A History of Argentina: From the Spanish Conquest to the Present, Ezequiel Adamovsky, translated by Rebecca Wolpin, 2024, Duke University Press
What is fascinating about the way Argentina portrays itself to the world is what it thinks it is not.
Its political culture projected outwards would have us believe that its people are not, like most Latin American countries, the unruly product of a melting pot of mestizaje.
Argentina is something else, it would insist, a mainly European country displaced by chance in the Americas with an Old World civilisation and ambitions, so often and so visibly frustrated by the realities of its unjustified, secondary position in global capitalism.
This is important to Argentine politics because just as today what is called “social cohesion” is at the heart of policy efforts by a large swathe of countries to cope with the impact of mass migration, so it was throughout Latin America in the 19th and 20th centuries as slow and troubled processes of nation building forged independent republics in narrative opposition to the settler colonialism of the preceding Spanish and Portuguese empires.
Thus, Mexico’s revolutionary state transformed mestizaje into an ideology through fantasies about a hybrid “cosmic race”. Similarly, the “racial democracy” of Argentina’s giant neighbour Brazil, portrayed as unique for its smooth blending of African, indigenous, and European peoples, became a valuable policy fiction aimed at easing the strains of a post-slavery society.
Some countries such as Bolivia and Guatemala are still struggling with the colonial legacies of ethno-racial diversity and discrimination, and their indigenous populations continue to pay a high price for white denialism.
But Argentina would beg to differ. Its vision of itself as largely untainted by miscegenation is a defining attribute and an important undercurrent of Ezequiel Adamovsky’s history of a country still inordinately fascinated by its own existence. If nations were to have psychotherapists, Argentina would be visiting thrice weekly trying to work out what makes it special.
Adamovsky’s magisterial historical summary is built on an argument he has put forward elsewhere that helps to explain the struggles of introversion that bedevil the country.
“We Argentines do not agree on who we are or what the history is that brought us here,” the historian has stated, with the candour befitting a scholar of his status.
But as he shows, the truth is quite different to what Argentines tell themselves.
With a courage that is necessary whenever scholarship must turn to genetics to make a valid point—and sometimes it must—Adamovsky notes that research shows that most Argentines today have multiple ancestry. An estimated 70 per cent have both European and indigenous genetic inheritance, and about 8 per cent have some ancestry from sub-Saharan Africa.
In short, Argentina is very much the product a long post-colonial process of mestizaje — even if its popular narratives would almost certainly be in denial of that fact and the relative weight of these genetic markers varies considerably.
There is little doubt about their social weight, however. As the author writes: “The heterogeneity and disparities revealed in these data, along with state violence against indigenous peoples and the constant repetition of racist insults in daily interactions and political debates, clearly speak of a society that continues to find it difficult to deal with ethnic differences in a more or less egalitarian manner.”
Indeed, visions of a struggle of European civilisation against native barbarism have been woven like an unbreakable thread directly through the ideas of the country’s political and intellectual elites since Sarmiento.
They have marginalised the potential, as in the rest of Latin America, for the emergence of something akin to a national “race” reflecting a mixture of inheritances.
Looked at in the round, this phenomenon can help to explain many things about this intriguing country, not least a seam of violence and intolerance in the zero-sum and forever populist competitions to write its political story.
As Adamovsky writes: “Partially because of the demographic and social legacies of the colony, partially because of the discourses and narratives proposed during the organisation of the Argentine state, and partially because of the contentious manner in which political life unfolded during the twentieth century, in Argentina no vision of this ‘we’ has ever managed to become hegemonic.”
But an irony noted by the author is that these exclusionary visions do not extend to thought, and Argentina has been wealthy in cultural mestizaje. Its intellectual creativity is arguably without compare in Latin America, and has often focused on the other factor that frustrates Argentine identity: it’s peripheral position in global capitalism.
It is no surprise that the foundation of dependency theory were the ideas of the Argentine economist Raúl Prebisch, who distinguishedthe world into the economic “centre”, consisting of industrialised nations such as the US, and the “periphery”, consisting of primary producers among which was trapped his own country.
Nor is it surprising that Che Guevara was Argentine and devoted himself to anti-imperialism, or that the “Philosophy of Liberation” of Enrique Dussel, the highly influential Argentine Marxist, responds to the historical and socio-political context of Latin America as part of a global periphery under dependency theory.
As Adamovsky stresses, the peripheral position of Argentina in the global expansion of capitalism has had a profound effect on the nature of its society—the social forms fashioned by its incorporation into the international division of labour as a supplier of foodstuffs and importer of technology and higher value-added products.
One legacy of these structural characteristics underlying Argentina’s development has been pressure from below striving to shape the country according to other visions, and both popular protagonism and state violence to subdue it are again recognisable aspects of its national story.
The author writes: “In a variety of ways, the multiple forms of resistance by subaltern groups to authoritarianism, economic exploitation, the patriarchy, the commodification of culture, and the devastation of the environment have left a profound mark on national history.”
But, he adds, “The fact that the changes associated with popular protagonism were generally of a progressive nature was no guarantee that society would inevitably evolve in that direction.”
Adamovsky’s history of Argentina offers enlightening and candid insights into the currents that course beneath the surface of this complex and misunderstood country, which in some ways is unique in Latin America yet in others reflects all the region’s psychoses.
If you have struggled so far to understand it—and I confess to being one of the many who has—reading this history is the best way to start.
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Categories: Argentina, South America