I have presented my research at several conferences. Below, you can find brief summaries of some of my recent conference papers. For a full list of my conference activity, see my CV.

“The Future of Ethnicity in Buenos Aires, 1880-1930”
Presented at the Southern Cone History Workshop, Glendon College, York University, March 5, 2016.

This paper is the introduction to my book manuscript, Citizenship and Belonging: Germans, Argentines, and the Meaning of Ethnicity in Buenos Aires, 1880-1930. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the self-proclaimed leaders of various immigrant communities in Buenos Aires created ethnic spaces in an effort to maintain in Argentine society the cultural and linguistic pluralism that their own migration had created. Community leaders of many European backgrounds built charities, mutual aid societies, schools, and places of worship, and they encouraged people of a common ethnic background to use those institutions. Making ethnic communities became a way that immigrants embraced the developing ideas of Argentine citizenship and asserted their belonging in the country. Nevertheless, these efforts to make lasting ethnic communities long into the future were never entirely successful. In the case of German speakers, children, Spanish-speaking spouses, socialists, Catholics, and many others struck their own balance between community, ethnic heritage, and Argentine belonging.

The book analyzes the activities and fantasies of the people who sought to create a lasting German community in Buenos Aires and the behavior of others who challenged that project. It argues that ideas about the future drove thousands of German-speaking immigrants to carve out a place for ethnicity and pluralism in the cultural and linguistic landscape of Buenos Aires. In a moment when there was increasing pressure from the Argentine state and new nationalist forces to create a citizenry that was more culturally homogeneous, the leaders of German-language institutions promoted a more pluralistic vision of Argentine belonging by insisting that it was possible both to be both ethnic and a good Argentine. Alongside other immigrants, German speakers and Argentines of various backgrounds negotiated the terms of citizenship and the nature of cultural pluralism between 1880 and 1930. The efforts of immigrants to create communities led to conflicts between Argentine nationalists and immigrant educators, children and parents, parishioners and religious leaders, and the self-defined leaders of community institutions and thousands of other immigrants who remained indifferent to those visions of community.

“The Unbounded Nation? Education Networks and Migration Between Germany and Argentina, 1890-1930”
Presented at the annual meeting of the American Historical Association, Atlanta, Georgia, January 7-10, 2016.

This paper examines the transatlantic network that emerged between Germany and German speakers in Argentina in an era of both mass migration and high imperialism. It analyses how immigrant leaders, educators, and families interacted with both European and Latin American nationalism. Focussing on the circulation of teachers, the flow of financial support from Germany, and a system of offering both Argentine and German diplomas, it offers new perspectives on how constructions of European ethnicity and Argentine belonging developed in a transnational context. The prevalence of transatlantic connections influenced the development of German-Spanish bilingual schools in Argentina in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but this relationship competed with local concerns. This paper argues that German-speaking educators in Argentina took advantage of transatlantic support from Germany while navigating between their own interests in community, ethnicity, and belonging in Argentina.

“Comunidades paternales: Asistencia social e inmigración en Buenos Aires, 1880-1930”
Presented at 5º Coloquio sobre la inmigración de habla alemana en la Argentina, Universidad San Martín, Buenos Aires, Argentina, April 23, 2015.

Esta ponencia examina la eclosión de varias instituciones de asistencia social dirigidas por grupos migratorios en Buenos Aires entre 1880 y 1930. Tomando las organizaciones de habla alemana como punto de partida, la presentación demuestra que los inmigrantes tuvieron un papel central en la creación del sistema de asistencia social en la capital argentina a lo largo de medio siglo. Esta investigación se centra en la autonomía que los inmigrantes prósperos buscaron y las ideas sobre clase social, género y etnicidad que invocaron para cumplir con esa meta. El interés en la asistencia social ayudó a los líderes auto-declarados a construir una imagen específica de su comunidad, a solidificar jerarquías de género y clase social y a organizar de manera paternalista a los obreros bajo su liderazgo. Estas acciones fomentaron un espacio para los inmigrantes acaudalados en un sistema de relaciones sociales más amplio en Buenos Aires. Al crear un espacio para las colectividades étnicas en un área donde el Estado, la Iglesia Católica y los filántropos hispanohablantes también tenían influencia, los inmigrantes ricos de habla alemana y de otros origines trascendieron las comunidades de los cuales se esforzaban ocupar y participaban en moldear las relaciones entre comunidad y sociedad.

“Between Community and Nation: British, French and German Schools in Buenos Aires, 1880-1930”
Presented at the workshop The New Ethnic Studies: Problems and Methods, Tel Aviv University, Israel, February, 18, 2015.

In the late-nineteenth century, German, British, French, Italian, Jewish, and many other immigrants founded bilingual schools in the Argentine capital. Their project emerged at a moment of change in Argentina. Fueled by the international circulation of ideas about pedagogy, education ceased to be something reserved for a small portion of society and became almost universal. In the Americas and Europe, this project would apparently create a new kind of citizen, equipped with the civic, cultural, and economic knowledge to contribute to the societies that sponsored them. In the case of Argentina specifically, however, the self-proclaimed leaders of immigrant communities carved out a space for themselves alongside the efforts of both state reformers and the Catholic Church. At bilingual schools, immigrant parents and educators sought to strike a balance between their own cultural identities and the linguistic practices, civic identity, and citizenship of their children. These immigrants’ efforts in turn changed the state’s and the Catholic Church’s positions in the overarching system.

Focusing in particular on German, British, and French immigrants in Buenos Aires, this paper examines the balance that those who supported foreign-language education struck between community and Argentine national belonging. This paper argues that immigrant educators promoted bilingualism and participated in the broader educational project taking hold in the Argentine capital. The paper is based on a chapter in my book manuscript, and it draws from both my doctoral dissertation and new research I have done in London and Paris.

“The Language of Religion: German Ethnicity in Argentina and Canada, 1880-1930”
Presented at the annual meeting of the Social Sciences History Association, Toronto, Ontario, November 6, 2014.

This paper explores the relationship between language and denomination among German speakers in the Americas between 1880 and 1930, focusing in particular on practising Lutherans and Catholics in Argentina and Canada. The analysis centers on the bilingualism that permeated the lives of many so-called German-speaking adults and children. Over time, the relationships between Spanish and German or English and German in what were once solely German-language religious communities began to change. However, one also observes a rather constant interest in ethnicity and the “mother tongue.” The paper argues that denominational identity (Lutheran or Catholic) played a crucial role in debates about language use. Contributing to a larger discussion about migration and religion, this German case study reveals the significance of language, denomination, and children in the construction of ethnicity. Through the intergenerational and interdenominational debates about German and Spanish or German and English, it highlights the relational and changing nature of ethnicity. Many of the debates about ethnicity and the German language were fundamentally oriented around the pervasive presence of Spanish or English in people’s everyday activities, and efforts to promote German in fact represent an implicit acceptance of bilingualism.

“Exchanging Empire: Education and Teacher Mobility in Canada and the Commonwealth, 1910-1940”
Presented at the annual meeting of the Candian Historical Association, Brock University, St. Catharines, Ontario, May 26, 2014.

This presentation examines how ideas of empire and Britishness developed in Canada between 1910 and 1940. It makes use of sources published in Canada and the United Kingdom, and it weaves together provincial, federal, and imperial perspectives on education and citizenship in Canada and the British world. Meetings and mobility greatly influenced people’s ideas of nation and empire, and this paper explores how ideas of Britishness in Canada were reconstituted over time. This paper argues that education and teacher mobility were an important cultural project that shaped the rise of the Commonwealth between 1910 and 1940. These growing international relationships gave new meaning to British identities in white settler dominions, and they helped set the stage for a group of connected, autonomous countries within a twentieth-century empire.

“Healing the Nation: Healthcare, Philanthropy, and Ethnicity in Argentina, 1890-1940″
Presented at the annual meeting of the Latin American Studies Association, Chicago, Illinois, May 24, 2014.

At the turn of the twentieth century, five immigrant-run hospitals formed a fundamental part of the health network of Buenos Aires. The Italian, Spanish, British, German, and French hospitals treated 20 percent of all hospitalized patients in the city. Founded in the mid-nineteenth century, these five hospitals were joined by a Galician and a Jewish hospital in the early-twentieth century.The affluent immigrant men who ran and funded these hospitals provided free services to working-class immigrants of a common cultural background. This paper examines how hundreds of thousands of people in Argentina organized along ethnic lines and provided social services in foreign languages. By focusing on a domain where the state could have but did not assert its influence, this paper illustrates how other cultural groups altered the nature of state power in early-twentieth-century Argentina. This paper argues immigrants played an important role in shaping the system of social welfare in Argentina between 1890 and 1940. Immigrant-run institutions created a third pole alongside the state and the Catholic Church, and this structural relationship had broader implications for the nature of both liberalism and pluralism in Argentina. At the seven immigrant-run hospitals and dozens of mutual aid societies focused on paying for healthcare, immigrant philanthropists in Buenos Aires fundamentally changed the state’s role in the overarching liberal regime.

“The School Promoters: Hybridity, Citizenship, and Children at the German Schools of Buenos Aires, 1880-1930”
Presented at the annual meeting of the American Historical Association, Washington, DC, January 5, 2014.

This paper examines the goals and activities of a diverse group of German-speaking immigrants in Buenos Aires that I call the school promoters. The bilingual schools they created serve as an illustrative case study that sheds light on broader questions of ethnicity, education, and citizenship in Argentina in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Similar relationships could be found at Italian, British, French, and Jewish schools in Buenos Aires as well. This paper focuses on how one group of schools in Buenos Aires participated in the state’s broader project.  In studying education in Argentina, scholars have often examined the imposition of nationalist education policies on immigrant groups. They have focused on how Argentine cultural and government elites reacted to immigrants’ efforts to create schools, or how these elites began a project of nation-building through public education beginning in the 1880s. But in this paper, I argue that immigrant school promoters in Buenos Aires attained a great deal of autonomy despite the assimilationist policies articulated by many Spanish-speaking politicians and bureaucrats. This group of educators viewed schools as sites that would help them reproduce their own ethnicity and participate in larger, Argentine projects of education. These German school promoters took advantage of the opportunities afforded to them by the Argentine state, and they and set out to construct a permanently bilingual community within the Argentine national body.

“Regulating Pluralism: The State and Bilingual Schools in Ontario, 1880-1930”
Presented at the conference “Language Policies in Multicultural Democracies,” Universidad Pablo de Olavide, Seville, Spain, December 12, 2013.

This presentation explores German and English in Ontario’s educational system between 1880 and 1930. It highlights the rising presence of English and the decline of German in schools that the Government of Ontario described as “German schools” until 1912. I argue that schooling in Ontario did far more to undermine children’s proficiency in German than it did to promote it. I situate the educational experience of German-speaking children and the goals of German-speaking parents within the broader context of rising state authority, projects of standardization, and many Anglophones’ declining interest in permitting bilingual education between 1880 and 1930. I challenge the assumption about the singular importance of the First World War on German language and culture in Ontario and elsewhere in North America.

“Transatlantic Religion: German Lutheran and Catholic Networks on the Río de la Plata, 1880-1930”
Presented at the annual meeting of the German Studies Association, Denver, Colorado, October 4, 2013.

Between 1880 and 1930, people, money, and ideas circulated between Lutheran and Catholic organizations in Germany and Buenos Aires. Distance, the power of Argentine Catholic structures, and immigrants’ growing desire to adapt to local conditions in Argentina, however, shaped this relationship. This paper examines this transatlantic dialogue, analyzing the diverging interests of Germans in Argentina and religious groups in Germany. This paper argues that German-speaking Catholics and Lutherans in Argentina were autonomous interlocutors who participated in a selective dialogue with several religious groups in Germany. This research contributes to debates in German history about the importance and nature of the transnational connections created by and that shaped German nationalism during the Imperial and Weimar period. It adds new perspectives by considering how Germans living outside the nation-state or colonies increasingly took interest in participating in another national context. This paper draws on extensive archival materials found in German-language Catholic and Lutheran congregations in Buenos Aires, the Lutheran Church of Argentina, religious periodicals published in Argentina and Germany, the annual reports of the Bremen-based Evangelischer Verein für die La Plata Staaten, the private collections of the Gustav-Adolf-Verein in Leipzig, and the international activities of the Kirchliches Außenamt.

“Entangling North America: Borderlands, Transnationalism, and Comparison”
Presented at the annual meeting of the Canadian Historical Association at the University of Victoria, Victoria, British Columbia, June 3, 2013.

This paper examines migration from a North American perspective, and it engages with often separate historiographic trends in Canadian and US history. It lays out the interrelated methodological approaches of borderlands, transnationalism, and comparison for the study of migration, race, and ethnicity in Canada and the United States. Each approach offers different ways to examine either Canadian or US history with a broader perspective, and the use of all three provides a more complete way to identify and analyze phenomena that transcend the nation-state. Studies of borderlands and transnationalism of course take an international approach, but they often ground themselves in only one national historiography. Comparative history, by contrast, is more sensitive to two or more bodies of scholarship, but it does not necessarily require historians to ask questions about transnational flows and influences. In all three of these approaches, nation-states remain important, and the use of borderlands, transnationalism or comparative history still contributes to national historiographies. I argue that borderlands, transnational, and comparative lenses enrich the study of Canadian and US history in different ways. Alongside this argument, I propose the concept of “entangled history” as a framing category that encompasses all three of these approaches. This paper formed the base for the introduction to a book that I am co-editing. For more on that project, visit: http://borderlandsworkshop.wordpress.com/book/

“Regulating Ethnicity: German, Spanish, and Civic Education in Buenos Aires, 1880-1930”
Presented at the annual meeting of the Canadian Association for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, Carleton University, Ottawa, May 4, 2013.

This presentation focuses on the relationship between education and immigration in Argentina, and it examines how and to what extent the state regulated immigrant-run, bilingual schools. There is a dominant historiographic argument that schooling in Buenos Aires gave bureaucrats and nationalists the ability to stamp out cultural pluralism. However, civic integration did not instantly bring monolingualism. By including the state’s perspective on bilingual private schools and the ways that immigrant educators discussed state regulation, we find not only cooperation but also institutions that undermined the official goals that have dominated the historiography. The paper focuses both on the Consejo Nacional de Educación (the National Council of Education) and the competing ideas of German-speaking parents and educators. I argue that German-Spanish bilingual schools undermined the assimilationist goals promoted by many Argentine nationalists.

“Welfare for the Nation: German Charities, Lutheran Women, and Duty in Buenos Aires, 1880-1930”
Presented at the annual meeting of the American Historical Association, New Orleans, Louisiana, January 4, 2013.

This paper examines a range of German-language social welfare institutions in Buenos Aires. It explores the relationship between the state and an ethnic group and the connections between working-class immigrants and ethnic elites. In the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, liberal politicians and Catholic leaders in Argentina and elsewhere in the Americas increasingly dedicated their attention to the creation of social welfare institutions. In the case of Buenos Aires, however, immigrant women and men also created these institutions. This paper seeks to explain how making a network of ethnic institutions created a third pole alongside the state and the Catholic Church. These three groups, each with its own objectives, participated in the evolving liberal regime in Buenos Aires.

Through the lens of German-language institutions, this paper argues that ethnic groups formed a fundamental part of the system of social welfare in Buenos Aires at the turn of the twentieth century. It contributes new insights to Latin American historiography by including healthcare, mutual aid societies, and homes for the elderly in the study of social welfare in the early-twentieth century. This paper also adds new perspectives on the relationship between the liberal state, Catholic social reformers, and the immigrant women and men who founded and funded a range of institutions in Buenos Aires between 1880 and 1930.

“Protecting the Nation: Children, Gender, and Lutheran Orphanages in Buenos Aires, 1896-1927”
Presented at the annual meeting of the German Studies Association, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, October 6, 2012.

At the turn of the twentieth century, German speakers in Buenos Aires proudly described a network of institutions as the “building blocks” of their community. Social welfare institutions such as workers’ aid societies, a hospital, homes for the elderly, transient workers, and sailors, and two orphanages were among the most prominent. On the one hand, such institutions created a web that made up a loosely-defined German community. On the other hand, they brought anybody who used them into contact with the surrounding society.

This paper examines two social welfare institutions, the German Women’s Home and an orphanage run by the Lutheran church in order to explore this tension between isolation and integration. It advances three interrelated arguments. First, many efforts to protect Deutschtum (German ethnicity) were highly informed by religion. Second, projects to create institutions and to promote language and denomination were centrally oriented around children and the generational reproduction of ethnicity. Third, and perhaps most fundamentally, all of this behaviour was incredibly Argentine. In creating orphanages, German-speaking Lutheran women and men were fundamentally concerned with children’s advanced proficiency in Spanish and the threat of conversion to Catholicism. Moreover, in making Protestant orphanages, German speakers behaved liked thousands of other European immigrants in Buenos Aires.

This is a study of adult fantasies and children’s agency. The insistence upon Deutschtum was as a response to children’s ability to disagree with these ideas. By highlighting the importance of gender, denomination, and language, I seek to reconceptualize the activities and goals of elite German-speaking immigrants in the Argentine capital. My focus on children and reproduction challenges the persistent historiographic idea about Germans in Latin America focused on political nationalism, economic imperialism, and ethnic enclaves. Ultimately, I argue that the main goal of many German speakers in Buenos Aires was to reproduce their ethnicity and to promote their denomination in Argentine society.

“On the borders of North America: Spatial Networks, Transnationalism, and German Lutheranism in Ontario, 1880-1930”
Presented at the annual meeting of the Canadian Historical Association, University of Waterloo and Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo, Ontario, May 28, 2012.

In this paper, I examine the two largest German-language institutions in Canada between 1880 and 1930, the competing Canada Synod and Canada District of the Missouri Synod. I analyze the spatial network that linked German speakers from across Ontario into two religious bodies, and then a web of connections with a variety of Lutheran institutions in different parts of the United States and Germany. I use both a transnational and spatial lens and argue that that German Lutherans in Ontario were active participants in a larger North American world.

This paper makes use of two German-language Lutheran journals as well as the institutional documents of the Canada Synod, the Waterloo Lutheran Seminary, and several German-language congregations. This study explores the porous boundaries of the ethnic space that the intersection of local, provincial, and transnational forces created. Within this ethnic space, ideas and people freely circulated and this had a profound impact on the nature of the German-language religious institutions that developed over time.

The case of German Lutherans in Ontario speaks to a much larger historiography on borderlands, transnationalism, and diaspora. Most importantly, this study brings to light a rather unique case where widespread transnational connections did not bind an ethnic minority to a country of origin or an imaginary homeland but rather to a larger group living in a neighbouring country, the United States. In the case of German Lutheranism in Ontario, people’s behaviour and ideas destabilized national categories. Ethnicity, community, and institutions were constructed and redefined in ongoing processes that crossed in and out of Canada’s political boundaries.

“Immigration and Education: State Regulation, Nationalism, and School Policy in Ontario and Buenos Aires, 1880-1914”
Presented in Spanish at the Interuniversity Seminar on Canadian Studies in Latin America (SEMINECAL), University of Havana, Cuba, April 12, 2012.

In 1910, at the height of an emergent and changing Argentine nationalism, politicians, bureaucrats, and writers in the public sphere proudly discussed the influence of the growing network of public schools in Buenos Aires. They boldly lauded the role of education in solving the “problem” created by decades of mass migration. Many viewed schooling as a necessary means to attain a united, loyal, and ethnically homogeneous nation. At the same time, bureaucrats and educators in Ontario were engaged in a very similar project. A growing pro-English linguistic ideology faced off against the entrenched rights of French and German in provincially-controlled public and Catholic elementary schools. In both cases, state officials and politicians discussed and engaged in activities that illustrated their ideas about the relationship among language, citizenship, and nation.

This paper lays out some key commonalities in the educational systems that emerged in Ontario and Buenos Aires. It also seeks to outline the relationship between state regulation and ethnic minorities between 1880 and 1914. I examine German schools in both places as a case study. Understanding the changing position of German in both places forms a fundamental part of the history of education in Ontario and Buenos Aires. German offers a lens through which we can observe the rising authority of the educational state but also the limitations of state influence. Elites in both Canada and Argentina made similar arguments about the “problems” of cultural pluralism, but the state apparatus in Ontario was much more effective in actually implementing this discourse. In this period, a growing network of schools emerged in both Ontario and Buenos Aires that were part of larger projects of modernization, changing notions of citizenship, and a growing apparatus of state authority. Yet between two forms of liberal governmentality in Ontario and Buenos Aires, noticeable differences began to emerge.

“Linguistic Ideology and Ethnic Space: German-language Education in Ontario, 1880-1918”
Presented at the conference “Transformation: State, Nation, and Citizenship,” York University, Toronto, Ontario, October 14, 2011.

Long before the First World War, very few children in Ontario studied German. By 1889, German was not the language of instruction at any school in the province, and there were no “German schools” despite the persistence of this category in some government documents. In the historiography about Germans in Ontario, scholars have often sought to explain low attendance figures by turning to questions of identity and generational differences. Yet an important cultural and political process has been overlooked. From the 1880s onwards, the nascent provincial state in Ontario propounded a very clear linguistic ideology and interest in a homogeneous nation. This paper aims to show that this political process emerged in opposition to the pre-existing status of German-language education.

Drawing on inspectors’ reports, discourse in the annual departmental reports, annually published provincial regulations, German textbooks authorized by the province, and the discussion of education in a variety of German-language sources, I examine the linguistic ideology and cultural nationalism of one of Ontario’s largest ministries. This paper outlines the lack of ethnic space that this ideology on language and nation created. Instead of allowing citizens to create separate ethnic institutions, it appears that the nature of Canadian liberalism in this time period encouraged people to use locally-run school boards with minor concessions to ethnic interests. I argue that the presence of German-language education in Ontario between 1880 and 1918 was severely limited by the cultural hegemony of the Anglophone state, its linguistic ideology, and its overarching control of local school boards.

“Conflicting Loyalties: Religion, Family, and Ethnicity at the German Schools of Buenos Aires, 1895-1930”
Presented at the Annual Conference of the German Studies Association, Louisville, Kentucky, September 24, 2011.

In the fall of 1898, Max Hopff sent a letter of complaint to the Deutsche La Plata Zeitung of Buenos Aires, the largest German-language daily in the region. He very publicly decried the financial and administrative connections between the city’s main German school and the Lutheran congregation.  He was concerned with the quality of education, the school’s pedagogical goals, and most importantly, that “instead of [serving] a broad German community, [it] only maintains a German Lutheran one…Germans of other denominations are excluded from participating in community affairs.”  The letter provoked a large debate over the next ten days with about a dozen letters, and several men debated the place of the Church in their ethnic community.  When Hopff, Theodor Alemann, Paul Oehrtmann, and Otto Beines founded a new school four months later in August 1898, they announced that “the question of faith should not prevent children from attending a German school and that the school should not meddle with this moral issue.”

This debate in the fall and winter of 1898 set off a process of change and growth that would define German-language education in the city for the next three decades. Using Max Hopff and the newly founded German School Association of Buenos Aires as a point of departure, this paper examines the divergent goals of the four largest German educational associations in Buenos Aires between 1890 and 1930. It studies the intersection of ideas about religion, nation, and language with the goal of detailing the varying criteria that defined ethnicity and Deutschtum. It analyzes ideas about childhood and lineage because gendered concerns about the cultural identity and the linguistic abilities of children appear to have been centrally important for the men who ran these associations. Finally, it examines the concept of Deutschtum as it was used in Buenos Aires and in relation to education. These autonomous associations, while in contact with the Foreign Office in Berlin, were not tools of empire but rather community institutions created and funded by immigrant members with the goal of perpetuating their ethnicity in a very multiethnic Argentine society.

This paper argues that ideas about family, religion, and ethnicity were the dominant factors that motivated parents and ethnic elites to build, fund, and support German-language schools in Buenos Aires.

“Providing Welfare for the Nation: Honour, Race and Family at the German Hospital in Buenos Aires, 1878-1930”
Presented in Spanish at the conference “La minoría de habla alemana en Argentina,” Centre for Latin American Migration Studies, Buenos Aires, Argentina, March 22, 2011.

At the turn of the twentieth century, the booming metropolis of Buenos Aires had a vibrant German community with an active publishing industry, a number of schools, and several welfare organizations. This paper examines the largest German-language institution in the city, the Hospital Alemán, from 1878 to 1930 to reveal the internal structure of one of Buenos Aires’ small but visible ethnic groups. In a variety of sources, community leaders presented the hospital as a cornerstone a cohesive community that should transcend class lines and citizenship. The hospital and its leadership garnered massive financial contributions by emphasizing racialized ideas of a Germanic nation and highlighting the group’s supposed obligation to care for “indigent” workers of Germanic stock.

I examine a number of fundraising campaigns orchestrated by German women and the large contributions and leadership role of German men. I engage with Donna Guy’s recent examination about the role of gender and ethnic ties in performing charity in Argentina. By broadening charity beyond child welfare, I highlight the role of both women and men. The hospital’s organization was shaped by conservative models of masculinity that promoted men as providers for their families and reinforced paternalistic ideas in its efforts to care for working-class immigrants.

The Hospital Alemán was not an unique case of immigrant organization in Buenos Aires. Italian, Spanish, French, British, Jewish, and Syrian immigrants also created hospitals. Yet hospitals have received little attention in the historiography on immigration to Argentina.  The German case can speak to larger debates about the power of the Argentine state, ethnic community organization, and the nature of cultural pluralism in Argentina.