INTRODUCTION CITIZENSHIP IN TWENTIETH- CENTURY ARGENTINA BENJAMIN BRYCE AND DAVID M. K. SHEININ t many moments in the twentieth century, the meaning of citizen- ship in Argentina has changed. In 1912, electoral reform expanded Avoting rights from elite men to include all men born or naturalized in the country.1 Only in 1947 did the franchise expand to include women. Yet, that alone is not the story of Argentine citizenship. When electoral democ- racy was interrupted in 1930, 1943, 1955, 1962, 1966, and 1976, people did not cease to be citizens. When Juan Perón became president in 1946, he cam- paigned heavily on the idea of social justice. During his populist rule, the rights of citizenship came to encompass greater access to social services and housing as well as higher wages. Throughout the century, citizenship—as a concept invoked by diverse groups of people—has defined people’s relation- ship with the state and their expectations about that state. It also shaped the rights and duties of not only Argentines but also foreign nationals living in the country. The language of citizenship was also fundamentally about belonging. Scholars in this volume and beyond use terms such as cultural, moral, and social citizenship. In seeking out these cultural, moral, and social require- ments, groups with power excluded others whose status in Argentine society was vulnerable. Even if formally citizens, workers, indigenous peoples, racial- ized groups, leftists, and religious minorities have often not been included in the Argentine body politic or have not experienced the same rights as others in many periods of the past century. Citizenship is, therefore, both a category of inclusion and of exclusion and one of rights and of the denial of those rights. ©2017 University of Pittsburgh Press. All rights reserved. 2 ||| BENJAMIN BRYCE AND DAVID M. K. SHEININ When indigenous peoples and Argentines outside major urban centers received fewer social services from the national and provincial governments over the course of the twentieth century; when employers, the police, or the military used force to quell strikes and worker protests in the 1910s and 1920s; when female sex workers rather than their male clients were dispro- portionately targeted by state health authorities as the culprits in the spread of venereal disease; when military governments detained, tortured, or killed dissenters in the 1970s and 1980s; and when growing numbers of urban poor observed others with better access to education, land, and water, one sees ample evidence of social exclusion and the denial of rights. Yet these examples of inequality are also part of making citizens in Argentina. The chapters in this book chart the evolving meanings of political, social, and cultural belonging in Argentina. Over the course of the twentieth century, the application of the label of citizen or its selective use affected the lives of millions of people. The volume’s authors examine the power of the Argentine state and of other social actors in defining the terms and boundaries of citi- zenship. Examining immigration, science, race, sport, Peronism, and dictator- ship, the volume illustrates how different groups and individuals developed and contested the meaning of citizenship in the country. This book argues that citizenship is an expansive and malleable concept worthy of analysis. It is a term that appears in sources and historiography, but its meaning is all too often taken for granted. DEFINING CITIZENSHIP Workers, politicians, elites, indigenous peoples, immigrants, and others in Argentina had a stake in defining citizenship. According to Anna Lundberg, citizenship describes “the relationship between individuals and a controlling authority in which rights and obligations are regulated.”2 At the same time, however, through this very relationship, “women, minority groups, and the poor become outsiders or second-class citizens.”3 Various social groups have a vested interest in limiting or expanding the boundaries of inclusion and in acquiring rights or denying them to others. By negotiating the meaning of citi- zenship, various groups—in political, social, cultural, and economic spheres— define it in terms of rights and duties that every resident of a society has in relation to one another and to the overarching system. Kathleen Canning and Sonya Rose have proposed that “citizenship can be understood as a political ©2017 University of Pittsburgh Press. All rights reserved. INTRODUCTION ||| 3 status assigned to individuals by states, as a relation of belonging to specific communities, or as a set of social practices that define the relationships between peoples and states and among peoples within communities.”4 Rose adds that it can be helpful to think of citizenship “as a discursive framework, as a malleable language referring to the relationship between individuals and a political community.”5 In the context of a country transformed by mass migration between the 1870s and the 1930s and again in the two decades after the Second World War, citizenship in Argentina in the sense of legal status or nationality was a concern for millions of people. Starting in 1913, government officials and public health advocates deemed disease sufficient grounds to impede entry to the country, thereby marking certain groups ineligible for citizenship.6 In the 1920s, legislators also sought to exclude single mothers, political activists, prostitutes, beggars, and alcoholics attempting to immigrate to Argentina, all with a similar logic of protecting the national body from people who suppos- edly had the potential to become internal threats.7 Children and parents often complicated the categories of citizen and foreigner in the country.8 In 1910, 46 percent of the 1.2 million residents of the city of Buenos Aires were foreign nationals, and in 1914, 30 percent of the country’s 7.9 million residents were foreigners.9 Nonnaturalized foreign nationals were the parents of many of the Argentine citizens who made up the other 54 percent of the population of Buenos Aires or the 70 percent of the population born in the country. The demographic reality of the country in the early twentieth century meant that many foreign nationals had a deep interest in questions of citizenship. Aware that their children could or should have certain rights and duties, noncitizens could also participate in public debates about the terms of citizenship. State-funded or state-regulated education had the same impact on all families in Argentina, regardless of whether the pupils or the parents were Argentine citizens. Legislation made school attendance obligatory in 1884 in the city of Buenos Aires and in all national territories, and the country’s autonomous provinces passed similar legislation in the following decades. Nevertheless, while this official policy can serve as an example of a right and a duty of citizenship, attendance rates languished everywhere in the coun- try outside the city and province of Buenos Aires.10 As the century wore on, millions of Argentine children did not complete their elementary education. Some children and youth attended only sporadically or dropped out in order ©2017 University of Pittsburgh Press. All rights reserved. 4 ||| BENJAMIN BRYCE AND DAVID M. K. SHEININ to meet the needs of the family economy. A lack of public services in some areas also made it difficult to provide universal access to education. This enduring deficit illustrates an important element of citizenship politics. In the founding discourse of the public school system from the 1880s, the themes of preventing crime, fostering peace, promoting general well-being, and securing the benefits of liberty appeared frequently.11 Argentine educa- tion reformers believed they could focus on the next generation and impose specific criteria of citizenship while older, less desirable civic and social cul- tures would vanish with the passage of time.12 Language also became a central feature of the nascent school system and of the evolving definition of civic and cultural belonging in Argentina.13 In 1910 José María Ramos Mejía, president of the National Council of Education, stated that “the better we teach our lan- guage in schools, the more the child will be bound to his land, even when he is not taught for expressly patriotic purposes.”14 He also asserted, “It is well known that the mastery of a language that is spoken in a country can be a way to ensure that the country is loved and can be something that unites the men who inhabit it. Studying language has so much importance that in terms of patriotic education many feel that it is the only way to cultivate patriotism.”15 Citizenship—in the sense of nationality—could be acquired in Argentina, but doing so in the early twentieth century was uncommon. In highlighting the exclusionary vision of national belonging held by many Argentine elites, Julia Rodriguez writes that it was one thing to welcome Europeans as laborers and agricultural peons, but “it was another thing to welcome them as citizens.”16 Conversely, Lilia Ana Bertoni has shown that a group of prominent Argentines in the 1880s and 1890s, including Domingo Sarmiento, Roque Sáenz Peña, and Estanislao Zeballos, very much wanted to encourage naturalization. These liberal reformers believed that if a large portion of men were not politically represented, they would challenge the legitimacy of state authority.17 As Samuel Baily notes, until a major electoral refom in 1912 (the Sáenz Peña Law), the Argentine political system “consisted of a number of powerful groups . competing within a restricted arena to influence decisions of the national, provincial, and city governments. Elections were a mechanism to provide the peaceful rotation of offices among the members of the recognized political groups, not a way for all adult male citizens to express their views and influence governmental actions.”18 Because citizenship did not grant the majority of residents in the country, especially workers, access to political power, few foreigners took on Argentine citizenship.