Social Welfare beyond the State in Argentina, 1880–1955

Historians often present social welfare in Argentina and elsewhere in Latin America as a task divided between the state and the Catholic Church and a domain that the state came to dominate during the presidencies of populist leaders in the mid-twentieth century. Yet in the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries, social welfare in Argentina was provided by families, the Catholic Church, charities, immigrant-run institutions, and some public institutions. Rather than looking for the origins of mid-twentieth-century welfare states in a select group of pre-existing government policies, this paper – and the broader book project from which it draws – argues that the nascent Argentine welfare state in the early 1950s stood on the shoulders of a pre-existing system where other entities beyond the state played important roles. The patchwork network of services supported by various social actors meant that state authority alone did not determine how this system evolved.

Drawing on state and religious archives as well as the private archives of several immigrant-run hospitals in Buenos Aires (particularly the Italian, British, Jewish, and German Hospitals), this paper focuses on health care as an illustrative example of a range of social welfare services such as orphanages, help for the needy, pensions, workers’ compensation, and unemployment benefits. So doing paints a more complex picture of the evolving ideas of citizenship and belonging in the country, in particular by focusing on organizations and funding models (religious institutions, private philanthropy, and immigrant associations) where nationality and legal status were not necessary for access.