Remarkable Argentina - The Wise World Traveler: Becoming a Part of All that You Meet - page 332

Italian, Spanish, and German. A popular joke has it that Argentines are Italians who speak
Spanish, furnish their homes in the style of Louis XIV, dress like the English, and work
like the Germans. If, as has been said many times, geography is destiny, the work ethic and
energy of Argentines owe much to Argentina's temperate climate. Its furthest north is sub-
tropical and its furthest south (Tierra del Fuego) is sub-Antarctic. The southern 25 percent
of Argentina (south of the Rio Colorado) is Patagonia, a land of dry plateaus that step down
from the Andes to the Atlantic.
Buenos Aires has a magnificent harbor that historically has connected Argentina to
Europe. The grasslands of Argentina's central region, the pampas , are a rich alluvial plain
whose topsoil (several yards deep) gave the country its original wealth—abundant crops
of wheat and vast grazing grounds for cattle. Throughout South America, vaqueros (cow-
boys) are folk heroes and national icons. And as cattle ranching moved northward to what
is now the American West, the language of the vaqueros slipped into English (and, of
course, Hollywood movies): lasso, chaps, rodeo, corral, sombrero, and desperado. The
cowboy has become the legendary American icon; in Argentina the legendary icon is the
gaucho —fiercely independent, daring, brave, and capable of enduring hardship, a magni-
ficent horseman. In the nineteenth century, the gauchos fought for independence and also
fought for a decentralized Argentina under the leadership of General Rosas, the first in a
long line of Argentina's strong-man generals. [287]
Argentine hides were first shipped to Europe in the 1500s. For more than 400 years,
leather was the all-purpose material of everyday life: shoes, clothes, laces, door hinges,
body armor, carriage springs, saddles, ropes, and horsewhips. To bring wheat and cattle
from the pampas to Buenos Aires for shipment to Europe, foreign investors (mostly Brit-
ish) built railroads and laid down railroad lines. (The British did not come themselves, but
their bonds and engineers did.) The same investors built what was long the chief industry
of Argentina: slaughterhouses. Other foreigners (Americans, English) built steel mills for
rails, bridges, and barbed-wire factories to fence the plains. In 1871 the first steam-powered
refrigerator ship sailed from Buenos Aires, bringing Argentine beef to Europe. Under-pop-
ulated Argentina soon beckoned to Europe's ambitious poor as the land of hope and oppor-
tunity. (That and the pampas frontier helped to create another Argentine comparison: the
United States of South America.) In 1869 Argentina's population was a scant two million.
By 1914 it was fourteen million, and more than one-third were foreign-born.
“OUR HISTORY IS WRITTEN IN BLOOD AND FAILED EXPECTATIONS”
The first European to land in Argentina was Juan De Solis. The year was 1516. As ship-
mates watched in horror from the safety of their ship, de Solis was dismembered and eaten
by his Indian hosts. (As the old joke of questionable taste has it, his last words were, “This
cruise has cost me an arm and a leg!”) In 1535 the Spanish explorer Pedro de Mendoza