Mass migration from Europe to the Río de la Plata
La gran inmigración europea al Río de la Plata
1880–1930. Between about 1880 and 1930 Argentina received some four million immigrants, most of them Italians and Spaniards, drawn by cheap land, high wages on the farms…
Draft: not yet checked against its sources.
What happened
Between about 1880 and 1930 Argentina received some four million immigrants, most of them Italians and Spaniards, drawn by cheap land, high wages on the farms and railways of the pampas, and a government that actively recruited settlers. By the census of 1914 about a third of the people living in Argentina had been born abroad, the highest proportion of foreigners of any country in the world; in Buenos Aires it was around half. A huge Hotel de Inmigrantes, begun in 1906, received the newcomers in the port. The mixing of Italians, Spaniards, Galicians and others with the local population shaped the Spanish of Buenos Aires and Montevideo: its Italian-flavoured intonation, the slang called lunfardo, and the tango. Uruguay, southern Brazil and, on a smaller scale, Cuba lived the same story.
Events along the way
- 1878–1885: The Conquest of the Desert
Connected
- The Conquest of the Desert (1878–1885)
- The Spanish Civil War (17 July 1936–1 April 1939)
- Perón, Evita and the birth of Peronism (17 October 1945–September 1955)
- The Venezuelan exodus (c. 2015)
Sources
- El contexto nacional — Museo de la Inmigración — argentina.gob.ar (Dirección Nacional de Migraciones)
- El Hotel — Museo de la Inmigración — argentina.gob.ar (Dirección Nacional de Migraciones)