South Atlantic crossings: Fingerprints, science, and the state in turn-of-the-century Argentina

American Historical Review

Volumn 109, Issue 2, 2004, Pages 387-416

  Rodriguez, Julia ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF NEW HAMPSHIRE   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 33749017470     PISSN: 00028762     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/530337     Document Type: Review

References (181)

1. Notable recent studies on the transatlantic exchange of ideas in the modern era, focusing mostly on United States-European relations, include Daniel T. Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge, Mass., 1998);
2. James T. Kloppenberg, Uncertain Victory: Social Democracy and Progressivism in European and American Thought, 1870-1920 (New York, 1986);
3. Axel R. Schafer, American Progressives and German Social Reform, 1875-1920: Social Ethics, Moral Control, and the Regulatory State in a Transatlantic Context (Stuttgart, 2000).
4. See also Elisabeth Gläser and Hermann Wellenreuther, eds., Bridging the Atlantic: The Question of American Exceptionalism in Perspective (Washington, D.C., 2002).
5. Recent scholarship in Latin American history has begun to challenge the centrality of the North in transatlantic history as well as the assumption that the Americas were primarily recipients of European ideas. See Jeremy Adelman, Republic of Capital: Buenos Aires and the Legal Transformation of the Atlantic World (Stanford, Calif., 1999);
6. Gil Joseph, et al., eds., Close Encounters of Empire: Writing the Cultural History of U.S.-Latin American Relations (Durham, N.C., 1998).
7. On the flow of ideas from the new world to the old, see Antonello Gerbi, The Dispute of the New World: The History of a Polemic, 1750-1900 (Pittsburgh, 1973);
8. and two books by Germán Arciniegas: America in Europe: A History of the New World in Reverse (San Diego, Calif., 1986);
9. and Cuando América completó la tierra (Bogota, 2001).
10. Moreover, Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra provides an excellent discussion of how the term "West" excludes and marginalizes Latin America; see How to Write the History of the New World: Histories, Epistemologies, and Identities in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World (Stanford, 2001), 10.
11. Historians of science have rightly placed technological innovations within their larger social context, looking to politics, economics, and culture as equally consequential as individual brainpower in the discovery of new ideas. A number of recent studies of Latin American science have illustrated that economic privation or "underdevelopment" does not necessarily result in mediocre science. In certain settings, a confluence of ingenuity and institutional and societal patronage produced not only equally recognized knowledge but also arguably a more "practical" science. For examples of this literature, see Cañizares-Esguerra, How to Write the History of the New World;
12. Marcos Cueto, Excelencia científica en la perifería (Lima, 1989);
13. Cueto, "Laboratory Styles in Argentine Physiology," Isis 86 (1995): 228-46;
14. Stuart McCook, States of Nature: Science, Agriculture, and Environment in the Spanish Caribbean, 1760-1940 (Austin, Tex., 2002);
15. Julyan Peard, Race, Place, and Medicine: The Idea of the Tropics in Nineteenth-Century Brazilian Medicine (Durham, N.C., 1999);
16. Nancy Leys Stepan, "The Hour of Eugenics": Race, Gender, and Nation in Latin America (Ithaca, N.Y., 1991).
17. Marcos Cueto, "Andean Biology in Peru: Scientific Styles on the Periphery," Isis 80, no. 4 (1989): 640-58;
18. Nancy Leys Stepan, "The Interplay between Socio-Economic Factors and Medical Science: Yellow Fever Research, Cuba, and the United States," Social Studies of Science 8 (1978): 397-423.
19. Alfred W. Crosby's scholarship drew our attention to the historical significance of the migration and exchange of biological organisms (including humans, animals, plants, and pathogens) as well as cultural forms; see The Columbian Exchange: The Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492 (Westport, Conn., 1972);
20. and Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900-1900 (New York, 1998).
21. Social scientists in the 1970s, influenced by dependency theory, dubbed Latin America, Africa, and Asia "peripheral" to the scientific "centers" of Western Europe and North America. For analysis and revision of this view, see Cueto, Excelencia científica en la perifería;
22. Elena Díaz, Yolanda Texera, and Hebe Vessuri, eds., La ciencia periférica: Ciencia y sociedad en Venezuela (Caracas, 1983).
23. For comparisons of Argentina, the United States, and other lands of recent settlement, see D. C. M. Platt and Guido Di Telia, Argentina, Australia, and Canada: Studies in Comparative Development 1870-1965 (New York, 1985);
24. Carlos H. Waisman, Reversal of Development in Argentina: Postwar Counterrevolutionary Policies and Their Structural Consequences (Princeton, N.J., 1987), chap. 3;
25. Luis Roniger and Carlos H. Waisman, Globality and Multiple Modernities: Comparative North American and Latin American Perspectives (Portland, Oreg., 2002).
26. At times, Latin American scientists and philosophers recognized this advantage, referring to their lands as open and fertile compared to a rigid, stultified old world. Cañizares-Esguerra found that eighteenth-century scientists, historians, and philosophers of the Spanish colonies had a similar understanding of their environment; How to Write the History of the New World, 7;
27. see also his article on Spanish-American racial theories, "New World, New Stars: Patriotic Astrology and the Invention of Indian and Creole Bodies in Colonial Spanish America, 1600-1650," AHR 104 (February 1999): 35.
28. I more fully explore the relationship between scientific and medical rhetoric and practice, the expansion of the state, and control of citizenship in my forthcoming book, tentatively titled "Civilizing Argentina: Science and the State against Barbarism." The legacies of the turn of the century, a foundational period in the growth of disciplinary ideology and institutions, continued to place Argentina on the extremes of the modern state forms. Ironically, attempts to secure social order under both liberal and authoritarian twentieth-century regimes (up to and including the hygienic rationales for repressive practices during the military dictatorships of the 1940s and 1970s) originated in the exuberance and radicalism of this earlier " positivist" moment. For a similar interpretation of the paradoxes of nineteenth and early twentieth-century "liberal" reforms in Argentina, see Ricardo Salvatore, "Death and Liberalism: Capital Punishment after the Fall of Rosas," in Salvatore, et al., eds., Crime and Punishment in Latin America: Law and Society since Late Colonial Times (Durham, N.C., 2001).
29. On the paradoxes of modernity in particular for women, see Kristin Ruggiero, "Honor, Maternity, and the Disciplining of Women: Infanticide in Late Nineteenth-Century Buenos Aires," Hispanic American Historical Review 72, no. 3 (1992): 353-73;
30. Lila Caimari, "Whose Criminals Are These? Church, State, and Patronatos and the Rehabilitation of Female Convicts (Buenos Aires, 1890-1940)," Americas 54, no. 2 (1997): 185-208;
31. Donna Guy, "Parents before the Tribunals: The Legal Construction of Patriarchy in Argentina," in Elizabeth Dore and Maxine Molyneux, eds., Hidden Histories of Gender and the State in Latin America (Durham, 2000), 172-93.
32. Argentina, like many large countries, has its own version of manifest destiny reaching back to the earliest years of independence. Similar to neighboring Brazil, this idea involved expansionism (including the appropriation of native lands) and a sense of grandeza (greatness). In contrast to most other Latin American countries, however, Argentina's vision of grandeza was distinctly racialized as Euro-American. On ideas of Argentine greatness, see Nicholas Shumway, Inventing Argentina: History of an Idea (Berkeley, Calif., 1991), 296.
33. Fingerprinting can be described as a type of what James C. Scott calls "state-initiated social engineering" within the "imperialism of high-modernist, planned social order." Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, Conn., 1998).
34. On European fascination with and exploration of the Americas in an earlier period, see Anthony Pagden, European Encounters with the New World: From Renaissance to Romanticisim (New Haven, Conn., 1993);
35. Victor Von Hagen, South America Called Them: Explorations of the Great Naturalists: La Condamine, Humboldt, Darwin, Spruce (New York, 1945), as well as the vast literature on Alexander von Humboldt's Latin American journeys.
36. Argentine medicine was most strongly influenced by French models; in 1903, psychologist Horacio Piñero even pronounced, "From the intellectual point of view, we are French." Quoted in Hugo Vezzetti, El nacimiento de la psicología en la Argentina (Buenos Aires, 1998), 43.
37. On Argentine medicine, see Ricardo González Leandri, Curar, persuadir, gobernar: La construcción histórica de la profesión médica en Buenos Aires, 1852-1886 (Madrid, 1999);
38. Mirta Zaida Lobato, ed., Política, médicos y enfermedades: Lecturas de historia de la salud en Argentina (Mar del Plata, 1996).
39. On tropical medicine within a larger imperialistic system, see Nancy Leys Stepan, Picturing Tropical Medicine (Ithaca, N.Y., 2001);
40. Arnold Davis, Warm Climates and Western Medicine: The Emergence of Tropical Medicine, 1500-1900 (Amsterdam, 1988);
41. Roy M. Macleod and Milton James Lewis, Disease, Medicine, and Empire: Perspectives on Western Medicine and the Experience of European Expansion (New York, 1996).
42. A rich literature exists on the scientific and medical response to European, especially French, social anxieties at the fin de siècle. See Daniel Pick, Faces of Degeneration: A European Disorder, c. 1848-c. 1918 (New York, 1989);
43. Robert A. Nye, Crime, Madness, and Politics in Modern France: The Medical Concept of National Decline (Princeton, N.J., 1984);
44. Susanna Barrows, Distorting Mirrors: Visions of the Crowd in Late Nineteenth-Century France (New Haven, Conn., 1981);
45. Jan Goldstein, Console and Classify: The French Psychiatric Profession in the Nineteenth Century (New York, 1987);
46. Ann-Louise Shapiro, Breaking the Codes: Female Criminality in Fin-de-Siècle Paris (Stanford, Calif., 1996).
47. For historical studies of criminology, see Ruth Harris, Murders and Madness: Medicine, Law and Society in the Fin de Siècle (Oxford, 1989);
48. Marie-Christine Leps, Apprehending the Criminal: The Production of Deviance in Nineteenth-Century Discourse (Durham, N.C., 1992);
49. Nye, Crime, Madness, and Politics in Modern France;
50. Pick, Faces of Degeneration;
51. Nicole Rafter, Creating Born Criminals (Chicago, 1997);
52. Shapiro, Breaking the Codes;
53. Richard Wetzell, Inventing the Criminal: A History of German Criminology, 1880-1945 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2000).
54. On the history of criminology and penology in Latin America, see Lyman L. Johnson, ed., The Problem of Order in Changing Societies: Essays on Crime and Policing in Argentina and Uruguay, 1750-1940 (Albuquerque, N.M., 1990);
55. Pablo Piccato, City of Suspects: Crime in Mexico City, 1900-1930 (Durham, 2001);
56. Ricardo Salvatore and Carlos Aguirre, eds., The Birth of the Penitentiary in Latin America (Austin, Tex., 1996);
57. Salvatore, Crime and Punishment in Latin America.
58. Lombroso's work was expanded and amended by his two students, Enrico Ferri and Raffaele Garofalo, and the work of the three men was collectively known as the "Italian school" of criminology. A description of the context from which the Italian positivist school emerged can be found in John A. Davis, Conflict and Control: Law and Order in Nineteenth-Century Italy (Atlantic Highlands, N.J., 1988),
59. For discussions of Lombroso, see Mary Gibson, Born to Crime: Cesare Lombroso and the Origins of Biological Criminology (Westport, Conn., 2002);
60. Pick, Faces of Degeneration;
61. J. Davis, Conflict and Control, esp. 326-38;
62. Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man (New York, 1981), 122-42.
63. Lombroso's "homo delinquens" was a single sex species: male. Lombroso elaborated his views on women in his 1893 book, The Female Offender (La donna delincuente; note the contrast with "the criminal man"), written with his son-in-law Guglielmo Ferrero. On Lombroso and gender, see Gibson, Born to Crime, chap. 2;
64. Beverly Brown, "Reassessing the Critique of Biologism," in Loraine Gelsthrope and Allison Morris, eds., Feminist Perspectives in Criminology (Philadelphia, 1990), 41-56;
65. Nancy A. Harrowitz, Antisemitism, Misogyny, and the Logic of Cultural Difference: Cesare Lombroso and Matilde Serao (Lincoln, Neb., 1994), 30-36.
66. Their collective efforts, usually labeled criminology for the theorists and criminalistics for the hunters of actual criminals, were closely related in Argentina, as in North Atlantic countries. Experts in both fields frequently collaborated on research projects and their practical applications. Criminologists appeared as expert witnesses in trials, took an active role in defining the markers of criminal identity, and drafted new laws and policies to punish criminals and prevent future offenses. On the distinction between the two, see Allan Sekula, "The Body and the Archive," October 39 (Winter 1986): 18-19;
67. on identification science in comparative perspective, see Simon Cole, Suspect Identities: A History of Fingerprinting and Criminal Identification (Cambridge, Mass., 2001);
68. Jane Caplan and John Torpey, eds., Documenting Individual Identity: The Development of State Practices in the Modern World (Princeton, N.J., 2001).
69. See Paul Rabinow, "Galton's Regret: Of Types and Individuals," in Paul R. Billings, ed., DNA on Trial: Genetic Identification and Criminal Justice (Plainview, N.Y., 1992), 5-18.
70. Raymond Fosdick, "The Passing of the Bertillon System of Identification," Journal of the American Institute of Criminal Law, no. 6 (1915): 364. Fosdick describes at numerous points the Vucetich system on an equal footing with the Henry system in terms of its application throughout Europe; his larger point is that either one was preferable to Bertillonage, since fingerprints taken under any system could be compared with each other, while the French anthropometric system was incompatible with all. More broadly, art historian Allan Sekula calls our attention to the need to efficiently classify, file, and retrieve anthropometric records, a challenge faced by European and American scientists alike.
71. Sekula, "Body and the Archive," 1-86.
72. For general discussions of Argentine science, see José Babini, Historia de la ciencia en Argentina (Buenos Aires, 1986);
73. Hugo Biagini, El movimiento positivista argentina (Buenos Aires, 1985);
74. Marcelo Montserrat, ed., La ciencia en la Argentina entre siglos (Buenos Aires, 2000);
75. Oscar Teran, Vida intelectual en el Buenos Aires fin-de-siglo (1880-1910): Derivas de la "cultura científica" (Buenos Aires, 2000).
76. Vucetich believed he was contributing to criminalistic "science" with what some might argue was a bureaucratic innovation. Both Argentine scientists and their colleagues abroad perceived anthropometry and other identification techniques as "scientific." A plea for increased attention to the history of criminalistics in historical studies of criminology and science more broadly is Claire Valier, "True Crime Stories: Scientific Methods of Criminal Investigation, Criminology and Historiography," British Journal of Criminology 38, no. 1 (Winter 1998): 88-101.
77. Argentines attended international public health, criminology, and criminal law congresses, a great source of new scientific ideas. The Argentine delegation to the Stockholm congress in 1878, for example, reported, "The decisions made at this Congress will be of great importance to us since they will not fail to exercise influence on our criminal legislation ... The approved resolutions will be like the treatment prescribed by a medical doctor to combat an illness. If we are sicker than other countries, we should try to demonstrate it and indicate the symptoms of our social ills so that we may find a remedy." Quoted in Rosa Del Olmo, América Latina y su criminología (Mexico City, 1987), 63.
78. See also "Republique Argentine," Le Congres Penitentiaire International de Stockholm, memoires et rapports, Bureau de la Commission Penitentiaire International (Stockholm, 1879). After 1889, they sponsored scientific meetings of their own, usually with a regional focus, such as the Latin American Scientific Congress.
79. After 1880, Argentina's gross national product increased by about 6 percent per year, comparable to most industrial countries. Per capita income in this period was at times higher than in Spain, Italy, Sweden, and Switzerland, and equal to that of Germany and Holland. On nineteenth-century economic growth, see David Rock, Argentina, 1516-1982 (Berkeley, Calif., 1987), 118-61;
80. Waisman, Reversal of Development in Argentina, 36-127;
81. for the statistics cited, see Rock, Argentina, 172.
82. Eduardo Wilde trans. and quoted in José Luis Romero, A History of Argentine Political Thought (Stanford, Calif., 1963), 185.
83. Immigration statistics derived from Rock, Argentina, 141;
84. José Moya, Cousins and Strangers: Spanish Immigrants in Buenos Aires, 1850-1930 (Berkeley, Calif., 1998), 149;
85. Carl Solberg, Immigration and Nationalism: Argentina and Chile, 1890-1914 (Austin, Tex., 1970), 33-38;
86. Alberto Kleiner, ed., Publicidad oficial sobre Argentina como país de inmigración, 1903 (Buenos Aires, 1983), 30.
87. Charles Darwin, Origen de las especies por medio de la selección natural: ó, Conservación de las razas favorecidas en la lucha por la existencia, 2d edn., Enríque Godínez, trans. (Madrid, 1877);
88. Marcelo Monserrat, "The Evolutionist Mentality in Argentina: An Ideology of Progress," in Thomas Glick, et al., eds., The Reception of Darwinism in the Iberian World: Spain, Spanish America, and Brazil (Dordrecht, 2001).
89. On positivism in Argentina, see Biagini, El movimiento positivista argentino;
90. José Luis Romero, A History of Argentine Political Thought (Stanford, Calif., 1963);
91. Ricaurte Soler, El positivismo argentino (Buenos Aires, 1968);
92. Oscar Terán, Positivismo y nación en la Argentina (Buenos Aires, 1987).
93. On positivism in Latin America, see David Hale, "Political and Social Ideas in Latin America," in Leslie Bethell, ed., The Cambridge History of Latin America, vol. 4 (New York, 1986), 382-414;
94. Ralph Lee Woodward, Jr., ed., Positivism in Latin America, 1850-1900: Are Order and Progress Reconcilable? (Lexington, Mass., 1971).
95. Henry T. F. Rhodes, Alphonse Bertillon: Father of Scientific Detection (New York, 1968), 71-101. In 1896, Bertillon added a section to his record card for the impression of four fingers of the criminal. After 1902, he also recommended the use of fingerprint technology in crime-scene investigation.
96. Vucetich's decision to back fingerprinting in the La Plata Office of Identification infuriated Bertillon and resulted in a much-publicized dispute between the two scientists. According to one account, the competition surfaced in 1913, when Vucetich dropped in on Bertillon in Paris. "As the creator of the first complete system of classification of fingerprints, Vucetich evidently thought he was entitled to call upon Bertillon without giving notice of his intended visit ... Vucetich arrived one morning, evidently expecting to be received immediately and with open arms ... Suddenly the door leading to Bertillon's office was flung wide open. The Chief of Service stood on the threshold. He treated his visitor to a hostile scrutiny which slowly passed from head to feet. 'Sir,' he said, 'you have tried to do me a great deal of harm.' He slammed the door in the face of Vucetich. It was the first and last occasion upon which they met." Rhodes, Alphonse Bertillon, 146-47.
97. While Vucetich certainly claimed that he meant no harm, Bertillon was not far off the mark in seeing fingerprint classification as a threat to his anthropometric system. By 1904, Vucetich would proclaim that he had "proved the inefficacy of anthropometry as a means of identification." Juan Vucetich, Dactiloscopía comparada: El nuevo sistema argentino (La Plata, 1904), 15.
98. Cole, Suspect Identities, 133.
99. The article on Galton's work was by French scientist Henry Crosnier de Varigny, "Antropologie-Les empreintes digitales, d'apres M. F. Galton," Revue scientifique 47, no. 18 (May 2, 1891): 557-62.
100. Galton was best known for his interest in heredity and eugenics (indeed, he coined the latter word). Criminalistics was a side preoccupation, yet, according to Sekula, "his interest in heredity and racial 'betterment' led him to join the search for biologically determined 'criminal type.'" Sekula, "Body and the Archive," 18-19.
101. See also George Wilton, Fingerprints: History, Law, and Romance (London, 1938), 78;
102. Carey Chapman, "Dr. Juan Vucetich: His Contribution to the Science of Fingerprints," Journal of Forensic Identification 42, no. 4 (1992): 286-94, 288.
103. The provincial police also began fingerprinting their own candidates to the force, the first experiment in the civil use of fingerprints in Argentina. This exercise was a seeming success: of 373 candidates in the first year of the procedure, eleven with previous police records were weeded out. By 1903, Vucetich cited this evidence to show that his system "functions regularly, and secures the recognition of repeat offenders to justice, as it assures the elimination of individuals with bad pasts who want to join the police." See Vucetich, "Historia sintética de la identificacíon," Revista de identificación y ciencias penales 7 (1931): 29;
104. Juan Vucetich to Luis M. Doyenhard, May 1, 1903, miscellaneous correspondence folder, Archivo Vucetich, Museo de la Policía de la Provincia de Buenos Aires, La Plata (hereafter, AV).
105. Cited in Vucetich, "Historia sintética," 30.
106. See Registro Oficial (La Plata, 1893), 184. Even after the successful implementation of dactyloscopy, Argentine police and prison officials continued to record anthropometric data. The two systems existed simultaneously, were used jointly, and influenced each other.
107. For examples, see the prison registers and identification cards (fichas de filiación) from Buenos Aires provincial prisons; Entradas y salidas de presos criminales (carcel de Bahía Blanca, Dolores, Mercedes, Sierra Chica, Departamento del Centro, del Sud), 1882-1915, Archivo Penitenciario de la Provincia de Buenos Aires, La Plata.
108. See Cole, Suspect Identities, 128.
109. Vucetich gave the patterns on the thumb the following abbreviated designations: A = Arch (arco); I = Inner Loop (presilla interna); E = Outer Loop (presilla externa); V = Whorl (verticilio). Similarly, numbers were used to identity the patterns on the remaining fingers: 1 = Arch; 2 = Inner Loop; 3 = Outer Loop; 4 = Whorl. Elaborated from Vucetich, Dactiloscopía comparada, 80-83.
110. For a detailed explanation of Vucetich's fingerprint identification method, see also Luis Reyna Almandos, Dactiloscopía argentina: Su historia é influencia en la legislación (La Plata, 1909), 34-37;
111. Cole, Suspect Identities, 128-29.
112. See also (as cited in Cole) Frank M. Boolsen, "Fifty-One Fingerprint Systems: An Outline of the Various Methods in Different Countries for Classifying and Filing Fingerprints under the Ten-Finger and Single-Print Systems," Burtis C. Bridges, ed., unpublished typescript (Berkeley, Calif., 1935);
113. Burtis C. Bridges, Practical Fingerprinting (1942; New York, 1963);
114. Spencer L. Rogers, The Personal Identification of Living Individuals (Springfield, Ill., 1986), 73-75.
115. Juan Vucetich, "Instrucciones generales para el sistema de filiación 'Provincia de Buenos Aires,'" (La Plata, 1896).
116. An earlier publication, the pamphlet "Instrucciones generales para la identificación antropométrica," was published in 1893. Large portions of it were printed in the Platense newspaper El día. See El día, December 22, 1893.
117. Juan Vucetich to Francis Galton, December 11, 1896, Centro de Estudios Históricos Policiales, "Comisario Inspector Luis Romay," Policía de la Capital, Buenos Aires (hereafter, CEHP).
118. Galton to Vucetich, January 11, 1897, miscellaneous folder, CEHP.
119. Vucetich, Dactiloscopía comparada, 14.
120. Lombroso wrote to Vucetich in 1896, requesting samples of fingerprints along with "descriptions of every one of the criminals to whom they belong." He praised Argentina's progress in this field, stating that "at least twenty-five years will pass before we in Italy will arrive to where you are now ... I have discussed [your] discovery more widely in the new edition of Criminal Man. If you consult this book you will see how much I am indebted to your work." Quoted in Vucetich, "Historia sintética," 36, 44.
121. Vucetich, Dactiloscopía comparada, 41.
122. Luis M. Doyenhard, La policía en Sud-América (La Plata, 1905), part 1, "El momento."
123. For a discussion of the post-independence reorganization and growth of the Buenos Aires police, see Oswaldo Barreneche, "Crime and the Administration of Criminal Justice in Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1785-1853" (PhD dissertation, University of Arizona, 1997).
124. A. Cutrera, review of Alfredo Niceforo, "La policía científica," Archivos de psiquiatría y criminología 6 (1907): 499.
125. For examples of other such assessments in contemporary Argentine police histories, see Doyenhard, La policía en Sud-América;
126. Luis J. Albert, Historia de la policía, 2d edn. (Buenos Aires, 1913), 102-03, 154-55, 161-63.
127. While Vucetich did not emphasize the influence of race in determining the patterns of individual fingerprints, he did call for investigation into the correlation between fingerprint patterns and criminal types. He cited studies that seemed to link fingerpad patterns in primates and certain types of human "degenerates." "The frequency of determined form," he wrote in 1904, "serves as a point of departure for future investigations of anthropologists and forensic specialists." Vucetich, Dactiloscopía comparada, 55.
128. Guillermo J. Nunes, Memoria del Departamento de Policía correspondiente al año 1891 (La Plata, 1892), 5.
129. Memoria del departamento de Policía de la Capital, 1883-1884 (Buenos Aires, 1884), 81.
130. See also Alberto Méndez Casariego, La criminalidad de la ciudad de Buenos Aires en 1887: Contravenciones, suicidios y accidentes (Buenos Aires, 1888);
131. and the Boletín mensual de estadística (1895-99).
132. A 1909 police report, addressed to the minister of the interior, praised the 1902 Residence Law for reducing the need to deport "those persons whose background and behavior constitute a very grave danger to the public order." Calling the measure a "law of public health," the police suggested its expansion to the control of vagrants and other quasi-criminal social disturbances, "in order to provide better and more healthful effects." Memoria del departamento de la Policía de la Capital, 1906-1909 (Buenos Aires, 1909), 15-16.
133. Despite the emphasis on identifying urban immigrants as prone to crime, a recent analysis of late nineteenth-century police statistics showed that class status was far more significant than nationality in determining criminality. In fact, crime rates for all major ethnic groups remained roughly constant with the representation in the population; Spanish immigrants had a slightly higher rate than native-born Argentines, but Italian-born immigrants had a lower rate. According to this analysis, the few voices questioning the blame on immigrants were overwhelmed by scientific and popular stereotypes of immigrants. For example, Miguel A. Lancellotti recalculated crime rates by age in 1912 to show the bias against foreigners, but criminologists discounted his critique as late as the 1960s. The statistics also revealed that most types of crime were in fact decreasing at this time; the increases that captured the attention of contemporaries were crimes against property, such as assault, theft, and vandalism, which surged during each period of economic crisis. See Julia Kirk Blackwelder and Lyman L. Johnson, "Changing Criminal Patterns in Buenos Aires, 1890 to 1914," Journal of Latin American Studies 14, no. 2 (1982): 359-80, 361, 367.
134. That is not to say that individuals always subjected themselves willingly to anthropometric and dactyloscopic examination. Popular resistance as well as judicial opposition (on constitutional grounds) is examined in Kristin Ruggiero, "Fingerprinting and the Argentine Plan for Universal Identification in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries," in Caplan and Torpey, Documenting Individual Identity, 185-88.
135. Nunes, Memoria, 5;
136. see also "Medicina legal," Anales del Departamento Nacional de Higiene 1, no. 2 (February 1891): 97.
137. Bibiano S. Torres, "Observaciones sobre las Oficinas de Antropometría é Icnofalangometría" (Buenos Aires, 1894), 5.
138. Ernesto Weigel Muñoz, "Prólogo," to Vucetich, "Instrucciones generales para el sistema de filiación," 3.
139. José Rossi to Francisco Beazley, September 9, 1901, miscellaneous correspondence folder, AV.
140. José Rossi to Juan Vucetich, 1901-1907, correspondence file R-Z, AV.
141. See Orden del día, November 9, 1903, 1066.
142. Belisario Otamendi to Juan Vucetich, May 11, 1901, miscellaneous correspondence folder, AV.
143. Vucetich reported in 1903 his excellent relations with the capital police's commissioner of investigation; see Vucetich to Luis M. Doyenhard, May 1, 1903, miscellaneous correspondence folder, AV.
144. For example, in 1910, the records of Simon Radowisky, an anarchist who had assassinated the Buenos Aires city police chief one year earlier, flew between the capital police and local stations. After Radowisky's conviction and life sentence, the capital police forwarded his file to the provincial police, including his photographs, fingerprints, and anthropometric description. José Rossi to Ricardo Rojas, January 19, 1910, miscellaneous correspondence folder, AV.
145. See also telegrams requesting Radowisky's mug shots and fingerprints in his court trial documents, located in Tribunales, Legajo R5, 1872-1909, Archivo General de la Nación, Buenos Aires.
146. José Rossi to Juan Vucetich, telegram, December 31, 1907, miscellaneous correspondence folder, AV.
147. Memoria del departamento de la Policía de la Capital, 1906-1909, 298.
148. Furthermore, in 1911, a legislative committee called Vucetich to share his method at a special meeting with the minister of the interior and the minister of war. José Tonrouge to Juan Vucetich, April 29, 1911, correspondence file A-M, AV.
149. Memoria de la División Técnica, año 1916 (Buenos Aires, 1917), 18.
150. City population figure from the 1914 census; see Tercer censo nacional (Buenos Aires, 1916), vol. 1: 3. As in most statistical reports, population figures were broken down by nationality; the city's population in 1914 was apparently almost evenly split between foreigners and Argentines. La Plata's population of 137,413 was about 28 percent foreign born.
151. Reyna Almandos, Dactiloscopía argentina, 109.
152. On the proposed laws for universal fingerprinting in Argentina, see Juan Vucetich, Comentario al proyecto de ley creando el registro general de identificación (La Plata, 1916).
153. For a discussion of the legal proposals and debates leading up to its creation, see Julia Emilia Rodriguez, "Encoding the Criminal: Criminology and the Science of 'Social Defense' in Modernizing Argentina (1880-1921)" (PhD dissertation, Columbia University, 2000), chap. 4;
154. Ruggiero, "Fingerprinting and the Argentine Plan for Universal Identification," 192-96.
155. Reyna Almandos, Dactiloscopía argentina, 109, 125, 127.
156. The accelerating state interest and ability in tracking foreigners in Argentina corresponded with movements in the North Atlantic world of the late nineteenth century, such as the increase in the distribution and use of documents of personal identification. See John Torpey, The Invention of the Passport: Surveillance, Citizenship, and the State (New York, 2000), esp. chap. 4.
157. Nicéforo Castellano, "Oficina Nacional de Identidad: Proyecto presentado al Ministerio del Interior" (Buenos Aires, 1908), 21-22. See also the inscribed and annotated copy in Vucetich's files, miscellaneous correspondence folder, AV.
158. Dirección General de Inmigración, "Resolución No. 292," May 21, 1912, miscellaneous folder, AV.
159. Provincial police chief Nunes had linked fingerprinting with good citizenship as early as 1891, saying "each good citizen should lend cooperation, under the auspices not only of his material interests, but also those of domestic honor." G. J. Nunes to the President of the Supreme Court of the Province of Buenos Aires, November 24, 1891, p. 4, miscellaneous correspondence folder, AV.
160. Dirección General de Inmigración (Buenos Aires), "Libreta del inmigrado," 1911, 3.
161. The inconsistency of the law and legal practices and the persistence of local power and autonomy in Latin America are widely recognized. "Obedezco pero no cumplo" (I obey but do not comply), the phrase that characterized colonial administrators' creative interpretation of Spanish law, has its legacy in the modern administration of justice as well. See Jeremy Adelman, ed., Colonial Legacies: The Problem of Persistence in Latin American History (New York, 1999);
162. Juan Mendez, et al., eds., The (Un)Rule of Law and the Underprivileged in Latin America (Notre Dame, Ind., 1999).
163. See Malcolm Anderson, Policing the World (Oxford, 1989);
164. Fenton Bresler, Interpol (London, 1992).
165. For a description of this collaboration, see "La dactiloscopía: Sus resultados en el Tercer Congreso Científico Latino-Americano de Rio-Janeiro y en el Convenio Policía Sud-Americano de Buenos Aires," Archivos de psiquiatría 5 (1906): 354. Other regional conferences at which Vucetich presented his work include the 1904 International Hygiene Conference, held in Buenos Aires, the International Police Conference, also held in Buenos Aires in 1905, and the 1908 Chilean Scientific Conference.
166. There is strong evidence that the key ideas in the Henry system were developed by his two Indian assistants, Azizul Haque and Hem Chandra Bose. On Henry and the significance of the colonial Indian setting, see Cole, Suspect Identities, 81-83;
167. and Chandak Sengoopta, Imprint of the Raj: How Fingerprinting Was Born in Colonial India (London, 2003), 138-45.
168. M. Dastre, "Des empreintes digitales comme procédé d'identification," in Comptes rendus hebdomadaires des séances de l'Académie des Sciences (1907), 45.
169. Similarly, the Danish scientist A. Daae recommended the Vucetich system in "Die daktyloskopische Registratur," Archiv für Kriminal Antropologie und Kriminalistik 24 (1906): 26-44.
170. See also F. Spirlet, "Méthode de classification des empreintes digitales," Archives internationales de médecine légale 1 (1910): 7-34;
171. and Fosdick's remarks in "The Passing of the Bertillon System of Identification."
172. Juan Vucetich, "The Fingerprint System," Address to the International Association of Chiefs of Police, 1913, trans. and rpt. in Donald C. Dilworth, ed., Identification Wanted: Development of the American Criminal Identification System, 1893-1943 (Gaitbersburg, Md., 1977), 94.
173. Dilworth, Identification Wanted, 93.
174. See Daae, "Die daktyloscopische Registratur," for instance.
175. Whether they supported the Argentine or the British classifications, most experts agreed that some kind of conversion was necessary to create a universal standard allowing for the sharing of data across borders and other types of international collaboration in policing. The world would ultimately have to wait until the 1980s and the widespread use of computer-based imaging of fingerprints for that, however. For a discussion of computer technology and the digitization of fingerprints, see Cole, Suspect Identities, 134, 225, 250-53.
176. The offer was to teach in the fingerprint department at the salary of $150 per month. W. K. Evans to Vucetich, July 3, 1917, correspondence folder "Norte América A-Z," AV.
177. Of police departments in thirty-one countries that Bridges describes in detail in his survey of fingerprint applications, twenty-one of them were influenced by Vucetich. Of the twenty-one, sixteen credited Vucetich as the primary influence. Both systems were similar in that they subdivided among ridge types; Vucetich used four main subtypes, while Henry used three. Bridges, Practical Fingerprinting, 161-206, quote 161.
178. Cole and Sengoopta, too, argue that fingerprinting technology flourished precisely in colonial and high-immigrant settings, because of the perceived need to distinguish among a large, seemingly indistinguishable population. See Cole, Suspect Identities, chaps. 3 and 5;
179. Sengoopta, Imprint of the Raj, esp. the introduction and chap. 5. More broadly, both Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra and Ann Laura Stoler have discussed colonies (Spanish-American, Dutch, British, and French) as the settings for the development of theories of racial difference that were then imported back to Europe.
180. See Cañizares-Esguerra, "New World, New Stars," 35-36;
181. and Ann Laura Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault's "History of Sexuality" and the Colonial Order of Things (Durham, N.C., 1995).