I have been fortunate enough to have had the opportunity to travel around Latin America quite a bit. I grew up in a relatively upper-class family, with both my parents being from Portugal. My father would take me around traveling through his work. He also was a reporter. When I was seventeen years old, I went with my father, who loved to travel, to Argentina. How could I forget Buenos Aires: the Parisa of Latin America. It was not the infamous layout of the streets that I remember, or the significant number of Italians and French walking around, but the one organization my father interviewed. It was a group of Argentine elites working together to bring in European immigrants as well as their ideologies.
City of Buenos Aires of 1860
Although, I do not remember the members names (it was quite long ago, in 1870), I do still remember a couple sentences which for some reason stuck with me to today. These Brazilian elites “are proud of our heritage.” My father talked to them, while I listened and took several notes, about the establishment of the at the time new organization. This group was just one example of the eugenics which has been sweeping over the continent. At the time this group was just starting. They did not even have a formal name set up. However, they were very hard-working adamant people. They were largely influenced by the infamous Argentine president to 1874, Domingo Faustino Sarmiento. The goals of these men were to promote the immigration of Europeans, specifically from England, France, and Germany. It was a way to help integrate the European, liberal ideology into the nation of Argentina.
When asked the methods they were to use, the group immediately was able to give a response. I remember, it was as if they knew the question would be asked to them many times, which was quite possibly true. Their two main routes were to provide subsidies for the immigrants in order to attract more to move to Argentina. Secondly, they were working to “beautify” the city, to make it seem more European, like Paris. These were their ways to work with eugenics and to promote a more pure race.
The reason I start this article with this group is because I just recently visited another organization who I thought was a symbol of the connection eugenics has through the time period of Latin America. This also was a newly formed group, without a name yet. They were a group of medical students here in Brazil. They decided to organize this group in order to talk about intellectual interests such as modern theories and philosophies. However, mostly the group is meeting to talk about the “whitening” of society. With all the different peoples and populations living here, many have come from Africa, many indigenous people and so on, these group members believe that it is necessary to make the whole population more healthy and pure in general. The biggest way to do this, they believe, is to focus on migration and immigration. The meeting I sat in they talked about Darwinism, Darwian biology and his social theory. Although, this group I just met with is not doing the exact same thing as the group I met in Argentina in 1870, they are still quite similar. It is interesting to see the change in society, but to see how eugenics is still on people’s minds. It is something that the Latin American world thinks needs to happen in order to progress and have a more progressive society. These two organizations are just a couple examples of many.
Chasteen, John C. Born in Blood and Fire: A Concise History of Latin America. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2006. Print
Chasteen, John C., Wood, James A. Problems in Modern Latin American History: Sources and Interpretations. Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2009. Print.
Dulin, D. Buenos Aires a vista de pajaro. 1860. New York Public Library. NYPL Digital Gallery. Web. 10 Mar. 2011.
Stepan, Nancy L. “The Hour of Eugenics” Race, Gender, and Nation in Latin America. New York: Cornell University Press, 1991. Print.
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