The Invention of Argentina

719 Pages·1993·2.84 MB·English

by  Nicolas Shumway

title: The Invention of Argentina
author: Shumway, Nicolas.
publisher: University of California Press
isbn10 | asin: 0520082842
print isbn13: 9780520082847
ebook isbn13: 9780585181677
language: English
Argentina--History--19th century,
Argentina--Intellectual life--19th century,
subject Intellectuals--Argentina--Attitudes,
Nationalism--Argentina--History--19th
century.
publication date: 1991
lcc: F2843.S47 1991eb
ddc: 982/.04
Argentina--History--19th century,
Argentina--Intellectual life--19th century,
subject: Intellectuals--Argentina--Attitudes,
Nationalism--Argentina--History--19th
century.
Page iii
The Invention of Argentina
Nicolas Shumway
University of California Press
Berkeley Los Angeles London
Page iv
University of California Press
Berkeley and Los Angeles, California
University of California Press
London, England
Copyright © 1991 by The Regents of the University of
California
First Paperback Printing 1993
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Shumway, Nicolas.
The invention of Argentina / Nicolas Shumway.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-520-08284-2
1. ArgentinaHistory19th century. 2. Argentina
Intellectual life19th century. 3. Intellectuals
ArgentinaAttitudes. 4. NationalismArgentina
History19th century. I. Title.
F2843.S47 1991
982'.04dc20 90-24574
CIP
Printed in the United States of America
2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements
of American National Standard for Information SciencesPermanence
of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984
Page v
To the memory of my father
James Carroll Shumway
Page vii
Contents
Preface ix
1. Prelude to Nationhood 1
2. Mariano Moreno 24
3. Populism, Federalism, and the Gauchesque 47
4. The Rivadavians 81
5. The Generation of 1837, Part One 112
6. The Generation of 1837, Part Two 146
7. Alberdi and Sarmiento: The Widening Breach 168
8. Bartolomé Mitre and the Gallery of Argentine 188
Celebrities
9. Roots of Argentine Nationalism, Part One 214
10. Roots of Argentine Nationalism, Part Two 250
Epilogue 297
Bibliography 301
Index 313
Page ix
Preface
Borges argues that books write themselves, that however much writers
try to choose their subjects, the subject itself eventually dictates its
own expression. While in no way equating myself with Borges, I
sense that this book's writing confirms his point. Originally, I planned
to write an intellectual history of the fifteen-year span bracketed by
the coup of 1930Argentina's first in this centuryand the triumph of
Juan Domingo Perón in 1945. My goal was to reconstruct the
intellectual currents that anticipated Peronism and explain to some
degree the extraordinary polarization that has gripped Argentina ever
since. I dutifully read nationalists like the Irazusta brothers, Hugo
Wast, Carlos Ibarguren, Ramón Doll, and Monsignor Franceschi;
populists like Arturo Jauretche and Raúl Scalabrini Ortiz; liberals and
cosmopolitans like Eduardo Mallea, Ezequiel Martínez Estrada, Jorge
Luis Borges, and Victoria Ocampo. I was particularly interested in
how the fierce disagreements among Argentine intellectuals stemmed
from radically different concepts of what the Argentine nation was all
about: its history, its nature, its role among other nations of the world.
But when I began writing, I found that what appeared new in the
1930s was often repeating, reworking, or at least conversing with
Argentine thought of earlier times, so much so that my footnotes
seemed to grow faster than my text. I eventually bowed to the
inevitable and wrote this bookabout nineteenth-century Argentina.
While I make occasional reference to more recent Argentine thought,
the other book, the one specifically about modern Argentina, will have
to wait. I console myself thinking that

Page x
the book I failed to complete might now write itself more easily using
this one as a point of departure.
Argentina is widely perceived as a national failure, one of the few
countries that has moved from first-world to third-world status in only
a few short decades. As recently as the 1920s, no one would have
considered Argentina underdeveloped. With an apparently stable
government, a highly literate populace, and unequaled prosperity
relative to other Latin American nations, Argentina was perceived as
one of the world's successful new democracies, equal in many ways to
Australia, Canada, and the United States. Yet, despite this early
promise, during the last fifty years Argentina has moved from crisis to
crisis, sinking into deeper depths of economic turmoil, social
disruption, political chaos, militarism, debt, and governmental
irresponsibility. Of course there have been bright, hopeful moments,
when courageous, committed Argentines have rallied to restore the
prosperity and stability of the early twentieth century. But without
exception, social unrest, class resentment, and economic uncertainty
have thwarted the best plans wrought by the country's brightest
people.
What happened? Why is it that a nation blessed with enviable human
and natural resources finds it so difficult to reverse this slow and
melancholy decline into pettiness and inconsequence? The
explanations are numerous, contradictory, incomplete: colonial
economic structures, an irresponsible upper class, messianic
demagogues like Perón, a reactionary Catholic hierarchy, power-
hungry generals, authoritarian traditions, the Communist conspiracy,
omnipotent multinationals, meddlesome imperial powers such as
Great Britain and the United States.
This book considers another factor in the Argentine equation which is
often overlooked in economic, social, and political histories: the
peculiarly divisive mind-set created by the country's nineteenth-
century intellectuals who first framed the idea of Argentina. This
ideological legacy is in some sense a mythology of exclusion rather
than a unifying national ideal, a recipe for divisiveness rather than
consential pluralism. This failure to create an ideological framework
for union helped produce what novelist Ernesto Sábato has called "a
society of opposers" as interested in humiliating each other as in
developing a viable nation united through