Chileanization and Whitening in 19th-Century Argentina

Recently, historians have made substantial progress in understanding the construction of Argentina as a white nation, from examining the place of Afro-Argentines in this construction to how immigration policies worked to reinforce self-conceptualizations about national whiteness. While the capital of Buenos Aires has drawn the lion’s share of scholarship on this subject, there is perhaps no better place to unpack this history than the province of Mendoza, a place constructed as particularly white within a nation already constructed as white. This paper works to build on recent attempts to demystify the idea of Mendoza as a particularly white province by examining the place of Chileanness in this process of whitening in the mid-nineteenth century, a time when the erasure of racial categories in official documents, from criminal records to censuses, helped obfuscate social realities and tensions based on racialized and ethnicized hierarchies. What remained, however, were a different set of categories of social differentiation, including nationality. Criminal records and census records in the mid-nineteenth century identified people along the lines of sex, age, profession, and nationality, and in the context of Mendoza province this often helped identify people as Chilean. But far from being an indicator of having been born in Chile, this category was reflective of a process of filtering internal social tensions through this category of foreignness. This paper puts this process of reinscribing categories of social conflict into a broader context of the interplay of what are traditionally seen as internal categories of social differentiation (race and ethnicity) and external ones (nationality and foreignness) in the service of reinforcing social hierarchies and obfuscating social conflict in Latin America.