Gauchos, Gringos and Gallegos: The Assimilation of Italian and Spanish Immigrants in the Making of Modern Uruguay 1880-1930

Abstract

Uruguay is a country rarely studied or even mentioned by migration scholars, even though its history provides a rich testing ground for many of the paradigms that have been debated in migration studies over the last half-century.1 Uruguay’s British-supported independence as a buffer state between Argentina and Brazil in 1828 was first followed by the near-extermination of the small remaining indigenous population, and then by the arrival of many European immigrants, principally from Italy, Spain and France. These were joined by smaller contingents from Portugal, Germany, Switzerland, Austria and the British Isles and, after the First World War, by eastern Europeans and Middle Easterners. For much of the period from 1850 to 1930, during which most immigrants arrived, the ratio of newcomers per decade to resident population matched or even surpassed that of the United States, making Uruguay’s population grow sevenfold in the second half of the nineteenth century, the highest rate in Latin America by far.2 Immigration has also played an important role in attempts to explain the peculiarities of Uruguay’s twentieth-century political history. The arrival of so many Europeans, so goes the argument, led to the creation of working and middle classes, a process that ultimately found its expression in the progressive ideas of José Batlle y Ordóñez (president from 1903 to 1907 and from 1911 to 1915), who promoted welfare provisions, democratic institutions and secularization.3 In spite of this, the scholarship on immigration in Uruguay is limited to a few publications rarely read outside the country, which are often rather anecdotal and have tended to focus on the smaller and more ‘exotic’ groups, such as Waldensian or German agricultural colonies or the Jews or Armenians in the capital city of Montevideo. In relation to their size, the two largest groups by far, the Italians and the Spanish, who together made up roughly 70 per cent of all European immigrants from 1850 to 1930, have been rather neglected.4 This article seeks to redress this shortcoming by discussing the process through which these two groups blended into a Uruguayan society that was itself being formed, situating its findings within the wider international context of the transatlantic migrations of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.