To Belong in Buenos Aires

Germans, Argentines, and the Rise of a Pluralist Society

Benjamin Bryce

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781503601536
• eBook ISBN: 9781503604353
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Latin American & Caribbean History
• Index: History

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a massive wave of immigration transformed the cultural landscape of Argentina. Alongside other immigrants to Buenos Aires, German speakers strove to carve out a place for themselves as Argentines without fully relinquishing their German language and identity. Their story sheds light on how pluralistic societies take shape and how immigrants negotiate the terms of citizenship and belonging.

Focusing on social welfare, education, religion, language, and the importance of children, Benjamin Bryce examines the formation of a distinct German-Argentine identity. Through a combination of cultural adaptation and a commitment to Protestant and Catholic religious affiliations, German speakers became stalwart Argentine citizens while maintaining connections to German culture. Even as Argentine nationalism intensified and the state called for a more culturally homogeneous citizenry, the leaders of Buenos Aires's German community advocated for a new, more pluralistic vision of Argentine citizenship by insisting that it was possible both to retain one's ethnic identity and be a good Argentine. Drawing parallels to other immigrant groups while closely analyzing the experiences of Argentines of German heritage, Bryce contributes new perspectives on the history of migration to Latin America—and on the complex interconnections between cultural pluralism and the emergence of national cultures.

CHAPTER 1

Social Welfare, Paternalism, and the Making of German Buenos Aires

In the spring of 1905, Richard Petersen, Hermann von Freeden, Carlos Aue, and fifteen other affluent men in Buenos Aires launched a fundraising campaign on behalf of the German Women’s Home. The men stressed the need for the city’s German community to increase its care for the sick, the poor, single women, sailors, and orphans.¹ Adele Petersen, Elisabeth von Freeden, Hanna Scheringer, Dr. Petrona Eyle, and more than two hundred other female members of the German Women’s Association of Buenos Aires had been making small contributions to the home since its founding in 1896, but this fundraiser called on the support of men in order to garner larger contributions. All told, the campaign collected almost twenty-five thousand pesos for the nonprofit association, which enabled its female leaders to buy a twenty-room building in the Recoleta neighborhood of Buenos Aires.² With this purchase, the Women’s Association intensified its activities of providing affordable and temporary accommodation for working-class women, leading a job placement program for women, offering permanent housing for the elderly, and funding an orphanage.³

The women’s home was part of a much larger network of German-language social welfare services in the city. Prosperous German speakers also created a hospital and clinic, work placement programs, and other homes offering overnight accommodation, food, and financial support for single men or families. Affluent German-speaking men and women in Buenos Aires often described these institutions and the social welfare services they provided as the cornerstone of their community. These self-described leaders situated themselves, through the patron-client relationships that they established with working-class German speakers and through various fundraising campaigns, as the benevolent protectors of an ethnic community.

Similar activities could be found at institutions run by immigrants of other backgrounds in the Argentine capital at the turn of the twentieth century. Affluent Italians founded a hospital, mutual aid societies, work placement services, and other organizations that improved working and living conditions for Italian immigrants, and similarly, Spanish immigrants established a hospital, mutual aid societies, and a women’s home.⁴ Jewish immigrants and Jewish Argentines also became involved in matters of social welfare, charity, and philanthropy.⁵ The efforts of the self-proclaimed leaders of different immigrant communities resembled those of Argentine elites as well.⁶ By asserting a place for their own institutions alongside those run by the state, the Catholic Church, and Spanish-speaking elites, affluent immigrants of many backgrounds transcended the individual communities they aspired to care for and helped define the relationship between community and society.

This chapter argues that affluent immigrants used various social welfare institutions to shape the meaning of citizenship in Buenos Aires. Through German-language social welfare organizations, thousands of immigrants and second-generation bilinguals also gave form to a certain vision of a German community. The community leaders who offered job placement, health care, and other services to workers promoted idealized notions of male breadwinners who supported their families, of productive and healthy workers, and of respectable female laborers. All of these community actions, however, were also civic actions, and the ideas of obligation to working-class immigrants were also ideas about rights and duties for members of Buenos Aires society. At stake for wealthy German speakers—as for other European immigrants who sought to provide social welfare services along ethnic lines—was their social, gender, and class power, both within their own community and in Argentine society. A belief in community, a sense of social responsibility, and concerns about their own and their community’s respectability drove the leaders and funders of these organizations to become involved. This network of community institutions, like those created by the self-proclaimed leaders of other ethnic communities, claimed a place for immigrant leadership in Argentine social and moral reform movements and a place for a German community in the Buenos Aires of the future. Leaders felt that economically stable men and families would help create a vibrant and lasting German-speaking community.

The efforts of German-speaking and other immigrants resembled those found in North American cities such as New York, Chicago, and Toronto at the turn of the twentieth century. In those cities, however, ethnic communities, the state, Protestant reformers, the Catholic Church, and labor unions established significantly different relationships with each other compared to those found in Buenos Aires.⁷ Protestant reformers in North America sought to uplift and assimilate recent immigrants in a way that was less common among Catholic elites in Argentina.⁸ Various levels of government in the United States—even before the major increase in federal authority in the 1930s—played a larger role in the provision of social welfare than did those in Argentina.⁹ And because the state and reformers played larger roles in North American cities than their counterparts did in Buenos Aires, leaders of immigrant groups in the United States and Canada played a smaller role, comparatively speaking, in questions of social welfare.

In Buenos Aires, wealthy German-speaking men and women financed a range of social services, but in general, it was a group of middle-income people who actually delivered those services. The German Aid Society (founded in 1873), the German Hospital Association (1878), the Association for the Protection of Germanic Immigrants (1882), the German Women’s Association (1896), and the German Charitable Society (1916) had memberships that ranged between one hundred and fifty and two thousand five hundred people each.¹⁰ The organizations were independent from one another, although their membership lists reveal some overlap. Based on those lists, the number of people cared for at the German Hospital, and the number of workers who received services from other German-language social welfare organizations, it appears that as many as half of the city’s forty thousand German speakers (whether born in Europe or the Americas) had at least occasional contact with these organizations in the 1920s.¹¹

The male leaders of and main donors to these associations owned bookstores, bakeries, restaurants, import companies, and other businesses in Buenos Aires. Others were directors of companies such as the German Transatlantic Electrical Company (Compañía Alemana Transatlántica de Electricidad) and the Quilmes and Palermo breweries. Wives of businessmen and Lutheran pastors as well as female professionals led the German Women’s Association. Overall, these organizations worked toward the common goal of creating a web of social welfare institutions along ethnic lines that would help German-speaking workers and their families adapt to, succeed in, and stay in Argentina. These institutions were exclusively led and primarily staffed by German speakers. The German Hospital employed German- and Spanish-speaking doctors, and its support staff was similarly diverse. The leaders of these social welfare associations had little ideological competition from other groups of German speakers in the city. There was no German-language labor union in the country in this period, and the approximately 270 members of the socialist association Vorwärts (founded in Buenos Aires in 1882) were little match for the large network of paternalistic charities.¹²

In the second half of the nineteenth century, a growing legal apparatus shaped by liberal ideology emerged in Argentina, and it governed notions of citizenship, the economy, and labor relations.¹³ This body of legislation included the Constitution of 1853, the Code of Commerce of 1859, the Penal Code of 1886, and a law on universal public education in 1884. The laissez-faire nature of the state apparatus in Argentina allowed space for other actors such as immigrant groups, and these actors in turn helped form the evolving state.¹⁴ After reformers separated the city of Buenos Aires from the province of the same name and made it the national capital in 1880, the federal state began to craft new relationships with autonomous provinces. Further government reforms in the 1930s and particularly during Juan Perón’s two presidential terms (1946–1955) did not erase the previous social welfare system, but the relationships among immigrants, the Argentine state, the Catholic Church, Spanish-speaking philanthropists, and other social actors underwent significant changes.

The social welfare services in Buenos Aires in this period were provided in a patchwork manner by the state, private philanthropy, the Catholic Church, and immigrant communities. Each group had its own motivations, and despite tensions between secular reformers and Catholic authorities in the late nineteenth century and between private philanthropists and government bureaucrats in the 1930s, each seemed content to complement the services offered by the others. Catholic congregations and orders ran orphanages and charitable services for elderly, disabled, and unemployed people. The other main actor in questions of social welfare was the Society of Beneficence (Sociedad de Beneficencia). Founded in 1823 and run by elite Spanish-speaking women, it primarily operated hospitals and orphanages that were funded through a combination of monthly dues from wealthy women, philanthropy, and public subsidies. Throughout this period, Argentine politicians and bureaucrats gave money to the charities, hospitals, and orphanages run by the Society of Beneficence and the Catholic Church. Politicians and bureaucrats recognized that the Society and the Catholic Church provided many of the social services the state could not or did not want to provide, and by the 1890s this public funding had become a core feature of social policy.¹⁵ From the 1890s to the 1940s, financial assistance to the Society of Beneficence slowly increased.¹⁶

The government also offered a range of social services on its own. For example, in the second half of the nineteenth century, it began to employ public health officials to combat communicable diseases.¹⁷ In 1882, the city of Buenos Aires established an agency called Public Assistance (Asistencia Pública) to, in the words of Donna Guy, “centralize and expand medical treatment and to offer free services to the urban poor who registered as indigents.”¹⁸ A philanthropic group with some public funding began operating the Hotel of Immigrants (Hotel de Inmigrantes) in the 1850s, which provided recent arrivals with lodging for five days, medical care, and work placement services.¹⁹ Pensions, which scholars highlight as important precursors to the welfare state in many countries in the North Atlantic, were a relatively limited part of the system of social welfare in Buenos Aires between 1880 and 1930. There was no extensive program of soldiers’ pensions, and the national government did not create maternity benefits for women in industry, commerce, and domestic work until 1934.²⁰ In the early decades of the twentieth century, Argentine legislators established pension schemes co-funded by employees, but only for those working in sectors such as the civil service (1904), foreign-owned utilities (1921), and banking (1922).²¹

Immigrant philanthropists interacted with the state and the Catholic Church in several ways. Catholic missionaries from Germany, Italy, Spain, and elsewhere in Europe provided services such as poor relief and work placement to Catholic immigrants of a common background, and they ran orphanages through Catholic congregations or religious orders.²² In addition, immigrant-run organizations began receiving the government subsidies that had previously been earmarked for the Society of Beneficence and Catholic institutions. In the 1890s, German and other immigrant-run hospitals began receiving a small portion of the National Charitable Lottery (Lotería de Beneficencia Nacional), and the German Hospital received between five and ten thousand pesos per year.²³ The city of Buenos Aires sometimes exempted the German Charitable Society from paying property taxes and gave irregul...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• List of Tables
• List of Figures and Maps
• Acknowledgments
• Note on Terms
• Introduction: The Future of Ethnicity
• 1. Social Welfare, Paternalism, and the Making of German Buenos Aires
• 2. Children, Language, and the Rise of a Pluralist Society
• 3. The Language of Citizenship: Curriculum and the Argentine State
• 4. An Unbounded Nation?: Local Interests and Imperial Aspirations
• 5. Transatlantic Religion and the Boundaries of Community
• 6. The Language of Religion: Children and the Future
• Conclusion: Citizenship and Ethnicity
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index