants to
South America had long lost their true ethnic identity to a shapeless melt-
ing pot.1 Emigration to South America, according to Corradini’s message,
sucked the blood out of Italy’s veins and diluted the country’s essences by
scattering its people all over a world where they languished in servitude to
other nations. A vigorous and youthful military expansionism, especially
in Africa, was needed instead. Consistent with such views, Corradini’s Na-
tionalist Association would merge with the Italian Fascist Party in 1923.
Benito Mussolini adopted a similar stance and in the 1920s sought to curb
emigration, especially to Argentina, the country with the highest propor-
tion of Italians outside Italy.
Italian Fascism and Diasporic Nationalisms in Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay · 235
Corradini’s opinion differed markedly from the vision outlined only ten
years earlier by the liberal economist Luigi Einaudi in his book Un principe
mercante (A merchant prince).2 Here, Italian settlement in far-flung Argen-
tina was portrayed as a peaceful conquest for the mutual socioeconomic
benefit of brother peoples. Rather than decrying assimilation into the host
society as a dilution of Italianness, Einaudi celebrated Italy’s allegedly ami-
cable diaspora and contrasted it to the belligerent imperialism of other Eu-
ropean countries. The difference between Corradini’s account and that of
Einaudi betrayed much wider discrepancies in the appreciation of the value
and purpose of emigration for Italy’s national development. It also testified
to a broader shift in which, around the turn of the century, ethnicity was
increasingly privileged as the defining element of italianità.
Although the association of this shift with debates about emigration was
perhaps especially intimate in Italy, such a nexus between ethnic national-
ism and the diaspora developed in other European countries too. Ethnic
nationalists in turn-of-the-century Germany invoked the German commu-
nity in southern Brazil as a repository of a pristine Deutschtum untarnished
by the perils of modernity, as Stefan Rinke’s and Frederik Schulze’s articles
in this volume demonstrate.3 Diasporas, in other words, fed the nationalist
imagination at home. There was, however, a telling difference between the
Italian and the German case. While German nationalists pointed to Bra-
zil as an idyllic rural haven of the purest essences of “Germanness,” they
scorned the United States—where Germans formed a much larger propor-
tion of the population than they did in Brazil—as an amorphous melting
pot that in no time watered down the arrivals’ national identity.4 Italian
nationalists, by contrast, singled out South America—particularly Argen-
tina—as the place that through admixture most endangered the emigrants’
identity. Although such nationalist discourses were in good measure pro-
jections, the difference between German and Italian appreciations of their
diasporas also suggests that they were not entirely independent from the
social experiences of overseas migrants on the ground.
By discussing different diasporic nationalisms among Italians in three
Latin American countries, this chapter makes two contributions to the
study of migration. First, as the comparison with the Germans indicates,
it shows that the social history of migration and the political and intel-
lectual history of diasporic nationalism are intimately connected to each
other. This should go without saying, perhaps, but all too often the social
history of migration and the intellectual history of various types of na-
tionalism continue to be divorced. Second, the chapter demonstrates that,
just as migrants themselves were not homogenous groups, their diasporic

nationalisms were not either. In other words, there was more than one na-
tionalism among the various Italian diasporas of Latin America and the
different kinds often competed with each other. To tease out these two main
arguments, the chapter adopts a comparative angle, examining fascism and
diasporic nationalisms among Italians in Brazil, Uruguay, and Argentina
during the period of the Italian kingdom.
It emerges that, contrary to Corradini’s vision, Italian migrants were, in
Emilio Franzina’s words, “living agents” in the worldwide spread of nation-
alism.5 Even though this was true for the nineteenth century, too, much
of the historiography on Italian diaspora nationalism, whether in Latin
America or elsewhere, has so far concentrated on one particular period,
namely that of fascism. As this literature has shown, the identification of
Italian emigrants with fascism was in many cases the outgrowth of a vague
and much older identification with the homeland, now represented by the
strongman Mussolini rather than a wholesale adherence to fascist ideol-
ogy.6 In many instances, joining local branches of the Fascist Party could
thus be an expression of a much broader diasporic nationalism. Opponents
of fascism, on the other hand, similarly drew on certain tropes allegedly
embodying italianità to defend their political position. While fascism can
therefore be treated as one instance of diasporic nationalism, there was no
straightforward path from one to the other.
Comparing the different American countries in which many Italians set-
tled, it has been argued that fascism kindled less support in Latin America
than it did in the United States, where scholars have cast it as an instance
of “defensive nationalism,” a rallying behind Mussolini based on ethnic
pride in reaction to discrimination by the receiving society.7 With more
specific regard to the cases under consideration here, João Fábio Bertonha
has maintained that the Italian communities of the Rio de la Plata coun-
tries remained more immune to fascism than those in Brazil.8 While this
chapter supports this comparative argument in general terms, it adopts a
more long-term perspective on various kinds of nationalism and patrio-
tism among the Italian communities of the three countries in order to ar-
rive at a better understanding of how the social, economic, and cultural
features of these communities interacted with political developments over
time. The chapter examines these variations counterchronologically, start-
ing with some observations on the comparative weight of fascism in the
Italian communities of Argentina, Uruguay, and Brazil.
Fascism and Italian Migrants
Mussolini’s policy regarding emigration followed a two-pronged ap-

proach.9 On the one hand, his regime viewed emigration to the Americas
and Europe, if not to Africa, as a sign of national weakness that had to be
assuaged. On the other hand, Mussolini saw Italians abroad as a promising
bridgehead to buttress fascist foreign policy. The regime therefore sought
to strengthen homeland ties among overseas Italian communities and har-
ness them to the fascist state and its ideology either through the diplomatic
corps or party organizations. Among the latter, the foremost vehicles for
this purpose were the fasci all’estero or, a few years later, local branches of
the leisure organization Opera Nazionale Dopolavoro, which Italian con-
suls and other public envoys were supposed to spread. By the 1930s Italian
ambassadors and consuls were simultaneously the bosses of local branches
of the Fascist Party.10
In Latin America, efforts at bringing Italians abroad into the fascist fold
were most clearly directed toward Brazil and Argentina.11 Not only did Ital-
ian foreign policymakers consider them to be the most influential Latin
American nations (besides Mexico, which was still marred by internal
conflicts). More significantly, they were also the two countries with by far
the largest Italian populations in Latin America. Almost 1 million Italian
citizens lived in Argentina at the eve of World War I, and roughly 560,000
in Brazil shortly after the war. Although absolute numbers were lower than
those of Italians in the United States (approximately 1.6 million according
to the 1920 census), the share of the Italian-born population in Latin Amer-
ica’s principal destination countries of overseas migrants was much larger.
Roughly one-third of all overseas immigrants in Argentina, Uruguay, and
Brazil between 1850 and 1950 were Italians. Their proportion was highest
in the Rio de la Plata countries of Argentina and Uruguay, particularly if
the population of Italian origin is included in the count, not only—as was
customary in Latin American censuses—those born in Italy. Just like im-
migrants as a whole, Italians clustered especially in large cities, first and
foremost Buenos Aires and São Paulo, but also in the region’s secondary
cities, such as Montevideo, Rosario, and Porto Alegre (see figures 9.1 and
9.2).
The degree of success that crowned the fascist government’s attempts
to enthrall overseas Italians to the new regime in the homeland varied be-
tween countries as well as over time and within the communities. Initially
Figure 9.1. Chart depicting Italians as a percentage of total population in the nations of
Argentina, Uruguay, and Brazil.
Figure 9.2. Chart depicting Italians as a percentage of total population in the cities of
Buenos Aires, Montevideo, and São Paulo.
Italian World War I veterans, who had left Latin America for Europe to
fight on Italy’s side during the war and returned to Latin America there-
after, played a crucial part in setting up local fascist branches, sometimes
spontaneously and without previous approval from Italy. In many cases the
Italian Fascist Party even withheld official recognition on the grounds that
a local branch contained too many unreliable or undesirable members.12

The fascist regime’s intention of merging a broader sense of italianità with
fascist ideology took time to sink in more deeply as the emigrants’ daily
dealings with Italian community organizations or diplomatic representa-
tives brought them into closer touch with fascist imagery and ideas. The
Italian–Ethiopian war of 1935 marked a highpoint of patriotic identifica-
tion with the homeland as well as with the fascist regime.13 Political con-
junctures and government attitudes in the respective Latin American host
countries either hampered or facilitated fascist efforts at proselytizing as
well as antifascist activities. Organizational endeavors of whatever political
couleur proved more arduous in rural areas than in urban settings. Histo-
rians have argued that the middle and upper social strata of Italian com-
munities in Latin America were more receptive to the fascist message than
workers were.14
While for all these reasons comparing the “success” of fascism among
the Italian communities of various countries is difficult, most indicators
suggest that Italians in the Rio de la Plata embraced fascism less enthusias-
tically than their compatriots in Brazil, let alone in the United States, did.
The number of fasci that were founded in the early 1920s in the respec-
tive countries reflected this: by 1924–25 Brazil counted more than forty
such branches, but only eight had been established in Argentina.15 Whereas
Brazil’s major Italian newspaper, Fanfulla of São Paulo, wholeheartedly
embraced fascism, its Argentine equivalent, La Patria degli italiani, did
not.16 Similarly, a memorandum about the influence of Italian fascism
written by the French Foreign Ministry in 1938, worried about France’s
waning influence in intellectual circles in Latin America, confirmed this
viewpoint, commenting at length on fascist influences in Brazil while not-
ing that in Argentina, “in spite of the numerical importance of the Italian
colony . . . we do not think that a very noticeable effort has been made by
the fascist groups with a view of influencing the official actions of the Ar-
gentine government.”17
Different approaches to Brazil and Argentina in fact harked back to ear-
lier reports of fascist envoys to South America, which also confirmed the
impression that fascism made greater inroads in Brazil than in the Rio de la
Plata. In 1927 Amadeo Fani, a delegate of the secretary general of the fasci
all’estero, Cornelio di Marzio, informed his boss that Argentina’s nature as
a materialist melting pot, in which social ascent meant everything, entailed
that large parts of the Italian Argentine community had irrevocably lost
their interest in the homeland and consequently did not identify with the
fascist government. In Brazil, by contrast, Fani wrote with some surprise

that Italian immigrants and even their descendants felt strongly Italian and
that there were many ardent supporters of Mussolini among them. Fani ex-
plained that this was the case because Italians in Brazil were less assimilated
than in Argentina. Consistent with Corradini’s vision, Fani thus correlated
assimilation in the host society with a lack of patriotic fervor and, by infer-
ence, with distance from the fascist regime.18 Or, put differently, greater
ethnic segregation equaled more nationalism, which equaled more fascism,
according to Fani’s reasoning.
While differences in the degree of support for the fascist regime seem to
have been real enough, the underlying assumptions on the basis of which
Fani and others accounted for this difference—namely, the correlation of
ethnic segregation in the host society with both nationalism and fascism—
merits two comments. First, the conflation of fascism with diasporic na-
tionalism tout court requires qualification. Antifascist groups in the Italian
diaspora, after all, also drew on a myriad of symbols of italianità. In par-
ticular, they sought to mobilize the symbols of the Risorgimento for their
political purposes. For example, on the occasion of founding a periodical
in Buenos Aires in 1929 with the title Il Risorgimento, the recently exiled
Italian socialist Francesco Frola, who became a leading antifascist activist
in various Latin American countries, explained that “the risorgimento, I
note as an Italian, cannot be but anti-fascist: for liberty against violence,
for justice against arbitrariness, for democracy against dictatorship.”19 Both
the fascist regime in Italy and antifascists at home and abroad laid claims to
being the rightful heirs of the nineteenth-century national hero Giuseppe
Garibaldi.20 The republican leader Giuseppe Mazzini also served as an em-
blem for antifascists, of whom many emerged from republican groups that
in the nineteenth century had been Mazzinians.21 Fascists and antifascists
alike celebrated September 20, the date on which the Italian army captured
Rome in 1870, marking the unification of Italy. The degree of support for
fascism, in other words, was not simply a matter of how patriotic the vari-
ous Italian communities felt but which political group proved more effec-
tive in appropriating a series of elements derived from nineteenth-century
ideas about Italian national identity.
The second comment concerns the relationship between assimilation in
the host society and attachment to fascism. It has been argued for the case
of Italians in the United States that identification with the fascist regime in-
deed had to do with the migrants’ low degree of assimilation. Cheering for
Mussolini, so this argument holds, was a reaction against discrimination,
segregation, and socioeconomic marginalization.22 The comparison be-

tween the Rio de la Plata countries and the United States, where fascism
struck a stronger chord among Italians, seems to bolster such an argument:
on most of the usually applied yardsticks—such as socioeconomic standing
and mobility in relation to the host society, marriage patterns, or residen-
tial segregation—Italian immigrants and their descendants appeared to be
more “integrated” in Argentina and Uruguay than in the United States.23
The argument does not work well, however, if one compares Brazil, in par-
ticular São Paulo, and the Rio de la Plata. To be sure, as Samuel Baily has
shown, there were significant differences between the Italians of Buenos
Aires and those of São Paulo in terms of community organizations. Asso-
ciational life was more developed, organized, and effective among Italians
in Buenos Aires than in São Paulo, an observation that speaks against Fani’s
and Corradini’s view that Italians in Argentina lacked a sense of commu-
nity.24 But there is little evidence of substantial dissimilarities with regard
to the overall socioeconomic standing, marriage patterns, residential inte-
gration, or discrimination. The level of ownership of industrial properties
around the time of World War I, for instance, was roughly similar for Bue-
nos Aires, Montevideo, and São Paulo.25 Nonetheless, identification with
the fascist regime seems to have been more widespread in São Paulo than
in the River Plate.
Explaining Differences
There are several alternatives to the simple formula of “assimilation” in

order to explain the greater support for fascism among Brazil’s Italians
compared to those in the River Plate countries. A first option, which schol-
ars have rarely considered, has to do with the regional origins of migrants
within Italy. After all, fascism found more adherents in some Italian regions
than in others. As is well known, the proportion of southerners within the
respective Italian communities of the Americas was much higher in the
United States than in Latin America, where the immigrant stream was
more evenly divided between northern Italians, who on average arrived
earlier, and those from the Mezzogiorno. Moreover, among the American
areas of settlement, São Paulo received a disproportionately high number
of families from the Veneto who, after the abolition of slavery in 1888, ar-
rived on subsidized tickets to work on coffee fazendas.26 Variance in re-
gional origins, however, does not serve well as an explanation in and of it-
self. If anything, by the early twenties Mussolini had more active supporters
and voters in the north than in the south, which would make stronger ad-
herence to fascism in the United States difficult to explain. As for Brazil,
Veneto did not stand out as a “particularly fascist” region.27 In a migratory
context such as this, an explanation based exclusively on premigratory fac-
tors is not convincing.
The contemporary politics in the receiving countries at first glance ap-
pear to be a more persuasive explanatory factor. Italian antifascists, for
example, often linked up with local socialists and other left-wing groups
whose political power must have reflected back on the effectiveness of anti-
fascist networks within the Italian communities and may by extension have
hampered the prospects of fascist emissaries to inspire overseas Italians
for the new regime in Rome.28 Socialism had indeed taken deeper roots in
Buenos Aires and Uruguay than in Brazil, which might have been a rea-
son for the relative weakness of antifascism in the latter country. The issue
could be broadened further. Citing the Brazilian government of Getúlio
Vargas of 1930–45 and its anticommunist repression after 1935, Bertonha
has even claimed that political culture in Brazil was generally more authori-
tarian and, hence, akin to Italian fascism than in Uruguay and Argentina.
In his view, such affinities between Italian fascism and the political culture
and the government in Brazil partially explain the greater resonance of
fascism among Italians in that country.29 Similarly, the aforecited French
memorandum opined that, in contrast to Brazil, the reason for the more
limited repercussions of fascism in Argentina was “that the great majority
of the Argentine people has sincerely democratic sentiments.”30
The relationship between Italian fascism and national politics in Latin
America therefore deserves some closer scrutiny. Vargas’ propaganda de-
partment signed an agreement of mutual cooperation with the Italians,
from whose perspective it was designed to favor and sway public opinion in
Brazil in Italy’s favor. Brazilian newspapers often received cables from the
Italian news agency Stefani, and Brazil was the only country in Latin Amer-
ica where a truly professional Italian radio, supervised by the fascist state,
operated. Italian schools in southern Brazil and the Dante Alighieri Society,
both designed to spread Italian culture abroad but supervised by the fascist
government, served as vehicles for fascist indoctrination and propaganda
among both Italian immigrants and native-born Brazilians.31 Moreover,
the extreme right-wing Brazilian Integralist Action (AIB), a party founded
by Plínio Salgado in 1932 with generous borrowings from Italian fascist
ideology and mobilization practices, operated freely until 1937. Including
many first- and second-generation Italians who sympathized with Mus-

solini, the AIB was cofinanced by the Italian embassy in Rio de Janeiro and
liaised with fascist foreign policymakers in Rome.32 By the mid-thirties
at least, in many ways the highpoint of fascist foreign propaganda, Brazil
indeed appears to have offered a more hospitable climate for Mussolini’s
proselytizing.
There are numerous caveats to such a straightforward explanation, how-
ever. Even the more specific claim regarding the importance of socialism is
problematic. After all, Mussolini himself was a former socialist and, with
the exception of Piedmont, fascism initially found greater support in Italy
precisely in those regions that also had an important socialist constitu-
ency.33 The formula according to which more socialism equaled less fas-
cism is therefore not especially convincing. Concerning the broader argu-
ment about political culture as a whole, there are even weightier problems.
It would be difficult, for instance, to accommodate the case of Italians in the
United States in such a model. Few historians would be prepared to argue
that political culture in the United States was generally more authoritar-
ian and akin to fascism than in Latin America. The political comparison
between the three Latin American countries has serious pitfalls too. If we
follow the above-cited report by Fani or the number of fasci as indicators,
differences between Brazil and Argentina predated Vargas’ rise to power
and the foundation of the integralistas. The assertion that Argentina’s po-
litical culture as a whole was more liberal than Brazil’s is debatable too. As
Federico Finchelstein has shown, Mussolini’s message did find a positive
echo among right-wing Argentine nacionalistas, whose movements were
no less important than that of their Brazilian counterparts, the integralis-
tas.34 The case of Uruguay sits uncomfortably in this scheme. While some
scholars have depicted Uruguayan political culture as distinctly liberal and
democratic in comparison to Argentina, the right-wing Uruguayan gov-
ernment of Gabriel Terra (1931–38) maintained unusually cordial relations
with Mussolini’s Italy to the extent that the Italian envoy to Montevideo
became something close to a Uruguayan government adviser. At the same
time, Uruguay had a particularly active and internationally well-connected
scene of antifascist Italian exiles.35
At any rate, Italian fascist cooperation with local right-wing nationalist
groups such as the nacionalistas in Argentina and the integralistas proved
to be a double-edged sword. As David Aliano has demonstrated for Ar-
gentina, Mussolini’s geopolitical goals in South America provoked strong
reactions and attempts to “nationalize” politics and curb fascist influence.36

Right-wing nationalist movements in Latin America were torn between
the attraction that fascism exerted on them and their rejection of foreign
meddling. From the viewpoint of fascist foreign policy, too, cooperation
with these movements could thus be a treacherous matter. Until the 1920s
at least, as Jeane DeLaney’s chapter in this volume reveals for the case of
Argentina, these movements showed their nativist anti-immigrant roots,
which mitigated their attractiveness from the perspective of both Italian
foreign policy and Italian immigrants.37 In the 1930s nacionalistas and in-
tegralistas gradually shed this nativism and became less elitist and more
populist in what amounted to a growing ideological convergence with Ital-
ian fascism. These borrowings not only revealed how the rise of rightist
nationalism in Europe fed into its Latin American counterparts but also
recommended them as potential tools for fascist envoys in their attempts to
influence politics in South America. Yet, instead of filling the ranks of local
branches of the fasci, those descendants of Italian immigrants potentially
attracted to fascism now joined these extreme right-wing Latin American
movements in increasing numbers. This prompted new worries for Italian
envoys in the host countries about the “Brazilianization” or “Argentiniza-
tion” of “their” diaspora. For example, the Italian ambassador in Rio, Vin-
cenzo Lojacono, reported to Rome in 1937 that he had heard of “specialists
within the country [Brazil], some of whom are good Fascists, who speak of
Integralism as the tomb of italianità.”38
Similarly, although the Argentine army, in which nacionalista ideas
spread during the 1930s, included many middle-ranking officers who sym-
pathized with Mussolini’s message (most famously the later president Juan
Perón), the army was also a formidable vehicle for the social integration
and ascent of Italian immigrants.39 This, too, ran against Italian foreign
policy designs of preserving the patriotic fervor of Italy’s emigrants in or-
der to draw on them as a bridgehead of fascist influence in the world, of
which the Argentine army from another angle appeared to be a promis-
ing bridgehead. When Italian diplomats were forced to decide, geopoliti-
cal aims usually overrode their concerns about the emigrants losing their
italianità. Lojacono thus chose to continue his backing of the integralistas
and even pushed their plans to unseat the Vargas government through a
military coup—a plan that backfired because Vargas outlawed the AIB and
instituted the infamously authoritarian Estado Novo, which again drew
some inspiration from the Italian fascist model.40 In spite of, or because
of, its borrowings from fascism, Vargas’ various governments were in fact
especially nationalist in their intolerance regarding any expression of eth-
nic particularity, especially in combination with foreign attempts to influ-
ence Brazilian politics. Well before the Estado Novo, Vargas had moved
against Italian schools in southern Brazil. As is well known, his government
joined World War II in 1942 on the side of the Allies, whereas the military
regime of Argentina (1943–45), equally inspired by aspects of Mussolini’s
corporatism, remained neutral until March 1945, in good part because of
its leaders’ sympathies with the Axis Powers. For all these reasons, politics
or the political culture in Brazil and Argentina cannot wholly account for
the greater receptiveness for fascism of Italians in Brazil compared to those
in Argentina. In short, even if one were to accept the problematic argument
that a more illiberal political climate prevailed in Brazil in contrast to the
River Plate countries, it is not clear whether this facilitated or undermined
the spread of Italian fascism in Brazil.
This is not to say that origins in Italy and politics in the receiving societ-
ies played no role in determining the specific course that Italian diasporic
nationalisms were to take in the respective countries. The problem is that
isolating factors specific to origin from those relating to the receiving con-
text makes little sense. It is in the history of the connection between places
of origin and destination where the most convincing explanations can be
found. One argument often mentioned but rarely spelled out in the histori-
ography deserves particular attention here: it has been maintained that the
previous resonance of liberal Mazzinian nationalism, greater in the Rio de
la Plata and perhaps also southern Brazil than in São Paulo, hindered the
later acceptance of fascism in Latin America’s Italian communities.41 The
argument sounds odd at first because after all a liberal Risorgimento na-
tionalism existed in Italy, too, without deterring Mussolini’s rise to power. It
is therefore not so much the emergence of an earlier nonfascist patriotism
linked to nineteenth-century liberal republicanism that mattered per se;
what mattered were the specific ways in which it related to the organi-
zational development of community life and, crucially, to political elites
in the host countries. Attention to these questions shifts emphasis away
from the assumption that there was “more” or “less” diasporic nationalism
among Italian communities of different countries, pointing instead to the
importance of competing interpretations of Italianness. The argument ul-
timately accords greater importance to the issue of timing of the migratory
process and, with this, generational matters, which proved pivotal.
Risorgimento Nationalism in the Rio de la Plata
In order to understand differences between Argentina, Uruguay, and Brazil

in this respect, the long-term history of Italian migration to Latin America
has to be considered in some more detail. Although statistical data relat-
ing to immigration in nineteenth-century Latin America are notoriously
unreliable, sketchy, and problematic to compare, it is clear that Italian mi-
gration to the River Plate began much earlier than to Brazil, where it really
took off on a larger scale only from the late 1880s (see figures 9.3, 9.4, and
9.5). This difference appears to be even greater if one bears in mind the
size of the existing population by the mid-nineteenth century, which of
course was much greater in Brazil than in Argentina, let alone Uruguay.
In Uruguay, the proportion of Italians among the population as a whole
was particularly large already by the middle of the nineteenth century, so
scholars have spoken of “a case of precocious migration.”42 As early as the
late eighteenth century there had been a significant migration of Ligurian
traders to the Rio de la Plata, in particular via Cádiz. During the decades
following Argentine independence these pioneers were joined by growing
contingents from northwestern Italy, including political exiles of the Pied-
montese insurrection of 1821.43
As Maurizio Isabella has shown for the case of Mexico, exiled Risor-
gimento activists were intimately involved in state- and nation-building
attempts in Spanish America, not least because their undertakings at home
had been so bound up with events in Spain in the first place.44 In the Rio de
la Plata, a close relationship between local political elites and Italian exiles
Figure 9.3. Chart depicting net number of Italian immigrants to Uruguay, 1880–1929.
Figure 9.4. Chart depicting net number of Italian immigrants to Argentina, 1855–1919.
Figure 9.5. Chart depicting net number of Italian immigrants to Brazil, 1855–1919.
developed. Even though his roots do not seem to have played a central role
for him, one of Argentina’s founding fathers and foremost national heroes,
Manuel Belgrano, was the son of a Ligurian merchant. The so-called Gen-
eration of 1837, from which the leading Argentine statesmen-writers dur-
ing the period of “national organization” after 1852 hailed, borrowed heav-
ily from the ideas of Giuseppe Mazzini and the Giovine Italia in general.45
The most important mediator in this ideological exchange was the Ligu-
rian Giovanni Battista Cuneo, who had left Italy after the failed uprising
in Genoa in 1837 and then helped organize some of the leading Argentine
intellectuals in Montevideo, where they were exiled during the dictator-
ship of Buenos Aires’ governor Juan Manuel de Rosas. Even the arguably
xenophobic Rosas himself could count on a prominent Risorgimento exile

as a panegyrist, Pedro de Angelis.46
The most famous of these exiles was Garibaldi himself, whose extended
stay in South America earned him the nickname “hero of two worlds” and,
through the iconic gaucho attire he sported during his later military ex-
ploits in Italy, fed back into Italian popular culture. After being sentenced
to death in Genoa, he set sail for Rio de Janeiro in 1835 but soon became
entangled in the political and military strife that at the time was endemic in
southern Brazil and the River Plate region. He first fought on the side of Rio
Grande do Sul’s republican farrapos against Brazil’s imperial government
in Rio de Janeiro and from 1842 joined the liberal colorados in Uruguay’s
civil war of 1839–51. With his Brazilian wife and remnants of Uruguay’s
“Italian legion,” he returned to Italy in 1848, where he put the military ex-
pertise he had acquired in South America at the service of Italian unifica-
tion. While Garibaldi unsurprisingly became a central national symbol for
Italians in Latin America, memories of his adventures additionally lived on
in local political traditions. In southern Brazil, republican regionalists often
invoked Garibaldi as a hero, whereas in Uruguay he was frequently hailed
by the colorados, who became the dominant political faction in the early
twentieth century.47
Since Italian communities in the River Plate region reached a critical
mass much earlier than they did in most of Brazil, ethnic associations
flourished earlier too. Given their customary interests in the politics of
the homeland, many such institutions were steeped in the liberal brand of
unification nationalism espoused by figures such as Mazzini or Garibaldi.
The most famous case is that of Buenos Aires’ mutual-aid society Unione e
Benevolenza, founded in 1858, whose success in bridging divisions between
Italians of different regional origins in Italy even preceded the unification
of Italy itself. As Samuel Baily and Andrea Scarli have underlined, the early
development of such community organizations was crucial in bestowing a
sense of identity on both settled migrants and, more importantly, new ar-
rivals.48 Arguably, the point could be made even more forcefully for Mon-
tevideo. In 1885, for instance, the director of Montevideo’s Italian school
wrote: “The Italian colony of Montevideo is perhaps, among all those of
the Americas, the one that has most social clubs in relation to its size.”49
Due to the size and richness of the Italian immigrants’ organizational life,
the boundary between migrant community institutions and state-building
efforts in Argentina and Uruguay became blurred. Mutual-aid societies or
Italian hospitals, for example, were crucial in the general development of
a public health sector. Around the turn of the century Argentina’s most
important Italian newspaper, La Patria degli Italiani, was the country’s
third-largest daily in terms of sold copies, and its editor-in-chief, Basilio
Cittadini, was simultaneously vice president of the Argentine press associa-
tion.50 In short, Argentina’s and Uruguay’s Italian communities developed
ethnic institutions at an early stage and in conjunction with the nation-
building efforts of those countries’ elites, with whom they held close ties
during much of the nineteenth century.
This cordial relationship, to be sure, was challenged from the late nine-
teenth century onward, especially in Argentina, owing to a combination of
factors. Parallel to the growing ethnicization of national identity in Europe,
growing parts of Argentina’s native elite turned away from the preceding
liberal nation-building model and began to valorize authentic criollo cul-
tural customs. As Lilia Ana Bertoni has observed, the Italian community,
widely associated politically with the ideas of the Generation of 1837, was
often singled out as a target in the arguments of the emergent cultural
nationalists.51 Even former advocates of immigration, such as Domingo
Sarmiento, began to criticize the “Italianization” of Argentina as immigra-
tion reached a truly massive scale from the 1880s onward.52 With a greater
proportion of Italians now coming from the impoverished Mezzogiorno,
even in Uruguay Italians, especially if they came from the south, began to
suffer from prejudice.53 Over time anti-immigrant attitudes were coupled
with anxieties about working-class activism, leading to the Argentine law
of residency that eased the expulsion of foreigners in 1902. In his 1909
book La restauración nacionalista, Argentine cultural nationalist Ricardo
Rojas—discussed in some detail by Jeane DeLaney in this volume—com-
plained about the existence of prominent statues of Mazzini and Garibaldi
in central Buenos Aires. Garibaldi at best stood for a specific political tradi-
tion in the River Plate, Rojas argued, whereas Mazzini “as a thinker does
not reach universal proportions. Our nationality does not owe this man
anything,” he concluded.54 The same nativist elites, meanwhile, revalued
the Spanish heritage and language as an element of national identity fanned
by the Spanish–American war of 1898 and a rising anti-imperialism across
Latin America, which pitted Anglo-Saxon “materialism” against Hispanic
“spirituality.” In Argentina this reconsideration culminated in the institu-
tionalization of the pan-Hispanic festivity of the Día de la raza (October 12,
when Columbus landed in the Americas) as a national holiday in 1917.55
However, as Rojas’ musings on Garibaldi reveal, the rejection of Ital-
ian republican influences was targeted as much against Argentina’s
nineteenth-century political traditions associated with the Generation of

1837 as it was against liberal Italian nationalism. The problem, rather, was
the extent to which the two strands had become merged in the eyes of
posterior cultural nationalists in Argentina. Rojas’ principal complaint was
about “our cosmopolitan culture,” which had led to prioritizing statues of
Garibaldi and Mazzini in prominent places over those of homegrown na-
tional heroes. On other occasions Rojas highlighted Garibaldi’s military
skills and likened them to those of the native gauchos, who at the time
were transformed into a prime marker of Argentine national identity.56 The
overriding point when comparing the River Plate countries to Brazil, there-
fore, is the lasting link between Mazzinian traditions and nation-building
elites in mid-nineteenth century Argentina and Uruguay. As late as 1932,
for instance, both Italian antifascists in Buenos Aires and the local press
likened Garibaldi’s political achievements to those of Argentina’s liberator,
José de San Martín.57 That the drawing of such parallels was possible was
the result of the early establishment of a sizeable Italian community with
powerful organizations that developed in convergence with the politics of
the host country and hence led to intimate political ties between Italian
exiles and local political elites.
Longue-durée Paths
For several reasons, this was much less true for Italians in Brazil. First, the
timing and nature of Italian immigration, especially in the principal area
of settlement (São Paulo), was different. There were, quite simply, far fewer
Italians in the region before 1890 than there were in the Rio de la Plata.
When they arrived in larger numbers, most were initially poor Venetian
families settling in the countryside with little access to Brazilian institu-
tions. Such circumstances hindered the development of the kind of ties
between an immigrant elite and the politics of the host country that had
developed in Argentina and Uruguay. Second, the principal areas of settle-
ment of Italians in Brazil, again in contrast to Argentina and Uruguay, were
geographically removed from the center of national political power. Al-
though the Brazilian capital, Rio de Janeiro, did have an Italian community,
this was not nearly as important as that of Buenos Aires or Montevideo.
Hence, if community leaders could establish close contacts with political
elites in the host country, these ties were usually regional, not national.
Third, even if the possibility of links with the national political elite had
existed, Brazil’s imperial decision makers would most probably have shown
themselves far less enthusiastic about republican ideas, whether from Italy
or elsewhere, than the political leaders of Spanish American countries. The
endemic military troubles and the political fragmentation of nineteenth-
century Spanish America arguably made politics in those countries more
permeable for outsiders to begin with when compared to the elitist stability
of imperial Brazil.
Such an overarching comparison between three national cases masks
important variations within Brazil. Because, in contrast to immigration in
Uruguay and Argentina, immigration in Brazil was primarily a regional,
not a national, affair (and was perceived as such by contemporary observ-
ers), immigration as a marker of identity or as a fountainhead of political
traditions was assimilated in differing ways by the political elites of dif-
ferent provinces (or states after 1889). Though not specifically related to
Italians and their diaspora nationalism, paulista regionalists drew on their
state’s history of European immigration in order to distinguish a suppos-
edly “white” São Paulo from the “dark” rest of the country.58 The more
pertinent example, however, is that of Rio Grande do Sul. In many respects,
the area’s social, economic, political, and cultural history as well as that of
its Italian immigrants was more similar to that of the River Plate coun-
tries than to the rest of Brazil. It has even been argued that Rio de Grande
do Sul should be considered historically as a part of a common “Platine”
region.59 Italian settlement in Rio Grande began much earlier, was more
spontaneous than that of the initially state-sponsored immigration in São
Paulo, and included a significant number of Risorgimento exiles. As Garib-
aldi’s involvement with the farrapos testifies, Rio Grande do Sul’s Italians,
similarly to those of Uruguay, also became engaged in local politics. There
emerged a lasting discursive link between Italian diaspora patriotism and
gaucho (Riograndense) regionalism, as can be derived from the names of
towns and hamlets in the “Italian zone” north of Porto Alegre, such as Far-
roupilha, Bento Gonçalves, or Garibaldi.
As one would expect on the basis of this argument, fascism indeed found
fewer followers among the Italians of Rio Grande than it did in São Paulo,
notwithstanding the common idealization of Rio Grande do Sul’s immi-
grant enclaves as pristine rural repositories of authentic italianità—a trope
similarly found in German nationalist literature by the turn of the cen-
tury.60 In part this difference can be attributed to the overwhelmingly rural
character of Italian settlement in southern Brazil, which complicated or-
ganizational efforts of any kind. The parallel with Argentina and Uruguay,
however, suggests that another factor also played a decisive role. Similarly
to the River Plate countries, yet in contrast to São Paulo, the development
of an organized Italian community with a crucial contingent of liberal pro-
fessionals and political exiles had from early on allowed for a close overlap
of local politics with that of the Italian diaspora. An early conflation of Ital-
ian national symbols with local ones made it subsequently more difficult
for Italian fascism to construe an aggressive version of italianità in marked
contradistinction to local identities.
The timing of the migratory process, in other words, appears to be the
most crucial variable in explaining different trajectories of Italian diaspora
nationalism and different receptions of fascism in the Americas. There is
ultimately also a demographic component to this argument. Italians in Ar-
gentina and Uruguay, but also in Rio Grande do Sul, were older on aver-
age than those of São Paulo. Moreover, Argentina’s and Uruguay’s “Italian”
communities naturally contained a much larger contingent of locally born
people of Italian—and more often partial Italian—ancestry than in Brazil.
Unsurprisingly, Italian-born younger generations were more likely to have
direct ties with the politics of their home country as well as contact with
consulates and other institutions of the Italian fascist state. As Robert New-
ton has observed for the case of Argentina, enthusiastic supporters of the
fascist cause were disproportionately found among the younger cohorts of
the Italian community.61 Too often forgotten by the scholarship, this gen-
erational issue applied to Italy itself, where fascism was more warmly re-
ceived among younger people than among the elderly.62 The generational
makeup of overseas Italian communities thus likely had an impact on their
reception of fascism.
Conclusion
Contrary to the view of contemporary fascist observers, the prospects for

the success of fascism among Italians in Latin America could not simply be
reduced to the question of whether respective communities were more or
less “assimilated” and whether they espoused more or less patriotic attach-
ment to their homeland as a consequence. Nor could the reasons for the
varying fate of diasporic nationalisms among Italians in Latin America be
found unilaterally in either Italy or Latin America. Rather, it was the history
of the transnational connection itself that shaped the experience of several
generations of migrants and their relationship to both homeland and host
country. These histories differed among the three cases examined in this
chapter. As Fernando Devoto has put it in a catchy phrase, “everything in
Argentina seems Italian, but at the same time it is difficult to single out
what really is [Italian].”63 The statement could certainly be extended to
Uruguay, and perhaps also to Rio Grande do Sul, but much less to the rest
of Brazil. There was, in other words, not simply “more nationalism” and
“less assimilation” among the “living agents” in the spread of nationalism
and their descendants in one country than in another. Instead the political
history of Italian immigrants in Latin America took varying paths over
time stemming from the history of transatlantic ties between Europe and
Latin America. There were different types of diasporic nationalisms, some
of them competing, in different places and at different times. Just as Ital-
ians in Latin America were not a homogenous group, neither was their
nationalism.
Notes
1. Corradini, La patria lontana.
2. Einaudi, Un principe mercante. For a similar juxtaposition between Corradini and
Einaudi, see Choate, Emigrant Nation, 49–53 and 159–68; and Pagano, “From Diaspora
to Empire.”
3. Conrad, Globalisierung und Nation, 229–78.
4. Ermarth, “Hyphenation and Hyper-Americanization.”
5. Franzina, Gli italiani, 15.
6. A concise global overview is de Caprariis, “‘Fascism for Export’?” The most re-
searched case has been that of the United States: Diggins, Mussolini and Fascism; Cannis-
traro, Blackshirts in Little Italy; and Luconi, La “diplomazia parallela.” On Latin America,
see Scarzanella, Fascistas en América del sur; and Bertonha, O fascismo e os imigrantes. On
Paris, see Milza, “Le fascisme italien.” On Australia, see Cresciani, Italians in Australia, 73–
97. On Canada, see Principe, Darkest Side. On Tunisia, see Bessis, La Méditerranée fasciste.
7. Bertonha, “Italiani nel mondo anglofono,” 24.
8. Bertonha, “Fascismo, antifascismo.”
9. Cannistraro and Rosoli, “Fascist Emigration Policy” provides a concise overview.
10. “Memorandum confidentiel sur l’activité du fascisme . . . ,” n.d. [1938], 8, Centre des
Archives Diplomatiques (CAD), 6CPCOM39.
11. A useful overview is Mugnaini, L’America Latina e Mussolini.
12. Gentile, Struggle for Modernity, 145–60.
13. Bertonha, “A ‘Foreign Legion’?”; Rodríguez Ayçaguer, Un pequeño lugar, 279–85;
and Scarzanella, “Cuando la patria llama.” A similar assessment about the slow inroads
and the peak of fascism in “Memorandum . . . ,” n.d. [1938], 1–2 and 12, CAD, 6CPCOM39.
14. From a Marxist perspective, this argument has been made especially for Rio Grande
do Sul: Giron, As sombras do littorio. A critical discussion can be found in Bertonha, O
fascismo e os imigrantes, 220–23, who nonetheless maintains this overall argument. A more
nuanced discussion for Argentina is Newton, “Ducini, Prominenti, Antifascisti.”
15. Caprariis, “‘Fascism for Export’?,” 158. More generally, see Trento, “I fasci in Brasile”;
and Zanatta, “I fasci in Argentina negli anni trenta.” As usual, information on Uruguay is
hard to come by.
16. Trento, “L’identità dell’emigrato italiano”; and Bertagna, La stampa italiana, 9–10
and 57–60.
17. “Memorandum . . . ,” n.d. [1938], 31, CAD, 6CPCOM39.
18. Sanfilippo, “Il fascismo”; and Sergi, “Fascismo e antifascismo.”
19. Quoted in Bertagna, La stampa italiana, 56.
20. Fogu, “‘To Make History’”; Bresciano, “El antifascismo,” 96 and 103; and Cattarulla,
“Orgoglio italiano.”
21. Contu, “L’antifascismo italiano,” 458.
22. A useful overview is Pretelli, “La risposta del fascismo.”
23. Klein, “Integration”; Baily, Immigrants; and Goebel, “Gauchos, Gringos and Gallegos.”
24. Baily, Immigrants, 228–31.
25. Alvim, Brava gente!, 141–42; Goebel, “Gauchos, Gringos and Gallegos,” 216–21; and
Beyhaut et al., “Los inmigrantes en el sistema ocupacional argentino.” Rates of ethnic
endogamy were remarkably low among Italians in Brazil: see Klein, “Social and Economic
Integration,” 325.
26. Holloway, “Creating the Reserve Army?”
27. Petersen, “Elettorato e base sociale,” 644.
28. See, e.g., Cane, “‘Unity for the Defense of Culture.’”
29. Bertonha, “Fascismo, antifascismo,” 123.
30. “Memorandum . . . ,” n.d. [1938], 1–2 and 12, CAD, 6CPCOM39.
31. Ibid., 2–3, 9, and 25–28.
32. On its membership, see Seitenfus, “Ideology and Diplomacy”; Bertonha, “Between
Sigma and Fascio”; and Zega, “‘Italiani alta la testa!,’” 88.
33. Petersen, “Elettorato e base sociale,” 645.
34. Finchelstein, Transatlantic Fascism; and Deutsch, Las Derechas. The French “Mem-
orandum . . . ,” n.d. [1938], 29–30, CAD, 6CPCOM39, singled out the Legión Cívica Ar-
gentina, the Legión de Mayo, and the Asociación Nacionalista Argentina as the three Ar-
gentine groups closely cooperating with the Italian embassy.
35. Aldrighi, “Luigi Fabbri en Uruguay.” On Terra and fascism, see Marocco, Sull’altra
sponda del Plata, 89–125; and Oddone, “Serafino Mazzolini.” See also “Memorandum . . . ,”
n.d. [1938], 28, CAD, 6CPCOM39. For a comparison of political culture in Argentina and
Uruguay, see Spektorowski, “Nationalism and Democratic Construction.”
36. Aliano, Mussolini’s National Project in Argentina.
37. Deutsch, Las Derechas, 41–44 and 99–112.
38. Quoted in Seitenfus, “Ideology and Diplomacy,” 521.
39. Nascimbene, “Assimilation of Italians.”
40. Seitenfus, “Ideology and Diplomacy,” 521–34.
41. From a global perspective, see Gabaccia and Ottanelli, Italian Workers, 1–20; and
Franzina, Gli italiani, 369–71. On Latin America, see Bertonha, “O antifascismo,” 23; Fa-
nesi, “Italian Antifascism and the Garibaldine Tradition.”
42. Devoto, “Un caso di migrazione precoce.”
43. Devoto, Historia de los italianos, 48–54. On the influence of early Ligurian traders,
see Brilli, “La diaspora commerciale.”
44. Isabella, Risorgimento in Exile, 32–64.

45. Gallo, “Esteban Echeverría’s Critique”; Myers, “Giuseppe Mazzini”; and Marani, El
ideario mazziniano.
46. On Cuneo and de Angelis, see, generally, Scheidt, Carbonários.
47. Examples are Collor, Garibaldi e a guerra; and Pereda, Garibaldi en el Uruguay.
48. Baily and Scarli, “Las sociedades de ayuda mutua.”
49. Bordoni, Montevideo, 163.
50. Baily, “Role of Two Newspapers,” 327 and 329.
51. Bertoni, Patriotas.
52. Sarmiento, Conflicto y armonía.
53. Oddone, Una perspectiva europea, 83.
54. Rojas, La restauración nacionalista, 455.
55. On Argentine elite attitudes to Spanish and Italian immigrants in comparison, see,
generally, Moya, Cousins and Strangers, 332–84.
56. Rojas, Eurindia, 214 and 216; Rojas, Historia de la literatura Argentina, 406.
57. Fanesi, “Italian Antifascism,” 168.
58. Weinstein, “Racializing Regional Difference.”
59. See, e.g., Jochims Reichel and Gutfreind, As raízes históricas.
60. Bertonha, O fascismo e os imigrantes, 218–26.
61. Newton, “Ducini, Prominenti, Antifascisti,” 44–45.
62. See Wanrooij, “The Rise and Fall”; and Linz, “Some Notes toward a Comparative
Study,” 81.
63. Devoto, “Italiani in Argentina,” 4.
10
“The Summit of Civilization”
Nationalisms among the Arabic-Speaking Colonies
in Latin America
Steven Hyland Jr.
Arabic-speaking migrants from the eastern Mediterranean and residing in

the Americas played a critical role in the formation, evolution, and diffu-
sion of nationalist ideologies and national identities to their home societ-
ies during the first half of the twentieth century. The creation of layered
identities and the formulation of ideas about the destiny of the old coun-
try was a contested process, producing dissolution and refashioning of the
larger community and inspiring the creation of parochial institutions—all
of which hardened lines of division within the émigré colonies. There were
three critical geopolitical issues directly affecting this group of diverse peo-
ple, namely, the 1908 Young Turk Revolution, the Ottoman Empire’s entry
into World War I on the side of the Central Powers, and the emergence
and decline of the French and British mandates in Syria, Lebanon, and
Palestine following the collapse of the Ottoman state. For the majority of
these migrants living in the Americas, the question of the French in Syria
and Lebanon was by far the most divisive and consequential concern for
the community. The mandate provoked the continued and decisive frag-
mentation of the Arabic-speaking colonies across the Americas as lines of
association were redrawn, complete with the promulgation of new institu-
tions, emergence of new press organs, and the birth of new national identi-
ties. Migration and transnational processes, notwithstanding local consid-
erations, forced these people to reformulate how they viewed themselves,
the immigrant community to which they belonged, and how best to present
it to the host society. At the collective level, local memory was constantly
contested, readjusted, and rewritten based upon the contingencies of life
Nationalisms among the Arabic-Speaking Colonies in Latin America · 257
and goals of various actors. Certainly, these immigrants were critical to

the formation of modern national identities in Argentina, Brazil, and else-
where in Latin America; however, this essay focuses on the formation and
evolution of political identities linked to the old country. As such, to fully
understand the long-distance nationalism of these migrants, scholars must
assess the social relations among and makeup of Arabic-speaking immi-
grants to fully appreciate how distant political transformations influenced
émigré communities and gave rise to national identities.
This essay highlights some of the key actions and expressions of various
nationalist sentiments among Arabic-speaking populations in the Ameri-
cas. Given the fact that a substantial portion of immigrants from the east-
ern Mediterranean likely did not associate with immigrant institutions, this
discussion focuses on the colonies’ intellectual and socioeconomic elites.1
That said, it is likely that most immigrants would have shared in one or
more of the sentiments and ideas circulating in the colonies’ Arabic-lan-
guage newspapers.2 The essay uses signifiers such as “Syrian,” “Lebanese,”
and “Palestinian” but situates the terms in their historical context. It is clear
from the historical evidence that these typologies were never neutral signi-
fiers but were contested spaces designed to create boundaries of inclusion
and exclusion.
What’s in a Name? Ottomans, Syrians, Lebanese, Syrian-Lebanese,

Palestinians, and Arabs
The establishment of modern nation-states and, thus, hegemonic national

identities in the Middle East happened in the context of massive emigra-
tion, imperial collapse, global war, European imperialism, and decoloni-
zation during yet another global war. As such, the states of Lebanon and
Syria and territories populated by Palestinians, including present-day Is-
rael, experienced severe political transformations directly affecting the ur-
gencies of nation building, the creation, appropriation and refashioning of
national symbols, and the self-identification of these polities. Immigrants
from these lands residing in the Americas contributed material aid, clashed
in ideologically charged debates regarding the destiny of their homelands,
and helped formulate national identities of these newly formed states. At
the same time, situations on the ground and the makeup of the commu-
nity and its elite in the Americas also influenced a particular colony’s ap-
proach to these national questions. Taken together, there was no single
response to these national questions by immigrants across the continents
258 · Steven Hyland Jr.
and, importantly, religious identity did not predict necessarily one’s politi-
cal allegiance.
A majority of sojourners from Bilad al-Sham (present-day Syria, Leba-
non, and Israel/Palestine) who lived abroad between 1880 and 1950 arrived
before World War I carrying Ottoman documents. These travelers formed
a part of the mass movement of people moving to the Americas. Many
of the pioneer generation—those who arrived in the Americas prior to
1900—possessed better skills, had access to capital and information, and
were overwhelmingly Christian. Most of these migrants elected commerce
as the best way to achieve financial betterment, creating an intercontinental
phenomenon of the Arab itinerant peddler.3 As emigration became a more
widespread phenomenon after 1900, the composition of the flow changed as
poorer and less educated migrants moved, including many more Muslims.
Yet scholars rarely have produced thoughtful discussion about how these
migrants possessed a number of competing loyalties and layered identities
or why certain allegiances became more or less prominent over time. For
many of these people, the terms “Syrian,” “Lebanese,” “Palestinian,” and
“Arab” metamorphosed in significance multiple times over the course of a
couple of decades. Local issues, such as host society values, legal regimes,
economic participation, stereotypes, and prejudices, influenced identity
formation. Politics of the homeland and institution building by the mi-
grants themselves did too. The creation of immigrant and national identi-
ties was a contested process having as much to do with the old country as
with local, internal deliberations within these émigré colonies.
Authors have increasingly focused on the ethnicity of these migrants
to better assess how these immigrants viewed and presented themselves
privately and publicly, but this scholarship too has suffered from a disposi-
tion that there was something essential, an a priori element to a Lebanese,
Syrian, or Palestinian identity. Yet focusing on ethnicization—the creation
of an ethnic identity in relation to a perceived outside group—has been a
critical contribution to the study of Arabic-speaking migrants in the Amer-
icas.4 As Akram Khater has elegantly argued, Syrians became Syrians in the
Americas, but this identity was constructed in direct relation with fellow
immigrants elsewhere, in dialogue with intellectuals based in Beirut, Cairo,
and Damascus and with the host society’s social and moral values in mind.5
Community institutions, particularly the press, served as the critical cata-
lyst to this collective identity formation. Charting the development of these
community institutions can assess the expression of competing, emergent,
and novel identities and how they change over time.6
Ethnicity fundamentally refers to relationships and contacts between

groups of people.7 For ethnicity to materialize, groups of people must have
a “minimum amount of contact” between each other and think about “ideas
of each other as being culturally different from themselves.”8 It is, therefore,
a feature of a relationship and not an innate or primordial quality of a cer-
tain group of people. Ethnic groups rely on cultural and historical artifacts
to help create boundaries with those deemed different. People use symbols
that evoke a certain meaning with which many from the group identify,
fostering a perceived authentic and shared cultural heritage.9 Hence, the
construction in the Americas of Arab, Lebanese, Palestinian, and Syrian
identities were sensitive to multiple forces, ideologies, and processes.
In the United States, for instance, immigrants did not possess equal
economic rights as citizens. Residents there could lease property, but they
could not purchase real estate unless they had at least applied for citizen-
ship. Syrian immigrants debated among themselves the value of taking U.S.
citizenship. After evaluating, an increasing number of Syrians pursued this
option and thus had to prove before a court in places like New York and
Atlanta their descent from the Caucasian race, as stipulated by the law. The
urgency of creating a racial classification in the first decade of the twentieth
century provoked a heated transnational debate among Arabic speakers,
including such prominent intellectuals as Jurji Zaydan in Cairo and Mu-
hammad Kurd Ali in Damascus, regarding the importance of defining a
racialized identity.10 This issue was simply not a concern for Syrian immi-
grants in Argentina, who had equal economic and civil rights as Argentines
whether or not they naturalized. More broadly, the process of ethnicization
of Arabic speakers would become increasingly associated with nationalist
movements. Nationalism, the politicization of ethnic identity, shaped cul-
ture because “ethnic, linguistic, and racial differences, hitherto politically
inconsequential, [acquired] an ideological force and institutional weight.”11
The idea of national culture had an integrative potential where in many
cases elites embraced a shared identity and past with non-elites for the first
time. Yet when nationalists appropriated symbols and attached a national-
ist discourse to them, their meanings changed, necessarily including some
and excluding others.12
For the Arabic-speaking communities in the Americas, the cultural
and social elites of these immigrants spearheaded the formation of a hege-
monic immigrant identity through the erection of community institutions
and periodicals. Within the community and in the Arabic-language press
published in the Americas prior to the collapse of the Ottoman Empire,
the community referred to themselves as “jāliyya suriyya” and “jāliyya

῾uthmāniyya” (“Syrian colony” and “Ottoman colony,” respectively). In
Spanish, they used “colonia siria,” “colectividad siria,” and “colectividad
sirio-otomana.” Latin American officials alternated between “colonia siria,”
“turcos,” “árabes,” and “sirios.” Argentine officials standardized the use of
Ottoman for their political identity in 1914, and Brazilian administrators
did not start counting Syrians and Lebanese as separate recognized politi-
cal identities until 1921.13 This hegemonic immigrant identity went through
a variety of transformations during World War I and later throughout the
French and British colonial moment in Lebanon, Palestine, and Syria. After
the collapse of the Ottoman state, immigrants in Latin America began to
refer to themselves as Lebanese, Palestinians, Syrians, and Syrian-Lebanese.
Which terms were used depended upon local consideration of the particu-
lar immigrant communities.
While there is a certain necessity and convenience in using these typolo-
gies, simply dividing these people into Syrians and Lebanese and Palestin-
ians has obscured the alterations of the meanings of these terms wrought by
intense political transformations in the old country and the corresponding
debates and urgencies within the Arabic-speaking colonies in the Ameri-
cas. Moreover, these terms, as used by most scholars of these communities,
essentialize these identities into seemingly self-evident axioms, conflating
nationality with ethnicity and obscuring internal dynamics and diversity.14
And despite the current tendency to see ethnicity as “indissolubly linked to
nationalism and race, to ideas about normative political systems and rela-
tions, and to ideas about descent and blood,” scholars of immigrants and
minorities must appreciate the fluidity and amorphous nature of cultural
symbols and discourses and how internal and external processes trans-
formed them.15
The Ottoman Empire and the Syrian Colonies in the Americas
The role of the Ottoman state and its émigré communities in the lives and
destiny of each other is remarkably understudied. Part of this problem
stems from a general acceptance on the part of scholars to propagate or
accept certain myths about the emigrants. The Syrian colonies throughout
the Americas forged a saga of fleeing religious persecution from their Otto-
man Muslim overlords.16 The truth is less dramatic. Changes in the regional
economy of Bilad al-Sham created an environment where an increasing
number of Syrians, who benefited from increased access to education and
information, sought adventure, economic relief, and vast riches by moving

into the mahjar (land of emigration). As the local economies expanded
and greater wealth circulated even among peasants of Mount Lebanon,
the Ansariya Mountains and the Valley of the Christians, a cultural shift
placed emigration as an acceptable life choice and recognized social prac-
tice. While emigration from Ottoman domains was technically illegal until
1900, state officials and diplomats could do little to stem the tide.17
Once in the mahjar, relations among the migrants and with the Otto-
man state were complex, featuring a variety of issues, demands, fears, and
expectations. As early as 1890 Syrian immigrants in Buenos Aires began
requesting the Ottoman state to establish formal diplomatic relations with
Argentina.18 Brazil and the United States had forged agreements earlier
in the nineteenth century. Outside of these formal channels, immigrants
certainly kept in touch with family and friends by using the standardized
international mail service, remitting between 20 million and 35 million
French francs back to the old country via wire transfer and subscribing
to periodicals and journals published in Cairo, Beirut, Jerusalem, New
York City, Rio de Janeiro, and Buenos Aires.19 The Young Turk Revolution
(July 24, 1908) and the Ottoman entrance into World War I on the side of
the Central Powers (August 2, 1914) were two historical events in the old
country that proved consequential to immigrants abroad. These incidents
intersected with local issues confronting immigrants in the Americas, such
as naturalization.20 For a great number of Arabic speakers abroad, the po-
litical destiny of the old country prompted a great deal of anxiety, distress,
mobilization, and confrontation.
In broad terms, Syrian immigrants in the Americas desired to remain a
part of the Ottoman Empire prior to World War I.21 In response to a New
York–based Arabic-language newspaper support in 1904 for naturalization,
Na῾um Labaki, a Christian from Mount Lebanon based in São Paulo, ar-
gued in his paper al-MunāΩir that Syrians must “remain loyal to Ottoman-
ism and committed to Syrian patriotism [wataniyya] so they can return
to Syria.”22 The expressed opinions were as diverse as the composition of
immigrants, and in spite of “antagonistic attitudes on the part of certain
groups of politically motivated intellectuals,” the Arabic-speaking commu-
nities in the Americas possessed “close and friendly contact” with Istan-
bul.23 Hence, it was not contradictory for Palestinians in Chile to establish
the Sociedad Otomana de Beneficencia in 1904 or Maronites from Mount
Lebanon in Tucumán to organize the Sociedad Turco-Argentina in 1898.24
When the Young Turks seized power in July 1908 and reinstated
constitutional rule, the Syrian émigré colonies embraced them. People

across the hemisphere held celebrations commemorating the heroes of
the revolution and the shared commitment to reform within the empire.
In Buenos Aires, the colony organized an event at the posh theatre house
Casa Suiza featuring a performing ensemble of young girls, Ottoman flags,
Chinese lanterns, a portrait of Midhat Paşa (author of the Ottoman Con-
stitution) and a rendition of Argentine and Ottoman anthems.25 In New
York, the Young Turks, the Armenian Revolutionary Federation, and the
Hunchakist Society hosted a raucous celebration at Carnegie Hall compris-
ing “Turks, Armenians, Syrians, Albanians and even some former Greek
subjects of the Sultan.”26 Under banners written in Armenian, Turkish, and
French declaring “Hurrah for the Young Turks,” “Hurrah for the Armenian
Revolutionary Federation,” and “Liberty, Equality and Fraternity,” Otto-
man Chargé d’Affaires Munji Bey noted the mutual suffering of the Sub-
lime Porte’s subjects under the despot Sultan ῾Abd al-Hamīd and called for
a common purpose, declaring, “But we must be friends and brothers now.
We must respect justice. If we use this force which God has given us we
shall be strong and we will fight for liberty without blood.”27 In November
1912 Tanus Shahin Abi Dagher, writing as “an Ottoman from Mount Leba-
non” and supposedly on behalf of the three thousand Syrians in Venezuela,
dispatched a letter to the Grand Vizier Kamil Paşa declaring the ability to
muster twenty thousand émigrés in Latin America to return and battle the
Balkan separatists and defend the “Great Ottoman state.”28 In Brazil, Nami
Jafet, a former schoolteacher in Mount Lebanon, the most respected Syr-
ian intellectual in South America and likely the wealthiest immigrant too,
offered public and full-fledged support for the Ottoman Constitution and
the Young Turk government on the fourth anniversary of the revolution,
concluding with a rousing “Long live the Constitution! Long live the Otto-
man homeland!”29
Notions of liberty and constitutional rule served as the critical elements
for the celebrations in Argentina, Brazil, and the United States. Despite
the proscribed nature of democratic practices in these countries, the per-
ception of liberty, the opportunity to purchase property and pursue eco-
nomic betterment combined to influence how Arabic speakers understood
their place in local society and how they interpreted the events in the old
country. Arabic-speaking émigrés attempted to identify with their host
countries through the liberal discourse of guaranteed individual rights and
national leaders responded in kind. For instance, Syrians in Buenos Aires
celebrated the empire’s entrance into the pantheon of free nations, while
the distinguished Socialist legislator for the capital, Alfredo Palacios, dis-
patched a letter reminding local Syrians that one must fight for liberty.
Nami Jafet persistently cited Brazil as a “land of freedom and equality, the
country of democracy.” At the event in Carnegie Hall, U.S. assistant secre-
tary of the treasury James B. Reynolds read a letter from President Theo-
dore Roosevelt pronouncing that all men who believe in liberal government
should take great interest in the events taking place in the Ottoman Empire.
Congressman Herbert Parsons spoke on behalf of “young America” in con-
gratulating the restoration of the constitution and welcoming the “newer
torch bearers of liberty.”30
The excitement of revolution collided with the inertia of institutional
change. As the Young Turks, in the form of the Committee on Union Prog-
ress, implemented a series of policies perceived to be pro-Turkish, many
politically active Syrians began pondering what the particular arrangement
should be within the larger imperial superstructure, initiating an intercon-
tinental debate.31 On the whole, Syrian communities in the Americas sup-
ported greater autonomy (expressed as “administrative decentralization”)
and equality of representation within the Ottoman bureaucracy. This was
best exemplified by Syrian émigrés’ participation in and support of the
First Arab Congress, held in Paris, France, in June 1913. The month before
the meeting, the Cairo-based Ottoman Administrative Decentralization
Party sent letters to editors of Arabic-language periodicals in the Ameri-
cas requesting opinions regarding the pace and depth of reform.32 As the
congress convened, delegates from New York and a Paris-based envoy for
the Syrian colonies in Mexico attended. At the event’s conclusion, the par-
ticipants produced eleven resolutions and three appendices to be delivered
to the Ottoman ambassador stationed in Paris. The most important ones
focused on the guarantee of political rights, Arabic as an official state lan-
guage, improved representation in the Ottoman bureaucracy, and greater
local rule via administrative decentralization. These declarations inspired
Syrian colonies as far afield as Waynoka, Oklahoma, and Rio de Janeiro to
wire congratulatory telegrams to Paris.33 Yet as it became clear in Octo-
ber 1913 that the Ottoman state would not implement these reforms, com-
munities in Brazil and the United States, as part of a coordinated strategy
with activists in Europe, the empire and Egypt, sent telegrams to Istanbul
demanding implementation.34 Despite this increased agitation for greater
autonomy and reform within the empire, broad swathes of Syrians abroad
continued to celebrate the constitution and the Ottoman state on the eve of
global war.35
The Ottoman Empire’s entrance into World War I as part of the Central
Powers provoked great consternation on part of many in the various Syrian
colonies and inspired critics of the regime’s stalled reforms and advocates
of independence to intensify their claims and demands. Indeed, the calls
for Lebanese and Armenian independence reached critical mass and led to
direct, and at times violent, altercations within the colonies in São Paulo
and Buenos Aires. During the war the Syrian communities moved toward
a definitive break between the Ottoman state and Greater Syria while si-
multaneously formulating new and at times confused ethnic and racialized
identities: Lebanese, Syrian, and Arab. At the same time, new questions
emerged orbiting around whether Mount Lebanon formed a part of an in-
dependent Syrian state and whether France should serve as a guarantor and
mentor in the transition to independence. In an effort to secure support for
French designs in the Levant, the Paris-based and French-funded Syrian
Central Committee dispatched Dr. Cesar Lakah and Jamil Mardam Bey
to Latin America to raise money and volunteers for the Légion d’Orient, a
fighting force folded within the French military. The committee envisioned
this group comprised of Syrian volunteers helping to fight for the inde-
pendence of Lebanon and Syria. This Lakah-Mardam mission met varying
success depending on which community they visited.36
In Argentina, after an initial push of support for the Ottoman war ef-
fort, those who were politically committed divided along three axes: pro-
Independent Lebanon, independent Syria including Lebanon under the
aegis of France, and the establishment of an Arab-led Islamic empire with
Husayn, the sharīf of Mecca, as its head. Disagreements between these
compatriots became so heated that violence manifested multiple times,
provoking the expulsion of Ottoman sympathizers (diminished though
never extinguished during the war) from the Barrio Turco, located in the
downtown Socorro district radiating out from Tres Sargentos Street, as well
as the murder of a Syrian Armenian at the hands of a Syrian Muslim in
the La Boca neighborhood.37 While most of the intellectuals advocating
French policy in the Levant were Maronites, early on it was not solely them.
Alejandro Schamún, a Maronite Catholic writing January 21, 1919, in La
Nación, argued that Syria included Lebanon and needed French support,
while the Lebanese Union in Buenos Aires, a largely Maronite organization,
demanded a Lebanon free from European influence. Emir Emin Arslan, a
Druze from Mount Lebanon and former Ottoman consul general in Bue-
nos Aires, publicly supported the goals of the Syrian Central Committee,
including in an open letter to President Woodrow Wilson.38 In Brazil lead-

ing members of the colony also struggled to find common ground and con-
sensus. As the war progressed the Lebanese Renaissance Society, which was
established in 1912, dedicated itself to the independence of Mount Lebanon.
In Rio de Janeiro, émigrés established the Syrian-Lebanese Patriotic Society
with Nami Jafet as its president. This organization advocated the indepen-
dence of Syria (including Lebanon) under the aegis of the French, and con-
tributed men and money to the Syrian Central Committee, which raised
volunteers for the French Legion d’Orient.39 Yet friction between activists
in Brazil boiled over into homicide, as Ilyas Masarra, a journalist for the
pro-French Arabic-language periodical al-Brazīl, murdered Salim Labaki,
editor of a rival, pro-Ottoman journal.40 In the United States, the Lebanon
League of Progress, led by Naoum Mokarzel, advocated for Lebanese in-
dependence. His group clashed with the Syria-Mount Lebanon League of
Liberation, which included important intellectuals such as Kahlil Gibran,
Ameen Rihani, and Mikha᾿il Na῾ima. This group called for the indepen-
dence of Syria and Lebanon but did not speculate or advocate on how the
arrangement between the two entities should be manifest.41
The end of World War I produced a brief moment of Syrian self-rule.
In June 1919 the Syrian National Congress convened, composed of dele-
gates from the former Ottoman administrative districts of Syria, Beirut,
Aleppo, Mount Lebanon, and Jerusalem. The congress pronounced Faisal
al-Hashemi, son of the sharīf of Mecca, king of the Syrian Arab Kingdom
on March 8, 1920.42 This constitutional monarchy lasted just four months
but produced divisions among the émigrés in the Americas. For instance,
the Lebanon-Syria Commission in Montevideo telegrammed French prime
minister Alexandre Millerand to protest the “pretensions” of Faisal and re-
affirmed their request of Lebanon and Syria’s independence with France as
guarantor.43 Groups in Argentina and Paraguay dispatched similar cable-
grams. At the same time, Dr. George Sawaya, prominent physician and
intellectual, articulated clearly to the French embassy that the destiny of an
Arab kingdom lay in the hands of the Allied powers. Following the fall of
Faisal in the summer of 1920, Sawaya’s newly founded Arab Patriotic Party
organized meetings and sent telegrams to local diplomatic missions and the
League of Nations condemning France and Britain.44
The French and British Mandates and the Lebanese

and Syrian Colonies
The Early Mandate
The beginning of the new decade witnessed the collapse and partition of
the Ottoman Empire and fall of King Faisal in Damascus and the granting
by the League of Nations to France of a mandate over Syria and Lebanon.
For Arab nationalists, the short-lived monarchy of Faisal I in Damascus
was the realization of their dreams and political activities. France’s forceful
deposing of Faisal in July 1920 and the subsequent creation of the State of
Greater Lebanon, which would become the French-dependent Republic
of Lebanon in 1926, were critical events for Lebanese nationalists. For ad-
vocates of a Greater Syria, many viewed the mandate with great anticipa-
tion. In the midst of the maelstrom of competing nationalisms, some intel-
lectuals moved to form groups advocating cultural politics. For instance,
young intellectuals established the Shabība Mutahīda (United Youth) in
San Miguel de Tucumán, Argentina, on June 4, 1921. This group held public
events, published a newspaper, staged plays, and used the printing press to
further its mission of fashioning an Arab fellowship. In January 1922 the
organization launched the monthly literary review al-Hadiqa (the garden).
In the opening editorial, the directors declared that the surge of compet-
ing views expressed in the Arabic press in the Americas on politics and
national destinies resulted from poor national education. The editors an-
nounced they would use novels to help foster love for the nation, avoid
divisive politics, and move Arabic speakers along the path “to reach the
summit of civilization.”45
Yet this vision of a cultural pan-Arabism for the colonies proved futile. A
group of activists in Buenos Aires united and formed the Syrian-Lebanese
Committee, featuring the leading intellectuals and some of the colony’s
wealthier members. These men began organizing a public event sched-
uled for July 1922 designed to remonstrate France’s imposition of colonial
rule. The scheduled demonstration caused grave concern for supporters of
French rule, in particular the Maronite priests resident in Buenos Aires.
The superior of the Lebanese missionaries, the order of Maronite priests,
convinced the French minister in Argentina to meet with the Buenos Ai-
res chief of police, municipal leaders, and the undersecretary of state at
the offices of the Argentine foreign ministry. The diplomat requested state
intervention to prevent the demonstration from taking place; however, the
Argentines refused to intercede. Some 250 people took to the streets in

protest of France’s presence in the Levant. In the aftermath, Gen. Henri
Gouraud, the high commissioner of the French Republic in Syria and
Lebanon, sent a letter to the Argentine president requesting his help in
managing the efforts of “a fanatical party of the Lebanese-Syrian colony in
Argentina” that had been spreading lies about the mandatory powers. The
communication seemingly carried great weight. After the reception of this
letter, Argentine officials collaborated with their French counterparts to
quiet the dissidents and prevent public criticism of France.46 The actions
of the Argentine government in support of the French demonstrated that
anti-imperialism equated with anti-American sentiment.
Similar to Argentina, Syrian and Lebanese émigrés in Brazil advocated
a variety of positions and ethnonational identities through the creation of
new institutions, the Arabic press, and the occasional public demonstration.
France’s decision to create Greater Lebanon heartened pro-French Leba-
nese in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro and provoked others. Khalil Saadeh,
now resident in Brazil, used his newspaper, al-Jarīda, as the mouthpiece
of his new National Democratic Party (Hizb al-Dīmuqrātī al-Watant), an
organization that demanded full independence of Lebanon, Palestine, and
Syria under the leadership of locals and the move toward true secular, dem-
ocratic governance. These aims compared with Asad Bishara’s Syrian Na-
tional Party (Hizb al-Watanī al-Surī). Yet a strong pro-French current was
channeled through the Lebanese Renaissance Party (al-Nahda al-Lubnānī)
and the periodicals al-Brazīl, al-Qalam al-Hadīd, and Fatāt Lubnān.47 The
creation of Greater Lebanon also inspired some immigrant institutions in
Latin America to transform themselves to fit new realities and identities.
For instance, the Sociedad Sirio-Libanesa in Durazno, Uruguay, changed
its name to the Comité Patriótico Libanés.48
The Great Syrian Revolt (1925–1927)

The news of the rebellion in Jebel Druze and Damascus in August 1925,
known as the Great Syrian Revolt, provoked a variety of opinions and ac-
tions by Syrians and Lebanese in the Americas. In Argentina, the press re-
lated French actions as “particularly odious and barbaric,” thus intensifying
opposition toward the French Mandate and prompting a public relations
campaign across Argentina. Even the pro-mandate institutions began to
see support for France among their membership dissolve. The communi-
ties in Rosario and Mendoza raised money for the victims of the Damas-
cus shelling. The colony in Mendoza held a large protest demonstration
during which Syrian and Lebanese merchants shuttered their shops and
conducted a procession of mourning complete with black flags. The French
worked assiduously with Argentine officials to prevent similar events. At
the same time, the French Chargé d’Affaires partnered with the president
of the Club Libanés in Mendoza to publish a note declaring that the public
protest did not have the support of the majority of Mendoza’s Lebanese. A
whisper campaign ensued suggesting there was an assassination attempt
on the French consul.49
In Buenos Aires intellectuals mobilized with great purpose, organiz-
ing street demonstrations, demanding—via telegrams to the League of
Nations—that France quit its mandate, and pursuing the support of Ar-
gentina’s representative to the League’s Office of Intellectual Cooperation.
The Círculo de Damas Siro-Argentinas invited Syrians and Lebanese to
the Casa Suiza on November 8, 1925, for a wake mourning the lost lives in
the outbreak of violence. The ladies stressed this was an apolitical event.
Emir Emin Arslan led the anti-mandate charge with a series of articles in
La Nación, including a confession of his previous error in supporting the
French presence in Syria and Lebanon. Habib Estéfano, former Maronite
priest and partisan and official for King Faisal’s short rein in Damascus,
gave public conferences in the most important venues in Buenos Aires and
elsewhere in Argentina; even President Marcelo T. de Alvear attended an
event. French diplomats asked Argentine officials to intervene and secured
a promise from the Argentine press to refrain from printing the articles of
Arslan and the speeches of Estéfano. The French, fearing a public relations
debacle, even asked the consul in Mendoza to seek state help in muzzling
Estéfano in that Andean province.50
Yet certain Lebanese and Syrians in Argentina continued to support the
French, especially the Maronite priests. Pro-mandate groups dispatched
letters of support to the League of Nations and raised ten thousand francs
for the communities afflicted by the violence. In October 1926 Estéfano
gave a public lecture in Tucumán’s prestigious Sarmiento Society excoriat-
ing the French mandate in Syria and Lebanon. Naguib Bacclini, a noted
Lebanese intellectual in the province, published an editorial in his newspa-
per Sada al-Sharq (Echo of the east) berating Estéfano as “a renegade Ex-
Maronite priest” who suffered from a “Bedouin mentality.” Bacclini then
argued that France was the right partner for Lebanon as it was the paladin
of culture and democratic governance.51
The criticism of the French for the repression and shelling of Damas-
cus seemingly was more muted elsewhere in the Americas. Pro-French
organizations in Uruguay never wavered in their support. In January 1926

the Liga Patriótica Libanesa in Montevideo circulated a statement declar-
ing that the rebels “came to rob, steal and persecute the Christians.” The
Liga then sent a telegram to the League of Nations condemning the for-
eign campaign against “dear” France and demanding the continuation of
the mandate in Syria and Lebanon. The Club Libanés, which historically
kept some distance from the French legation, split. A group dispatched a
telegram in the name of the organization to the League of Nations criticiz-
ing French actions, provoking another group to declare anew their orga-
nization’s attachment to France. In Paraguay, after two members from the
Unión Líbano-Siria in Concepción failed to establish a separate organiza-
tion protesting the bombing of Damascus, the Buenos Aires–based Antio-
chian Greek Orthodox bishop Ignatius Aburrus, during a trip to visit his
flock, used the pulpit to express the “loyalty to France” by all Syrians and
Lebanese in attendance, regardless of confessional identity.52
The large Syrian and Lebanese communities in Brazil split over how to
respond to the October bombing of Damascus by the French, during which
more than one thousand civilians perished. Khalil Saadeh sent a cablegram
to the League of Nations condemning France’s “cruel behavior.” Rashid
Atiyeh, publisher of the pro-French Fatat Lubnan, organized a meeting of
the colonies’ leading members to advocate for open condemnation of the
French. Consensus was elusive as several members desired to focus on the
crime—not the mandate itself—and push humanitarian efforts. The Antio-
chian Greek Orthodox communities in Brazil raised and dispatched sixty
thousand French francs to their patriarch in Damascus, an activity mir-
rored by several other Syrian and Lebanese organizations there.53
Lebanese and Syrian émigré colonies in the United States also raised
large sums of money to aid the bombing victims of the French. The com-
munity there also divided over how to respond to the violence. Some in-
dividuals, speaking in the name of all Syrians and Lebanese in the United
States, wired telegrams to the League of Nations to protest France. These
actions provoked the American-Syrian Federation, the “representative or-
ganization of the Syrians in the United States, [with] affiliated organizations
throughout the country,” to clarify that no such protest by the institution or
its constituents had been lodged. Naoum Mokarzel, president of the Leba-
non League of Progress, went so far as to say that the rebellion against the
French was simply cover for “murdering the native Christians” and razing
and pillaging Christian villages and towns. Hence, the French departure
was tantamount to an existential threat for Levantine Christians.54 This
declaration provoked a response from fellow Christian Habib Katibah, a

New York-based member of the Palestine National League and the Syrian
National Society, to point out that the “leaders of the Syrian Nationalist
movement” had agreed to the Maronite demand that the French remain
in Greater Lebanon provided that they quit the rest of Syria. The French,
for Katibah, used the protection of the Christian populations as a pretext
for its “lusty colonial ambitions.”55 Yet, as the violence continued unabated
into the next year, the Syrian Convention, another body said to represent
Syrian-Americans and Syrians in the United States, met in Detroit and for-
mally asked for help from the U.S. government to “give Syria her rights as
befits her culture, her capacity and her aspirations.”56
Of the nations with large numbers of Levantine immigrants, Argentina
stands out as possessing the most vocal critics of the French presence in
Lebanon and Syria. Two primary factors may account for this characteris-
tic. First, the Arabic-speaking colonies in Argentina numbered 160,000 by
1928, with more than half coming from Syria. This compares to the over-
whelming majority of Lebanese Christians in Brazil and Uruguay and Pal-
estinians in Chile. Second, the presence of Emir Emin Arslan and brothers
Wadi and Alejandro Schamún likely played a critical role. Each came from
a prominent family from Mount Lebanon, had close relatives active in anti-
French politics in the homeland, and possessed great respect from both
the Syrian-Lebanese colonies in Argentina and Argentine government
officials. Arslan and the Schamúns each published their own periodicals
that demanded self-determination of their homelands. Finally, Muslims ac-
counted for one-third of the immigrant population from the Levant. This
vibrant community was especially active in the industrial city of Rosario
and Buenos Aires, and it enacted a variety of strategies to challenge French
rule and support political and educational initiatives in the old country.
The High Era of the Mandate

Despite the stalling of the Great Syrian Revolt in 1927, an active campaign
against the mandate persisted in Syria and the Americas, especially af-
ter the French dissolved the Syrian assembly following an impasse relat-
ing to specific articles for inclusion in a Syrian Constitution. This placed
the French, in the eyes of its critics, as an imperialist power. The Unión
Libanesa continued its demand for complete independence and its criti-
cism of the French. Estéfano perdured, lecturing throughout Argentina
and, in the eyes of French diplomats, spreading “his harmful venom.” Yet
there was apparently a noticeable waning of support among some actors
and the Argentine public due to the schisms plaguing the executive com-
mittee of the Syrian-Palestinian Congress based in Cairo and the revolu-
tionaries in Transjordan and Syria.57 Even some Maronite priests, hearty
supporters of the mandate, expressed occasional disagreement with French
policy in Lebanon and Syria.58
At the end of the 1920s several Syrian revolutionaries emigrated to South
America, in particular to Argentina. Upon their arrival they sought the
support of Emir Emin Arslan, George Sawaya, and Habib Estéfano. Ar-
slan, who was disillusioned at this point with the events in Syria and the
politics that the Damascene Muslims had toward the Druze, rejected the
overtures for financial support by Assad al-Bakri, nephew of the promi-
nent Syrian nationalist Nasib al-Bakri. Further, Sawaya and Arslan asserted
that al-Bakri did not leave Syria to work on behalf of the revolution but
rather to hacer la América. With this rumor circulating, the fundraising for
al-Bakri stopped and only Estéfano contributed to the drive. With these
meager funds, al-Bakri moved on to visit the Syrian and Lebanese colonies
in Chile.59 But efforts on behalf of the revolution continued in Argentina.
In April 1932 the editor of the Buenos Aires Arabic-language weekly al-
Watan (The homeland) published a letter from the leader of the Syrian
Revolutionary Forces, Sultan Paşa al-Atrash, acknowledging receipt of the
most recent remittance of funds and thanking the “generous almsgiving”
(al-muhsin al-karīm) from the Arabic-speaking colonies in Argentina. He
urged these people to continue giving material aid and emotional support
against the “politics of colonialism” (siyāsat al-ist῾amār), a call many im-
migrants heeded.60 The same edition contained a letter from Yusef al-῾Issa,
a Palestinian Christian based in Amman who was part of the Arab na-
tionalist intelligentsia. Al-῾Issa emphasized the continued struggle of the
freedom fighters (mujāhidīn) against the French, proudly announcing that
various Syrian political parties had met in Egypt and had agreed to unify
in common cause in support of the fighters.61
The resistance benefited from an organized transnational network that
exchanged letters and moral support, collected and transferred money to
pay for the fight against European colonialism, and debated the future of
the homeland. Suleiman Najm al-Bikfāni, a fundraiser for the Syrian revo-
lutionaries, was in constant communication with the leaders of the resis-
tance, including Sultan al-Atrash and leading Arab nationalist figures in
South America. In Argentina al-Bikfāni traveled to large cities and small
towns where Arabic-speaking immigrants worked and lived, collecting do-
nations for the resistance. In addition to securing funds for remittance,
al-Bikfāni, who self-identified as a “volunteer freedom fighter,” also pub-

lished the names of the donors and the amounts they gave.
Nevertheless, a firmer sense of a Lebanese national identity among those
in Argentina continued to develop at the expense of a collective Syrian
or Arab fellowship and with consequences at the institutional level. For
instance, activists designed the Centro Libanés in Tucumán specifically as
a political association catering to immigrants from Lebanon and the mor-
phing sense of identification with a Lebanese nation. The controversy sur-
rounding this group spread throughout the Syrian and Lebanese colonies
in Argentina in early 1931. In explaining the reason for establishing this
institution, the members of the Lebanese Center rejected the notion that
Syrians and Lebanese were united by “indissoluble bonds” as a “false con-
ventionality.” Furthermore, the founders proclaimed “the children of two
distinct states [Syria and Lebanon] could never work jointly in good of the
interests of their homeland.”62 In Santiago, Chile, the Club Sirio and Centro
Libanés emerged in 1934, spurring a massive wave of institution building
within the colonies there.63
Nineteen-thirty-six was a critical year for Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, and
their émigrés in the Americas. The rise of Lebanese president Émile Eddé
in January 1936, his partial restoration of the constitution, and his push for
parliamentary elections led pro-mandate and anti-mandate Lebanese to
close ranks under the banner of an independent Lebanon. This year also
witnessed the completion and ratification of the French-Lebanese Treaty
(November 13); a protocol of agreement for the French-Syrian Treaty (Sep-
tember 9); the creation of the Phalanges Libanaises by Maronite Pierre Ge-
mayel; the establishment of the Syrian Popular Party by Antun Saadeh,
an ardent Syrian nationalist from a Christian Lebanese family who lived
for years in Argentina and Brazil; and the claim over Antakya by Turkey.
The Syrian Congress enthusiastically ratified the French-Syrian Treaty on
December 27, but the French parliament refused, creating another political
impasse.64
These events were seminal in galvanizing immigrants from Lebanon in
Argentina behind the push for independence while at the same time proved
decisive in hardening the final split between Syrian and Lebanese émigrés.
In August 1936 Maronite priest Miguel Latuf Inderi invited Lebanese of all
faiths to an event at the Colegio San Marón in the Retiro neighborhood
in downtown Buenos Aires to unite all behind the idea of protecting the
independence and integrity of Greater Lebanon. On August 28 a Leba-
nese delegation led by Domingo Kairuz (president of the Unión Libanesa),
Nami Fares, and the Maronite superior presented a letter to the French am-
bassador for the French government requesting that the mandatory powers
ensure the territorial integrity of Lebanon and support the efforts of Leba-
nese President Eddé and the Maronite patriarch. These activities inspired
the creation of the Asociación Patriótica Libanesa on October 18, 1936, its
headquarters at the Colegio San Marón. The organization brought together
old supporters of the French in Lebanon and some of the anti-mandate
Lebanese. Rachid Rustom, a delegate of the asociación, arrived in Tucumán
and established a branch office the following August, which was rebranded
Asociación Libanesa de Socorros Mutuos in 1938. The Tucumán-based or-
ganization’s leadership included prominent merchants and public intellec-
tuals who embraced the goal of an independent Lebanon free from French
control.65 At this point, the internal split of the Syrian-Lebanese colony
in Tucumán and beyond was complete; the product of national identities
hardened in the crucible of European colonialism. The idea of a Lebanon
folded within a nation with Syria was now a nonstarter.
It was in this context that the Syrian Social Nationalist Party (SSNP)
leader Antun Saadeh arrived in Argentina in 1939. To a hero’s welcome,
Saadeh relocated to Tucumán in 1939 at the invitation of Yubran Massuh, a
local Syrian intellectual. The colony’s wealthiest merchants and youth lead-
ers met him at the train station, and later held a huge party in his honor
at the home of Camel Auad, a prominent wholesaler. At this event, local
members of the Syrian-Lebanese colony organized a political party com-
mitted to the independence of Syria.66 Antun Saadeh advocated a Syrian
nationalism. For this movement, the past and future Syria included con-
temporary Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, historical Palestine, the Sinai Peninsula,
and the island of Cyprus. These lands possessed natural borders and an
assortment of people that over time formed one nation. As a result, Saadeh
and his disciples eschewed Arab nationalism, asserting that it was “a sur-
render of Syria’s uniqueness, and an acceptance by its gifted people of an
inferior status.” This emphasis on a Syrian national identity attracted many
“among the educated urban population” in Syria and Lebanon.67
As Saadeh settled into his new environs, Yubran Massuh escorted and
introduced Saadeh to the various Syrian-Lebanese colonies in Argentina,
and soon the two established a periodical, al-Zawba῾a (The cyclone) with
Massuh as editor and chief propagandist. It was in Tucumán that Antun
Saadeh set out to mobilize the immigrant colonies and create branches of
the SSNP across Latin America. He initially encountered strong support
from a broad cross-section of these communities in the Americas. Active
groups emerged in Argentina, Chile, and Mexico, who published articles

in al-Zawba῾a and produced their own local publications. In Tucumán,
Saadeh’s arrival inspired intense action at the cultural level as immigrants
formed theatrical troupes, organized meetings, and produced plays and
poetry about the homeland. A strong SSNP branch in Mexico published
a periodical in Spanish, and the young Aniceto Schain, the son of an im-
migrant from Homs, Syria, living in Santiago, Chile, became a regular con-
tributor to al-Zawba῾a.68 The Syrian nationalist cause also featured a dis-
persed set of financial supporters. For instance, Syrian-Lebanese merchants
located on the island of Fernando Pó, Spanish Guinea, raised and wired
eleven thousand Spanish pesetas (two hundred British pounds sterling).69
These transnational connections were simply a continuation of a long-held
practice by Arabic-speaking immigrants in the Americas, who used com-
munication and transportation technologies to maintain contact, carry on
debates, share news, and remit money to support revolutionary movements
and assist relatives in the old country.
Yet this early surge in support encountered heavy resistance from many
established immigrants who were advocating an independent Lebanon,
thus stoking controversy over who spoke for the community. For Saadeh
and his adherents, a Syrian identity surmounted all other identities, and
divisions along confessional lines were viewed as an impediment to the
nationalist project. While others within the Syrian-Lebanese colony also
viewed the tragedy of religious divisions and its impact on the commu-
nity, Saadeh venomously attacked all competitors and enemies, real and
perceived.70 The most infamous case involved a six-month, thirty-six-part
rhetorical assault on the dean of Arabic-language poets in the Americas,
Rashīd al-Khuri, also known as al-Shā῾ir al-Qarawī (Village Poet), who
was based in São Paulo. The feud aired for so long that prominent Arab
intellectuals residing in New York intervened on behalf of al-Qarawī.71 This
pugilistic attitude toward some of the most esteemed members of the Syr-
ian and Lebanese lettered class abroad and the criticism directed at the sup-
porters and fans of these poets surely undercut support for Saadeh. Shortly
after the series concluded, the SSNP in Mexico published two older articles
desperately showing that even the most famous Lebanese in the Americas
supported a unified Syria.72 As Saadeh’s perceived influence waned, fund-
ing for al-Zawba῾a must have suffered either from cancelled subscriptions
or weak fundraising, or both, because by late 1944 the editors began pub-
lishing infrequently. For their part, the French never considered Saadeh or
his movement in Argentina to be much of a threat.73
Meanwhile, Arab nationalists residing in the Americas met in Buenos

Aires in early 1941 to discuss the status of the homeland. Emir Emin Ar-
slan served as president of the First Pan-Arab Congress in America (al-
Mu῾tamar al-᾿Arabī al-awwal fī Amīrikā), announcing Shakib Arslan,
Emin’s cousin, as the official representative before governments and in-
ternational bodies. The participants included Sunni Muslims and Chris-
tians, such as the Zaki and Elias Qonsol, brothers from Nabk, Syria. The
attendees agreed on and published a set of principles, the second declaring
Syria consisted of “Lebanon, Palestine, and East Jordan,” and together this
territory made up the Arab land (qutr ῾arabī). The subsequent principle
rejected the legitimacy of the French and British Mandates and denied a
Jewish national home (al-watan al-qawmī al-sahyūnī) in “Southern Syria
(Palestine).”74
Nevertheless, for both Saadeh and the delegates of the pan-Arab Con-
gress, the goal of a united Syria on the scale imagined was simply an unat-
tainable dream. The majority of Syrians and Lebanese in Argentina stayed
away from the pan-Arab and pan-Syrian advocates and propagandists. In
addition, the treaties signed by France and the political figures in Lebanon
and Syria provided a clear path to the end of mandatory rule and eventual
independence. As a result, most émigrés in Latin America moved their
support to these initiatives, despite the fact that implementation was years
in the offing.
Conclusion
The independence of Syria (1946) and Lebanon (1943) signaled the end of a
long pursuit for self-determination and struggle against French colonialism
by people in the Levant and their compatriots abroad. Yet the establish-
ment of the new nation-states still had consequences in the Americas. For
instance, independence provoked problems in relations between émigrés
now from distinct countries. It also created strife in many of the mutual aid
societies, cultural associations, and other clubs in Brazil founded in an era
where the dominant immigrant identity was Syrian as partisans initiated
legal proceedings to break apart institutions established in this era.75 Ac-
tions such as these helped mark the conclusion of nationalist activities by
Lebanese and Syrians trying to create barriers of distinction or programs
of inclusion. The reality was that Lebanese and Syrians were now politi-
cally distinct peoples with separate national governments with which to
identify. The course of the first half of the twentieth century witnessed a
variety of nationalist sentiments and ideologies emerge. As political trans-

formation and economic collapse, war and famine, colonialism and revo-
lution gripped the old country, Lebanese and Syrians articulated, debated,
and grasped at ideologies and arrangements they thought would best serve
their homelands. These competing nationalisms added layers to these im-
migrant identities that on many occasions resulted in internecine violence
and sparked contested claims over who spoke in the name of the commu-
nity. In many cases homeland politics was as much about the local com-
position of the immigrant colony as it was about securing independence.
At the same time, the advocates of these novel national identities were in
continual contact with their peers, competitors, and family who remained
in the Levant. These émigré communities marshaled resources, mustered
volunteers and combatants, wired letter after letter to the League of Na-
tions and international politicians advocating various positions regarding
the Levant, and communicated with officials from the host society. Indeed,
Arabic-speaking émigrés were critical in the formation of Lebanese and
Syrian national identities and nationalist ideologies, both in the old coun-
try and abroad. Appreciation of these processes and changes allow for a
more subtle understanding of immigrant lives and the evolution of com-
munity life amid profound political transformation during the first half of
the twentieth century.
Notes
1. Jeffrey Lesser and Raanan Rein make this point regarding Jewish populations in
Latin America, challenging scholars to study “unaffiliated ethnics” too (see also chapter
5 of this volume). I eschew the challenge in this particular essay but certainly recognize
the importance of incorporating immigrants who did not associate with the community
or its institutions in studies. See Lesser and Rein, “New Approaches to Ethnicity,” 31–32.
2. Abdeluahed Akmir asserts that the Arabic press in Argentina reflected “faithfully
the life, aspirations and values of the Arab community.” Akmir, “La prensa árabe en Ar-
gentina,” 294.
3. For North America, see Khater, Inventing Home, 74–75; for Mexico, consult Alfaro-
Velcamp, So Far from Allah, 29–30; for Brazil, review Lesser, Negotiating National Identity,
50–51; and for Nicaragua, see González, Dollar, Dove, and Eagle, 70–71, 81–82.
4. The concept of ethnicization has been a staple of studies on immigrant communi-
ties in the United States; however, little of the scholarship examines how these groups
fashioned identities in relation with those in the homeland. See, for instance, Conzen et
al., “Invention of Ethnicity.”
5. See Gualtieri, Between Arab and White, 81–112; Khater, Inventing Home, 71–107; and
Khater, “Becoming ‘Syrian.’”
6. For North America, see Khater “Becoming ‘Syrian,’” 302; and Gualtieri, Between
Arab and White.
7. For recent reviews of the concept and scholarship, see Eriksen, Ethnicity and Nation-
alism; and Banks, Ethnicity.
8. Eriksen, Ethnicity and Nationalism, 12.
9. Certainly, ethnic identities are lived identities; however, the ascription of ethnic-
ity by observers cannot be overlooked. The individual or group constructs ethnicity and
boundaries as much as the observer does. Banks, Ethnicity, 190.
10. Gualtieri, Between Arab and White, 65–73.
11. Jusdanis, Necessary Nation, 19.
12. Eriksen, Ethnicity and Nationalism, 98–103; and Jusdanis, Necessary Nation, 39–43.
13. See República Argentina, Tercer Censo, vol. 2; and Boletim do Departamento Es-
tadual do Trabalho 16, no. 58, first trimester of 1927.
14. For examples of this tendency, see Valverde, “Integration and Identity in Argentina”;
Klich and Lesser, Arab and Jewish Immigrants; and Khatlab, Mahjar.
15. Banks, Ethnicity, 189.
16. Khater, “Becoming ‘Syrian,’” 303–4.
17. Khater, Inventing Home, 52–55.
18. “Arribo del Cónsul Otomano,” La Nación (Buenos Aires), October 30, 1910.
19. Archivo, Biblioteca y Museo de la Diplomacia (ABMD), Box 1210, Folder 42, Arturo
de Luciano to Argentina’s Minister of Foreign Affairs Victoriano de la Plaza, November 22,
1910; and Ruppin, Syrien als Wirtschaftsgebiet, 24–25.
20. Naturalization for Syrian émigrés in the United States was more important than it
was for the colonies in Latin America. Immigrants in Argentina, for instance, had equal
economic rights as citizens whereas foreign nationals were prohibited by federal law from
purchasing real estate in the United States. Hence, there was greater incentive to natural-
ize in North America, and a correspondingly larger percentage of Syrians pursued U.S.
citizenship than elsewhere in the Americas. See Gualtieri, Between Arab and White, 52–80.
21. Prior to the pioneering works of Akram Khater and Sarah Gualtieri, most scholars
subscribed to the notion that Syrian émigrés departed the Levant primarily due to Otto-
man oppression, a rhetorical device deployed by emigrants themselves. This trope also
colored the scholarship on Ottoman state and Arab society relations in Syria, Lebanon,
and Palestine in the late Ottoman period, which Hasan Kayalı convincingly dispels. See
Khater, Inventing Home, 48–70; Gualtieri, Between Arab and White, 21–51; and Kayalı,
Arabs and Young Turks, 17–143.
22. Quoted in Gualtieri, Between Arab and White, 86.
23. Karpat, “Ottoman Emigration,” 193.
24. Olguín Tenorio and Peña González, La inmigración árabe, 122; and “Solicitada,” El
Orden (San Miguel de Tucumán), June 10, 1898.
25. “La constitución otomana,” La Nación (Buenos Aires), September 9, 1908.
26. The Armenian Revolutionary Federation (ARF) and the Hunchakist Society were
Marxist-influenced movements established by Armenians from the Russian Empire in
the late nineteenth century that advocated for the independence of Armenians in the
Ottoman Empire. In the lead-up to the Young Turk Revolution, ARF partnered with the
Committee on Union and Progress—the civil–military secret society that led the coup
against the Sultan—until 1913 in the Second Constitutional era (1908–18). Four ARF and
two Hunchakist members won election to the Ottoman parliament in 1908. See Davison,
“Armenian Crisis”; and Nalbandian, Armenian Revolutionary Movement, 30–131, 151–78.
In New York the elements of the Hunchakist Society apparently operated as a mafia outfit
led by the Armenian archbishop, extorting and assassinating members of the Armenian
colony in the city. See “Evolution of the Armenian Hunchakist,” New York Times, August
4, 1907.
27. “Roosevelt Hails Freedom in Turkey,” New York Times, September 7, 1908.
28. The Balkan Wars of 1912 and 1913 were led by and then fought between the Balkan
League, composed of Bulgaria, Serbia, Greece, and Montenegro, which sought indepen-
dence and to wrest additional lands, such as Macedonia, from the Ottomans. Hall, Balkan
Wars; and Necati Kutlu, “Ottoman Subjects,” 242–44.
29. Jafet, Ensaios e Discursos, 233–47; for Jafet’s business concerns, consult Dean, Indus-
trialization of São Paulo, 31–32, 113; and Tofik Karam, Another Arabesque, 25–29.
30. “La constitución otomana,” La Nación (Buenos Aires), September 9, 1908; a fac-
simile of Palacios’ July 1909 note to Schamún is found in Akmir, “La inmigración árabe,”
820; and Jafet, Ensaios e Discursos.
31. Hasan Kayalı criticizes the Turkification trope prevalent in the scholarship as over-
played. See Kayalı, Arabs and Young Turks, 82–96.
32. See the letter to Alejandro Schamún, editor of the Buenos Aires-based al-Salam
newspaper, dated May 6, 1913, from the Ottoman Administrative Decentralization Party.
Akmir, “La inmigración árabe,” 795–96.
33. Tauber, Emergence of the Arab Movements, 178–97; and Óizb al-Lā-Markazīyah bi-
Mişr, al-Mu᾿tamar al-᾿Arabī al-Awwal, 185–86, 207–10.
34. Tauber, Emergence of the Arab Movements, 204–5.
35. See, for instance, the massive banquet in São Paulo held on the sixth anniversary
of the Young Turk Revolution featuring the elite of the Syrian colony, the local director of
the London Bank, and the Ottoman consul, Emir Sami Arslan. “Constituição Ottomana,”
O Estado de São Paulo, July 24, 1914.
36. See “O Banquete a Colónia Siria a Dois Membros do Grande Comite Syrio de
Paris,” O Estado de São Paulo, August 20, 1917; and Tauber, Arab Movements in World War
I, 212–14.
37. Ikmīr, al-῾Arab, 142–43.
38. Klich, “Argentine–Ottoman Relations,” 177–205; and Brégain, Syriens et Libanais,
149.
39. “O Brasil na Guerra,” O Estado de São Paulo, December 4, 1917; and Tauber, Arab
Movements in World War I, 214.
40. Logroño Narbona, “Development of Nationalist Identities,” 67–69.
41. Tauber, Arab Movements in World War I, 226–27; E. G. Tabet, “The French in Syria,”
New York Times, May 4, 1919; and Logroño Narbona, “Development of Nationalist Identi-
ties,” 102–3.
42. Matthews, Confronting an Empire, 24–25.
43. “A Independencia do Libano,” O Estado de São Paulo, March 19, 1920. See also
the telegrams to Millerand from various Arabic-speaking colonies in the Americas that
challenged Faisal’s claim; located in Archives Diplomatiques La Courneuve, Série E, Box

44, Folder 313.
44. Brégain, Syriens et Libanais, 148–50; and Logroño Narbona, “Development of Na-
tionalist Identities,” 105–6.
45. “Kalimatunā al-Aūla,” al-Hadīqa (San Miguel de Tucumán), January 3, 1922.
46. “Pro Independencia de Siria,” La Razón (Buenos Aires, Argentina), July 24, 1922;
quoted in Brégain, Syriens et Libanais, 151–53; and Logroño Narbona, “Development of
Nationalist Identities,” 110–11.
47. Logroño Narbona, “Development of Nationalist Identities,” 72, 108–10.
48. Brégain, Syriens et Libanais, 149; and Logroño Narbona, “Development of National-
ist Identities,” 109–10.
51. Brégain, Syriens et Libanais, 158; and “Habib Estéfano o Estofán,” Eco de Oriente,
October 30, 1926.
52. Brégain, Syriens et Libanais, 154–55.
53. Logroño Narbona, “Development of Nationalist Identities,” 114–15.
54. Naoum A. Mokarzel, “Syria a Religious Problem,” New York Times, November 29,
1925.
55. H. I. Katibah, “Islam and Christians in Syria,” New York Times, December 6, 1925.
56. A. M. Shakpa, “Pleads for Aid to Syria,” New York Times, January 25, 1926.
57. The Syrian-Palestinian Congress was called to session in 1921 in Geneva, produc-
ing a demand for independence and territorial integrity (folding Lebanon and Palestine
into a larger Syria) and delivering it to the League of Nations. In Geneva, the congress
elected an executive committee and relocated its headquarters to Cairo. The committee
was composed of two primary groups. The former was led by Michel Lutfallah, scion
of a fabulously wealthy Christian Lebanese family based in Egypt, and Abd al-Rahman
Shahbandar, a physician from a middle-class merchant family in Damascus. Both men
were Western-educated and supported a secular nationalism. Shakib Arslan, Rashid Rida,
and members of the Istiqlal (Independence) Party led the latter group. Arslan and Rida
supported an Islamic-influenced nationalism while the Istiqlalists were battle-hardened
pan-Arabists who brooked no compromise with the British or French and were based in
Amman. Personal rivalries and recriminations of compromise and corruption led to a
schism among these camps as the Great Syrian Revolt stalled in 1927. See Khoury, “Fac-
tionalism”; and Matthews, Confronting an Empire, 75–81.
58. Brégain, Syriens et Libanais, 159.
59. Ibid., 159–60.
60. “Jawāb Sul®ān Bāshā al-A®rash ῾an al-Irsālīyya al-Māliyya al-Akhīra,” (“Response of
Sultan Paşa al-Atrash to the latest financial remittance”), al-Wa®an (Buenos Aires), April
28, 1932. “Ist῾amār” translates into English as both imperialism and colonialism. See Wehr,
Dictionary of Modern Written Arabic, 644.
61. “Min murābidh al-mujāhidīn ila al-wa®iniyyin fi al-jumhūriyya al-fadhiyya,” al-
Wa®an (Buenos Aires), April 28, 1932.
62. “El Centro Libanés. Causas de su fundación,” al-Hurrīyya (San Miguel de Tucumán),
February 3, 1931.
63. Olguín Tenorio and Peña González, La inmigración árabe, 126; and Mattar, Guía
Social, 191–92.
64. Classic accounts include Hourani, Syria and Lebanon, 199–229; and Khoury, Syria
and the French Mandate. See also Brégain, Syriens et Libanais, 167.
65. Mario N. Turbay, “Asociación Libanesa de Socorros Mutuos. Una parte importante
de su historia,” La Casa (San Miguel de Tucumán), November 1993, 48; Ponsati, Aportes
para una reseña, 31; and Brégain, Syriens et Libanais, 166–67.
66. “Awal Mars fī Tūkūmān,” al-Zawba῾a, July 15, 1943. Al-Zawba῾a was edited in
Tucumán and published in Buenos Aires.
67. Dawisha, Arab Nationalism, 97–98.
68. See, among others, Aniceto Schain, “Inquietud Siria,” al-Zawba῾a, April 15, 1942;
and Mattar, Guía Social, 317.
69. “Mabarra Qawmīya,” al-Zawba῾a, April 1, 1942. Fernando Pó is now known as the
island of Bioko, where Malabo, the capital of Equatorial Guinea, is located.
70. “al-Bunyān al-Marsūs,” al-Zawba῾a, August 15, 1941; “World War: Middle Eastern
Theater: Mixed Show,” Time, June 23, 1941. The series against al-Qarawi ran in al-Zawba῾a
from October 15, 1941 to May 1, 1942. See also Maatouk, “Saadeh’s Views on Literature.”
71. The series ran in al-Zawba῾a from October 15, 1941, to May 1, 1942. See also Maa-
touk, “Saadeh’s Views on Literature.”
72. “El Apocrifo Nacionalismo ‘Libanés,’” al-Zawba῾a, September 15, 1942.
73. Brégain, Syriens et Libanais, 169–70; Schumann, “Nationalism”; Dawisha, Arab Na-
tionalism, 98.
74. al-Mu῾tamar al-῾Arabī al-Awwal, al-Kitāb al-akh∂ar, 44; and “al-Kitāb al-akh∂ar
al-thānī,” al-Fitra al-Islāmīyya (Buenos Aires), July 14, 1944. Brégain incorrectly notes that
Rachid Rustom was the lone Christian at the congress. See Brégain, Syriens et Libanais,
170–73.
75. Khatlab, Mahjar, 34.
Conclusion
Writing Latin American Nations

from Their Borders
Bringing Nationalism and Immigration Histories into Dialogue
Nicola Foote
How does replacing a nation-state or “groupist” perspective on immigra-

tion with a comparative, pan-continental approach reshape our knowledge
of the process and significance of migrations in Latin America?1 How are
understandings of Latin American nation building and national identity
formation advanced by a focus on immigration? And how does bringing
migration into explicit communication with nationalism contribute to the-
ory building in both fields? This conclusion synthesizes the findings that
emerged from the three interlocking questions posed by contributors to
this volume. It uses the themes of assimilation, race formation, and trans-
nationalism to explore how the development of regional nation-states was
inextricably entwined with global migratory currents.
Inserting Latin America into the Global Historiography of Migration
This volume shows that an in-depth and comparative study of immigration

to Latin America can make multiple important contributions to the global
historiography of migration. The questions posed by the contributors di-
rectly engage several of the research priorities laid out in the most recent
“state of the field” overview in the International Migration Review. The es-
says collated here examine and contextualize immigrant transnationalism
and assess the role of immigrants in the formation of economic, sociocul-
tural, and political institutions by looking at states and state systems in
cross-national comparative perspective—issues labeled as the most press-
ing concerns for the field by Alejandro Portes and Josh DeWind.2
282 · Nicola Foote
The book underlines the importance of Latin America as a receiving

destination for immigrants, and demonstrates that migration played a
transformational role in regional nation-building processes. Full consider-
ation of Latin America as a migratory destination challenges the U.S.-cen-
tric paradigms that have imagined transatlantic migratory flows as a North
American phenomenon. Just as Atlantic migration has been prioritized by
researchers to the point where the Pacific and trans-Asian and African mi-
grations that were part of same global processes have been marginalized
within global historiographies and models, understandings of Atlantic mi-
grations themselves have been skewed by the focus on the United States at
the expense of Latin America.3 This volume examines the ways in which
Latin America formed part of an integrated and interlocking transatlantic
migratory circuit, and reinforces the argument that migration and nation
formation throughout the Americas as a whole should be viewed as en-
tangled and inseparable processes.
Lara Putnam’s chapter makes this case most strongly through her con-
ceptualization of the “entangled histories” through which Caribbean na-
tion formation emerged out of events and developments spanning the
anglophone, francophone, and Spanish-speaking Antilles and the Atlantic
coasts of Central America and South America. This entanglement operated
both at the level of legislation and of identity formation. Anti-Chinese laws
passed in the Greater Caribbean, for example, were influenced by those in
the United States and Canada enacted in the 1880s, which were themselves
informed by debates surrounding the experiences of indentured Asian
workers in Cuba, Trinidad, and Guyana beginning in the 1840s. Similarly,
British West Indian nativism was fueled by black exclusion in the migra-
tory circuits of the Latin American rimlands while the racialization of East
Indians, Chinese, and Syrians within British Caribbean nationalisms was
shaped by the racial discourses of Spanish America and the strong associa-
tions between race and national identity that had structured the experiences
of black migrants. Several other chapters also highlight how migratory cur-
rents were entwined with global geopolitics. Stefan Rinke shows that Ger-
man immigration to the Southern Cone cannot be understood outside of
German histories of empire and expansion, and was profoundly shaped by
the international alliances of World War I. Likewise, Steven Hyland reveals
how the identities of Arab immigrants were forged in relationship to the
shifts in the Ottoman Empire resulting from the Young Turk Revolution
and World War I, and he highlights how Middle Eastern histories were
Conclusion · 283
profoundly shaped by transnational intellectual and political networks in

Rio de Janeiro and Buenos Aries.
The breadth and depth of transnational associations is a common theme
throughout the volume. Kathleen López shows how Chinese merchants in
Peru, Cuba, and Mexico were part of transnational commercial networks
that circulated merchandise imported from China via ethnic entrepreneurs
in California. In the same manner, Jürgen Buchenau examines the close
economic ties between Japanese immigrants in Mexican Pacific Port cities
and their counterparts on the West Coast of the United States. Both authors
depict frequent border crossings by migrants, with the U.S.–Mexico border
being the site of a surprisingly large amount of back-and-forth Chinese
and Middle Eastern migration. This transnational circulation was not lim-
ited to Asian migrants. My chapter demonstrates that British Caribbean
migrants circulated through a far greater range of spaces than has typi-
cally been acknowledged in the historiography, with migratory networks
expanding down the Amazon and up into the Andes, and incorporating
ties and linkages made in an earlier wave of migration that began in the
eighteenth century. Both Michael Goebel and Jeane DeLaney touch on the
famous European golondrinas (back-and-forth migrants), while Goebel
elucidates the range of secondary migrations through which Italian immi-
grants moved across national borders in the Southern Cone. As such, the
volume definitively dismisses the idea of migration as a one-way flow from
point A to point B, and addresses José Moya’s call for Latin Americanists to
treat migration “as a series of movements that include temporary and per-
manent settlement, return, back-and-forth traveling between sending and
receiving societies, and relocation from one destination to another outside
the point of origin.”4
In addition to broadening the geographies of Latin American migration,
the book also expands our perception of its chronological reach. In conven-
tional periodizations of migration, 1914 has been seen as an effective cutoff
point, with the outbreak of the Great War seen to mark the end of mass
global movement. Adam McKeown has challenged this received wisdom
and argues that it applies only to Germany and Italy as sending destina-
tions and the United States as a receiving destination.5 This interpretation
is borne out by this volume. Jürgen Buchenau shows that immigration to
Mexico in fact increased during the 1920s—precisely as a result of exclu-
sionary laws in the United States that diverted immigrant streams—while
in the 1930s Mexico became an important destination for Spanish refugees
284 · Nicola Foote
fleeing Francoism. Lara Putnam’s chapter demonstrates that migration to

Cuba hit a high point after World War I as sugar prices soared while Haitian
migration to the Dominican Republic surged in the same period. Similarly,
the Venezuelan oil boom between 1920 and 1935 prompted a pronounced
wave of British Caribbean migration. Even in the “classic” immigration
case studies of the Southern Cone, the idea of 1914 marking a period of
decline does not entirely hold. Michael Goebel’s chapter provides evidence
that although the numbers of Italian immigrants to Uruguay crashed dur-
ing and immediately after World War I, they began to rebuild steadily in the
1920s. Frederik Schulze attests that Japanese migration to Brazil boomed
in the interwar period, while Jeffrey Lesser and Raanan Rein show that
Eastern European and Jewish immigration to Brazil and Argentina grew
significantly through the 1920s and ’30s, with Jewish immigration hitting a
peak in 1938.
The idea of World War I ushering in a new era of anti-immigration legis-
lation does not quite hold up in these case studies either. Our volume again
builds on McKeown’s arguments by demonstrating that the hardening of
borders and the rise of government regulation over immigration was part
of a cumulative process in place since at least the 1870s.6 Multiple chapters
establish that restrictions on black and Asian immigration were the norm
throughout South America from the late nineteenth century onward, even
if they were rarely enforced. Only in Central America and the Caribbean,
where U.S. economic penetration was most acute and national elites had to
contend more directly with the preferences of foreign capital, was immi-
gration regulation a new phenomenon after 1914. A comparative focus on
Latin American migration thus questions the assumption that World War
I marked a definitive shift in either the numbers or the legal underpinnings
of transatlantic migration.
Immigrant and Nation in Latin America
The contribution of Latin American case studies to the global historiogra-

phy of migration can be seen even more clearly when the process of nation
formation becomes the central unit of analysis. As Michael Goebel argues,
when the study of migration and nationalism are examined in conjunction,
new insight is presented into each field. In probing the relationship between
immigrants and nation formation, the contributors in this volume advance
debates around core questions in migration theory, including assimila-
tion, transnationalism, and diaspora, while also contributing to regional
Conclusion · 285
understandings of nationalism by suggesting that in Latin America nation

building occurred in fairly substantial part through immigration.
At the simplest level of nation formation, the unprecedented expansion
of population brought by immigration wrought a demographic revolu-
tion. Small populations in marginal countries that had been on the edge of
the Spanish Empire were radically transformed by the absorption of huge
numbers of migrants. Argentina received some four million immigrants
in the years between 1870 and 1930 while 1.2 million immigrants arrived
in Brazil in the space of the single decade of the 1890s. Even where the
raw number of immigrants was relatively small in the greater scheme of
transcontinental immigration systems, the presence of immigrants could
have truly profound implications for national demographics. The example
of Uruguay where three hundred thousand immigrants contributed to a
sevenfold increase in the local population is especially revealing, but one
of the insights of the volume is that parts of the Caribbean experienced
similar migratory patterns to the classic immigration case studies of the
Southern Cone. Lara Putnam shows how territories like British Guiana and
Trinidad, which were less developed prior to emancipation, became such
important destinations for mass immigration (mainly from India) that by
1930 almost a quarter of the population had been born overseas. In some
of the Caribbean rimland towns of Central America, immigrants quickly
came to outnumber nationals. According to the 1927 census, Limón, for
example, had 1.5 foreigners (mostly from the British Caribbean) for each
native-born Costa Rican.7
Expanding the population base was essential to economic development
as well as to staking territorial claims. Juan Bautista Alberdi’s insistence
that “to govern is to populate” dominated modernization plans across the
continent. Immigrant workers developed the roads, railways, and airbases
that served to integrate national resources and were the primary labor force
in the agro-export and mining industries that brought marginal spaces in
tropical lowland regions into the global economy. Immigrant coloniza-
tion helped to form national boundaries and consolidate nationalist land
claims. Schulze’s chapter, for example, explores how European settlement
in the southernmost Brazilian provinces of Rio Grande do Sul, Santa Cata-
rina, and Paraná solidified national ownership of territory also claimed by
Argentina.
The relationship between immigrants and territorial claims was some-
times unexpected. My chapter addresses the genocide of indigenous peoples
in the Peruvian Amazon during the rubber boom, and points out that this
286 · Nicola Foote
was blamed on Barbadian migrants. The international scandal the genocide

created ironically helped Peru to assert its regional claims. The Putumayo
region where the devastating abuses occurred had also been claimed by
Colombia and Ecuador, but it was Peru that was labeled as responsible for
the region by international investigators. As the scandal broke, Ecuador
and Colombia were only too happy to drop their claims in order to avoid
any censure, leaving Peru temporarily embarrassed but ultimately with
control of the rubber-rich region. Migrants in this context were not only
the agents who made the nation’s claim to control meaningful, but they
also provided a convenient scapegoat who could be blamed for actions that
threatened the nation’s international reputation.
The role of immigrants in the mapping of national spaces can also be
seen through their role in urbanization. Immigrants in most of the case
studies reviewed here formed overwhelmingly urban populations, flow-
ing into expanding cities whose massive growth was also supplemented
by internal migration from the countryside. Urbanization represented an
important form of nation building that heralded the creation of new sites
of national power.
Both urban and rural immigrants pushed forward economic transfor-
mations that strengthened the national treasury and expanded the admin-
istrative reach of the state. Skilled and unskilled immigrants brought the
raw manpower and technical expertise needed to bring about industrial
development. Immigrant peddlers and merchants played a crucial role in
developing regional consumer culture by extending networks of credit and
providing popular access to industrial goods.8 Immigrants also contributed
to agricultural advancements. López details the centrality of Chinese im-
migrants to the continuation of plantation production systems following
the abolition of the slave trade; Lara Putnam and I demonstrate the critical
contribution of British Caribbean immigrants to the agro-export sector;
and Schulze shows how German immigrants in Brazil helped develop the
coffee industry. Immigrants also contributed to enhanced agricultural pro-
duction as peasant subsistent producers, with European and Japanese colo-
nists granted land rights in exchange for bringing agricultural development
to sparsely populated rural areas. Lesser and Rein show that the correla-
tion between immigrants and agrarian development was so powerful that
it became the lynchpin of immigrant nationalisms, with the most common
trope of immigrant museums across the continent being that immigrants
had “made the land bloom.”
Conclusion · 287
The pattern described here did not hold everywhere. In Mexico these
same economic transformations were achieved through the use of foreign
capital without recourse to expansive immigrant labor. The same was true
in the Andes. These differences may have related to population patterns:
areas that were heartlands of pre-Columbian indigenous civilizations had
access to reserves of labor that other nations did not, and thus were not
as economically dependent on immigration, even if the “racial fantasies”
of elites who desired social whitening manifested parallels at times. Yet it
remains the case that in many parts of the region the physical transforma-
tions of nation building occurred in significant part through immigration.
If immigrants helped shape the expansion of national territories and
economies, they were also essential to imaginings of nationhood, both
at the elite and popular level. National identities were constantly chang-
ing and being remade in this period, and the experiences of immigrants
provide a useful window for tracing how ideas of nation shifted from the
nineteenth-century idea of a political association based on civic ideals to
the early-twentieth-century ethnocultural formulation predicated on the
idea of a national “race” forged through mestizaje. Immigrants were in-
extricably entwined with nationalist visions of modernity—symbols first
of the promise (and later of the failings) of the U.S.–driven technocratic
model of development elaborated, as DeLaney details, by the Argentine
generation of 1837 and adopted continentwide in an effort to sweep away
the legacies of Spanish colonialism and allow Latin America to emerge as a
global economic leader.9 The presence of immigrants also served to make
the nation tangible and meaningful for ordinary people, and in the populist
protests and xenophobic riots catalogued throughout this volume we see
that, at least for the urban mestizo working classes, interactions with im-
migrants contributed to their own imaginings of what it meant to be part
of the nation.
Two important themes to come out of the case studies presented here are
the role of intellectual discourse on immigration in shaping nationalism,
and the way in which representations of migrants contributed to the imag-
ining of national boundaries of inclusion and exclusion. The significance
of intellectual discourse for understanding the realities of Latin American
immigration has sometimes been questioned by historians. José Moya has
pointed to the immigration histories of Mexico, the Andes, and Guatemala
to argue that elite whitening and civilizing rhetoric had more to do with
“the intellectual history of the region’s elites . . . than with the demographic
288 · Nicola Foote
and sociocultural history of its peoples,” suggesting that “political rhetoric,

like bananas, is sometimes just that, and migration clearly obeyed might-
ier laws than those produced in national legislatures.”10 That immigration
could not be determined by nationalist desire is unarguably true, but the
intellectual discourses produced by elites were more than just bananas—or,
at least as tangible as them in some senses. Discourses could not deter-
mine whether immigrants arrived, but they could mediate the experiences
of them once they were present on national soil. Several of the chapters
emphasize how intellectual discourses shaped immigrant lives. DeLaney
explores the way in which nationalist debates over immigration affected
immigrants’ own perceptions of whether they could be a Protestant or a
Jew, or could conserve their Spanish or Italian heritage, and still become an
“Argentine.” My chapter suggests that intellectual discourses could in some
instances be a matter of life or death, arguing that representations of black
migrants as savage, violent, and disease-ridden led some police and army
officers to feel so afraid (or, alternatively, contemptuous) of West Indian
immigrants that they used armed force against them with few qualms.
Recognition of the role of intellectuals in shaping nationalisms does not
distract from the significance of other agents and institutions. The volume
also accentuates the importance of the state as a central staging ground
for the negotiation of national identity. The state appears as a weak actor
in many of the case studies presented, with state capacities often lagging
behind the visions of nationalist projects. The fragility and especially the
financial weakness of the state in many areas meant that day-to-day im-
migration decisions about who was admitted to the national territory were
not always controlled by state officials, and legislation was often sidestepped
and ignored. Local officials worked in collaboration with foreign corpora-
tions and sometimes took autonomous actions. Yet, despite its weaknesses,
the state served as a crucial touchstone in the allocation of citizenship,
serving as a critical space in which immigrants and those who supported
and opposed them negotiated access to civil, political, and social rights.
Multiple chapters show that ideas about citizenship and national belonging
were played out and made real through state constitutions, immigration
codes, labor and education policy, and the regulation of military service.
In focusing on citizenship and the state as areas where social and political
power was distributed, the volume points to the role of the state in shaping
ideas of nationhood, and advances recent calls by political scientists for the
incorporation of rights as a legal and institutional variable into the analysis
of international migration.11
Conclusion · 289
Negotiating National Inclusion: Assimilation, Pluralism,

and Citizenship
Evaluating inclusion and exclusion regarding immigrants inevitably means

looking at issues of assimilation and integration. This volume moves be-
yond the traditional assumption that immigrants were more quickly and
successfully integrated into Latin American societies than was the case in
the United States, an argument that has effectively associated the absence of
hyphenated identities with integration.12 Contributors document profound
and often violent hostility toward many groups of immigrants, and show
that xenophobia had broad pan-regional and cross-chronological reso-
nance. Race riots protesting the presence of various groups were frequent.
The Chinese seemed to be the most common targets of such outbursts,
with chapters by Putnam, Buchenau, and López documenting popular
anti-Chinese uprisings and massacres in Peru in 1881 and 1909, Mexico in
1911, and Jamaica in 1918. As Lara Putnam demonstrated, members of trad-
ing diasporas were particularly convenient scapegoats in times of economic
depression, and popular hostilities toward such groups were encouraged
by elites because they distracted anger and attention away from the deeper
causes of economic hardship, such as unequal landholding structures and
exclusionary political systems. Yet it was not only mercantile communities
who were the victims of xenophobic violence. Fears about divided German
loyalties culminated in a wave of anti-German riots during World War I,
Afro-Antilleans were the subjects of systematic deportations and sustained
violent abuses including lynching and massacres, and even in Argentina—
typically held up as the classic case study of easy assimilation—the rise
of right-wing nationalism targeted Jewish immigrants, and anti-Semitism
also rose in Brazil in the aftermath of the Great Depression. All of this
suggests that the received wisdom that Latin America was somehow less
xenophobic than other receiving destinations cannot be upheld.
As such, this volume significantly advances our understandings of pro-
cesses of assimilation in Latin American. As Michael Goebel notes in the
introduction, the recent shifts in migration theory that have complicated
the conventional opposition between assimilation and pluralism have not
found their way into the historiography of Latin America. The case studies
presented here bring the region more firmly into conversation with con-
temporary migration theory, and view assimilation as a complex, multilay-
ered process that also involved the transformation of the mainstream.
DeLaney’s chapter in particular helps to turn the conventional question
290 · Nicola Foote
about assimilation on its head. She argues that European immigrants to

Argentina were successful in integrating precisely because assimilation was
not expected of them. Immigrants were seen as bearers of superior cultural
values who would sweep away the dusty Spanish colonial heritage and help
forge a new, more modern national culture. Thus, the measure of their suc-
cess was not how well they fit into the mainstream but whether they could
sufficiently change the mainstream and create a more “civilized” culture.
In effect, then, it was pluralism itself that fueled immigrant assimilation.
Where immigrants felt at home in a society they had reshaped to partially
reflect their image, ethnic identity markers were no longer necessary.
The idea of immigration as central to nation formation did not hold the
same resonance everywhere. This in turn impacted upon processes of as-
similation. In Mexico, where immigration was regarded with more caution
in the nineteenth century because of the association between the presence
of foreigners, war, and loss of territory, the onus was on immigrants to
adapt to a national identity; there was no expectation that Mexican society
would adapt to immigrant culture. As a result, separations and distinctions
remained entrenched. Indeed, Buchenau sees the absence of the hyphen—
the typical indicator of the success of assimilation—as a barrier to immi-
grant integration, suggesting that without a hyphenated identity to ease the
transition between “Mexican” and “foreigner,” many immigrants elected to
remain in the latter camp.
Levels of integration and assimilation also varied by ethnic group and
depended on the kinds of social and economic capital immigrants brought
with them. Where immigrants started on the social and economic “lad-
der” mediated their relationship with the mainstream significantly. Because
of their whiteness, European migrants brought enormous social capital
regardless of their economic resources, which meant they were seen as
“improving” the demographic composition of the nation. Jewish, Middle
Eastern, and to a lesser extent Japanese (and some Chinese) immigrants
possessed substantial economic capital and were perceived to bring wealth
and industrial or agricultural knowledge that would advance national eco-
nomic development. This in turn provided them with the opportunity to
expand their social capital by making claims to whiteness (discussed in
more detail later). As a result, these groups were granted a greater chance
to achieve inclusion and assimilation.
However, not all who had the chance to assimilate took the opportunity.
Incentives and motivations mattered, and some immigrants appear to have
concluded that they could gain more from staying within ethnic economies
Conclusion · 291
and seeking the support and protection of their ethnic peers than they
would in joining the mainstream. This was true for some members of trad-
ing diasporas, but it was an especially noteworthy tendency among dias-
pora communities composed solely of sojourning economic elites. This can
be seen most strikingly in the case of the American, French, German, and
Spanish immigrants in Mexico City, discussed by Buchenau, who formed
“enclave” societies behind high gated walls. It was also true of the American
and British corporate officials who appear in my chapter as the abusers of
West Indian workers, and who are rarely considered as immigrants in the
scholarly literature. Similarly, where assimilation was perceived to lead to
marginalization, it was rejected, and British Caribbean migrants on balance
preferred to reject an ethnic minority status and instead seek a claim to
racial superiority by emphasizing their Anglo-Saxon heritage and insisting
on their distinctiveness from their host societies.13 In that sense, then, the
Latin American case studies presented here reinforce Alba and Nee’s argu-
ment that patterns of assimilation can be explained by looking at incentives
from the dominant society, but they also stress the role of immigrant’s own
evaluation of how these should be weighed.14
Conceptualizing Diaspora Nationalisms
Certainly, to fully understand the relationship between immigrants and

nation formation, it is essential to examine the issue of inclusion and exclu-
sion from the perspective of immigrants themselves and to evaluate their
own identities, desires, and perceptions. If the presence of immigrants
made the idea of the nation tangible to many ordinary Latin Americans,
the concept of nation also became real to most immigrants through their
experience of migration. However, it was not always the Latin American
host nation with which they came to affiliate: there were always compet-
ing loyalties for immigrants, and whether they adopted Latin American
identities depended not only on what host nations and elites wanted but
also on broader transnational processes. Any discussion of assimilation
and integration therefore cannot proceed in isolation from the evaluation
of diaspora nationalisms.
It is clear that many immigrants (or at least their home governments and
ethnic community leaders) had very different ideas about what contribu-
tion they would make to their host nation than did the nationalist elites
recruiting them. Both Schulze and Rinke suggest that German immigra-
tion could be characterized as an imperial diaspora, and they show how
292 · Nicola Foote
the preservation of the language and culture of the emigrants was explicitly
viewed after 1871 as a tool for expanding German economic interests and
informal empire. While Latin American governments viewed German im-
migration as a means to racial and national improvement and assumed
and desired that assimilation would take place, many German actors saw
migration as a way to strengthen the German nation and to expand and
preserve German language and culture. German elites both at home and in
Latin America sought to fight off de-Germanization, which they equated
with racial degeneration. Similar views were held by the governments of
other migrating groups. The Italian state prior to the emergence of fascism
saw immigration to Latin America as representing a form of “peaceful con-
quest” while the Japanese government perceived immigration to Brazil as a
means of expanding their international influence.
In such cases, emigrant state policy could prove an essential component
in shaping diaspora identities. The German government provided funding
for German-language schools and for the support of institutions such as the
Association for Germanness Abroad. The Japanese government likewise
gave financial support to schools and immigrant societies. In other cases
the immigrants themselves called on their states of origin to recognize
and support the maintenance of their identities. Hyland shows how Syrian
ethnic leaders pushed the Ottoman state to establish diplomatic ties with
Argentina so that they could open official lines of communication, while
British Caribbean subjects agitated for the British government to intervene
in legal and economic disputes on their behalf, in the process insisting on
their right to a British identity. Immigrants who escaped persecution could
make no claims on their originating state but formed institutions that fu-
eled chain migrations and helped to shape cohesive diaspora identities,
such as the Jewish Colonization Association that helped fund agricultural
settlement for Jewish migrants in Argentina and Brazil. These negotiations
remind us that, as Green and Weil have insisted, emigration and immigra-
tion must be viewed in conjunction, as mutually constitutive realities.15
Immigrants also forged distinct ethnic and political identities through
the rich associational lives they created. Virtually all of the groups consid-
ered here forged and sustained “multi-stranded social relations that link[ed]
together their societies of origin and settlement.”16 They sent remittances
home, operated small cross-national businesses, invested their savings in
their home countries, and established social services, recreational activi-
ties, clubs, hospitals, schools, and churches that catered specifically to their
own ethnic group. These institutions were as much about the maintenance
Conclusion · 293
of day-to-day cultural practices and the need for mutual support as they
were about patriotic fervor. Yet the institutions created were the means
through which migrants became transnational actors, expanding their net-
works and connections overseas while also retaining a presence in their
original societies. It was also through these institutions and networks that
many immigrants began to develop national identities that would not nec-
essarily have resonated with them prior to immigration. Goebel points
out how Italian migrants gained a sense of themselves as unified “Italians”
rather than as people of distinct regional origins through the experience
of migration, while the eastern Mediterranean immigrants discussed by
Hyland, who became passionate advocates and shapers of Syrian and Leba-
nese nationhood from within Brazil and Argentina, are classic examples of
groups gaining their national identity in the diaspora. Similarly, Putnam
shows how Hindus and Muslims in Trinidad consolidated as “Indians” in
the face of racial discrimination, sharing among themselves religious and
cultural symbols that would have separated them in India.
This is not to suggest that diaspora nationalisms were uniform or un-
varied. This volume also draws our attention to the local specificities that
shaped the expression of diaspora nationalisms. Immigrant groups were
never homogenous, and immigrants from the same nation of origin could
manifest distinct identities and political loyalties depending on factors such
as their specific region of origin, when migration occurred, and the po-
litical and religious orientation of the founding members of an individual
diaspora community. Goebel’s chapter shows how differential support for
fascism among Italian immigrants in the Southern Cone can only be ex-
plained through intimate organizational processes occurring at the level
of distinct individual communities—not by broad-brush categorizations
about degree of ethnic segregation or host nation political leanings, as has
previously been argued. Such insights further emphasize the necessity of
bringing social histories of migration and intellectual histories of national-
ism into closer dialogue.
Immigration, Ethnicity, and Latin American Race Formation
In the discussion of both assimilation and diaspora nationalisms, the fus-

ing and unfusing of distinct ethnic identities was one of the primary issues
at stake. The categorization and conceptualization of race and ethnicity
were absolutely critical to immigrant experiences, and it is not possible to
fully evaluate the relationship between nation and immigration without
294 · Nicola Foote
discussing race. This volume directly advances Samuel Baily’s call for the
prioritization of research on the relationship between race and immigra-
tion, and demonstrates conclusively that an analysis of immigration can
provide critical new insight into Latin American race formation.17 Immi-
gration has largely been marginal to Latin American racial theory. Despite
the wave of research on race, gender, and nation over the last two decades,
few historical studies of race and national identity have used a comparative
lens, and most have focused on indigenous groups or Afro–Latin Ameri-
cans—rarely on immigrants or their descendants. Yet race was absolutely
central to the history of immigration to Latin America. Immigration policy
and legislation was founded on a racial logic that borrowed heavily from
the biological discourses of scientific racism and eugenics; the problems
immigration posed to national polities were often expressed in terms of
racialized difference, while ultimately assimilation was often determined
by how and where immigrants fitted into preexisting racial categories and
hierarchies.
Migratory patterns were driven in part by changing racial demographics.
In coastal plantation regions, most notably Brazil, Cuba, and other parts of
the Caribbean, mass immigration was prompted by the shift in labor rela-
tions generated by the abolition of slavery and the slave trade. Immigra-
tion was also shaped by the dispossession of indigenous peoples. In the
Southern Cone success in attracting European immigrants was prompted
in part by the genocide of indigenous peoples. In Mexico the few successful
instances of immigrant colonization were prompted by liberal land reform,
notably the Law of Fallow Land discussed by Buchenau, which allocated
private investors title to indigenous communal lands.
As several chapters in this volume pointed out, the idea of whitening
dominated discourses of immigration and immigration policy was always
predicated on acquiring the “right” type of immigrant. These ideas were
woven into immigration codes, and legislation governed entrance and the
acquisition of rights prioritizing Europeans. Asian and African-descended
people were often formally barred from entrance, and legal barriers were
erected to their acquisition of citizenship rights that were not applied to
Europeans. In Ecuador, for example, European immigrants could apply for
citizenship after just two years of residency, but black and Chinese im-
migrants were ineligible for citizenship regardless of their length of resi-
dence.18 In Panama, as my chapter showed, even second- and third-gener-
ation black immigrants were excluded from rights of citizenship in the 1941
constitution.
Conclusion · 295
But this volume also suggests that the concept of whitening itself is in
need of a deeper interrogation than it has previously been allocated, and
that the category of “whiteness” on which it was predicated was far from
stable. Questions have been raised in U.S. immigration history over the
way in which the whiteness of certain categories of European immigrants
was contested, and attention has been drawn to how labels such as “Celtic,”
“Hebrew,” “Latin,” “Slav,” “Iberic,” and “Mediterranean” operated as racial
terms, designed to mediate access to power.19 Yet the whiteness of immi-
grants to Latin American has largely been taken for granted.20 However, the
flexibility and inclusivity of whiteness as a category during the era of mass
immigration was extremely significant and provides an important partial
explanation for some of the differences between immigrant experiences
and socioeconomic mobility in Latin America as opposed to the United
States. Critically considering whiteness also advances a deeper understand-
ing of the racial underpinnings of mestizaje in Latin America.
In marked contrast to the United States, most Jewish and Middle East-
ern immigrants to Latin America, and even some Japanese and Chinese,
were officially classified as “white.” As noted earlier, this was fundamentally
related to class positioning. Immigrants who brought financial capital or
business skills and aptitudes that could tangibly contribute to economic
development were able to tap into the class dynamics that underpinned
discourses of whitening and gain social status as groups pushing forward
modernization, industrialization, and development.
Yet the flexibility of whiteness does not suggest that white supremacy
was any less powerful within Latin America. The admittance of preferred
immigrant groups to the category did not undermine whiteness; rather, it
reinforced and reconstructed it as the apex of social prestige and political
and economic power. The inclusive negotiation of whiteness also served to
reconstruct the negation of blackness within national identities. Lesser and
Rein, for example, suggest here that Jewish claims to whiteness in Brazil
were mediated through nonblackness. In the inverse of the one-drop rule
in the United States, because Jewish immigrants were not black, they could
become white through cultural action. They achieved this by rejecting work
associated with blacks as sharecroppers on large plantations (work that had
at one point been fulfilled by non-Jewish German immigrants whose racial
status was less ambiguous).
Interestingly, some of the most obviously “white” immigrant groups
seemed to reject inclusion in Latin American racial categories of any kind,
with the British, French, German, and American ethnic enclaves in Mexico,
296 · Nicola Foote
and to a lesser extent German immigrants in Argentina and Brazil, pre-

ferring to remain separate from mainstream Latin American society—a
decision that, regarding Mexico, Buchenau attributes to ethnic enclaves’
conviction of their own Anglo-Saxon superiority. It was precisely their ef-
forts to negotiate the international discourses that shaped such attitudes
that made Latin American national elites so keen to extend the category
of whiteness to a broader cross-sector of immigrants. The idea that the
logic of social whitening could be fulfilled by classifying non-European
groups as white was consistent with emerging racial nationalisms based on
mestizaje, which engaged dominant scientific racisms by negotiating them
and insisting that the (unquestioned) inferiority of black and indigenous
groups could be overcome through mixture with “more civilized” groups.
Mestizaje seems to have provided an important platform through which
immigrants could engage local nationalisms. Lesser and Rein demonstrate
how immigrants explicitly laid claim to mestizaje by creating fictive his-
torical links to allow them to make a claim to the core ethnic underpin-
nings of national identity. Jewish immigrants used histories of crypto-Jews
in the colonial period to make a claim to a deeper rooted presence in Latin
America than their nineteenth- and twentieth-century migrations would
otherwise allow. Some Asian immigrants used phenotypic similarities with
indigenous peoples to make claims to indigenity. Japanese ethnic leaders in
Peru posited the idea that the Incas were a lost tribe of Japanese while Chi-
nese immigrants in Mexico claimed that the founders of the Aztec Empire
were shipwrecked Chinese.
Although both whiteness and mestizaje were flexible discourses, there
were limits to their expansiveness, and these served as important brakes
on immigrant inclusion. Notably, groups who were not seen as potentially
“meltable” into the imagined national white–mestizo race were rejected
as antinational. The dynamics of inclusion and exclusion centered around
ideas of miscegenation and exclusionary currents applied most strongly to
black and Chinese immigrants.
Both whitening and mestizaje were at their core about racial mixture: im-
proving the national racial stock through cultural and biological blending.
The painting by Modesto Brocos that depicts German immigrants “saving”
Afro-Brazilians from the curse of Han illustrates this point powerfully (see
Frederik Schulze’s chapter). Blacks were saved in this formulation through
the eradication of blackness, just as the nation would be saved through
the same means. That miscegenation was viewed as a tool to whiten exist-
ing populations meant that the presence of nonwhites in the immigrant
Conclusion · 297
stream was very problematic since it defeated the whole premise of immi-
gration as a civilizing tool. The biological discourses underpinning social
constructions of race meant that in the whitening formulation, cultural
transformation would be demonstrated through physical shifts in pheno-
type. Thus, any group (including Jews, Japanese, and Arabs) that arrived
with phenotypic characteristics associated with “Caucasians”—light skin,
straight nose, and straight hair—could play the whitening role because they
would lend these physical attributes (perceived to be an extension of cul-
tural and intellectual assets) to the national population. Conversely, misce-
genation with Chinese and black immigrants was a source of tremendous
nationalist concern. Both my chapter and Putnam’s demonstrate that black
immigrants were characterized as a source of racial danger, and trace how
the fear that black fecundity would overwhelm the national population
base reached almost hysterical proportions in certain contexts. Similarly,
López explores the horror with which intermixing between Chinese im-
migrants and the local population was viewed. In Peru the children of Chi-
nese and indigenous women were classified as injerto (transplant) while
the offspring of Afro-Peruvians and Chinese were shunned still further,
the denial of an official label a clear signal that they were not supposed to
exist. Miscegenation that mixed local populations with whites was seen as
strengthening the nation while mixing with nonwhites was seen as a path
toward degeneration.
The exclusion of blacks and Chinese from discourses of mestizaje calls
attention to the importance of race as a category for understanding assimi-
lation. In Alba and Nee’s definition, assimilation is a form of ethnic change
that occurs as result of changes taking place on either side of an ethnic
boundary.21 The case studies presented here show that some boundaries
were more malleable than others, and that racialized imaginings of bio-
logical heredity operated as a critical factor in determining their porous-
ness. National identities could be inclusive of ethnic diversity, but attitudes
toward racial difference were much more unyielding. This suggests that
some of the classic arguments about differential assimilation made by War-
ner and Srole back in 1945 have some validity. While their argument that
it would take dark-skinned Europeans like Armenians and Sicilians eight
generations to assimilate, and that the integration of African Americans
would prove almost impossible was patently incorrect, their basic idea that
phenotype and perceived racial identities shape the ability to assimilate
seem to have some resonance, at least within the Latin American context.22
The relationship between phenotype and national identity can also be
298 · Nicola Foote
seen in attitudes toward near-neighbor migrations. Putnam shows how

migrants from neighboring territories went largely unremarked in politi-
cal debates, despite their significant numbers. Only when ethnic divisions
between neighbors were racialized did nativist tensions take form, and
then they often spilled over into violence. The genocide of Haitian mi-
grants in the Dominican Republic in 1937 was the ultimate example of this;
it stemmed in significant measure from the pathologization of blackness.
A core part of Dominican efforts to construct a “white” national identity
entailed the classification of black Haitian migrants as different and an-
tinational, and the perception of this difference as threatening to national
integrity led to extreme measures to extirpate this threat.23
That blackness and Chineseness were profoundly racialized categories
certainly contributed to the violence black and Chinese immigrants expe-
rienced. While xenophobic violence and rioting was directed against Ger-
mans and Middle Eastern immigrants as well as against blacks and Chinese
in the case studies presented here, it was only the latter group who were
subject to large-scale massacres and for whom violent deaths at the hands
of state officials were common. The nature of these racializations seems
to relate to international racial discourses. Attitudes toward Chinese im-
migrants were shaped by the U.S.-projected discourse of the threat posed
by a “yellow peril.” Likewise, blackness was characterized as especially
problematic within scientific racism, and blacks inevitably appeared at the
bottom of imagined racial hierarchies, regardless of how these were spe-
cifically construed. The force of this discursive negativity combined with
economic and strategic concerns—fear of Chinese competition among the
urban middle-classes, and the association of black demography with U.S.
domination—may have made it harder for these categories to be renegoti-
ated in a more inclusive manner.
Conversely, in the British Caribbean, blackness informed national iden-
tity in precisely the opposite manner. Emerging protonational identities
coalesced around blackness and largely excluded East Indian and other
Asian immigrants. Putnam argues that this was in direct response to the
racialization of nativisms in Latin America: returning British Caribbean
migrants developed their own nationalisms in a mirror image form, en-
couraged by regional elites who saw anti-Asian agitation as a convenient
distraction from white power.
Immigration, then, brings ethnicity to the fore of a discussion of Latin
American race formation. Jeffrey Lesser has insisted elsewhere that the
value of immigration to racial theory is its introduction of ethnicity as a
Conclusion · 299
category and the way this pushes us to move beyond the idea presented
in nationalist ideologies that Latin America was a society fused from the
collision of these three original races and to thus expand our understand-
ing of who participated in the formation of mestizo nations.24 Yet the clear
significance of ethnicity for understanding racial categories does not mean
that race and ethnicity can be blurred together. Racialization operated in
tandem with ethnicity, and sometimes through it, but race and ethnicity
were processes that produced distinct and separate outcomes. This volume
makes clear that certain ethnic groups become associated with particular
racial distinctions such that group characteristics were imputed to hered-
ity while others were viewed through lenses that were more mutable and
changeable. This in turn impacted processes of assimilation and shaped
the racialization of existing populations as much as it did immigrants
themselves.
Gendering Immigration Histories
Both immigration and race formation are profoundly gendered phenom-

enon, and assessing their interrelationship also helps us understand the
gendering of the nation.25 Gender is at best a secondary theme in most of
the chapters because—as Lesser and Rein point out in their contribution—
far too little of the existing scholarship on Latin American immigration
currently examines gender, sexuality, or the specific experiences of women
and children. This makes it difficult for synthetic overview pieces such as
those collected here to fully engage with such issues. Yet there are many
clearly gendered currents that underpin the case studies that speak to the
need for additional research in this field.
As with race, gender fundamentally impacted who was counted as an
immigrant. Men dominated migratory streams, and this fed into immigra-
tion legislation. In Argentina, for example, both the constitution of 1853
and the 1876 law of immigration and colonization defined “immigrant” as
a “male head of household.”26 Such definitions put single and unaccompa-
nied women immigrants at a distinct disadvantage, making it more difficult
for them to gain labor contracts or obtain government support.
Women immigrants occupied a problematic positioning within na-
tionalist imaginaries and immigrant women were singled out in many of
the anti-immigrant discourses that the chapters assess. In the very act of
migration, women challenged dominant gender ideologies that associ-
ated women with domesticity and the home. The preference for women
300 · Nicola Foote
to migrate as part of families calls attention to the threat that single female
immigrants were perceived to pose to patriarchal structures of authority.
As Anne McClintock has famously pointed out, women’s role in national-
ist discourses was typically as upholders of the past, as the people in and
by whom tradition was inculcated.27 In migrating, women were taking on
a more typically male role of striving for the modern. This was as trou-
bling for elites in Latin American receiving nations as it was for those in
countries of emigration. Women migrants were seen as morally suspect
and were frequently characterized as vectors for prostitution and insanity.
The argument that Afro-Caribbean women were responsible for the spread
of prostitution in areas of high West Indian immigration was mirrored in
the well-known hand-wringing over “white slavery” in Argentina.28 The
representation of immigrant women as sexually immoral could have tragic
consequences at the level of lived experience and was likely a factor in the
violent rapes and sexual assaults of British Caribbean women migrants dis-
cussed in my chapter. More research is urgently needed to uncover whether
these kinds of attacks were part of the experiences of immigrant women
from other ethnic groups.
The sexual stereotyping of immigrants affected men as well as women.
López shows how Chinese male sexuality was seen as a moral threat in
Peru, where Chinese men were characterized as addicted to prostitutes and
blamed for the spread of brothels. In Mexico this was take a step further
with Chinese men characterized as driving Mexican women into prosti-
tution by taking on traditionally “female” jobs such as laundry work and
domestic service. Putnam reveals that the spark for the 1918 anti-Chinese
riot in Jamaica was the shooting of an Afro-Jamaican man by a Chinese
immigrant in a fight over a love triangle. Fears about black male sexuality
were often the spark for violence against British Caribbean migrants, as
happened most notably in Cuba where several black male immigrants were
lynched for allegedly abducting white children.
Discourses and policies surrounding miscegenation reveal the role sexu-
ality played in shaping ethnic boundaries. As discussed earlier, European
miscegenation was seen as strengthening the nation while black and Chi-
nese miscegenation was viewed as a source of racial pollution and national
degradation. Positive and negative incentives for miscegenation were cre-
ated through the regulation of women’s sexuality. Social and sometimes
legal sanctions were placed on local women who forged relationships with
“the wrong kinds” of immigrants. Prior to 1936, Mexican women who mar-
ried foreigners lost their right to Mexican citizenship—a way to ensure that
Conclusion · 301
the children of immigrants were not granted the rights of jus solis. Special
steps were taken to prevent miscegenation with Chinese immigrants, and
in the state of Sonora marriages between Mexican women and Chinese
men were legally banned. Conversely, Buchenau shows how Mexican ef-
forts to encourage foreigners to assimilate in the 1930s proceeded through
legislation waiving immigration restrictions for those who married Mexi-
can women. Notably, immigrant women who married Mexican men were
not included in this legislation, thus reconstituting the association between
“immigrant” and “male.” The same formulation is present in the Brazilian
painting The Redemption of Ham, in which a male European immigrant is
depicted as “improving” the national race through his relationship with an
Afro-Brazilian woman. Such policies and discourse underscore the way in
which women’s bodies served to demarcate ethnic boundaries.
Given the importance of marriage to processes of ethnicization, racial-
ization, and assimilation, more research is needed on topics such as the
agency of immigrant women within marital decisions, the way in which
patriarchal values in certain immigrant cultures shaped endogamy rates
and patterns of ethnic entrepreneurship, and the way in which claims to
whiteness shaped marriage patterns. Did high rates of endogamy reflect ef-
forts by immigrant men to control and restrict the access of native men to
immigrant women (as was likely the case for the East Indians in the Greater
Caribbean discussed by Putnam)? Were male migrants who brought wives
from home more able to direct the labor of women and children toward
family businesses than those who married locally, and did this affect the
economic strategies they pursued? Was there a relationship between social
positioning and endogamy? Were decisions made by Arab and Japanese
immigrants to send home for wives an effort to maintain their class prestige
by avoiding intermarriage with local mestizo, black, or indigenous popu-
lations that might jeopardize their claims to whiteness? Answering these
questions will provide a new perspective on regional understandings of the
relationships between race, gender, and nation.
Concluding Remarks
In using the comparative method pioneered by Samuel Baily, this volume

has broken through the methodological nationalisms that have impeded
the study of Latin American migrations, and offers a foundation for a more
integrated history of Latin American immigration.29 The broad compara-
tive and trasnational lens reveals the complexity and interrelatedness of
302 · Nicola Foote
migratory currents and allows us to see the intersections of global, regional,

and local forces in Latin American nation formation. The approach also
challenges exceptionalist arguments that have held that certain immigrant
experiences, whether in particular places (the United States or Argentina)
or of distinct groups (Jews or Italians) were somehow unique, and this ap-
proach underlines that, although each immigrant group and receiving des-
tination had their own special particularities, there are many meaningful
points of comparison.
The volume presents significant insight into Latin American nation
building, providing new angles on the role of intellectuals and the state in
the forging of national identity; complicating debates on mestizaje; center-
ing miscegenation as a window into gender and nation; and underlining
the fluidity and multi-citedness of identity formation. In drawing attention
to the international currents that shaped Latin American nationalisms and
to the entangled networks that structured state formation, the case studies
presented here historicize the workings of transnationalism in a region in
which the phenomenon is typically associated only with the contemporary
wave of out-migration, and allow us to pinpoint the deep-rooted transna-
tional processes out of which Latin American nation-states were forged.
While many of the chapters focus on elite discourses and government pol-
icy, they nevertheless provide an important reminder of the importance
of subaltern agency to nation building. The decisions made by ordinary
people at the individual and household level to move somewhere new and
strive to improve their socioeconomic circumstances completely reshaped
not just their personal lives but the configuration of Latin American econo-
mies, polities, and societies—often in ways not envisaged or intended by
the elites who encouraged and incentivized their migration.
This volume is by no means a complete study of immigration and nation
in Latin America. The massive internal migration that led huge numbers of
Andean peoples to move to costal plantations and cities and the displace-
ment of Mesoamerican and Patagonian indigenous peoples, for example,
are beyond its remit, and the focus is purely on international immigration,
which formed just one part of an interlocking process of shifting demo-
graphic boundaries in the period under consideration. Even within this
framework, some groups and regions are given less attention than others.
Yet it is hoped that the volume helps to reposition Latin America within
the global historiography of migration, stimulate new research into the re-
lationship between nationalism and immigration, and make a contribution
toward halting the region’s marginalization within theoretical models.
Conclusion · 303
Notes
1. The title is adapted from Donna Gabaccia’s suggestion that “We can write the story
of nations from their borders.” Cited in Green and Weil, Citizenship, 8.
2. Portes and DeWind, “Cross-Atlantic Dialogue,” 829–30.
3. The exclusion of Latin America has been perpetuated even within efforts to chal-
lenge U.S.-centricity. The recent edited collection by Dirk Hoerder and Nora Faires, for
example, seeks to explore how the processes of migration and state formation in North
America—defined as Canada, the United States, Mexico, and the Caribbean islands—were
integrated and interlocking, yet it sidesteps the fact that, as Lara Putnam points out in this
volume, the relationship between Caribbean migration and state formation cannot be
understood without consideration of Central and South American processes. See Hoerder
and Faires, Migrants and Migration.
4. Moya, “Continent of Immigrants,” 3.
5. McKeown, “Global Migration,” 172.
6. McKeown, Melancholy Order.
7. Dirección General de Estadística y Censo, Censo de población de Costa Rica, 63.
8. This point is also made by Moya, “Continent of Immigrants,” 23.
9. Miller, Reinventing Modernity, 16–18.
10. Moya, “Continent of Immigrants,” 3. This builds on arguments Moya has made
elsewhere, notably in Cousins and Strangers.
11. Hollifield, “Politics of International Migration.”
12. See, for example, Míguez, “Introduction,” xxii.
13. This parallels the argument Rajagopalan Radhakrishnan makes regarding East
Indian migrants in the United States, who, on naturalizing and accepting an American
identity, simultaneously minoritize their identity by becoming American—but an ethnic
minority American. See Radhakrishnan, “Ethnicity in an Age of Diaspora,” 121.
14. Alba and Nee, Remaking the American Mainstream.
15. Green and Weil, Citizenship.
16. Quote taken from a classic definition of “transnationalism” provided in Basch, Glick
Schiller, and Szanton Blanc, Nations Unbound, 7.
17. Baily, “Conclusion,” 285.
18. Foote, “Race, State and Nation,” 264.
19. Jacobsen, Whiteness; and Roediger, Wages of Whiteness.
20. For a major exception in the Latin American literature, see Lesser, Negotiating Na-
tional Identity.
21. Alba and Nee, Remaking the American Mainstream, 11.
22. Warner and Srole, Social Systems.
23. See Howard, Coloring the Nation; and Derby and Turits, “Historias de terror.” This
interpretation also reflects recent arguments made by anthropologist Jorge Duany about
how the ethnicity of Haitian migrants in the Dominican Republic and of Dominican mi-
grants in Puerto Rico has been racialized as black, leading to their exclusion. Duany, “Ra-
cializing Ethnicity.”
24. Lesser, Negotiating National Identity, 11.
25. Donato et al., “A Glass Half Full?”
304 · Nicola Foote
26. Cook-Martín, “Soldiers and Wayward Women,” 576.

27. McClintock, “No Longer in a Future Heaven,” 105.
28. See Guy, Sex and Danger.
29. Baily, “Adjustment of Italian Immigrants”; Baily, Immigrants in the Lands of Prom-
ise; and Baily and Miguez, Mass Migration.
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ABMD Archivo, Biblioteca y Museo de la Diplomacia, Buenos Aires, Argentina

ANC Archivo Nacional de Cuba, Havana, Cuba
ANCR Archivo Nacional de Costa Rica, San José, Costa Rica
BA Bundesarchiv Koblenz, Germany
BAP Bundesarchiv Potsdam, Germany
CAD Centre des Archives Diplomatiques, La Courneuve, France
CO National Archives, Kew, United Kingdom; Colonial Office
FAPECFT Fideicomiso Archivos Plutarco Elías Calles y Fernando Torreblanca, Mexico
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FO National Archives, Kew, United Kingdom; Foreign Office
PAAA Politisches Archiv des Auswärtigen Amtes, Berlin, Germany
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Archivo Nacional de Costa Rica, San José, Costa Rica.
Serie Congreso, no. 16753
Archivo Nacional de Cuba, Havana, Cuba.
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Bundesarchiv Koblenz, Germany.
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Archive of the Deutsches Ausland-Institut (DAI-Archiv): Neu/1208
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AA 4732
AA 44674
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Archivo Plutarco Elías Calles, Fondo Plutarco Elías Calles, serie 0204, gav. 86, exp. 56,
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National Archives, Kew, United Kingdom; Colonial Office.
28/264/16186
28/269/5443
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28/274/8
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137/479/19
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295/443/10862
295/596/17
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Contributors
Jürgen Buchenau is professor of history and Latin American studies at the

University of North Carolina at Charlotte, where he also serves as chair of
the Department of History. His publications include Plutarco Elías Calles
and the Mexican Revolution, the winner of the 2007 Alfred B. Thomas book
award from the Southeastern Council of Latin American Studies.
Jeane DeLaney is associate professor of history at St. Olaf College in North-

field, Minnesota. Her articles on Argentine nationalism and national iden-
tity have appeared in Comparative Studies in Society and History, the Jour-
nal of Latin American Studies, and several edited volumes.
Nicola Foote is associate professor of Latin American and Caribbean his-

tory at Florida Gulf Coast University. She is the coeditor of Military Strug-
gle and Identity Formation in Latin America: Race, Nation and Community
During the Liberal Period (with René Harder Horst) and the editor of The
Caribbean History Reader.
Michael Goebel is Wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter (assistant professor) of

global history at the Freie Universität Berlin. He is the author of Argentina’s
Partisan Past: Nationalism and the Politics of History and the editor of a
special edition of The Bulletin of Latin American Research on “Nationalism
and the Left in Latin America.”
Steven Hyland Jr. is assistant professor of history at Wingate University. His

PhD thesis examines with the Syrian-Lebanese diaspora in Argentina. He
is a recent Fulbright Fellow and has published an article in the Journal of
Latin American Studies.
346 · Contributors
Jeffrey Lesser is Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Latin American His-

tory and chair of the History Department at Emory University. His newest
book is Immigration, Ethnicity, and National Identity in Brazil. He is also the
author of the prizewinning A Discontented Diaspora: Japanese-Brazilians
and the Meanings of Ethnic Militancy, 1960–1980 (published in both English
and Portuguese).
Kathleen López is assistant professor with a joint appointment in the De-

partment of Latino and Hispanic Caribbean Studies (LHCS) and the De-
partment of History at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey. She is
the author of Chinese Cubans: A Transnational History. She has also coed-
ited with Evelyn Hu-DeHart a special issue on “Afro-Asia” of the journal
Afro-Hispanic Review 27, no. 1.
Lara Putnam is professor of Latin American and Caribbean history at the

University of Pittsburgh. Her publications include Radical Moves: Carib-
bean Migrants and the Politics of Race in the Jazz Age and The Company
They Kept: Migrants and the Politics of Gender in Caribbean Costa Rica,
1870–1960.
Raanan Rein holds the Souraski Chair of Iberian and Latin American Stud-
ies and is the head of the S. Daniel Abraham Center for International and
Regional Studies at Tel Aviv University. Rein is the author and/or editor
of more than twenty-five books and several dozen articles in academic
journals. He is also a coeditor of the journal Estudios Interdisciplinarios de
America Latina y el Caribe.
Stefan Rinke is professor of Latin American history at the Institute of Latin

American Studies, Freie Universität Berlin. Among his most recent publi-
cations is Las revoluciones en América Latina: Las vías a la independencia,
1760–1830.
Frederik Schulze is Wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter (assistant professor) of

Latin American History at Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster.
He is the coauthor of Kleine Geschichte Brasiliens (with Stefan Rinke) and
the coeditor of Brasilien in der Welt: Region, Nation und Globalisierung
1870–1945.
Index
Africa, 17, 39, 50, 54, 55, 189, 234, 237 conflict with Brazil, 119, 121, 285; demo-
African: ancestry, 8, 32, 36, 49, 54, 60, 82, graphic transformation and immigration,
93, 95, 115, 188, 197, 205, 216; descended 2, 10, 12–13, 66–67, 74, 76, 91, 93, 95–96,
populations, 141, 187, 192, 200, 219, 294; 104, 111, 148, 189, 285, 290, 302; ethnic
diaspora, 17, 18; migrants, 33, 93, 123, 150, violence in, 8, 150, 175–76, 289; French in,
197, 282; religion, 217, 225; slaves, 2, 36, 12; Germans in, 11, 13, 22, 76, 160–64, 166,
68, 117, 133, 144, 182, 184, 185, 219 168–69, 173, 175, 179nn22,36,37, 296; Irish
Afro-Caribbeans: communities, 47, 227; im- in, 12; Italians in, 8, 22, 24n19, 234–53;
migrants, 38, 40, 44, 48, 50, 189, 190, 206; Jewish migrants in, 11, 21, 110, 142–43, 146,
nationalism, 55, 56; women, 217, 300. See 148–49, 154–55, 284, 292; national identity,
also British Caribbean; West Indians 18–19, 24n10, 50, 93–94, 97–98, 100–111,
Afro-Latin Americans, 122, 219, 228, 294 143, 148, 249–50, 257; Spanish in, 12, 102;
Alberdi, Juan Bautista, 72, 94, 96, 112, 122, women immigrants, 299–300
136, 147, 285, 308 Armenians, 1–2, 11, 14, 16, 262, 264, 277n26,
Amazon: Arab migration to, 146; Caribbean 297
migration to, 206–7, 209–10, 214–15, 283; Asia, 25n30, 38, 47, 57, 77, 128, 130, 153,
Jewish migration to, 25, 150–52; rubber 182–83, 189
boom in, 14, 207, 232, 285 Asians: assimilation of, 155, 186, 200, 296;
Americans, 15, 68, 198, 220; African Ameri- in Brazil, 117, 128, 130–31, 133, 134; in the
cans, 68, 297; in Caribbean, 39, 46; in Caribbean, 41, 43–46, 49, 54, 59–60, 186,
Ecuador, 211; in Mexico, 86, 191, 201; in 190, 192, 197; discrimination against, 8,
Panama, 225; in Venezuela, 222 32, 41, 44–45, 46, 49, 54, 59–60, 130, 152,
Anglo-Saxons, 124, 220–21, 249, 291, 296 186, 190, 196, 198, 203n34, 284, 294, 298;
Anti-Semitism, 8, 18, 108, 111, 149–50, 155, indentured workers, 2, 14, 47, 154, 183,
289 201n4, 282–83; merchants, 55; in Mexico,
Arabian nationalism, 16, 19, 22, 141, 256–76, 72, 77; in Peru, 186, 192
282 Assimilation: assimilationist policy, 7, 85, 87,
Arabs: in Argentina, 11, 158n16, 257, 259, 111, 115, 130–31, 133, 207–8, 224–25, 292;
261–62, 264–68, 270–76; in Brazil, 11, by immigrants, 99, 115, 161, 170, 235, 240,
118, 142, 146–52, 257, 260–63, 265, 267, 289–90, 293–94, 297, 299; rejection of,
269–70, 272, 275; in Caribbean, 43–44, 47, 125, 128, 134, 167, 192, 291; theories of 3–6,
57; in Central America, 11; in Ecuador, 11; 18, 26n60, 131, 227, 241, 253, 281, 284, 289,
and whitening, 297, 301. See also Arabian 291, 297, 301
nationalism; Ottoman Empire Atlantic, 2, 10, 44, 49, 53, 74, 91, 146, 221
Argentina: Arabs in, 11, 44, 147–48, 158n16, Australia, 32, 38, 45, 50, 55
257, 259, 261–62, 264–68, 270–76, 292–93; Aztec, 74, 82, 146, 296
348 · Index
Bananas, 36, 39, 44, 207, 219, 221, 233, 288 260; diplomacy, 171, 186, 212, 214–15, 218,
Barbadians, 14, 32–33, 40–41, 48, 52, 57, 222–24, 226; economic imperialism, 108,
209–10, 213, 215, 217, 220, 224, 286 117; identity, 220–22, 291; immigrants, 76,
Barbados: British colonialism in 17; home 78, 113n53, 118, 295; investment, 71, 73, 75,
island associations and 53; immigrants 106, 171, 291; military, 210; newspapers,
from, 210, 215, 222; immigrants in 42, 57; 174; scholars, 5; subjects, 12, 55, 224, 226.
newspapers, 210; return of emigrants to, See also Great Britain
58; strikes in, 59 British Caribbean, 21, 32, 45–48, 51–56, 298;
Basques, 12, 15, 25 emancipation in, 34; immigration laws
Bavarians, 12, 121, 169 in, 32–33, 48; indentured workers in, 38,
Beirut, 258, 261, 265 44, 47, 183; migrants from 8, 14, 22, 34,
Blackness, 22, 206, 208, 210, 215–17, 219, 226, 40–43, 49–51, 58, 201n1, 205–8, 210–11,
228–29, 229n2, 295–96, 298 213–21, 223–29, 230n8, 283–86, 298, 300;
Blacks: negative ideas about, 52, 195, nationalism, 21, 33, 52–56, 60–61, 220–22,
215–16, 218–19, 225; and race mixture, 228, 224–25, 228, 282, 291–92, 298. See also
296–97; and racial theory, 228, 230; rela- Afro-Caribbeans; British West Indies;
tions with Chinese, 187, 192; as sharecrop- West Indians
pers, 295; stateless, 226; violence against, British Empire, 61, 221–22, 226, 256, 266, 275
211–12, 298. See also Afro-Caribbeans; British Guiana, 2, 38, 42, 57, 60, 201, 222,
West Indians 226, 229, 285
Bolivia, 14, 26n51, 93, 111, 149, 185 British West Indies, 2, 34, 61, 201n1, 229n1
Borders: borderlands, 9, 58, 78, 184, 200; Buenos Aires: Arabs in, 261–62, 264, 266,
communities, 12, 25, 33, 41, 83, 188; 268–72, 275; Armenians in, 2; and car-
conflict, 14, 207, 222; consolidation of, 13, nival, 99–100, 107, 112n28; foreign-born
33, 41, 48, 58, 187, 203n46, 284; crossing, population in, 25n43, 91, 148; Germans in,
12–13, 40, 59, 78, 219, 283; open borders, 166, 168–70, 172, 175, 179n22; growth of,
50, 87; U.S.-Mexican, 71, 75, 78 3, 105; immigrant associations in, 99–100,
Brazil: Afro-Brazilians, 17, 121, 123, 157, 296, 148, 172, 248–50, 264, 266; Italians in,
301; Arabs in, 2, 11, 260–63, 265, 267, 269, 237–38, 240–42, 247–48; Jews in, 148,
272, 275, 293; assimilation of immigrants, 150, 157; Spanish in, 16, 18; and strikes
18, 26n60, 115, 130, 132–34; Brazilianiza- and demonstrations, 98, 175, 268. See also
tion, 8, 14, 76, 119, 125, 131–32, 134, 244; Argentina
Caribbean migrants in, 22, 206–7, 217,
223; demographic transformation and, Cacao, 36, 39
2, 10, 66–67, 117–21, 151, 189, 237, 285, Cairo, 258–59, 261, 263, 271, 279n57
294; Germans in, 8, 13, 17, 21–22, 26n60, California, 50, 70–71, 201, 283
76, 115–20, 123–27, 130–34, 160, 162–69, Canada, 66, 67, 71, 76, 303; and Chaco War,
171–77, 235, 286, 296; Italians in, 22, 118, 14; and racial exclusion, 32, 44, 47, 55, 282
227, 234–48, 250–53; Japanese in, 2, 11, Canary Islanders, 12, 189
21, 25n36, 115, 127–29, 132–34, 142, 144, Cape Verde, 11
151–52, 284, 292; Jews in, 11, 21, 142–47, Caracas, 50, 170
150–58, 289, 295; national identity, 21, Caribbean: Anglophone, 17, 32; circum-
115–23, 130–35, 143–45, 155–58, 242–45, Caribbean, 21, 31, 39, 48, 57–58, 61–62,
250–53, 257; Portuguese in, 18, 116–18; 203n46; Eastern Caribbean, 36, 40–41;
racial democracy, 133, 136n19; racism, elites, 47, 54; French Caribbean, 43;
26n63, 120–22, 295; whitening, 120–23, Greater Caribbean, 31–32, 34–35, 37, 41,
130–31, 296, 301 44, 53, 58–59, 61, 301; Hispanic Caribbean,
British: anti-British sentiment, 106; colonial- 12, 17; Indo-Caribbean, 47, 56, 60–61, 183;
ism, 17, 31–32, 34, 45, 61, 85, 123, 208, 222, migrants from, 8, 10, 14, 22, 40, 49, 57–58,
Index · 349
205–29, 286, 291, 294; migration to, 1–3, 178n18; laws, 25n33, 75, 97, 188, 288; and
21, 32–52, 183, 193, 285, 303n3; national- nationality, 92, 95, 97, 112n5; and place of
isms, 13, 21, 52–62, 182, 200–201, 224–26, birth, 10, 75; revocation of, 125, 199, 300;
282. See also British Caribbean; Afro- theories of, 10, 200; U.S. citizenship, 259,
Caribbeans; West Indians 277n20
Carnival, 100, 112 Class, 61, 102, 111, 141, 156, 162, 166, 201, 205;
Catalans, 12, 16 conflict, 44, 52, 105, 225; merchant, 199;
Catholic: Church, 69, 82, 84, 105, 149, 161, middle class, 54, 74, 77–78, 80, 83, 87, 100,
168–69; communities, 68, 70, 111, 119, 147, 118, 123, 155, 170, 191, 195–96, 298; and
150, 173; converts, 145, 150; intellectuals, race, 32, 49, 59, 73, 196–97, 225, 229, 295,
18, 101, 264; nationalisms, 8, 19, 105–9, 148; 301; ruling, 70, 164; upper class, 71, 92, 100,
priests, 175, 208 155, 190; working class, 9, 32–33, 38, 41, 45,
Catholicism, 18, 69, 95, 103, 105–6 48, 52, 54, 57, 60, 83, 96, 110, 170, 186, 188,
Cayman Islands, 208, 230 190, 249, 287
Central America: banana plantations, 39, Coffee, 77, 117, 119, 127, 131, 135n9, 241, 286
207; immigration to, 22, 43, 71, 206, 208, Colombia, 17, 36, 40–44, 51, 57, 206–8,
221, 285; and military dictatorship, 87; and 210–12, 216, 228, 286
nation formation, 13, 282; racial ideas in, Colonialism, 17, 113n53, 123, 189, 232n41, 271,
216, 219; and railways, 183; and Spanish 273, 275–76, 287
Empire, 145; and U.S. capital, 284; West Colonists, 77, 79, 102, 118–19, 126, 130, 134,
Indians born in, 60 143, 152, 205, 286
Chicago School, 3–4, 18, 31 Colonization, 74, 78, 115, 118–19, 129, 143–44,
Chile: Arabs in, 261, 270–72, 274; Caribbean 189, 285, 292, 294, 299
migrants in, 206, 230n4; and enclaves, 76; Concepción, 164, 168, 269
Germans in, 14, 22, 160–64, 166, 169–71, Coolies, 16, 33, 56, 75, 122, 184–88, 191, 201n4.
173, 176–78, 180nn41,46, 181n55; immigra- See also Chinese; East Indians
tion to 2; indigenous peoples in, 13; and Cosmic Race, 2, 68, 79, 82–83, 85
War of the Pacific, 14, 185–87 Costa Rica, 42, 57; and Caribbean immi-
China, 16, 25n30, 43, 77, 79, 128, 149, 182–84, grants, 2, 38, 40–41, 53–54, 58, 206–7, 212,
194–99, 201, 283 216, 221, 225, 227–28, 285; and Chinese
Chinese: communities, 1, 14, 39, 43, 60, immigrants, 44, 183; and economic devel-
153, 182–201; Coolies, 2, 16, 75, 122, 191, opment, 14; and European immigrants,
197; in Cuba, 14, 19, 22, 182, 184–90; 40; and Marcus Garvey, 17, 26n64, 53, 56;
discrimination against, 9, 33, 44–47, 50, and Nicaraguans, 41; and United Fruit
55–56, 64n61, 77, 79–81, 84, 122, 182–93; Company, 211, 219
indenture, 36, 183–85, 192; merchants and Crime, 18, 96, 100, 189, 213, 215–16, 223, 269
shopkeepers, 33, 44, 46, 55–56, 66, 83, Cuba: Afro-Cubans, 17, 187, 189, 200, 216,
184, 186, 188, 190, 196–98, 201; in Mexico, 218; and British Caribbean immigrants,
9, 14, 22, 66, 75–77, 79–81, 83–84, 86, 146, 22, 36, 39–41, 46–47, 51, 56–58, 206–7,
182, 184, 186–87, 190–94, 196, 199–200; 210–11, 213, 216–19, 223, 300; and Chinese
nationalism, 16, 183, 193; in Peru, 9, 14, immigrants, 2, 14, 16, 19, 22, 44, 46, 182–
22, 182, 184–87, 190–201. See also Coolies; 201, 282–83; demographic transformation
Indenture in, 2, 42, 57, 67, 284, 294; and Garveyism,
Citizenship, 182, 225, 288; and assimilation, 53, 56; and Haitians, 2, 8, 36, 39, 45, 57–58,
99; Brazilian, 127, 151; British, 17, 26n64; 218, 229; and independence, 12, 14, 19, 36,
Chinese and, 49, 183, 188, 193–94, 197, 185–87, 189; and nationalism, 8, 33, 53, 57,
294; Costa Rican, 227; cultural, 197; and 188–90, 197, 216; and Spanish immigrants,
descent, 10, 75; exclusion from, 49, 154, 12–13, 36; and U.S. intervention, 34, 36,
225, 228, 294; German, 125, 132, 160, 39, 101, 188
350 · Index
Dance, 100, 157 blackness, 229n1, 303n23; and class, 73,

Decolonization, 34, 59, 61, 257 225; and immigration restriction, 95, 152;
Delinquency, 96, 99, 194, 216 and Italian identity, 235; and national
Deportation, 58, 191, 216, 226, 289 identity, 141, 157, 260; and race formation,
Depression, 58, 79, 84, 106, 152, 196, 289 293, 298–99; and whitening, 73
Diaspora, 1, 15, 26n53, 127, 284; African, 17; Eugenics, 36, 47–51, 57–58, 218, 294
Arab, 159; Armenian, 16; Chinese, 16; Ger- Europe: Central, 17, 71, 148; and colonial-
man, 76, 137, 162, 235; Imperial, 162, 291; ism, 271, 273; and economy, 25n30, 70, 76,
Italian, 17, 235–36, 240, 244, 252; Jewish, 191, 193, 207; immigration from, 2, 7–8,
16, 292; nationalism, 14, 16, 220–21, 228, 10, 13–14, 23n2, 25n41, 34, 39–41, 43, 57,
236, 251–52, 291, 293; trading diasporas, 66–68, 72, 77–79, 91, 93–96, 104–6, 111,
33, 44, 289, 291 117–18, 120, 134, 145–46, 183, 186, 188, 200,
Diaz, Porfirio, 67, 72–73, 184 205, 227, 229n2, 237, 251, 283, 285–86,
Dictatorship, 67, 73, 84, 87, 149, 156, 240, 290, 294–96; and nationalism, 102, 113n40,
247 120, 189, 244, 249, 263
Discrimination, 7, 12, 15, 22, 32, 46, 68, 149, Europeans: Eastern Europeans, 2, 4, 49,
155, 183, 199, 236, 240–41, 293 83, 111, 143, 146–48, 152–53, 169, 284;
Disease, 69, 77, 96, 191, 215, 217–18, 288 Northern Europeans, 36, 147; and racial
Domestic servants, 207, 217 fusion, 82, 103, 121, 123, 144, 197, 300–301;
Dominican Republic, 39–42, 44, 50, 54, Southern Europeans, 4, 36, 49
57–58, 203n46, 218, 229n1, 284, 298,
303n23 Family, 84, 221, 226, 270, 272, 276; and
Drunkenness, 213, 216 Brazilianness, 131; business, 301; and mail,
Dutch, 39, 145, 183 261; networks, 19, 70; structure, 225; and
work, 38, 188
East Indians, 38, 47–48, 50, 56, 60–61, 183, Fascism, 106–7, 234, 236–37, 239–45, 251–52,
282, 298, 301, 303n13. See also Indenture; 292–93
India Fascist, 17, 84, 234, 236–44, 252
Ecuador, 2, 11, 22, 38, 206–7, 209–12, 214, 216, Food, 56, 74, 142, 148, 184, 191, 209, 221
219, 231, 286, 294 Foreign capital, 39, 50, 74, 207, 284, 287
Education, 188, 225, 288; and Arabs, 260, France, 2, 10, 172, 239, 263–69, 275
266; in Argentina, 95, 97–98, 100; bilin- French: canal, 38; Caribbean, 31, 36, 43,
gual, 87; in Brazil, 124; Catholic, 106, 109; 183; companies, 71, 76, 171; culture, 17,
English-language, 227; and Germanness, 73; immigrants, 12, 25n41, 39, 66, 71,
124, 169; and Jews, 143–44, 151; in Mexico, 74, 76, 78, 85, 99, 101–2, 118, 291, 295;
73–74, 82–83; and nationalization, 14 language, 46, 59, 151, 262; mandates, 256,
Egypt, 1, 149, 263, 271, 279 260, 264–75; occupation of Mexico, 69;
El Salvador, 43, 57, 206 Revolution, 94
Enclaves, 76, 85, 87, 208, 225, 251, 291, Freyre, Gilberto, 26n63, 120–21, 133
295–96
English: companies, 171, 207; identity, 220, Gardel, Carlos, 100, 157
222; immigrants, 12, 39, 43, 46; language, Garibaldi, Giuseppe, 16, 240, 248–51
22, 46, 208, 221, 227; patois, 36; speaking, Garvey, Marcus, 17, 26n64, 53–54, 56, 59–61
59, 70, 226 Garveyism, 221
Estado Novo, 119–20, 131, 133, 244–45 Gaucho, 99–103, 143–44, 248, 250–51
Ethnicity: as analytical category, 20, 27n74, Gender, 20, 127, 192, 203, 213, 294, 299, 301–2
127, 136n26, 142, 153–54, 259, 276n4, Genocide, 214–15, 285–86, 294, 298
277n9, 299; and Arab nationalism, 258; German: anti-German sentiment, 8, 14,
and Argentine identity, 106, 110; and 128, 130, 132, 170–77, 289, 298; colonists,
Index · 351
11–14, 17, 22, 118–19, 126, 133, 141, 160, India, 38, 43, 47–48, 201n1, 285, 293. See also
162–63; Empire, 17, 123–24, 130, 161, 165; East Indians
Jews, 147, 153; language, 83, 116, 123–27, Indians. See East Indians; Indigenous
130, 132, 165–67, 170, 173, 292; merchants, peoples
71, 118, 164, 171; nationalisms, 21, 26n60, Indigenismo, 18, 82, 120, 195
116, 123–27, 134–35, 160–62, 165–70, 177, Indigenous peoples: in Argentina, 13–14,
178n5, 235, 251, 282, 291–92 93, 95, 103, 110, 143, 294; in Brazil, 115,
Germans: in Argentina, 92, 160–63, 166, 120–21, 133, 136n19, 146, 151; in Central
168–70, 172, 175–76, 227, 296; in Brazil, America, 230n8; in Mexico, 69, 71–76,
115–20, 123–27, 129–35, 150, 152, 160, 80, 82, 85, 188, 287, 294, 296; in Peru,
162–64, 167–69, 172, 174–77, 286, 296; in 146, 182, 186–88, 190, 192, 195, 215, 285,
Chile, 160–64, 168–69, 172–73, 176, 181n55; 296–97; racial ideas about, 68–69, 73,
in Mexico, 69, 71, 75–76, 78, 83, 86, 170, 75, 82, 93, 95, 115, 120, 133, 136n19, 142,
201n5; in Paraguay, 141; in Peru, 195; in 144, 187–88, 195, 200, 296, 301; studies of,
Venezuela, 222; and whitening, 8, 123, 126, 228, 294
205, 295–96 Industrialization, 66, 74, 87, 119, 128, 207,
Germany, 2, 10, 17, 123–26, 130, 132, 134, 150, 295
161–62, 164, 169, 171–73, 189, 235, 283 Integration: as analytical concept, 6, 18,
Gold, 34, 39, 151, 207, 209, 222 27n73, 142, 289–91; in Argentina, 147,
Great Britain, 40, 43, 47, 106, 113n53, 117. See 244; in Brazil, 115, 126, 130–31; and
also British Caribbean immigrants, 225; and Chinese,
Grenada, 38, 41, 52 194, 197, 199; and Germans, 130, 173, 175,
Guano, 184, 186, 207, 210 178n5; in Israel, 155, 157; in Mexico, 67;
Guatemala, 40–43, 57, 71, 78, 170, 206, 287 of national territory, 205, 207–8, 227;
Guayaquil, 210, 213, 216 political, 56; residential, 241; in U.S., 6,
297
Haiti, 10, 31, 39, 43–35, 50, 58, 203n46, 207, Intermarriage, 155, 191, 193–94, 196, 301
230n5 Irish, 12, 39, 46, 66, 113n53
Haitians, 229; in Cuba, 2, 8, 40, 57–58; and Israel, 11, 16, 143, 149–51, 154–57, 216, 257–58
discrimination, 8, 12, 57; in the Domini- Italian immigrants: in Argentina, 24n19,
can Republic, 41, 58–59 92–93, 99, 101–2, 104, 106, 114n72, 147,
Havana, 39, 50, 170, 198, 200 234–39, 241–53; in Brazil, 116–17, 119, 129,
Hawaii, 16, 183 132–33, 152–53, 175, 223, 227, 234–39,
Hebrew, 151, 156, 157, 295 241–48, 250–53; in the Caribbean, 39; ex-
Hindu, 39, 48, 50, 61, 293 iles, 19, 243; identity, 15, 234–53, 288, 293;
Hispanidad, 18–19, 40 Italianization, 8, 18, 24n22; in Mexico, 75,
Holocaust, 85, 156 85–86; nationalisms, 22, 129, 141–42, 154,
Honduras, 11, 36, 40–44, 57, 59, 207–8, 214, 205, 234–53; in Uruguay, 13, 19, 234, 238,
216, 219, 225–26 241–42, 246, 248–53, 284; in the United
States, 49, 75, 243
Immigration laws, 32, 44, 46, 51, 55, 75, 77, Italy: and fascism, 17, 240, 242–43, 252; im-
84, 188–89, 198, 226 migrants from, 96, 111, 149, 234, 237, 292,
Imperialism, 206; anti-imperialism, 200, 244; Italian-Ethiopian War, 17, 239; and
249, 267; British, 108, 113n53, 223, 225; liberalism, 245; and Giuseppe Mazzini,
economic, 108; European, 257; Italian, 235; 247; as motherland, 154; and Mussolini,
Japanese, 129; U.S., 79, 218, 220, 225 243; and national development, 235;
Incas, 146, 182, 296 Northern, 189, 246; as sending country, 2,
Indenture, 2, 33, 36, 38, 44, 47, 183–86, 192, 13, 241, 283; unification of, 13, 15–16, 240,
201nn1,4, 282 248; and World War I, 238
352 · Index
Jamaica, 42, 211; and bananas, 36; and Brit- Guinea, 274; in Uruguay, 270; in the
ish colonialism, 17; and Chinese, 45–46, United States, 269
57, 59–60, 201n1, 289, 300; and Cuban Lebanon, 2, 11, 16, 256–58, 260–62, 264–75,
Independent Party of Color, 218; and 277n21, 279n57
East Indian immigration, 38, 47, 183; Liberalism: in Argentina, 91–97, 99, 104–10,
elites, 45, 55; and Marcus Garvey, 60; and 112, 235, 243, 248–49; in Brazil, 245; and
Haiti, 230n5; and nationalism, 54–56, 60; equality, 262–63; Italian, 243, 250, 252;
peasants, 46; and relations with Nicara- and land reform, 72, 294; in Mexico,
gua, 222; relations with San Andres and 72–73, 86; and modernization, 8, 72, 81,
Providencia, 208; and return immigration, 201n4; in Peru, 195; in Uruguay, 248
58, 226; strikes and riots in, 59, 300 Lima, 170, 186, 190
Jamaican immigrants: discrimination Limón, 212, 213, 221, 227, 285
against, 46, 51; in Colombia, 210, 212; in Lynching, 79, 228, 289
Costa Rica, 38, 213, 221, 227; in Cuba,
213, 217–18; in Ecuador, 38, 209, 212–13; Maracaibo, 217, 220
in Haiti, 230n5; in Nicaragua, 222; in Marriage, 12, 18, 25n41, 46, 192, 199, 202n30,
Panama, 36, 38, 51–52, 212, 217, 226; and 241, 301
nationalism, 52, 54–55, 221, 300 Martinique, 38, 217
Japan, 11, 25n36, 128–29, 132, 134, 151, 153, 191 Massacre, 84, 186, 212–13, 228, 289, 298;
Japanese: in Brazil, 2, 11, 21, 115–19, 122, Culebra (1885), 212; Haitian (1937), 58
127–33, 142–44, 150–53, 284, 286, 292; in Mazzini, Giuseppe, 16, 240, 245, 247–50
Caribbean, 43, 203n46; in Cuba, 198; in Mediterranean, 110, 256–57, 293, 295
Mexico, 76, 78, 85–86, 283; and national- Memory, 68, 152, 156, 187, 256
isms, 11, 117, 128–29, 134, 141, 292; Nikkei, Mennonites, 14, 83
129, 143, 151; in Panama, 50; in Paraguay, Mestizaje, 187, 193, 200, 225, 228, 287,
144; in Peru, 2, 11, 144, 146, 198, 204n52, 295–97, 302
296; Russo-Japanese War, 128; and white- Mestizo nationalism, 68
ness, 152, 290, 295, 297, 301; and World Methodological nationalism, 3, 5, 23n6, 301
War II, 85–86, 129, 153, 198 Mexican Revolution, 14, 79, 86, 186, 193
Jewish immigrants: in Argentina, 19, 21, Mexico: British Caribbean immigrants in,
92, 95, 98–99, 101–2, 104, 110–11, 112n26, 58, 207, 210; Chiapas, 71, 77; Chinese in,
142–44, 146–50, 153–58, 275, 284, 292; 9, 22, 76–77, 79–80, 146, 182, 184, 186–87,
in Brazil, 21, 120, 142–47, 150–58, 284, 190–94, 196, 199–200, 283, 289, 296, 300;
288–89, 292, 295; Diaspora, 14, 16, 20; in as destination for immigrants, 8–9, 11, 21,
the Dominican Republic, 203n46; from 66–88, 283; and economic development,
Eastern Europe, 2, 49, 83–85; in Jamaica, 10, 36, 74–75, 89n42, 287, 294; Germans
60; in Mexico, 69, 83, 145; from Morocco, in, 69, 71, 75–76, 78, 83, 86, 170, 295–95;
11, 25n35, 147–48, 151; from the Ottoman Guatemalans in, 41; Italians in, 237, 246;
Empire, 11, 147–48; in Peru, 145 Japanese in, 78; Mexico City, 3, 74–76, 87,
291; Middle Eastern immigrants in, 11,
Lebanese, 19, 43; in Argentina, 11, 44, 264, 83–84, 263, 274, 283; and oil, 39, 89n30; as
266–69, 272, 274–75; in Brazil, 11, 260, sender of immigrants, 12, 41, 43; Sonora,
265, 267, 269, 270; in Chile, 271, 274; in 73, 77, 80, 84, 89n48, 187, 191, 193, 196,
Ecuador, 11; and Émile Eddé, 272–73; 203n32, 301
independence, 264–65; Latin Americans Middle East. See Arabian nationalism; Arabs;
of Lebanese descent, 153; in Mexico, 11, 68, Armenians; Egypt; Jewish immigrants;
78, 201, 274; missionaries, 266; national- Lebanon; Muslims; Ottoman Empire;
ists, 266, 276, 293; problems with, as Syria
descriptive term, 11, 257–59; in Spanish Migration studies, 1, 3–7, 9, 20
Index · 353
Military: in Argentina, 106, 109–10, 148, 175, Nationalization, 14, 57, 132–33, 177, 196, 199
245; associations, 166; in Brazil, 120, 244; Nation state, 1, 9–10, 12–13, 15–16, 19–20, 48,
in Colombia, 210, 212; French, 264; Italian, 52, 185, 197, 207, 281; African, 17; Latin
234, 248, 250; in Panama, 50; in Peru, American, 302; Middle East, 257, 275
195; regimes, 59, 87, 109–10, 120, 148–49, Nativism, 7, 32, 50, 54, 57, 60–61, 152, 220,
156, 195, 245; service, 96, 170, 219, 288; 244, 282, 298
struggle, 185, 222, 248, 251; U.S. military Naturalization, 75, 96–97, 125, 151, 196, 261
intervention, 34, 39, 61, 188, 220 Nazi, 84–85, 109, 132, 161, 226
Minas Gerais, 117, 131, 167 Neocolonialism, 206, 208, 224
Miscegenation, 68, 85, 191–93, 296–97, Newspapers, 15, 44–45, 53, 118, 132, 142, 173,
300–302 189, 198, 201; Arabic-language, 257, 261,
Modernity, 17, 117, 128, 144, 189, 195, 205–6, 266–68; Argentine, 97, 99, 100; and Gar-
228, 235, 287, 303 veyism, 221; German, 124, 175; Italian, 239,
Modernization, 20, 22, 72–73, 81, 102, 147, 242, 249; Japanese, 129; and representa-
189, 206–8, 228, 285, 295 tions of British Caribbean immigrants,
Montevideo: Arabic speakers in, 265, 269; 210, 216, 219; and World War I, 171–72, 176
Argentines in, 247; Armenians in, 2; New York, 15, 40–41, 53, 259, 261–63, 270,
Germans in, 172; Italians in, 19, 237–38, 274
241, 243, 248, 250; Spanish in, 19; U.S. Nicaragua, 39–43, 57, 207–9, 222, 228
citizens in, 13 Nikkei. See Japanese
Morocco, 148, 150–51
Museum, 123, 143–44, 286 Oil, 39, 73, 82, 207, 217, 284
Music, 87, 99–100, 148, 156–57 Okinawa, 11, 129, 150, 153
Muslims, 11, 48, 83–84, 144, 148, 258, 260, Ortiz, Fernando, 36, 39, 46, 107, 197, 216
264, 270–71, 275, 293 Ottoman Empire, 22, 259, 260, 263, 266, 282;
Mussolini, Benito, 234, 236–37, 240–41, and entry into World War I, 256, 261, 264;
243–45 immigrants from, 11, 83, 147–48
National identity, 5, 7, 10, 14–16, 22, 141–42, Pacific, 72, 78, 282, 283; War of the Pacific,
146, 153–55, 157–58, 187, 226, 228, 235, 14, 185
281, 288, 296, 302; and Argentina, 92, 97, Palestine, 146, 256, 258, 260, 267, 270,
100, 103–4, 143, 249, 250; and Brazil, 135, 272–73, 275
143, 152, and “cosmic race,” 82; and Cuba, Palestinians, 11, 43–44, 257–61, 270–71
194, 197; and Germans, 162, 164, 235; and Pan-Africanism, 17, 221
Italians, 240; and Lebanese, 272, 293; and Panama, 2, 14, 17, 33, 41–43, 47, 51–58, 183,
Mexico, 68, 193, 290; and race/racialization, 211, 212, 217, 224, 225, 226, 228, 294; and
226–29, 282, 294, 297–98; Syrian, 273, 293 Marcus Garvey, 17, 53, 221; Panama Canal,
Nationalism, 1, 5, 7–10, 12, 14–15, 18–21, 33, 32, 39, 206, 209; Panama Railroad; 36,
50, 61, 102, 116, 128–29, 141, 187, 216, 224, 206, 209; Republic of Panama; 40, 50, 222
244, 248, 250, 259–60, 281–82, 284–89, Paraguay, 14, 111, 144, 149, 168, 265, 269
296, 298; “Arab,” 257, 266, 273, 276; and Paris, 71, 263–64
Argentina, 92, 102–3, 105, 107–8; Black, Park, Robert E., 4, 131
53, 54; and Brazil, 131; and Cuba, 33, Patagonia, 14, 302
188; diaspora, 14–17, 19, 22, 220–21, 228, Peasants: in Brazil, 118; Costa Rican, 221; East
235–36, 245, 251–53, 291, 293; German, Indian, 47; German, 164; Jamaican, 46;
125, 161, 177; Latin American, 206, 224, Lebanese, 261; in Mexico, 69, 78, 82; and
227–29, 302; methodological, 3, 5, 301; migration to the United States, 71; Peru-
and Mexico, 67, 68, 79, 80, 82, 87, 186, 187, vian, 204n52; and xenophobia, 9, 186
193, 200; theory, 1, 4, 5, 6, 7, 20 Perón, Juan, 110, 149, 244
354 · Index
Peru, 2, 9–11, 18, 22, 67, 93, 145–46, 187–88, Race formation, 206, 281, 293–94, 298–99
206–7, 210; and Chinese immigrants, 14, Racism, 7, 22, 46, 49, 61, 84, 128, 133, 149,
16, 22, 182–87, 190–97, 199, 200, 283, 289, 154, 196, 199, 208, 221, 225
297, 300; and genocide, 286; and Japanese Radio, 86, 104, 132, 242
immigrants, 144, 146, 198, 296 Railways, 38, 73–75, 79, 183, 206, 210–11, 216,
Peruvian, 146, 195, 215; Afro-Peruvian, 192, 285; Panama Railroad, 36, 183, 206, 209
297; Amazon (Company), 209, 210, 214, Rape, 213–14, 228, 300
285; and Chinese; 185–87, 190–92, 194–97; Refugees, 58, 70, 83–85, 87, 111, 120, 149, 153,
Peruvian-Chinese, 197; Peruvian-Japanese; 283
198 Regionalism, 15, 251
Plantation, 10, 34, 40, 55, 152, 194, 209, 212, Residential segregation, 18, 191, 241
227, 295, 302; and changes in labor sys- Rio de la Plata, 19, 236–37, 239, 241, 245–46,
tem, 117, 119, 286, 294; and immigrants as 250
labor supply, 36, 38, 119, 182–83, 186; and Riots, 59, 129, 287, 289; anti-Chinese; 46,
sugar, 36, 39, 44, 47, 183, 207, 224 57, 188, 199; anti-German; 130, 174–76,
Pluralism, 3, 94, 95, 100, 102, 107, 110, 289–90 289
Polish, 67, 115, 133, 142, 153 River Plate, 13, 15, 241, 245–46, 248–52
Porto Alegre, 116, 118, 170, 172, 174, 237, 251 Rosario, 91, 237, 267, 270
Port-of-Spain, 38–41, 59 Rosas, Juan Manuel de, 94, 247, 248
Portugal, 2, 43, 117, 120, 145 Rubber, 14, 150–51, 207, 210, 214–15, 285–86
Portuguese, 12, 23, 142, 145; in America, 6, Russia, 11, 14, 147
68, 145; in Argentina, 19, 99; in Brazil, 18,
116–20, 153; colony of Macau, 199; culture, Santiago, 39, 168, 170, 272, 274
19, 133; language, 125, 131–32, 168, 175; São Paulo: Arabic-speaking immigrants in,
names, 176; in Port-of-Spain, 39; treaties 16, 261, 264, 274, 278n35; Armenians in, 2,
with Britain, 117 264, 267; and coffee plantations, 117, 119,
Prostitution, 100, 193, 217, 300 131; expansion of, 3; Germans in, 115, 167,
Protestantism: in Argentina, 92–93, 95–96, 172; Italians in, 237–39, 241, 245, 250–52;
168, 228; in Brazil, 116, 124–25, 167, 175; Japanese in, 115, 129; and U.S. merchants,
and British identity, 22, 208; and cultural 118
values, 72; and exclusion from citizenship, Sarmiento, Domingo Faustino, 8, 94, 96–97,
69; and Germanness, 161, 167, 170, 173; and 249
Hispanicization, 227; and modernization, Schools, 8, 76, 87, 93, 95, 97–98, 109, 132, 151,
93; and U.S. immigration, 70 292; German (language), 124, 161, 165–70,
Puerto Rico, 13, 34, 42–43, 57, 213, 223 173, 175, 177, 292; Italian, 242, 245; Japa-
Putumayo, 214–15, 286 nese, 129, 130, 134, 292
Scientific racism, 32, 187, 205, 294, 296, 298
Race, 8, 20, 31, 33, 34, 39, 44, 46, 48–52, Sex, 47, 73, 209; sexual assault, 213, 214, 300;
54–56, 59–61, 73, 80, 89, 101, 109, 182, 193, sexual mixing, 34, 47; sexuality, 157, 217,
212, 216–17, 219–21, 226–27, 259–60, 282, 299–300
289, 294, 297, 299, 301; and Argentina/ Sicilian, 15, 297
Argentine race, 102–3, 105, 107, 110–11; Sinophobia, 192, 200. See also Chinese:
and Brazil, 120–21, 134–35; and class discrimination against
dynamics, 32, 33; “cosmic race,” 68, 79, Slavery, 33, 38, 51, 183, 210, 215, 228, 300; abo-
82–83, 85; and Cuba, 36, 185, 187–89, lition of, 185, 241, 294; and Brazil, 117, 121;
198–99; Debendetti on, 103–4; Freyre on; and Cuba, 36, 210; and Marcus Garvey, 59
133; German, 165; and mestizo/mestizaje, Sociology, 3, 4, 117
68, 82, 225, 287, 296, 297; and “Negro Southern Cone, 205, 282–85, 293, 294
Race,” 53, 56, 60–61 Spain, 13, 18, 43, 189, 246; and Hispanism,
Index · 355
101; immigrants from, 2, 70, 96, 111, 149, Trinidadians, 48, 52, 54, 220, 226–27
154; independence from, 184, 185, 189; Trujillo, Rafael, 41, 58
New Spain, 69, 70, 145; Roja on, 103 Turkish, 43, 262, 263; turco, 11, 43, 44, 57, 83,
Spanish, 9, 12–13, 18, 36, 39, 51, 68–69, 71, 74, 84, 150, 260, 264; Turks, 11, 50, 83, 262;
93–94, 144, 148, 183, 189, 192, 194, 249, 274, Young Turks, 261, 262, 263
283; anti-Spanish sentiment; 70, 101; in Ar-
gentina, 93, 99, 101–2, 105–6, 108–9, 147; in United Fruit Company (UFCO), 51, 207, 209,
Brazil, 117–19, 133, 152; Empire, 34, 144, 285; 211, 219
immigrants, 18, 19, 40, 57, 66, 154, 160; lan- United States: and Arab nationalism, 262,
guage, 31, 42, 44, 46, 47, 59, 70, 72, 151, 196, 265, 269–70; and bracero program,
208, 221, 260, 282; in Mexico, 68–70, 76, 86–87; Chinese in, 47, 72, 75, 77–78, 184,
81, 84–85, 87; Spanish America, 12, 13, 14, 196, 199; and Chinese Exclusion Act,
18, 32, 34, 58, 61, 189, 246, 251, 282; Spanish 77, 122; and constitutionalism, 262; and
American elites, 32, 34, 39, 41, 46, 48 counterculture, 87; and diplomatic rela-
State formation, 31, 48, 302 tions with Britain, 208; and diplomatic
Sugar, 36, 39, 44, 47, 183, 207, 224, 284 relations with Ottoman Empire, 261; as
Sun Yat-sen, 16, 19, 195, 198 destination for immigrants, 3–4, 7, 10, 12,
Swiss, 14, 118, 173 57, 66–67, 72, 75, 77–78, 88n4, 184, 259,
Syria, 2, 11, 43, 148, 257, 258, 260, 264–65, 277n20, 283, 302, 303n13; and economic
267, 271, 273–75; French mandate, 256, investment, 76, 82, 207; and Garveyism,
266, 267, 268, 269, 270 53; Germans in, 123–24, 133, 168, 235;
Syrians, 1, 19, 33, 47, 56, 60, 133, 153, 257, historiography of immigration in, 3–4,
259, 265, 270, 272, 276, 282, 292, 293; anti- 7, 282; Immigration Act of 1924, 24n25,
Syrianism, 44, 45, 50, 55; in Argentina, 49, 83, 137n59; immigration from, 70–71;
259–61, 268, 271–72, 275; in Brazil, 260, Italians in, 15, 24, 75, 239–40, 243; Japa-
267, 269; Great Syrian Revolt, 267, 268, nese in, 128, 130, 137n59, 191, 283; Jews in,
270; identity, 258, 259, 260, 274, 276; and 156; and Mexican-American War, 70; as
Ottoman Empire, 261, 264; Syrian Central model of immigration policy, 38, 44–46,
Committee, 265, 264 Syrian-Lebanese, 11, 50, 55, 61, 130, 188, 191, 282; as part of
22, 257, 265, 266, 273, 274; Syrian Social Greater Caribbean, 31, as point of com-
Nationalist Party, 16, 273; and Young Turk parison with Latin American experiences
Revolution, 262, 263 of immigration, 3, 17, 24n25, 26n60,
27n74, 95, 117, 148, 163, 177, 189, 236–37,
Tango, 100, 107, 157, 158 239, 241–42, 276n4, 289, 295, 302, 303n3;
Teacher, 98, 132, 169, 170, 173 and racism, 47, 50; and Spanish-Ameri-
Trade, 44, 71, 87, 106, 124, 132, 164, 246; and can War, 101; and World War I, 163, 172,
Chinese immigrants, 77, 184, 190; coolies, 174–75; and World War II, 85, 153, 198
183, 189, 199; and German immigrants, 171, Universal Negro Improvement Association
172; slave trade, 68, 117, 210, 286, 294 (UNIA), 17, 53, 56, 221
Transatlantic, 95, 253; migration, 3, 66, 117, Uruguay, 2, 8, 10, 12, 13, 22, 91, 121, 267,
282, 284; slave trade, 68 285; comparison to Brazil, 251, 252, 253;
Transnational, 7, 16, 20–21, 51, 58, 78, 150–51, Garibaldi in, 248; Germans in, 168; Ital-
167, 184, 193, 197, 200, 206, 208, 256, 259, ians in, 236–38, 241–43, 246, 249, 250,
271, 283, 291, 293, 302; connections, 15, 19, 284; Lebanese in, 269, 270; Socialism in,
252, 274; migration, 1, 7, 9, 10, 12, 14 242
Transnationalism, 143, 281, 284, 302; and eth-
nicity, 153; and identity, 17, 228 Vargas, Getúlio, 8, 76, 115, 119, 131, 133, 134,
Trinidad, 2, 36, 38–42, 47–48, 53–60, 183, 242–45
222, 282, 285, 293 Vasconcelos, José, 68, 82, 83
356 · Index
Venezuela, 12, 22, 206, 228, 262; British Ca- 192, 297; and citizenship, 54; German,
ribbean migrants in, 53, 207, 211, 217–20, 161; indigenous, 68, 151, 192, 196, 209,
222, 226, 284; and gold fields/cacao plan- 297; Jewish, 156; and labor contracts,
tations, 34, 36, 39; and Carlos Gómez, 34, 299; market women, 44; and marriage,
36; and immigrants, 40, 41, 42, 43, 50, 54, 25n41, 85, 192–93, 196–97, 199, 300–301;
57, 58; and Laureano Vallenilla Lanz, 49 and matriarchy, 225; and nationalism,
Vincentians, 40, 41, 57 299–300; and prostitution, 192, 217, 300;
Violence, 44, 45, 58, 240, 264, 268–70, 276, and sexual violence, 213; women’s move-
289, 298; anti-Chinese, 79, 80, 183, 191; ment, 119
anti-German, 175, 176, 177; anti-Semitism World War I: Brazil’s entry into war, 130;
and, 8, 155; British Caribbean migrants and British Caribbean nationalism, 221;
and, 208, 213–16, 219, 224, 228, 300 and German nationalism, 124, 282; and
hostility to Germans, 8, 14, 22, 130, 162,
West Indians: and British identity, 12, 208, 172–76, 289; and Italian nationalism, 15,
221–22; in Costa Rica, 2, 14, 17, 26n64, 238; and Jewish migration, 2, 148, 150,
38, 40–41, 53–54, 56, 58, 206–7, 211–12, 152; and Ottoman Empire, 83, 256, 258,
216, 219, 221, 225, 227; in Cuba, 22, 36, 260–61, 264–65, 282; and sugar prices, 36,
39–41, 46–47, 51, 56–58, 206–7, 210–11, 284; as tool of periodization, 12–13, 25n31,
213, 216–19, 223, 300; and debt peonage, 118, 163, 170, 237, 241, 284; and United
209; and drugs, 216; hostility toward, 32, States, 163
50–51, 196, 203n46, 208, 213–19, 288; and World War II: and Axis infiltration, 85–86,
infrastructural development, 22, 206–8, 129, 132; and Brazilianization, 76, 245; and
211, 228, 291; and nationalism, 52–54, 57, Chinese immigration, 197, 203; and de-
60, 206, 220–27, 282; in Panama, 2, 14, 17, colonization, 34; and import-substitution
33, 41–43, 47, 51–58, 183, 211, 212, 217, 224, industrialization, 87; and Japanese, 129,
225, 226, 228, 294; and U.S. imperialism, 198; and Jewish migration, 149; as tool of
220, 224 periodization, 78, 120, 199
Whiteness, 95, 144, 205, 290, 295, 296, 301
Whitening, 8, 33, 95, 188, 192, 205, 220, 229, Xenophobia, 7, 9, 21, 22, 51, 67, 72, 77, 79, 87,
294–97; and Brazil, 120, 121, 123, 125, 130; 187, 220, 289
and Mexico, 72, 73, 76, 287
Whites, 33, 52, 68, 192, 196, 220, 297 Yellow peril, 22, 44, 128, 130, 132, 188, 298
Windward Islanders, 34, 39, 57 Young Turk Revolution, 256, 261, 262, 263,
Windward Islands, 40, 58 282
Women: Afro-Brazilian, 301; Afro-Carib-
bean, 47, 207, 217, 300; Afro-Peruvian, Zionism, 15, 19, 141, 154, 156
192; as analytical category, 299; Chinese, Zionists, 8, 142, 143, 154, 155

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ist of Illustrations vii

Introduction. Reconceptualizing Diasporas and National Identities in

Part I. Spaces of Migration

Part II. Migrating Peoples

1.1. Immigrant populations of the greater Caribbean, ca. 1930 42

and encouragement during multiple research trips. Thanks also to Marcel

Migrations to Latin America and the Caribbean, 1850–1950

Even though Latin America has been a continent primarily of emigration

Furthermore, migrations within Latin America, both internal and between

Migration Studies and Theories of Nationalism

the rise and ongoing importance of nationalism owing to an implicit and

serious attention to the transformations of the “mainstream” as a result of

More problematically still, notwithstanding the changes within both

Interactions between Transnational Migrations and Constructions of

To be sure, there are countless Latin American examples of discrimination,

of the contributions to this volume testify to the recurrence of prejudice

in spite, because, or regardless of its limited number of immigrants—wit-

of people across the Atlantic easily exceeded the grip of policymakers in

identified them as Portuguese. Making their appearance in Foote’s and Put-

while Cuba, besides containing a large immigrant contingent, had until

transnational migrations frequently played a crucial role in the “nation-

Diaspora Nationalisms and Homeland Relations

Another issue to consider is that of “diaspora nationalism” or “long-dis-

Romanticism as well as more recent race theories of the extreme right.59

workers returned in the 1930s, coinciding with the stirring of pan-African

on average, and more often imprisoned than most other “foreigners.” On

Migrations and Comparison

coded as such in different settings. The volume thereby seeks to meet a

moment in the history of German Latin Americans—mainly in Argentina,

8. Wimmer and Glick Schiller, “Methodological Nationalism.”

46. Devoto, “Un caso di migrazione precoce,” 15.

A Region Remade: Islands and Rimlands as the Spanish Empire

In the wake of independence in the Spanish American rimlands (1810s–

as thousands of Jamaicans did likewise for the Panama Railroad. French-

Windward Islanders harvested cacao in northeast Venezuela and joined the

The Heyday of Labor Migration, 1900s–1920s

As we already previewed in the case of Cuba after 1898, the expansion of

Struck though this traveler was by the range of Europeans he perceived

The Temptation of Anti-Asian Demagoguery: 1900s–1920s

Trinidad & Tobago 1921 243,796 57,509 (24%)

Barbados 1921 156,774 5,373 (3%)

British Honduras 1921 45,317 7,000 (15%)

Dominican Republic 1935 1,479,417 73,070 (5%)

Puerto Rico 1920 1,299,809 8,167 (1%)

Colombia 1928 7,851,000 35,251 (0.4%)

Canal Zone 1930 39,467 33,193 (84%)

Costa Rica 1927 471,524 29,265 (6%)

Nicaragua 1920 638,119 10,375 (2%)

Honduras 1930 854,184 42,280 (5%)

Top three external birthplaces / number of residents Europe Syria/ China

Spain 257,596 Haiti 77,535 British 28,206 266,863 n/a 24,647

Colombia 18,872 Spain 5,506 British 5,261 12,916 2,167 935