Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
1854 census reckoned that a quarter of the rural population of Buenos
Aires province, then numbering more than 183,000 persons, consisted
of newcomers. While native-born peons worked the cattle, industri-
ous immigrants found jobs in sheepherding, construction, and petty
merchandizing or as artisans. Newcomers seemed to find greatest
opportunity in the agricultural zone close to Buenos Aires, where the
infrastructure was more highly developed.
Besides economic opportunities in the expanding marketing system,
the immigrant also found advancement as a renter or landowner. Large
cattle ranchers were subdivided numerous times between 1820 and
1850 as the value of land and its products steadily rose. Each step in
the process intensified land use and rural production on the Pampas.
On the frontier, owners still held giant tracts and worked them as huge
production units. Land closer to the expanding markets of Buenos
Aires was subdivided, and the units of production became smaller. In
district after district straddling the Salado River, the larger cattle estates
of the early 19th century gave way to smaller, more intensively worked
properties producing sheep and eventually cash crops. Usually, sons
of
estancieros
and immigrant Europeans benefited from the spread of
landownership. Native-born gauchos did not.
The structure of the
estancia
followed traditional Hispanic patri-
monial organization. Although the owner of large properties lived
in the city, he controlled life on the ranch, for example, making all
arrangements for marketing the ranch's products in the city. The big-
gest
estancieros
in a particular sector of the countryside, especially in
the sparsely settled frontier areas, effectively dominated the entire area
through their monopolies of
pulperías
(rural stores) and transportation.
The landowner's nominal control over the workers went a long way
toward enforcing order in the rural hinterland. Still, this control was
never complete.
A racial division of labor evolved on the Pampas. Native-born and
migrant mestizos and mulattoes usually handled cattle. Immigrant
whites went into sheep raising, farming, and merchandizing. Native-
born males were susceptible to the military drafts, while the exempt
foreign-born saved to buy land. The same kind of social process mar-
ginalized people of color in the city of Buenos Aires, where immigrants
also enjoyed the advantages of upward mobility. Most artisans and
shopkeepers in the capital were foreign-born; most household servants
were native-born Argentines of color.
Manpower in the Argentine hinterland was always scarce in the
19th century.
Estancieros
complained of how levies for the provincial
