Argentina

GELER, LEA; RODRÍGUEZ, MARIELA

The Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of Race, Ethnicity and Nationalism

Blackwell

Lugar: Chicester; Año: 2016; p. 1 - 6

As happened in other American countries, the process of state consolidation in Argentina required the building of a nation. The local elites running the state agreed on a national, white-European project, different to other Latin American countries that embraced mestizaje as a national ideology, veiling the presence of Afro-Argentineans and Indigenous peoples and celebrating the European migrations. Territorial conquest and citizenship worked to create an integrated system in the Republic, allowing the growth of feelings of national identification that subordinated ethnic or racial identities. The nation building process was also supported by strongly enforced public policies that nationalized the massive European immigration of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. During the twentieth century, the racialization of the class system, framed in a very nationalistic environment, channeled popular demands, leaving no place for claims of ethnicity. As a result of such a strategy Argentina, for the most part of its republican history, considered itself to be a homogenous white European nation. Today, this situation is changing, opening the future to new identifications, policies and categories.