Italian Argentines


Italian Argentines are Argentine-born citizens of Italian descent or Italian-born people who reside in Argentina. Italian is the largest ethnic origin of modern Argentines, after the Spanish immigration during the colonial population that had settled in the major migratory movements into Argentina. It is estimated that up to 30 million Argentines have some degree of Italian ancestry.
Italians began arriving in Argentina in large numbers from 1857 to 1940, totaling 44.9% of the entire postcolonial immigrant population, more than from any other country. In 1996, the population of Argentines of partial or full Italian descent numbered 15.8 million when Argentina’s population was approximately 34.5 million, meaning they consisted of 45.5% of the population. Today, the country has 30 million Argentines with some degree of Italian ancestry in a total population of 40 million.
Italian settlement in Argentina, along with Spanish settlement, formed the backbone of today's Argentine society. Argentine culture has significant connections to Italian culture in terms of language, customs, and traditions.

History

Small groups of Italians started to immigrate to Argentina as early as the second half of the 18th century. However, the stream of Italian immigration to Argentina became a mass phenomenon only from 1880 to 1920, during the Great European immigration wave to Argentina, peaking between 1900–1914, about 2 million settled from 1880 to 1920, and just 1 million from 1900 to 1914. In 1914, Buenos Aires alone had more than 300,000 Italian-born inhabitants, representing 25% of the total population.
The Italian immigrants were primarily male, aged between 14 and 50 and more than 50% literate; in terms of occupations, 78.7% in the active population were agricultural workers or unskilled laborers, 10.7% artisans, and only 3.7% worked in commerce or as professionals.
The outbreak of World War I and the rise of fascism in Italy caused a rapid fall in immigration to Argentina, with a slight revival in 1923 to 1927 but eventually stopped during the Great Depression and the Second World War.
After the end of World War II, Italy was reduced to rubble and occupied by foreign armies. From 1946 to 1957 was another massive wave of 380,000 Italians to Argentina. The substantial recovery allowed by the Italian economic miracle of the 1950s and 1960s eventually caused the era of Italian diaspora abroad to end, and in the following decades, Italy became a country with net immigration. Now, 527,570 Italian citizens still live in Argentina.

Characteristics of Italian immigration to Argentina

Areas of origin

In the decades before 1900, Italian immigrants initially arrived mainly from the northern regions of Piedmont, Veneto and Lombardy; after the turn of the century, the Unification of Italy and the establishment of the North as the dominant region of Italy, immigration patterns shifted to rural and former independent Southern Italy, especially Campania, Calabria and Sicily. In Argentine slang, tano is still used for all people of Italian descent although it originally meant inhabitants of the former independent state the Kingdom of Naples. The assumption that emigration from cities was negligible has an important exception. Naples went from being the capital of its own kingdom in 1860 to being just another large city in Italy. The loss of bureaucratic jobs and the subsequently declining financial situation led to high unemployment. In the early 1880s, epidemics of cholera also struck the city, causing many people to leave.
According to a 1990 study, the high proportion of returnees can show a positive or negative correlation between regions of origin and of destination. Southern Italians indicate a more permanent settlement. The authors conclude that the Argentine society's Italian component is the result of Southern rather than Northern influences.
PeriodNorthwest
Italy		Northeastern
and central Italy		Southern
and insular Italy		Total
1880–188459.8%16.8%23.4%106,953
1885–188945.3%24.4%30.3%259,858
1890–189444.2%20.7%35.1%151,249
1895–189932.3%23.1%44.6%211,878
1900–190429.2%19.6%51.2%232,746
1905–190926.9%20.1%53.0%437,526
1910–191427.4%18.2%54.4%355,913
1915–191932.3%23.1%44.6%26,880
1920–192419.7%27.4%52.9%306,928
1925–192914.4%33.1%52.5%235,065

RegionPercentage
North53.7%
South32.0%
Centre14.5%

RegionPercentage
Veneto26.6%
Campania12.1%
Calabria8.2%
Lombardy7.7%
Tuscany5.9%
Friuli-Venezia Giulia5.8%
Trentino-Alto Adige/Südtirol5.3%
Emilia-Romagna4.3%
Basilicata3.8%
Sicily3.2%
Piedmont2.8%
Apulia2.5%
Marche1.8%
Molise1.8%
Lazio1.1%
Umbria0.8%
Liguria0.7%
Sardinia0.4%
Aosta Valley0.2%

Culture

Language

According to Ethnologue, Argentina has more than 1,500,000 Italian speakers, making it the third most spoken language in the nation. In spite of the great many Italian immigrants, the Italian language never truly took hold in Argentina, partly because at the time of mass immigration, almost all Italians spoke their native regional languages rather than standardized Italian, precluding the expansion of the use of Italian as a primary language in Argentina. The similarity of the Italian dialects with Spanish also enabled the immigrants to acquire communicative competence in Spanish with relative ease and thus to assimilate linguistically without difficulty.
Italian immigration from the second half of the 19th century to the beginning of the 20th century made a lasting and significant impact on the intonation of Argentina's vernacular Spanish. Preliminary research has shown that Rioplatense Spanish, particularly the speech of the city of Buenos Aires, has intonation patterns that resemble those of Italian dialects and differ markedly from the patterns of other forms of Spanish. That correlates well with immigration patterns as Argentina, particularly Buenos Aires, which had huge numbers of Italian settlers since the 19th century. According to a study conducted by National Scientific and Technical Research Council of Argentina, and published in Bilingualism: Language and Cognition The researchers note that this is a relatively recent phenomenon, starting in the early 20th century with the main wave of Southern Italian immigration. Until then, the porteño accent was more similar to that of Spain, particularly Andalusia.
Much of Lunfardo arrived with European immigrants, such as Italians, Spanish, Greek, Portuguese, and Poles. Most Italian and Spanish immigrants spoke their regional languages and dialects, rather than Standard Italian or Spanish; other words arrived from the pampa by means of the gauchos; and a few came from Argentina's native population. Most sources believe that Lunfardo originated in jails, as a prisoner-only argot. Around 1900, the word lunfardo itself, originally a deformation of lombardo in several Italian dialects, was used to mean "outlaw." Lunfardo words are inserted in the normal flow of Rioplatense Spanish sentences. Thus, a Spanish-speaking Mexican reading tango lyrics needs only the translation of a discrete set of words, not a grammar guide. Most tango lyrics use lunfardo sparsely, but some songs employ lunfardo heavily. "Milonga Lunfarda" by Edmundo Rivero is an instructive and entertaining primer on lunfardo usage. Here are some examples:
Between about 1880 and 1900, Argentina received a large number of peasants from the South of Italy, who arrived with little or no schooling in Spanish. As the immigrants strove to communicate with the local criollos, they produced a variable mixture of Spanish with Italian languages and dialects, specially Neapolitan. The pidgin language was given the derogatory name cocoliche by the locals. Since the children of the immigrants grew up speaking Spanish at school, work, and military service, Cocoliche remained confined mostly to the first generation immigrants and slowly fell out of use. The pidgin has been depicted humorously in literary works and in the Argentine sainete theater, such as by Dario Vittori.

Cuisine

Argentine cuisine has been strongly influenced by Italian cuisine; the typical Argentine diet is a variation on the Mediterranean diet.
Italian staple dishes like pizza and pasta are common. Pasta is extremely common, either simple unadorned pasta with butter or oil or accompanied by a tomato- or bechamel-based sauce.
Pizza, for example, has been wholly subsumed and, in its Argentine form, more closely resembles Italian pizza al taglio but round instead of rectangular. Pizza is shared between two or more people, it's not the usual Italian personal pizza. Typical or exclusively Argentine pizzas include pizza canchera, pizza rellena, pizza por metro, and pizza a la parrilla. While Argentine pizza derives from Neapolitan cuisine, the Argentine fugaza/fugazza comes from the focaccia xeneise, but in any case, its preparation is different from its Italian counterpart, and the addition of cheese to make the dish started in Argentina or Uruguay.
Fainá is a type of thin bread made with chickpea flour. The name comes from the Ligurian word for the Italian farinata. Pizzerias in Buenos Aires often offer fainá, which is eaten with pizza, a wedge of fainá on top of a wedge of pizza.
Nevertheless, the pastas surpass pizzas in consumption levels. Among them are tallarines, ravioles, ñoquis, and canelones.
For example, pasta is often eaten with white bread. That can be explained by the low cost of bread and the fact that Argentine pastas tend to come with a large amount of tuco sauce and accompanied by estofado. Less commonly, pastas are eaten with a dressing of pesto, a green sauce based on basil, or salsa blanca.
Sorrentinos are also a local dish with a misleading name. They look like big round ravioles stuffed with mozzarella, cottage cheese and basil in tomato sauce.
Polenta comes from Northern Italy and is very common throughout Argentina. And, just like polenta concia in Italy, it is eaten as a main dish, with sauce and melted cheese, or it may accompany a stew.
Other dishes are milanesas, breaded meats similar to the Wiener schnitzel. A common dish of this variety is the milanesa napolitana, an Argentine innovation despite its name, which comes from former Buenos Aires restaurant "Nápoli." It is breaded meat baked with a topping of melted cheese, tomatoes, and sometimes ham. The milanesa was brought to Argentina by Central European immigrants.
Pasta frola is a typical Argentine recipe heavily influenced by Southern Italian cuisine, known as Pasta Frolla in Italy. Pasta frola consists of a buttery pastry base with a filling made of quince jam, sweet-potato jam or milk caramel and topped with thin strips of the same pastry, forming a squared pattern. It is an Argentine tradition to eat pastafrola with mate in the afternoon. The dish is also very popular in Paraguay and Uruguay. The traditional Italian recipe was not prepared with latticework, unlike in Argentina, but with a lid pierced with molds in the form of hearts or flowers.
Ice cream is a particularly popular Argentine dessert. Its creamy texture is caused by the large proportion of cream, and, as everywhere, many flavors are available. Ice cream was again a legacy of the Italian diaspora.

Education

Italian international schools in Argentina include:

Anarchists

Juan Manuel Fangio, F1 5 times world champion