Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
census takers counted residents in 1936. Immigration increased the
overall ratio of men in the city, as foreign males outnumbered foreign
females. The capital of Argentina experienced its most radical transfor-
mation and growth during this period when both working-class and
middle-class suburbs blossomed and proliferated. Buenos Aires was the
most populous urban center in Latin America and among the 10 most
populous cities in the world. Nearly one-third of all Argentines lived
in Buenos Aires.
Immigrants also settled in the interior, but the second-largest
Argentine city—Rosario in Santa Fe province—had a population of
only 223,000, or just one-sixth the size of Buenos Aires. Still, 47 other
Argentine cities had residents numbering more than 10,000 people
each; in fact, half of Argentina's people had been urbanized by World
War I. Together with the railways, the rising urban population had
created a national market that stimulated the domestic wine and sugar
industries of the interior. Between 1895 and 1914, annual wine pro-
duction in the Andean foothills increased by 940 percent. The sugar
industry, centered in Tucumán, more than doubled its output. Imports
of foreign wine and sugar, therefore, began to dwindle after the turn of
the century.
With its rapidly increasing population, Argentina's capital city
received the services and utilities that accompanied modern urban
living. British financiers and technicians constructed a modern port
complex with docks, grain elevators, and hydraulic equipment within
view of the presidential palace. A British-owned company in 1888
began installing gas lighting in the city. At the turn of the century,
electrification and a tramway system permitted the city to spread into
suburban neighborhoods. Horsedrawn and electric trams ran on more
than 1,860 miles of tracks throughout the city and carried nearly 400
million urban passengers in 1914. Telegraph and telephone lines arched
through the city and out to provincial centers. Coastal and river ship-
ping, whose traffic expanded ninefold between 1880 and 1910, linked
the littoral provinces to the commercial and communications hub of
Buenos Aires.
Furthermore, the export economy of the era induced significant
investment in schools so that Argentina became the educational
leader of Latin America. The literacy rate reached 62 percent of the
total population, driven more by the fact that most immigrants were
already literate on arrival than by Argentine educational success. More
immigrants were able to read and write than native-born Argentines.
