To Belong in Buenos Aires: Germans, Argentines, and the Rise of a Pluralist Society

Abstract

Benjamin Bryce's To Belong in Buenos Aires offers an impressively researched and compelling account of German migrants' and their descendants' efforts to carve out an ethnic space within the Argentine nation. The book's primary focus is the institutions—mutual aid societies, schools, and churches—that German porteños established and nourished between 1880 and 1930, which Bryce situates in various local, national, and transnational processes. Bryce argues convincingly that the diverse notions of German ethnic identity that emanated from these institutions represented, at their core, attempts to assert belonging within Argentina, not attempts at cultural isolation or separatism. The successes of these identitary projects complicated the pretensions of Argentine political and intellectual elites to forge a homogenous nation based primarily on the country's Iberian roots. They also confounded attempts by successive civic, religious, and political entities in Europe to foment certain specific kinds of Germanness in the Americas. In this way, Germans in Buenos Aires helped to form a de facto pluralist society in Argentina.The book is organized thematically by type of institution: social welfare (chapter 1), educational (chapters 2–4), and ecclesiastical (chapters 5–6). This structure emphasizes the multifarious meanings and purposes of engagement with so-called ethnic institutions. Attending a bilingual German-Spanish school could be as much an attempt to emphasize ethnic difference or cultural maintenance as it was about ensuring that the Argentine-born children of immigrants had every advantage possible to thrive as Argentines. Hiring a Catholic priest to give sermons in German could be as much about encouraging insertion into broader Catholic porteño society as about maintaining a separate German confessional community. Welcoming financial support from Prussian institutions did not prevent German porteños from spending that money to further their Argentine goals. While the book's structure makes it somewhat harder to grasp the general development of German institutions and identities in Buenos Aires over time, it greatly facilitates comparisons across and between ethnic groups in Argentina and elsewhere. For example, any researcher interested in the interplay between religious, ethnic, and national identities will easily find many helpful points of comparison with the German Argentine case.Methodologically, Bryce breaks out of traditional dichotomies used to map a group's trajectory from arrival in a new host country to becoming part of the local social fabric. Rather than rely on sliding scales of assimilation (linguistic, economic, political, confessional, etc.) to a national norm, he effectively demonstrates that claiming difference in one area can, in reality, be an assertion of belonging in another. The book is also careful to resist the exceptionalist narratives common among immigrant groups and too often reproduced within the historiography. To do this, Bryce consistently contextualizes his findings not just within the relatively scant historiography on Germans in Argentina but also within the cases of other migrant ethnic communities in Argentina and the Americas, as well as the growing body of work on Germans abroad (Auslandsdeutsche). This makes To Belong in Buenos Aires a prime example of the novel insights offered by the “New Ethnic Studies” in Latin America, demonstrating how ethnic identities can reveal much about broader cultural, political, and societal contexts within a nation. It is even more impressive that Bryce also engages robustly with contemporary debates in German historiography, showing the importance and limitations of transnational connections in the period.What remains less clear is how non-German Argentines (including other migrant groups and their descendants) understood, engaged with, represented, and shaped German identities in Argentina in this period. For example, Bryce justifiably holds that more porteños of German heritage were “indifferent about Weimar politics” than held strong positions either way, but that does not mean that others did not associate German ethnic populations with the upheavals of the 1910s and 1920s (p. 9). Similarly, while Bryce rightly points out that within the German communities the notions of whiteness or racialized identity were far less important than that of an ethnic Germanness, German migrants were undoubtedly imagined in racialized ways by other Argentines, both elite and nonelite.To Belong in Buenos Aires is a much welcome addition to the fields of migration and ethnic studies in Latin America, particularly in relation to the state's important role in shaping the contours of community identities and institutions. It also promises to make large contributions to Argentine and German historiographies and the histories of education and religion in the region.