Race and Argentina

by Paul Jones

When I first visited Buenos Aires, Argentina in late 1979 a British guidebook described the country as 98% White. I had my doubts, but then I had heard that Argentina was supposed to be the most European of the Latin American countries.

As time went by, I realized that for the case of the city of Buenos Aires to a certain extent this was true, but for the rest of the country it was mainly Mestizo. The Argentines gradually pushed back the Indians towards Patagonia in the south, in a similar type of movement as had happened in the United States with westward expansion. But whereas in the United States  there was a certain amount of admixture, the expansion mainly involved white families moving along the famous wagon trains such as the Oregon Trail. The saying, “The only good Indian is a dead Indian,” showed the general attitude in the West towards the “Redskins,” and so “Mountain Men” who had squaws for wives remained either outcasts or on the fringes of respectable society.

However, in Argentina growing numbers of Spaniards mated with Native Americans and produced what became known as the “Gaucho.” These were similar to the “Vaqueros” in Mexico, who also were usually mixed race between Spaniards and Indians. As time went on, at least in the provinces outside the city of Buenos Aires, these became the predominant ethnic mix in the country. In fact, there is a national, epic poem called “Martin Fierro” that was written in the mid-1800’s and which describes the trials of a Gaucho who gets in trouble with the law and has various adventures that show the injustices of the society towards someone who is poor and down on his luck.

If we fast forward to the present, we see that while Argentine society does have a majority of Mestizos, the power structure is exceedingly white. The British influence in Argentina was quite strong in the early 20^th century, and many British private schools were established. In fact, my first teaching experience in the country in the early 1980’s during the times of the military dictatorship began at an all boys school established by a Scottish headmaster. In previous decades it had many boarding students who were sons of British “estancieros,” land owners in Patagonia. However, most of the students I had fit the saying I once heard about those living in Buenos Aires, that “they speak Spanish, think they are British and have Italian last names.”

Nowadays, there must be at least 25-30 British private schools in the city of Buenos Aires, and the boys play principally rugby and the girls field hockey. While there is the occasional Mestizo student, for the most part they are of European origin. It must also be realized that white skin color alone is not the sole criterion for being considered as having European background, so an Italian from southern Italy or a Spaniard from Spain with olive skin is considered European and part of the mainly white, European culture.

In short, while all Argentines are part of a universalistic, Hispanic culture and heritage, the racial realities are that those of mainly unmixed, European background are the “movers and shakers” of the society. While the Jews play an important role in the media and entertainment, as well as in financial affairs, they are not trying to do an “extreme makeover” of society as is obviously what has been happening in the United States and all over the West. The mainly white students who attend private schools in Buenos Aires do not feel ashamed about their European heritage and are not hammered day and night as they are in the United States and the West to feel guilty for being who they are. At the university level there is obviously a strong Marxist component at play, but it is involved with issues of economics and social class protest, not Cultural Marxism.

To summarize, white young people in Buenos Aires, and in all parts of Argentina for that matter,  grow up with a much healthier racial outlook than is present here in the U.S. and Europe, where they are being pressed to “check their white privilege” and accept their fate as second class citizens in a society which is increasingly less like the one their parents and grandparents grew up in.

However, racial demographics has a way of catching up with societies of Latin America which had been initially controlled by mainly persons of European descent. Consider the wave of Cubans who fled that country after the Communist takeover in the late 1950’s:  It was made up  almost all of persons of Spanish descent in the upper-middle class who came into Florida, and with their professional and educational background it wasn’t long before they became influential in Miami and other areas of the south of that state. In a similar way, the white “upper crust” of Venezuela became swamped by the Chavez, Socialist revolution, and a further exodus of upper-middle class, European background Hispanics entered the U.S. in the first decades of the 21^st Century. So while for the moment those of European background in Argentina are “riding high,” especially with the new President, Mauricio Macri and his moderate-conservative political party, one wonders if they too are “living on borrowed time” so that the racial dialectic might catch up with them as it did previously with their counterparts in Cuba and Venezuela.

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