Introduction: race and nation in the Southern Cone

‘The expulsion [of immigrants] will take place from the dock where, next to the customs house in which goods are checked, there will be an office exclusively for controlling [them].’ These words are from a fictitious report about immigration controls in the port of Buenos Aires written by founder and editor of Caras y Caretas Eustaquio Pellicer in 1899. The piece, published in the regular Sinfonía section of the magazine, which offered satirical commentaries on current social and political events, predicted that the process ‘will be managed by specialized personnel who can distinguish between useful people and dangerous ones, and who can read their faces like an open book’. To the contemporary middle-class reader of Caras y Caretas the author's satirical references to the anthropological and criminological sciences would be immediately recognizable: Pellicer was mocking the scientific pretence to identify dangerous individuals merely from observing their physical appearance in search for signs of degeneration. His caustic language reflected and somehow anticipated the cultural and political practice of the following decade: in analyzing immigration legislation of the early twentieth century in Argentina, Gabriela Anahí Costanzo has stated that ‘it sounded as if Cesare Lombroso were speaking through the mouths and pens of the legislators’.

From the end of the nineteenth century, the heavy influx of European immigrants to the Southern Cone triggered doubts about the social and political consequences of such a sharp and unprecedented increase in foreign population. The racial question (el problema de la raza) ‘preoccupied Argentine and Chilean thinkers no less than economic problems’. The impact of European immigration on the development of both racialist theories and social reforms has been widely discussed, especially in the case of Argentina. Considerable attention has been devoted to the application of criminological theories to mechanisms of social control, to the impact of racial theories on ethnic and nationalist ideologies, and to the process of legalization and medicalization of social issues. By focusing on the relationship between European immigration and the discourse of the raza, this chapter argues that the debate on the nation was shaped by perceptions of decadent Latinity.