Argentina, Latin America, and the global historiographical turn

In the last decade, a critical discussion emerged regarding the extent to which Latin America has been fully integrated into global history. On the one hand, scholars have pointed out that Latin America has long been exposed to and shaped by global processes. As Adelman (Reference Adelman2004, 400) observed, “there is a special relationship between Latin American and world history that has a longstanding history of its own.” The region’s historiography has reflected this: many foundational texts and classic debates have contended with colonialism, imperialism, immigration, and dependency and its legacies, and grappled with how global forces, ideas, and cultures have shaped the history of the region.Footnote ² On the other hand, historians have also portrayed the subfields of global history and Latin American history as disconnected or somewhat at odds. Matthew Brown, for example, contended that Latin America was overlooked in the grand narratives of global history; he observed that, despite contending with questions of a global nature, including imperialism, neocolonialism, Latin Americanists remained largely focused on the national paradigm, resistant to integrating new frameworks (Brown Reference Brown2015). Recently, however, a diverse array of studies, and forums have traced and debated transnational and global histories of the region. Many have engaged national histories while employing various international frames. Thus, even while some argued that global history had not fully embraced Latin America in its narratives, the persistent prominence of nation-based histories proved not to be an obstacle for the emergence of global narratives of the region. Histories that engaged the national but reframed those histories with a global twist have been in clear emergence.

A compelling constellation of studies on the new transnational history of South America serve as example. Recent work by Ori Preuss (Reference Preuss2016) has explored the transnational South American connections and mutual cultural and diplomatic influences between jurists, intellectuals, and statesmen in Argentina, Uruguay, and Brazil in the late nineteenth century. In a similar vein, Edward Blumenthal (Reference Blumenthal2019) has shown how the experience of exile has strongly shaped the process of state and nation building in Argentina and Chile in the earlier part of that century. The transnational history of South America has also emerged as a topic for Diego Galeano and Martin Albornoz, who traced anarchist South American Atlantic networks and police disciplinary reactions and practices (Albornoz and Galeano Reference Albornoz and Galeano2017). Martín Bergel (Reference Bergel2020) has invited us to contemplate the global ties that informed the emergence of South American populisms. These studies are joined by other contributions that have suggested that international networks and forums informed labor advances and the construction of international legal ideas and institutions in the twentieth century (Scarfi Reference Scarfi2017; Palacio Reference Palacio2018; Fink and Palacio Reference Fink and Palacio2018), examined the global origins and reach of Latin American cinema and music (Palomino Reference Palomino2020; Manzano Reference Manzano2014), and traced South-South connections and Latin American interventions in the Global Cold War (Stites Mor Reference Stites Mor2022; Bystrom, Popescu, and Zien 2019; Joseph and Spenser Reference Joseph and Spenser2008; Gleijeses Reference Gleijeses2002).

Although these studies speak to different themes, reflect diverse interests, and respond to different concerns, they have collectively illustrated the benefits of the transnational frame and illuminated networks of contacts and political, legal, social, and cultural exchanges that were previously overlooked. While some have revealed how unforeseen geographies of connection constituted and constructed the idea of a region, others have revisited subjects that were traditionally written with a national scope and brought to light networks of international connection and transnational forces at play (Karush Reference Karush2017; Palomino Reference Palomino2020; Semán Reference Semán2017; Scarfi Reference Scarfi2017; Lida Reference Lida2019; Tossounian Reference Tossounian2020; Ubelaker Andrade Reference Ubelaker Andrade2014; Nállim Reference Nállim, Bryce and David2017; Manzano Reference Manzano2017).

Despite their emphasis on regional and global connections, it is worth emphasizing that many of these studies have not abandoned the nation as a frame of reference. This points to a longer tradition in the region’s historiography in which the global and the national were conceived as not necessarily incompatible. As noted, Latin America’s national historiographies have long contended with global history, narrating the impacts of global structural relations of economic dependency, as well as global processes of colonial dissolution and independence (Halperin Donghi Reference Halperin Donghi1985, Reference Halperin Donghi1982; Stein and Stein Reference Stein and Stein1980; Platt Reference Platt1980).

Transnational frameworks have also enriched national historiographies. Specifically for Argentina, an abundance of new projects and works have sought to understand how national histories can be enriched by analysis of global connections and entanglements: transnational, regional, and global in scope. Recent contributions by Paula Alonso and Marcela Ternavasio, among others, frame debates about democracy and representative government in Argentina as constituted through connections with other South American nations (Alonso and Ternavasio, Reference Alonso, Ternavasio, Innes, Posada-Carbó and Philpforthcoming; Blumenthal Reference Blumenthal2019; Ternavasio Reference Ternavasio2021). Other historians have shown the degree to which inter-American intellectual networks became critical to the development of a thriving national book industry (Sorá Reference Sorá2017, Reference Sorá2021), revealed the ties both immigratory and political between Argentina and the Middle East (Balloffet Reference Balloffet2020), examined the connections between local Catholic and Protestant practices and the global trajectories of those religions (Seiguer Reference Seiguer2019; Lida Reference Lida2015), and illustrated how Buenos Aires figured as a critical node in the formation of other regional and trans-Atlantic intellectual and political networks (Stites Mor Reference Stites Mor2022; Semán Reference Semán2017; Nállim Reference Nállim, Bryce and David2017; Manzano Reference Manzano2017).

Although these contributions are quite scattered in subject matter, they have collectively served to illustrate that Argentina is not only a place where global forces are grappled with but also a nation with active agents who moved, collaborated, and catalyzed global processes. Taken within the broader transnational and global turn in Latin American historiography, they also suggest that, while the peoples and states of the Global North have been traditionally seen as the protagonists of the history of globalization, those in global peripheries, like Latin America, were also initiators of global processes in their own right. That is, ideas, products, industries and movements originating in Latin American nations and bearing the marks of those cultures, economies, and environments have moved beyond their own borders and played varying roles around the globe.

Dynamics of globalization from the periphery

The contribution of a history of Argentina outside of Argentina to global history stems from a suggestion that if we attempt to more deliberately map the global processes that originate in nations on the periphery, we might open the field of global history to new terrains of inquiry and be able to visualize new geographies of interaction that were previously minimized. Furthermore, examining these questions more closely could reframe our understanding of Latin America’s role in both global history and the history of globalization. One likely outcome is that such a project will find that Argentina’s (and other Latin American countries’) history of international trajectories does not mirror the more coherent global reach or “outward shadow” typical of a world power, but more closely resembles disparate shadows and fragmented scattered resonances in different regions and areas of the world. Reconstructing these stories means filtering in such a way as to illuminate and make sense of their centrifugal forces, periodization, and their unsettled forms of influence and dissemination across the globe.Footnote ³

It is worth clarifying that the term globalization here does not seek to allude to mere capitalist integration to the world economy, North-South world hegemony, or a borderless world. It refers instead to the formation of cultural, social, and economic spaces of interaction and networks shaped by centuries of uneven industrial, economic, and capitalist connections, the use of technologies of communication connecting peoples and their ideas, and instances with accelerated movements of people and goods (Osterhammel and Petersson Reference Osterhammel and Petersson2019, 24–28).

Thanks to the rise of global history, sociological approaches to globalization have been reinterpreted in a new contextual and historical key, highlighting the need to explore the origins and development of globalization as a historical phenomenon (Beck Reference Beck2000; Osterhammel Reference Osterhammel2014). Sociological perspectives stressed that globalization essentially entailed the progressive integration of the world economy into international institutions of global governance, transnational migration, and the homogenizing effects of global communication and connections. By contrast, the history of globalization emerged as a field devoted to the exploration of “the history of the construction of spaces [of interaction], the conformation of networks and the history of their mutual inter-connections” (Osterhammel and Petersson Reference Osterhammel and Petersson2019, 26).

Latin Americanists of many stripes have illustrated that ongoing contact between cultures, along with colonial projects and uneven power dynamics, have been formative in the creation of dynamic and hybrid local histories (García Canclini Reference García Canclini2005; Pratt Reference Pratt1992; Joseph Reference Joseph, Joseph, LeGrand and Salvatore1998). They have historicized processes of globalization, highlighted the complex and multiple forms of colonial and imperial relationships, and illuminated the ways in which connectivity, within a framework of asymmetrical global relations, has shaped local, social, and political formations and cross-border connections. In this light, the new transnational and global historiography emerging in Latin America, read alongside the globally minded national historiographies that preceded them, invites us to contemplate how these nations on the periphery have become active agents in such processes, even while existing within a context of unequal relations, economic unevenness, regional collaboration, and varied connectivity.

To reframe our historical understanding of globalization as seen from the peripheral context of Latin America, it is worth engaging with what David Armitage (Reference Armitage2013, 20) has called the “spatial dimensions of context,” an effort to revisit the spatial dimensions of history and call into question assumptions about the globalization of ideas, goods, and policies. The recent emphasis on places and locations of knowledge have contributed to denaturalizing the universality of scientific reason and shown that the collection of knowledge and scientific innovation takes place in fragmented and uneven interstices (Withers Reference Withers2009; Finnegan Reference Finnegan2008). The “spatial turn” builds on the notion that globalization has been both uneven and framed by histories of structural power; and invites us to reconsider the extensions of globalization as distributed across different locations and frontiers.Footnote ⁴ It suggests that mapping the “extensive” global hegemonic power as well as “intensive” or more dispersed but place-based effects would likely reveal peripheral and semi-peripheral nations as producing contradictory spatial effects of integration into a global system and fragmentation.Footnote ⁵

This construction inverts a more traditional path of histories of globalization. It argues that cultures, media, political movements, ideas, goods, athletes, exiles, and industries, and so on that have originated in a country like Argentina have had a varied international trajectory. Those global processes merit exploration with historical rigor and should be understood as the likely consequence of motors of expansion that are distinct from those that have catalyzed and shaped the globalization of traditional central powers from the Global North and are also particular to its history of nation formation, politics, connectivity, and economy. How can such a history be imagined? How might it contribute to our understanding of globalization and, in turn, global history?

Patterns of peripheral globalization: Observations from the history of Argentina outside of Argentina

Any exploration of outward globalizations from the periphery must be attuned to the history and contexts from which they came. There is no doubt that the history of Peru outside of Peru will be unique and reveal different qualities from that of Mexico, the Dominican Republic, Honduras, Ecuador, or Argentina. The driving factors of any peripheral nation’s globalization, as well as its periodization, the actors and industries involved, and the specific dynamics and arenas of engagement, will reflect the politics, cultures, roles in international economic and political orders, and other qualities unique to that place. In this sense, the impacts of Argentina book publishing or its football industry are certainly unique in scope and character; the international trajectories of Cuban exiles, Peruvian cuisine, or Brazilian abolitionists are likewise singular and connected to specific histories. In each case, an understanding of national and local contexts as well as investigation into the nature of various global paths will prove decisive.

At the same time, however, it is worth contemplating how a peripheral position may inform the production of global processes, differentiating these histories from a traditional historiography that focuses on hegemonic nations. With this in mind, and taking the history of Argentina outside Argentina as just one example, this section provides some preliminary observations about the characteristics of global processes originating in the periphery. Specifically, it considers the intermittent role of the state, the critical role of material and human forms of connectivity, and a muddled peripheral influence.

First, it is possible to observe that unlike the processes that characterize the global presence of European nations, the United States, or China, those that originate in the periphery find paths to transnational, regional, or global integration without the sustaining backdrop of their nation’s imperial ambitions or strategic programs: they are often conceived outside state or bureaucratic-led offices. For starters, most peripheral and semi-peripheral countries do not have at their disposition large, empowered bureaucratic apparatuses built to control or organize calculated programs of global dissemination and expansive impulses, nor do they exhibit the type of imperial, military, or even commercial reach that could allow the state to accompany industries in their outward expansion. As a result, many first emerge outside the bounds of state control (sometimes explicitly so) or see the state as an intermittent actor, eager to capitalize on a global presence rather than to generate or back it explicitly.

For Argentina, in fact, numerous cases illustrate how local ideas found audiences abroad in direct opposition to state policy (Moya Reference Moya2005). The processes of exile and migration and the creation of networks emerge as key components to the circulation of ideas. One example can be found be in the coordinated efforts of political exiles in the nineteenth century. While living abroad, exiles of the Rosas era coordinated critiques of their home country while also placing the Argentine experience in conversation with debates abroad, thus contributing to broader, global debates about democracy and the Republican experience (Blumenthal Reference Blumenthal2019; Alonso and Ternavasio, Reference Alonso, Ternavasio, Innes, Posada-Carbó and Philpforthcoming). For the twentieth century, recent scholarship in queer history has foregrounded that the Frente de Liberación Homosexual in Argentina, an activist organization that emerged in the 1950s, developed specific traits as a form of resistance and response to local political restraints and social factors. By connecting to an international network of queer activists, the movement not only found avenues to sustain its project but also constructed avenues by which local ideas about queerness, activism, and organizing could flow outward from Argentina (Fernández Galeano Reference Fernández Galeano2019; Palmeiro Reference Palmeiro2011).

The connections formulated by Argentine anarchists provides a third example: José C. Moya (Reference Moya2004) has shown how Argentine anarchist factions developed unique strategies and ideas that responded to their national political environment. Yet he also shows that organizers did not statically engage with the national field alone; rather they traveled, were expelled by the Argentine state, and reconvened in foreign locales, a movement that did not diminish their experience or formation in Argentina but informed their insertion abroad and, in turn, left its mark on the global anarchist movement.

Looking beyond political and social movements, one can find a wealth of instances in which Argentine industries, cultures, and ideas find fertile ground abroad without a bureaucratic apparatus to propel, monitor, or capitalize on their popularity. The global story of tango, one of the cultures most associated with Argentina worldwide, is a classic example. As is often noted, the dance flourished as a local popular culture, but it took transnational recognition in Paris before its sounds and traditions became fully embraced as a national art form. In tandem, one might consider the international stardom of tango singer Carlos Gardel, who was propelled to international fame not by his own talents alone but with the help of transnational satellite production studios, the international reach and popularity of radio in Argentina, and the national and international film industries that promoted his rise. International recognition and a global tango trend preceded any attempt by bureaucratic forces to capitalize on its popularity.Footnote ⁶

This is not to say that the state plays no role at all. At many times in its history, Argentina’s state actors have worked within a sometimes paradoxical position; politicians, diplomats, and other state actors have expressed aspirations for regional leadership in a variety of fields and a desire for the nation to become a player in global political affairs. However, on many occasions bureaucratic and economic constraints (including external dependencies) limited the ability to take such a protagonist role. Ambitions for regional or even interregional leadership were sometimes possible but were also often curtailed by limited resources (military, economic, or tools of political coercion) (see Salvatore Reference Salvatore2008; Plotkin and Zimmermann Reference Plotkin and Zimmermann2012, Reference Plotkin and Zimmermann2013). The state’s ability to consolidate clear leadership in formal global affairs has also depended on the agenda of its political administrations.

The ability or interest of the state to act in promotion or defense of Argentina’s global presences, has, as a result, expanded and contracted over time, depending on the interests and impulses of specific administrations. Scholarship on protectionist policies, including those in the film industry, are suggestive of the ways in which national policies have shaped the local industries that would eventually go on to find international audiences, even if these policies were not written with an international projection in mind (Ramírez Llorens Reference Ramírez Llorens2017).

More specifically, recent studies on Peronist diplomacy have illuminated efforts to use labor policies and Peronist ideas to generate spheres of influence and collaboration (Semán Reference Semán2017; Balloffet Reference Balloffet2020). In some of these instances, it is evident how personal and professional networks laid the groundwork for state diplomatic projects to capitalize. Lily Pearl Balloffet’s research into the connections between Argentina and the Middle East, for example, illustrates how immigration from the Middle East to Argentina, and the communities that formed as a result, became an important channel of communication outward from Argentina in the twentieth century. Arabic-speaking Argentines not only translated key Peronist texts but also acted as emissaries of Peronism amid Gamal Abdel Nasser’s rise in Egypt in the late 1950s, promoting Peron’s Third Position as “viable and influential” in that region (Balloffet Reference Balloffet2020, 145). This compelling narrative serves as just one illustration of how state political projects often built on existing social and cultural networks for outward communication; at the same time it suggests that such state efforts are not always successful in their goals, in part, perhaps, due to that peripheral status.

These examples underline that, in the place of political or commercial global hegemony, other forms of connectivity—human (personal, migratory, and professional) and material (technological access and economic resources)—play a major role in the where, why, and how of processes from the periphery gain international reach. We know, for example, that Argentina’s industries and its communities were rarely lacking in cultural and intellectual desire for global connection. The examples already noted highlight how intellectual, activist, and migratory networks became key pathways for the transmission of ideas, and the exportation of products.

However, and as the example of Carlos Gardel’s success might intimate, material connections are also critical. Lila Caimari’s recent research into the materiality of global communication in the nineteenth century underlines that there existed a very entrenched desire for (and fetishization of) “connection” to Europe in Buenos Aires, but investments in material connection (often dictated by private interests) were also important facets in establishing everyday forms of global networks (Caimari Reference Caimari2016). Put in conversation with work on other communication industries, including radio, television, and film, it becomes clear that access to material connectivity, and in particular, the human, technological, and economic means for production, created a context in which international projections of the nation became possible.

Economic investment in communication industries not only provided connection but also generated channels whereby local productions and representations could reach audiences abroad and local thought could gain international authority. Although the international success of Argentine film is one clear example, one could also take example of Argentina’s book industry. Gustavo Sorá’s contributions to the history of Spanish-language publishing industry have shown that Argentina’s publishing houses grew in prominence across the Spanish-speaking world in the early twentieth century (Sorá Reference Sorá2021; Heilbron, Sorá, and Boncourt Reference Heilbron, Sorá and Boncourt2018). The international prominence of these houses not only transformed into an important commercial industry but also elevated the works of Argentines—and their intellectual priorities—far beyond national borders.

Argentine radio channels provide another example. At a time when some neighbor nations in the region were recently acquiring technology and building up a national radio cultural program, Argentina’s own radio channels had an extensive reach. Listeners in plazas as far away as Quito, Ecuador, tuned into to local Buenos Aires channels, integrating the sounds of tango and the voices of porteño sports announcers into their own cultural histories. The trajectory of regionalizing media like radio, of course, was built on a longer history of Argentine economic, technological, and commercial privilege in the region, a history of uneven regional development. Unlike the expansion of radio from other more imperial or central nations, the influence or impact of these sounds were also uncoordinated to state projects and likely even occurred without the deliberate recognition of those transmitting in Argentina. In these cases, international presence may not have resulted in a state-utilized field of political power but reflected structural factors and the momentary conditions of an uneven industry. These types of migrations reveal much about how culture moves, where it goes, and why.

Such an example also points to a third consideration: the question of influence and other forms of impact. The influence of Argentina outside of Argentina could be defined as the capacity to potentially modify or have a direct effect on the development of social habits, practices and ideas or other people´s behavior as they evolve in other regions, countries or continents. It is tempting to frame the history of Argentina outside of Argentina as an analysis of peripheral influences on the rest of the world. Certainly, as in the cases of the publication industry, influence can often be clearly visualized or argued, even if it does not translate into state strategy. In the case of publishing, the reach of the Argentine publishers generated not only an international readership of Argentine ideas, but also made the country an important pole in the circulation of ideas in the Spanish-speaking world. Other realms of industry or commercial dominance create similar frames of influence. Argentine fútbol (soccer) would be a second example: the sport is a particular realm of global integration—a massive and truly globalized commercial industry, a social practice, and a cultural enterprise of entertainment. As recent work by Klaus Gallo (Reference Gallo2017) has underlined, Argentine players, coaches, and style of play have had an immense impact on the global sport. While the fame and reputation of legendary Argentine players like Diego Maradona and Lionel Messi have certainly generated a singular reputation for the nation, the broader presence of Argentine coaches, players, and club philosophies in European leagues have prompted some to assert that the sport has been informed by an Argentine style of play.

While these examples are notable, structuring a history of Argentina outside of Argentina in terms of influence also runs the risk of conflating an effort to compile the history of global processes that originate from a peripheral nation with material or abstract gain for the country in question. This may not always be so. There are also ample examples of more muddled influence or integration; cases in which migration of people, ideas, objects and products made an impact but that impact did not translate into tangible influence or even result in awareness or recognition of their place of origin.

This is likely even more the case when industries, individuals, or ideas integrate in places farther afield where the peripheral nation is less well known or even lacks name recognition. In such contexts, globalizing processes might become disassociated from their place of origin, becoming vaguely Latin American or even more generically exotic. One could observe in the case of mate, the archetypical drink of the Río de la Plata region, which, due to immigration and exchanges to and from Argentina, has undergone an important commercial migration to the United States (where it has been rebottled as an energy drink) and, even more notably, become an article of consumption among Druze communities in Syria and Lebanon. These transregional cases are propelled by migration as well as entrepreneurial efforts to commodify the drink in foreign markets (Folch Reference Folch2010). However, in the process, mate has undertaken its own codes and meanings of consumption (Pite Reference Pite2020) and has been recoded as South American or Latin American, or has lost associations with those places altogether, integrating into local patterns and cultures of consumption.

Global processes originating in the periphery not only hold hybrid origins but may well be mutated and altered in their globalization; they can also be absorbed, taken up, or dissolved into a broader global or transnational context. This act of disappearance or invisibility, however, should not be disregarded or discounted—on the contrary, the shedding of a national or even regional association may be a key aspect of peripheral global processes. When a place of origin lacks the hegemony or imperial scaffolding to accompany their globalizing articles with other forms of power, integration may look and be perceived differently: to put it one way, while mass consumption of Coca-Cola in Paris might sound alarm bells of “Americanization” (see, e.g., Kuisel Reference Kuisel1991; Emmanuel Reference Emmanuel1958), the consumption of mate in Syria or Lebanon is unlikely to be perceived as imposing a broader “Argentinization” of the Middle East. When political movements, symbols, cultures, and products that are generated out of a place-based history move outward from the periphery, they might have their national ties erased or deemed irrelevant when integrated abroad. These types of movements are not just worthy of study; taken together, they will likely be revealing of a type of global process that would otherwise be ignored.