Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
resulted in a diffusion of occu-
pations. While big landown-
ers were becoming wealthy, a
group of rural middlemen arose,
composed of shopkeepers, small
growers, warehousemen, buyers,
and sellers.
Nonetheless, it is certain that
immigrants did not benefit ini-
tially from the diffusion of land-
ownership, at least not on the
Pampas, where cattlemen and
speculators relegated the immi-
grants to public lands far from
markets and rail traffic. Rather,
newly arrived immigrants settled
on unused public lands in isolated
sections of Santa Fe, Córdoba,
Entre Ríos, and Corrientes. One
area of the interior of Entre Ríos,
whose farms were settled under
the financial sponsorship of the
German Jewish philanthropist
Baron Maurice de Hirsch, became famous for its “Jewish gauchos.”
Most foreigners on the Pampas, nonetheless, were sharecroppers and
farm tenants. Entire immigrant families signed tenancy contracts with
estancieros
to fence off a section of cattle pastures, plow the land for the
first time, and cultivate wheat. The tenants then shared with the owner in
the proceeds from the sale of wheat. In other words, Argentine cattlemen
on the Pampas were getting into the export of wheat without becoming
farmers. One agricultural journal of the time described the common ten-
ant's contract: “The land is first divided into fenced grazing pastures of
four to five thousand acres and then subdivided into surveyed numbered
lots of five hundred acres each without any intervening wire. These
lots are rented on a three-year contract . . . to Italian farmers who bring
their own equipment and supplies and agree at the end of the period to
leave the land sown with alfalfa, the seed being supplied by the owners”
(Scobie 1971, 118).
Needless to say, farm immigrants led a precarious existence dependent
on the benevolence of landowners and good grain prices. Their relations
with the
estanciero
could become strained in falling markets for agricul-
This rural woman posed with a large stone
montero,
which was used to manually grind
wheat.
(Casa Figueroa, 1900)
