Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
of Buenos Aires cheek-to-jowl with the working poor. As in the colonial
tradition, the wealthy families resided in fortresslike one- and two-story
homes near the main square (the Plaza de Mayo), the president's palace,
and the cathedral. In Buenos Aires, trade had also centered on the Plaza
de Mayo, which lay within two blocks of the riverbank over which
passed the nation's cargoes. The 1871 epidemic of yellow fever thus
plagued the elite as well as the poor in the unhealthful and crowded
downtown area.
By the dawn of the 20th century, however, the elite had moved out of
the city center into the Barrio Norte. Laborers may have come to work
in this exclusive neighborhood of Parisian-style town houses, but only
the household servants resided there. On the
estancias
, the landowners
erected sumptuous chateaus and abandoned the traditional huts with
thatched roofs. As a contemporary British writer observed, “Increasing
wealth no doubt has set a bar betwixt the classes, making the poor man
feel his poverty, and the rich know that isolation is the best weapon in
the fight that he must wage” (Walker 1978, 150).
One interpretation holds that the expansion of cattle raising con-
centrated land ownership among the elite, coerced free gauchos into
working on the
estancias,
and prevented the spread of farming on the
Pampas. This is an exaggeration. Recent studies of frontier settlement
have uncovered more variety in landownership and rural produc-
tion. Prior to 1880, a process of subdivision was already working to
reduce the size of the first great cattle estates. General Julio A. Roca's
Conquest of the Desert temporarily reversed that trend, as specula-
tors and political insiders rushed to gobble up frontier land by the
hundreds of square miles. Soon, however, railways and cereal pro-
duction began to push the cattle herds farther out into the Pampas.
Then herds of sheep left the Pampas and migrated to Patagonia. The
Pampas was now available to dirt farmers. This agrarian transforma-
tion set in motion new forms of production and caused the older
cattle
estancias
to be subdivided.
The rural district of Baradero is a convincing example of this trend.
Properties smaller than 1,000 hectares (about 2,500 acres) occupied
only 14 percent of Baradero in 1895; huge
estancias
accounted for the
rest. Within 15 years, however, those “modest” units had multiplied
at the expense of the big estates to cover nearly 85 percent of the
Baradero's total land. These indications suggest that export growth
fostered the subdivision of older landholdings as well as the settlement
of new land. Likewise, the growth of pastoral and agricultural exports
