Italian criminal anthropology in Argentina: a short-circuit between migration, law and literature.

The long and troubled road that Argentina took to achieve political independence from Spain (1810) and to establish itself as an autonomous federal republic (1853) was not accompanied by a resolute process of decolonization. The Argentine elites, in fact, took as their economic, cultural and political model the same European powers from which they had recently been emancipated, and they intended to strengthen their national community through welcoming European immigrants, considering their contribution indispensable for founding a new and modern political community. The slogan that effectively summed up the nation building project of the new state, coined by one of the “fathers of the Argentine homeland” J. B. Alberdi, was “gobernar es poblar”. If the first legislative initiatives, directed at attracting labor and capital from the other side of the Atlantic, have been sporadic and disjointed, the project of populating Argentina with Europeans found a stable home and coherent organization in the Constitution of 1853 itself and was later perfected by the famous Ley Avellaneda of 1876. The regulatory framework strongly oriented to the “fomento de la inmigración” is explained on the one hand by the scarcity of the native population in comparison with the vastness of the Argentine territory, and thus by the demand for labor-power and business capital, and on the other hand by the “neo-colonial” interest of European countries, which planned to export laborers, farmers and entrepreneurs in exchange for the import of raw materials, to be resold later in South America as processed products. The advantageous conditions offered to European workers by the Argentine Republic and the stimulating role of the Immigration Agents, met a strong supply of labor from Europe, and produced, especially in the period 1880-1902 a real migration boom, mostly composed by Italians. Precisely from the last two decades of the 19th century, however, an “antigringo” sentiment began to emerge in Argentina, directed particularly against Spanish and Italian immigrants. The latter showed integration difficulties at least equal to those faced by northern European immigrants, but both their greater number and the presence among them of a strong socialist and anarchist component generated an increasing xenophobia against them. The paper will point out a singular paradox: the intolerance toward such ethnic groups, which was expressed first in literature, then also in law, was based on the stigmatization of negative characteristics “peculiar” to those ethnic groups. Such characteristics were borrowed from criminal anthropology, the science that in those years Cesare Lombroso, precisely from Italy, wished to spread throughout the world.