Reducing Argentine history to racial whitening oversimplifies a process shaped by identity disputes, and may reinforce contemporary narratives that portray the country as a racist exception in Latin America.
Argentina’s history cannot be explained as the outcome of a project by the national elites aimed at racial whitening that reproduced colonial structures, but rather as that of a Latin American nation whose identity-building was the subject of a historical struggle among different political projects. The Europeanization of certain sectors of the ruling classes did exist, but it was part of a broader struggle linked to the economic model, international integration, and the definition of national sovereignty. Argentina’s problem was becoming trapped between contradictory projects over what the nation should be. The existence of an elite that imagined Argentina from Europe does not prove that the country was essentially a European project; it demonstrates that there was a struggle to impose that conception as the definition of the Nation.
The problem would not be that Argentina sought to become a white nation, but that a particular political elite, linked to the local oligarchies, sought to impose a civilizational model as the exclusive national identity. Argentina’s diversity should not be interpreted exclusively as an operation of racial replacement, but also as a historical experience of social integration and state-building. Historical figures such as Julio Argentino Roca cannot be reduced to contemporary moral categories, but must instead be analyzed within the framework of conflicts between different projects for the Nation.
From a national and Latin American perspective, it can be argued that labeling the Conquest of the Desert a genocide, as sectors of the intelligentsia have done, distorts the historical record. Casualties were numerically comparable between the army and Indigenous forces, while the civilizing repression against gauchos and provincial montoneros was considerably bloodier. This perspective frames Roca’s campaign primarily as an effort to extend Argentine sovereignty over a territory that had remained beyond the reach of the colonial and republican state. The subsequent evolution of events further complicates interpreting that process as a project of systematic racial extermination: a significant portion of the Pampas and Ranquel peoples ultimately became incorporated into the structures of Argentine society. Some Indigenous people joined the Army of the Line or the police forces; others became ranch hands and farm laborers, while certain chiefs received military ranks and official salaries. There was also assimilation, intermarriage, and the transformation of identities.
But the majority of contemporary historians, together with Indigenous rights organizations, now reject this framework and describe the Conquest of the Desert as a colonial-style campaign of dispossession that meets the defining criteria of genocide. Even so, the persistence of this dispute is revealing: it shows how the logic of civilization versus barbarism that Sarmiento deployed against gauchos also structured the violence against Indigenous peoples. Reducing this dichotomy to a project of racial whitening also amounts to dehistoricizing it: the category was a political weapon within a struggle over the organization of the state.
This ideological project of the Buenos Aires elites and local oligarchies did not operate in a vacuum, but was the cultural expression of a more precise material condition: Argentina’s status as a semi-colony within the orbit of the British Empire. Beginning in 1880, England’s share of Argentine imports rose from 27.6 percent in 1880 to 40.6 percent in 1890, consolidating a relationship of dependency. The country exported raw materials while importing manufactured goods, capital, and, crucially, a system of ideas. Positivism, adopted by intellectuals and the ruling class from the late nineteenth century onward, functioned as a scientific justification for a supposed racial hierarchy: the belief in linear progress and the superiority of European races was what authors in the national tradition defined as pedagogical colonization, the formation of an educated elite trained to think of itself and the country through the eyes of the metropolis.
The very milestones of national formation make it difficult to argue that Argentina was built exclusively on whitening. The Assembly of the Year XIII had abolished Indigenous tribute and eliminated colonial institutions such as the mita, encomienda, and yanaconazgo, while also establishing freedom of the wombs; four decades later, the Constitution of 1853 consolidated the abolition of slavery and civil equality. Added to this was the multiethnic character of the armies of Independence, which incorporated Black people, Indigenous peoples, mestizos, gauchos, and Creoles. These processes challenge the idea of a society structured from its origins by insurmountable racial barriers: the national trajectory can also be read as a process of mestizaje, assimilation, and integration in which diverse identities were incorporated into a common political community.
The contemporary persistence of the whitening narrative cannot either be analyzed in isolation from the symbolic struggle within the global information ecosystem. During the 2026 FIFA World Cup, episodes involving the Argentine national team were reframed to consolidate an international narrative in which the country appeared as a paradigmatic case of racism and intolerance. From the perspective of cognitive warfare, the objective is not necessarily to invent facts, but to select real events, amplify them, and turn them into permanent attributes of a national identity. Under this logic, the whitening thesis ceases to be merely a historiographical interpretation of the nineteenth century and becomes a narrative resource capable of reinforcing a contemporary stereotype about Argentina among global audiences.
This dynamic is significant because it operates on Argentina’s soft power. Its international projection has been supported by sports, education, science, culture, and immigration. Reducing this experience to the concept of whitening displaces a complex process of state-building and social integration and erodes one component of its international legitimacy: the image of a country that welcomed migrants and was relatively successful in integrating different populations.
From this national and Latin American perspective, the dispute goes beyond the historiographical debate over Roca, Sarmiento, or the Conquest of the Desert. What is at stake is who has the authority to define the historical meaning of the Argentine Nation. The current decolonial rereading constitutes a new stage in this struggle over meaning. It is not a matter of denying the episodes of violence, exclusion, or racial hierarchization that shaped the construction of the State, but of questioning an interpretation that turns these processes into the totalizing explanation of the Argentine experience. Paradoxically, a narrative conceived to denounce the legacies of colonialism runs the risk of producing a new essentialism: replacing the old image of a “European Argentina” with that of an “intrinsically racist Argentina,” reducing a history shaped by social, geopolitical, and national conflicts to a single interpretive key. In the context of competition over perceptions and international reputation, this simplification can be instrumentalized to consolidate a negative country image that goes beyond academic debate and spills over into foreign policy, sports, and international prestige.
The problem with interpreting whitening does not lie in pointing to the existence of Europeanizing projects in nineteenth-century Argentina, something that is historically undeniable, but in turning them into the dominant explanation of national construction. The Europeanization of the elites was inseparable from struggles over the state, international integration, and sovereignty. Argentina was not simply constructed in order to cease being Latin American: it was the result of competing projects over what it meant to be a nation. The problem was intellectual and economic subordination. It is necessary to critically analyze the Europeanization of the elites, but to situate it within a broader issue: the Europeanization of the Latin American intelligentsia and the adoption of foreign categories to interpret national realities.
Autor
Bachelor's degree in International Relations from the National University of Rosario. Master's candidate in International Relations at EPYG-UNSAM. Diploma in Media and Networks in Times of Polarization from EPYG-UNSAM and in Communication and Defense from UNDEF.
