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Abstract
During the latter half of the nineteenth century in Argentina, Sarmientan liberal ideology adopted scientific discourse, particularly Darwinism, within its “civilizing” nation-building program. Liberals also encouraged European immigration as part of their war against the “barbarous” elements of the nation. Eugenio Cambaceres's last novel, En la sangre (1887), invokes Darwinian biological discourse—the tool of Sarmientan ideology—to critique this liberal immigration policy. The narrative grounds itself in Darwinian discourse and its popular permutations, and consequently, the novel's virile and vicious protagonist, a second-generation Italian immigrant to Buenos Aires, illustrates how the extinction of the creole community may be an unintended consequence of such massive immigration. Throughout En la sangre, Cambaceres marginalizes social difference through scientific discourse and suggests that the liberal immigration program may trigger apocalyptic biological mutations. Articulating creole fears of social change, Cambaceres's text envisions the future of Argentina as a Darwinian monstrosity.
Notes
1Peter Bakewell calculates that 2.5 million immigrants came to Argentina between 1871 and 1915, and four fifths were from Spain and Italy (449). John Chasteen estimates more generally that 4.2 million immigrants from Italy emigrated to the Southern Cone in the nineteenth century (Born 211). During this period, the majority of the population of Buenos Aires became foreign-born (Bakewell 449).
2Domingo Faustino Sarmiento's liberal policies during his presidency (1868–74) purportedly supported human rights and social equality. However, in reality, liberal programs revealed the ideological inconsistencies typical of this period. For example, although Sarmiento worked to improve the quality of and access to public education throughout Argentina, his administration encouraged immigration in order to populate Argentina with more “desirable” European blood to displace the mestizo rural population (Chasteen, Born 169–70).
3Levine and Novoa further note: “President Sarmiento, like most public figures of his generation, observed no strict demarcation between politics and science. For him they were as inseparable as they were essential in the process of civilizing primitive cultures” (¡Darwinistas! 8). Levine and Novoa's translation and compilation of Darwinist texts in ¡Darwinistas! is one of several recent publications that examine Darwinism and scientific discourse in Argentina and Latin America more generally. See also Levine and Novoa's companion volume From Man to Ape: Darwinism in Argentina 1870–1920; Novoa's article, “The Meaning of Blood in Argentina: Genealogy and Darwinism in the Recovery of the Past”; Leila Gómez's Darwinism in Argentina: Major Texts, 1845–1909; and Gioconda Marún's two articles on the subject. On Darwin in Spain and Spanish America, see the edited collections The Reception of Darwinism in the Iberian World: Spain, Spanish America and Brazil, edited by Thomas Glick, Miguel Angel Puig-Samper, and Rosaura Ruiz, and What about Darwin? All Species of Opinion, edited by Glick. On science in Argentina, see J. Andrew Brown's Test Tube Envy and Kristin Ruggiero's Modernity in the Flesh; regarding science in Spanish America, see Science in Latin America: A History (edited By Juan José Saldaña) and Science and the Creative Imagination in Latin America (edited by Evelyn Fishburn and Eduardo L. Ortiz).
4During the nineteenth century in Spanish America, “creole” (or criollo) was generally understood to denote people of European descent who were born in the Americas. This term often more generally referred to the elite classes, however, functioning as a discourse of social blanqueamiento, or ethnic “whitening.” Throughout this essay, I therefore use the lower case to recognize the term's use as an ethnic fiction rather than a stable social category. Contemporary historiographers such as Elizabeth Kuznesof and John Charles Chasteen show that this fantasy of “pure” European blood obscured a multiracial heritage in most cases.
5The cluster of theories known as Social Darwinism developed from the application of evolutionary theory to human society, some instances of which predated Darwin while others grew out of subsequent metaphorical and social applications of Darwin's theory. This was done somewhat in Darwin's own later writings (Dickens 14) as well as by other writers of the time such as Herbert Spencer (1820–1903), who coined the term “survival of the fittest” at least ten years before the publication of Darwin's Origin (Dickens 19). Peter Dickens suggests, “Darwin could not help but be caught up by [such social applications of evolutionary theory] and be influenced by them” (15). The eugenics movement, the manipulation of human genetics with the goal of “improving” or “preserving” aspects of the human race, was popularized and practiced in Latin America (as well as in other parts of the world) throughout the first half of the twentieth century (Leys Stepan 1, 6).
6See Cymerman for a detailed biography of Eugenio Cambaceres (85–121). Cymerman also provides a complete bibliography of the literary criticism written on Cambaceres (589–626). Among critics whose work focuses on En la sangre, there is agreement on the novel's clear warning against immigration: See Cymerman's book as well as articles by Susan Halstead-Dabove, David Mauricio Solodkow, Aída Apter Cragnolino, and Oscar Ramírez. Halstead-Dabove studies the fashion and consumption as means by which Genaro simulates class, while Solodkow identifies the trope of monstrosity within the novel, which he reads independent of scientific discourse. Ramírez, along with Cymerman, analyzes the novel's form and message in relation to the folletín genre, while Apter Cragnolino focuses on the naturalist discourse. Gabriela Nouzeilles offers a rich reading of the novel alongside the political and criminological discourses of that period (158–81).
7Historian Rosaura Ruíz Gutiérrez chronicles the distorted Darwinian theories circulating within Mexico during this time and indicates that the circulation of Darwin's ideas—along with their perversions—surpassed the geographical limits of South America to engage much of Spanish America.
8Chancellor and Van Wythe disagree with this prevailing impression: They observe, “Despite Frank Sulloway's decisive refutation in 1982, it is still widely believed that Darwin ‘discovered’ evolution on the Galapagos. This belief is constantly reinforced in TV programmes, travel brochures and so forth” (408).
9Milburn's article offers an intriguing comparison of tropes of monstrosity within Darwin and Derrida: He concludes that Darwin reveals the “uncertain functioning of monsters” (621), while “Derrida advances the monster as the icon of deconstruction” (621). Milburn notes that Derrida “observes that monsters […] must be continually subjected to deconstruction by their own monstrosities” (621).
10The majority of science and other textbooks used in places like Mexico and Argentina during the 1870s and into the 1880s were foreign (Roldán Vera 212–13), illustrating quite concretely the privileged status of European ideas as sources of knowledge and authority. Eugenia Roldán Vera comments that her analysis is based on numbers that do not identify “local” textbooks “published under the name of an Argentine author but evidently based on a foreign work” (212, n. 28), indicating that the influence of European scientific theory was even more dominant in Spanish American education systems than is shown by the numbers of foreign textbooks.
11All quotes in this article are taken from the Colihue edition.
12Levine and Novoa clarify that Ingenieros actually intended this argument to distinguish Italian immigrants, such as Ingenieros himself, from other “undesirable” marginal groups (¡Darwinistas! 222).
13The missing word here is “culo,” which has apparently been redacted from this Colihue student edition (Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes). The Biblioteca Cervantes's online transcription reproduces the first book edition of En la sangre from 1887.