The Mutualist Moment: Heath and Ethnicity in Buenos Aires, 1910–55

In the first half of the twentieth century, mutual aid societies played a central role in the health network of Buenos Aires. Through a combination of hospitals, clinics, and home visits, they provided the health care services to approximately 20 percent of the people in the city. The overwhelming majority of the people who fostered this mutualist project joined specific organizations based on their ethnicity. Indeed, approximately 80 percent of the members of mutual aid societies in Buenos Aires in the 1920s were immigrants or the children of immigrants. Mutualism was often both a community and ideological project, one that envisioned a harmonious and progressive social order that united affluent and working-class people along ethnic lines. Yet rather than reaching its apex during an era of mass migration, which peaked in the 1910s and declined significantly in the 1930s, mutual aid societies continued to expand in the 1930s and 40s. Major organizations such as the Centro Gallego, the Italian Unione e Benevolenza, the Catalan Montepío de Montserrat, and the non-ethnic Asociación Obrera de Socorros Mutuos doubled their membership numbers between 1925 and 1935, and combined they had over 100,000 members.

This paper draws from research in the private archives of several mutual aid societies in Buenos Aires as well as state sources in public archives. Engaging with an Argentine historiography about health that generally overlooks the agency of immigrants, it highlights the prominent role of immigrants in the provision of health services. Immigrant doctors, donors, and workers not only formed an important pillar – alongside the state and the Catholic Church – in social policies, they played a role in shaping the foundation on which the social policies of Juan Domingo Perón were built.