Emotions and Migration in Argentina at the Turn of the Twentieth Century

Abstract

This book is about failed marriages and how migration played a role in their failure. It is a translation of a 2019 book titled Lazos rotos: La inmigración, el matrimonio y las emociones en la Argentina entre los siglos XIX y XX. Narrower than its English title suggests, the book focuses specifically on cases of marital conflict that found their way into the judicial record, including bigamy, domestic abuse, murder, and adultery (real or imagined). Migrating might not lead to a greater proportion of failed relationships (and their related crimes), but as María Bjerg shows, it added unique pressures, ones that sedentary people did not have. The book draws from about 25 court cases from the city and province of Buenos Aires between 1880 and 1905 as well as newspaper accounts of the plaintiffs, defendants, and victims. Migration is central to all these cases. Strains brought by a significant period of separation (several years) before a couple was reunited were a significant factor in all disputes. Feelings of alienation in a new society also loomed over these unhappy denouements. Many of the crimes took place in the conventillos (tenement housing) of Buenos Aires, and the tight living quarters and the prying eyes and ears of neighbors fueled discovery and appeared in court testimonies and newspaper accounts.The cases of bigamy were particularly striking. Bigamy here refers to men remarrying in Argentina while having an estranged wife across the ocean. Bjerg uncovers several instances of married men leaving behind wives (and sometimes children), nominally with the shared decision that the woman would later follow. Yet in these cases, absence did not make the heart grow fonder, and sometimes the man grew more distant or entirely silent in epistolary exchanges or the woman refused to uproot her life and resettle in Argentina. In court, some men successfully argued that so much time had passed (as much as a decade) or that the wife disobediently refused to follow that they were entitled to remarry and start anew. That such arguments worked in some instances reveals much about the importance of class, gender, and the malleability of the law. Other men, such as Domingo DeBartolo, were sentenced to 4.5 years in jail. In these cases of bigamy and in others of adultery and murder, Bjerg exposes the varied meanings and double standards that applied to male and female honor at the turn of the twentieth century in Argentina.Bjerg draws exclusively from cases involving Italian and Spanish migrants, and the author notes that archival records in Argentina suggest that rural Germans and Danes or urban Jews settled marital conflict differently (p. 123). More theorization or reflection on these archival absences or the incorporation of further research in the revised English book could have been illuminating. That Italians and Spaniards comprised 75 percent of the foreign nationals in the country (according to the 1914 census) does not explain why they make up 100 percent of the court cases related to abuse, murder, adultery, and bigamy. Did factors relating to longer separations and a trailing spouse, compared to those relating to more family-centered migration, lead to greater strife for the few dozen Italians and Spaniards who appear in this book? Were there cultural, religious, or community factors that kept marital conflict out of the public eye (whether through preemptive conflict resolution or hiding)? If other groups are not in court cases, are there other ways to talk about emotions as they relate to migration (such as hope, nostalgia, nationalism, love, boredom, sadness, disdain, etc.)?The focus on migration-specific issues that affect emotions offers a fascinating contribution to both the history of emotions and the history of migration. As Bjerg notes, these cases reveal the “heavy emotional toll of migration” and expose the flip side of standard accounts of people living or embracing transnational lives (p. 2). This book reminds us of some of the ways that separation, epistolary relationships (including when illiteracy was an important factor), and emotions suffered as the result of that same transnationalism. This book examines the final breakdown of marriages, but it offers a potent reminder of how multiyear separations put strains on all relationships and how everybody involved in migration works “to reestablish the affective bond and rekindle the language of love and the intimacy of conjugal life” (pp. 45–46). With its focus on emotions, this book proposes a series of new methodological questions, and historians of migration and of Latin America more broadly will find that Bjerg's work offers many new angles to approach well-studied topics.