Beginning in the second quarter of the eighteenth century, numerous migrants from the territories of the recently suppressed Crown of Aragon began to make their way to Montevideo, then in the process of becoming the most important outpost of Spanish colonial power in the Plata region. While never constituting anything close to a numerical majority within the colony, or in the independent republic that succeeded it in 1830, these mostly Catalan-speaking immigrants nonetheless exercised an enormous influence on the development of Uruguay's economic and social institutions. For all its importance, however, the phenomenon has generally been ignored in most accounts of the country's historical development.

In this essay, I will begin by exploring some of the reasons for the persistent invisibility of the Catalan impact on the genesis of modern Uruguay. I will then address the particular model of social penetration and social deployment that Catalan migrants brought to Uruguay, emphasizing its links to their society's intense and long-standing engagement with the Mediterranean world. I will conclude with a by no means exhaustive summary of the many contributions of Catalan migrants to the development of contemporary Uruguayan culture.

The Frequent Invisibility of Substate Networks of Power

Since the late nineteenth century, the nation-state and its attendant institutions of cultural management (philology, national history, and, more recently, political science) have greatly blunted our collective ability to recognize, never mind carefully trace, the often key roles played by consolidated networks of “non-central” (understood in terms of both geography and/or institutional power) cultural actors within such polities.

In Spain, both state institutions and the intellectuals who—despite their frequent protests to the contrary—so often look to them for ontological guidance have worked steadily for the last three centuries, and with still greater intensity and sophistication during the last 150 years, to discourage the detailed exploration of the truly unique and often glaringly distinct familial, economic, and juridical comportments of its non-Castilian citizens, especially those originating in Catalonia, and in a still broader and more retrospective sense, the historic territories of the Crown of Aragon.