To my parents ad memoriam

Any festival can only be of its time.
Michel Vovelle

When we examine the press at the end of the XIX century or at the beginning of the XX century, recurrently appears, in a specific epoch of the year, the announcement of the celebration of the Spanish "Romerías" (Popular festival celebrated in a religious local date) followed by the comments on their development. Being in different points of Buenos Aires province like Olavarría, Pringles, Balcarce, or inner cities, even Montevideo, the certain thing is that these festivals covered both margins of the Río de la Plata and were practiced "from Buenos Aires to the last patagonian village" as one of the Spanish intellectuals that also experienced the emigration said. (Grandmontagne, 1994: 145 y ss).
In fact, though the lapse of the greatest affluence -a hundred thousand annual entrances- occurred between 1905 and 1910, the peninsular´s presence was notable since the two last decades of the previous century. A presence that on the other hand should be tracked from very early epochs, when even the Spanish legislation limited it seriously.
Well, why do we have to take charge of a festival to analyse the Spanish people´s insertion in Argentina?, does this or other festival have any sense beyond the recreation or the obtaining of any profit? Perhaps the most important sense of the festival is a symbolic character. Besides of the anchorage in which Huizinga (1968) called "the recreational sense of life " ("el sentido lúdico de la vida") that lets men and women be free from the weight of their daily routines, the festivals always express a specific conception of the world (Bajtín, 1987). From there their central character for the comprehension of any culture, beyond their growing manipulation. Without ignoring their symbolic meaning -that certainly supposes an analysis and a kind of sources that exceed this work-, here we intend to take charge of a closer dimension like the social uses to which they have been object. In fact, although we are very far from those interpretations of the 60´s that linked mechanically the cultural practices and the social subjects, these activities keep some correspondence with the sort of relations in force in a society (Chartier, 1990).
The Spanish "Romerías" allow then an approximation to the different interests put "in game" in the context of the massive migration to Argentina. As social practice really extended, they had the virtue to convoke the most diverse subjects. Who were the agents and participants of these parties?, what purposes did they pursue with them?, did they simply look for reproducing the traditions of the peninsula?. How were these festivals affected by the transformations operated along the almost half a century of massive migration?. Finally, beyond the Spanish people, which was their impact in the receptive society?.
To answer all these questions, we will centre in the analysis of the course that the "romerías" followed in one of the urban centres that, as many others, emerged because of the agriculture and cattle-raising exporting´s expansion that reached the Argentine littoral in the cross of the centuries. We refer to Mar del Plata city, that had about a thousand inhabitants in 1881 and overpassed the 25.000 in the second decade of the new century. This growth involved a quick urbanization that to its function of nucleus of interchanges with the rural environment -that united it with other cities of the pampas-, added the function of elegant resort for the high social class of Buenos Aires and other points of the country. By the 10´s the social and economic diversification had promoted the emergence of new subjects conformed by urban workers and media or ascending sectors, that caused a complexity declared as well in the multiplication of intermediate companies as in the political-partisan pluralism that carried the socialism to the municipal government during almost a decade from 1920 (Da Orden and Pastoriza, 1991; Da Orden, 1991).
The European immigrants and particularly the Spanish ones had a decisive role in all this process. In fact, by 1914 almost a quarter of the Mar del Plata´s settlers had been born in the peninsula, most of them in the north of Spain. Basque, from Navarro and Aragón conformed the early crushes, while others from León, Asturias, Galicia and Almería prevailed in the new century. By the time of the Centenary the almost six thousand Spanish people that lived in the city formed a varied cultural and social mosaic that in a good way broke the homogeneity and polarization of the first years of the place when a small number of immigrants, most of them merchants from Navarro, had decided to found a Spanish company called "Mutual Helps" (1883).

(1) E-mail: mldaor@mdp.edu.ar