A History of Latin America

LATIN AMERICA IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 187

After 1880 European immigrants swarmed into Argentina, Uruguay, and

Brazil and, in lesser numbers, into such countries as Chile and Mexico. Combined

with growing urbanization and continued expansion of the export sector, this

helped accelerate the rate of social change. These developments helped create a

small, modern industrial working class and swelled the ranks of blue-collar and

middle-class white-collar workers.

But aside from that minority of the working class that adopted socialist, an-

archist, or syndicalist doctrines, the immigrants posed no threat to the existing

social structure or the prevailing aristocratic ideology; instead, many were con-

quered by that ideology. The foreigners who entered the upper class as a rule al-

ready belonged to the educated or managerial class. Movement from the middle

class of immigrant origin to the upper class was extremely diffi cult and rare, and

for the lower-class immigrant, it was almost impossible. A few immigrants made

These fi ne sketches of Colombian mestizo farmers and upper-class fi gures eff ec-
tively make the point that in nineteenth-century Latin America, clothes still made
the man. [Carmelo Fernandez, Mestizo Farmers of Anis, Ocana Province, Colombia, 1850–1859,
watercolor, Biblioteca Nacional de Colombia, Bogotá]