Argentina’s Frontier of Promise

The legacies of the immigrants, old and new, converge on the streets of this prosperous port city that has been shaped and reshaped by foreign diasporas for more than a century.

In La Boca, the historic waterfront enclave of brightly painted tenements founded by Genovese dockworkers and fishermen, the worshipers at Our Lady Mother of the Immigrants church are mostly of Italian and Spanish descent. But after Mass, a celebration fills the church with the music of the newest immigrants fleeing poverty and strife: Peruvians.

“My mother still speaks a mix of Sicilian dialect, Italian and Spanish,” said Maria Grazia, 56, who arrived from Sicily half a century ago. “She has not adapted. She misses everything. I have adapted, although I miss the mother country. . . .

“And I miss the old La Boca. The neighborhood has changed a great deal, with all the immigrants from across the border.”

At dawn on the other edge of the city, a plaza in the Bajo Flores neighborhood bears a startling resemblance to the street-corner hiring halls of Southern California: The owners of textile factories, mostly Koreans, recruit illegal Bolivian and Paraguayan day laborers, who line up patiently for jobs that pay $3 per hour per double shift, cot included.

“There is no justice for us,” said Gloria, 24, a short, animated Bolivian who is a veteran of the sweatshops. “If we find a job, they exploit us. We can’t complain because we are undocumented. If you answer an ad in the paper for a job, they ask for documents, and if you don’t have them, they never call.

“But the people keep coming. I ask myself: Are things really that bad in Bolivia?”

Like the United States, Argentina remains a frontier of promise, the most powerful magnet for immigration in Latin America.

Like the United States and Western Europe, Argentina has experienced the classic collision of a tightening economy and a wave of immigrants from impoverished neighboring nations.

“Argentina is a very European nation,” said Father Wolmar Scaravelli, a priest at the church in La Boca who directs a Roman Catholic social service agency. “It looked to the north. Now it is beginning to look to the south. This new migration has a lot to do with that.”

The “Latinamericanization” of the migrant flow also forces Argentines to look inward, at themselves.

The spirit of mobility remains fresh in this self-confident and well-educated society. Enterprising Argentines still occasionally depart for the United States or for the European countries their ancestors left behind. This breeds tolerance toward newcomers.

But as unemployment has reached 18%, the government has toughened border policing and laws against smuggling and illegal entry.

Hugo Franco, the energetic special administrator appointed last year to overhaul the neglected immigration service, said the new policies do not contradict Argentina’s identity as a nation of immigrants.

“Argentina says yes to immigrants, but no to illegality,” Franco said. “I don’t know of any nation that became great with illegals.”

There have been nationalistic rumblings: Gov. Domingo Bussi of rural Tucuman province, a retired general with a stern reputation forged during the military dictatorship of the 1970s, caused a stir recently by declaring that he preferred that natives, not Bolivian farm workers, harvest “the fruit of our land.”

At times, the national conversation about immigration sounds like the debates in California and Washington, D.C.

Referring to border-crossers, Population Secretary Aldo Carerras told the press: “There is no way to stop them. You could put guards one next to the other all along the hundreds of kilometers of border. And what’s more, Argentina has always been a nation with open doors.”

The doors opened in the late 19th century, when the sprawling, sparsely populated country was home to descendants of Spanish settlers and remnants of indigenous groups that largely had died out or been destroyed.

A boom stoked by agricultural exports brought waves of immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe. They toiled in the ports, meat-packing plants, railroads, service industries.

In 1914, the end of the first great migration, more than a third of Argentina’s population was foreign-born. Forty percent of the newcomers were from Italy and 35% from Spain, according to government statistics. These two groups also led smaller influxes after World War II.

So Italian and Spanish cultures predominate in the names and faces of many Argentines, their predilection for pizza and pasta, their jaunty, talkative and occasionally operatic manner.

In the Pasaje de Recoleta tavern, the dignified waiters still speak with the melodic accent of Galicia, the rainy northwest region of Spain that dispatched so many immigrants that all Spaniards here are called “Gallegos.” And in his satiric novel “The Dogs of Paradise,” writer Abel Posse describes Christopher Columbus as the typical Argentine, “an Italian who learned Spanish,” jocularly asserting that he spoke lunfardo, the slang that melds street Spanish with Italian dialects and provided the lyrics of many a tango.

Jews are the nation’s third-largest ethnic group, estimated at about a quarter of a million. The biggest Jewish community in Latin America originated largely in Russia, where a philanthropic baron financed an exodus to escape the pogroms at the turn of the century.

Arab immigrants, meanwhile, settled in the arid north and made their mark in commerce and politics; the family of President Carlos Menem came from Syria to the northwest province of La Rioja.

Buenos Aires, a cosmopolitan metropolis of nearly 12 million, has experienced the inevitable influx of popular culture from the United States. But it still looks resolutely toward Europe. The Old World boulevards, cafes, tea salons and architecture recall Barcelona, Paris, London.

The poetic nostalgia of the portenos, as local denizens are known, derives from this longing for the elusive idea, or illusion, of home.

“The most European of all have always been the Argentines,” said Grazia, sitting in the Mother of the Immigrants church amid shrines and murals celebrating the ethnic mosaic. “We are always dreaming of Europe, thinking of that place. Myself in particular, I remember it well. I was 7 years old, but the transition was very traumatic for me.”

Grazia’s family left Messina, Sicily, in 1947. Her father operated small boats in the harbor of La Boca, whose cramped tenements of corrugated iron and wood glow in cheerful reds, oranges and yellows.

Like faded Little Italies of U.S. inner cities, though, the cobblestone streets and crumbling high sidewalks exude melancholy.

Many once-rollicking Italian restaurants are shuttered. Time and prosperity dispersed the population to the elegant upper- and middle-class expanses to the north and west.

Grazia and her husband stayed. They built careers at an Italian-owned bank, saving enough to make the ritual return visit to Italy several years ago.

The family wanderlust endures. An uncle left for New York. Grazia’s son went last year to Spain to seek his fortune, waiting tables on the island of Ibiza. A dozen friends followed. It is not uncommon for young Argentines to take advantage of their heritage to obtain European Union passports and head east.

“I told him that I knew what it was like to suffer such a change,” Grazia said. “I cried for six months after he told me he was leaving. More than the lack of opportunity here, these kids are drawn by the sense of adventure.”

While emigration has declined along with the hyper-inflation of the late 1980s and early 1990s, cutbacks in the modernizing private and public sectors gnaw at a lifestyle that allowed workers greater comforts than elsewhere on the continent.

Predictably, immigration from the desperate countrysides of adjacent nations spurs concern. The tenements of La Boca are now crowded with Bolivians, Paraguayans and Peruvians.

Grazia complained about drugs, robberies, squatters.

“I don’t want to criticize anyone,” she said, “but there are many problems.”

Argentines are basically tolerant, Scaravelli said, because of their history and because “there are only 33 million Argentines, and that is not a lot. With more people, we are stronger.”

But Father Ernesto Narcisi argued that the fixation with Europe has a reactionary underside.

He lives and works with new immigrants in Perito Moreno, a shantytown on the city’s periphery where stray dogs and youth gangs roam and horse-drawn carts are used to collect trash for recycling.

The portenos, Narcisi said, tend to look down on other Latin Americans because many are racially mixed and darker-skinned.

“There is a sense that there is Buenos Aires and then there are the provinces, and that all of Latin America is the provinces,” the black-bearded activist priest said. “It is a cultural weakness to live copying one reality and denying another. Eighty percent of our continent is this reality represented by the immigrants.”

Shrill voices in the debate have calculated the number of illegal immigrants at 1 million.

But experts such as Franco, the director of the immigration service, say that figure is too high.

Officially, foreign-born residents were 5% of the population in 1991. Based on the results of a 1993 amnesty that legalized more than 200,000 people, experts believe that the illegal population amounts to several hundred thousand. Job competition from illegal immigrants, according to a government study, accounts for about 1% of unemployment.

Gloria, the seamstress who arrived 10 years ago from Bolivia, said nobody else wants to do menial labor in domestic service, construction or agriculture.

“There are jobs, but the problem is that people here like to work less and earn more,” said the mother of two. “My countrymen like to work hard, they like to work themselves to death.”

Gloria spoke in the gritty brick plaza in Bajo Flores, where immigrants congregate outside a fenced recreation center. The aroma of spices floats from a thriving Bolivian food stand in a vacant lot on the south end of the plaza, the border of the Perito Moreno shantytown.

Employers in trucks and vans arrive from the north, many from the tree-lined streets and well-kept storefronts of a fledgling Koreatown nearby.

Estimated at 35,000, the Korean population of Argentina dates back several decades and has flourished in small businesses, particularly the textile industry, alongside longtime Jewish entrepreneurs. As the day laborers watch, ready to bolt, a blue Ford Falcon pulls up and disgorges two strapping federal police investigators. They accost a trio of long-haired Bolivian youths, glance at their documents and order them into the car.

Some police regard immigrants as either potential criminals or targets for extortion, complained Gloria, who asked that her last name be withheld. Robbers terrorize immigrants because they are perceived as timid and industrious.

“The victims are the Bolivians,” Gloria said. “The punks wait for them after work. And the police say they’ll do something, but nothing happens.”

In a gripping case that left another slum in a virtual state of siege, a Bolivian shopkeeper used a hammer to beat to death two members of a notorious gang who robbed him.

The enraged gang, known as “The Paraguayans,” sprayed the shop, police and journalists with sniper fire, forcing authorities to evacuate the family of seven.

The distraught shopkeeper, Pedro Ruiz, appealed to authorities to help his family return to Bolivia.

He spoke out in a recent televised interview, his face concealed by sunglasses and a ski mask.

“Please help me,” he said, weeping. “Give me a hand, and to my family. We are desperate.”

The changing texture of the urban landscape hints at assimilation. Volleyball nets appearing on working-class patios reflect the Paraguayan love for the game.

The Bolivian community organizes around village religious orders devoted to the Virgin Mary. Festivals, soccer clubs, restaurants and radio stations have multiplied.

Clandestine border-jumping remains rare. Most illegals simply enter by posing as tourists.

Recognizing that disarray and corruption had also weakened the defenses, Franco launched a plan to reform the immigration agency.

“The administrative disorganization made the agency permeable to corruption,” he said.

Procedures that once required 36 stops in the formidable bureaucracy now take six. Databanks and the 191 official ports of entry along the vast borders--Argentina’s western boundary is about 500 miles longer than the U.S-Mexico line--are being computerized. More funds are needed because “there are no indications that the flow of people is going to change,” Franco said.

In La Boca, the latest group finding sanctuary at the church are Peruvians such as Wilbert Salas, 31.

Two years ago, Salas boarded a bus in Lima for the three-day ride down the Pacific coast to Chile, then east across the Andes to Buenos Aires. He lived initially in one of the teeming old hotels in Once, the predominantly Jewish garment district, where rivers of shoppers flow past stalls and shops piled with discount clothing, where new Asian owners occupy doorways next to longtime merchants in skullcaps.

Salas, a factory worker, has become a leader among a Peruvian community estimated at 40,000. They meet at the church on Sundays for dances, meals and camaraderie.

Their stories are harsh: danger and hunger at home, hardship here. Worse yet, marauding criminal gangs who arrived in recent years have hurt the image of Peruvians.

“The Argentines are the sons of immigrants, and if we were Europeans, I am sure they would welcome us with applause,” Salas said. “But there are things here that you must value a great deal. Eating meat, for example, is a luxury where I come from in Peru. Here we can eat well and still send money home.”

Behind Salas, men and women look after a 3-month-old baby lying on a pile of blankets in a corner of the church social center.

The Argentine-born boy, Marcelo, is the son of a single mother, an unemployed illegal immigrant whom fellow Peruvians have chipped in to help.

“He is the child of the community,” Salas said, grinning. “The child of all of us.”