Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Ranches for pasturing cattle and mules dotted the countryside of Salta
and Jujuy in support of this annual commercial event. The largest estates
could brag of wine presses, brandy distilleries, flour mills, soap-making
equipment, and stores of wine and wheat. Inhabitants specialized in the
livestock trades to such an extent that they seldom cultivated enough
vegetables to supplement their beef diets. One traveler noted that Salta's
commerce supported a town of 400 houses, six churches, 300 Spaniards,
and three times that number of mulattoes and blacks.
Jujuy also depended on the mule trade. The town's position on the
road between Salta and the highland valleys made it the terminus of the
overland cart route from Buenos Aires and Córdoba. At Jujuy, teamsters
had to transfer their freight to mules for the trek up the rocky passes
leading into the Bolivian highlands.
All this commercial development transformed the old homeland of the
Diaguita agriculturists. While the Spaniards easily overcame their resis-
tance, the Diaguita did not disappear. True, European disease reduced
their numbers to about 15 percent of their precontact population, but
the Diaguita remained part of the new Spanish society of the Argentine
northwest. They retained enough land for a meager subsistence, were
converted to Catholicism by the Spanish friars, and served influential
Spaniards as laborers. Some of the women among them contributed—
certainly unwillingly—to the formation of the mestizo working class of
Argentina. The progeny of these indigenous women and Spanish men
became the bearers, drivers, cowboys, and agricultural workers who
underwrote the wealth of Salta and Jujuy. Sons and daughters of the
Diaguita survived, but they were denied leadership opportunities in the
development of new Spanish commercial enterprises.
The Cattlemen of Córdoba
Commerce at Salta depended on trade through and production in
Córdoba. Three cordons of low mountain ranges run north to south
through the present-day provinces of Córdoba and San Luis. They form
both the easternmost fringe of the great Andean cordillera and the bor-
der between the semiarid uplands of western Argentina and the humid
Pampas to the east. Consumer goods from these locales flowed to mar-
ket through an integrated commercial pipeline of riverboats, oxcarts,
and mule trains, which featured numerous customs collection points
and not a little contraband. The extended overland routes economically
united the faraway cities of Mendoza at the base of the Andean moun-
tains and Buenos Aires, the port to the Atlantic Ocean.
