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IMMIGRANT CITIES
Buenos Aires
Ports have always been hubs of arrival. As centres of trade with the world, port cities draw people from all over the globe. The communities that take root in them are more cosmopolitan and outward-looking than those of inland towns.
The Immigrant Times has launched a new series, Immigrant Cities, which explores how immigration has shaped some of the world’s major cities: their neighbourhoods, cultures, conflicts, and personalities. We begin with Buenos Aires, New Orleans, Marseille, Rotterdam, and Liverpool.
Hundreds of thousands of immigrants from Europe arrived in Buenos Aires during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Genoese stevedores painted their corrugated iron houses using leftover shipyard colours. The history of Polish immigration dates back to the late 19th century. Poles founded a neighbourhood affectionately known as ‘Little Warsaw’.
Buenos Aires, a city formed by immigrants from three continents
May 2026: Buenos Aires is a city whose immigrant roots are evident in its fabric. The tin-sided houses of La Boca, painted in leftover shipyard colours by Genoese stevedores, line streets still bearing Italian names. In Once, the old Jewish quarter, delicatessen signs advertise their wares in Spanish and Yiddish. The conventillos of San Telmo, mansions subdivided into low-cost tenements after the yellow fever epidemic of 1871, where Italian, Spanish, and Afro-Argentine families once shared courtyards, have been gentrified into boutique hotels, though the buildings’ bones remain.
Even the Spanish spoken here is distinct: the rhythm is Italian, the slang is Lunfardo, a street language that borrowed half its vocabulary from the docks of Genoa and Naples.
A geographical clarification is necessary at the beginning of this article. The Autonomous City of Buenos Aires, officially the Ciudad Autónoma de Buenos Aires, known as CABA, is a separate administrative entity, organised separately from Buenos Aires Province since 1880, when it was federalised as the national capital.
The province’s capital is La Plata, established in 1882. CABA has a population of approximately three million; the Greater Buenos Aires metropolitan area, which extends into the surrounding province, has around thirteen million residents, making it the second-largest metropolitan area in South America after São Paulo. This article focuses on the city itself, although immigration patterns naturally involve the broader conurbation.
Argentina’s 1853 constitution was almost unique in explicitly welcoming the world. Article 25 directed the federal government to encourage European immigration freely, without restrictions, taxes, or entry barriers. Between 1850 and 1913, per capita, more immigrants arrived in Argentina than in any other country. That founding commitment to openness makes the current situation all the more striking.
Argentine President Javier Milei is adopting an increasingly hostile stance towards immigration, targeting migrants from Paraguay, Bolivia, and Venezuela, and echoing the rhetoric of US President Donald Trump by framing immigration as a threat to public order. A city built entirely through immigration is now governed by politics that would deny that heritage.
The Spanish colonisation
16th – 18th centuries
Buenos Aires was founded twice before it prospered. In February 1536, Pedro de Mendoza led a Spanish expedition to the western bank of the Río de la Plata and established a settlement called Nuestra Señora Santa María del Buen Aire, Our Lady of the Fair Wind. The indigenous Querandí people withdrew their food supplies and laid siege to it. Hunger, disease, and raids reduced the garrison; Mendoza sailed back to Spain in 1537 and died at sea. The settlement was abandoned.
Juan de Garay refounded the city in 1580, naming it Ciudad de la Santísima Trinidad, and brought settlers from Asunción, in present-day Paraguay. He laid out the street grid, which is still recognisable today, allocated land to his colonists, and established colonial governance. While three years later, he was killed by Querandí raiders, the city endured.
For the next two centuries, Buenos Aires remained a backwater. Under the Spanish imperial trade system, all commerce with Spain had to pass through Lima and Callao on the Pacific coast; a complete trade cycle took two years or more. The settlers’ response was pragmatic: Buenos Aires became a centre of smuggling. The English obtained a licence in 1713 to ship enslaved Africans through the port. Portuguese smugglers operated from Colonia de Sacramento on the other side of the river. The city developed its own character, pragmatic, outward-looking, sceptical of authority, through long years of semi-isolation from Madrid.
In 1776, the Spanish Crown established the Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata with Buenos Aires as its capital, legalising Atlantic trade. The city’s population nearly doubled in the following decades, from 24,000 in 1778 to 42,500 by 1810. A cosmopolitan merchant class grew, comprising individuals from Spain, Portugal, Britain, France, and the Italian states. This class played a key role in the May Revolution of 1810 and the subsequent declaration of independence in 1816.
The issue of Buenos Aires’s relationship with the rest of the new nation, whether the city’s customs revenues should benefit the country as a whole or remain under provincial control, caused decades of civil conflict. The city temporarily seceded from the Argentine Confederation between 1853 and 1860. The matter was settled in 1880 when the city was federalised as the permanent national capital. Buenos Aires Province, having been stripped of its capital, established La Plata the following year.
The arrival and exploitation of African slaves
17th – 19th centuries
The Buenos Aires that tourists visit today, European in appearance, imagining itself as the Paris of South America, was not always this way, and the transformation was not accidental. For most of the colonial period and well into the nineteenth century, a substantial portion of the city’s population was of African descent.
Between 1680 and 1812, at least 110,000 enslaved Africans were brought to Buenos Aires and Montevideo, mostly from Congo and Angola. They served as domestic workers, labourers in the saladeros, the meat-preserving facilities on the Riachuelo, skilled artisans, and port labourers. By the early nineteenth century, between 30 and 40 per cent of Buenos Aires’s population was Black or of mixed African descent.
The May Revolution of 1810 abolished the slave trade, and the ‘freedom of wombs’ law of 1813 declared that children born to enslaved mothers would be free, although it did not free those already enslaved. Full emancipation was achieved in 1861.
However, the Afro-Argentine population had already begun to decline sharply. Black soldiers were conscripted in disproportionate numbers into the wars of independence and the War of the Triple Alliance against Paraguay (1864–1870).
The yellow fever epidemic of 1871 devastated the poorer southern neighbourhoods where Afro-Argentines were concentrated. From the 1880s onwards, the Generation of 1880, the political and intellectual elite that modernised Argentina, explicitly promoted European immigration in order to ‘whiten’ the population. The Black community was marginalised and ultimately erased from the country’s official self-image.
The cultural legacy could not be easily erased. The candombe, a drum-driven practice imported from Congo and Angola, served as the rhythmic foundation from which the milonga developed, and the milonga became one of the roots of tango. The word ‘tango’ itself is most likely of African origin: the historian Ricardo Rodríguez Molas, researching the languages of enslaved Africans brought to Argentina in 1957, traced the word to meeting places called ‘tango’ in both Africa and colonial America. The dance the world associates with Buenos Aires was invented in the dockyards and tenements where Afro-Argentine musicians played for Italian immigrants.
The great wave of European immigration
(1870s – 1940s)
In 1869, Buenos Aires had 178,000 inhabitants. By 1914, it had grown to 1.6 million. Between 1830 and 1950, 8.2 million European immigrants arrived in Argentina, more than in any other country except the United States during the same period. Most were displaced through the port of Buenos Aires, and a significant proportion stayed.
The Avellaneda Law of 1876 organised and sped up the flow. The state constructed the Hotel de Inmigrantes near the port, advertised in European newspapers, and offered assisted passages. The response was mainly from Italy and Spain. By 1895, immigrants made up 52 per cent of the city’s population. By 1914, 70 per cent of Buenos Aires residents were either foreign-born or children of immigrants.
The Italians arrived first and in the largest numbers. Most in the early decades were Genoese sailors, dock workers, and traders who settled in La Boca, at the mouth of the Riachuelo. They painted their tin houses with leftover shipyard paint, creating the patchwork of colours that makes La Boca one of the most photographed streetscapes in South America. The neighbourhood became known as La Piccola Italia.
Later waves of immigrants from the Mezzogiorno settled in the conventillos (cheap tenement housing) in San Telmo and the working-class south. Their influence on the city was considerable: there are nearly as many Italian surnames as Spanish in Argentina; the rhythms of Rioplatense Spanish are closer to Italian than any other dialect of the language; Lunfardo, the street slang born in tenements and prisons that became the linguistic vehicle of tango, borrowed roughly half of its vocabulary from Italian dialects.
The Spanish arrived in similar numbers, many fleeing rural poverty in Galicia and Andalusia, with a further wave of Republican exiles arriving after the Civil War of 1936–1939. Germans, Welsh, British, French, Armenians, Syrians, and Lebanese all added their diverse backgrounds. A significant Jewish community started arriving in the 1880s, fleeing pogroms in the Russian Empire under the sponsorship of Baron Maurice de Hirsch’s Jewish Colonisation Association, which established agricultural colonies in the provinces but found that most settlers eventually gravitated to Buenos Aires. By the 1920s, Once had become the city’s Jewish quarter, with the largest Jewish population in Latin America.
Buenos Aires differed from the immigrant cities of North America in one respect: there was relatively little ethnic clustering. Unlike New York, where entire boroughs were identified with specific national groups, immigrants in Buenos Aires dispersed throughout the city. La Boca attracted Italians, Belgrano attracted Germans, and Once attracted Jews, but members of each community could be found throughout the city. Institutions, hospitals, schools, social clubs, and newspapers served immigrant communities and provided cultural anchoring, but the city’s physical fabric was genuinely mixed.
Tango originated from this mixture. Emerging in the 1880s and 1890s from the conventillos and port-side bars where Afro-Argentine musicians, Italian immigrants, Spanish workers, and criollo gauchos lived close together, it combined multiple traditions: African candombe and milonga, Spanish flamenco, Italian melody, and Cuban habanera. Early tango reflected the experiences of the urban poor, desire, displacement, and nostalgia. The respectable classes were appalled by it. Only when Parisians embraced tango in the 1910s did Buenos Aires’s upper classes find it acceptable. The journey of tango, from the slums to the salons to the world, mirrors the journey of Buenos Aires itself.
The arrival of Jewish refugees and Nazi war criminals
1930s - 1960s
The decades surrounding the Second World War marked the most morally complex chapter in Buenos Aires’s immigration history. The city was both a refuge for those fleeing Nazi persecution and a destination for individuals escaping justice for Nazi crimes.
The Jewish community in Buenos Aires had been growing since the 1880s, reaching several hundred thousand by the late 1930s, mainly based in Once, Belgrano, and Villa Crespo. Argentina received more Jewish refugees than any other country in South America, although the welcome was not entirely warm. The immigration office, led by the anti-Semitic commissioner Santiago Peralta, quietly obstructed Jewish applications, and in 1938, Buenos Aires police banned the use of Yiddish at public gatherings.
Juan Perón, who came to power in 1946, had shown sympathy for the Axis powers during the war but later established diplomatic relations with Israel in 1949, becoming the first Argentine leader to allow Jewish citizens to hold public office. By the 1950s, the Jewish community had grown to about 450,000, making it the largest in Latin America.
At the same time, Perón’s government facilitated the arrival of Nazi war criminals through escape routes known as the ratlines, which extended from Germany via Rome and Genoa, often with help from elements within the Catholic Church, to Buenos Aires. Perón appointed officials with fascist connections to speed up immigration procedures and allocated funds to support the escape routes. An estimated 9,000 Nazi war criminals and collaborators arrived in Argentina after 1945.
The most notable figure was Adolf Eichmann, the SS officer responsible for managing the logistics of the Holocaust. He arrived in 1950 using the false identity Ricardo Klement, secured employment at a Mercedes-Benz factory north of Buenos Aires, and led a quiet life in a suburb for ten years. Mossad agents eventually tracked him down and abducted him from a street near his home in May 1960.
He was tried in Israel for crimes against humanity, convicted on all charges, and executed in 1962, the only civilian execution in Israel’s history. Josef Mengele, the Auschwitz doctor, also lived in Buenos Aires for several years before fleeing to Paraguay and later Brazil after Eichmann’s capture.
In 2025, President Milei released 1,850 classified documents from Argentina’s national archives detailing the full extent of Nazi immigration to the country.
The sizeable Jewish community in Buenos Aires rendered the city susceptible to anti-Semitic terrorism during the 1990s. On 17 March 1992, a bomb devastated the Israeli Embassy, resulting in 29 fatalities. On 18 July 1994, a subsequent attack destroyed the Argentine Israelite Mutual Association (AMIA), the principal Jewish communal organisation, causing 85 deaths and injuring hundreds.
The AMIA bombing remains the deadliest terrorist attack in Argentine history and one of the deadliest assaults on a Jewish institution outside Israel. Investigations implicated Iranian state actors and Lebanese Hezbollah operatives; no perpetrators have been brought to justice. The Pasteur-AMIA station on the Buenos Aires metro is decorated with the names of the victims.
The turbulent years of the Peróns, the dictatorship and the financial collapse
1955 – 2000
Starting from the 1940s, Perónist industrialisation drew hundreds of thousands of workers from Argentina’s rural provinces to the factories of Greater Buenos Aires. These internal migrants, the cabecitas negras, meaning ‘little blackheads’ as the Buenos Aires establishment called them, referencing their darker skin from mixed indigenous and European heritage, settled in the villas miseria on the city’s outskirts. They formed the social backbone of Peronism, and their arrival significantly reshaped the city’s politics, much like any wave of European migration would.
Regional immigration from Bolivia, Paraguay, Chile, and Uruguay had been increasing since the mid-20th century. These workers filled agricultural and construction jobs vacated by internal migrants from the provinces. The Bolivian community in Greater Buenos Aires became concentrated in the garment industry; the Paraguayan community, the largest immigrant group by number, in construction and domestic work.
In March 1976, a military junta led by General Jorge Rafael Videla overthrew Isabel Perón's government and initiated what it termed the ‘Process of National Reorganisation’, known as the Dirty War. Over the following seven years, an estimated 10,000 to 30,000 people were abducted, tortured, and murdered by state agents.
Victims were taken to secret detention centres, the most notorious being the ESMA Navy Mechanics School in Buenos Aires, and most were murdered, with many thrown from aircraft into the Río de la Plata or the South Atlantic. The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, whose children were among the disappeared, started holding weekly vigils in front of the presidential palace in 1977; they continue to do so today.
The Jewish community was disproportionately impacted. Between 1,500 and 2,000 of the disappeared were Jewish, making up about 10 per cent of the total, despite Jews representing less than 2 per cent of the Argentine population. Anti-Semitism was evident in the behaviour of some interrogators. Thousands of Jewish Argentines fled into exile in Europe, Israel, and the United States; several thousand emigrated to Israel during these years.
Democracy was restored in 1983, followed by trials of the junta leadership, although amnesty laws in 1986 and pardons in 1990 interrupted the process. Only in 2003 did Argentina’s Congress revoke those laws; the Supreme Court later declared them unconstitutional. By 2019, the Attorney General’s office had charged over 3,000 people and convicted more than 900 for crimes committed during the dictatorship.
The financial collapse of December 2001, when five presidents came and went in a week, savings accounts were frozen, and unemployment exceeded 20 per cent, triggered a wave of emigration. Tens of thousands of middle-class Argentines, many grandchildren of Italian or Spanish immigrants, used their ancestral European passports to relocate to Spain, Italy, and other countries. The great-grandchildren of those who had built Buenos Aires were now emigrants themselves.
New arrivals, old hostilities
21st century
According to Argentina’s 2022 census, the country has approximately two million foreign-born residents. Paraguayans and Bolivians constitute the largest communities, followed by Venezuelans, whose numbers are increased by the economic and political collapse of their country. Most of these groups are concentrated in Greater Buenos Aires. The proportion of foreign-born residents in Argentina’s population is about 4.2 per cent, the lowest since data collection began in 1869, even as the political debate regarding immigration has reached its highest level in a century.
The newest communities encounter familiar challenges: language barriers, documentation issues, the informal economy, and housing in the most marginalised settlements. Bolivian workers in the garment workshops of Once, Venezuelan street vendors in the Microcentro, Paraguayan construction workers in the rapidly expanding corridors north of the city, they hold the same economic position as the Genoese of La Boca and the Galicians of San Telmo did a century ago.
The current Argentine government of President Milei, which took office in December 2023, has moved to tighten immigration policies by speeding up deportation procedures, restricting asylum claims, and framing immigration as a cause of crime. However, the data do not support this portrayal. In Buenos Aires Province, with over sixteen million residents, the foreign-born population in prison has remained steady at around five per cent of the total for twenty years, roughly proportional to the immigrant share of the population. President Milei has claimed, without a clear methodological basis, that 1.7 million undocumented immigrants have entered Argentina over the past twenty years.
Porteños of influence
Carlos Gardel (c.1890–1935) is the most celebrated figure in tango history, and nearly everything about his origins was obscured by his own choice. He was almost certainly born in Toulouse, France, as the illegitimate son of a Spanish woman named Berta Gardez, and he arrived in Buenos Aires as a small boy. He grew up in the Abasto neighbourhood, near the large market where he used to sing as a boy. In 1917, he recorded ‘Mi Noche Triste,’ considered the first significant tango song, and his career picked up steam after that. He toured France in the 1920s; Parisian enthusiasm for tango encouraged Buenos Aires’s upper classes to embrace it. Gardel died in a plane crash in Colombia in 1935. His tomb in the Chacarita cemetery, where mourners still leave lit cigarettes in his statue's hand, is the most visited memorial in the city.
Diego Maradona (1960–2020) was born in Lanús, Buenos Aires Province, and raised in Villa Fiorito, a shantytown on the southern edge of the city. His parents had moved from Corrientes, a poor north-eastern province, to Buenos Aires in the early 1950s, joining the wave of internal migrants seeking work in the capital. His father was of Guaraní and Galician Spanish descent; his mother had Italian and Croatian ancestry. As one writer observed, he was ‘the product of two migratory currents that shaped Argentine society in the twentieth century: mass European immigration and internal migration from the provinces to the capital.’ Maradona grew up without running water or electricity, becoming the defining footballer of his generation. His ‘Hand of God’ goal against England in the 1986 World Cup was seen in Argentina as the viveza of the slum child who has learned to survive by his wits. He died in 2020.
Jacobo Timerman (1923–1999) arrived in Buenos Aires as a five-year-old, having been brought from the Ukrainian town of Bar by parents fleeing the pogroms of the early Soviet era. They settled in a single room near Once; his father died when Jacobo was twelve, leaving his mother to raise two boys in poverty.
He became the most influential newspaper editor in Argentine history, founding La Opinión in 1971, a serious liberal daily that published investigative journalism at a time when most editors kept their heads down. When the military junta seized power in 1976, Timerman continued reporting.
In April 1977, twenty men broke down the door of his Buenos Aires apartment and took him away. He was held without charge, subjected to electric shock torture, brutal anti-Semitic abuse, and kept in solitary confinement for two and a half years. International pressure led to his release in 1979; the junta deported him to Israel. There, he wrote Prisoner Without a Name, Cell Without a Number (1981), a memoir of his imprisonment that became a landmark in human rights literature.
He returned to Buenos Aires in 1984, testified before the national commission investigating the disappeared, and spent the remaining years of his life in the city that had tortured him. He died there in 1999.
Sources and Methodology
This article draws on: Britannica (Buenos Aires, Argentina, La Plata); Wikipedia (Buenos Aires, Buenos Aires Province, Immigration to Argentina, Afro-Argentines, Tango, Dirty War, Ratlines, Federalisation of Buenos Aires, History of the Jews in Argentina, Jacobo Timerman, Diego Maradona, Adolf Eichmann’s capture, Carlos Gardel, Lunfardo); Migration Policy Institute; Mixed Migration Centre; Latin America 21; Global Urban History blog (Benjamin Bryce, ‘Immigration, Communities and Neighborhoods in Buenos Aires, 1880–1930’); Wiener Holocaust Library; Times of Israel; The Week; De Montfort University (‘Mirror Man: Diego Maradona and Argentine National Identity’); Hadassah Magazine; Yiddishkayt; Encyclopedia.com; University of Illinois Diaspora Project (‘The Untold Afro-Argentine History of Tango’); La Bruja Tango Berkeley; Frommers; LAC Geo.
A note on terminology: ‘immigrant’ refers to those who arrive in Buenos Aires from outside Argentina; ‘migrant’ includes those who move within Argentina between provinces. Buenos Aires denotes the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires (CABA), except when the broader metropolitan area is specifically mentioned.
We launched the series Immigrant Cities in March 2026, starting with Liverpool, Rotterdam, Marseille, and New Orleans. In May, we added Buenos Aires. In the coming months, we will include other cities from Europe, the Americas, Asia, and Africa. Please contact the Editor if you would like to suggest cities with a captivating immigration history.
Further reading from The Immigrant Times: Immigration in South America || Venezuelan immigrants contribute billions to the economies of their host countries || Chile’s new hard line on immigration ||
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