Ricardo Rojas’s Nationalism in the Centennial Era (1900–1916)

Abstract

This paper analyzes the early works of Ricardo Rojas’s nationalist thought—La Restauración Nacionalista, Blasón de Plata, and La Argentinidad—in which we will examine the emergence of a new critical approach to the “civilizing-racist” postulates characteristic of nineteenth-century Argentine thought.

Rojas creates a historical-cultural concept of the nation in which previously brutalized identity-bearing subjects—the Indigenous person, the criollo, and the Spaniard—come to form part of a pluricultural and multiethnic concept of nationality, represented by the spirit of Indianism. The author argues for the need to disseminate these ideas in order to lead Argentina out of the “identity disorientation” in which it found itself, as a result of the expansion of “cosmopolitan” and “exoticist” ideologies.

Rojas plays a fundamental role within the State as a planner of nationalist educational policies and also as the creator of their study materials. For this reason, Rojas must be understood as a hegemonic intellectual of great weight in the design of state policies aimed at shaping and “nationalizing” Argentina’s multicultural population at the beginning of the twentieth century.