Argues that Jewishness is an essential element of Argentina's self-fashioning as a modern nation.

In the early part of this century, Argentina was one of the most affluent nations in the world. Since then, the Argentine economy has experienced long periods of stagnation and recession. Larry Sawers links the country's economic failure to the backwardness of the interior, which comprises 70 percent of the area of the country and in which nearly one-third of the population resides.The interior's poverty, according to Sawers, is caused by the scarcity of agricultural resources and by serious inequalities in the distribution of those resources. The region is poorly endowed, land has been degraded through abuse and overuse, and most farmers work tiny, unproductive plots. Moreover, most of the products of the interior are produced for highly protected domestic markets and face stiff competition and falling prices in world markets. Recent reforms in Argentina have dramatically aggravated the economic crisis of the interior.Sawers shows how the poverty of the interior has contributed to the dismal performance of the Argentine economy as a whole. He emphasizes the deleterious effects of extensive emigration from the interior to the major urban areas that are unable to absorb the human tide. Additionally, the national government has taxed the more prosperous regions in order to subsidize the interior, placing a severe drain on the federal government budget and worsening inflation. The effects of the interior's poverty on the nation are also political. Sawers argues that the backward political system in the interior exacerbates the worst features of the national political culture and governance, which in turn pose profound obstacles to economic progress.

Winner of the 2020 Best Book in the Nineteenth Century Award presented by the Nineteenth Century Section of the Latin American Studies Association As Argentina rose to political and economic prominence at the turn of the twentieth century, debates about the family, as an ideological structure and set of lived relationships, took center stage in efforts to shape the modern nation. In Argentine Intimacies, Joseph M. Pierce draws on queer studies, Latin American studies, and literary and cultural studies to consider the significance of one family in particular during this period of intense social change: Carlos, Julia, Delfina, and Alejandro Bunge. One of Argentina's foremost intellectual and elite families, the Bunges have had a profound impact on Argentina's national culture and on Latin American understandings of education, race, gender, and sexual norms. They also left behind a vast archive of fiction, essays, scientific treatises, economic programs, and pedagogical texts, as well as diaries, memoirs, and photography. Argentine Intimacies explores the breadth of their writing to reflect on the intersections of intimacy, desire, and nationalism, and to expand our conception of queer kinship. Approaching kinship as an interface of relational dispositions, Pierce reveals the queerness at the heart of the modern family. Queerness emerges not as an alternative to traditional values so much as a defining feature of the state project of modernization.

VCU CABELL FIRST NOVELIST AWARD FINALIST CENTER FOR FICTION FIRST NOVEL PRIZE LONGLIST “A debut novel as impressive as they come. Tough, wily, dreamlike.” —Seattle Times A decade after fleeing for his life, a man is pulled back to Argentina by an undying love. In 1976, Tomás Orilla is a medical student in Buenos Aires, where he has moved in hopes of reuniting with Isabel, a childhood crush. But the reckless passion that has long drawn him is leading Isabel ever deeper into the ranks of the insurgency fighting an increasingly oppressive regime. Tomás has always been willing to follow her anywhere, to do anything to prove himself. Yet what exactly is he proving, and at what cost to them both? It will be years before a summons back arrives for Tomás, now living as Thomas Shore in New York. It isn’t a homecoming that awaits him, however, so much as an odyssey into the past, an encounter with the ghosts that lurk there, and a reckoning with the fatal gap between who he has become and who he once aspired to be. Raising profound questions about the sometimes impossible choices we make in the name of love, Hades, Argentina is a gripping, ingeniously narrated literary debut.

Nationalism has played a uniquely powerful role in Argentine history, in large part due to the rise and enduring strength of two variants of anti-liberal nationalist thought: one left-wing and identifying with the “people” and the other right-wing and identifying with Argentina’s Catholic heritage. Although embracing very different political programs, the leaders of these two forms of nationalism shared the belief that the country’s nineteenth-century liberal elites had betrayed the country by seeking to impose an alien ideology at odds with the supposedly true nature of the Argentine people. The result, in their view, was an ongoing conflict between the “false Argentina” of the liberals and the “authentic”nation of true Argentines. Yet, despite their commonalities, scholarship has yet to pay significant attention to the interconnections between these two variants of Argentine nationalism. Jeane DeLaney rectifies this oversight with Identity and Nationalism in Modern Argentina. In this book, DeLaney explores the origins and development of Argentina’s two forms of nationalism by linking nationalist thought to ongoing debates over Argentine identity. Part I considers the period before 1930, examining the emergence and spread of new essentialist ideas of national identity during the age of mass immigration. Part II analyzes the rise of nationalist movements after 1930 by focusing on individuals who self-identified as nationalists. DeLaney connects the rise of Argentina’s anti-liberal nationalist movements to the shock of early twentieth-century immigration. She examines how pressures posed by the newcomers led to the weakening of the traditional ideal of Argentina as a civic community and the rise of new ethno-cultural understandings of national identity. Identity and Nationalism in Modern Argentina demonstrates that national identities are neither unitary nor immutable and that the ways in which citizens imagine their nation have crucial implications for how they perceive immigrants and whether they believe domestic minorities to be full-fledged members of the national community. Given the recent surge of anti-immigrant sentiment in Europe and the United States, this study will be of interest to scholars of nationalism, political science, Latin American political thought, and the contemporary history of Argentina.

Congratulations to Adriana Brodsky and Raanan Rein whose edited volume has been chosen as the winner of the 2013 Latin American Jewish Studies Association Book Prize! The New Jewish Argentina aims at filling in important lacunae in the existing historiography of Jewish Argentines. Moving away from the political history of the organized community, most articles are devoted to social and cultural history, including unaffiliated Jews, women and gender, criminals, printing presses and book stores. These essays, written by scholars from various countries, consider the tensions between the national and the trans-national and offer a mosaic of identities which is relevant to all interested in Jewish history, Argentine history and students of ethnicity and diaspora. This collection problematizes the existing image of Jewish-Argentines and looks at Jews not just as persecuted ethnics, idealized agricultural workers, or as political actors in Zionist politics. "This book is a must-read for students and scholars interested in immigration to Latin America, Ethnic History, and Jewish Studies, but its readership could extend to anybody who is interested in this chapter of social and cultural history." Ariana Huberman, Haverford College

Whether in search of adventure and opportunity or fleeing poverty and violence, millions of people migrated to Argentina in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By the late 1920s Arabic speakers were one of the country’s largest immigrant groups. This book explores their experience, which was quite different from the danger and deprivation faced by twenty-first-century immigrants from the Middle East. Hyland shows how Syrians and Lebanese, Christians, Jews, and Muslims adapted to local social and political conditions, entered labor markets, established community institutions, raised families, and attempted to pursue their individual dreams and community goals. By showing how societies can come to terms with new arrivals and their descendants, Hyland addresses notions of belonging and acceptance, of integration and opportunity. He tells a story of immigrants and a story of Argentina that is at once timely and timeless.