Ethnic In(Visibility) in Neoliberal Argentina

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Summary *

During the 1990s, Argentina’s government and national media repeatedly called attention to a wave of migration that was supposedly flooding the country with new immigrants, a wave comparable in scale to the influx of Europeans at the turn of the previous century. This time, however, the new arrivals were coming from the neighboring countries of Bolivia, Paraguay and Peru. But overshadowing the celebration was an official xenophobia that blamed the newcomers for the country’s growing social and economic ills. According to government and media accounts, the torrent of immigrants from bordering countries was causing an explosion in unemployment and crime. The truth was, demographic data disproved the storied jump in immigration rates. The proportion of the population consisting of immigrants from neighboring countries increased by only a fraction of a percent during the 1990s. Between 1991 and 2001 their representation within the total population increased from 2.6% to 2.9%. Clearly, the fiction of exploding immigration rates was motivated, at least in part, by the need to find a scapegoat for the country’s then-building economic and social crisis. But the nature of ethnic visibility in Argentina was also changing. In the past “diversity” had been rendered invisible, but by the 1990s difference was increasingly highlighted, or “hyper-visibilized.” Information provided by the agent in SIGEVA