Sociability, identity and politics.

Fascism and the idea of italo-argentineness as a tool to create relationships outside the italian community (Bahía Blanca, 1930-1936)

Abstract

This article looks forward to inquire into the use that local fascists made of the notion of Italian-Argentineness with regard to Bahía Blanca’s society in order to generate social nets and bonds outside the local Italian community. With that understanding, the previously mentioned notion allows us to demonstrate the capitalization of visibility and prestige in individual terms by the collectivity’s leading sectors related to fascism.

            By the analysis of local press and the Sociedad Italiana de Socorros Mutuos de Bahía Blanca’s files, we reconstruct the ways in which the idea of Italian-Argentineness operated cultural and politically from the foundation of the Instituto Ítalo-Argentino de Cultura, on April 1930, to the end of the Second Italian-Ethiopian War and the resulting declaration of the Italian Empire, on May 1936.

            To sum up, this study departs from a local case to observe the mechanisms of the instrumental and selective use of the homeland’s politics in the host society as an element for the construction of symbolic capital within the latter, which we consider can give a renew complexity to political History of immigration, as well as that of Italian-Argentinian fascism in particular.