Abstract
This article focuses on the early insertion of Italian scientists and thinkers in the Argentinean modernisation process, highlighting how science and teaching were placed “at the service” of the construction of the modern state, therefore laying the foundations of an academic exchange capable of fostering the development of international relations that accompanied the political, social and cultural integration. In so doing, the article proposes a reconsideration of the history of Italy–Argentina relations in light of the study of scientific migrations.
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Notes
- 1.
Article 14: “All the inhabitants of the Nation enjoy the following rights in accordance with the laws regulating their exercise, namely: the right to work and to engage in any lawful activity; the right to navigate and trade; to present petitions to the authorities; to enter, remain, transit and leave Argentine territory; to make their ideas public through the press without prior censorship; to use and dispose of their property; to associate for charitable purposes; to worship freely; to teach and learn”.
Article 20: “Foreigners enjoy in the territory of the Nation all the civil rights of a citizen; they may conduct their own business, trade and profession, own real estate, acquire the same and dispose of it; navigate along rivers and coasts; freely profess worship; make a will and marry within the law. They are not required to take citizenship, nor to pay extraordinary forcible contributions. They shall obtain nationality after two years of continuous residence in the country, but the authority may shorten this period in favour of those who request it, claiming and proving that they have rendered services to the Republic”.
- 2.
The progression of the flow of Italian emigrants to Argentina went from 284,000 in the period between 1884 and 1893 to 393,000 in the period between 1894 and 1903, increasing to 810,000 between 1894 and World War I (Fauri, 2015).
- 3.
In his speech Miguel Cané pointed out that “the profound social upheavals that have Europe as their theatre, have highlighted the state of absolute defencelessness of the Argentine state, and this because the Constituent Assembly of 1853 could not have foreseen that among the men of goodwill called to cultivate the land would come the enemies of any social order, who had come to commit savage crimes in the name of a chaotic idea” (Oved, 1976).
- 4.
- 5.
“I went into all the old familiar corners, and as I passed under the vaults of the cloister, my memories rose up, obedient to a sympathetic evocation. Here, I said to myself, the good Cosson, so affectionate, so just, read to us the elegies of Gilbert, with sincere enthusiasm, or recited to us the Théraméne’s roll without looking at the book; here was where Professor Rosetti, delighted with my exposition, predicted to me that I would be a distinguished engineer if I persevered in mathematics, for which I was born”.
- 6.
Looking at the censuses of 1887, 1895 and 1904, more than half of Buenos Aires’ population continued to be made up of foreigners. According to Zaragoza (1996), thanks to European immigration Buenos Aires experienced spectacular growth, going from 200,000 inhabitants in 1869 to over 300,000 in 1878, over half a million in 1890 and one million in 1905.
- 7.
In his constant concern to keep Europe as an example of civilisation, with regard to the integration of foreigners observed in Paris, in one of his memoirs and impressions Miguel Cané comments (not without a note of admiration): “The foreigner is admitted, the doors of the temple of science are opened to him, but only as much as is necessary to make him a propagandist of French glory. Not for opening his arms to him, to say to him: this is your land, this is the homeland of all men of good will who inhabit the globe, come to me, study, make a career for yourselves, live among us and prosper” (Cané, 1934, 79–81).
- 8.
Apart from philanthropic issues, according to Fernández, the presence among the members of the Association of some of the most detached rural landlords and entrepreneurs of the time (such as Olivera, Gowland, Pereyra, Martínez de Hoz, Armstrong or Casares) can be explained by the interest in introducing a labour force more accustomed to new modes of production into the country.
- 9.
The Argentine researcher Tarragó (2011) reminds us in her study on Ligurian navigators and traders in the Plata and Parana rivers, the relationship between the Italian regions of Piedmont and Liguria and the region of Rio de la Plata became more complex in the first half of the nineteenth century, in parallel with the intensification of the violent and contradictory process of Italian unification, inevitably linked to the Savoy dynasty and its role as a balancing space for European tensions gravitating around the north of the peninsula.
- 10.
In the macro subject of Italian immigration to the Plata region, the figure of the exile as an active subject deserves a separate reflection, and the category of exile as a fundamental element in the process of building a transcontinental national identity, thanks to the proselytising work of revolutionaries, volunteers and intellectuals installed on the Atlantic side, promoters of a national sentiment fuelled by the development of collective identities, in turn fuelled by the formulation of patriotic discourses, and capable of propitiating the creation of political options decisive for the birth of modern nation-states (Bonvini, 2018a, 2018b).
- 11.
In addition to representing the culmination of a cultural and political process that began at the end of the eighteenth century, the Risorgimento can be considered as the Italian response to the call of European romantic nationalisms, in opposition to the conservative forces of the ancient regime: not only a political/territorial impulse, but a political/spiritual process that led to the identification of the Italian nation as the community of reference on which to base the claims and projects for the construction of an Italian nation-state (Salvatorelli, 1963).
- 12.
“What name shall you give, what name is worthy of a country composed of two hundred thousand leagues of territory and a population of eight hundred thousand inhabitants? A desert. What name shall you give to the Constitution of that country? The Constitution of a desert. Well, that country is the Argentine Republic; and whatever its Constitution may be, it will be nothing else for many years to come but the Constitution of a desert. But what is the Constitution that best suits the desert? That which serves to make it disappear; that which serves to make the desert cease to be a desert in the shortest possible time, and become a populated country (…) The Constitutions of depopulated countries can have no other serious and rational purpose, for now and for many years, than to give the solitary and abandoned territory the population it needs, as a fundamental instrument of its development and progress” (Alberdi, 2008, 207).
- 13.
“How will the life-giving spirit of European civilisation come to our soil in the future? As it has come in all ages: Europe will bring us its new spirit, its habits of industry, its practices of civilisation, in the immigrations it sends us. Every European who comes to our shores brings us more civilisations in his habits, which he then communicates to our inhabitants, than many books of philosophy […]. Do we want to plant and acclimatise in America the English liberty, the French culture, the industriousness of man from Europe and the United States? Let us bring living pieces of them in the customs of its inhabitants and establish them here” (Alberdi, 2008, 100).
- 14.
Probably its most brutal expression will be the military campaign of extermination and genocide of the original peoples of the Pampean and Patagonian regions, sadly known as the Conquest of the Desert (1878–1885).
- 15.
In his studies on the military, scientific and religious campaigns in southern Argentina during the second half of the nineteenth century, the Italian-Argentinean historian Blengino (2005, 27) points out: “the term desert does not indicate an uninhabited space, devoid of life, but the territories of the pampas and Patagonia occupied by the Indians. The frontier advancing over the pampas contributes not only to the physical disappearance of the Indians occupying these territories, but to transforming nature, to conditioning and selecting the primitive fauna. Political, military and religious observers, and especially men of science […] describe these men and this nature with full awareness that what they are perceiving is about to disappear. The present, compressed between past and future, is translated into the opposition between prehistory and modernity”.
- 16.
Just a detail, but enough to recall the leading role played by the Italian economic and entrepreneurial elite of Buenos Aires in completing the work. It was then thanks to loans from the two main Italian banking institutions in Buenos Aires, the Banco Italiano del Rio de la Plata and the Nuevo Banco Italiano, that in 1889 they were able to purchase the Almagro land where the institution still stands today.
- 17.
At the time of the Colony, there was no Argentinean Science, and if, by chance, activities of this nature had appeared, they would have been the result of the action of religious orders, a legacy undoubtedly of the evangelising process and the scientific and teaching activity that they themselves exercised in the Middle Ages. […]. Reading through the archives of the SCA (Sociedad Cientifica Argentina), it is evident how its founders sought, through their studies, works and initiatives, “to foment the country's nascent industry, to unveil the secret of its lands and climates with each class of exploration and study trips, to make it a place of intellectuality and animating spirit for men of study, professionals and students. Foment knowledge of the country abroad through collaboration in congresses, scientific competitions, symposia (…) dictate lectures and organise a public library that would contribute a large number of selected works to spread knowledge and culture” (Pous Peña, 1969, 115).
- 18.
An emblematic figure of Argentine engineering, despite being considered one of the reference points for railway development and having directed the construction of the port of Riachuelo in 1876, Luis Huergo ultimately intervened in the most diverse sectors: river navigation, construction of bridges and docks, installation of industries, flooding, mining and quarrying, and oil fields. 6 June, the day of his graduation, is today considered National Engineering Day.
- 19.
In alphabetical order: Valentín Balbín, Santiago Brian, Adolfo Büttner, Jorge Coquet, Luis A. Huergo, Francisco Lavalle, Carlos Olivera, Matías Sánchez, Luis Silveyra, Miguel Sorondo, Zacarías Tapia, Guillermo Villanueva y Guillermo White. Guillermo White, president of the SCA between 1877 and 1878, was responsible for the construction of a large part of the national railway network, which grew from 722 km of roads in 1870 to over 20,000 km, directing during the 1890s the construction of the railway line from Bahia Blanca to Neuquen, a strategic work to assert the State's domination and control over the Patagonian regions following the Conquest of the Desert. The port of the city of Bahia Blanca (Ingeniero White) is named after him by decree of President Julio Argentino Roca.
- 20.
“Science can only be revolutionary, that is to say, it can only demolish the work of error in order to build a new one in its place, because that is what progress, the inevitable destiny of mankind, consists in, and science is the minister of that progress. Like the latter, then, it is irresistible and, like the sea, invasive; except that the finger of God does not wish to stop it, saying, Thou shalt not pass this way. When it conquers and persuades one truth, a million other truths of all kinds spring up as its consequence and enlarge its domain” (J. M. Gutiérrez “Escritos Históricos y Literarios”, in Palcos, Alberto (Dir.), Grandes Escritores Argentinos, Buenos Aires, Jackson, 1953, vol. 22, 205).
- 21.
The genre of travel diaries compiled by Italians across the boundless distances of Argentina is a genre that stretches from Alberto Maria De Agostini, famous for his cartographies of Patagonia, to figures such as the Neapolitan Pedro de Angelis (1784–1859), considered one of the first (and most controversial) historians and chroniclers of the Rosismo period.
- 22.
With their names, the localities of Ingeniero Jacobacci, Cipolletti and Clemente Onelli, all three in the Patagonian region of Rio Negro, pay tribute to the three Italian engineers and their works.
- 23.
Darwin’s voyage to Argentina, on board the ship Beagle, commanded by the young captain Robert Fitzroy (1805–1865), lasted approximately five years, from 27 December 1831 to 19 October 1836 (Palma, 2009).
- 24.
The arrival of the three lecturers Rosetti, Strobel and Speluzzi came about thanks to Paolo Mantegazza and his recommendation to Juan Maria Gutierrez.
- 25.
From this perspective, the arrival and rooting of the so-called Lombroso Galaxy in Argentina would function as a kind of catalyst between the turn-of-the-century reception of eugenics implicit in Darwinist thought and the subsequent involvement of intellectual elites with the bio-typological theories enunciated by the Italian fascist endocrinologist Nicola Pende (“godfather” of the Argentine Association of Biotypology, Eugenics and Social Medicine, founded in 1932), promoting the monopolisation of the eugenic field by ideas close to the Italian authoritarianism of the period between the two World Wars, and the consolidation of bio-typology as a scientific ideology that extends until the beginning of the post-World War II period, affecting the different public policies conceived during a broader time span that goes almost to the most recent history (Vallejo & Miranda, 2010).
- 26.
Among the noteworthy projects we include the First International Congress of Latin Culture, strongly desired by Nicola Pende and scheduled for 12 October 1936, at which the AABEMS founded an Athenaeum (1934) to promote the study of all expressions of Italian culture, science, arts and philosophy. The Congress project was to be abandoned due to the opposition produced in the diplomatic field by the Ethiopian Campaign.
- 27.
For a comparative study of the fascist phenomenon, authoritarianism and Latin American nationalisms in the period between the two world wars, see Paine (1980).
- 28.
For a reflection on the relationship between Italian fascism and Argentine politics, intellectual world and society in the 1930s, see Bertagna’s recent article (2020). For an in-depth look at the migration phenomenon in the post-Fascist era and the legal or clandestine forms of “escape” of the fascist political and business establishment from Italy to Argentina, see Bertagna’s La patria di riserva (2006). For an overview of nationalism and fascism in Argentina, see Devoto’s text (2002a).
- 29.
As an exile from Mussolini’s fascist regime, Gino Germani paid particular attention to the advent of Peronism, often reductively christened by Western opponents and observers as a kind of South American fascism (not least by virtue of Juan Domingo Peron’s military trajectory and his documented presence in the Europe of totalitarianism in the late 1930s). Nevertheless, an acute observer like Germani was intrigued above all by the apparent paradox of a workers’ movement unconditionally supporting a military-style government led by a leader of a different extraction from that of the masses supporting it. According to Germani, Argentina’s rapid process of industrialisation in the 1930s had generated an equally rapid movement of migrants who, moving from rural areas to the city, were abandoning a traditional society to integrate into a “modern” one, in which they arrived without any trade union or political experience and therefore experienced the feeling of having lost their sphere of reference, belonging and representation, therefore remaining in a state of ‘availability’, ready to be appropriated by the pseudo-representation offered by a charismatic leader like Perón” (Terán, 2008, 273).
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Galassi, P. (2023). Science, Techniques, Ideas: Italian Emigration in the Construction of Modern Argentina. In: Fauri, F., Mantovani , D. (eds) Past and Present Migration Challenges. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-39431-7_5
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