The Pole of Prosperity: Race, Modernization, and Tucumán As Argentina’s National Laboratory, 1959–70

Throughout the twentieth century, governments from the Americas to Europe confronted the alarming existence of underdeveloped regions that jeopardized a fragile social order. For Latin American regimes, the rise of post-war populism and the Cuban Revolution fueled fears that these regions’ supposed cultural and economic “backwardness” were breeding grounds for demagoguery, communist subversion, and the mass exodus of racially suspect migrants. Argentina’s northwestern province of Tucumán provides a compelling case study of how these fears transformed peripheries into epicenters of larger national struggles. My paper examines how, between the years 1959 and 1970, Argentina’s smallest yet most densely populated province became a laboratory for radical modernization projects. Saddled with a collapsing sugar industry, one of the region’s largest militant labor unions, and a mestizo rural proletariat that overwhelmingly supported deposed populist Juan Domingo Perón, Tucumán captured the attention of policy makers and the public in Buenos Aires at a time when the country grappled with significant social cleavages. By 1966, the newly installed Onganía military dictatorship declared that the province would become a showcase for its “Argentine Revolution”: an ambitious attempt to extirpate Peronism and all other “subversive” tendencies from the nation. The dictatorship envisioned re-ordering Tucumán’s supposedly “feudal” economy to promote stability and transform the Peronist “cabecita negro” from an impoverished illiterate easily manipulated by dangerous elements into a modern, non-threatening subject. The “Argentine Revolution” ended in wholesale disaster, resulting in a quarter of a million desperate migrants and political turmoil. This history is important not only for its tragedy, but also for what it reveals about peripheries as sites of contestation, where developmentalist discourse and violence marked the difference between welcomed citizens and undesirable inhabitants.