THE INMIGRATION
Graciela Swiderski – Jorge Luis Farjat
First settlements.
Government migration policies.
Statistics and orientation guide for the search of information concerning entry.
According to the vulgarized meaning, the immigration consists on the arrival to a country or region of those that were in other or another to settle down there. Immigrants are also called to those that form new colonies or reside in those already formed. Between 1857 and 1952 more than seven million European immigrants crossed the Atlantic and they arrived to the Republica Argentina, to populate a deserted territory, but rich, and although it is true that not all of them approached definitively and that it was high the number of returns, this spectacular human movement represents one of the most impressive events in the contemporary history: the massive migrations. In these big human adjournments with their consequent social impact interests to develop: In the first place, the causes that motivated these movements toward the Rio de la Plata, the characteristics of those trips as for the conditions of on board (health and comfort) and to the evolution of the nautical science and of the naval engineering, from the sailing ships to the transatlantic steams. Also the particularities of the arrival to Buenos Aires along the time, embracing aspects like the landscape changes in the riverside, from the primitive breakwaters to the jetties and the ulterior port facilities, until the numerous modalities of the passengers’ landing, through the boats and carts of the first times to the vapours of landing of the last ones. In second place the performance of the receptor institutions of the immigration, the registration and the statistic, the admission conditions, the epidemics and quarantines, the lodgings, the medical attention, the labour placement, the transfer of the immigrants to the different points of the country thanks to the asylums and hotels in the interior and to the auxiliary commissions of immigration, for finally studying the insert of the foreigners in the agricultural colonies.
…..Finally the state policies and their legislative concretion deserve a separated study, topics that won’t leave of being conditioned by the regime of holding of the public and private earth, factor that acquired in turn, a momentous importance in an agro exporting nation. It is also important to explain the reasons that slowly went driving to the decline of the European migratory process, and that they coincided with the decline of the economic pattern, in the same way that the arrival of the immigration had contributed to the expansion of the Argentinean economy.
…..The text has been printed on different colour funds, marking the different chapters and also individualizing the matters tried in the articles 1 and 2 (travels, arrivals, lodgings, transfers and labour placements), of the other points tried in the third article (historical marks, establishments, state policies, etc.)
…..The contents have been distributed in four periods that divide a century and half of history to the effects of a better didactic understanding. The first period embraces from 1810 to 1852, the second from 1852 at 1880, the third from 1880 to 1910 and the fourth from 1910 to 1955. Although the division of the history in periods is not a fact, it has been considered as necessary hypothesis or mental tool, valid in the measure in that illuminates us, although it depends on the interpretation, in that it makes to its same validity, (Carr, What is History?: 1961).
…..The historical development, basted on the base of memories and original documents, it is also accompanied by extracted stories of oral history of audiovisual and annexed sources. This book corresponds to the text extracted by the authors of its titled work: The Immigration. Cultured history and Audiovisual Memory, published in two volumes, accompanied in its turn of the rehearsal Migrations and Survival of Jorge Luis Farjat and of an iconographic selection of the same author’s audiovisual work.
The different character of that work when embracing other topics, and mainly the span of their concerning productive aspect to format and volume (near 500 cultured pages), it took to the authors to disclose the historical contents separately through a more accessible publication as the present, understanding the forced necessity to make know in a didactic form and the most massively possible, a history of the immigration that took especially as axis the participation of the State, a matter that is of notorious lack in all the educational means and also in that of the specific investigation.
Biblioteca Nacional de Maestros. Rincón del Editor.
This work, necessary as much for the education as for the specific investigation, it is a selection, prepared with didactic purposes for Graciela Swiderski and Jorge Luis Farjat, of documents, testimonies and images of the book The Immigration. Cultured History and Audiovisual Memory, of the same authors. In this edition they enlarge and they deepen the topic incorporating to the texts and images on trips, arrivals, lodgings and transfers (first part), a historical mark and information about how they left giving the establishments and the state politicians on immigration (second part).
The period that embraces is from 1810 up to 1955. The edition is very original and of excellent quality.
La Nación
18 de abril de 1999
Image and text: it is impossible to describe the importance that, for historians, the intervention of graphic recording media, such as photography and cinema, had. From that moment, the existence of the men of the past, which was presented uncertain and deferred through the tenuous written descriptions, began to take on a precise life. A precise, but strange life, when it is approached from a reality very different from the one that appears in those testimonies of a world that is no longer there.
La Inmigración, by Graciela Swiderski and Jorge Luis Farjat, wants to once again dazzle us with that estrangement and, through the image and the text, reveals once again how close and how far we are from Buenos Aires and Argentina to the that, between 1840 and 1950, millions of immigrants arrived from almost all the regions of Europe. The presentation of the book, belonging to the Collection of Audiovisual Art and Memory, evokes with complicity the characteristics of a family album: the landscape form, the careful editing, adorned with boxes and vignettes, and the sepia of the photos finely embedded in the ocher of its pages.
In the various sources he cites, one voice is heard above all others: that of a state charged with conducting, supervising, and evaluating; through its officials and bureaucrats, the results of that gigantic flow of people thrown into a country under construction. But among those voices, the vital accounts of some witnesses and protagonists are also heard: journalists, intellectuals and, of course, immigrants.
On the one hand, the official political discourse – “an approach less frequented today in the works on the subject” – conveys the concerns, hopes and warnings of officials, leaders and intellectuals, completely persuaded that they are building a great country with that new source of wealth and work from overseas. On the other hand, the latent life in those old photos (full of confused and overwhelmed crowds of newcomers, carts loaded with travelers, children dressed in work clothes, sheds, dining rooms, crops, ports and railways ) brings us definitively closer to the material and spiritual horizon of these concrete and real lives. A fair synthesis of an Argentina of the past, built at the intersection of the projects and ambitions of its progressive ruling class and the vital hopes of generations of men, launched into the hard struggle to create, on these lands, the other country, the one that it was not in the speeches..
Rogelio Paredes
Clarín
14 de noviembre de 1999
Graciela Swiderski and Jorge Luis Farjat synthesize here an announced work, consisting of combining literary sources with images.
He structures his story around carefully chosen period texts, and, in most cases, original ones, which Swiderski has been able to choose thanks to a wide domain of existing, published and also unpublished documentation. Suggestive fragments of interviews conducted according to the techniques of the so-called “oral history” are also included. Farjat, with experience in the elaboration of documentary works, is responsible for bringing the images that recreate each of the circumstances of the immigrants’ journey. This gives the work an opening to the actors’ experiences that is irreplaceable and also offers material that, properly treated, is one of the most significant sources for historical analysis. In short, it is an interesting and at times inviting book, suitable for entering one of the most relevant topics in Argentine history. It fully fulfills its dissemination function and, in addition, provides good materials for the teaching task.
Luis Alberto Romero
Soles
Agenda Cultural de Buenos Aires
Mayo de 1999
Much of what is affirmed, speculated or invented regarding the role that immigrants have had in shaping Argentina as a Nation; very little and scattered is what is generally documented. The available records are generally hard and difficult to interpret.
A large part of the inhabitants of our country have in their memory the stories of their parents, grandparents, uncles and other close relatives; thousands of anecdotes about the way of traveling, the place where they stayed when they arrived, the type of work they found. But these invaluable individual testimonies are not enough to form a clear vision of the social and economic importance of foreigners in our land.
Graciela Swiderski and Jorge Luis Farjat’s book, “La Inmigración”, is destined to be an excellent study material and permanent reference. It brings together an extensive bibliographic material, along with a huge number of images (160 photos and illustrations) that allow us to seriously reconstruct the times when, from all over Europe, people came to the port of Buenos Aires with the hope of finding new horizons.
The beauty and care of this edition, enhanced by its magnificent presentation, makes this book a gift for the pleasure of remembering.
Ambito Financiero,
19 de mayo de 1999
There is a book, almost a jewel for the quality and color of its papers, printing and photography. It is simply called “Immigration.” The thematic organization, divided into two parts, incites the reader’s curiosity: the first one talks about Travels, Arrivals, Old Hotels and Job Placements. The second points to the first Population Settlements and state Migration Policies. And no one believes that it addresses the immigration of this century, not even that of the end of the past. He starts in 1810, with “The first trials”; continues in “The beginnings” (1852/1880) and in chapter III attacks with “The apogeo” that covers from 1880 to 1910. The fourth and last chapter describes “The Sunset”, which occurred, according to the figures that the National Directorate of Migration, between 1910 and 1955.
There is a profusion of photographs, in sepia, and drawings. In the colorful descriptions of trips, arrivals, lodgings, illnesses and jobs, the reader can glimpse, imagine, what it was like for our parents, grandparents or great-grandparents to arrive in that promised land.
“The Immigration” that they assure is part of a collection of “Audiovisual Art and Memory” (consult 4754-9129) perhaps it is the beginning of a recovery of our roots..
Jorge P. Barceló
Revista Todo es Historia
Setiembre de 2000
It is already a very common place to affirm that Argentines descend from ships. This happy insight is giving us the true magnitude of the phenomenon that, from the Spanish conquerors onwards, involves practically the entire Argentine population. The book La Inmigración by Graciela Swiderski and Jorge Farjat addresses this issue that is so dear to national policies from the very origins, before the dissolution of the national bond in 1827 or after Caseros, and at the end of the century with massive flows of immigrants.
The study of this extensive historical period begins with the regulation of the Casa de Contratación in 1505 – which prohibited the presence of foreigners in the domains of the crown – and reaches our days focusing on its journey global aspects but also those generally discarded sides that They are the very cuisine of this event: the vicissitudes of the trip, the incidents of disembarkation and the stay in those “hotels”, aspects that arouse the interest of the reader eager to penetrate the fabric of everyday life. In this way, the text is interwoven with official testimonies, memories of ministries and of the immigrants themselves, which color an exhibition that is already dense in events.
Examples abound of the enormous difficulties faced by those masses of immigrants: landing 8000 meters from the coast to board a whaling boat and then the beach cart to the precarious dock; from there to the dark hotels and taverns on the Paseo de Julio, where they were often robbed and robbed.
In 1810, as soon as the national government was installed, the locks of monarchical restrictions on the entry of foreigners were opened, and this process of opening to the world coincides with the conditions of the Industrial Revolution and its corollary of unemployment in the Old World. Rivadavian policy was based precisely on this reality, promoting the creation of agricultural colonies through immigration subsidized by the State.
The second period begins after Caseros until the First World War, a period in which the country absorbed no less than 3,300,000 immigrants, a quarter in the rural area of the Pampas. Colonia Esperanza (1856) is a clear reference of this time.
Within the agro-export scheme, the purpose was to attract farm men to work the considerable extensions incorporated after the conquest of the desert, and here the profile of the required immigration is defined. It remained to design the land policy; Rawson and Sarmiento expressed the desire to implement irrevocable ownership of the land for the agricultural settler. But, with good reason, the authors affirm, unlike what happened in the American agricultural development, Argentina took the path of precarious land tenure, thus conditioning the migratory movement and the agricultural evolution itself. And this, because the official policy had been abandoned, and the private one had fallen into the hands of speculators.
Alberdi’s famous premise “to govern is to populate”, the guiding product of national construction, was reformulated in 1910: “To govern is not only to populate as Alberdi said, it is to give good land to the farmer and root him in it”.
For this reason and contrary to the expectations of the official discourse, most of the immigrants did not join the countryside but ended up living in the cities and in tenements with poor sanitation conditions. By the 1980s, most of them worked in public services: running water, railways, public buildings, port works, and housing.
This interesting flight of the bird over such a long time is enough to give an idea of the gravitation exerted by the modern phenomenon of mass immigration.
As for the edition itself, the book is carefully printed in landscape form, with abundant photographic material in sepia color, which gives it a unique charm.
José Eizykovicz
Música: Anton Bruckner (1824-1896)