Logo: Darío's princess

Question SA-7. Here is the text reference (p. 150/1 to 3):

As the 19th Century drew to a close, much of Latin America found itself transformed by the progress brought about by the foreign investors and their allies among the upper levels of their societies. The Positivists had encouraged immigration, especially from Europe, in their belief that this would make their nations more European. Behind this rationale was also the racist attitude that their Indigenous, Mestizo and Black populations had little to offer. These European immigrants flocked to the cities, adding their numbers to those of the less privileged who had left rural poverty in the hopes of finding a better life in an urban environment. The growth was impressive in cities such as Buenos Aires, where at one point every third inhabitant had been born in Europe (mainly Spain or Italy).

The fast-growing cities such as Mexico and Buenos Aires reflected the elites' imitation of French culture, and the buildings put up around the turn of the century show a strong French influence.

Political, social and economic life continued to be dominated by the old conservative order of landlord-politician, army officer and priest, although Positivism was changing their outlook. Their nation's dependency on the center-periphery economic model continued, and it was fair to say that the system was a neocolonial one because of the control the center exercised on the periphery. Meanwhile, the middle class, which had always been small in Latin America, was growing with the influx of large numbers of immigrants, many of them from Europe's lower middle class. Slavery had been formally abolished, but the economic and social system tended to keep the Black population at the bottom of the pyramid. The Indigenous population defended itself as best it could from the inroads of Positivism by retreating to its communities far from the Europeanized cities.