Immigrant Stories and Lives

“Lots of Wine, Very Quickly, Very Badly:” European Immigrants and the Making of Argentina’s Wine Industry

Argentine wine is synonymous with one thing: Malbec. But a little more than a century ago, it barely existed. The booming demand of newcomers from Italy and Spain saw the demise of uva criolla grapes and the explosion of a new production. Yet as historian Steve Stein explains, that early Malbec was a far cry from the elegant wine produced today. How did European immigrants transform wine production and consumption, laying the foundations for one of the country’s most celebrated commodities?

This Is Not Your Gefilte Fish: Couscous, Cookbooks, and the Making of Modern Argentine-Sephardi Identity

Jewish communities comprised a small but significant part of Argentina’s immigrant population in the twentieth century. However, being Jewish was mostly equated with being Ashkenazi. Yet as historian Adriana Brodsky finds, Sephardic Jews – particularly women – with cultural origins in the Mediterranean established their own cultural identities: at once true to their origins, distinct from Ashkenazi, yet of their own time and place in Argentina?

Stuck in the Port, Shipped out of the City: Excluding South Asian Immigrants in Early Twentieth Century

Argentina is known for its history of European immigration in the twentieth century. But UBC historian Benjamin Bryce has found that the country also worked to keep Asian migrants out of the country. This is what Bryce calls, ‘a history story of absence.’ What can the account of 600 Punjabi laborers, stranded in the port of Buenos Aires in 1912, tell us about Argentina’s efforts to transform itself through immigration? How might this relate to the enduring myth of whiteness?