In 1910 Alberto Gerchunoff’s The Jewish Gauchos, a book on Jewish life in agricultural colonies, was published in celebration of the centennial of Argentinean independence. The creative potential of the oxymoron “Jewish gaucho” coined by Gerchunoff has been proven over and over again, and it has become a shortcut to talk about the experience of Jews in Argentina, and all over Latin America. Its use in the title of The Invention of the Jewish Gaucho: Villa Clara and the Construction of Argentine Identity is misleading, since while Judith Noemí Freidenberg does treat the figure of the Jewish gaucho, her book does much more than that. Freidenberg documents one hundred years of the life in Villa Clara, an agricultural colony in the Argentinean province of Entre Ríos, and is both observer and participant in the celebration of the town’s centennial. As the author shows, Villa Clara’s Jewish majority has moved away from the village, and the town is now more diverse in terms of ethnicity and class, but it does maintain its role as a “producer of heritage.”The book originated as a personal project: Freidenberg traveled to Villa Clara with her mother, who grew up in the village. She uses Villa Clara as “a case study of the impact of nineteenth-century European immigration on the construction of Argentine national identity” (p. xv). Freidenberg advocates the use of the ethnographic method to elicit plural versions of local history and thus contribute to the writing of a more inclusive and diverse social history. She uses direct observation, literary sources, documents, and multiple interviews. What emerges is a diverse microcosm of Argentina, inhabited by indigenous peoples, European immigrants of different regions, and criollos. Freidenberg’s attention to native populations, often overlooked in studies on immigrant communities, is especially pertinent.Freidenberg studies the Jewish establishments alongside several other European colonies hailing from Italy, Spain, Switzerland, France, and Belgium. She also accounts for other displaced communities such as the Germans of the Volga, the German Russians, and the Lebanese Syrians. She therefore complicates the relationships between nation, language, culture, and country of origin. While it is estimated that about half the immigrants from Italy and Spain went back to their countries of origin, Jews had nowhere to return to, since they had signed away the possibility of return when they left the Russian Empire. The poignancy of this situation underlies the commitment of Jewish immigrants to make the Argentinean experience work. For them, however, migration to the big cities, with their economic and educational opportunities, was a new frontier, and second generation colonos often chose internal migration.Freidenberg traces the creation of European colonies in the provinces of Entre Ríos, starting off with the question “who was here first?” The response to this might seem obvious but as her research shows is contested among the different communities and different social agents. Her emphasis is on memory and the creation of community, and she describes the different layers of memory that lie within the region where the Jewish colony that would become Villa Clara and other European colonies were established. Freidenberg’s study moves from country to province; from province to region, and then closes in on the town of Villa Clara and its neighborhoods in order to show us how the national echoes in the local, and how the local signifies in the national. The last chapter that deals with the 1990s has the main objective of analyzing changes in Villa Clara but also problematizing the writing of history. “When I began fieldwork in 2002,” Freidenberg says, “I invited residents to discuss how best to write the history of Villa Clara. I asked them to visualize Villa Clara and describe it to an imaginary outsider” (p. 125). The experience indeed yields exciting results, from quasi-lyrical accounts of interclass and interethnic bliss to embattled descriptions of struggles for space, material goods, and recognition.Freidenberg’s The Invention of the Jewish Gaucho: Villa Clara and the Construction of Argentine Identity is an important contribution to the social history of rural communities in Latin America. It will be illuminating for scholars of Latin American immigration and for those interested in multiethnic communities. The maps, graphs, and photographs that illustrate the book and its literary references and oral history interviews open it up as well to a more general reading public.
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Oct 1, 2013
Nicholas Corsaro 
Open Access